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Remastered music from lost psych gods The Damnation of Adam Blessing
02.21.2018
09:58 am
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By purloining their band name from a pulp crime novel, The Damnation of Adam Blessing sealed their fate. DJs’ reluctance to announce their name on-air in 1970 basically kept them off the radio despite the high quality of their output (Damn Yankees could exist on stage and in cinemas because the FCC couldn’t levy indecency fines on theaters), and that their name led to their frequent misidentification as an occult-themed band a la Coven didn’t help them find their audience, either.

But The Damnation of Adam Blessing’s output holds up against any other hard rock band circa 1970—they’d fit comfortably into a playlist with Cream, Sir Lord Baltimore, Humble Pie, or Atomic Rooster—and their first two albums (the second, in particular) are lost psych-rock treasures. Emerging in the late ‘60s from the same Cleveland, OH cover-band scene that produced members of The James Gang and The Raspberries, Damnation set themselves apart with powerful, groove-oriented playing and a compelling vocalist (Bill Constable, credited as “Adam Blessing” because why not just run with that) who could channel Mark Lindsay and Leslie West with equal aplomb. Though their originals were the main attraction, their 1969 self-titled debut album betrayed their cover-band roots with its inclusion of transformative versions of Bonnie Dobson’s “Morning Dew” and The Monkees’ “Last Train to Clarksville.”
 

 
Per Damnations guitarist Jim Quinn:

Originally Adam and I were in a band called The Society, basically a cover band. I was 19, just got out of the service and was working at a gas station. The owner was dating a woman who said her son was in a band that was looking for a guitar player. I went and auditioned, and Adam Blessing was in the band—he was still going by his real name, Bill Constable—and we played around maybe for a year, battles of the bands. But Adam and I wanted to do our own music, we’d written several songs together, so he went out looking for a band, and he found a band called Dust. They were a four-piece band, guitar, bass, drums, and a lead singer, and we talked the band into leaving the singer and coming over to us. We had management and original material, so we went in to the basement for six months, and came out to get a gig as the house band at a place called D’Poos.

 

 

 

Memorabilia from Jim Quinn’s stash, much gratitude for its provision. Clicking spawns a more readable enlargement

Though the band’s albums came out on the major label United Artists and were promoted pretty heavily, distro just plain sucked; though the band was wowing crowds on tour, those audiences were often unable to find Damnation records in shops. So when they broke up in 1973, both the band and its legacy vanished but good. Their post-mortem cult never really developed until 1999, when they were exhumed for an incredibly lengthy and detailed article in Ugly Things #17, which led to a suite of CD re-releases on the Italian reissue label Akarma, which in their turn created a mini-renaissance of interest in the band among deep psych-heads—Decibel called them “one of the greatest U.S. rock bands that hardly anyone has heard.” A hometown reunion concert took place after their bass player was released from prison—another story altogether, one best told by the man himself.

Those Italian reissues were sourced from surviving vinyl, and so sonically they were no great shakes, but the crucial first two albums are being reissued again, with superior sound. (Seriously, never mind the second two, they were not up to the standards the band had set, and the last came out after they’d been dropped by UA, under the band name “Glory.”) The Brooklyn-based label Exit Stencil secured the licensing to The Damnation of Adam Blessing and The Second Damnation, and remastered the albums from the original tapes, which turned up in Universal’s vaults along with all the original album art. These are as pristine as reissues get, and we’re excited to have been granted permission to share some of the newly remastered tracks with you today. We’ve got the debut album’s “Cookbook,” which was the b-side to their “Morning Dew” single, and the second album’s excellent “Back to the River.” We got some background on both tracks while we had Jim Quinn on the phone:

“Cookbook” was the very first song we wrote together. We’d watched a movie called I Love You, Alice B. Toklas, and they made marijuana brownies in it, and that’s what the song started to develop from, the idea there would be a cookbook with that recipe. We really thought that should have been our first single instead of the b-side, it would have been a hit—so many bands have covered it and had success with it. But it was a fun song to write.

“Back to the River,” we wrote when we didn’t have a place to rehearse. We were hanging out with a woman we met through our manager, and she was pretty much into the witchcraft thing, Beelzebub statues in her house and so forth. We started writing that song in her living room one night. It started with our bass player coming up with his part, and it was a protest song about the war. We all took that pretty seriously. “Take Me Back to the River” was about the idea of bringing these soldiers back home. In fact it was in a Vietnam documentary that Bill Paxton narrated, called Sky Soldier.

 
More after the jump…

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Posted by Ron Kretsch
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02.21.2018
09:58 am
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