Easy Chair - Easy Chair (1968)

Consisting of just three tracks and less than 20 minutes of music, the Easy Chair’s one-sided demo LP is a legendary westcoast artefact. Few people have actually heard it, but among those some have expressed surprise at how good it is, apart from the collector wet-dream perspective.
Recorded as early as April 1968, the sound is surprisingly mature and selfconfident, pointing towards the epic-psychedelic style found on 1970s classics such as Bob Smith, D R Hooker and Garrett Lund. The short fuzzrocker “My Own Life” has gone around on a CD-R compilation, but it’s the extended “Slender Woman” and “Easy Chair” (which named the band) that give the demo its moody ahead-of-time character, reminiscent of the “Sardonicus” Spirit at times. Easy Chair are often mistakenly referred to as a Bay Area outfit, but the band was from Seattle and recorded the demo with the local Vanco label, whose LP catalog seems to have been a custom/vanity operation. Each of the few hundred copies pressed came with one of four different promo photos. None of this did much to break the Easy Chair, but after opening for the Mothers Of Invention, Frank Zappa liked the band enough that he invited them down to LA for his Straight label. However, the band fell apart in the interim, leaving band leader Jeff Simmons to cut a solo LP for Straight and later join Zappa’s band.