J. K. & Co. - Suddenly One Summer (1968) [US Original]

J. K. & Co. - Suddenly One Summer (1968)

Original USA Terre Haute pressing

White Whale – WWS 7117 (Discogs)
~ThePoodleBites rip at 96 kHz / 24 bit + full hi-res scans!~

The marvelous J. K. & Co. album -- a long-time favorite of myself and many -- is a collection of magnificent psychedelic vistas painted in Vancouver, B.C. by young musician Jay Kaye along with a stellar cast of Canadian musicians, including young composer Robert W. Buckley (of Spring), sitarist Craig McCaw (from the Poppy Family), guitarist Rodger Law (of Mother Tuckers Yellow Duck), and producer Robin Spurgin (who also worked with MTYD, along with the Collectors, the Painted Ship, the United Empire Loyalists, and others). Unlike the plethora of "underground" psychploitation garbage that emerged from this era, J. K. & Co.'s sole recorded output is a genuine acid-fueled psychedelic classic, as confirmed by numerous adventurers since its original release. There are few tracks that can soothe out a bum trip like "Fly"! The fact that this record was created by Jay Kaye as a teenager adds immensely to its legend, as the tracks are lyrical and mature, enveloping love, innocence, drugs, and death into a cosmic concept album of ambitious proportions.

Original front cover artwork, conceptualized by Gerhart Sommer.
The photography is by Ray Leong (the Seeds, Sky Saxon, The Mothers, and others).

One look at the album cover will tell you exactly the type of music Suddenly One Summer contains: free-flowing, sunny American psych-rock with retrospective tones of peace and nostalgia. Dressed in a white kaftan in front of the pastoral Tahquitz Canyon near Palm Springs, California (top left) is Jay Kaye himself, then a 16-year-old boy from Las Vegas, Nevada, who had grown up in quite a musical family. His mother, Mary Kaye, was a well-known singer in an internationally-acclaimed lounge trio, and his grandfather Johnny Ukulele was one of the world's premier players of the instrument. Jay's tastes were quite different, though, with his songs drawing upon his love of the Beatles, whose influence undoubtedly shines through on Suddenly One Summer. 

The story as originally told by Efram Turchick in the booklet of BeatRocket's (Sundazed) reissue is the following: in early 1968, Jay traveled with his mother to Vancouver for a musical stint at Izzy's Supper Club. It was there that Jay met producer Robin Spurgin, who was hoping that Mary would be able to record a few songs -- but she declined. Jay took advantage of the situation to enthusiastically offer some of his own work: "I went to the studio and played a couple of my songs, and they flipped!"

Spurgin introduced Jay to Robert Buckley, another teenager, and one who could play over a dozen instruments.  Buckley worked with Jay to translate his ideas into amazing arrangements: "It was beyond my expectations! I knew what I wanted to hear, and he did far more. I'd play my songs for him, tell him what I heard, what I'd like to hear, and he made it possible. On 'Fly,' the intro to that is a backwards piano. Robert wrote it out, and then we wrote the score backwards. And he played the score backwards, so that when we played the tape forwards, the score came out right. So all those backwards decaying effects, that's how that was done."

Together with several local studio musicians, the group worked for months to create a full musical album. Drugs played no small role in its inspiration, according to Jay: "From the sound of the album, I'm sure you've surmised that it was a lot of psychedelic experiences. That whole album was an experimental learning experience for me. It was actually a spiritual realization through LSD. My main reason for taking LSD was to find a relationship to God, or whatever you want to call that force that permeates everything. That's one of the first things that I realized, that life and death is just a transition. Being enlightened... that was part of the whole thing back then, getting closer to one's self and becoming one with life." The influence of a higher power does not seem to manifest musically in the lyrics; nonetheless, the poem on the back cover undoubtedly references the well-known hymn "How Great Thou Art."

After the album was complete, Jay traveled with Spurgin to Los Angeles, California, where they again met up with Mary Kaye (who had recently relocated to North Hollywood). Benefiting from her notoriety, the duo easily found audience with executives at Capitol Records, bringing their tape along. As Jay recalls, "They liked the songs, but they wanted to completely redo it. We put so much work in; I really believed in the way the album was." They decided to take their chances somewhere else, and visited White Whale. "We went in and played the tape for them, and they flipped! The name of the album was by Ted Feigin, the president of White Whale. Actually it was more from his perspective, because we just walked in there off the street, one summer day."

Original rear cover slick for the LP, featuring a poem likely written by J. K.

