Jim Sullivan - UFO

Ultra rare 1969 private press psych-folk-rock masterpiece featuring the legendary Wrecking Crew (Beach Boys, Phil Spector). A seventh son of a seventh son, Jim Sullivan was a west coast should-have-been, an Irish-American former high school quarterback whose gift for storytelling earned him cult status in the Malibu bar where he performed nightly. Sullivan was always on the edge of fame; hanging out with movie stars like Harry Dean Stanton, performing on the Jose Feliciano show, even stealing a cameo in the ultimate hippie movie, easy rider. UFO was a different beast to the one-man-and-his-guitar stuff Jim had been doing on stage; instead, it was a fully realised album of scope and imagination, a folk-rock record with its head in the stratosphere. Sullivan's voice is deep and expressive like Fred Neil with a weathered and worldly americana sound like Joe South, pop songs that aren't happy - but filled with despair. the album is punctuated with a string section (that recalls David Axelrod), other times a wurlitzer piano provides the driving groove (as if memphis great Jim Dickinson was running the show). UFO is a slice of American pop music filtered from the murky depths of Los Angeles, by way of the deep south.