Rodd Keith and his music were a product of the depraved and druggy Hollywood music scene of the late 60's and early 70's. A classically trained session musician, he largely made his living by writing and recording what the music industry referred to as song poems. He and others like him would take out ads in the back of trade journals and other publications that offered up, for a fee, the ability to craft a song to go with "your poem." The recordings would then be pressed to a 45 in a small edition and be sent to radio stations that by and large ignored them. In the wake of Dylan's pushing of pop music towards literacy this somewhat hubris-driven cottage industry took off. The result may not have been a huge financial reward for people like Rodd, but it did leave an enormous volume of strange work for the rest of us, of which this LP documents a small sliver. A P.C.P. induced fall from an L.A. overpass killed him in December, 1974, and since then cultish record collectors have scoured the planet for his recordings. The intrepid James Lindbloom, of Roaratorio Records is one such person.
