Thomas Edisun's Electric Light Bulb Band - The Red Day Album FLAC

It was 1967, the Summer of Love was hot, everyone was looking for a cool breeze, where the best place to find that was to sit in the shade with your transistor radio and a frosty Coke from a bottle.

The Thomas Edisun’s Electric Light Bulb Band had a handful of singles that went sort of nowhere, though if one listened with the right sort of ears, their harmonic lightweight flowing music could be heard on the AM stations. That said, I’ve never seen a band so inclined to link themselves with the Beatles as this group, where even their album art has been fashioned with those references. Yet, truth be told, the band was simply one of many who enjoyed some moderate success before they broke up, leaving this album to reveal itself a lifetime later.

The selling aspects regarding this creation heavily rely on images created from the heady days and nights of the psychedelic 60’s, though without the actual credits to make it a reality. The band’s frontman touted himself with the moniker of Richard Orange (after the orange swirl gracing the Beatles' Capital singles, though others claim it was a reference to the Beatles' lyric 'Marmalade Skies), where the group fashioned mildly memorable baroque music laced with harmonies in a Beatlesque style, psychedelic pop, based more on legend than a factual enterprise. Now … it’s claimed that after hearing the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper, that Thomas Edison’s Electric Light Bulb envisioned their own psychedelic masterpiece, but who didn’t, the Beach Boys certainly did, Jimi Hendrix certainly did, as did the Rolling Stones and even the Monkees. Yet it’s said that this American Fab 4 (two girls and two boys), smartly dressed in groovy threads, locked themselves into a dark rudimentary studio for an entire weekend, where they smoked a lot of weed while ingesting mind altering substances, which pretty much sounded like a normal weekend for me, though I can attest that one would get little accomplished, other to lay on the couch and watch the ceiling slip away.

Now, perhaps the true part of this embellished manifestation is that the tapes got shelved and the record never got further than a test pressing, though today, as if in some sort of acid flashback, it’s all here for you, in deja vu technicolor. And with that, the legend grows even more complex, as it’s now being suggested that the band nearly invented the Caravan style keyboard freak-outs, also suggesting that Thomas Edison’s Richard Orange was a Steve Winwood fifteen year old aficionado, and was responsible for the now dynamically popular lo-fi music that’s captivating so many … but hey, that’s sort of like walking the cat backwards.

It’s an unremarkable album, though it is a snapshot of those days, where more of a fuss is being made than the album deserves … though you listen, you decide. I was there then, and I do remember.

Review by Jenell Kesler