Customer Reviews

Aladdin / Dinner Music

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Take an utterly beautiful, soulful band like the Fifth Dimension and add a heavy, professionally-crafted theatrical sheen, and you've got Rotary Connection. One of my amazingly astute and lively college companions/girlfriends was heavily into theatre - and was wild about them. If you like listening to music that's reminiscent of 'Hair' and/or 'Jesus Christ Superstar', RC will be right up your alley - they're definitely a very artistic/dramatic/appealing element of the late 60's counter-cultural ethos.
It's also notable that some of the instrumental breaks and harmonic underpinnings veer a bit in the direction of folks like Van Dyke Parks - quite an avant-garde touch, as it were, and quite flavorful, if that's were your tastes lie.

I thought about this for a long time and as it turns out it is really very simple. Aladdin is a wonderful album oozing with class and character. I had the pleasure of seeing these folks in concert shortly after Aladdin was released and to this day I consider their performance that evening one of my all time favorites. I don't know how it came to be that this album became lost in time, but I found it again and I am really glad I did.

When I first heard this CD it was in 1969 or 1970. I saw the group live in my college town of Carbondale, Il. Funny part of the album is that it is psychedelic keeping in tune with the 60's, then it seems to mellow out alot for the 70's when everyone, almost everyone, smoked a little reefer. All kidding aside, this cd is 30 years ahead of its time, and Minnie Riperton died soon after this release. I just found this cd, been looking for it for years. My LP is totally trashed from years of playing.

I love Rotary Connection Music. It's not for everybody. Combine Sly & Family Stone with the Fifth Dimension on Psychedelic steroids & add classical backround arrangements, 4 great harmonizing singers & you have an idea of what to expect. This album is the 2nd and 5th RC albums combined. I like their first album the best. The 2nd one which you get here (Aladdin) I liked all the way thru. It continues the psychedelic strain on the first album except these are originals & not covers. On the 5th album which you get here (dinner music) it seemed as though the band, because of a lack of commercial success were no longer sure what they wanted or were supposed to be doing. There are several songs I like a lot, but some I could take or leave. That is why I give this combined album disk 4 instead of 5 stars. In case you don't know Minnie Riperton is a singer in this band. It took me awhile to realize that what I thought was instrumentation at first is actually Minnie's 5 octave voice soaring where no voice has gone before. A great album by a wonderful group. They have a sound all their own. Worth a curious checking out.

Rotary Connection may be one of 1960s rock's best kept secrets and understanding why is easy. When AM bands were doing vocal music and FM bands experimenting with virtually all of music, this band did both.

The results are a big, strange, orchestral rock with a mass of vocal, including a young Minnie Ripperton. These albums are wonderfully eccentric, with great vocal form but a strange sense of psychedelic experimentation--older music heads may remember strange music that went bump in the middle of a three-bong night on FM during the era, when after 12am flights into the exotic and strange were common practice on underground radio. Remember or not, you probably at some point heard Rotary Connection.

Now we have them on little silver discs, two for one, and straight, they sound just as good--unless you are still one to indulge. Before you do, Minnie Ripperton: most know her for her angelic 1970s soft rock piece, "Lovin' You." Great song, but that was a different era, and has little to do with the sound of Rotary Connection.

Just so you know.

I wore out my LP of Aladdin years ago. Even the cover eventually

fell apart from extensive handling. What made this music so

desireable? One thin is the anthemic quality. You fell

like you are listening to songs of praise for a state of

consciousness in which you might not have had full citizenship,

but which you got to visit from time to time. It was an album

that made you fell good about your generation and its value.

The musical craftsmanship of this lovely album was also one of

the things that sustains it and makes it freshly appealing. The

work is fully orchestrated and musically ambitious. The themes

remain appealing. Don't you still want to take a ride in

the caravan? Wouldn't you love it if someone taught you how

to fly?

A lot of the psychedelic music of the sixties and seventies

seems remarkably childish today, but the Rotary Connection

remains a link with its feet on both sides of the time line.

--Lynn Hoffman, author of THE NEW SHORT COURSE IN WINE and

the forthcoming novel bang BANG from Kunati Books.ISBN

9781601640005\