Zoo – If You Lose Your Woman
Zoo – Mammouth
Zoo – Endless Words
My wife and I spent the past weekend in the Bay Area for our anniversary. Any trip to the Bay Area wouldn’t be complete without a trip to Groove Merchant, but the real surprise for me this time around was over at the SF Antique & Design Mall. In most cases antique stores don’t have particularly good records. Most of the time they have 15-20 copies of Streisand, Elton John, Barry Manilow, etc., etc., etc. A small bin of records by the classic magazines was filled with the likes of those, but a little further in, in a totally different section, it was an entirely different case.
What I expected to be a bin full of Engelbert Humperdink, instead included Captain Beefheart, the Left Banke, Contortions, Crazy Arthur Brown and all kinds of other really quite good records. Prices were a bit steep for antiqueland, $15-45, but there were many fine albums (I didn’t even mess around with all the 45s that were strewn everywheres, just didn’t have the patience, and, after all, I was originally there looking for an anniversary gift). After about 15 minutes of moderate digging, I just about flipped my wig when I ran into this bit of French prog-rockery from 1969.
I first heard music from Zoo on the Funk Rock comp. that BBE put out in 2001. “If You Lose Your Woman” was one of the better tracks that I had never heard before when that compilation dropped and I’d been looking out for the LP since then. A quick spin on the wobbly (but working) fisher price turntable at the store confirmed that the record was definitely worth the wait.
“If You Lose Your Woman,” with that scintillating opening drum-organ-horns break, remains my favorite track on this set, but many of the other tracks are mighty solid too. The instrumental “Mammouth” is also pretty breaktastic at times, with some wicked and eerie organ sounds created by Andre Herve. “Endless Days,” which is actually sandwiched between those two tracks on the original record, starts off heavy then lightens the mood and gets extra breezy up til its abrupt end. Posting these three shouldn’t give you the impression that the first side isn’t good, it’s not shabby by any means, but of the 8 total tracks on the record, these three were my favorites.
I did run into this instrumental track “Ramses” on Youtube and now I’m wondering if there are alternative versions of this record, if this comes from a 45 or if this song comes from a second LP…time will tell.
Cheers,
Michael