Father Yod And The Source Family - The Thought Adjusters (Drag City)
It'd be easy to let the backstory overshadow the music with this release--after all, Father Yod was basically a cult leader, though with none of the more terrifying aspects people usually associate with cults in these post-Jonestown/post-Manson Family times. Instead of getting involved in mass poisoning, serial murder, or attempts at fomenting a race war, he based his life's work around health food. Born James Edward Baker in 1922, he was a decorated soldier in World War II, and brought his knowledge of jujitsu with him to postwar Hollywood, where he became a stuntman. He fell in with some beatniks who introduced him to the vegetarian lifestyle, as well as philosophy, religion, and yoga. By the late 60s, Father Yod's wide-ranging religious and philosophical studies had led him to the founding of a vegetarian health food restaurant on the Sunset Strip in LA, one of the first of its kind, which he called The Source. At the same time, in a large mansion in the Hollywood Hills, he founded a commune--mostly made up of young hippies who thought of him as their patriarch--called The Source Family. Father Yod considered 13 of the female members of the commune to be his wives, which fit right in with the hedonistic "free love" vibe that dominated youth culture in late 60s/early 70s California. And along with a revolving cast of young musicians, Father Yod, who was also known as YaHoWha, had an improvisational psychedelic band called YaHoWha 13, for which he was the lead singer. YaHoWha 13's home-recorded jam sessions were privately pressed on vinyl and sold at The Source restaurant, and they released nine albums before Father Yod's untimely death in a hang gliding accident in 1975.
So yeah, that's a hell of a backstory, and no wonder it can at times overshadow the music, right? And yet, considering the music itself, that's kind of a shame. YaHoWha 13 created some seriously far-out, epic psychedelic music during their career as a band. And despite the fact that they only released nine albums during Father Yod's lifetime, they recorded their improvised music frequently, and left behind enough unreleased tapes to fill quite a few more albums. The Thought Adjusters, a vinyl-only double LP release, is the third release by Drag City of previously-unheard recordings from the Source Family vault, following 2008's Songs From The Source (released under the name Children Of The Sixth Root Race) and 2009's Magnificence In The Memory.
The Thought Adjusters contains seven officially listed songs spread over four vinyl sides, though considering the fact that the last two are just two halves of a 30-minute song that was split up due to the time limitations of vinyl records, and further considering the fact that the first track, "Bells," is just a 30-second ambient intro, it's more like five songs. Long, loosely-structured jams are the order of the day here, and the YaHoWha recording methods are not the most sophisticated, meaning that, while all of the instruments are audible, the recordings sound somewhat muddy, and contain audible tape hiss throughout. But don't worry, this isn't like listening to your burnout uncle's boring-ass Grateful Dead bootlegs. For one thing, the musical structures here aren't the most sophisticated, and the jam sessions certainly are not designed to emphasize complex solos. Although these songs tend to stretch out to far greater lengths, the sound of The Source Family band has its roots in the simple three-chord psychedelic garage rock of the mid-60s. While the musicians backing Father Yod clearly know their way around guitars and drums--and you'd certainly expect no less from longhaired hippie kids in early 70s LA--they are hardly virtuosos, and anyway, technically skilled playing isn't really the point here. These jam sessions grow out of meditations that the commune engaged in, and as a result, they seem designed to evoke the flowing stream of consciousness that meditation seeks to inspire. And the longer the song, the closer Father Yod And The Source Family come to achieving transcendence through their frenetic musical crescendos.
Most of the songs here start out quietly. "Seed Of YaHoWha," the first real track on the album (after the aforementioned 30-second intro), is only five minutes long, and it stays pretty mellow throughout, with a quiet guitar line and a tribal drumbeat being the main instrumentation throughout the song. "The Goddess Earth (All My Sons Are Jesus)," which ends the first side of this album, is the first song that really gets rolling. Beginning with a long, quiet interlude, during which Father Yod does some preaching (more on that later), it slowly grows into a midtempo blues groove, which has built up quite a bit of momentum by halfway through the song. Like most of the tunes here, the repetitive riffing will get your head nodding, in a manner that's similar to the repetitive motorik beat of Krautrockers like Neu and Can, who were creating their own long, droning jams in Germany around the same time that YaHoWha 13 were most active.
"The Goddess Earth" has a propulsive rhythm, but only really gets heavy in the last 90 seconds or so of its running time. It is on the two longest songs here, "Sleepy Heads" (which is 21 minutes long) and "Spin Around" (the two parts of which add up to over 27 minutes in length), where Father Yod and The Source Family really let loose. "Sleepy Heads" starts out sounding like a lullaby, but even as it languidly drifts through riffs seemingly designed to lull you to sleep, Father Yod and the female backup singers who show up on the album occasionally (his wives?) are urging that the listener wake up. And after two and a half minutes, the music suddenly changes, grows faster and more urgent. Over a pounding backbeat, as the band's lead guitarist solos wildly and somewhat atonally, Yod talks, sings, and yells, his untrained singing voice sounding somewhat unusual but certainly not an unprecedented phenomenon for any listener in our modern post-punk era--it would have sounded much stranger at the time.
While his voice may be an acquired taste for some, Father Yod's assumedly improvised lyrics are definitely the weirdest part of listening to this album. He's always singing about his own religious message, which mingles all sorts of established theological teachings from various religions together with mysticism and what a lot of people would probably call hippie bullshit. Considering that these are free-form psychedelic jams, it seems likely that anyone who'd enjoy the music enough to listen to it regularly would at least see Father Yod's mystical/pseudo-religious lyrics as adding to the overall atmosphere. As a fan of psychedelic music who is nonetheless pretty immune to the trippier trains of thought that often go along with it, I would never expect to take Yod's lyrics seriously, but there are points on this album where what he's saying jumps out at me as being rather silly. "Osiris/Isis," a song about male/female relationships, features Father Yod asking, "What does woman really want?" before answering his own question with "She must be penetrated by what she wants." I'm sure he was dead serious, but I find it hard to maintain a straight face at this point in the song. "The Goddess Earth (All My Sons Are Jesus)" features several predictions, all of which should have come true decades ago. A discussion of the idea that the Earth is a living organism--very similar to James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis, which was gaining currency at the time--leads to a declaration that the "planet goddess Earth ... is virgin, and now she's having sons." He predicts a puberty-like crisis of the planet, during which continents will rise, and other continents will sink, and dates this occurrence to 1987. Clearly, this didn't take place.
But none of the lyrical weirdness has much of an effect on the excellence of the music on this album. Fans of psychedelic music who want to hear a band of stoned freaks get wild, free, and far out will find much to enjoy on The Thought Adjusters, regardless of the way they perceive Father Yod's lyrical messages. And after all, when the guy was really just selling health food, the entire message seems much less sinister than the average Black Sabbath record, so why worry about it? Instead, my advice is to throw this album on your turntable, crank up the volume, and take a musical trip through the cosmos with Father Yod And The Source Family. You'll be glad you did.