The album begins with the short experimental soundscape "Break of Dawn", composed from a faded-in police siren, a stream, & fire crackling, all slowly rising before suddenly 'breaking' with the clatter of what sounds like a wooden wind chime slowed down. This introduction -- apparently supposed to symbolize the birth of a man -- quickly fades into what is probably the band's most memorable track, "Fly," a dreamy, floating psych masterpiece built from backwards piano, a tack piano (forwards), an echo-laden flute, drums with backwards cymbals, some vibraphone, Jay's voice, and a bunch of other sound effects I haven't figured out yet. Frankly, it's a remarkable studio achievement for 1968.

Without pause, the reverberations transition into "Little Children," and ode to the innocence of childhood. The basic tracks are formed from drums, harpsichord, Jay's vocals, horns, and flute, with all wind instruments overdubbed by one Robert Buckley. The central section of the song is a round of the children's song "Frère Jacques," played on flute and saxophone, and kids can be heard playing outside at a preschool near Spurgin's first recording studio in the background. This composition is charmingly followed by the electric bass-driven "Christine" -- undoubtedly a Revolver-influenced pop song, complete with teenage love lyrics and tastefully-added horn interludes.

For me, the guitar jam "Crystal Ball" which follows, including its 14-second build-up "Speed," sounds incredibly dated and is the weakest point of the album; nonetheless, it lasts just over a minute before we are treated to "Nobody," one of the album's highlights. Jay's voice quavers over two layered acoustic guitars strummed in synchrony -- one in either stereo channel -- and a church organ accenting the fills. It's a dark song of seclusion and depression, aching for lost times and memories, and escapism:

"My happiness is in a needle
I will escape for another day
Pain is my pleasure
Loneliness is my friend..."

It's worth reflecting on how incredibly powerful this is -- and how it must have sounded in 1968. There were very few popular artists who had the guts to cut a track with this subject matter at this time (the Velvet Underground and Steppenwolf are the only ones that come to mind). Side 2 continues this theme with "O.D.", which, for you non-English natives, means "overdose": a powerful proto-acid rock song which starts out with a sax crescendo underlain by pulsating piano & erupting into a powerful fuzz-guitar laden melody:

"The man with the glass in his eyes is on the bed
He's so quiet, is he sleeping or is he dead?
He told me to bring him the saddle and horse which he scored
He thanked me for bringing them in, and he closed the door..."

This is followed by the chorus, with Jay's 'screams' of a man overdosing on heroin ("saddle and horse"). The song suddenly cuts into a funeral-like horn arrangement:

"Come everybody, now fold your hands and bow your heads,
The man that was trapped by the horse now is pronounced dead..."

I can only imagine the shock this might have caused coming out of speakers in 1968. But how many people understood the lingo at that time? "Johnny, go to your room and put on that nice record about the man and his horse."

The mood is immediately lifted by the lilting "Land of Sensations & Delights," almost certainly an allusion to the realm of LSD ("You'll climb and climb until you reach your peak..."), though the most acid-powered track to my ears is "Magical Fingers of Minerva," a single-chord drone overlain with sitar and oscillating organ, driven primarily by a thumping, repetitive bass line accented by low tom on the drums, eventually fading into the sound of the wind. The lyrics touch on themes of consciousness, spirituality, and transcendence; Minerva is the Roman goddess of wisdom (and music), whose otherworldly force attempts to awaken the listener.

The album closes with "Dead," a musically diverse piece which explores the feeling of death. Producer Robin Spurgin can be heard reciting funeral proceedings from the Order for the Burial of the Dead, from the Christian Book of Common Prayer, in the latter half of the song. "'Dead' was written by Jay because there was a presence or a spirit, or whatever you want to call it, in my studio," Spurgin recalls. "Part of that burial service was fit to have him out of the picture, because he was interfering with the production! Jay would actually see him; I would sense that he was there." Musically the latter section is built from a piano playing mysterious chords built off a whole-tone scale, echo-drenched percussive sounds, and a guitar snaking through the sound of shovels piling dirt into a grave. After the fade out, we are finally treated to a few-second reprise of "Fly"; as Jay explains, "it's just the end of that whole sequence of those songs, and then it goes to the beginning, you know, at the end."

Review in Billboard Magazine, 20 July 1968

Full-page ad in the Los Angeles Free Press, 16 Aug 1968

Advertisement for an 8-track version of the album, manufactured by GRT (misspelled GTR) – Billboard Magazine, 7 July 1968

Advertisement for an 8-track version of the album, manufactured by RCA – Billboard Magazine, 17 Aug 1968

Suddenly One Summer was rapidly pressed and released in July 1968 and was immediately available on both vinyl and 8-track cassette, with several variations in both formats manufactured by various external facilities across the US. It was also available in Canada, and contemporary publications suggest that it was released in the UK and Australia as well, though perhaps only as an American import and not a domestic pressing. The album seems to have sold relatively well, owing to the prevalence of copies today, and White Whale seems to have spent quite some effort promoting it. Jay's cousin John Kaye recalls: "I can remember driving with my aunt and her manager in a limousine to go meet with Jay. We went down Sunset Boulevard and drove by Wally Heider's Music City, and the album was in every window, going around the corner of that store, on both sides. It seemed like the promotion deparment for White Whale put that record everywhere." However, that same department unbelievably decided that the 32-second "Break of Dawn" should be a double-sided single, which certainly failed to provide adequate promotion. Jay laments this: "It could have been more than what it was, marketing-wise, on White Whale's part, but that's all history now."

