Way out sounds from San Francisco’s Mojo Men!
There Goes My Mind finds the Mojo Men in full control of their high-wire blend of boy-girl vocals. Abetted principally by sparkling keyboard wizardry, winsome vocals, and lavish guitars, this is your ticket to one of West Coast’s best psychedelic garage bands. First time on vinyl!
Considering all the wonderfully buoyant material they tracked for Warner Brothers in the ‘60s, it’s puzzling the label never pulled the trigger on an album by San Francisco’s Mojo Men. They’d had regional, British Invasion-style hits for Tom Donahue’s visionary Autumn Records in 1965–66, and even cracked the national top 40 for Warner/Reprise in 1967 with “Sit Down, I Think I Love You,” a lavish, Van Dyke Parks-embellished production that the song’s composer, Buffalo Springfield’s Steve Stills, apparently preferred to his own band’s version.
The Mojo Men featured the robust vocals of Jim Alaimo, Paul Curcio’s solid guitar work and the sparkling keyboard wizardry of Don Metchick, trained at Rochester, NY’s Eastman School Of Music. And, best of all, they had the beautiful Jan Errico who could play drums as well as any guy in town and possessed a singing voice that would stop people dead in their tracks. Yet, no LP sprang from these San Fran stalwarts!
The most ironic card in this rainbow-hued deck, however, is the album’s title song, “When You’re Down.” Had they sloshed on some psychedelic guitar–a la John Cipollina or Jorma Kaukonen–this opus alone might have gained them entry to any West Coast hippie love palace. But that really wasn’t what the band was after. To paraphrase the most sagacious Roger McGuinn, things turned out just fine for the Mojo Men.