Many records are scarce or rare, but few are such holy grails as an original copy of Ithaca’s A Game for All Who Know. This 1973 UK private press title was only produced in a run of just 99 copies, so as to avoid having to pay sales tax. I can’t help but think whoever was the winning bidder of an eBay auction for an original copy probably will have to pay some tax, as they paid the equivalent of more than $6,500 for the honor.
That’s a bit steep for me, and I am content with a repress. I also have some tracks from it on the 2019 Record Store Day release Ithaca, Agincourt & Other Psych-Folk Fairy Tales. I had never heard of this album until the long night camping outside a record store before that particular occurrence of Record Store Day, as I sampled online tracks from such releases I saw were going to be for sale. I’m glad I had that opportunity, as this quickly become not just my favorite RSD purchase of all time, but one of my all-time favorite albums, period.
Admittedly, the cover does it no favors, a rather amateurishly rendered drawing of what appears to be a naked man powerfully striking the ground with his fist, a strong wind blowing his long hair into horizontal streaks.
That’s not the only thing on the cover which makes this prospect seem unpromising, as the back cover reveals there are only six tracks, each of which is a suite of small songs. And the titles of those suites are “Journey”, “Questions”, “Times”, “Feelings”, “Dreams” and “Journey (ii)”. Obviously, no small amount of pretention here.
And the first few seconds after the needle lands on side one suggest we are about to enter a kind of hell for those who aren’t fans of prog music, as the first thing we hear is an explosion followed by roughly a minute of sound effects wankery. Getting to the start of the music proper, it is just acoustic guitar, mandolin and bass at that point, yet a melancholic feel of autumn is established. This is a grey day album, and it is no surprise one of the lyrics is “My life feels so grey.”
And that is the tone of the rest of the album. It is the best album The Moody Blues never recorded. That it was made by a small group of amateur musicians using non-professional recording equipment boggles my mind, and reminds me a bit of some of the output of artists in the Elephant 6 Recording Co. in the 90’s and 2000’s. In my memory, I keep mistakenly thinking there is a small orchestra, or at least a string quartet, but that is only because the fullness of the sound had deceived me. Really, there are only moments of flute or scattered timpani hits which suggest more instrumentation. It is like my mind fills in the orchestra.
I thought there at least had to be a Mellotron (the instrument which people are really thinking of when they recall the classic Moodies sound), but that doesn’t appear among the instruments listed on the back cover. Since a Mellotron was a keyboard which “played” tape loops, I wonder if Peter Howell’s credit for “tape effects” was essentially a poor man’s Mellotron. Whatever he is doing, I assume it is some type of tape wizardry, as he went on to join the BBC’s legendary Radiophonic Workshop, even getting an opportunity to rework the Doctor Who theme in the Tom Baker years.
Howell is half of the main creative force of Ithaca, a group that, in fact, never existed. Neither did Agincourt, which recorded preceding album Fly Away. There also wasn’t a real group called Friends which recorded the next set, Fragile. All were collaborations with John Ferdinando, and all were limited to 99 copies.
Sales tax in the UK must be a total mofo, as an incredible amount of effort obviously went into records which were never intend to be reproduced in even 100 copies. The musicianship and production quality are astonishing. How these two managed such full, rich soundscapes using a four-track recorder is beyond me.
Consider the opening of “Feelings” which begins the second side. What sounds unmistakably like a string quartet plays a gentle tune which pulses forward, sounding like it surges forward a bit which receding back a distance before pouncing forward again. It is the sound of a gentle tide rolling in. It is the sound of fog that, like the famous poem, cautiously creeps in on tiny cat feet.
Of course, production means nothing if the tunes aren’t there, and the album delivers on that front. One of my yardsticks for the worth of a tune is whether I can whistle it, and these all pass my test. They are, in fact, all minor earworms.
But it was the lyrics which first grabbed me. One line I immediately latched ontois: “I feel we’ve come a million miles through right and wrong.” I don’t know why that touches me as deeply as it does, but I feel an odd truth there which defies explanation. I feel the same way about “She Said She Said”, my favorite Beatles song.
Other lyrics seem to have a curiously bemused take on love, all of which are sung by guest vocalist Lee Menelaus. One such line is “Running to you/just to amuse you/that maybe you’ll do/given time.” Or how about this bit of cynicism: “Now slowly/in your face/I see a place for me.” A couple of lines seem to address both the book and movie of Love Story, works widely regarded as trash: “Everybody’s reaching for a love story/but watching the film of the book doesn’t help anybody.”
That seems to reflect an odd sense of humor, so I shouldn’t have been so shocked to discover Ferdinando, who wrote all the songs for this album, apparently meant this to be a parody of the such music as made by the Moodies. And yet, I was shocked, and it knocked me back a bit to have something so meaningful to me turn out to be a joke. All that said, I should have realized something was amiss when there are such odd lines as the cloying “Nobody knows, if you follow your nose/what you might find.”
The final sounds on the record are the sound of paper tearing, going from the left to the right channel, it sounding like the music is somehow being torn out of reality. Another long tear, and there’s silence. We hear the paper being crumbled into a ball, and then the sound of it arcing through the air and into a trash can. The lid briefly opens and we hear just a bit of the music, then the lid closes again, followed by complete silence.
It is an odd conclusion to an album, both a technological achievement and a curious audio joke. It is one of the most appropriate conclusions I have heard of any set, which it makes it all the more odd that, should this not have eventually found reissue, its total worldwide audience was likely to be only 99 people. And, by accepting this joke at the conclusion, I have come to make peace with an album that I find more meaning in than what was intended by its creators. Those final sounds suggest the writer was throwing their work away, but I cannot treat it like it was tossed-off. I will rescue it from the trash and, by applying my own meaning to it, give this album what I feel is its true worth.