Exposé Online » Reviews of releases for 1968

Items found : 35

July - July

1967: a year for flower children and fledgling bands to gather together, smoke a bag, and experiment with new musical ideas, albeit sometimes sappy, but fun. Tony Duhig and Jon Field were two of...

 » Read more
(Posted by Jeff Melton 1997-10-01)

The Yardbirds - Yardbirds '68

Few other bands from the 60s have a legacy quite like the Yardbirds, maybe the Rolling Stones and Beatles and a few others, but in those heady four years from their early recordings in 1964 to...

 » Read more
(Posted by Peter Thelen 2018-12-02)

It's a Beautiful Day - Live at the Fillmore '68

The two disc package at hand contains two very different things: a CD of the live band in 1968, almost ten months before the release of their self-titled debut album, and a documentary DVD The...

 » Read more
(Posted by Peter Thelen 2013-08-21)

One of Hours - When You Hear the Music, It's Yours

Winding the clock back to 1966 in Lexington, Kentucky, a group of friends at the University of Kentucky got together to form the garage-psych band One of Hours. They released their first 45,...

 » Read more
(Posted by Henry Schneider 2019-11-14)

Ars Nova - Ars Nova

If you name your band “Ars Nova” you have to be: a) Serious Artists; b) Sarcastic reactionaries; c) Into psychedelic drugs; or d) Japanese. It’s Latin, for goodness sake, and...

 » Read more
(Posted by Jon Davis 2005-03-01)

Giles > Giles > Fripp - The Brondesbury Tapes

The early exploits of Giles, Giles and Fripp have always been a footnote considering the impact of the first King Crimson album on unsuspecting English and US audiences. Their only album, The...

 » Read more
(Posted by Jeff Melton 2002-04-01)

Soft Machine - Soft Machine Turns On, Volume 1 & 2

The legacy of the early Soft Machine has been chronicled by many bootlegs and re-releases of the band's first album demos by Giorgio Gomelsky. What so far have not surfaced are official...

 » Read more
(Posted by Jeff Melton 2002-04-01)

The Yardbirds - Live and Rare

The 60s were turbulent times, the decade where rock music grew up, going through a number of phases and reaching new extremes as time went forward. Within the span of just two years, from 1963 to...

 » Read more
(Posted by Peter Thelen 2019-05-28)

Peter Banks - Can I Play You Something?

Guitarist Peter Banks continues to dig deep into his roots and comes up another winner with his latest disc. This one is of keen interest to collectors of the psychedelic era, since that’s...

 » Read more
(Posted by Jeff Melton 2001-03-01)

Santana - Live at the Fillmore '68

There were three CDs floating around as imports of early Santana recordings entitled Persuasion, Latin Tropical, and Acapulco Sunrise which were roughly of the same...

 » Read more
(Posted by Mike McLatchey 1998-02-01)

Grateful Dead - Anthem of the Sun - 50th Anniversary Edition

A most important reissue in that it contains both the original 1968 mix of Anthem of the Sun, the Grateful Dead’s most psychedelic and experimental album, as well as the 1971 remix,...

 » Read more
(Posted by Peter Thelen 2018-08-17)

Pearls Before Swine - One Nation Underground & Balaklava

A slice of the past, but certainly one that shouldn’t be overlooked. Pearls Before Swine was essentially the vehicle of guitarist / composer / poet / singer Tom Rapp, which over the course of...

 » Read more
(Posted by Peter Thelen 1998-07-01)

Robert Wyatt - '68

After Soft Machine’s first American tour both Kevin Ayers and Mike Ratledge hurried on back to Europe to lick their wounds while Robert Wyatt stayed on in the US with friends. Opening for the...

 » Read more
(Posted by Jeff Melton 2013-10-19)

Wendy Carlos - Switched-On Bach & The Well-Tempered Synthesizer

Given the limitations of the synthesizers available in 1968, the choice of Bach as a focus for Wendy Carlos’s pioneering recordings makes perfect sense: the instruments could play only one...

 » Read more
(Posted by Jon Davis 2002-09-01)

The Jimi Hendrix Experience - Electric Ladyland

Are You Experienced? and Axis: Bold as Love provided the lion's share of Hendrix's songbook while he was alive, although there was certainly material on both albums that...

 » Read more
(Posted by Mike McLatchey 2017-11-16)

The Beatles - The Beatles (AKA The White Album)

Sgt Peppers opened the gates wide, and the creativity of the Fab Four wasn't even close to exhausted. An album such as this almost makes me want to type out the entire song list as...

 » Read more
(Posted by Mike McLatchey 2017-03-23)

The Hook - Will Grab You

Transitional periods can be very interesting in music. The Hook falls in the transition between 60s garage-psych and 70s hard rock. Reliable information has it that this album dates from 1968 in...

 » Read more
(Posted by Jon Davis 2003-12-01)

The Hook - Hooked

One of the best parts of picking up modern reissues of obscurities from the 60s is that so many of them have interesting liner notes detailing the near-misses and might-have-beens of that distant...

