Speed, Glue & Shinki - S/T

Praise for Speed, Glue & Shinki’s  S/T from San Francisco’s Aquarius Records:  Another Japanese seventies psych classic reissued! This is an old fave, in part ’cause of the appealing tiger cover painting and in part ’cause of, well, how ridiculously badass and bad-acidly ridiculous it is. Here’s some of what we said about this the last time we had a CD reissue of it to list…

Sniffin & Snortin (parts 1 and 2!), Run & Hide, Bad Woman, Don’t Say No, Wanna Take You Home…sound good? Those are some of the song titles on this classic women-and-drugs obsessed dumbo-rock Japanese psych album. It stars guitar whiz and massive stoner Shinki Chen (also of Foodbrain and oodles of other obscure Japanese psych outfits), bassist Masayoshi Kabe (from Food Brain too), and singing drummer Joey ‘Pepe’ Smith – a Vietnam vet whom you might know from the Filipino band Juan De La Cruz, one of the few outfits ever whose outputs maybe tops this for sheer truly stoned rock retardation (a good thing).

Actually, you’ll hear at least one tune, “Wanna Take You Home”, also recorded by Juan De La Cruz on this, the second SG&S album, originally released as a double LP in 1972. Speed, Glue & Shinki, as you might imagine from their name, were a goddamn weird, messed up, completely wacked heavy psych / blues / prog band. So messed up that this time out, guest musicians wrote (and performed?) most of it! But it doesn’t matter. And even when Joey plugs in a Moog synth to do a whole solo LP side devoted to the Sun, Planets, Life, Moon, and Angels (really, he does!), this never ever remotely gets pretentious and proggy (not that we don’t like proggy). It just can’t.

Speed Glue & Shinki are primal, so primal, too primal. At least one track hints at the Stooges, some others Zeppelin, while the rest approximates a brain-damaged James Gang. Record collector types might recall the fancy, expensive Shadoks LP reissue that was available several years ago for about two seconds. We were enthralled with the lovely tiger cover art and the ridiculous rock and have been hoping ever since to bring in a cd version…

Julian Cope’s Japrocksampler Top 50 ranking: #15! (He puts their debut, Eve, at #1, tied with Flower Travellin’ Band’s Satori, but actually we prefer this to Eve… though both Speed Glue & Shinki records are way cool, even if neither we’d put quite in the company of Satori).