(Psychedelic Rock / Psych-Folk Rock) Bermuda Triangle - Bermuda Triangle (1977) {Radioactive Records RRCD 143, UK} - 2006, APE (image+.cue) lossless

Editiorial Reviews:

Review
"Truly bizarre folk-psych album that's more enjoyable than a lot of 'better' records. Transcendental female vocals, elaborate keyboard arrangements, and autoharp which is often treated with phasing flanging and other effects. Fine originals. It's not often i discover something so original and bizarre." --Lysergia/ Acid Archives

Review
"The sound is totally lost in time and transports you back to the carefree days of the early seventies and is extremely trippy. You have to check out the wah wah autoharp, the wierd percussion and bass. A great listen. Almost predates the current folktronica scene. This wild album has to be heard and is quite superb from folk to reels to country all bathed in this misty autoharped glory." --Forced Exposure

Review
"If you like psych folk you've got to have this album." --Uncledog-Rock written in Japan

Product Description
"This one is something of a stunner. Recorded in 1977...we can only be but grateful for it in this case as the resultant album is a joy and any acid folk/rural roots fans should grab it with both hands." Paul Martin -Shindig! magazine

----

Customer Reviews:

5.0 out of 5 stars - Great find by Radioactive Records, November 27, 2007
By: collegemoney
This is absolutely one of the best resurrections from the reissue folks at Radioactive Records. Quality songs throughout; very electic selections. Covers of Moody Blues "Nights in White Satin" and Aerosmith's "Dream On" layered around original renderings. When is the last time you heard a band with an autoharp as a central instrument? Early Lovin' Spoonful? But, in terms of style here, think "It's a Beautiful Day," with the nice trade-off of vocals between male and female leads. Oh, surely, nothing here is quite as good as "White Bird" but then again IABD never quite did anything else that superb either. Good stuff!! (PS the following information is courtesy of my friend Vic Ferri: Bermuda Triangle was formed by Roger Penney and Wendy Penney, who previous to Bermuda Triangle, had the band Euphoria, who had a hit called "You Must Forget". Before Euphoria, they were known simply as Roger and Wendy. )

3.0 out of 5 stars - GOOD, February 2, 2010
By: Bill Your 'Free Form FM Handi Cyber Print DJ ... (Mahwah, NJ USA)
This is a pretty good male female folk dou who do some cover songs. The album maintains a soft and subtle tone--not bad soft music. But at times, such as when they cover "Wind" by Circus Maximus, they are a little too laid back. You lose some of the impact.

It started in 1966 in New York City with the guy across the hall, who
was missing 2 fingers, saying he earned money playing flamenco
guitar in a Greenwich Village coffeehouse. Roger and Wendy exchanged
glances. Could it be that easy to get paid for making music? They put
together some songs with 2 vocals and Roger's autoharp, and headed from
their 5th floor walk-up slum building, where the holes through the ancient
brick wall were big enough for snow to blow in, across town to the BASEMENT
coffeehouse on MacDougal St. in the village to audition. Hired after one song,
they played their first sets that night and every night thereafter til 4 A.M.,
7 nights a week, 365 days a year.
The coffeehouses were then called basket houses
since the only pay was what was collected in a straw
basket passed around at the end of each 20 minute set.
Steve Stills (Crosby,Stills & Nash),saying "I love you
guys music", dropped $20 in, which more than half
covered their $35 /month rent. Emmylou Harris
played with Rog and Wendy. David Bromberg
sometimes sat in the front row picking his guitar along to their singing.
Midway through that first year Wendy bought her first
bass guitar, a Hofner clone. "Then for the next two weeks I carried that bass,
in a huge cardboard box, way across town every single night before I got up
enough nerve to play it on stage."
They often played 2 different coffeehouses, or even 3, in one night,
running up and down Macdougal St. to make the next set on time. Twelve
20 minute sets at 3 clubs in one night was the record. The Freudian Slip.
Four Winds, the Basement, Fat Black Pussycat, Rienzi's, Cafe Wha?,
The Underground, Folk City, Bitter End, Kenny's Castaways, Speakeasy,
The Gaslight. Too many to remember.

