Dawn Of Perception
Retrieved from music’s vault of the forgotten and slept-on, acid folk’s ground zero?
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.
“I was so sorry when he died, and so young,” says Susan Archuletta, who as Susan Graubard was Kilroy’s musical foil and sometime girlfriend. “We didn’t really know anything about cancer in those days. Or illness. We were living on brown rice and veg. What could go wrong?”
Such boundless optimism courses through the one LP Kilroy managed to finish, compromised as Light Of Day is. When he first met the singer, producer Peter K Siegel was sold on Kilroy’s multi-octave vocal range and ability to belt out blues standards. He was less enamoured of the interests in esoteric philosophy and Eastern musical scales that made Kilroy’s signature tunes – Cancereal, Vibrations, Star Dance and Light Of Day’s ecstatic title track – a forgotten prototype for what would come to be known as acid folk.
Archuletta first saw Kilroy singing Child ballads while she was a student at UC Berkeley, then ran into him by accident while he was a chef at the proto-New Age commune in Big Sur now known as the Esalen Institute. Kilroy was struck by her taste for Balinese, Japanese and Middle Eastern music, and – despite barely knowing her – took her to New York in early 1966 to accompany him and tabla player Bob Amacker on Light Of Day.
Unschooled in the kind of loose, improvisational process that forged Kilroy’s songs, the classically trained Archuletta needed a degree of chemical assistance to get into their groove (“they gave me a tiny little dose of LSD,” she tells MOJO).
After a first recording session for the album, Kilroy and Archuletta crossed the Atlantic in search of traditional music and unusual instruments. They landed in Iceland, had what Archuletta calls “a rather unsuccessful” meeting with Bert Jansch in London, and then visited Kilroy’s ancestral homelands (Ireland and Spain) before venturing into north Africa. All of those elements (plus the glockenspiel they picked up in London) fed into the songs that they brought back to New York.
Siegel, though, got cold feet, insisting that Kilroy record some of his material with an electric blues band, the muscular sound giving tales of spiritual self-discovery like A Day At The Beach and The Pipes Of Pan an oddly leathery heft.
Left to their own devices, Kilroy, Archuletta and Amacker wove rainbows. Archuletta’s flute soars through The Magic Carpet as Kilroy accepts an invitation “to float through life’s wonder in new peaceful life.” Cancereal – a nod to the trio’s shared star sign – is a loosely structured ramble, Kilroy singing about being “guided by the light of wonder… to the sea of the unknown.” Archuletta’s flute and London glockenspiel decorate the skeletal Star Dance while Kilroy’s The Fortune Teller yearns for a way out of time: “I’m on the crossroads of tomorrow and yesterday and I want to stop dying and start living today.”
The title track is the summit of their achievements, Kilroy foreshadowing the Incredible String Band and John Martyn as he wanders into primordial darkness, certain in his expectation of a new spiritual dawn. “More and more friends are starting to feel a light around that’s shining through,” he sings, his voice spiralling upwards. “And a voice within that’s shouting – shouting to you, saying it’s true.”
Kilroy was hearing that call from somewhere, even if those around him were not quite sure what the message was. Elektra boss Jac Holzman would damn him with faint praise later, saying Kilroy was “heading in a direction that to some extent I would say Tim Buckley perfected.” Kilroy had a similar vocal range, maybe, but his questing spirit and the uncanny arrangements Archuletta helped to create on Light Of Day and with The New Age set a unique course. Their back catalogue is small and frustrating – Light
Of Day is strung between two worlds, while The New Age recordings, released in 2006 as All Around, are tantalisingly incomplete. Yet they remain a one-off.
“We were just constantly growing and evolving as musicians,” says Archuletta, who also played with Robbie Basho, Mighty Baby and The Habibiyya, and later endured the same British Sufi commune as Richard and Linda Thompson. “I really miss Patrick as a music partner. He was brilliant, a really beautiful singer, I mean, just amazing. I’ve never met anyone else like him.”
“They gave me a tiny little dose of LSD…” SUSAN ARCHULETTA