The Seeds - Future / A Full Spoon of Seedy Blues (2001)

The Seeds' 1967 Future LP coupled with another release from that same year, the Sky Saxon Blues Band's "solo" disc A Full Spoon of Seedy Blues, is exciting for collectors as it helps bring the prototype punk group's catalog together under one roof, though these two albums are worlds apart. Future was not only an effort to be totally psychedelic, it explored that world with a vengeance, while A Full Spoon of Seedy Blues is Sky Saxon (aka Richard Marsh) tempting fate by venturing into sacred ground where icons like Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf reign supreme. The punk-pop delicacies are fun while the blues experiment didn't work. The musical vision and pioneering image Saxon put forth found a more comfortable home in the soundtrack to the film Psych-Out, as the first half of the CD proves; as for the latter part, a prophecy from Elton John and Bernie Taupin's line from "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road applies well here: The boy's "too young to be singing the blues." But let's not forget that half of the fun of '60s recordings by a character as charming as Saxon was the capturing of spirited experiments on tape. The strengths of the album Future along with the attitude and energy captured on the Web of Sound and Raw & Alive: The Seeds in Concert at Merlin's Music Box discs demand that all this group's documents from the day be resurrected. Despite its deficiencies, A Full Spoon of Seedy Blues is still more acceptable than much of the posing and whining being manufactured by youthful musicians 30 years after these sounds were committed to tape. These two albums on one disc are a strong charge for the kids of the future to get back to the garage.