The ASYLUM CHOIR

The ASYLUM CHOIR

I remember about two months ago, before the magic of “Blackbird” and “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” had entered my mind, I was listening to the Nighttripper show on WABX and I heard the new Beatles album.

I yelled to my wife “Here’s the new Beatles’ album!” She screamed joy to me, but I couldn’t hear her. We sat silently, holding hands and drenched in the chills that people always get the first time they hear something the magnitude of a new Beatles album.

The gravel-soft voice of Dave Dixon followed the cut and said “That was ‘Thieves in the Choir’ by the Asylum Choir.”

I sat shattered, feeling cheated and hating the Asylum Choir, whoever they were. Now .it just sounded to me lik2 another Beatle-imitating group.

A week later I heard the Asylum Choir again. I knew by now that there were two of them, that they played almost every instrument on the LP, that they were Leon Russell and Marc Benno, that they lived in Hollywood, where, in the basement of Leon’s home they had cut the LP, and that they only sounded like the Beatles sometimes.

The Asylum Choir are at home when you set them loose in their own brilliant inventiveness, and just let it pour out of themselves (if you want to know what “it” is, you’ll have to hear the album).

I have never in my life heard a collection of musical ideas that interweaves itself as assuredly as this one does.

, Compare the lines:

with the fanfare that follows immediately afterwards and see if you don’t get the point of the Asylum Choir led by “Ralph Asylum and his boy-biting dog and choir.’'

I predict big things for the Asylum Choir (“Stick with me baby, and I’ll make you a star!”), but I’m probably wrong.

Asylum Choir will be too far out, too hip to be cool, too unknown.

Three years ago, the Mothers were in the same position.