SYZYGY

SYZYGY is back! Originally released as a limited-run LP in the aftermath of bandleader Henry Wilson’s sudden death in 1990, the album was immediately pulled from stores following a flurry of cease-and-desist letters between Wilson’s estate and the surviving band members during what became known as the “lawsuits and cashgrabs” era.  But time heals all wounds (except very large shark bites that become infected) and now these 9 psychedelic specimens of pure liquid acid-wave are finally available again, remastered and flowing through the internet like a fuzzy multi-colored snake.

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At least 100,000 people made it to Haight-Ashbury for 1967’s “Summer of Love,” but Space Butter’s bandleader Henry Wilson wasn’t one of them. Originally from Farmington, New Hampshire, Wilson had hitchhiked as far as Keystone, South Dakota by the time Ken Kesey and co. held the symbolic hippie funeral and told seekers like Wilson to stop coming west and to start spreading the social revolution wherever they happened to be. Taking the message literally, Wilson was arrested after scaling Mt. Rushmore, gluing gigantic googly-eyes to each of the presidents and using wire and purple cellophane to turn Theodore Roosevelt’s stodgy stone glasses into hip, round tea-shades.

Eventually settling in Los Angeles’s secluded canyon enclave of Topanga, Wilson met and fell in love with neighbor and future-wife/drummer Cookie Komatsu after unsuccessfully attempting to save her pet cat from a marauding trio of hungry coyotes. The attack, which happened as Wilson was recording an early, bare-bones version of “Dark Blue Star-System,” was captured in full by his still-recording reel-to-reel machine and was later used by Komatsu in her hugely-controversial, blood-soaked gallery show “This Is What Death Sounds Like.”

Space Butter’s single full-length studio record, 1969’s fuzzy masterpiece Galaxy II, was never released commercially in Wilson’s lifetime and was only widely discovered after his mysterious death in 1990.

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