Dec 14

1523 Blair

Barely Appreciated

1523 BLAIR

 
The Outcasts’ last single, “1523 Blair” (released in January 1967) took the band in a different direction and is a nearly unique psychedelic rock song in that it is played at a furious pace.  The song inspired the name of a future entry in the Under-Appreciated Rock Bands, a marvelous British band who released one album as Blair 1523. 
 
(September 2011)
 
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Mostly it is just Linda Pierre King and her guitar, but that is a full-blown band backing her on “Hard-Lovin' Babe”.  They are named the Outcasts, and the people at Collectables Records hinted that they were the famed Texas garage rock band called the Outcasts that won the statewide Battle of the Bands in 1966 (the peak year for the garage rock genre) and whose records include classics like “I'm in Pittsburgh (and it’s Raining)” and “1523 Blair”.   Whoever is backing King is definitely not the famous Outcasts – former bandmember Denny Turner disavows the recordings on his website – so they are a mystery for now.   
 
 (April 2012)
 
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After Galen Niles joined the Outcasts as their new lead guitarist, the band recorded another classic called “1523 Blair”.  

 

The unusual name is taken from the street address for a recording studio that was operated in Houston by Doyle Jones.  One recent reviewer said of this song (as posted on www.officenaps.com):  “The music on this selection is jarringly experimental, the spirit is possessed fervor.   ‘1523 Blair’ is one minute and forty seven seconds long because it couldn’t have possibly been any longer.”  

  

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It is amazing how often I will mention a past UARB or UARA in the article on this month's entry, only to find that they come up in the Flashback or the Picture Gallery.  Maybe these really are flashbacks!  In this case, Galen Niles of the Outcasts – who performed the furious psychedelic guitar on “1523 Blair” – was one of the founders of the Texas hard-rock band Ultra.
 
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The music on Destination: Bomp! is amazingly good from end to end, but the next to last song really caught my attention:  “Fantasy of Folk” by Blair 1523.  I immediately caught the reference to “1523 Blair” by the Outcasts.  Sonic Boom, a member of the 1980’s British psychedelic rock band Spacemen 3, told Greg Shaw about this band:  “[They’d] sent him a tape from a place with the unlikely name of Praze-an-Beeble, somewhere in Cornwall.  By the time I got in touch to offer them a deal they’d already broken up, but I went ahead and compiled a CD from their various demos, and it became a favorite of mine and many others.  This [“Fantasy of Folk”] is one of their charming, poppier tunes; but the album also includes some stretched-out, deep space jams that are not to be missed.”  

 

(September 2013)

 

Last edited: April 3, 2021