The Rising Storm

In the mid-1960s, while still enrolled at prep school, a New England ensemble laid down one of the scarcest and most revered garage-rock albums, the 1967 release Calm Before..., which balanced outside material with its own compositions in equal measure. The disc stood apart from countless similar efforts not because of its capable covers of songs first recorded by Them, Wilson Pickett, Love, and fellow Boston garage bands the Remains and the Rockin' Ramrods, but owing to the ensemble’s own luminous, atmospheric folk-rock ballads. After graduation the members went their separate ways, only to be unearthed by devoted 1960s collectors more than fifteen years later, when unplayed copies of Calm Before... began changing hands for thousands of dollars. They reconvened in the early 1980s to tape a concert at their alma mater, Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, which appeared as the live album Alive Again at Andover. The Rising Storm have stayed sporadically active ever since, regrouping for club dates and festival gigs throughout the United States and Europe from the 1990s into the new millennium and issuing the album Second Wind on the Arf! Arf! label in 1998. In 2018 Sundazed Records released a remastered edition of Calm Before... on both CD and vinyl.