Although I still own a turntable—a really nice one at that—it’s out gathering dust in the garage and hasn’t been hooked up once since 2006, and then only for a single day. I haven’t had a turntable in steady use since about 1999. Once you could burn your own CDs, I was totally over vinyl.

Over the years, I’ve slimmed my once vast record collection down to a tiny, tiny number of albums, some rarities and autographed items, and some things where I just thought “This will never, ever come out on CD.” More often than not these albums have ultimately been reissued on compact disc.

One of them is Gary Lewis and The Playboys’ New Directions album. When that came out on CD, I was shocked, but wanted to jump for joy to be able to replace my crackly old album. [Still I never expect to see Roslyn Kind’s 1968 RCA debut Give Me You, recorded when Kind (who is Barbra Streisand’s younger half sister) was fresh out of high school and sounding like a tortured teenage, female version of Scott Walker, although it and the less good follow-up This is Roslyn Kind are certainly worthy of a Light in the Attic or Now Sounds reissue treatment, hint, hint.]

One record I’ve kept around, never expecting to see on CD, The Adventures of Keith, came out on CD in 2008, but I didn’t know this until recently. I’ve only ever met one other person who knew about The Adventures of Keith besides me, and that person was a fanatical Japanese collector/otaku who knew about everything and was impossible to stump. We both agreed that it was a “very, very good record, but not great” in that way of communicating that American music nerds have of relating to Japanese music nerds who speak little English.
 

 
“Keith,” or Barry James Keefer or “Bazza” as his mother called him and the name he goes by today, was a bubble gum pop singer, a good-looking young guy from Philly who had a great voice, but he sang other people’s songs. After two albums and a few hits like the insanely catchy “98.6,” “Sugar Man” and “Ain’t Gonna Lie,” (all produced by Jerry Ross) Keith signed to RCA who allowed him to write and record his own material.

The Adventures of Keith must have had a considerable budget to pay for the album’s elaborate Bee Gees-like orchestrations featuring strings, brass and accordion. It was also one of the very first attempts to do a quasi narrative “rock opera” and by strange coincidence, the album—released just one month after The Who’s Tommy—tells the story of a blind boy, Charley Cinders and his trials in life.

RCA didn’t promote the record and it, naturally, flopped. Over the years the album’s profile has slowly risen, until the point—to my surprise—there was enough interest to warrant a CD release. In 1974 Keith recorded a one-off single for Frank Zappa’s DiscReet Records, “What Did You Do In The Revolution, Dad?” His website says he sang with Zappa around that time too, but I’m unaware of any recordings of this.

As you can hear below, The Adventures of Keith is a really amazing, and in many ways brilliant and dazzling song cycle, but it falls short of being truly “great” as my Japanese pal and I agreed, even as we were both extremely enthusiastic about it at the same time. Is it a masterpiece? No. The work of a musical genius? I ain’t gonna lie (see what I did there?), no, but still, it’s “very, very good” and a record that fans of early Cat Stevens, The Moody Blues, Donovan or The Small Faces will dig the shit out of! Give The Adventures of Keith a listen and see what you think.
 

 
The Adventures of Keith is also on Spotify