stonewall: s/t

"First officially licensed release ever; Limited to 500 copies. 'So you're addicted to hard rock from 1972 and getting tired of LPs that don't take you for the full ride. You check out tons of 'em. Stonewall? Hmmm... only the most potent and rare stuff can get you off nowadays. Kicks intense enough to remind you why you got into it in the first place. Jams you can't wait to lay on your friends so uncontrollably alive you know it's gonna wipe 'em out. Yeah... you really need Stonewall. It's ritual time. Drop the needle into the groove. Side One. Stoned swaggering confidence, attitude and energy right out of the gate. Stonewall immediately take charge with 'Right On', an 'incite-the-audience, invoke-the-jams' renegade rocker akin to 'Are You Ready?' by Grand Funk or 'Combination of the Two' by Big Brother conceptually but taken way further. I can't say more without some sort of spoiler alert. To mess with your head, after a near cluster-fuck with the audience in the opening track comes 'Solitude'. No problem. 'Solitude, it do not bother me... drifting from mountains to the endless sea... oh, I'm flying by myself, I don't a-need nobody else'. After a savage encounter with 'Bloody Mary' the side ends with my favorite track. As soon as the guitar riff ignites 'Outer Spaced' you know you're gonna get crushed. The singer is taunting 'hey baby this ain't no come on to impress you" tossing purple planets and pure white galaxies into the mix and sneering like an outcast "I'm out in the wind and rain and snow, breaking may back!' Attitude. Climax. 'Outer space... God I'm out of my mind!' If that sounds like a rush, wait until you hear the music. It's a perfect storm. A perfect side. The band destroys, the arrangements are concise and the singer is a total trip. I hear people all over the world saying Stonewall is a 'Holy Grail'. I agree. 'Holy Grail' status for an LP requires the most extreme and exciting combination of quality and rarity. That's not all. It has to have mystery. It has to reek of humanity. There can be no other LP that beats it at its game. Top dog. It has to be a mindfuck capable of destroying anybody who hears it, including those who have previously only experienced the usual killer classics. Finding a copy must come as close to impossible as possible and remain that way even after everybody knows about it. As an original pressing, Stonewall fulfills all of the 'Holy Grail' requirements and I am jacked that a legitimate reissue finally happens some 30 odd years after it first blew me away! As far as I know, I was the first person to put an original copy up for sale on the collector scene. People were very secretive back then, so maybe a couple other copies were hidden out there in private collections. In the late '80s, I listed it in one of my 'Sound Effects' rare record catalogs for $60 mint condition after a cursory listen. Hmmm... cool hard rock, I thought, but I was mainly into weirdo records at the time. Like a numbskull, I initially failed to detect what was obviously one of the biggest monsters I ever held in my hands. A week or so later, a second listen utterly floored me. I got it. It got me. The heaviest collectors in the world at the time had a chance to grab it for $60, but no one did. Whew... close call. An unknown monster. The search was on. Find the band. Due to the Tiger Lily Morris Levy tax scam label vibes, I knew even if I found Stonewall, it was unlikely they had any LPs stashed in the attic. I knew that quite possibly (as time has shown), the band didn't even know the LP existed. I failed to find the band, so in desperation, I turned my attention to locating that mythical wall of Tiger Lily label LPs supposedly out somewhere in a rehouse on Long Island. People around here used to whisper in awed tones about that, but I think they were most likely whispering about somebody's hallucination. Long ago, my original copy landed in an underground hurricane-proof bunker on the coast of Texas. I sold it for $2000 when I needed some green. The guy who scored it clearly wanted to keep it very safe and that was huge money for even a 'Holy Grail' hard rock monster at the time. Recently an original copy hit $14,000, and it makes sense! Stuff this good is priceless so now that you can get this reissue into your life for cheap, don't be a numbskull... Do It!' --Paul Major"