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LOST TREASURES – Fraternal Order of All

Posted on 13 January 2016

LOST TREASURES

FRATERNAL ORDER OF ALL

“Greetings from Planet Love”

By Peter Marston

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One of the pitfalls of success for pop bands is that record companies, fans and sometimes the bands themselves develop fairly fixed views of what the band can and should sound like. Sometimes recording under an alias can help restore a band’s sense of play and open up new horizons in their recordings. This was certainly Paul McCartney’s thinking when he hatched the Sgt. Pepper concept. XTC did it with the Dukes of Stratosphear and the Damned did it with Naz Nomad and the Nightmares (and those are a couple of my favorite albums!). The Fraternal Order of the All’s Greetings from Planet Love is Andrew Gold’s foray into the same territory.

Gold’s career as a working musician began in the late ’60s with Bryndle, an L.A. folk-rock band that also featured Wendy Waldman, Karla Bonoff and Kenny Edwards (and that’s quite a line-up). Signed to A&M, the band released only one single and when that failed to catch fire, the band split up. Waldman and Bonoff went on to considerable success as singer-songwriters and Gold and Edwards joined Linda Ronstadt’s backing band (Edwards had, in fact, been an original member of the Stone Poneys). Gold parlayed his success as a sideman into a solo career himself, releasing Andrew Gold in 1975. The follow-up, What’s Wrong with This Picture?, included the Top Ten smash “Lonely Boy” and only two years after that he scored again with “Thank You For Being a Friend.” In 1984, he teamed up former 10cc member and legendary ’60s songwriter Graham Gouldman to form Wax UK who recorded three LPs and charted with two singles, including the terrific “Bridge to Your Heart.” Gold then resumed his solo career, reformed with Bryndle, and in the mid-’90s began recording Greetings from Planet Love in his home studio, overdubbing nearly all the instruments himself (as he had done on Ronstadt’s “Heatwave”).

The album is psychedelic pastiche, using virtually every studio trick imaginable from the playbooks of the Beatles, Beach Boys, Pink Floyd and the Byrds. What keeps the project from becoming a parody is the quality of the material, which is uniformly excellent (just a tick or two below the Dukes of Stratosphere, in my opinion). Some of the highlights include “Love Tonight,” a lovely Beach Boys-style ballad co-written with Gouldman and ex-Bread drummer Mike Botts. “Chasing My Tail” pits wonderful chord changes and a beautiful melody against vocals often drenched in tremolo and a tag borrowed from the solo of “Being For the Benefit of Mr. Kite.” “King of Showbiz” is perhaps the least psychedelic track, coming closer to Gold’s work in Wax UK, but is one of the standouts nonetheless. “Freelove Baby” features guest vocals by Jimmy Caprio and mixes British soul and Indian influences in a good and proper freakout. “Space and Time” recalls the Byrds circa The Notorious Byrd Brothers, including a pitch-perfect 12-string raga solo. “Mr. Plastic Business Man” alternates Dylan-esque verses with Beatle-esque choruses, showing what The Masked Marauders might have been if it had been more fully realized. The closer, “Tomorrow Drop Dead,” is a clever (and decidedly less mystical) take on the Beatles’ “Tomorrow Never Knows,” reprising many of the latter’s tape loops sounds. The album is rounded out by a number of short transition pieces some of which are throwaways, but some of which are charming and effective miniatures.

No review of the album, however, can fail to mention the horrendous artwork which seems to be a simulation of spin-art using the medium of vomit.

Following the release of Greetings from Planet Love, Gold recorded a few more solo albums as well as another well-realized nostalgia project (1998’s Copy Cat). In June, 2011, he passed away in his sleep, apparently from heart failure.

Greetings from Planet Love is no longer in print. Used copies I see online are often fairly expensive ($30-$60), but I have found several copies in the bargain bins at local record stores, so I know it’s out there. The album is available in the digital domain and can be streamed on Spotify and other such sites. Fans of the Beatles’ psychedelic period and its many imitators are encouraged to give it a spin!

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Pop Pioneer and “Lost Treasures” writer, Peter Marston is the leader of long-running power pop band, Shplang, whose most recent album, “My Big Three Wheeler” has been described as “the Beatles meet Zappa in pop-psych Sumo match.” Peter has a new project in 2015 under the name MARSTON. They will have a track on the upcoming “Power Pop Planet – Volume 5” compilation shipping end of December, 2015.

You check it out at this link: http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/shplang

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