Hunger - Strictly From Hunger (1969)

Hunger arrived in L.A. from Portland in late 1967 as the Outcasts, a teenage cover band, but within six months they'd signed with a connected manager, played all over Los Angeles, embraced psychedelia and signed up to record an album of original music for the label their manager founded for them: Public! Records. They showed tremendous promise – and their producers invested heavily into a band that was going to be the next marquee act at the Whiskey A Go-Go, bringing in members of Strawberry Alarm Clock, including future Lynyrd Skynyrd star Ed King, to produce an album. However, the band broke up before the record could be released, and so as the label had little interest in them any more, they butchered the tapes before releasing it on the Public! Records label. Most of the tracks had been recorded as lengthy guitar-led psychedelic rock, but many of them were cut down, often with hilariously fast fade-outs. Other tracks had the superb fuzz guitar parts unceremoniously buried in the mix, while the version of 'Trying To Make The Best', which in its unedited version was seven and a half minutes long, was split into two new songs, a heavily edited version of the original, losing two minutes from the recording, and then a second version, which was mostly the unedited version of the original but with the vocals removed, and tagged onto the end of side two. If the label were doing that to make up the playing time to 40 minutes then why didn't they just leave the longer takes of all the tracks? When I first heard this album some 40-odd years ago, it was on a cassette tape from a friend in Germany, and he sent me the original un-edited version of the album, which I didn't know existed, and so I just thought that it was a brilliant late-60's psyche album, and enjoyed it as such. When I later heard the story of this album, and listened to the Public! version of the record, I could see exactly why the band were so incensed at the butchery of their work, and I never listed to that version again. If you already know the band but not the back-story, then you are in for a treat, and if this is your first introduction to them, then prepare to be blown away by one of the best hard-psyche albums of the late 60's, now exactly as the group themselves wanted it to be heard.

Track listing

01 Colors 
02 Workshop 
03 Portland 69 
04 No Shame 
05 Trying To Make The Best 
06 Open Your Eyes 
07 The Truth 
08 Mind Machine 
09 She Let Him Continue