Fat Mattress “Fat Mattress” 1969. As if the cover doesn’t make it crystal obvious, Fat Mattress were a psychedelic folk band from England, formed in ’68 by vocalist Neil Landon and guitarist and vocalist Noel Redding, known also as the bassist for the Jimi Hendrix Experience. Hendrix himself appears on one track, “How Can I Live,” credited with “percussion.”

Fat Mattress was the band’s debut LP (they only released one more, in 1970) and it squeaked onto the charts, going to #134 on the US album chart. The sole single, “Magic Forest,” a funky little ass-shaker with trippy hippie lyrics, charted but only in the Netherlands at #11. Less funky and even more trippy English countryside twee (think fairies, gnomes, Stonehenge – you know what I mean) is “Walking Through a Garden” but honestly the whole record is just dripping in late 60’s vibes. It opens with the flute-forward track “All Night Drinker,” the flute performed by Chris Wood, founding member of Traffic. I didn’t know that until I just now looked it up but even before I could hear the Traffic influence woven through much of the rest of the record. “I Don’t Mind” feels like a mashup of Amboy Duke’s “Journey to the Center of the Mind” and all Beatles releases from ’67-’69. “Bright New Way” has an Americana-Grateful Dead-hippie (less twee, more twang) while “Everything’s Blue” leans jangly hard blues rock…a little Them influence maybe. We picked up Fat Mattress at a record store in Appleton (Eroding Winds) over Labor Day weekend – this one might not be staying long in our collection.

Rocket From the Tombs “The Day the Earth Met The…” Subtitled “Live From Punk Ground Zero, Cleveland 1975.” 2002. Smog Veil Records. Subtitled “Live From Punk Ground Zero, Cleveland 1975” on marbled vinyl. Spinning this pre-Dead Boys comp of demos and live tracks in honor of Cheetah Chrome (b. Eugene Richard O’Connor 1955, d. September 13th 2026) who died yesterday at the age of 71. We briefly met Cheetah almost 10 years ago in April 2017 at Rush Mor Records (and saw he and Johnny Blitz perform later that night down the street at Club Garibaldi). That’s Cheetah giving Joe bunny ears. Sides 1 and 2 were recorded in February 1975 at the band’s rehearsal loft onto a borrowed reel-to-reel; Sides 3 and 4 are from a show on July 24th 1975 at The Piccadilly Inn in Cleveland (Television also performed and the internet tells me tickets were $3). I wrote about this LP back then and here’s what I had to say:

The Stooges-influenced 70′s band, plagued with internal strife from the outset, split after just a couple of years and formed The Dead Boys (Chrome and Blitz plus the fantastic Stiv Bators). The other half, Peter Laughner and David Thomas (Crocus Behemoth) formed Pere Ubu. This double LP (“the greatest album never recorded”) has early versions of “30 Seconds Over Tokyo” and “Final Solution,” which Pere Ubu would later rerecord and self-release as singles, as well as the entirely insane “Life Stinks” (on The Modern Dance). “What Love Is,” “Ain’t It Fun,” “Down in Flames” and “Sonic Reducer” all showed up on on the Dead Boys’ debut Young Loud and Snotty. RFTT also honor The Stooges with fairly authentic covers of  “Raw Power” and “Search & Destroy” plus there’s a sludgy punk version of the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction.”

Here’s a video from someone who was at that Club Garibaldi show in 2017:

Love and Rockets “Motorcycle” 1989. 12″ single, Beggars Banquet records. “Motorcycle” was the lead single from their 1989 s/t record (their fourth studio LP) Love and Rockets. I’m not sure if it charted or not; if it did, it wasn’t nearly as successful as the second single “So Alive” which hit #3 on the US charts. I loved that record (though I liked their earlier material a bit more) and had the cd around the time it was released in ’89. Now the singe/record/band is lumped in with “alternative rock” but that term either didn’t exist in ’89 or was not on my radar. We just called it “cool” and danced in the alternative/punk/industrial clubs to this song and other L&R tracks. Also on the 12″ is “I Feel Speed” which is essentially a slowed-down version of “Motorcycle;” the band does this fairly frequently to their songs (see “Mirror People” from Earth, Sun, Moon and “All in My Mind” from Express). Side Two has two industrial dance-styled instrumentals: “Bike” and “Bikedance.” Both are hypnotically pounding and a bit experimental (which I suppose is why another genre they are thrown into is neo-psychedelia).