Peter Grudzien - The Unicorn (2007)

Peter Grudzien's Vision....
In 1974, working alone in his New York apartment, Peter Grudzien released his album The Unicorn in a pressing of 500 copies.
Fast forward somewhere around 10-12 years later and rare record collector/dealer, Paul Major, arrives home from a day of record hunting the likes of which simply can no longer be done in 21st Century New York and begins to listen to some of the unknown records he’s brought home. In a catalog Paul used to write up and mail out called Sound Effects, in one salmon-colored issue with a photocopy of the cover of an LP by the band Companion on the front, I remember his description of doing a spit-take with a mouthful of beer right after dropping the needle on the Grudzien LP for the first time.
I have that list here, somewhere, but the act of looking for anything specific in the chaos and clutter of this room immediately causes whatever it might be to don a fake moustache and pair of glasses and hide behind one of the record crates. But what I remember is that the essence of Paul Major’s description set the tone for pretty much all the descriptions I’ve read since, those that really understand the record. The Unicorn presents a viewpoint as, if not more, unique and singular than any other I’ve ever encountered.
Once people got the whole story, the one about Grudzien’s Nashville aspirations in the 50s and his meeting with Johnny Cash and his homosexuality and his involvement in the original Stonewall Riots (the big bang of the Gay Rights movement in the US) all those details worked more to cloud the character of the album, more than to suss out anything important about it.
The people who are genuinely clueless are those who think the point of the record is in the “so bad it’s good” realm with records by The Shaggs or The High Hopes. Nothing could be farther from the truth.
With the help of Mike Ascherman, a friend of Paul Major’s and another New York collector who was among the album’s first fans, I sat down a while back and transcribed the lyrics of what I think is the album’s masterpiece, “Kentucky Candy.”
I’ve just spent the better part of the morning looking in vain for a download of the song – I suspect it’s archived in a WFMU show somewhere but you’re going to have to go on without me and find it on your own. Or you could just buy the CD reissue, it’s been done twice, once with Peter’s involvement on the Parallel World label (with bonus material) and again as a bootleg on the UK Radioactive label (without bonus, but with the original cover art, a plus).