Saint StevenOver The Hills/The Bastich | Eclectic Discs  October 10,
2006 12:42:34 PM
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One of Boston’s more notorious late-’60s artifacts, this is the psychedelic album that a 19-year-old Steve Cataldo recorded a few years before forming the Nervous Eaters, and it’s making its CD debut on a prog-specialist UK label. Legend holds the disc to be some of the most whacked-out hippiedom this side of Ultimate Spinach, and it doesn’t disappoint: with its playground melodies, Tolkien-esque lyrics, and gratuitous sound effects, it’s a cautionary tale of what happens when a budding songwriter gets hold of a recording budget and too much acid. (The CD adds a pair of folk-rock demos from 1966 that sound less dated than the ’69 album.) Each half is structured as a suite, with an unlikely mix of fairy-tale and political-protest elements. But toward the end of each side, the tripper trails off and his craftsman’s instincts make themselves known. Despite its absurd lyric, “Aye-Aye-Poe-Day” is a solid Hendrix-style rocker, and “Louisiana Home” resembles the acoustic tunes that the Allman Brothers would record years later. To judge by the evidence here, Cataldo might have turned into an eclectic Todd Rundgren type once he got the psychedelia out of his system. Of course, the mind boggles at the thought that he went from this to “Shit for Brains” and “Just Head.”
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