Tuesday, November 27, 2012

Enoch Smoky - "It's Cruel" b/w " Roll Over Beethoven" 45 single

Enoch Smoky was a hard psych band from Iowa City, Iowa back in the late 60s and early 70s.  They were around for a few years, toured Europe, and, from what I've read, they put on a pretty fantastic live show.  A short history of this band has been chronicled on the Iowa Rock'n Roll Music Association's website, and you can read that here.

I have been trying to track this record down for quite a long time.  You see, a few years back I went on a downloading spree of all the old Iowa psych bands I could find.  The a-side track of this 45, "It's Cruel",  quickly became my favorite of the Iowa psych bands alongside Phafner, and it was always easily available to listen to on the internet because it had been featured more recently on the A Lethal Dose of Hard Psych psych rock comp in the early 2000s.  "It's Cruel" quickly became one of my favorite songs.  Kick ass drums, nasty bass, and ripping guitar solos is what this track was all about... but I could never find the b-side song, "Roll Over Beethoven", online anywhere.  The 45 would pop up rarely but randomly on eBay, and when it did, I always seemed to be away from internet access and would miss out on nabbing it (and I wasn't going to pay $300 for the one that's been up as a Buy It Now for forever).  This changed though when one popped up a week before my birthday this year, and my brother Mike won the auction as my birthday gift,  Thanks!  Turns out the b-side track is just as ripping as the a-side.  A Chuck Berry cover dripping in psychy guitar solos.  It rules.

So, yeah, here it is, Enoch Smoky's "It's Cruel" b/w "Roll Over Beethoven" on Pumpkin Seed Records.  This is the first time a digital recording of the b-side is available on the internet as far as I know.  Hopefully sometime soon some live recordings of this band will pop up, because I'm definitely interested in hearing more.



Enoch Smoky - "It's Cruel" b/w " Roll Over Beethoven" - 1968 (??)

1. It's Cruel (3:41)
2. Roll Over Beethoven (3:35)

Click here to download.

1 comment:

  1. I remember seeing a large quantity of that 45 in an Iowa City thrift store back in 1976-'77, and unfortunately most of the discs were warped. I did purchase about 20 of them which have all found happy homes over the years. Great hard psych disc, and I also saw Enoch Smoky live in a club back then. Supposedly they had legal problems by including the Chuck Berry song "Roll Over Beethoven," so I think Dickie told me that promotion of the record was aborted. They were killer live!

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