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There are bands, often a bit obscure, whose records I only bought because of a sampler album. There are loads of them, in fact The Rock Machine Turns You On alone is responsible for turning me on to a dozen great bands. It’s where I first heard Spirit and at the same time, I got The Guitars That Destroyed The World, which also featured Spirit. I also loved the experimental band United States Of America and The Electric Flag and got their albums. It turned me on to the early Blood Sweat and Tears and Taj Mahall, the Zombies Odessey and Oracle and The Peanut Butter Conspiracy.
Other standouts were the Bumpers album where I first heard Nick Drake performing Hazy Jane and If’s Reaching Out On All Sides, Early Mott and long-forgotten bands like Clouds, Renaissance and Blodwyn Pig. That, and The Guitars That Destroyed The World album was where I first heard Blue Oyster Cult and Edgar Winter’s White Trash. Then there was the magnificent El Pea, featuring the likes of folksters Tir Na Nog and Amazing Blondel and a track from Mick Abrahams excellent debut album as well as Traffic and Free and Mountain.
Nice Enough To Eat was a similar selection of bands on Island, with added Quintessence, Spooky Tooth and King Crimson. I eagerly made lists of albums to buy second-hand when the occasion arose, which it often did in Newcastle University library which sold off people’s collections cheap, as student hippies entered the real world and no longer wanted to listen to Dr Strangely Strange records. A great time for collecting.
But when I was just starting out on my collecting journey aged 13 and 14, these albums were an absolute treasure trove and led me down many a rabbit hole that I would’ve known nothing about otherwise. They seemed to stop being used in the first years of the 70s. The last one I have was an unusual charity release in the mid-80s called Feed The Folk, but apart from that it’s 1973.
