Jim Sullivan – U.F.O (LP, Light In The Attic)

Vinyl LP pressing. Digitally remastered edition of this 1970 curiosity. Jim Sullivan was a West Coast should-have-been, an Irish-American former high school quarterback whose gift for storytelling earned him cult status in the Malibu bar where he performed nightly. Sullivan was always on the edge of fame; hanging out with movie stars like Harry Dean Stanton, performing on the Jose Feliciano Show, even stealing a cameo in the ultimate hippie movie, Easy Rider. U.F.O. was a different beast to the one-man-and-his-guitar stuff Jim had been doing on stage; instead, it was a fully realized album of scope and imagination, a Folk-Rock record with it’s head in the stratosphere. Sullivan’s voice is deep and expressive like Fred Neil with a weathered and worldly Americana sound like Joe South, pop songs that aren’t happy but filled with despair. The album is punctuated with a string section, other times a Wurlitzer piano provides the driving groove. U.F.O. is a slice of American Pop music filtered from the murky depths of Los Angeles, by way of the deep south.