PLANETEN SIT-IN

If the musicians whose efforts were illegally sold by Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser (according to legend, at any rate) had any misgivings about the first two Cosmic Jokers albums, they must have been livid about this one: number three in the series, not counting the ersatz Kosmische Kuriere sampler "Sci-Fi Party".

Never mind the not unjustified legal complaints; this barely organized hodgepodge of musical snippets, effects, and fragmentary jams (half of the tracks hardly crack the one-minute mark) is the sound of R.U. Kaiser scraping the bottom of the Krautrock barrel. Clearly by this stage of the supergroup sessions the drugs had kicked into (appropriately) high gear: a good deal of it sounds like the players trying to simply tune their instruments, apparently not the easiest task when under the influence of LSD.

A couple of worthwhile grooves finally emerge in the last ten or twelve minutes of the album, during the haphazardly titled "Interstellar Rock: Kosmische Musik" and "Die Planet des Sternenmädchens". But by then it's too little too late, and I doubt even the novelty of quadraphonic sound was enough to save it at the time.

And yet the ringleaders of this cosmic circus deserve a lot of credit, for thrift and economy if not for musical unity. The original AMON DÜÜL only managed to squeeze three albums from a single 1968 jam session; R.U. Kaiser stretched his exploitation to five LPs before being hounded out of the business by legal action and negative press.

Questions of ethics aside, the first Cosmic Jokers album had some phenomenal music on it; "Galactic Supermarket" was almost as good; but this one is strictly for hardcore fans willing to overlook its obvious shortcomings. Four Stars to Three Stars to a very generous Two Star rating...you can see a trend here, and I wouldn't want to compromise my admiration for the whole misguided Cosmic Jokers experiment by delving any deeper into their catalogue.