The Cowsills - Captain Sad And His Ship Of Fools 1968 (@320)

 

The Cowsills - Captain Sad And His Ship Of Fools 1968

Captain Sad and His Ship of Fools Review by Mark Deming.

It says a great deal about how pop records were made in the 1960s that the Cowsills' Captain Sad and His Ship of Fools was the third album the Rhode Island family band would cut within the space of just 12 months, and while most current bands would balk at the workload of cutting one album a year along with touring, 1968's Captain Sad suggests the Cowsills were handling their busy schedule very well indeed. Captain Sad doesn't feature as many hits as the Cowsills' first two long-players (though "Indian Lake" would chart high for the group), but the music is uniformly splendid, and for a group that featured members who were nine and 11, the material is mature, tuneful, and beautifully executed, with excellent harmonies from the siblings and imaginative production from Billy Cowsill and Bob Cowsill. The Cowsills only wrote four songs for Captain Sad, but they happen to be four of the album's standout tracks -- "Newspaper Blanket" is a prescient and poignant tale of a homeless man asleep on a snowy bench, "Make the Music Flow" is a great slice of sunshine pop, "Meet Me at the Wishing Well" is superior folk-rock, and the title tune is a playful exercise in psychedelic-influenced pop with an arrangement that edges into baroque pop. Elsewhere, "Who Can Teach a Songbird How to Sing" (written in part by Graham Nash) is a great showcase for the group's harmonies, "The Fantasy World of Harry Faversham" is a silly but effective story of one man's Walter Mitty-style fantasies, "The Bridge" gives Barbara Cowsill a rare and lovely lead vocal, and if "Indian Lake" seems a bit lightweight in this context, it still sounds like the perfect hit single it was. Captain Sad and His Ship of Fools is a marvelous artifact from the golden age of pop record-making, and offers more evidence (as if it were needed) that the Cowsills were more than another bubblegum act of the era -- they were one of the more gifted and ambitious groups to hit the charts in their day.

Tracklist:

1.       Captain Sad and the Ship of Fools

2.       Make The Music Flow

3.       Indian Lake

4.       Ask The Children

5.       Who Can Teach a Songbird How to Sing

6.       The Bridge

7.       The Path of Love

8.       Meet Me at the Wishing Well

9.       Captain Sad and his Ship of Fools

10.   The Fantasy World of Harry Faversham

11.   Painting the Day

12.   Can’t Measure the Cost of a Woman Lost

13.   Indian Lake (Mono Version) *

14.   Newspaper Blanket (Mono Version) *

15.   Poor Baby (Mono Version) *

16.   Meet Me at the Wishing Well (Mono Version) *

17.   The Path of Love (Mono Version) *

18.   Captain Sad and the Ship of Fools (Mono Version) *

 

* Cuts available only on Now Sounds 2009 digitally remastered and expanded edition of the 1968 album

****