Sometimes the rediscovery of an obscure cult figure from pop's archives strips away the aura that scarcity and high auction prices once conferred. Many tracks on reissue compilations of forgotten garage, Northern soul, or freakbeat singles reveal why they failed to register originally: they simply lack quality. Bobb Trimble stands apart because the intense collector frenzy that has surrounded his two self-released albums—each pressed in runs of three hundred copies, with near-mint pressings of the 1981 Iron Curtain Innocence fetching more than one thousand dollars—rests on music of genuine merit rather than rarity or the colorful details of his uneven path.
Trimble sings in a high, quavering register that has drawn parallels to Marc Bolan of T. Rex, Russell Mael of Sparks, and Joni Mitchell. His songwriting fuses lo-fi psychedelia with an emotional depth rarely matched by fellow 1980s neo-psych practitioners such as R. Stevie Moore, Robyn Hitchcock, or the Bevis Frond. Although the two albums evoke late-1960s textures, Trimble aligns more closely in spirit with later artists including Neutral Milk Hotel, Smog, and the freak-folk movement led by Devendra Banhart and Joanna Newsom.
Born in Marlborough, a modest town in central Massachusetts, in 1958, Trimble absorbed standard classic-rock influences, above all the Beatles. The sleeve of Iron Curtain Innocence carried the plea: “Dear John, Paul, George and Ringo: If I'm a good boy and work real hard, may I please be the 5th Beatle some day?” He moved westward to the working-class city of Worcester, where, in his early twenties, he appeared on the local punk circuit while privately composing and taping the decidedly non-punk material that surfaced in 1981 as Iron Curtain Innocence.
After that release he assembled a garage-rock group called the Kidds, whose members, aged twelve or thirteen, also played on his more experimental follow-up, Harvest of Dreams, issued in 1982. The band’s youth complicated club bookings and eventually prompted its dissolution when parents objected to their children’s close association with the adult Trimble.
Trimble issued no further albums after the Kidds disbanded, though he performed around Worcester with a slightly older ensemble, the Crippled Dog Band, between 1983 and 1990 and continued making occasional unreleased recordings. In a November 2007 Boston Globe interview he stated that he had not written a single song since 1993. Interest nevertheless grew within psychedelic circles as cassette copies circulated and original pressings commanded ever-higher sums. Parallel World’s 1995 compact disc Jupiter Transmission, which gathered thirteen tracks from the two albums, amplified the attention.
Kris Thompson, a fixture of the Massachusetts psych-rock community whose earlier band the Prefab Messiahs had shared Worcester bills with Trimble, became an outspoken advocate. Thompson’s group Abunai! featured Trimble on guitar for one song on its 2000 album Round-Wound, and Thompson supplied liner notes for the 2002 archival vinyl Life Beyond the Doghouse, which paired previously unheard studio recordings made after Harvest of Dreams with live Crippled Dog Band tracks. Following Radioactive Records’ unauthorized 2005 U.K. compact-disc reissue of Harvest of Dreams, Thompson encouraged Secretly Canadian—whose act the Impossible Shapes had been likened to Trimble in a review—to issue both albums officially, complete with restored artwork, bonus material, and improved sound.
