I fully realize that my fetish for vintage drum machines is of very specific interest to myself and a small handful of other nerds but I feel that in these two singles from 1967 (!) I’ve found a sort of drum machine holy grail. Evidently Tea Pot (below) was a sizable regional (Chicago) hit for one Simtec Simmons (later of funk duo Simtec & Wylie). If this tune doesn’t qualify as a significant proto-krautrock jam then I dunno what. Endless thanks to Dangerous Minds pal Ian Raikow for pointing me in this direction after my Timmy Thomas post the other day.

 
But what’s truly mind blowing is this following attempted cash-in single by the same guy under the amazing moniker The Computer and the Little Fooler. As they perfectly framed it over at Office Naps, the fantastic (evidently defunct) blog where I found this incredible artifact,

The weirdest post-War American music has always shown up first on the 45 rpm record, one of the most expedient of commercial music media. But, that said, the strange-witted minimalism of “Computing” and its backwards flipside “Sw-w-wis-s-sh” beggars all belief. “Computing” was neither funny nor weird enough to be a novelty record, nor did it offer anything that anyone could point to as a being conventionally instrumental. There’s simply little sense to be made of it. Sometimes I think this is the greatest record ever made.

I must concur ! “Sw-w-wis-s-sh” is the most mysterious piece of vinyl I can recall, bathed as it is in sheets of white noise tape hiss, a skeletal rhythm section peeking through, bass all random. Yeah !