The Wanderers are five young fellows from Hartford, Connecticut, three in college, two seniors in high school. Their custom production has an excellent 1966/1967 garage/rock/psych feel that’s thick with basement electric guitar, cheesy organ, bass and drums. Side one is the “sacred” side, covering selections from early Avant Garde releases which was basically the only known Jesus rock at the time. A reverend opens with a brief spoken message on accepting “the profane” and bringing it to God in worship (obviously such a radical project must be justified and sanctioned to concerned skeptical parents). That out of the way, it’s on to covers of John Ylvisaker (‘Sing To The Lord’, ‘Lament Of The City’), Robert Edwin (‘Are You Running With Me Jesus’, ‘Keep The Rumor Going’) and the Medical Mission Sisters (‘The Wedding Banquet’), all performed with fun unrefined creative garage-band teenage zest. Selections on the secular side include ‘Testify’, ‘Knock On Wood’ and ‘Midnight Hour’. There’s some smokin’ lead guitar on Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Fire’ (yeah!), as well as the closing self-written track: a classic 9-minute hunk of up-tempo trippy fuzzed swirly-organ summer-of-love psychedelia with the cryptic title ‘B.S.R.S’ that’s been likened to Country Joe & The Fish. This piece especially makes The Wanderers a big $$$ hit among ‘60s psych private press collectors. Back cover says they participated in a high school youth gathering sponsored by several Catholic churches in the fall of 1967, performing a celebration of The Eucharist. “So great was the response that the need to make this music available to a wider audience has produced this recording”. (Ken Scott – The Archivist).
Thank you! What a pleasure to discover such rare and good recordings from the 60s
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