The ASYLUM CHOIR

I remember about two months ago, before the magic of “Blackbird” and “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” had entered my mind, I was listening to the Nighttripper show on WABX and I heard the new Beatles album.

I yelled to my wife “Here’s the new Beatles’ album!” She screamed joy to me, but I couldn’t hear her. We sat silently, holding hands and drenched in the chills that people always get the first time they hear something the magnitude of a new Beatles album.

The gravel-soft voice of Dave Dixon followed the cut and said “That was ‘Thieves in the Choir’ by the Asylum Choir.”

I sat shattered, feeling cheated and hating the Asylum Choir, whoever they were. Now .it just sounded to me like another Beatle-imitating group.

A week later I heard the Asylum Choir again. I knew by now that there were two of them, that they played almost every instrument on the LP, that they were Leon Russell and Marc Benno, that they lived in Hollywood, where, in the basement of Leon’s home they had cut the LP, and that they only sounded like the Beatles sometimes.