Blind Faith - Village Antiques - Non-Album Tracks (1969)

Today, it occurred to me that I've overlooked posting anything from Blind Faith, even though I've posted a lot of Eric Clapton's stuff from both before and after the band's short existence. So here's my attempt at giving the band a second album.

In case you don't know, Blind Faith was the first rock "supergroup," consisting of Clapton and Ginger Baker from Cream, Steve Winwood from Traffic, and Rick Grech from Family. They only existed for part of 1969, and put out one album, also called "Blind Faith."

There has been various extra material released over the years, including a deluxe three CD version of their album, plus a DVD of their first concert, in Hyde Park, London. The problem is that a lot of that material isn't very good. The deluxe edition is short on actual songs and heavy on long instrumental jams (all in the 15-minute range) that simply aren't that good. Plus, the Hyde Park concert sounds okay, but it isn't liked by the band members themselves, since they felt pressured to do it before they had practiced enough.

I also considered including an instrumental called "Change of Address." This was actually the first thing released by the band, as a single, though it wasn't for sale and only a small number were sent to radio stations. However, I decided it was pretty bad, just a simple chord change sequence repeated over and over with no soloing or meaningful variation. I decided it wasn't even worth including as a bonus track.

I decided to try to include as much songs with vocals as possible, and avoid all the long instrumental jams. I was helped by the fact that an earlier rerelease of the "Blind Faith" album contained two bonus tracks that were left off the deluxe edition: "Exchange and Mart" and "Spending All My Days." Both of these were meant for a Rick Grech solo album that never materialized, and Grech is the lead singer on "Spending All My Days." (The other song is an instrumental.) But it was basically Blind Faith playing on the two songs, plus a few extra people, including George Harrison assisting Clapton on guitar.

I found other songs here and there. For instance, the band had a limited concert set list that was almost entirely made of the songs from their lone album, but they did play a few extra songs. One was the Rolling Stones' hit "Under My Thumb," so I've included an excellent sounding version of that from a Steve Windwood box set.

They also played some Cream and Traffic songs to pad out their concerts. They did occasionally play Traffic's "40,000 Headmen" and Cream's "Sunshine of Your Love," but the only versions of those I found sounded extremely poor, not even good enough to be bonus tracks.

However, I did find better versions of Traffic's "Means to an End" and Cream's "Crossroads" from a Santa Barbara concert. (They didn't play either of those at the Hyde Park concert.) While the sound on those isn't great, I think they hold up with the rest of the album. It's especially interesting to hear Blind Faith perform "Crossroads," because Clapton sang it with Cream and all through his long solo career, but Winwood sings it here.

I've included two versions of their cover of the blues song "Sleeping in the Ground" because they did it two different ways. There's a fast version that's less than three minutes long, and a slow version that's nearly five minutes long. But since it's the same song, I put one version at the very front of the album and the other at the very end, to make listening to both of them less repetitious. I've also included an electric version of the band's best known song, "Can't Find My Way Home," because that's drastically different from the acoustic version that made their album.

Oh, I did include one long instrumental, but ironically it wasn't included on the deluxe edition of the album. I'm referring to the blues standard "Key to the Highway." Clapton would do a version with vocals for his acclaimed Derek and the Dominos album a year later. This version has no vocals, but in my opinion it has much more spirited soloing than any of the long jams that were included on the deluxe edition.

Add it all up, and this comes to 46 minutes of music, with only three instrumentals. I think this makes for a solid second album.

01 Sleeping in the Ground (Blind Faith)
02 Exchange and Mart [Instrumental] (Blind Faith)
03 Can't Find My Way Home [Electric Version] (Blind Faith)
04 Spending All My Days (Blind Faith)
05 Time Winds [Instrumental] (Blind Faith)
06 Under My Thumb (Blind Faith)
07 Crossroads (Blind Faith)
08 Means to an End (Blind Faith)
09 Key to the Highway [Instrumental] (Blind Faith)
10 Sleeping in the Ground [Slow Blues Version] (Blind Faith)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15902124/BlindF_1969_VillagAntiques_atse.zip.html

Normally, when it comes to naming albums, I try to chose the names of one of the songs, rather than come up with a name from scratch. However, with this album, I didn't think any of the song titles worked well as album titles. Then, with that still unresolved, I came across a great photo of the band. It was taken in front of a local store called "Village Antiques" near their recording studio, in July 1969, and was obviously considered for their album cover. So I decided to use "Village Antiques" as the album title. All I did to the cover was remove a little bit of text from the store's sign and replace that with the band name.

It seems the sort of quirky thing a band like this one would have done at the time. In case you doubt that, consider how much hassle and trouble the band had for their official album cover, which showed a topless 11 year old girl holding what some considered to be a phallic object. Many stores refused to stock the album, forcing the record company to make an alternate cover. As if that wasn't enough, the neither the band name nor the album name was put on the cover. So yeah, it was a time of quirky album covers. ;)