Gentle Revolution

Christian psychedelic music, mostly released on small private press labels in the late ’60s and early ’70s – a time where the concerns of the counterculture briefly dovetailed with a quest for a reinvigorated spirituality – has been the source of many now-revered psychedelic one-shots and classic label runs.

From the desperate alone-on-the-edge-of-the-void appeal of Bob Desper’s New Sounds, released on the Christian label Rose City Sound in 1974, through to classics like Fraction’s 1971 eschatological Biblical rock blow-out, Moonblood, The Search Party’s Montgomery Chapel (1969) and The Trees Community’s The Christ Tree (1975), folk song stylings combined with psychedelics, electricity and liturgy to birth some of the most otherworldly and beautiful music to come out of the confusion of the era. And there remains much to uncover, like Joe Wise’s alternately bleak and hopeful series of downer folk LPs on Fontaine House, for example. But one of the great unsung Christian psych labels remains New York’s Avant Garde Records, active between the years 1966 and 1972.

The Reverend Al Carmines’ 1968 album In Circles remains one of the label’s central draws. A setting of short texts from A Circular Play: A Play In Circles by Gertrude Stein, it combines genuinely experimental song and text arrangements with a theatrical minimalism that oscillates between the odd American song settings of a Harry Partch and the camp Catholicism of a fantasy Jack Smith religious revival in a music hall. Carmines was a Master of Sacred Theology and an early pioneer of experimental theatre, founding a performance space at the legendary Judson Memorial Church on Washington Square Park, but In Circles stands as his greatest gift to the future. (Later in the ’70s, the composer Charlemagne Palestine, then a student at Juilliard, was hired to create a piano and vocal score from Carmines’ settings.)

Crosscurrent Community’s 1971 album, Let the Cosmos Ring!, gets even further out and has long been a secret influence on the free folk underground, with Matthew Valentine’s celestial big-band Tower Recordings naming an album in its honour in 1996. Crosscurrent Community were a ministry coming out of Toronto, Canada, and Let the Cosmos Ring! stands as one of the most beautifully questing of Christian psych explorations. With passages of massed vocals supported by extended acid guitar, brass and zoned organ drones, the set peaks with the spectacular 13 minute “Genesis,” a setting of the creation myth tied up with spoken word passages – or “Fluctuations,” as the sleeve dubs them. It’s a spectacular reading of The Word made flesh, with music as pure energy constructs and themes lifted from “Yes, Jesus Loves Me” and “Onward Christian Soldiers” with all of the protean gall of a John Fahey.

Tenor saxophonist and composer Ed Summerlin’s inspired 1968 set of liturgical jazz, Ring Out Joy, boasts a beautiful black and white sleeve and a killer rhythm section on the side-long “Liturgy of the Holy Spirit,” with be-bop drummer Ed Shaughnessy, alto saxophonist Don Heckman and tenor saxophonist George Marge (who played with Bill Dixon) joined by two heavy hitting bassists, Richard Davis and Ron Carter. Davis played with Eric Dolphy, Roland Kirk and Van Morrison, and the way that he and Carter – best known for his work with Miles Davis – make creative use of subtle vortexes of time is particularly impressive, generating a heady, devotional atmosphere.

As with any Christian psych imprint worth its communion wafer, there’s a ton of goofily earnest singer songwriters to deal with, with John Ylvisaker leading the pack with three full-length releases to his name. His 1967 Avant Garde side, Cool Livin’, is the best, marrying almost garage-crude, organ-driven punkers with a moody “real people” delivery reminiscent of legendary song-poem auteur Rodd Keith. Robert Edwin’s Keep the Rumour Going is a little straighter but no less impassioned, with an instrumental trio backing him on hip, beat takes on “The Lord’s Prayer,” “Lord of the Dance” and the remarkable “The Devil Wore a Crucifix.”

But it is poet, preacher, playwright and pop star Bill Comeau’s timelessly beautiful Gentle Revolution, released by Avant Garde in 1969 that is the true diamond in the pack. It features one of greatest, period perfect sleeves this side of A To Austr’s Musics From Holyground. It pictures a teen hang-out by a lake, but no one is smoking or cracking a brew or dunking each other in the water, even though 75% of the guys are hanging around topless within a few feet of sexy librarian earth mothers with wet bikini bottoms and kaftans.

All except for Bill, that is. At least I’m guessing it’s Bill, because the focus is on one guy in particular as the cover star, hovering just behind the conversation, standing with an early underpants reveal that is total ghetto Christian style while he attempts to lean pensively on one finger with no elbow support, which is a tough deal, but which may also be a Christian way of secretly flipping the bird to the camera, you know, like using the wrong finger the way you would substitute the word “sugar” for “shit.” No punishment for that. But the last thing I want to do is pick on Bill, if it even is him, because Bill is the paradigm for good guy cool, rocking a hybrid Mike Nesmith/young John Fahey look that is pure shy teenage heartthrob. I imagine that the woman in front of him is his partner, and that maybe she’s pregnant (looks like it a little)? And that his demand for a Gentle Revolution is as much for the good of the next generation as it is for the kids at the swimming hole.

Although there are more overtly “weird” LPs on the label, Gentle Revolution has an atmosphere of goofy, heartfelt reverie that is more truly “counter-cultural” than any third-eye squeezing private. It features one of the few genuinely great Beatles covers in the form of Bill’s impassioned take on “Eleanor Rigby.” When he sings, “Ah, look at all the lonely people,” he delivers it with all of the sad otherworldly detachment of a minor deity. Comeau’s naive, child-like delivery is impossible to resist, especially when he regresses to small size on tracks like “How The Children Learn” and “If Children Ruled the World.” A song like “Mr. Dreamer” is as goofily zoned and reverb dazzled as another classic of childlike psych, Mark Fry’s 1972 album Dreaming With Alice.

Indeed, Comeau’s previous album on Avant Garde, 1968’s Busy Day, was a set of disarmingly gentle and surreal children’s songs recorded when he was Minister to Youth at the First Congregational Church of Old Greenwich, Connecticut. It’s almost a shock, then, when he takes on Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne” on Gentle Revolution, channelling a weirdly dislocated, dream-decadent sense of longing that is spine-tingling and confusing. Comeau cut another two albums before dropping beneath the radar altogether, but for fans of naively beautiful psychedelic folk, Gentle Revolution remains the softly beating heart at the core of the Avant Garde label. Truly, you never heard such sounds.