Euphoria
A Gift From Euphoria

They must have truly been, as Mario Capanna would say, "formidable those years". And I don't think there's any need to specify which years he was referring to, the why and wherefore.

A certain fact is that even young music (indeed, rock, looking at its official identity card, hadn't yet reached adulthood at that time) contributed significantly to make them truly formidable, if, for example, people like the Texans by origin, but Californians by obvious choice, Hamilton Wesley Watt jr. and William D. Lincoln, coming together with other temporary comrades under the not at all exclusive label - so be careful, if you're interested in applying your research... - Euphoria, in the annus mirabilis 1969 could come out with an absolute masterpiece - indeed, I'd be ready to declare it proudly before any Inquisition tasked with prosecuting Rock&Affini - like "A Gift from Euphoria" and then immediately disappear into oblivion, a fate that befell neither more nor less than that misunderstood "unicum". Of which, if there were an unlikely primacy, it certainly regards the crazy expenses that it cost the gentlemen of Capitol (not exactly Pizza&Fichi) to produce this "gift" assembled between Hollywood, Nashville, and London (!) by notable semi-unknowns - before, just a couple of similar-Elevators garage bands filling the two sides of a wandering 45 rpm. Furthermore, just to leave nothing out, with the assistance in some tracks of entire symphony orchestras. As if they were the Beatles. Or the Beach Boys. If then it sold almost nothing, there you have it, settle down, thank you, that's enough. I reiterate: among the most heinous crimes against memory.

Hollywood, Nashville, London... You listen to "A Gift from Euphoria", and you hear that magical little word that's usually used in these cases: derivative. And so yes, we reiterate: strikingly derivative. Because as often happens to those who perhaps didn't have the gift of intuition first, here the two partners seem..., down here they remind you...., there it's obvious they refer to.....and finally in those tracks they are the same as.... Except then, once the listening is over, you have to admit to yourself that this is indeed the most beautiful possible summary in only fifteen tracks and a scant forty-four minutes of: magnificent grandeur between musical and pop, but also jangle-rock acidified eight miles high, but also bluegrass dotted with apotheoses of banjo and pedal-steel, but also delicate folk watercolors that suddenly become ineffable madrigals, but also rock mists with a view (vision?) of the Bay or vice versa, crossing the ocean, on the gay Abbey Road or among the malevolent vapors of the Ufo Club, but also gritty moderately distorted guitarisms alternated with dreamy orchestral suspensions. That is, Tin Pan Alley, Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, Beatles, Tomorrow, Moby Grape, Love, International Submarine Band, Dillard & Clark and even a hypothesis of the Cosmic American Music that Gram Parsons would inspect shortly thereafter. Only that until then nobody (no-bo-dy) had ever tried to put everything together. Least of all thereafter.

And so the mind flies (away with metaphors, please) to how delightful it would have been to hear "Stone River Hill song" or the brief instrumental stopover in Nashville of "Something for the Milkman" in the fantastic expedition of Dillard & Clark, as well as how much it would have further enriched "The Notorious Byrd Brothers" both the lysergic electric pace of "Did you get the letter" and the psych-out expansion of "Suicide on the Hillside Sunday morning after tea", no less than it would have done for the debut of Moby Grape "Through a window". Just like "Sunshine Woman" would have fit marvelously on the first Buffalo Springfield and "Young Miss Pflugg" on "Again", as much as "I’ll be home at you" Gram Parsons would have been pleased to write it for his Flying Burrito Brothers or to slam it in the face of the despot McGuinn to embed it in the heart of "Sweetheart of the Rodeo". If then, by some strange design of fate, the orchestral enchantment of "Hollyville Train", "Docker's son" and the forty-five seconds of "Too young to know" besides the slightly less than two hundred of "World", a falsely trembling ballad (listen to the acidulous tail of wah-wah and fuuzzzz), had been found in sequence to close "Forever Changes", we certainly wouldn't be pointlessly debating which was the most beautiful Love album signed by Arthur Lee's genius, and not just among those.

So let's call it psychedelia, because never has it fallen so well and resolved the embarrassment, and that's that. Let's call it a masterpiece, and that's dead-set too. Formidable. Even for those years. Now go ahead and bring me before all the Torquemadas you want.