Plato And The Philosophers - Thirteen O'Clock Flight To Psychedelphia (1967)

In 1962, 14-year old multi-instrumentalist Ken Tebow took up the bass guitar and formed a group called The Checkmates. He was joined by the similarly aged guitarist Mike Imbler, and the pair played mainly in Church basements and Jr. High School Proms until around 1965. The Checkmate's manager suggested a name change in 1965 as there was another popular group with the same name, and he suggested coming up with a name that sounded like Paul Revere and The Raiders or Sam The Sham and The Pharaohs, so the band became Plato and The Philosophers. By this time the line-up had expanded to include Barry Orscheln on keyboards and Mark Valentine on drums. Initially Tebow suggested they go on stage dressed in togas and sandals, and they did this twice, but just before they were to perform a third time in the outfits, he went out to the parking lot and saw a fire, where the other members were burning the outfits! The band's first single was 'C.M. I Love You', released in 1966 on the It Records label, and Tebow was intent on getting the band signed to a major label, so many of the 500 copies were mailed to other record labels, and eventually a company in Chicago called GAR Records got in touch , and was interested in issuing the record on their label. The band received statements from the label which stated that it had sold 10,000 copies, but no-one knows for sure how many it shifted. 

After the success of their first single, Tebow got in touch with a well respected studio in Columbia, Missouri called Fairyland Studios, and worked out a deal with the studio to issue a record on the Fairyland Records label by paying for all the studio and record pressing costs. About four hundred copies were pressed of their second single 'Wishes', but sales were not good enough for a re-pressing, although this was the first outing for the brilliantly-titled psyche effort 'Thirteen O'Clock Flight To Psychedelphia', which appeared on the b-side of the single. The band went back into Fairyland Studios in September 1967 to record two more sides for a single, but the 'Doomsday Nowhere City'/'I Knew' record never appeared, as once the recording time was paid for they couldn't afford to press up the discs. In 1968 Plato and The Philosophers began to change to a heavier sound, influenced in part by their admiration for Iron Butterfly, and their keyboard player studied that band's 'In A Gadda Da Vidda' intently, and persuaded the other members to play the full eighteen minute version at every gig. The next recording sessions were done in 1968 in Pekin, where they recorded 'Ima Jean Money' and 'Take It Easy', before moving to Buffalo and taping another clutch of songs. These demos got the band a tentative agreement with Cedarwood Music for an album and single release, but despite recording some more tracks in Nashville, neither the single not the album materialised, and by the end of 1970 Plato and The Philosophers was no more. If they had released an album in 1969 then it would have sounded very different to those early singles, and as they are the sides that I prefer then I would have liked to hear a long-player some time in 1967, and so that's what this record is. 

Track listing

01 Today I Died
02 In Good Time
03 Doomsday Nowhere City
04 Ima Jean Money
05 Take It Easy
06 Back Room Bar
07 C.M. I Love You
08 Wishes
09 I Knew
10 Through Your Heart
11 I Don't Mind
12 How I Won The War
13 Thirteen O'Clock Flight To Psychedelphia