When I was 17 years old, my musical tastes were expanding exponentially. It was 1983. New Wave and Punk seemed played out and almost comical to me. Modern FM Rock was still regurgitating the 70’s hits. Metal was NOT an option, with a few exceptions. A lot of us from that generation were looking beyond our peers and contemporary music in search of interesting and unique sounds. My group of friends had our own resource guide, thanks to a book that my friend Steve had procured. It was called the NME Rock and Roll Encyclopedia, the 1978 edition. The in-depth reviews of classic psychedelic and progressive rock albums in that book was mind blowing for me and my friends who were now digging deeply into the past to find new obscurities and influences. This inevitably led to marathon crate digging vinyl sessions at every record store in the Dallas/Fort Worth area in exploration of the rarest and most difficult records we could find. The first really fun and obscure thing that Steve found was Soft Machine’s “Third” which was an easy acquisition from Austin’s Half Price Books. My little circle soon found their own personal favorite albums to search out based solely on the NME book reviews. And everyone except me found the one record they were looking for, but the record I wanted was nowhere to be found or heard. It was called “S.F. Sorrow” by Pretty Things. I had never heard of Pretty Things nor of this album, but the reviews and the mystique surrounding it was enough to really pique my interest. The first Rock Opera? It influenced Pete Townshend to write “Tommy”?! And it was produced at Abbey Road by Norman Smith in 1968?!! It had to be fucking amazing, right? The picture of the band in the book and their subsequent biography pretty much sealed the deal for me. They had everything that I loved about a band: diverse sounds from garage to psychedelia to blues-rock. And they looked like bad-asses in every pic from every era! They recorded an album with a French count that was even rarer than “Sorrow”!

The odyssey began to find this album and make this band my favorite. I searched every Half-Price Record store, Peaches, Bills, Record Exchange, VVV, Metamorphosis, even the Will Rogers Barn Flea Market where I had scored my first piece of vinyl back in 1976. No one had it. Few had heard of it. Bill knew what it ‘was’ but remarked that, “Everyone who has it probably likes it enough to keep it. I’ve only seen it twice in a decade. And the last one sold for top dollar too.” I didn’t care about price, I wanted it. Until he showed me a Goldmine Magazine a few weeks later with the US Rare Earth edition of “Sorrow” listed for $300 dollars. I didn’t have that kind of cash for a record in New Jersey. One summer, we went to Austin a few times record shopping but it was still unobtainable at all the used shops. By 1986, our psychedelic band ESP was beginning and I still had neither seen nor heard this amazing piece of 60’s genius. But I knew that once I heard it, I would not let it go. What I did however find was the other Pretty Things albums, starting with the amazing “Parachute”. That album alone introduced me to the great Phil May, whose voice was coated in velvet and whose words were shamanic. I also found “Emotions”, the other bookend of “Sorrow” with its lysergic pop grace of the Beatles coupled with the garage attack of The Standells and the melodic lyricism of Arthur Lee. This meant that “Sorrow” HAD TO BE THE GREATEST ALBUM OF ALL TIME! Because the album before and after it were masterpieces as well. Finding “Sorrow” became a total obsession at this point. Hearing it would be fine, but owning it would be best.

            So The Pretty Things became my go-to psychedelic band. Not many of my friends had heard of them and even fewer had heard them; they were this little hipster musical world that I could turn people onto and watch them marvel. But I had to do it without “Sorrow”. I even worked at Half-Price Books for two years in the late 80’s and NEVER saw it. I had the other local stores searching for it for me to no avail. There was a collectors vinyl store next door to us on Camp Bowie called Dino’s and even he had never seen it. There was a UK vinyl reissue on Edsel Records in 1987, but I was never able to find or obtain  or order it. Sorrow occasionally popped up in Goldmine for out-bloody-rageous prices which always made me stew. By 1991, I was living in Portland and still neither seen nor heard this mythical record. I knew it as only a matter of time. It took ten years after first reading about it to actually hear it.

I finally heard “S.F. Sorrow” in 1993 on cassette tape that John Whitson (later the owner of the wicked cool psychedelic label Holy Mountain Records) had from a Japanese CD reissue. And it was every bit as amazing as I had hoped. Phil’s lyrics and voice told the story so very well. It was musically well above “Sgt Peppers” and even “Piper At The Gates Of Dawn” to my ears. It was now my favorite record ever made, just as I had envisioned back in 1983 as a lad. I immediately made my own second generation cassette copy and basked in its virtuosity for a few months before the tape was eaten by my Subaru. But the search for the vinyl continued. I made a CD copy off the MP3 files in the early 2000’s through illegal download. I eventually bought an official CD reissue around 2005, but still pined for the vinyl.

Then finally, at Hasting’s Records in Albuquerque in 2009 I found it on vinyl. TWICE. The 2008 Sundaze reissue on virgin vinyl. As I was jumping up and down while freaking out at the record bin, one of the employees walked up and smiled slyly. He reached into a nearby used bin and pulled out a $15 beat copy of the Rare Earth 1969 die-cut vinyl. Destiny? I bought both instantly. They now sit together in my collection and get regular play. But isn’t it funny how the long search for this record led to an era where it is available to stream freely on Spotify and other computer music services?  Yeah, I still prefer the vinyl…