Used-Bin Bargains: Jan Dukes de Gray

Jan Dukes de Gray - High Priced Room (Decca 1969; re-released on Wounded Nurse 2002)

Jan Dukes de Gray - Butterfly (Decca 1969; re-released on Wounded Nurse 2002)

Jan Dukes de Gray - Sorcerers / Decca, Wounded Nurse

For me, used-bins aren't just about perusing the local record store or mining your own massive vaults or reading Wax Poetics or even hitting up your favorite torrent hot spots. Sometimes you have to go to places even more mundane than that to find some of the best stuff. Lately, the LiveJournal psych_folk community has been really spot on with some great finds and the latest I've had the pleasure of hearing is Jan Dukes de Gray, a short-lived English band on the famous Decca label. Two of those songs are presented here from their debut and showcase a duo that was about to grow into something otherworldly but had not yet reached full fruition.

Michael Bairstow and Derek Noy were the brains behind the Dukes, two multi-instrumentalists with their origins as rivals of T Rex before they went glam. Not much has been documented on the rivalry and it's supposed that Marc Bolan's origins in London in the 60s probably sprung from the same sort of collective that Bairstow and Noy come from. But as Bolan and his cohorts went glam as time went on, Bairstow and Noy went ever further into the acid-psych realm. Sorcerers was just the start: At 18 songs and with none longer than the concluding track "Turkish Time" at a mere 4m51s, Sorcerers was a gentle, plucking approach to rapid-fire ideas, bubbling out of the times that produced more psych-anything per capita than at any other point in, well, the history of the world.

I've taken to Sorcerers in recent days partly because it is just the opposite of its successor, the sprawling and now-legendary Mice and Rats in the Loft in 1971. Sorcerers is the work of two talented musicians with a bevy of ideas floating around but no idea yet of how they want to showcase it; as such, a variety of sounds permeates the album and it all starts with the trippy cover-art, which doesn't stand out in any particular way when put in context but which fits the album's lack of coherence and thematic elements well. It's the disheveled whimsy of the bongos of a track like the meditative "Trust Me Now" or the dual-lead vocals in "High Priced Room" that are presented here that give this album its charm. "High Priced Room" is the fourth track on the album but it's the first to use these layered vocals for an almost Middle Eastern effect. It's the pan flutes and the nonsensical (or "enigmatic") lyrics that follow up with the title-track, but these sorts of shifts are expected from an album that had 11 songs on its a-side alone. "Butterfly" is tucked far away on the b-side, fading in following "City After 3AM" and, like other tracks on the album, setting a mood of drug-tinged optimism.

But vocals aren't key; in fact, instrumentals often allow breathing space for the listener to take in each instrument almost individually, as it's happening. With barely a celeste, sometimes no percussion and only a few acoustic guitars to guide them, Bairstow and Noy created a rich album to listen and inhabit. Unfortunately, Decca didn't agree: Though they were moving away from the sounds that they were promoting with Jan Dukes de Gray by that point anyway, getting ditched by the label before their second album must have allowed them some kind of creative freedom.

Maybe this is fodder for another edition of Used-Bin Bargains, but in case we never get there, here's the short story: Bairstow and Noy went off the deep-end for 1971's Mice and Rats in the Loft, but they didn't do it alone. With renewed help from another label, Transatlantic, and a fresh drummer in Denis Conlan, Mice and Rats in the Loft was an explosive sonic tour de force that featured only three epic songs in the entire a-side "Sun Symphonica," "Call of the Wild" and the title-track closer. Generally hailed as the band's finest work and one of acoustic psych-folk's hallmark albums (whatever that's supposed to mean), Mice and Rats in the Loft marked the final album for the band. They disbanded shortly thereafter following an obvious lack of commercial appeal that even Transatlantic didn't want to deal with.

Sorcerers remains barely available, only in bootleg form really... But if you can find it in a used-bin, consider yourself a lucky one: Psych-folk elitists (and ex-Decca executives) may not prefer Jan Dukes de Gray's first album to the second one, but having even one is enough to raise a few eyebrows. Though it is unfortunate they lasted just two albums in two years, the band remains massively influential and can be heard in the sounds of modern acid-folkies all over the country. It would've been tough to guess what was to come when Sorcerers first hit the shelves almost unnoticed in 1969.