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Bent Wind


Bent Wind - Sussex

Sussex
Trend - 1969


Michael Panontin
Bent Wind's Sussex is phenomenally rare, with those few surviving copies fetching upwards of (USD)4000 bucks a pop.

Sussex traces its origins back to a drug-addled house on Sussex Avenue in Toronto's Annex neighbourhood. The street sits just off the campus of the University of Toronto and in 1969 was populated by the usual assortment of stoners, hippies and musicians.

"Myself and another friend from school days were running a boutique/headshop at the corner of Sussex and Robert," Bent Wind's guitarist Marty Roth recalled on his blog. "And, every so often...I'd hear a faint blur of something, close to what some might consider music. It was emanating from the basement of one of the houses beside the lane at 57 Sussex Avenue, almost a block away."

Ross popped in to find out what the ruckus was, and that was when the seeds of Bent Wind first started to germinate. "As it turned out, the guitarist was Gerry Gibas, a close friend who I'd been jamming with while writing original tunes any chance we could," he writes. "He dropped by the shop during their break and told me to drop over. That's where I met Eddie Thomas Majchrowski, the drummer."

Roth was also surprised to see that the guy on bass, Sebastian Pelaia, was a former classmate from high school. "I wasn't aware at that time that he even played an instrument. There he was standing in a corner whacking at his bass while singing, 'In a gadda da vida, honey!' ... and he'd grin."

With the nucleus of Bent Wind now in place, Roth, Gibas, Thomas and Pelaia started practising in "a damp, poorly lit, cramped room" in the basement at 57 Sussex. It wasn't long before the guys were getting gigs, initially at a couple of frat houses in the neighbourhood. But as Roth explains it was a far cry from the hopped-up frat rock of the early sixties. "All of our songs were without real words. We would use a sort of skat gibberish that sounded similar to words but were muffled by the way we used the microphone and echo effects. Nobody cared. They still liked the music. We didn't care. We liked playing."

On July 26, 1969, Bent Wind were on the bill for the North York Pop Festival at St. Gabriel's Hall up in the city's northern fringes. The posters advertised "12 Spectacular Hours, 12 Spectacular Bands". Bent Wind went on first, and their set was cut short by the usual rock festival behind-the-scenes confusion. But as the guys sulked back to the parking lot to pack up their gear, they were approached by Trend Records' Merv Buchanan, who offered them the chance to make a record. A week later they found themselves in Trend's studio, a converted one-room schoolhouse out in the Toronto suburb of West Hill, recording their first album.

Muffled production aside, Sussex would have been standard-issue cool at the time. Heavier tracks like 'Riverside' and 'Mystify' are top-rate psychedelia, especially the former's freewheeling guitar solos and the latter's soaring harmonies. Ditto for 'Hate', which adds a bit of ether with an airy intro before exploding into a near-maniacal freakfest. Elsewhere, the flowery ballad 'Look at Love', though well-intended, seems to lug its psychedelic baggage a little too awkwardly and would probably have been better left off the album.

Sussex came out in October 1969. A collector flipping through the new releases that month would have seen Zappa's Hot Rats, Led Zeppelin II, King Crimson's In the Court of the Crimson King, the Kinks' Arthur (Or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire) and Pink Floyd's Ummagumma. What chance did an album recorded on a shoestring budget, hand-delivered to the two big record stores downtown and sold for $2.89 on consignment have? Sussex was pretty well dead in the water. Still, in a Toronto awash in hippies and draft-dodgers, with a little spit and polish - not to mention some financial backing - Sussex could have been a contender.

Bent Wind broke up the following year. And those few copies of Sussex, Roth laments, were eventually shifted to the rear bargain bins, where they sat for years until the occasional collector took a chance and bought a copy. Fast forward to 1983 and Roth is running a second-hand shop on Queen West, next to Kopp's record shop. One day the dean of Canadian record dealers, Martin Koppel, walked into the shop and looked aghast at a copy of Sussex stapled to the wall.

"Oh man!" he cried out loud. "How could you nail a Bent Wind LP up on your wall??!!" Koppel produced a copy of Goldmine with an article on Bent Wind and told Roth that copies were selling for $300 each. Roth was floored. "How could this be?" he wondered. "My LP was recorded over a period of two days with most of the songs recorded in one take. They wouldn't even play it on the radio."

(Sussex has thankfully been reissued a number of times in a number of countries, most recently in 2018 by the good folks at Ugly Pop.)
         


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