Biography
In the closing years of the 1960s and the opening stretch of the following decade, numerous eccentric singer-songwriters put out barely circulated LPs marked by rudimentary musicianship and tinges of psychedelic counterculture, even when their foundations remained rooted in acoustic folk forms. One such overlooked artifact was Charlie Tweddle’s Fantastic Greatest Hits, captured on tape in 1971 and issued in a run of five hundred copies three years later, then passed along by hand with scant commercial result. Tweddle occupied a place within the same disoriented acid-folk lineage that ran from Skip Spence at its most accomplished extreme to Wild Man Fischer among its least polished practitioners. In contrast to either of those figures, however, Tweddle worked without access to respectable studio equipment, so that much of Fantastic Greatest Hits carried the sonic imprint of a modest portable cassette machine. The eight songs themselves echoed the sort of rudimentary home recordings that would later circulate through the cassette-trading networks of the 1980s, pitting loose and at times disjointed country-folk material against assorted sonic intrusions such as animal calls, breaking surf, and explosive detonations. Adding to the package’s determined resistance to conventional appeal, none of the eight selections carried titles. The final piece, which filled the entire second side and lasted twenty-two minutes, consisted chiefly of cricket chirps that were only sporadically broken or augmented by fragments of country-folk melody or sudden bursts of sound effects.
Charlie Tweddle himself was no fabricated persona but a genuine individual who had grown up inside a Kentucky cabin lacking electricity or plumbing. Before spending time in Haight-Ashbury, he performed with the Kansas City garage band the Prophets of Paradise. Although the album was tracked in San Rafael, a short distance north of San Francisco, the 1971 sessions remained unreleased until Tweddle issued the LP himself in 1974 under the reversed billing “Eilrahc Elddewt.” Long regarded as an extreme rarity, the original album resurfaced on compact disc through Companion in 2004, supplemented by six previously unheard bonus recordings made between 1971 and 1973.
Charlie Tweddle himself was no fabricated persona but a genuine individual who had grown up inside a Kentucky cabin lacking electricity or plumbing. Before spending time in Haight-Ashbury, he performed with the Kansas City garage band the Prophets of Paradise. Although the album was tracked in San Rafael, a short distance north of San Francisco, the 1971 sessions remained unreleased until Tweddle issued the LP himself in 1974 under the reversed billing “Eilrahc Elddewt.” Long regarded as an extreme rarity, the original album resurfaced on compact disc through Companion in 2004, supplemented by six previously unheard bonus recordings made between 1971 and 1973.
Albums
