One of the prized private press rarities of early 1970s American rock. Originally issued in 1972 on the tiny East Coast Records imprint, Keep On Truckin' is the lone album by Surprize, a Philadelphia five-piece whose single recorded statement - heavy, bluesy, psychedelic, and threaded with organ - has spent decades near the top of collectors' want lists, original copies nearly impossible to find and counterfeited more than once along the way.
The band had been together only eight months when, in August 1971, they entered Sigma Sound Studios - the Philadelphia room that was, in those very years, becoming the engine of Gamble and Huff's Philadelphia soul - to cut the album's six tracks. The lineup of Pete Accardi (lead vocals, harmonica, percussion), Mark Shapiro (guitar), Frank Bissel (keyboards), Rick Martin (bass), and Fred Kieffer (drums) works a territory somewhere between psychedelic hard rock, heavy blues, and the rural and proto-prog inclinations of the American underground: extended guitar and Hammond interplay, harmonized vocals, and a jamming looseness that never loses the song. The opening Earth Odyssey stretches past six minutes of churning organ and guitar, while See the Light and Try a Little More push the band's heavier instincts toward their limits.
What followed is one of the stranger endings in the annals of the era. The album earned the band local television and radio play and growing audiences, and a larger label came knocking with the offer of a second album and national distribution. Then, while performing out of town, Accardi underwent a sudden religious experience - one he described to his bandmates the next morning as supernatural - and walked away. The band dissolved, and Keep On Truckin' was left to stand alone: a single, self-contained document of a group that vanished at the very moment the door was opening.
Honest, heavy, and steeped in the unpolished energy that makes the American private press canon so enduring, this is a record that has long circulated more as rumor than as object. Its return to print is a welcome correction.
