Old Hickory & The Pirate MICHAEL MATHIS & WHITE LIGHTNING private psych SEALED

$

75

OLD HICKORY & THE PIRATE FEATURING MICHAEL MATHIS AND WHITE LIGHTNING. Hakim Records HR#1001 Still SEALED. Cutout mark in top left corner. examples of the music are available on youtube.

Additional info from Popsike:  

If you haven’t picked up on this one yet, I’m not surprised.  This unknown sitar psych album by Michael Mathis and White Lightning doesn’t look very promising, at least from the cover.  That, coupled with the subject matter of Andrew Jackson and Roger Lafitte, makes this LP look like some narrated history of the War of 1812 put out by your local library.  And who comes to eBay to learn?  But here’s a quick course in Psych 101, and I don’t mean “psychology.”  There’s not one, not two, but three genuine sitar psych headswirlers lurking under this Encyclopedia Brittanica style sleeve.  The School of Rock is now in session…

Fuzz Acid and Flowers claims Old Hickory and the Pirate is from “circa 1972,” but the back of this album clearly says 1977, and that’s just bad research.  Whatever the case, don’t worry – there are no Tavares disco beats here.  As a matter of fact, it sounds like the songs on this album were recorded during completely different decades – this thing changes styles more often than Madonna changes ac cents.  For example, the oddly-titled “Discomboober” is such a crude piece of lo-fi frat rock, it simply had to be recorded sometime in 1965.  In a room full of empty beer cans with a Radio Shack mike.

But ignore the frat rock and country pop songs, which is easy to do, and concentrate instead on the handful of genuine sitar psych monsters, beginning with the appropriately titled “Third Eye.”  This one rides along on a floaty mystical Indian magic carpet, with constantly echoing sitar, equally echoed-out vocals and lots of trippy headphone-friendly sound effects.  And if these guys really were pirates, it sounds like they plundered George Harrison’s notebook first:

“When you learn to look inside,

What lies hidden cannot hide.

There’s an eye they call the third,

There’s a voice you’ve never heard.

Lots of things for you to find,

Hidden deep within your mind.”

Elsewhere, “Home of Us All” sounds like the Beatles “Tomorrow Never Knows” on steroids, riding a faster but similar sitar/tabla rhythm with an exciting break that sounds a bit like George’s “Within You Without You.”   There’s another cool Indian jam break in the middle of “Wasting Time,” which rides a mystical tabla and hand drum rhythm while a wah wah guitar twists and turns like a bellydancer in heat.  Not that I would know what that sounds like or anything.

But my favorite of the bunch has to be the killer “Mary on a Go Round,” a super catchy slice of chiming West Coast popsike that sounds like 1968 despite its disco-era birthdate.  There’s some great quivery liquid vibrato guitar here, and a chiming jangle pop Byrds vibe, with just a hint of sitar in the mix.  Not only is this a dead ringer for late 60’s Turtles or Cryan Shames, it probably would’ve been a big hit for either band.  But seeing as it was released during a year in which David Soul topped the pop charts, from an album that looked like a Time-Life coffee table book, its chances at the charts were slim from the start.  Unless there was a sudden late 70’s interest in Andrew Jackson (there wasn’t), Old Hickory and the Pirate was a monumental anachronism.  Which is just what us psych heads love to see.