It’s a mistake to listen to this album as a pop album. I made this mistake myself — my ’80s paisley shirt & beatle boots on; expecting a worthy extension of ‘Future’ or ‘Web Of Sound’. Look at the cover (designed by Sky Saxon) — The Seeds in all their finery held aloft in a great silver spoon, guitarist Jan Savage in the foreground hauling a toke off a peace pipe, Sky Saxon scowling away in a red velvet cape. Disappointed by what I heard — Blues — I shelved this record away, chuckling at the effusive liner notes written by none other than Muddy Waters. Yeah right.

Years passed. This album and others got converted to Kraft Dinner and/or bills.

It’s one of life’s great joys as a music fan to learn about how wrong one had been about a particular record — to rediscover such a record and to be bowled over by it in due course. It’s a sublime joy made all the more special by one’s personal history with that record — To feel one’s familiarity change from one thing to another as surprise dismantles set opinion.

Pop music is listened to for its melodies. Blues offers mood. Where once I looked for melodies with this great album, this time out I appreciated the sound of the album itself. The guitars sound immense. If this is Jan Savage, he was really holding back with their pop material. Daryl Hooper’s organ has a nice sleazy juke joint sound to it and Sky’s lyrics and delivery are at least, if not more, authentic and fitted to the idiom as anything Mick Jagger had done. 

Maybe it’s down to the age of the 1000 song ipod, but I really seek out albums almost specifically for their sensory experience these days. Much more than vessels of song, a great album as this is a treat for the ears and a living portal to another time and place. If you, like me, had encountered ‘Full Spoon’ before and wrote it off, please revisit it once more and appreciate all that it has to offer. If this were a record out now by some new band we’d all be hearing a lot about it.

Fortunately it isn’t. There isn’t a thing contrived about it. It’s all real, all there, all preserved from a nice sounding studio circa 1967 for our reappraisal in this digital age.

Ahead of its time.