SPOOKY TOOTH

Considered by many to be the best and strongest of the SPOOKY TOOTH albums, the sophomore release SPOOKY TWO built on the momentum of the smooth psychedelic soul tendencies of the debut "It's All About" but at the same time maintained its trippy psychedelic demeanor and added the occasional heavier doses of hard rock. Likewise the keyboard sounds were better integrated into the musical mix and the band sounded like it was firing on all cylinders. Riding on the wave of a successful American tour, the five members crated a new batch of eight original tracks and left out the filler in the form of cover tunes. Primarily written by Gary Wright, SPOOKY TWO featured a more cohesive stylistic effect than its predecessor and showcased the band's ability to emulate the soulful blues rock of Traffic but by distancing itself even further from that band's similarly styled approach.

By this time keyboardist Gary Wright had also taken control of the lead vocals and had developed quite the sophisticated range of singing styles. The band tightened up its quirky mix of psychedelic rock, blues, soul and even adding a tinge of gospel. The album features a more dynamic songwriting process and the use of the double keyboard attack with the heavy guitar heft accompanied by the psychedelic smooth soul vocal style of Wright was exactly the perfect tour de force for success. Once again the critics raved yet once again the album sales floundered despite a stellar production and engineering job by the combo powerhouse duo of Jimmy Miller and Andrew Johns. The album produced one of the band's better known singles "That Was Only Yesterday" however it failed to chart during its day. Gary Wright at this point was becoming more recognizable as the singer who crafted the huge 1975 hit "Dream Weaver."

The album deftly blends smooth softness with moments of heavier contrast. Compared to both Savoy Brown and the Yardbirds, SPOOKY TOOTH at this point started to become its own with even the Traffic connections dissipating and whereas the debut was clearly influenced by the 1967 album "Mr. Fantasy," SPOOKY TWO is a powerhouse that stands on its own with epic performances that evoke a true sense of accomplishment. In many ways SPOOKY TWO prognosticated bluesy rock bands such as Little Feat that would find increasing popularity in the 1970s. Considered a blues rock band that didn't behave like one, SPOOKY TOOTH found a unique intersection between blues guitar, psychedelic atmospheres, Baroque pop compositional styles and a touch of jazz rock influences.

On top of the excellent musicianship and the impeccable instrumental interplay, Wright crafted some of the catchiest pop hooks of the band's entire career with tracks like "Better By You, Better Than Me" and "Waitin' For The Wind" topping the ear worm charts. While considered by some in prog circles to have been a progenitor of the prog movement, in reality SPOOKY TOOTH wasn't particularly progressive and considering this album emerged the very same year as King Crimson's stunning debut as well as other bands like High Tide, SPOOKY TOOTH is actually pretty tame in that regard. The band wasn't about crafting overly complex tunes and on the contrary was about nurturing beautifully addictive melodies into a total band experience and in that regard they reached an apex on SPOOKY TWO.

Due to disappointing album sales the band began to splinter and although several members would stick it out and release a few more albums before the final break up in 1974, the original lineup ended here and the band would never regain the momentum that SPOOKY TWO had delivered so well. Luckily the album has been reevaluated over the ensuing decades and has become designated a classic of period psychedelic soul rock which found all the band's best qualities synergizing for this brief moment in time. This album is very much as good as any Traffic album and although SPOOKY TOOTH didn't stick it out as long or produce as many hits, the first two albums are quite pleasing to the ears with this second offering being the most accomplished.

With roots originating all the way back to 1963, the four members that would form SPOOKY TOOTH played together in the British blues mod band The V.I.P.'s in Carlisle, England which most notably is the early act that also launched a fledgling Keith Emerson before he went on to form The Nice and later ELP. The four members of Luther Grosvenor (lead guitar), Mike Harrison (harpsichord, vocals), Greg Ridley (bass) and Mike Kellie (drums) released several EPs and singles as The V.I.P.'s but never really decorated the charts with hits and when the mod and beat scenes started to morph into the world of psychedelic rock, the four members wisely shifted gears and released a flower power freak out album as the band Art in 1967 but after one album the band moved on again and became SPOOKY TOOTH the same year.

After recruiting a fifth member in the form of American keyboardist Gary Wright, the band set out on the English club scene and after quickly capturing the attention of Island records commenced to record SPOOKY TOOTH's debut album IT'S ALL ABOUT which arrived in May of 1968. Taking a cue from fellow Brits, Traffic, SPOOKY TOOTH crafted a psychedelia-tinged slab of catchy pop rockers with Baroque piano influences, bluesy guitar riffing and a major leap up from the amateurish sounds of Art. The most notable improvement was the psychedelic soul smoothness of lead singer Mike Harrison who found his match in his harmonic double newbie Gary Wright. The two would alternate vocals and eventual Wright would wrest control.

