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Let’s take a break from all this punk nonsense and go for something a little different this week:
Stray: S/T LP (Transatlantic, 1970)
Stray was from London and formed in 1966, releasing this self-titled album, their debut, in 1970 on Transatlantic Records. I know basically nothing about the members of Stray or what they got up to in the years between 1966 and 1970, but one thing I really love about this album is that you can hear all four of those years of massive development in the rock world in Stray’s music. It’s hard to overestimate how much happened in that short period. In 1966 Revolver was the hot new Beatles album, but by 1970, Led Zeppelin had three albums out, Black Sabbath had two, the Stooges Fun House had come out… the 60s were fuckin’ dead, man!
Not so for Stray, though. Or at least not completely. Stray’s leadoff track, “All in Your Mind,” feels like it comes from that perfect moment in 60s rock when the era’s best artists had been fully trained as hook-generating machines, yet they’d also grown up a little, maybe turned on, and gained some artistic ambition. The songs got more complex, but kept their big pop hooks. Records like the aforementioned Revolver, the Kinks’ Face to Face, and the emerging freakbeat scene with bands like the Creation and Pretty Things feel like the musical antecedents of “All in Your Mind.” Maybe it’s the word “Mind,” but my brain also jumps to another favorite from late 60s London, the Open Mind.
That’s hardly the entire story with Stray, though… in fact, I don’t think anyone would call Stray a freakbeat band, as the emerging hard rock scene and the high psychedelia of 1967/8 are also fundamental ingredients on this album. For starters, “All in Your Mind” isn’t a concise two-minute pop tune, but a 9-minute-and-fifteen-second labyrinth of a song. Trust me when I say, though, that those nine minutes fly by. I think that’s where the pop song craft training comes in… Stray gets freaky with it, but keeps the song exciting and packed with hooks and melody. (There is a three-and-a-half-minute single edit of “All in Your Mind” out there, but I haven’t heard it.) “Around the World in Eighty Days” is more in that high psychedelia mode, its huge chorus hook and lyrics evoking a sense of childlike wonder reminding me of so many progeny of Sgt Pepper’s. Side A then ends with “Time Machine,” which starts off with a Sabbathian crunch and wanders into a sitar-emulating fuzz guitar solo, a heftier, more substantial take on the raga rock descended from “Within You Without You.”
I’ve seen Stray described as a hard rock band, but aside from “Taken All the Good Things” and “Only What You Make It,” their songs generally avoid the blues / Cream / Yardbirds influence that shaped so much proto-metal. Instead of the blues licks and structures, what Stray takes from that sound is the density, the insistence of the rhythm, and the sheer volume. In blues rock, vocals can often seem like an afterthought, and the guitar solo is typically the gravitational center of the song. But, like I said, Stray’s songs, for all their stretched-outness and heaviness, still feel like pop tunes with short instrumental hooks and vocal melodies as their basic building blocks.
So yeah, check it out… a fantastic and pretty unique record, I think. Oh, and I should also mention that Stray is often cited as one of Steve Harris from Iron Maiden’s favorite bands (Maiden even covered “All in Your Mind”), but I can’t hear much of a musical connection myself. Don’t let that dissuade you from checking this out; just don’t expect it to sound anything like Iron Maiden. And if you can track down an older pressing, the packaging is pretty cool, with the band’s logo die-cut into the jacket to show the inner sleeve. The inner part of the cutout has been ripped away on my copy, but you can just see how the band’s logo is stylized into the outline of a cat… pretty neat.