Sun City Girls — Torch of the Mystics [remastered album]
It’s 1972 and a half and the hangover from the sixties has just abated enough that you don’t murder the first person you hear playing sitar. You skipped town after your friend Murray got lifted in O’Hare with some of your product and you’ve been travelling around the world since. To keep yourself sane on long stops for longer drives, you sit in small rooms and record the radio. Later, ripped to the wind on local hooch you splice these recordings together with others from your collection. Strange quixotic long plays to counter the blasts of dead air and to keep the mind awake and on the road.
Remember that? You hardly ever go through the boxes in the garage these days, and you should. Your brother Jaff plays them all the time.
Formed in Phoenix Arizona, in 1979 and named after a retirement community in Maricopa County, Arizona, the Sun City Girls were, are, brothers Alan (bass, vocals) and Richard Bishop (guitar, piano, vocals) and Charles Gocher (drums, vocals). Springing from the cassette underground to LPs, they produced around seventy-three albums and cassettes and a host (fucktonne) of other stuff. They came to an end when Charles Gocher died from cancer in 2007. It is a quote by Gocher “Hiding in Plain Sight” (Mike Mcgonigal, Seattle Weekly 14/04/04) that perhaps offers the best approach to Sun City Girls,
“I read a pop bio about Harry Houdini, and it inspired me to make it seem like I was breaking out of manacles and a straight jacket. So I played the drums like that — and I still do. It’s an escapist reality, in a way!”
Originally, a limited 1000 run LP, Sun City Girls “Torch Of The Mystics” sees a long awaited rerelease in CD and limited LP format and it has been lovingly remastered by Mark Gergis aka Porest. The press tells me it is the most popular and revered SCG album and there’s a lot of reverential Shakers out there amongst the venom gins of the review community.
I probably won’t be any different.
This album is a thing of wonder.
If you’ve eaten too much typewriter ribbon and are having a Mobius/Jodorowsky near-death cross-over chat with the Loa type hallucinatory experience ends with you having the questions for your supposes and a renewed pace to the story. This is one of the albums that plays as you’re hurtling through between space.
I dislike the term “experimental rock” — I don’t know why. Perhaps because it conjures up the image of a man dressed as a spatula dressed as Jimmy Page using a cabbage as a violin bow on a twelve string as he reinterprets Bert Jansch. Actually, I’d probably go see that, but, something in that vein. I also dislike the terms Free Jazz (where is house arrest Jazz?) and liturgical polka. Sometimes, it’s just a band, doing band stuff, going new places where others have been. Still, perhaps the saving grace of reviews of bands like SCG is reading the reviewer twist themselves into Möbius strips as they try and describe what they’re hearing.
While this bristles with influences, shards, touches and echoes as far a field from Rock to Surf to Psychedelia to Middle Eastern to Django Reinhardt to Barney Kessel to Wes Montgomery to Pentangle and The Incredible String band and on. It does not really matter if it is areas visited before by Dr. Strangly Strange, the Velvet Underground or Wishbone Ash. Or originated by Omar Khorshid or Davey Graham or Sun Ra. It only really matters that when they visit or rattle by, it sounds good and they bring something new to the table.
In that regard, “Torch Of The Mystics” will always be a thing of happiness; ideal for listening straight through, though contextually safe for songs to be plucked. For other people I’ve played the album to over the last few days, sometimes the best things are those that leave you with no clear opinion and a wondering. They’re possibly working as intended.
I have been flipping back and forth between the copy I have and the remaster for a few days now. I find it very difficult to tell a huge difference except some more air and crisper quality to bits of the remaster. That is not to say it was not needed or warranted. Anything that kicks this back into the public consciousness works.
Drenched with a feeling of familial lineage (rather than formal) to Morricone. The album works for me, like the soundtrack to a ’70s film that was never made. A sort of metaphysical inverted cross between The French Connection, 200 Motels, Electra Glide in Blue and El Topo.
That is to say, If someone were to take the SCG and Alan Bishop’s radio recording and later amazing historian-exhibition work with Sublime Frequencies and turn it into some insane two and half hour dramatisation.
As you can hear the influences on it, you can still hear the influences this continues to have today.
If you don’t know it, you should get this, make friends with it. If you do, it’s available again, fresh and polished.
Sun City Girls’ reissued and remastered “Torch Of The Mystics” is available from Forced Exposure
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Originally published at on the 4/01/2016
