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This is the first re-issue in 25 years of the legendary rock funkateers,Black Merda:too late for the Hendrix generation and too early for the Parliament/Funkadelic generation.Black Merda defines the incendiary fusion of funk and rock at the dusk of the 60's.This fully remastered compilation combines their albums "Long Burn the Fire" and 1970's Chess classic "Black Merda" on one CD,complete with unseen photos and detailed liner notes in a ten page fold-out.For fans of Hendrix,Funkadelic and 'Osmium' era Parliament.

They rubbed shoulders with the cream of the Motor City, including Funkadelic, the Temptations, Edwin Starr, Bob Seger and the MC5. They recorded for the legendary Chess Records. And they picked up the torch of Jimi Hendrix to pioneer a distinctive breed of African-American psychedelia. Yet Detroit's Black Merda was history after just four years, a victim of record-industry vicissitudes and destined for cultdom. "We were slightly arrogant," Merda bassist VC Veasey says now, somewhat ruefully, of his group's brief tenure. "We thought we were doing something groundbreaking and meaningful-we put ourselves in the same category as Hendrix and the Beatles-but we were young guys and we made some bad business decisions."

Along their way, though, Black Merda made some bold artistic decisions.

As in-demand session players in early-'60s Detroit, Veasey, drummer Tyrone Hite and guitarist Anthony Hawkins, then known as the Soul Agents, were touring with both Edwin Starr and Gene "Duke Of Earl" Chandler by 1967. On the road with Chandler, one day the men wandered into a record store and came across Jimi Hendrix's Are You Experienced?

"We didn't stop playing it for a month!" Veasey marvels. "Hendrix turned us around, and we decided we wanted to emulate him, as far as that kind of dress, the attitude. We felt we had a spiritual kindred."

Soon afterward the Soul Agents adopted a decidedly Hendrixian fashion sense: towering Afros and flamboyant attire-Veasey claims they were doing "the freaked-out thing" when Funkadelic was still wearing matching suits. Dubbing their sonic style "black rock," adding Hawkins' younger brother Charles on second guitar and christening themselves Black Merda (after a brief stint as the somewhat inflammatory "Black Murder"), the group quickly notched a local reputation as a take-no-prisoners live act. Motown producer Norman Whitfield and the Temptations' Eddie Kendricks courted the quartet, but Merda resisted such overtures, stubbornly taking the attitude that, as Veasey puts it, "the 'old Motown thing' was passe."

In 1969, at the urging of songwriter Ellington "Fugi" Jordan (who penned Etta James' hit "I'd Rather Go Blind"), producer and Chess label boss Marshall Chess came to town to check out Black Merda. Thrilled to sign with the same label that had recently unleashed Muddy Waters' rock side on Electric Mud, Merda soon began work on its debut, additionally backing up Fugi on a proposed solo album for Chess.

1970's Black Merda was a heady melange of psychedelic funk, hard rock and dirty-ass chain-gang blues-Funkadelic meets MC5. Yet lost in the translation from microphone to mixdown was the group's big, visceral live sound. "With the album we wanted that," Veasey says. "But [the producer] toned it down. He took all the dynamics out of it."

Disheartened and unwilling to tour behind an inferior product, Merda decamped to California with Fugi, who had West Coast contacts and was now playing congas in the band. They soon became friendly with the members of L.A.'s War and entertained an offer to sign with the group's production company. Chess, however, wanted a second album, and Merda soon returned home. 1972's resulting Long Burn the Fire, with its mix of rockers and strings-laden ballads, wasn't as edgy as its predecessor, but it could've been a contender if not for two missteps: Confusingly, the group changed its name, to just "Mer-Da," and Chess, having recently been sold, shifted the project to low-priority status and issued the LP on its Janus subsidiary. With no label support and-with disco on the horizon-consumers' tastes changing, the Merda flame gradually flickered and dimmed.

"We just kind of stopped because we felt there was no place for us and the kind of music we were doing," Veasey explains. "[But] Black Merda had some magic going. We'd proven ourselves."

By the mid-'90s both Merda LPs were eBay-certified collectors' items-celebrity fans include Julian Cope and DJ Z-Trip-leading the Tuff City label to create vinyl reissues. 2002 saw the inclusion of a Merda track on an infamous compilation of '70s black rock, Chains & Black Exhaust. And in 2004, news of Tuff City's forthcoming repackaging of the two albums on CD prompted journalists to start inquiring about the band. Intrigued concert promoters began making their own inquiries, resulting in Veasey, the Hawkinses and Fugi, plus a keyboardist and a drummer (Hite, sadly, passed away from cancer in 2004), regrouping as Black Merda in January to play a Detroit music festival.

Since then the band has been recording fresh material, including what Veasey describes as a "Merda-ized version" of the Beatles' "A Day in the Life," with an eye toward making a new album. He's mindful, however, that comebacks sometimes serve only to kill the legend, saying, "You don't throw something together just to jump on some bandwagon."

"But," he adds, chuckling, "I think the future is promising. [At shows] people have really been responding-they say to us, 'Y'all still got it, man!' So I guess the music still makes a connection."