Back in the late 1960s, a fellow named Jerry Riegle stuck a recording studio underground in an active limestone mine near Kansas City, Missouri, and called it Cavern Sound. James Brown recorded a few cuts there throughout 1972, as did Brewer & Shipley. But for the most part the subterranean studio served as a creative lair for long-forgotten folk and rock hopefuls, high school garage heroes with amps, aspirations and just enough scrounged-up lunch money to pay for a daylong session or two.
On “Local Customs: Cavern Sound,” the fourth issue in the label’s Local Customs series, Numero Group has gathered up two dozen tracks recorded at Cavern Sound between 1967 and 1973, the majority of which have never before been released.
And if that conjures visions of purging that old, steel filing cabinet in the office basement or digging up a soil-encrusted time capsule from the backyard, then so be it. Much like a seemingly bottomless document repository or a nostalgic box of knick-knacks, the record’s got a little bit of everything.
Album-opener “Mustache in Your Face” by Pretty sounds like Bachman-Turner Overdrive forgot to look over its shoulder before changing lanes and side-swiped the 13th Floor Elevators. Fuzz-to-the-max guitar slides around over the top of a big, propulsive drum cadence and the track’s elastic groove is sporadically intruded upon by bursts of chirpy organ and primal screaming.
The low-fidelity, multi-tracked harmonies on Fraight’s “One Girl” evoke the Beatles crowded around one microphone in a subway station bathroom.
“Lovin’ You’s Blues” by Jaded, is one of the record’s most arresting cuts. The song’s effect is at once meditative and creepy, with half-mumbled vocals delivering low-key poetry like incantations muttered through an opiate haze. Muted tribal rhythms also filter through the mist, as the occasional explosive flute freakout whirls to the front of the mix before dissolving into reverberating shimmer.
Larry Sands and the Sound Affair’s “You’ll Know the Words” comes across as a mellow, Doors-y lullaby, but listen a bit more closely and the lyrics hurl venom at a previously domineering love interest upon whom the tables have now been turned. The song, along with the album’s other Larry Sands tune, “If I Didn’t Want to See You Anymore,” also represents some of the first recorded output of Sneaky Pete Kleinow, who went on to play pedal steel guitar with the Flying Burrito Brothers, Joni Mitchell, the Rolling Stones and Fleetwood Mac.
The singer on Tide’s “I Wish It Hadn’t Ended That Way” muses with elegiac nostalgia on a time “long ago when the deer ran wild, starlit nights were sweet and mild” and a “winding river ran fresh and clean” over a loose rumble of bass and acoustic guitar that crescendos to the electric, staccato attack of the titular chorus.
Morningstar predicts Bikini Kill’s reckless, no-holds-barred attack on “Little by Little,” a three-minute vector of nervous energy, rudimentary riffing and explosive soloing.
The collection’s final track is perhaps its best. In “Smoke My Pipe (The Sign Ain’t Right),” A.J. Rowe methodically spews a series of rambling vignettes in an instantly endearing, gravelly croak of a talk-sing, while subtle, trebly guitar jabs punctuate a circular rockabilly drumbeat and pulsing bass guitar run. As the song progresses, the cumulative effective of intermittent guitar stutters and vocal hiccups threaten to catapult the singer and his stories to the brink of collapse.
Here is someone doing exactly what he wants to, exactly how he wants to do it, and the result is five weird and stimulating minutes of unfiltered idiosyncrasy.