A veritable treasure trove of catchy psychedelic pop records IT'S ALL ABOUT featured seven original compositions and three covers including the Janis Ian track "Society's Child," Bob Dylan's "Too Much of Nothing" and the classic J.D. Loudermilk song "Tobacco Road." The album was graced with the production techniques of Jimmy Miller who worked with The Spencer Davis group and would become the legendary force behind The Rolling Stones, Motorhead and Blind Faith. Sounding virtually nothing like the band Art which featured four of the members in SPOOKY TOOTH, the songwriting skills of Gary Wright became a prominent aspect of the band's ability to distinguish itself from many of the other British blues based psych bands of the era however the Traffic similarities from the 1967 "Mr. Fantasy" album are undeniable. The other members did contribute by cowriting a few of the tracks.

SPOOKY TOOTH's recruitment by Island Records gained instant time pressures which only allowed so many hours in the recording studio and by the time the band went to record the band only a handful of originals and did what many bands were doing in the 1960s and simply finding some songs to cover. The album is a brilliant mix of bluesy psychedelic pop and although in the same vein as Traffic, at times prognosticated the style of Led Zeppelin especially in some of the vocal styles. The band was actually hailed by the critics and praised for its amazingly successful mix of blues, rock, psychedelic and Baroque pop. Unfortunately that didn't translate into successful album sales and after the band was set to go on an extensive tour in Europe, a sudden invitation to the United States altered the bands plans.

The American tour changed the course of the band's game plan and while practically ignored in its native UK, SPOOKY TOOTH enjoyed the attention of promotor Bill Graham and played at San Francisco's Fillmore Wets and all across America where it built its largest fanbase and subsequent success. While not as prog oriented as the following "Spooky Two," IT'S ALL ABOUT" paved the road with the right stepping stones for the band to ratchet up its sound a few notches. Taken on its own terms, this debut album is quite the pleasant slice of 60s psychedelic pop rock with great instrumentation, interplay and grooviliscious melodic constructs and even better are the vocal harmonies that borrow a few ideas from both The Beatles and The Beach Boys while capturing the essence of American soul music.

3.5 rounded down

SPOOKY TOOTH were a five piece band out of London, England and this is album number two from 1969. I'm into consistent albums and this is surprisingly consistent given the year. Kind of a hard rocking, bluesy, psychedelic affair with some prog leanings. The vocalist Mike Harrison is fantastic! He can belt it out and sing in different ranges really well. Bassist Greg Ridley would play with HUMBLE PIE while Luther Grosvenor the guitarist played with STEALERS WHEEL and MOTT THE HOOPLE. But the big name here is Gary Wright playing organ. As a teenager I was mesmerized with "Dream Weaver" and "Love Is Alive". Here on the opener "Waitin' For The Wind" he comes in with this distorted, rolling organ that is nasty and this along with the vocals makes this my favourite track off the album. The nine minute "Evil Woman" is just a killer track. The vocals and lyrics especially. Then there's the catchy "Better By You, Better Than Me" which was covered by JUDAS PRIEST. There's some not so great numbers like the gospel sounding "I've Got Enough Heartaches" which is about the vocals or "That Was Only Yesterday" which starts out ballad-like but then kicks into gear but I'm just not into it. The rest though is great to varying degrees. A solid 4 stars.

This album sounds to me like it maybe was recorded to fill contractual obligations with the record label. Maybe I´m wrong. But at that time SPOOKY TOOTH was a trio of remaining original members Mike Harrison (vocals), Luther Grosvenor (guitar) and Mike Kellie (drums), after Gary Wright (keyboards, vocals, and main composer of the band) and Andy Leight (bass) left the band after the release of the "Ceremony" album, which was recorded with French Avant Garde musician Pierre Henry. For this "The Last Puff" album, which was released as "SPOOKY TOOTH FEATURING MIKE HARRISON" in July 1970, they had Chris Stainton as producer. He also was the keyboard player / bassist for the GREASE BAND, a band which accompanied singer Joe Cocker in some of his early albums and tours in the late sixties and early seventies. So, maybe it was Stainton who brought some of the other members of the GREASE BAND to help SPOOKY TOOTH to record this album (guitarist Henry McCullough and bassist Alan Spenner). So, this album obviously sounds somewhat influenced by the sound of Joe Cocker, Chris Stainton and the Grease Band. Maybe one connection between SPOOKY TOOTH and Chris Stainton and The Grease Band was Mike Kellie, who previously appeared as session drummer on two tracks of Joe Cocker's successful "With a Little Help from My Friends" (1969) album.

