La Luz sound as if they should come from somewhere by the sea in sunny SoCal but actually come from rainy Seattle… though they did once record an album in a California surfboard shop, and now live there.

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Looking at a list of the Lovin’ Spoonful’s string of hits in the mid-1960s, I find I only know one of them… this summertime classic.

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Summer songs don’t get much more summery than this trippy number by Jonathan Wilson, leader of the latterday Laurel Canyon revival.

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Dawes move into new territory with their eighth album, a decade after I discovered them on a sweltering summer night in London. (more…)

Here’s a lost masterpiece blending jazz, funk, blues and soul – and psychedelia – by The Loading Zone, a long-forgotten late-1960s band from San Francisco. (more…)

Another lost classic from the funk vaults, The Watts Breakaway is just one of many musical achievements of Johnny Otis. The singer is Delmar ‘Mighty Mouth’ Evans and the guitarist may well by Johnny’s equally well-known son Shuggie Otis. (more…)

The Paul Butterfield Blues Band created the template for Acid Rock with the sprawling title track of their second album East West in 1966. (more…)

Joni Mitchell’s extraordinary gift for images and phrases first caught my ear, as much as her voice, with the jazz-textured 1975 album The Hissing Of Summer Lawns. (more…)