27 June : Parallelograms

This is late. The album was released on 4 April 1970 but, in my defence, I had never heard of it until Thursday when Peter Ross tweeted about it.

Linda Perhacs’ Parallelograms is, I now know, one of the great lost albums of 1970, original copies of which are currently advertised at just shy of £500 on Discogs. Happily, in more ways than one, it has been re-released on cd.

Part of that happiness is that Perhacs hated what the record company did with the dynamics and sequencing on the original record. She threw her copy away and went back to being a dental hygienist in Beverley Hills for the rest of her career, but she kept all the master tapes. The cd restores the record to what she originally intended. (Incidentally, that she was in LA, living in Topanga Canyon, rather than in San Francisco is a subtlety missed by some commentators).

More background on the making and fate of the record can be found in this interview with Psychedelicbaby in 2012.

The usual reference point I’ve seen is, somewhat predictably, Joni Mitchell of the Ladies of the Canyon era, and one song, Call of the River, does remind me a little of Joni. I think a better comparator in many respects would be Dory Previn, but the truth is that both Perhacs and this record are their own things, sui generis; she really doesn’t sound like anyone else. This is Perhacs unique creative voice (and her voice is gloriously flexible). That’s apparent the moment she harmonises with herself early in Chimacum Rain, but rather than stacking the harmonies in unison, as CSNY would, the voices cascade like a peal of bells.

The genre merchants lump this in with ‘psychedelia’ and, some of the lyrics did make me wonder if there was some lysergic influence on the album. Consider:

Paralelo-lelo-gram
Paralelo-lelo-lelo-lelogram
Spiralelo-lelo-gram
Spiralelo-lelo-lelo-lelogram
Semi para bolic
Semi metra bolic
Radio-larial-uni-cellular

The reality, as Perhacs discusses in this video is more interesting: she is synaesthetic and her arrangements reflect how she sees music. Thus, although the title track sounds like an evocation of an acid trip, a folky equivalent of the Dead’s Dark Star, it is something else entirely. And her lyrics go places most ‘psychedelic’ artists didn’t:

In the soar of leaves
And needle tufts and form,
In the grasses and the reeds,
And the spilling over stones
Chimacum rain

 

I’m spacing out, I’m seeing silences between leaves,
I’m seeing down, I’m seeing silences that are his
He belongs here, can’t have him
He belongs here, can’t know him
He belongs here

 

It kinda gets inside you,
The silences I mean
They kinda wrap around you,
And loosen everything
Chimacum rain

I mentioned a couple of entries ago that the problem with with Fotheringay, was its lack of adventure and imagination. Listening to Parallelograms only reinforces that. I am a great admirer of Sandy Denny, but nothing she did as a solo artist had this much imagination.

If, as Malcy says,my posts have become shorter when dismissing records I don’t like, then you might infer from the longer length of this post that I do like this record. Reader, you would be correct. I had an order in for the cd via Discogs before I’d finished my first listen.

I listened on Spotify and it’s also available as a YouTube playlist: