“You had to be able to do something unique!”
A few years before his death in 2023, Captain Beyond drummer Bobby Caldwell looked back on the late 1960s and early 1970s with something approaching disbelief. It was an era of explosive creativity, an age when even the lowliest band felt the need to push boundaries with every release, while the bigger groups transformed the simplest notion into a peak of towering excess. Not all of it worked, but when it did, the results were (and remain) incomparable. Caldwell, who played his own role in creating such peaks, was in no doubt. We will never see such madness again.
“And the people who lose are the listeners. It’s the joy of listening to music that is missing today.”
Well, that and the joy of creating it. “As a kid I was into jazz, and I thought ‘wow, maybe if I could find the right people, I could do this, and I could create something that’s unpredictable, a little bit different to the norm, where you can’t tell where it’s going necessarily.”
Music that shattered the barricades with which the media likes to neatly pigeonhole everything; music that took you on a magical mystery tour, with even the musicians sometimes not knowing precisely where they’d end up. But music which, no matter how adventurous and experimental it might become, never lost sight of one crucial element. Excitement.
Captain Beyond were all about excitement. And now, and with industrial metal icons Ministry, former New Order bassist Peter Hook, Hawkwind maestro Nik Turner and Thin Lizzy guitarist Brian Robertson all on board, alongside an exceptional cast of heavy rock favorites (Pentagram, The Flower Kings, The Quill,Zello, Locomotive Breath and more!)Thousand Days of Yesterday - A Tribute To Captain Beyond is the tribute album that confirms the progressive/hard rock legend’s place in American rock history’s stratosphere.
Titled for a cut on Captain Beyond’s self-titled 1972 debut album, Thousand Days of Yesterday is a mind-expanding reinvention of 19 songs (13 on blue vinyl) from the bands landmark early albums, and it’s really not hard to figure out why so many artists lined up to perform on this album.
In the parlance of the day, Captain Beyond were a supergroup. Vocalist Rod Evans was the frontman in the original, “Hush”-era, Deep Purple. Bassist Lee Dorman and guitarist Larry “Rhino” Reinhardt, had flown with Iron Butterfly. And Caldwell had most recently been sighted with the Johnny Winter Group.
Releasing on November 20, Thousand Days Of Yesterdays is making its long-awaited debut on vinyl, while the six CD bonus tracks not only round up a few more of the Captain’s classics, but also two wildly distinctive versions of the signature “Dancing Madly Backwards (On A Sea Of Air)” from Hook and Ministry - the latter, of course, riding high today with their own upcoming new album Hate To Go.
Back in the day, to repeat Caldwell’s comment, “You had to be able to do something unique!” Thousand Days of Yesterday proves that uniqueness remains just as fresh today.
CD/VINYL: https://cleorecs.com/search?q=thousand+days+of+yesterdays
DIGITAL: https://orcd.co/po7exqw
Track listing
1.Dancing Madly Backwards (On A Sea Of Air) - Pentagram
2. Armworth - Rise And Shine
3. Myopic Void - Standarte
4. Mesmerization Eclipse - Lotus, Brian Robertson
5. Raging River Of Fear - Flower Kings
6. Thousand Days Of Yesterdays (Intro) - The Quill
7. Frozen Over - The Quill
8. Thousand Days Of Yesterdays (Time Since Come And Gone) - Five Fifteen, Nik Turner
9. I Can't Feel Nothing, Pt. 1 - Locomotive Breath
10. As The Moon Speaks (To The Waves Of The Sea) - Zello
11. Astral Lady - Zello
12. As The Moon Speaks (Return) - Zello
13. I Can't Feel Nothing, Pt. 2 - Locomotive Breath
14. Dancing Madly Backwards (On A Sea Of Air) - Peter Hook (CD bonus track)
15. Dancing Madly Backwards (On A Sea Of Air) - Ministry (CD bonus track)
16. Starglow Energy - Orchid Leaves (CD bonus track)
17. Sweet Dreams - ZoomlenZ (CD bonus track)
18. Dansar Galet Bakåt - Qoph (CD bonus track)
19. Förtrollande Förmörkelse - Abramis Brama (CD bonus track)
