THE ASMOTO RUNNING BAND

The second and final album from the “Magic Theatre” version of Principal Edwards is much less ambitious and quite a bit shorter than their first release. Vivienne McAuliffe is still around on vocals, but less pronounced than before. The band was already in the last throes of their existence, and would break up completely shortly after this release. The times they were a’changing, and this sort of theatrical, pretentious and self-indulgent dinner theater sort of music was becoming pretty passé by the early seventies.

This is a sort of theme album, telling the disjointed tale of a pseudo-mythical Asmoto Running Band and some dude named McAlpine’s interactions with them – sort of a poor man’s Sgt Pepper, I suppose. Kind of hard to follow – there’s a booklet with lyrics in the CD version but they aren’t all that illuminating without some sort of herbal inspiration.

The guitar work is more prevalent here, but nothing spectacular for sure, and many of the tracks seem to be nothing more than musical props for the troupe’s live theater sketches, most notably “Asmoto Celebration” (followed immediately by “Further Asmoto Celebration”); the pompously named “Total Glycerol Esther”; and the anti-climactic finale “Weirdsong of Breaking Through at Last”.

A remnant of the group would reform as simply “Principal Edwards” following the breakup and would continue on as a slightly more conventional art rock act for a couple of years before their bass player would marry pianist/violinist Belinda Bourquin and leave for the Climax Blues Band along with band manager Miles Copeland. The smaller group did manage to record a set of studio tracks known as “The Devon Tapes” that has been discovered and will supposedly be released some time soon, but beyond that there’s not much to report on the band after the mid-seventies.

This is a mildly interesting curio of history, but not a very serious piece of progressive folk music. I hesitate to give it only two stars because I think it suffers mostly from having not stood the test of time all that well, but it is what it is so two stars is the right call. Not particularly recommended but might provide a bit of amusement to nostalgic prog folk fans.

peace