Greenwich Village was booming. Every night Macdougal and Bleecker Sts.
were so jammed with people shoulder to shoulder that no cars could get through.
Live music pumped from every third doorway. Friends
hung out on stoops, fire escapes, leaned out windows.
The air was thick. The pavement vibrated.Since we all
lived in dark hovels, we didn't go over to each other's
apartments. Instead we met on the street. We knew if
we went to the Village that our friends would be there.
In summer we'd all sit outdoors on steps leading to
strangers' front doors and comment on the carnival of people crowding the street.
In winter we'd gather in one of the coffeehouses and talk music. It was glorious.

Yet it really started when Roger was 5 and sang "Don't Fence Me In" in a radio show
contest where he won first prize, followed by 8 years of piano lessons. Several preteen
summers were spent in his cousins' Anchor Cafe, a gritty honkytonk at a port on Lake Erie
filled with stevedores and merchant mariners. In the late hours of the night he
would fall asleep on the bench seats as the seamen danced with the local women
to the songs of Hank Williams and Hank Snow on the jukebox. While at an engineering
college he bought his first autoharp from the Sears-Roebuck catalog and began
experimenting with various electric pickups. After graduating with honors, he moved into
a folk music communal house in Cambridge, Massachusetts aptly named Old Joe Clark's
for the folk/dance tune, took postgraduate courses at Harvard and did theoretical research
for NASA. But the love of music insistently pulled him away from a scientific life. He once
again immersed himself in traditional music at picking roundtables at the Silver Vanity
folk club in Amherst, Massachusetts.

On the other hand, there was Wendy with one year of comic/tragic piano lessons
and 1 single cello lesson "at which I learned to hold the cello between my knees
but didn't get to play a single note". Granted a lifetime membership in the famous
Art Students League of New York, she was awarded 1st prize
for one of her paintings in a prestigious juried exhibition.
"I went to three colleges and ended up relocating from the
New York City area to Boston. Roger and I were both taking
philosophy classes at Harvard but didn't meet until I moved in
to Old Joe Clark's,where he was living. We were immediately
drawn to each other, hitchhiked and tented in North Africa and
Europe for 5 months (I use the word 'tent' loosely,it was actually
2 ponchos snapped together and leaked badly) then studied
mime and acting. In a Theatre Company of Boston
performance of Shakespeare Roger managed to chip
his own tooth and stab a fellow actor during a sword
fencing scene."

Since every actor seems to end up in NY or LA,
they moved to New York City where Roger was a
member of The Harlem Theatre Company and did
4 Off-Broadway plays, one of them with
James Earl Jones. It was then that they encountered the 3-fingered flamenco
player mentioned above, and they committed full-time to music.

