PENNY ARKADE - Not The Freeze (Expanded - 2023 Reisssue) - 2LP - Vinyl [JUN 30]

2LP - Vinyl. The original album remastered plus 17 bonus tracks! Features a copper-free cover and new liner notes from Mike Stax.

Sundazed has unearthed another long-lost treasure, this one from the ancient ruins of mid-'60s LA: the unissued album by Penny Arkade! This Michael Nesmith-produced gem, a jangly melange of the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield and Moby Grape, was inexplicably shelved. At long last, here it is-plus 17 bonus tracks!

A sunshine pop delight with equal parts psych, folk-rock, and even a little garage! Taking its title from their mind-liquefying 12 minute psych opus, this edition of Not The Freeze features a copper-free cover and new liner notes from Mike Stax, the author of Swim Through The Darkness, his book about Craig Smith aka Maitreya Kali, leader of the Arkade!

While the first Sundazed release was being prepared, Don Glut discovered, quite by accident, a ¼” tape of the demo sessions that preceded the album. “Around that time, I was listening to a lot of my old reel-to-reel tapes,” he remembers. “I was looking for some old radio programs that I had recorded, and in this stack of tapes that I was listening to I came across something just labelled on the side of the box ‘Penny Arkade.’ I thought, ‘What in the world is this?’”

Don tried rewinding the tape and flipping it over, but couldn’t get the music to play forwards, so he sent it to Bob Irwin at Sundazed. Bob was able to play the tape, and
discovered an entire cache of early Penny Arkade recordings. The unexpected find included alternate versions of “Swim,” “Voodoo Spell,” “Lights of Dawn” (with Nesmith on maracas), and “Century of Distance” (which Craig would later rewrite as “Love is Our Existence”), as well as a formative reading of what would later become “Not the Freeze.”

At this stage the innovative song suite—titled “The Freeze”—was pieced together solely from Ducey’s compositions, and clocked in at a more modest seven minutes. It was only later that some of Smith’s songs were incorporated into the piece. Even more interestingly the tape yielded four songs that the band had dropped from their repertoire before the Not the Freeze album: Craig’s snappy proto-power pop winner “Split Decision,” and three of Chris Ducey’s songs, “Sick and Tired,” the ragtime-flavored “You Couldn’t Conquer Me” and the superb “No Rhyme or Reason.”

“I’ve done a lot of things,” Don reflects. “I’ve written and directed movies, I've written eighty published books, I’ve written hundreds of comic book stories and TV shows and
all that, but the thing I put the most pride in, the thing I get the most joy out of, is the music—playing it, listening to it… To me the most important thing was the music.”

His pride is not misplaced. More than a half century of distance later, the music of the Penny Arkade continues to sparkle and shine.

- Mike Stax 

Tracklist:

1. Lights Of Dawn
2. Country Girl
3. Thesis
4. Century Of Distance (Early Version)
5. Swim
6. Color Fantasy
7. Voodoo Spell
8. Not The Freeze
9. Love Rain
10. Century Of Distance
11. No Rhyme Or Reason
12. Swim (Early Version)
13. Split Decision
14. Voodoo Spell (Early Version)
15. The Freeze (Early Version)
16. Sick And Tired
17. Year Of The Monkey
18. Sparkle And Shine
19. Face In The Crowd
20. Woodstock Fireplace
21. You Couldn't Conquer Me
22. Lights Of Dawn (Early Version)