Cover by Victor Moscoso
Sopwith Camel, is a barely recalled—but amazing—group from the Summer of Love-era San Francisco, who were the second Bay Area band to be signed to a major label (after Jefferson Airplane) and the first to have a top 40 hit, 1967’s Lovin’ Spoonful-esque (both bands had same producer, Erik Jacobsen) “Hello, Hello.”
If you look at a book of San Francisco rock posters, you’ll see their name show up a lot on bills often above the names of much more famous groups (like the Grateful Dead, who opened for them), and on bills that included Love, Allen Ginsberg and the 13th Floor Elevators, but there’s precious little written about them online. I think they must’ve largely slipped past me because based on the evidence of “Hello, Hello” I probably mentally put them more into the bubblegum pop category, plus with their name, I think I conflated them with the Royal Guardsman, who had novelty songs like “Snoopy vs. The Red Baron” and “It’s Sopwith Camel Time.”
Here they are miming “Hello, Hello” on Dick Clark’s Where The Action Is:
Their first incarnation of Sopwith Camel only lasted about six months. Their debut album was pretty much cobbled together right before they split up—the album sported a sticker asking buyers if they remembered “Hello, Hello”—but Sopwith Camel reformed four years later in 1971 when their music took on a more jazzy/hippie Steely Dan-meets-War-meets-John Sebastian kinda sound.They released one more album in 1972 on Reprise before breaking up again, The Miraculous Hump Returns From the Moon and this is what I want to call your attention to. It’s one of the most amazing overlooked gems of the 1970s. In a decade positively teeming with great “lost” music, it stands out as one of the best “lost” albums.
I realize that I compared them to three different acts above, but really this album, or most of it, at least, isn’t too much like anything else that was going on at that time. And how many bands can you name that were fronted by a guy wielding a soprano sax? None, right? They had a highly original sound. If I was hard pressed to describe their music in words, I’d have to say they sound like what the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers would sound like if they’d have formed a real band. Only Frank Zappa’s Apostrophe can rival it as a soundtrack to reading underground comix of that era. It’s a quirky, fun, sleazy-sounding album. I highly, highly recommend giving it your time.
When the Guardian’s Rob Fitzpatrick wrote about The Miraculous Hump Returns From the Moon in 2014, he described the album as sounding like it was recorded last week, and this, I reckon, is quite true. He added:
Taking in elements of FM schmaltz, prog-rock, jazz, showtunes, Krautrock and indian classical music, this is an album that overflows with ideas, but never overwhelms. “Orange Peel” is cooly funk-scented ambient-jazz, “Dancin’ Wizard” is what Incredible String Band might have sounded like if they’d grown up with sunshine rather than rain, while “Coke, Suede and Waterbeds” is as lush and indulgent as the title suggests. However, it’s the last track “Brief Synthoponia” that is most startling. A fantastically stream-lined experimental jam, it manages to cram an awesome breakbeat, sax and synth squalls and some super-skronk hep-cat dynamism into its fifty-three second lifespan. A tiny masterpiece.
What he said.
Lucky for you, you don’t even need to leave your seat to hear The Miraculous Hump Returns From the Moon as the album streams on Spotify and Tidal. Do you have anything more important to do today? I didn’t think so. If you want to hear it on wax, Real Gone Music have just released a limited edition vinyl version of just 750 copies.
If there was just ONE song you’d hope to see performed by these guys on YouTube, it’s The Miraculous Hump‘s opening number, the futuristic and CATCHY AS HELL “Fazon.” I could listen to this on a loop for 24 hours and never get sick of it. Sadly the performance gets abruptly cut off, followed by “Monkeys on the Moon” another song from the album. (There are other versions of this video floating around.)
BONUS clip: Jonathan Wilson and his band covering “Fazon” in 2014