R&W moved from coffeehouses to clubs after a year and a half, and eventually
played every single club in Greenwich Village, perhaps 40 or more.
In 1969 Roger and Wendy joined with Sharon Alexander and Tom Pacheco to form
the sunshine pop group EUPHORIA and released an album on the MGM/HERITAGE label
titled "EUPHORIA". The single "You Must Forget" hit the charts in Europe.
Wendy bought her 2nd bass guitar, a 1969 Hofner Special Limited Collectors'
Edition, 5000/1, natural blonde, with active electronics (a rarity in 1969). "Our record company
volunteered to pay for it, so naturally I chose the most expensive bass in New York City."
EUPHORIA played a concert with Van Morrison at Madison Square Garden's Felt Forum,
a few college dates, and were booked on the Johnny Carson Show but disbanded before appearing.
In the late 60's and 70's Roger and Wendy broke ground in what has come to be
called the Psych Folk genre. They were one of the very few American innovators to play
in this style as it was mainly a British movement. Characterized as having strong roots
in folk music, it has electric and often unconventional arrangements. The lyrics
are complex and symbolic, the instrumentation highly unusual.
Roger Penney is the first person and the only person ever to have created and played
electric psychedelic autoharp. He is also the inventor of much of the technology required.
"In the early 60's there were no pickups to amplify the autoharp other than a
contact mic which had a tinny sound. Eventually bar magnetic pickups made specifically
for autoharp were available and I bought two. I ran two channels, one from each
of the 2 pickups, either as a straight amplified channel and/or to effects units. Among the
effects units I used were two Gibson Maestro G2's (the same model that reputedly
Jimi Hendrix used on several recordings) which triggered wahwah, fuzz, tone, percussion
etc. My favorite unit in the 70's was the Eventide Clockworks phase shifter. Next was a
Lexicon Prime Time digital delay. Another effect came from five 25 cent transducers
that were surplus from a pinball machine. I mounted them on the autoharp and ran a line
into a Linndrum sound module which allowed me the option of playing percussion/drum
rhythms simultaneously with finger-picking the strings." He now uses multiple effects to
achieve the multidimensional quality. The passages that listeners mistake sometimes for
electric guitar are actually autoharp. In addition, women bass players were a rarity in the 60's.
Consequently, their group was far out there beyond the leading edge.
Roger had also redesigned the autoharp's chord structure to facilitate switching between
keys and donated the new layout to Oscar Schmidt. Now all major autoharp manufacturers
worldwide have switched to making autoharps using his design.
In 1970 the College Concert Circuit courted the band and arranged many very successful tours.
ROGER AND WENDY quickly became the top act, and released a folk album "Roger and Wendy"
in 1971. Changing the band's name in 1975 to BERMUDA TRIANGLE, they gave more than
3000 concerts. For part of that time they incorporated a second woman, Sam, as fiddler/drummer.
Several of the many artists they shared the stage with are Billy Joel, Van Morrison, Steppenwolf, Harry Chapin, Suzanne Vega, Sly and the Family Stone, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Carolyn Hester, David Bromberg, Michelle Shocked, and
Emmylou Harris.
The psych folk album "Bermuda Triangle" was released in 1977 and "Bermudas II" in 1984.
In 2006 their musical career surged upward with the unexpected reissue of their 1977 album
by a British record company and its being played on radio stations all over the world.
In 2007, Roger and Wendy officially reissued the 77 album "Bermuda Triangle" as a CD
with 6 additional bonus songs. The bonus songs date from 1969 to 1976 and were taped at
Rensselaer Polytechnical Institute, Folk City(NYC), Woodstock New York, and Bell Sound(NYC)
and most had never before been released.
The band also released in 2007 "The Missing Tapes" CD, a compilation of some of their
Psych Folk tracks from the 70's. Five of these cuts are reissues. The other eight were
part of the group's live performances but were never released on disc. A number of the songs
had been completely lost with no known existing copies until they were unearthed in a
longtime friend's collection in New York and in the archives of the radio station at R.P.I.
A 12 inch vinyl of the 1977 "Bermuda Triangle" album was reissued in 2008 by Anazitisi Records.
Anazitisi also released a vinyl LP of "The Missing Tapes" cd in 2009.
The 1971 album, "Love Rog And Wem", recorded when the group still called itself
ROGER AND WENDY, was reissued in the fall of 2009 as a 12" vinyl by Acme Records (UK).
In October of 2010, Lion Productions (Records) released a cd of the "Love Rog and Wem" album.

DISCOGRAPHY

EUPHORIA
"Euphoria" (1969) MGM/Heritage Records, vinyl LP
"Euphoria" (2007) Heritage/Beatball Records, reissue of 1969 LP
"You Must Forget" (1971) MGM/Heritage Records, single on 8 track tape
"Calm Down/What A Day (1973) Polydor Records, single

ROGER AND WENDY
"Roger and Wendy" (1971) Horny Records, vinyl LP
"Love Rog and Wem" (2009) Acme Records (UK) 12 inch vinyl
"Love Rog and Wem" (2010) Lion Productions (Records), cd

BERMUDA TRIANGLE
"Bermuda Triangle" (1977) Winter Solstice Records, vinyl LP
"Bermudas ll" (1984) Winter Solstice Records, vinyl LP
"Bermuda Triangle" (2006) unofficial reissue on Radioactive UK Records, cd
"Bermuda Triangle" (2007) official reissue on Winter Solstice Records, cd
"The Missing Tapes" (2007) Winter Solstice Records, cd
"Bermuda Triangle" (2008) Anazitisi Records 12 inch vinyl collectors' edition
"The Missing Tapes" (2009) Anazitisi Records 12 inch vinyl collectors' edition

BERMUDA TRIANGLE - the infamous BERMUDA TRIANGLE BAND, ROGER AND WENDY, legendary Psych Folk pioneers.