Circus Maximus - Circus Maximus / Neverland Revisited (Reissue) (1967-68/2001)

To someone who never lived through the 1960’s, it’s hard to comprehend the amount of cultural experimentation that was taking place in America. Nothing it seemed was being taken for granted, almost as though young artists all across the country had made it their mission to try to re-imagine every last aspect of pop culture, especially music. At the epicenter of all this experimentation was, of course, New York’s Greenwich Village, which at that time was not only a hotbed of modern jazz, an art form that had at its very core, experimentation, but also the country’s budding folk music scene.

As an outgrowth of that Greenwich Village mix of jazz and folk, a group calling itself Circus Maximus emerged, formed when Bob Bruno, a young jazz piano player, happened to meet a young guitarist and recovering pop star wannabe named Ronny Crosby. A few months earlier, Crosby had come to the City from Upstate and reinvented himself as a wandering folk troubadour who went by the name Jerry Jeff Walker. Bruno had been playing piano since the age of five and had, literally, been hanging around jazz clubs his whole life.

Jerry Jeff Walker, on the other hand, had played ukulele as a kid, and eventually formed a garage band in his small hometown of Oneonta. Though his band was good enough to score an American Bandstand audition, rock and pop were not near and dear to Walker’s heart. Over the years he had fallen in love with country and folk, and knew that’s where he wanted to focus his creative energies...