Get “Real Gone” with Paul Butterfield & Timothy Leary This Black Friday!

Record Store Day’s November “Black Friday” event is rapidly becoming as big a deal as the original “Record Store Day” held every April. While there is a diverse selection of vinyl goodies available for purchase at your local indie retailer on Friday, November 25th, 2016 why not consider one of these daring releases from our friends at Real Gone Music?

The Paul Butterfield Blues Band’s sophomore effort East-West is now considered a classic blues-rock album, one upon which a lot of other musicians have built their own sound and careers. At the time of its release, though, East-West was a daring, adventuresome collection that grabbed the improvisational aspects of jazz and retro-fitted the concept to a Chicago blues framework. Featuring the raging harp play of frontman Butterfield, the band also boasted of two world class fretburners in guitarists Michael Bloomfield and Elvin Bishop, whose intertwined instruments broke through the barriers of blues tradition to soar into free-form jams with modal instrumental passages that were unlike anything previously heard in blues or rock ‘n’ roll.

Earlier this year, Real Gone released Got A Mind To Give Up Living – Live 1966, the first legit release of a legendary bootleg that captured the Paul Butterfield Blues Band in its full glory on the stage of Boston’s Unicorn Coffee House some 50 years ago, just prior to the release of East-West. The Reverend reviewed this live set back in July, and now Real Gone is making this longtime tape-traders’ favorite available for the very first time on vinyl.

This special “Black Friday” vinyl release adds four previously-unreleased songs that weren’t included on the CD, including red-hot covers of Percy Mayfield’s “Danger Zone” and the classic “In The Midnight Hour,” featuring the band’s bassist Jerome Arnold on vocals. With liner notes by Chris Morris that include new quotes from Bishop and keyboardist Mark Naftalin, as well as rare photos and re-mastered sound courtesy of Mike Milchner at SonicVision, Got A Mind To Give Up Living – Live 1966 will be released on “Butter” yellow and “Bloom” blue vinyl in a limited edition of 2,000 copies in a gatefold package.

The other notable “Black Friday” release from Real Gone Music is the return of the notorious The Psychedelic Experience LP to vinyl. In the mid-1960s, authors and psychedelic experimenters Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner, and Richard Alpert (a/k/a “Ram Dass”) wrote The Psychedelic Experience, a groundbreaking 1964 book based on The Tibetan Book of the Dead that addressed themes of death and rebirth in the context of the use of hallucinogenic drugs like LSD, psilocybin, and peyote. The three authors recorded an audio version of the book which was released by Broadside Records in 1966, the album proving to be a major influence on John Lennon of the Beatles, among many other musicians.

For the 50th anniversary of the original album’s release (it was reissued on CD in 2003 but has long been out-of-print), Real Gone is reissuing The Psychedelic Experience as a “Black Friday” exclusive as a limited edition of 1,700 copies on psychedelic magenta ‘splatter’ vinyl in a package that features the original album’s four-page insert and vintage album graphics. Look for both of these vinyl albums at your favorite vinyl sales location; check out the Real Gone Music website for more info.