THE GREATEST SONGS OF THE 1960s THAT NO ONE HAS EVER HEARD
1,580) Condello — “The Other Side of You”
A haunting, spacey pop psych number sounding a decade ahead of its time, sounding like Peter Gabriel wrote and performed it. In fact, I’m thinking that the Progfather did write and record it. The timing’s right! The song comes from a “fascinating album [Phase 1 that] moves from sparkling pop to near heavy metal, almost like a compilation album by one man” (Aaron Milenski, The Acid Archives, 2nd ed.), a “psychedelic masterwork . . . [that] flows and trickles through your mind with more saturation than Lucy and her diamonds in the sky-picking up a few nuggets, boulders, and pebbles in the emergent violet haze.” (Marios, http://rockasteria.blogspot.com/2014/04/condello-phase-i-1968-us-smart.html?m=1)
Oregano Rathbone is more equivocal:
Condello’s Phase 1 album, originally issued by Scepter in 1968 . . . enjoys a weighty rep as a road-less-travelled psych-pop conversation piece. But curious crate-diggers should tread with caution. If you were only to hear “It Don’t Matter” or “All You Need”, you might file the album alongside Moby Grape’s debut: melodious, goodtimey acid rock, topped and tailed with libertarian, Fillmore-friendly lead guitar (provided herein by the future Tube, Bill Spooner). However, pound for pound, it might be more apposite to posit Phase 1 as a heraldic totem of country-rock.
As to Condello, Oregano Rathbone tells us:
To a generation of Arizona’s baby-boomers, the late Mike Condello was synonymous with The Wallace And Ladmo Show, for which he acted as a prolific and wildly inspired musical director. Then again, psych supplicants and gungho garagistes revere the man for “Soggy Cereal”, an inimitably unlikely polka included on the third Pebbles compilation.
Marios adds:
Mike Condello did it all in four decades in the music business: serve as music director for two local Phoenix TV shows (Teen Beat and The Wallace & Ladmo Show), lead his own bands like Hub Cap and the Wheels, parody the Beatles with Commodore Condello’s Salt River Navy Band, and even play with luminaries like Keith Moon, the Tubes, and Jackson Browne. In 1968, he also led his own band – which released [Phase 1] . . . . Sadly, [he] committed suicide in the 90s after suffering from severe depression.
http://rockasteria.blogspot.com/2014/04/condello-phase-i-1968-us-smart.html?m=1
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