Background
In 1968, the band received a cease & desist letter from the Binney & Smith company, the manufacturers of Crayola crayons; in compliance, they changed their name from "Red Crayola" to "Red Krayola". This left them with two different names for all their commercially released 1960s studio albums. Mayo Thompson said, "When we signed with International Artists, we scared them to death, 'cause we said 'We want to change our name on every record!' And they were like, 'Oh, no.'"
After Red Krayola's performance at the Berkeley Folk Festival the band recorded tapes with folk guitarist John Fahey, which record label International Artists demanded they have given to them. Mayo Thompson later felt at "loose ends" and decided to go on a trip to Los Angeles, where he worked with Joseph Byrd of The United States of America as well as running into Nico, who had just left the Velvet Underground looking for musicians for her next solo album, Thompson did not work with her as he said "she was not interested in what I was doing". [7] [8] At this time, Frederick Barthelme left the band to pursue writing and conceptual art in New York City (working for a brief period at the Kornblee Gallery) and was replaced by Tommy Smith. [2] [7]
Recording and production
In an interview, Mayo Thompson said, "A lot of it was written on the fly, on the feet". [9]
Thompson said his label wanted another album due to the success of their debut, "but they wanted to know what the songs were, and I didn't want to tell them everything. So I played some tunes for them. Went in and made a demo". The album was recorded in one month, mostly on four-track. The group was left to their own devices; there was no use of artificial reverb on the record until the very last track, "Night Song". [9] [10] [11]
"Say Hello to Jamie Jones" and "Green of My Pants" were the first two songs they recorded, and they were both done in a single take. On the 17th, Mayo and Steve came back for an overdubbing session, and on the 18th, they cut "Leejol", "Victory Garden", "Music" and "Free Piece". Between the 20th and the 23rd, the album's remaining tracks were recorded, and by the end of the month, they had been edited and mixed. The album was finished on the 9th of March and submitted to Columbia Studios in Hollywood on the 25th for mastering on vinyl after Mayo returned to the studio to record more material during the first week of March. [10]
On producing the record, Mayo Thompson remarked, "I’m credited on God Bless The Red Krayola and All Who Sail With It [1968]. I played a role and so did Steve but we weren't the producers. It was Jim Duff". [12]
Thompson claimed that the band "eschewed all technical embellishment" for recording. [9] [10] [11]
Reception
The album failed to live up to the commercial success of The Parable of Arable Land : it sold only around 6,000 copies and was dismissed by most critics. [13] The Chicago Seed reviewed it on July 7, 1968. They compared the record to their debut and disliked the change in direction:
Unfortunately, the Crayola has fallen prey to the same exhaustion that seems to have hit so many other interesting groups. The handball noises in "The Shirt" are poor compensation for the absence of the Familiar Ugly. [14]
The band fell out with International Artists, and as demands grew for Tommy Smith elsewhere, they could not play the songs live as intended. As a result, they disbanded. Steve Cunningham moved to Vienna in 1969 to study linguistics whilst Thompson moved on to other endeavors. [15] [2] Thompson formed a new incarnation of Red Krayola in the late 1970s. [16]
Mark Deming of AllMusic wrote, "God Bless the Red Krayola and All Who Sail With It bears precious little resemblance to anything else that appeared at the time; it would take a few decades of post-punk experimentalism before Mayo Thompson's vision would have a truly suitable context". [17] Additionally, Deming would assess the opening track as "sounding like a post-punk experiment from late-'70s London". [18]
The Spin Alternative Record Guide called the album "superb", describing it as "small songs full of quiet terror and acoustic confusion". [12] Dave Marsh wrote in the 1983 Rolling Stone record guide "As a psychedelic novelty (from Texas yet), the Crayola was a late-Sixties amusement – the only band in the world ever to record a motorcycle live in the studio. That was on the inaugural disc, Parable . With God Bless, the joke had already worn thin, but after Radar reissued the first two albums in England, a band of arty post-punk minimalists attempted to carry the tradition onward, with particularly insipid results". [19]
Pitchfork's Alex Lindhart wrote, "For all the laudations heaped upon the Krayola by the punk and post-punk crowds, it might as well be bootleg Einstürzende Neubauten at its grimiest atonality and infuritating double integral time signatures". [2] Lindhart added "the Krayola's legacy is surely bolstered by their location in rock history – simply put, this was likely the most experimental band of the 1960s". [2]
Texas Monthly wrote, "With no song topping 3 minutes. A generation on, [the] album would be a blueprint for punk rock". [23]
Galaxie 500 later covered "Victory Garden" on a 1990 single. [24]
As part of the 2011 CD reissue booklet Sonic Boom of Spacemen 3 (who remastered the album as well as their debut at New Atlantis studios) said: "Nearly every track, recorded in '68, seems to presage the whole of independent music from '75 thru to, well, now!" also comparing portions of the tracklist to artists such as Syd Barrett, Richard Hell, Tortoise, Animal Collective and the Monochrome Set. Additionally, he noted that Thompson, "somehow forecast his work with Pere Ubu". [10] [11]
Joseph Byrd [25] of the United States of America called "Listen to This" his favorite song on the album, he recalled attending Red Krayola rehearsals before forming his own group. [26]
Notable fans of the album include Manos Hatzidakis [27] and Andrew VanWyngarden of MGMT. [28]
God Bless the Red Krayola and All Who Sail With It was placed number 185 on Uncut magazine's "the 500 Greatest Albums of the 1960s" list. [29]
Keith Connolly of Bomb magazine remarked that God Bless sounded like it was predicting bands such as the Minutemen, Unrest, Bastro and Gastr Del Sol. [12]
