The Red Crayola: Mayo Thompson, Rick Barthelme, Steve Cunningham.
Additional personnel includes: Roky Erickson.
Red Crayola was one of the freakiest bands of the 1960s, and that's no mean feat. Visionary wierdo Mayo Thompson and a couple of Texan pals made up the first incarnation of the mercurial group (legal wrangles with a certain crayon company would soon find the band replacing the "c" in its name with a "k"). The resulting debut, PARABLE OF ARABLE LAND, is mind-bendingly psychedelic without resorting to any of the now-dated tropes of the era.
You'll find no backwards guitars or electric sitars here. Instead, there are six wild and wooly pieces, each bearing the prefix "Free Form Freakout." A glorious cavalcade of skewed-sounding guitars, percussive havoc, and voices create a discordant sonic tapestry that occasionally deigns to fall into a traditonal melody or harmony. Echoes of everything from free jazz to the later freakiness of krautrock can be heard in these highly experimental and wonderfully wierd tracks.