4. The ZodiacThe Zodiac: Cosmic Sounds
The way I found out about this was my brother’s record collection. All this crazy music would be coming from his room, and I’d walk in and go, "What the fuck’s this?" This is another cash-in album. Around 1980, 1967 was my favourite year of all time, and this is a brilliant album that came out then on Elektra. They had so many great acts in the late 60s, and to have the budget to make a cash–in album like this, it’s a dream today, isn’t it? They’ve got the Wrecking Crew, Carol Kaye on bass and Hal Blaine on drums, who would have just been playing on Brian Wilson albums twelve months before and as well as a ton of other stuff. Obviously the vocals are just hilariously brilliant, but at the same time, the music comes in and it’s like, "Oh, holy shit, this is actually so rich." There’s so much going on.
This album provided sustenance for a very long time, because I would’ve first heard this album around 1986. Around that time were also the Pebbles albums and the Nuggets albums and Chocolate Soup For Diabetics, so we were just immersing ourselves in all this stuff. The beautiful thing about a lot of that was bands that only recorded one single ever. We always wondered, who were they? The Zodiac: Cosmic Sounds has always been a mystery, because I’ve never thought of it as a band called The Zodiac. There’s a lot of stuff in there that you can just trip on for a very long time.
