Back in July of 2009 I wrote, “This is it. This is the holy grail. I’ve made it my business to seek out someone with a copy of this album to provide me with a recording I can share with you all. I know two or three off the top of my head, but this thing is…it’s pretty scarce, to say the least. The first copy I’ve ever heard about auctioned to the public sold for over a thousand dollars, and that was without a cover. What makes it so cool? Los Angeles native Jerry Solomon, a “real person extraordinaire, creates an LP that is from a time and dimension not yet determined. Jerry’s songs are the modern psycho-acidic equivalent of the madrigals of Don Carlo Geualdo, music’s first outsider. With his highly chromatic melodies and overdubbed harmonies, Jerry sounds like a late ’50s vocals group from the Twilight Zone. His self-accompaniment consists of a repetitive one-chord (maybe two) guitar strum that predates Jandek and a toy piano that is ‘strummed’ and sounds like a lysergic zither from the Third Man soundtrack. The songs range from nostalgia for the earlier years of his life to total despair. He sings about not fitting in the modern age, life in the ’50s, his first date. A song about the drudgery of work and longing for green meadows with peace and solitude is an atonal dirge that is anything but peaceful. The starkest song, complete with distorted vocals, sings of being denied of all human life in the name of morality, though he never says whose morality it is. Those close to Jerry have compared his lifestyle to that of a westcoast Cosmo Kramer.”
This morning a kind soul who just started a blog called Imaginary Landscape e-mailed me to say, “Hey, I’ve got Past The 20th Century if you want it.” I didn’t believe him until I checked his website and saw that he had just posted the album a few minutes earlier. So, here it is, for your enjoyment, one of the most sought after private press albums in the history of recorded music, and one of the holy grails of “real people” albums. This is exciting…
Jerry Solomon
Past The 20th Century
MegaUpload DL Link
Tracklist:
01. I Just Don’t Fit This Modern Age
02. Chivalry Of Early ’50s
03. You Work Every Day
04. Come With Me My Angel
05. Denied (All Of Human Life)
06. Good Old Fashioned Date
07. They Came From Everywhere
08. Past The 20th Century
