Dig Deep: Kathy McCord – S/T – CTI (1970)

Kathy McCord – Rainbow Ride
Kathy McCord – Take Away This Pain
Kathy McCord – Candle Waxing
Kathy McCord – Velvet Smile

2022 has been a bit of wild ride, certainly haven’t posted here as much as I would have wanted, but I am a sucker for tradition, and one of the remaining traditions we have here at Melting Pot is to post up the last record I added to my collection for the year.  As has often been the case, my last trip to a record store this year was to Burbank’s Atomic. In past years, I’d dig through the whole of the store and spend hours looking through all of the bins for something I’ve never heard.  But that was not the mood I was in to close out 2022.  A lot of this year has been about going for things that I really want.  As a consequence of that, while I’ve had years where I bought more total records, I’m fairly confident that I’ve never spent as much on records as I have this year.  2023 is gonna be about being considerably more frugal, but to close out this year, I had my mind solely focused on the legendary wall at Atomic and perusing the rarest of rares up there.

I’d been in Atomic two weeks before, but without my phone, and so I didn’t get info on a few wall records that I’d never seen before.  Two weeks later, of course, those records I was eyeing were all gone, along with 30-40% of the other records that were there.  But, as this post attests, clearly there were some things up there that I was able to bring home, including the very first record on CTI, the debut & sole album of Kathy McCord.

As is the case with that Flow record that I posted about a couple years ago, these earliest records on CTI sound NOTHING like the Jazz fusion sounds the label became known for throughout the 1970s. They all have a bit of mystery about them because they so rarely turn up in the wild, and when they do, even seasoned record nerds don’t recognize them. McCord is hyped as a “new contemporary folk artist,” on the cover, but “folk” is not how I would describe the best songs on this album. There’s a bit of country twangy, some soulful horns, snappy drums, psychedelic guitar licks, and the extraordinary instrument that is McCord’s voice bringing it all together. The comparison isn’t entirely apt (except perhaps on “Candle Waxing” which features the flute of CTI stalwart Hubert Laws), but there are times where this album reminds me of Linda Perhacs’ Parallelograms, another album from the same period that people by and large really couldn’t fully get with, but has found a following here in the 21st century. That album is sometimes described as “psychedelic folk,” and I suppose that could be apt for this album to, but it also feels a bit limiting when listening to these songs…There’s more I want to say about this record, but it’s still super new to my ears and it’s NYE, so right now I’m gonna get some grub, and get cozy, and give this one many spins into the night…