This "The Last Puff" album starts with a cover of THE BEATLES's "I am the Walrus". A very well arranged heavy version, with some uncredited female backing vocals (like in other songs in this album), good guitar solos and generally very well played by the band. This song is maybe the most known song from this album, even being played a lot on the radio. It even was played by another very different line-up of SPOOKY TOOTH during their tour in 1974 (Gary Wright, Mike Patto, Val Burke, Bryson Graham and Mick Jones) with a similar musical arrangement!

The next track is Gary Wright's "The Wrong Time", also with some uncredited female backing vocals. I don't know why a song composed by a former member of the band was recorded for this album. Maybe it was played by the band before Wright left the band, so they decided to record it for this album.

The next track is Joe Cocker's song titled "Something to Say", a song which he was going to release in his album titled "Joe Cocker" (or titled as "Something to Say" in the U.K.) from 1972. Maybe SPOOKY TOOTH was the first band to record this song.

Two other covers of songs, "Nobody There at All" and "Down River" (both from less known songwriters, at least for me) sound good but maybe more far from the band´s original musical style, both sounding a bit like Pop Rock / Blues / Soul songs from the U.S.

"Son Of Your Father" is a song composed by Elton John and Bernie Taupin which is good, too.

The album ends with Stainton's "The Last Puff", which is a slow Blues / Jazz musical piece without vocals. It sounds good, too, but I think that they only recorded it to have more material to finish the album.

In conclusion: this album is good, but, as I wrote before, it sounds more like a record contract obligation album than anything else, with a lot of influences from Blues, Soul and Heavy Rock music, obviously influenced by the presence of three members of Joe Cocker's backing band led by Producer Chris Stainton. The band even toured a bit to promote this album in late 1970, but with John Hawken on keyboards and Steve Thompson on bass (there is a short video from this tour on youtbe), and without Stainton, McCullough and Spenner, before they split until 1972, when the band was reformed by Harrison and Wright with some new members.

The first time that I listened to this album was in the late seventies in an AM Radio station's broadcast . That AM radio station from my city was called "Radio Capital" (I don't know if it still exists) and it had a then famous radio programme called "Vibraciones", which some days of the week broadcasted some albums by some bands at night.

For this album, the original bassist of the band Greg Ridley (who went to form HUMBLE PIE) was replaced by Andy Leigh. The album's full title is "Ceremony - An Electronic Mass", and it was released as a collaboration by SPOOKY TOOTH / PIERRE HENRY, but in France it was credited as being an album by "PIERRE HENRY AVEC SPOOKY TOOTH".

This is an Experimental / Avant Garde / Rock Music collaboration between French Electronic Music composer PIERRE HENRY and the English Rock band SPOOKY TOOTH. I don't know how this collaboration was agreed and done, but it really sounds more like HENRY recorded his electronic music parts after the band recorded their musical parts. It really gives the impression that both parts were recorded separatedly and later mixed together song by song, which each song credited to be composed by HENRY with GARY WRIGHT (the main composer in the band). The sound mixing in my opinion is not very good, because HENRY's parts are more at the front of the mixing, and the music of the band is more in the background, with HENRY's parts sometimes sounding more like "interferences" to the band's music. This album has very good musical parts played by the band with the added electronic effects, noises and voices by HENRY. But, as a whole, it really wasn't a very successful collaboration. It has some interesting musical parts, but, as WRIGHT said in one interview, it really wasn't an album done in SPOOKY TOOTH's typical musical style, and it wasn't considered by him and the band as a SPOOKY TOOTH album, but the record label anyway wanted to release it as an album by SPOOKY TOOTH with PIERRE HENRY, against the band's wishes

Considered by Wright as a "failure" that "ended our career then", I think that this album has some interesting moments, even if I am not very much a fan of Experimental / Avant Garde music. Wright and Leigh left the band after this album was released, and the remianing members of the band (Grosvenor, Harrison and Kellie) remained together for a short time to record their next album titled "The Last Puff" (1970).

Spooky Tooth - Spooky Two (1969)

If you claim to have any love for sixties psych and prog its roots, you simply can't ignore this great second album Spooky Tooth. Psychedelic rock with soul and stunning performances by Mike Harrison, whoes voice is one of the better of the psychedelic movement. All songs on this album are great, but organ-driven opening track 'Waiting for the wind', the extended 'Evil Woman', the epic "Lost in a dream' and the cover 'Better by you, better then me' stand out. Furthermore, the album has a nice sixties sound with only minor flaws in the production (a few pitch anomalies). When people visit you when you play this record even the silliest among them will recognise this as being 'pure rock'. I can also warmly recommend the less adventerious but nice 'The Last Puff'. Four stars.

