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THE KATHMANDU SESSIONS by DANNY BEN-ISRAEL
Cat #: Merry001; Format: CD
 

  
  About the artist  
 

A year after the famous Woodstock Festival, the Europeans, across the Atlantic, had their own event - the Isle of Wight Festival. The time was August, 1970, and in front of Jethro Tull, The Who, Leonard Cohen, The Doors and Miles Davis, sat thousands of Flower Children. Among those young people was one, who sitting with a flock of brown curls and a joint, didn't look very different from any of the others. It’s just that he was different. Very much so. Aside from the fact that he was one of the only Israelis in the festival, for Danny Ben-Israel this was the end of a process that began with a successful career in an IDF band (Israeli Defense Force), blossomed into a position in Israeli culture as a local pop idol and ended with a shut door from the Israeli establishment.

In 1968, Ben-Israel returned to Israel from an eye-opening European trip where he discovered the world of communes, hippies and sex and decided to apply what he picked up in Europe to his music. Ben-Israel recorded "Bullshit 3 ¼", the first Psychedelic protest album in Hebrew. At the same sessions he recorded six English tracks now known as "The Lost Kathmandu Sessions".
 

  
  About the album  
 
Due to the insane character of the recordings, Ben-Israel doesn't remember much of the sessions. Details such as dates and the identity of the musicians involved are foggy at best. "We heard rumors, that in Katmandu, they sold Hashish in stores and on the street", Ben-Israel recalls. "So we sat in Tel-Aviv and dreamt of flying to Katmandu, and that was the inspiration for the recordings on this disc. The songs were recorded in one take and later the technician, Craig, and I mixed them. The people who played were Gordon or Sheldon on the bass; on guitar we had this kid who played really fast, the drummer was this British guy; and Craig played keyboard. Something like 20 people participated in the track "Bad Trip". Half of Casit (famous Tel-Aviv Coffee shop) used to come by and smoke bongs in the studio, and that day we had a really bad trip".

After the "Bullshit" album was banned in the local media for it's honesty and political dissent, Ben-Israel packed the "Kathmandu Sessions" and decided to take it to the United States in an attempt to interest American record labels. On his way to the States, Ben-Israel went to see the Isle of Wight Festival, which was sealed with a performance by Jimi Hendrix - two and a half weeks before his death. For Ben-Israel, as for many others, this festival symbolized the end of the Flower Era. The seventies arrived, the era's heroes were six feet under and the "make love not war" slogans were replaced by Yuppie ideology.

The end of the era gave Ben-Israel the inspiration to write the last song on this album "The Hippies of Today are the Assholes of Tomorrow". A month before finally going to America, Ben-Israel traveled to his parents' house in Vienna and recorded the track in a home studio. Once in the States, a small label offered him a contract but the label went bankrupt a short time before the release was due out. Ben-Israel forgot about the sessions and explored different paths. These seven tracks are released for the first time, 33 years after their original recording, and give a pristine opportunity to examine the height of creation by an original artist way ahead of his time.


 


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Track list

   
 
1.  INTRODUCTION
2.  KATMANDU (mp3)
3.  BAD TRIP
4.  DO YOU BELIEVE IN FAIRYTALES? (mp3)
5.  SEAGULLS
6.  CAN'T STAND YOU (mp3)
7.  THE HIPPIES OF TODAY ARE THE ASSHOLES OF TOMORROW      (mp3)

Price (including shipment): 14 USD