It’s a minor psychedelic gem, this is. This was a Boston band on Verve, rather than MGM, and their album got lost in the shuffle of the disastrous Bosstown Sound^TM hype. In fact, the liner notes indicate that it wasn’t released until after the hype was in full force even though they’d been signed and recorded first. That figures; this is the same label that didn’t know what to do with the Velvets. Not that these guys were the VU by any stretch...this was a nice, safe, contemporary, creative, collegiate psychedelic band. Ten years later and in a different town, they would’ve been the B52s. Yeesh, that’s a terrible thing to say about Phluph. OK, twenty years later they would’ve been Phish. Musically, they had a Doorsian lineup--one guitar, one keyboard. There was a bass guitar along with drums, though, unlike the Doors. What’s more, they also had three fully functioning vocalists and no Doorsian pretentions. They all looked wet behind the ears, and they probably were as green as their album cover, but they had some strong material. It was enough for some kind of “minor clasic” blurb in this or that catalog o’ collectables.

What was coolest about them? (Beyond the coffeehouse-poetry liner notes? “phluph is...a conscience at a prize fight...a priest crying at the vatican...the second car in a motorcade...the experience of a river...the humility of abraxas...” Uh-huh. Meanwhile, back in the real world, happiness is two kinds of ice cream.) The most singular thing about Phluph: their keyboardist was a genius. Pure and simple. Perhaps nowadays he owns a hardware store, but back then he flirted with godhead for minutes at a time. He and his Muse would indeed do the nasty for a stolen moment or two here and there, now and then, always and forever whenever John Cale wasn’t looking. And it’s hard to say who got the better of the deal. He owned but one cheepo 60s organ, yet he pulled sounds out of it that even John Cale never would’ve, all with just the three or four knobs and presets at his disposal. (Perhaps I indentify on some level, since in my very first rock band I played entire gigs on a “unit” that was even worse and abused it in similar ways. My hat is off to the guy because he managed to drag the sorry little instrument into a recording studio and acquitted himself brilliantly upon it for the length of an album.) What was even better was that the album wasn’t even a mere showcase for him, he was a fully integrated bandmember, a team player, the lightning bolt bringing their monster to life.

One factor that helps make the Phluph album such a “minor classic” is that it starts out really lame, with a cute little ditty called “Dr. Mind” and then a weak Dylan cover...and from there it just builds and builds. By the end of the side he’s run through ragtime, Bach, knob-twiddling, lead, rhythm, pomp and circumstance; all the while serving the damn songs. Then he gets to side two and pulls out all the stops (not that his instrument had any)--one minute he’s doing another of his fugue things, the next minute the band is chiming mindlessly about “Carnivals! Car-nivals! Lovely Carnivals to take you away,” and he obligingly whisks you onto his merry-go-round and twirls you into the next track. A couple minutes later he’s committing some unholy sacrilege with the volume knob, trying to sound like a backwards tape and damn near succeeding. Then they do yet another song, totally unlike the last--for him, just another mission.

As with most albums I admire, there’s some fine songwriting afoot, but it’s that keyboardist getting more and more bizarre with every track that does it for me every time...really, he’s playing upon this thing of an instrument that nowadays you’d have a hard time selling at a garage sale, yet over the course of 35 minutes or so his performance continues to grow ever more off the wall, pulling out yet another magic trick on every song--again, all of this coming out of a cheap little organ that only had two or three voicings and a couple of knobs to twiddle. More than anything else (such as the not-bad songwriting and even-better vocals) it’s this musicianly triumph of the will (even as he remains a just one guy of four who made up this band) that inevitably asserts itself, takes over, and winds up carrying the entire album. I like to think that the group taped the whole thing live in the studio, all in one take; and the reason it came out as it did is that they dosed him.