What a blast from the past, better than I remember!

Spooky Tooth ? Spooky Two is a classic in sound and style. Its got that 60s communal, almost Joe Cocker sound at times, that hammond organ heavy rock sound, that good hard rock guitar sound, and even a great gospel sound on an occasion.

Spooky Tooth are almost a pre-supergroup in 1969 in this line up with Gary Wright on keyboards of future "Dream Weaver" fame leading the way, Luther Grosvenor (alias Ariel Bender of the later years of Mott the Hoople fame) on guitar, and Mike Kellie on drums from Three Man Army duty, as well as Mike Harrison who shares vocals and keyboards with Gary, and then Greg Ridley bringing up the bass.

Most of the sound is heavy in nature with the opening track "Waiting for the Wind" as my favorite. Almost all the songs are full of delightful hooks that are not cheesy or forced by no means, but just darn good.

Four to four and a half stars, will keep it at 4 in the proto-prog world. Younglings and geezers alike, take a little trip back in time with Spooky Tooth!

This is often one of the most maligned album in the Spooky Tooth discography, probably because the combination of avant garde composer Pierre Henry with Spooky Tooth is regarded as a mismatch, much like Lou Red and Metallica decades later and the maligned Lulu in 2011. One listen to Ceremony and you get the impression that a.) Neither Pierre Henry nor Spooky Tooth listened to each others work, and so it sounds as if Pierre Henry did his thing, then Spooky Tooth their thing, and then have them combined, and voila! or b.) you get the impression that neither Pierre Henry had an understanding of rock music nor Spooky Tooth had an understanding of avant garde. So I can understand why people might run at the thought of this album, even I admit that some of Pierre Henry's part threatens to drown out Spooky Tooth's music. Thanks to the Electric Prunes releasing Mass in F Minor, I imagined this was the reason for Spooky Tooth to do their own rock Mass, but unlike the Prunes, they didn't use Gregorian chanting in a rock context. Now let me tell you that Spooky Tooth's end of things is nothing short of amazing. They really rock like there's no tomorrow. I can't believe this is that same Gary Wright later of Dream Weaver fame, because he really rips it on organ here! The problem comes with Pierre Henry. It's like he never even heard what the band put down before he did his part, as mentioned earlier, so it sounds like a bunch of random sounds that rarely seem to go appropriately with the music. One could say it sounds like a bad Krautrock album, because the best Krautrock out there the musicians involved had a full understanding of both rock and avant garde (in fact several Can members were Stockhausen disciples) and took that knowledge to their full advantage. There's a couple parts of this album that annoys me, particularly "Jubilation". Although the band puts on some killer bluesy guitar riffs on that song, you keep hearing this "bi bi bi bi bi bi bi bi bi bi" voices that NEVER stops. Despite the obvious flaws, there are some really brilliant and amazing moments put by the band, and if they did this by themselves without Pierre Henry, this could probably felt as one of Spooky Tooth's defining moments. Yet I still want to give it a four star rating (it would be five if Pierre Henry took his approach better) because I was blown away by what the band were doing.

Not a very interesting album for my taste, this first album by Spooky Tooth shows the band in a more Pop Rock and Psychedelic style, with all members of the band playing very well their instruments, and with very good lead and backing vocals by Mike Harrison and Gary Wright. Sometimes these vocals sound a bir "dramatic" in some songs, and they also use the harpsichord in some songs, an instrument which I think it was not very often used in bands of the sixties. Sometimes the music becomes heavier, but I can say that most songs are a bit more Pop Rock than in the next album titled "Spooky Two", which in my opinion is heavier and more "dark" and in general much better than this first album. Their first album really sounds a bit dated in sound, and the recording and mixing are good but showing the passing of time. I can say the same about the cover design. "Spooky Two" is a much better album than this and for this reason is more remembered and considered as their best album, I think. For collectors and fans only.

On Spooky Two, Spooky Tooth offer a gritty organ and guitar-driven sound which charts a course that meanders between the evocative prog-leaning proto-metal of Deep Purple or Atomic Rooster on the one hand and the brash, bluesy hard rock of the Faces on the other. Unlike the classics of those bands, however, it doesn't quite elevate itself beyond the aesthetic of its time and the album never quite catches fire; although all of the songs on here are good, if you've got an appreciable 1970s hard rock collection you've probably heard a lot of the tricks on here done better by other artists.

The absolute best and most original song on here is Better By You, Better Than Me, and to be honest the Judas Priest cover version of that number absolutely blows the original out of the water. Doubtless innovative on release, Spooky Two doesn't quite endure the test of time, though if you are feeling nostalgic and want to evoke the feel of the early 1970s it's an effective way to accomplish that.