Haymarket Square - Magic Lantern (1968) [Original]

Haymarket Square - Magic Lantern (1968)

Original U.S. private press LP
Chaparral – CRM-201  (Discogs)
~ThePoodleBites rip at 96 kHz / 24 bit FLAC + full high-res scans!~

Magic Lantern, the sole album by American psychedelic band Haymarket Square, was produced to document the music performed in synchrony with a visual art exhibit by the so-called Baron & Bailey Light Circus at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Illinois. Despite its immense rarity as a tiny private pressing, the album has become well-known among collectors for its untamed underground vibrations that many feel well-represent the summer of 1968. While it has suffered relative lack of fame outside of these fanatical circles, significant research has nonetheless gone into the history of this band, whose story has been told quite well elsewhere; I therefore won't attempt to breach that subject here. Despite this focused curiosity, no reissue of this ubiquitous collectors' grail has ever been sourced from the master tapes, and thus nearly 60 years later, its original pressing maintains sonic reign above all.

Many thanks to R.D. for lending out this incredible rarity from his archives!

Front cover slick for the Haymarket Square album. Hey, is that Brian Wilson? And behind him Ray Manzarek? Sadly, no...

There are few privately-pressed albums from the 1960s that have artwork nearly as mind-blowing as Haymarket Square. The album was released in a white cover with two 12" square slicks glued to the front and back, each offering a marvelous psychedelic design printed on pinkish Day-Glo stock. Yet, at the same time, I also struggle to fathom another album with such extraordinary imagery that contains music so startlingly mediocre. While the musicians that comprised Haymarket Square were clearly not totally incapable, these sole minor-label recordings are certainly several notches below what a typical professional label may have produced, which makes it at times difficult to listen to.

Perhaps the main attraction of the group is singer Gloria Lambert, whose blonde beauty as a fronting lady certainly must have had some pull in her audiences; and more importantly, when Lambert sings her voice typically holds the band's focus and keeps the songs from meandering into the uninteresting. [My partner also adds that Lambert sounds much like Jerney Kaagman from Earth And Fire, one of her favorites.] Guitarist Marc Swenson also deserves some attention here with his occasionally-great guitar backing lines, particularly through his use of wah-wah, though there is little in his soloing that I find especially memorable, despite its exploitation of spicy vintage fuzz. And while drummer John Kowalski manages to avoid the amateurish temptation to become a simple metronome, his fills sometimes meander and lose tempo, with a four-minute solo in one song ("Ahimsa") that manages to be more boring than the one in "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida." I was surprised to find great online praise for Kowalski's performances here, although some questionable comments were conjoined with reflections fusing the (perhaps unintentionally) hilarious:

Poster for the contemporary art concert (reproduction)

Review in the Chicago Tribune, July 4, 1968

All that being said, having the rare opportunity to digest an original pressing of this album has warmed my opinions from absolute zero to a more modest lukewarm. In particular, I think the opening tracks to either side, "Elevator" and "Amapola," are the clear highlights. The former track carries immensely heady vibes: within the first few seconds I can almost feel the cool sensations of THC filling my brain as my increasingly-heavy corpse sinks into the sofa. There's no doubt in my mind that plentiful quantities of green tea were used in production here, yet I'm simultaneously annoyed by the lyrics, which speak of psychedelics not with empowerment and self-determination but with an escapist, addictionist mentality that I think is extremely unhealthy. Perhaps that must be appreciated as an element of realism; these are juveniles from the first psychedelic era, and not experienced, well-tempered psychonauts.

The latter track, "Amapola," is even more alluring, and even though it staggers along for nearly eleven minutes, its catchy melody and good use of wah-wah guitar prevents me from ever feeling that it has dragged on for too long. For those who don't know, "amapola" is the Spanish word for poppy, the flower from which opium and its derivatives are sourced. The song's sole annoyance is a drum fill around the 3:30 mark that gets so incredibly out-of-tempo that it sounds like they had to cut and restart recording for the rest of the song. That being said, this is a self-produced album from 1968, so it's nit-picky for me to chew them out for that. Only Swenson is credited for songwriting here (and that solely on the Gear Fab reissue), though the bulk of the lyrics are "reinterpreted" (at best) from an old Spanish song of the same name, with English lyrics dating back to the time of Jimmy Dorsey. I wonder if Swenson found that 78 on his parents' shelf and figured no hippie would ever know the song's secret... If so, he was nearly right. In any case, I can hear essentially no musical parallels to the original song versions, so that omission was not totally dishonest.

The only other track worth mentioning is "Phantasmagoria," which I thought a terrific name for a song meant to accompany a psychedelic light show. The lyrics seem to be about sorcery and witchcraft, and there aren't many comtemporary tunes which breach that topic. At a 'mere' four minutes in length, it is the shortest song on the album, keeping focused at the expense of a guitar solo or similar instrumental break: which is not necessarily a bad thing, though it does get a tad monotonous. Lambert's performance here is very convincing, and for some reason the melody reminds me of "Music Of The Night" from Phantom Of The Opera (though of course there is certainly no connection).

Back cover of the Haymarket Square album, with fantastical psychedelic imagery & some poetry by Michael Siwek

If this were not a four-thousand-dollar LP, I likely wouldn't have deemed it worthwhile to restore for this blog. The cheap production values and demo-quality recording did not help its case. However, since the only official reissues are horribly noise-reduced vinyl rips, and since the original LPs are immensely rare and highly coveted (for whatever reason), I figured it valuable to produce a master which accurately represents the sound of the original tapes without the invasive & destructive techniques that others have Geared so Fabulously. Despite my reservations on its musical quality which I have plainly shared above, I hope that you will nonetheless enjoy the incredible and rare experience of feeling the underground psychedelic vibrations echoing through that Chicago art museum back in 1968.

Note: Weirdly, the side order is switched between the back cover and the labels of the album. Reissues opt for the side ordering as specified on the back cover rather than on the labels, which I also think makes the most sense musically, and is probably what the band actually saw and approved. (Labels could have been, and likely were, produced by the pressing plant without prior inspection.)

Track listing:
1) "Elevator" -- 7:07
2) "Train Kept-A-Rollin'" -- 7:22
3) "Ahimsa" -- 8:15
4) "Amapola" -- 10:44
5) "Phantasmagoria" -- 4:09
6) "Funeral" -- 9:23

Vinyl condition: M-

Dynamic Range: DR 13

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.x.x (fades between tracks, split tracks)
– Foobar2000 v2.x.x (tagging, dynamic range analysis)

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Enjoy! :)

Article about the exhibit including band photos, from the Chicago Tribune, July 2, 1968