Brown, Bobby (Live) - 1

One of the all-time mondo bizarro outsider classics. Ultra-spacy live private/DIY spiritual psych lunacy by enigmatic California mystic hippie one-man band! Whew, that's a mouthful – but well worth saying!

Apparently recorded live in his van(?!?) before a small audience (he had hoped to make the record from a performance when he opened for Fleetwood Mac, but the recording quality sucked, so he chose this more "intimate" venue instead!). He has an amazing, surreal voice with a 6-octave range (from blow-out-your-speakers bass to eunuch-inspired falsetto). I've seen it described as "a lysergically drenched Nick Drake". More amazing is the playing - oddball electronic and other effects performed on a homemade instrument (originally, it was comprised of approximately 50 smaller homemade instruments - 311 total strings, flutes, percussion, etc, inspired by and using parts of guitar, Irish harp, koto, dulcimer, flute, sitar, drums and thumb piano, to name a few – but he reduced the number and size for this performance). The whole thing is done 'one man band" style with no overdubbing. The result is like Moondog on acid with a bit of anabolic steroid thrown in for good measure.

And as you can imagine, this guy comes with a story - though not much is known about him. I do know he was Carol Kleyn's boyfriend at the time (he thanks her on the album cover, too), and he's weirder than she is! According to John McCormack of Sacramento News & Review:

"From the late 1960s thru the 1980s, Brown toured up and down the California coast, performing live and selling records out of his van... [He] remains a figure shrouded in mystery. Attempting to reconstruct a history of this Sacramento musician is like putting together an old jigsaw puzzle that, over time, has come to lose many of its pieces. Most of what is known about Brown comes either from firsthand, and usually clouded, accounts of his performances or from the detailed liner notes that Brown meticulously scribed on the back covers of his records".

A cult outsider "real people" wonderama!

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