Blurb in Billboard Magazine, 31 Aug 1968

Blurb in Cash Box, 3 Aug 1968

Blurb in Billboard Magazine, 27 July 1968

Jay, realizing that now was his opportunity to go on tour, quickly assembled a trio consisting of cousin John on bass & harmony vocals and friend Rick Dean on drums, and started playing any gig they could get. As John Kaye recalls, "There was a three-month period there, when all the hype about the record was coming out, Jay locked himself away into his room and learned to play lead guitar like nobody's business. We were all living in the San Fernando Valley, and we had a big rehearsal hall on Sepulveda Boulevard, built into the back of a house sitting on two and a half acres, and we had everything brought to us as far as musical equipment goes. From what I understand, someone had power of attorney over our group to spend the money whatever way they deemed necessary. So we never really saw any money, other than in the form of musical equipment." Over the next few years, the group's sound apparently became more hardened under the influence of Cream and the Jimi Hendrix Experience, though no more recordings appear to have been made. The group met their demise in the early 1970s: "We just kind of separated ways," according to John. 

Other than the strange, uncredited appearance of side 1 in its entirety on The Early Writings Of Zager & Evans (And Others) in 1969, and an Italian bootleg in the interim years, the album was basically forgotten until 2001 when Bob Irwin of Sundazed Music officially reissued it on his BeatRocket subsidiary. While much dubious information has been shared regarding the source of this reissue online (not uncommon with Sundazed releases), the facts are that side 1 was sourced from tape (probably a safety copy) with more tape noise and a reduced treble response compared to the original LP, while side 2 was sourced from vinyl, with digital processing to (partially) clean it up. The clear and obvious difference between the original pressing and even side 1 of this reissue seems to suggest that the original master tapes have been lost or destroyed, which is a huge shame considering that this is one of the highest classics of the genre, in more ways than one!

After comparing 3 original pressings of this classic LP, in addition to the conjoined Zager & Evans set, I settled on a US pressing from the Columbia facility in Terre Haute, Indiana for this restoration, having the cleanest and clearest sound quality of those that I auditioned. The usual manual restoration job meant that it took many hours of labor to produce a pristine digital master, though I am confident that it beats all reissues of this record and shall stand the test of time as the best way to hear this indisputable classic.

Vinyl condition: Near Mint (NM) / Mint Minus (M-)
Dynamic Range: DR 11

R.I.P.  Jay Kaye, 1953 - 2015
Songwriter, guitarist, and "musician for life"

Musicians:
- Jay Kaye: songwriting, vocals, acoustic guitar(?)
- Robert W. Buckley: arrangements, winds (flute, saxophone),
        keyboards (piano, harpsichord, organ)
- Doug Edwards: electric guitar
- Rodger Law: "country" electric guitar (tr. 10)
- Brian Newcombe: electric bass
- Paul Grant: drums, percussion
- Craig McCaw: sitar (tr. 11)
- Robin H. Spurgin: production, recitation (tr. 12)

Track listing:
1) "Break Of Dawn" -- 0:34
2) "Fly" --  4:42
3) "Little Children" -- 3:06
4) "Christine" -- 2:13
5) "Speed" -- 0:14
6) "Crystal Ball" -- 1:04
7) "Nobody" -- 4:04
8) "O.D." -- 3:19
9) "Land Of Sensations & Delights" -- 1:48
10) "The Times" -- 2:23
11) "Magical Fingers Of Minerva" -- 2:53
12) "Dead" -- 4:30

Equipment / Lineage:
– Audio-Technica VMN40ML stylus on AT150MLx dual moving-magnet cartridge
– Audio-Technica AT-LP1240-USB direct drive professional turntable (internal stock preamp/ADC removed)
– Pro-Ject Phono Box S2 Ultra preamp with dedicated Zero Zone linear power supply
– Focusrite Scarlett 6i6 MkII (96kHz / 24bit)
– Adobe Audition CC 2024 (recording)
– iZotope RX 11 audio editor (manual declicking, EQ subtraction, additional adjustments)
– Audacity 3.7.1 (fades between tracks, split tracks)
– Foobar2000 v2.24.5 (tagging, dynamic range analysis)

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