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By the late ‘60s, radio-delivered psychedelia had
saturated even the heartland. A Lovely Sight,
Pisces’ only attempt at an LP, never made wax; but
the fuzz guitar phrases and tambourine shuffle of
“Dear One” instantly illustrate the band’s woozy
realm. Deeper inside, bass scales borrowed from
Sgt. Pepper give way to Who moves wrecked by
bad fidelity and harsh intrusions of found audio.
Jefferson Airplane’s swirled, lysergic Haight
Street utopia melds with the urban narcosis of
the Velvet Underground’s East Village. But Pisces
hailed from another ghost town altogether:
Rockford, Illinois, where rusted, endless plains
bear close resemblance to a bummer acid trip or
a junkie’s rock bottom. In 1969, the industrial
Midwest was hurting for the hard stuff, but what
it got was plenty of the White Album—enough
to have Jim Krein, Paul DiVenti, and Linda
Bruner recording through a glass onion all their
own. The unsettling balance of their unissued
LP combines homespun psychedelic vision and
secondhand studio trickery with naive readings of
the rock sound of the day, resulting in a diverse,
haunted rock headspace few coastal bands ever
flew through, let alone over.
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