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Whistler, Chaucer, Detroit and Greenhill - The Unwritten Works Of Geoffrey, etc. (1968)

Track listing:
  1. The Viper (What John Rance Had To Tell) 2:26
  2. Day Of The Childhood 3:03
  3. Upon Waing From The Nop 2:01
  4. Live 'Till I Die 3:13
  5. Street In Paris 3:00
  6. As Pure As The Freshly Driven Snow 1:40
  7. Tribute To Sundanca 2:57
  8. House Of Collection 1:45
  9. Just Me And Her 2:25
  10. On The Lusry Gentlemen 2:42
  11. Ready To Move 3:19

Notes

This Texas group from Fort Worth comprised of Scott Fraser, Eddie Lively (both ex-Mods), David Bullock and Phil White, under the pseudonyms of Benjamin Whistler, Geoffrey Chaucer, Nathan Detroit and Phillip Greenhill. If Fraser, Bullock and White all began playing circa 1963, they apparently didn't team up before 1967, when David Bullock returned from the coffee house circuit of Houston.

John Carrick: "David knew me from a club/coffee house my mom and I owned in Houston. It was called 'Sand Mountain' and was quite the hot bed of singer songwriters including Jerry Jeff, Towns, Guy Clark and lots more. Anyway, I ended up going to Fort Worth and worked on the album for about a year. By the time the album photos were taken, I had moved back to Houston. They got Guy Clark to take the cover photo and he failed to call me for the shoot, so Guy set the timer and sat in the pic. Another interesting sideline concerns a song on the album called Me And My Babe. The song needed a banjo adding, so we contacted the Northeast Texas banjo stud, another young guy from Fort Worth called Steve Bruton."

Their album is a bit patchy but contains some superb psychedelic compositions (Day Of Childhood, House Of Collection) and good folk/rock songs with nice guitar solos and Beatles inspired vocals. All their material was original and Joseph "T-Bone" Burnett produced the sessions recorded in Fort Worth and in Santa Ana, California.

The lack of a permanent satisfactory drummer inhibited their efforts as a performing group. At the end of 1968, Frazer, Bullock and White would finally meet a percussionist, Brett Wilson, in Austin and together they formed Space Opera. They intensively toured through the South before finally signing with Epic in 1972, thanks to Michael Mann, their manager and sponsor. In 1969, Eddie Lively would play with John Abdnor.