BURIED TREASURE
Dawn Of Perception
Retrieved from music’s vault of the forgotten and slept-on, acid folk’s ground zero?
Tripping the light fantastic: (from right) Pat Kilroy, Susan Graubard (now Archuletta) and Jeffrey Stewart as The New Age in 1967.
Paul Kagan
Pat Kilroy
Light Of Day
ELEKTRA, 1966
“HE IS YOUNG, vigorous and wildly experimental,” read Gramophone’s review of Pat Kilroy’s quietly visionary debut LP, perhaps the deepest-set gem in the Elektra catalogue. “I expect we shall hear from him again.”
It was not to be the case. Having reacted swearily to the suggestion that the Elektra label might bring in an arranger to decorate a version of Joe Valino’s Garden Of Eden planned for a putative second solo album, the enigmatic Kilroy returned to his native California to pursue an even more extreme East-West fusion with The New Age. Their debut album for Warner Bros was all but completed when he discovered that late-stage Hodgkin’s lymphoma was the reason behind his constant exhaustion and the mysterious lumps in his body. He died on Christmas Day 1967, aged just 24.