What I am listening to- Jim Sullivan- "UFO"

I still get a great deal of my music information from magazines. There are a few British stalwarts who remain after many comings and goings. Uncut (once an obsession of mine) is still a favorite. It is where I first heard and got hooked on Jim Sullivan. Sullivan should have been a success, but didn’t reach those 70s audiences. His life a seemingly Forest Gump style chain of events (making an album backed by the Wrecking Crew, appearing in Easy Rider, being friends with Hollywood stars like Lee Marvin, recording for Hugh Hefner’s Playboy record label). If one was being crass (and writers often are) you could say his life was a film plot. Singer/songwriter writes an unheralded but amazing album about a UFO. A few years later, disappears in the New Mexico desert without a trace. (Abducted by that UFO?) In any case, Sullivan like many artists is finally getting his due via Light in the Attic records, a label known for finding and re-releasing these great lost discs. As for me, I love this record. In fact over the last couple of years, my favorite records are this triumvirate of great ‘lost’ discs ( Jim Sullivan’s UFO, Rodriguez’s Cold Fact and Donnie and Joe Emerson’s Dreamin’ Wild) all released by LitA. This may be as much to do with me as the current musical environment. I don’t know the best comparison to Sullivan. To me, he belongs on that list of 70s singer-songwriters (with plenty of gloom and doom already) -Buckley, Drake, Nilsson, Hardin, Hazlewood, Jansch and so many more. I don’t find it hard to believe he could have been a Van Morrison or a Donovan if his record had been received that well at the time. Maybe in an alternate Universe, this is their Astral Weeks. It’s not just that the title track is magical (it is), so is the rest of the album from the opener Jerome to songs like Highways and Sandman, which further the imagery of the missing artist’s tale. I’m not sure there’s a bad song in the ten on the record. (For me, “Johnny” is the weakest link as it does feel like it was recorded in a studio in 1969, in a way that the rest seem to defy categorization).