 » Read more
(Posted by Jon Davis 2005-03-01)

Marvin Gardens - 1968

Considering the first wave of 60s San Francisco bands as Jefferson Airplane, Moby Grape, Big Brother & the Holding Company, Quicksilver Messenger Service, and of course the Grateful Dead, then...

 » Read more
(Posted by Henry Schneider 2017-01-07)

The Collectors - The Collectors & Grass and Wild Strawberries

The Collectors hailed from Vancouver, Canada, not exactly a hotbed of the worldwide psychedelic scene, which maybe helps explain why they didn’t make a bigger impact. Their two albums, though...

 » Read more
(Posted by Jon Davis 2005-09-01)

Tyrannosaurus Rex - Early reissues

Here we have the long-awaited reissue of Marc Bolan’s earliest recordings, back when Tyrannosaurus was spelled out in full and electric guitars were unusual coloring rather than the...

 » Read more
(Posted by Jon Davis 2001-12-01)

Ultimate Spinach - Ultimate Spinach, Behold & See & III

Long before the British domination of all things progressive, progress was being made in the post-San Francisco underground scene in many US cities, among them Boston. The fact that producer Alan...

 » Read more
(Posted by Peter Thelen 1997-02-01)

Ultimate Spinach - Ultimate Spinach, Behold & See & III

Long before the British domination of all things progressive, progress was being made in the post-San Francisco underground scene in many US cities, among them Boston. The fact that producer Alan...

 » Read more
(Posted by Peter Thelen 1997-02-01)

The Insect Trust - The Insect Trust

As a longtime fan of Fairport Convention and British folk rock, I had dismissed American folk as being either too cloying or too familiar. Not so with The Insect Trust, who do for American folk and...

 » Read more
(Posted by Mac Beaulieu 2001-03-01)

The Insect Trust - The Insect Trust

This late-60s quintet from NYC epitomized the broad sense of musical experimentation of the era, pulling incongruent forms together, and through a combination of optimism and naiveté,...

 » Read more
(Posted by Peter Thelen 2001-03-01)

Fifty Foot Hose - Cauldron

Here's another one of those "I never thought they'd release that on CD" reissues. San Francisco's late 60s legacy left behind a volume of obscure bands, many with...

 » Read more
(Posted by Peter Thelen 1995-07-01)

Robert Wyatt - '68

This is one of the most amazing archival releases of "lost" music ever presented, at least for Soft Machine fans. I always thought of the first two Softs albums as the first phase of the band, with...  » Read more
(Posted by Jon Davis 2013-10-25)

Silver Apples - Silver Apples / Contact

Frankly, this is one of those reissues I thought I would never see. The (now long defunct) Kapp label issued these two albums in the late 60s, after which they quickly faded into obscurity. At a time...  » Read more
(Posted by Peter Thelen 1994-10-01)

Baby Grandmothers - Baby Grandmothers

Baby Grandmothers were a legendary underground Swedish psych trio from the late 60s who performed extensively throughout Scandinavia but only released a single in Finland. The band consisted of...

 » Read more
(Posted by Henry Schneider 2008-01-01)

Simon Dupree & the Big Sound - Part of My Past - The Simon Dupree and the Big Sound Anthology

There’s no doubt that a complete collection of the recordings of Simon Dupree and the Big Sound has historical value. Aside from being a curious footnote in the story of the psychedelic 60s with...  » Read more
(Posted by Jon Davis 2005-09-01)

Penny Arkade - Not the Freeze

In the last issue I covered the reissue of the two strange albums (Apache and Inca) credited to Maitreya Kali, who, it is now known, was Craig Smith, formerly of an obscure LA psych...  » Read more
(Posted by Jon Davis 2006-05-01)

Salvation - 1st & Gypsy Carnival Caravan

Among the mainstays of the West coast psychedelic scene in the mid- to late-60s was a jamming unit with a slight country flavor originally called The New Salvation Army Banned. Eventually a certain...  » Read more
(Posted by Jon Davis 2010-07-01)

Tomorrow - Tomorrow

Tomorrow's eponymous and only release is a solid example of 60s psychedelia featuring a precociously talented young guitarist named Steve Howe. It probably would have fared better commercially if not...  » Read more
(Posted by Paul Hightower 2007-03-01)

Moby Grape - Moby Grape, Wow, & Grape Jam

One of the very best of the late 60s San Francisco bands (if not the best), Moby Grape's recordings as well as the band's name itself has long been tied up in endless cycles of litigation thanks to...

 » Read more
(Posted by Peter Thelen 2008-01-01)

Moby Grape - Moby Grape, Wow, & Grape Jam

One of the very best of the late 60s San Francisco bands (if not the best), Moby Grape's recordings as well as the band's name itself has long been tied up in endless cycles of litigation thanks to...

 » Read more
(Posted by Peter Thelen 2008-01-01)