...for our purposes here it's 1975 and not too much is happening on the rock'n'roll front in most places round the globe (a few pockets of resistance here and there with some cats keeping the faith, keeping the 'rocking flag' flying but mostly it's lamesville, dull dud city) though in cleveland OH. its a different story, the underground cats and stoners are getting together their own sounds and RFTT are prime example of do it yourself...not caring about what was on the radio, what other people were thinking or what straight society had in the way of any entertainment the rocket bolted together stoogian riffery with hawkwind slop and velvet drone and smeared it all with back alley blues and street level surrealist poetry...chaotic guitar screach which on these tapes is real grungy adding to the out of control vibes that lift off in a MC5/sun ra way occasionally trying to set the controls for the heart of somewhere other than where they were...being the mid seventies glamrock had to rear it's head somewher along the line and bowies 'jean genie' is reworked to good effect on track 7 which gives way to a piercing version of '30 seconds over tokyo'...this 74 minute disk breaks down into 3 sessions at their rehearsal room /live at the famed agora ballroom and lastly a bar...eventually falling into two different combos (pere ubu/dead boys) both exploded with debut LPs of avant rock and '77 punk respectively though both their later careers were not nowhere near the promise of these starting wax...the magnitude of this swill is still so great that reverberations are occasionally heard in rock (both commercial and the so called underground) to this very day...a necessary earful for all layabouts intereseted in the developement of local underground rock seventies style...
...from the post industrial cityscape wastelands of mid seven ohs cleveland came a combo who dealt heavily in future mutant blues based solidly in an avant/basement prog, a prog that was street level amalgamation of english craziness like hatfield and the north / krautrock synthesizer blasts and general loner stoner pyrotechnics, everything exploding to infinite proportion...it sure came as some kind of a revelation at the time, and its power to mesmerize the listener still hasn't really diminished as not too many sound like this even today although plenty have given it a fair go, but this is temporal psycho-geography at work as we hear another part of western underground culture making its own way in the world after being shafted and sold down the polluted river by mainstream society when of no further use to the post nixon war machine...this whole LP is an outpouring of urban sound/word poetry that rages and rails against the staid and sedated pod people that populate the land, a marvellous piece of work that has got to be heard...
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