Companion
This album is a true oddity even by outsider music, vanity-pressstandards. Recorded and released in 1974 by Charlie Tweddle, a Kentuckynative and metaphysical haberdasher, the album encompassesintrospective Dylanesque folk, Appalachian music, psychedelia, fieldrecordings and radical tape experimentation. Tweddle was an art-schooldropout and an ex-member of Kansas City garage band The Prophets ofParadise when he decided to embark on a three-year lysergic tourthrough Haight-Ashbury. When he returned, his head still full of acid,he became convinced that he was a real life prophet with the mission ofbringing his peculiar brand of primitive hillbilly concrete psych tothe world. And so he got together with six guys that look like extrasfrom The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and recorded an LP combining hisoff-kilter songwriting with sudden, frightening excursions intoalarmingly atmospheric tape music. He dubbed the prophet part ofhimself Eilrahc Elddewt (Charlie Tweddle backwards) and wrote someastoundingly boastful liner notes: "Eilrahc is to music what Christ isto religion. This album will reach into the dustbins of your mind." Thealbum definitely reaches into something, but it's not my mind, it's adeep toybox of warped, drug-addled insanity. The opening track soundsinnocuous enough, a low-fidelity recording of a Dylan-influenced folksong, but soon there are strange things afoot: odd time signatures,strange tape effects, weird percussion. The second track, which I willcall "Hot Tamales" (all eight tracks are untitled), takes a jauntyTex-Mex tune and distorts it with sudden launches of time-compressedmariachi music. On track four, Tweddle and his pals perform aprimitive, ramshackle rendition of the gospel standard "This World IsNot My Home" (Incredible String Fans take note), adding a soundtrack ofchirping crickets to the background. Tweddle's obsession with UFOsreaches a nightmarish zenith on track six, which distorts fieldrecordings of seagulls into a menacing alien noise, while Tweddlenarrates his close encounter story: "In the darkness of the night, alight came dropping from above...The ship was landing on the shore/Andcoming from the ship...three creatures pointed to the sea...as youenter from beneath the ship, the figures follow you/It was a night oflove/You stood gazing into the eyes of your future/As the sea sang thesong with no words." The lysergic vocal mutations are dizzying, andadding to the confusion, Tweddle's narration competes with a recordingof himself playing "Blue Bonnet Lane." I figured that was about asstrange as this album could get, until I reached track eight, which isa 22-minute field recording of crickets chirping on a still, peacefulcountry night, as music plays in a far distant background. It's anabsolutely haunting end to one of the most idiosyncratic non-Jandekworks of outsider music I've ever heard. Companion Records does a greatjob with reissuing a record that was previously only available to themost diligent flea market crate diggers, adding six bonus tracks ofequally inventive music by Tweddle and retaining the original design ofthe packaging. Just when I think it's safe to be completely jaded anddisillusioned by the glut of over-hyped reissues of vinyl artifacts,along comes an album like Fantastic Greatest Hits, forcing me to wonder what other bits of unhinged genius might be hiding out there in history's dustbin.
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