My hometown of Claremont, California’s own Kaleidoscope was one of the great bands of the late 1960s.
David Lindley and Chris Darrow were two of its mainstays.
My dad bought Side Trips at a street fair at Pitzer College where the band performed, brought it home and we played the hell out of this album for the next five years, until it basically could not be triaged.
Kaleidoscope, like many musicians in town back then, melded folk, bluegrass, psychedelia, Middle Eastern music, R&B, and about two dozen instruments between them.
Makes you realize how rich in musicians, guitar players mostly, was Claremont in the late 1960s and much of the 1970s – due largely to the Folk Music Center and the five colleges, which, apart from CMC, had a pretty rich hippie scene. I remember because I accompanied my dad to a few anti-Vietnam marches when I was like 8 or so. Got a shirt stencil-painted with a clenched fist. Those were the days.
We were from the Claremont that’s south of Foothill, which only people from the town then will understand.
There’s great original music all the way through this record. But the dirge “Oh Death” seems fitting to the season.
