One of the strangest and most ambitious artifacts of American psychedelia. Originally issued by Monitor in 1967, Peak Impressions is the lone album by The Freeborne, a band of Boston teenagers - their ages ranged from seventeen to nineteen, three of them still in high school - who produced a record so overloaded with ideas that it has confounded easy classification ever since. Long a target of bootleggers, counterfeited repeatedly across the decades, it stands among the great cult objects of the era.
The circumstances of its making are nearly as unusual as the music. The Freeborne were the only rock band ever signed to Monitor, a New York label otherwise devoted to folk and ethnographic recordings, whose catalogue would eventually pass into the care of Smithsonian Folkways. Part of the album was cut at ESP's New York studio - home turf of the radical avant-garde jazz of Pharoah Sanders, where, by the band's own recollection, The Fugs had just wrapped a session when they arrived - the remainder at CBS Studios with a producer who had previously worked with Moby Grape. Lumped in with the much maligned Bosstown Sound, the band shared stages with The Velvet Underground at the Boston Tea Party and with Tim Hardin and Canned Heat at the Psychedelic Supermarket, before sinking with barely a trace. Only guitarist Bob Margolin found a wider audience, spending most of the 1970s in Muddy Waters' band.
What sets Peak Impressions apart from the legions of one-shot psych LPs is the sheer compositional restlessness at its core. Three of the five members were multi-instrumentalists working with orchestral hardware - piano, harpsichord, cello, trumpet, flute, recorder - and nearly every track moves through disorienting sequences of keys, meters, and instrumentation that push its psychedelic frame toward something closer to proto-prog. Images opens with soulful piano and harmonies before pivoting into a baroque waltz for piano and trumpet. Land of Diana begins in a jazz 5/4 and dissolves into a blues shuffle. Visions of My Own sets acoustic guitar against a swarm of recorders, then mutates without warning into a military snare march, while Sadly Acknowledged is framed by bursts of combat machine-gun fire. The closing But I Must Return to Frenzy stretches toward nine minutes of mock-classical piano and trumpet cadenzas. These were kids absorbing Miles Davis alongside The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, and refusing to leave anything out.
It sold poorly - by the label's own admission, the worst seller in Monitor's history - and the band dissolved soon after. Time has rendered a different verdict. Peak Impressions now reads as one of the most genuinely experimental records to emerge from American rock's psychedelic moment: too young, too eager, and too overflowing with invention to fit the categories of its day, or ours.
