The Wizards from Kansas

Album review

The Wizards From Kansas' eponymous album finds this Midwestern group sounding more like a West Coast hybrid combining rambling, melancholy country-rock elements with harder psych-rock sounds. Their biggest influences seem to have been Northern California-based groups like the Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver Messenger Service, and the Grateful Dead, and it shouldn't really come as a shock to discover that the Wizards From Kansas was recorded in San Francisco, between July and August of 1970. By the time the album was released, in October 1970, two of the band's five members had already quit the band, choosing instead to focus on playing jazz, and so the Wizards were essentially kaput, with a new album in the bins but no band available to promote it. The band's guitarist, Robert Manson Crain (who is credited here as C. Manson Roberts), wrote six of the nine originals, including the warbling, country-ish "Hey Mister," "Misty Mountainside," "Country Dawn," and "She Rides With Witches." They also cover Billy Edd Wheeler's "High Flying Bird," an awesome folk-psych track that was previously waxed by the Jefferson Airplane during one of their first recording sessions in late 1965 (it wasn't released until their 1965-1970 compendium of unreleased tracks, Early Flight). This classic was also covered by celebrated folk artists, including Judy Henske and Richie Havens, among others, but here it gets a visceral psych-rock workout, highlighted by Crain's guitar. Their lengthy cover of Buffy Sainte-Marie's "Codine" is excellent as well, and obviously inspired by Quicksilver's jam version, which approximated the one popularized by the Charlatans. In 1993, the Afterglow label reissued this long out-of-print album on CD for the first time. Incidentally, the back of the original album jacket credits the bandmembers as Robert Joseph Menadier (Monster Bass & Vocal Grace), Marc Evan Caplan (Snakey Snakes & Footler Breaks), John Paul Coffin (Guitar Lead & Strings That Bleed), Robert Manson Crain (Twelve String Roll & Songs of Soul), Harold Earl Pierce (Rhythm Machines & Vocalized Dreams).
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