(Almost A) One Album Wonder: Summer's Almost Gone, As Blissfully Told By Al Manfredi

Al Manfredi is one of those glorious also-ran's and never-was's of the music industry, writing and recoring usic almost all of his life, yet never coming close to a career in music or hell, even to get his work published correctly. I initially stumbled onto Al Manfredi and the song "Blue Gold" while hunting little-known songs of the 1970s for the All Pearls, No Swine series, for which "Blue Gold" with its main stream soft rock sheen seemed almost too soft and fuzzy. Still, the song showed up on volume 14 of the series, though it still took me a bit of time to check out more of Al Manfredi. Well, what little more there is. As indicated by the title, Manfredi never managed to even issue a full-length album, the closest he came was to gather a couple of his strongest compositions and privately finance and press a hundred copies of a self-titled six-song EP, not necessarily to sell, but to send to record company people and DJs as a marketing tool. This included the fabulous "Of The Sea" as its opening track, "I Don't Live Today", "Five, Six", the aforementioned "Blue Gold" as side two opener, "Foggy Night" and "Empty Of Your Possession"

Hailing from San Clemente, Manfredi had, as a teenager, started garage band The Nuts & Bolts, shortly after renamed The Lost & Found (who, incidentally are not the same as a Houston-based garage rock band of the same name), who then recorded a one-off single during a one-year stay in Phoenix in late 1966 and early 1967. Back in San Clemente, The Lost & Found started to get...lost. Manfredi's closest band mate Mike Ingram was found hanged under suspicious circumstances, aged 17. Manfredi took a couple of months-long sabbatical in New York to chnage his ideas, then upon returning to California started a new band with old Lost & Found drummer Mike Ryer, only to have Ryer succumb to cancer at only 19 years old. Manfredi quit the band scene altogether and began running the family's music store in Garden Grove, future birthplace of The Offspring. 

But Manfredi kept writing and recording, until he had that EP, or mini-album, ready in 1973. Manfredi's mini-album has the same feel as Brian Wilson's melancholic assertions that summer and its fun, fun, fun can't last forever. It didn't have a real album cover, just a blank white sleeve with a tiny sticker with name and a picture of the artist. The archival release from 2019 added a title, Blue Gold, and a wonderful image of Manfredi with his young son in his arms, standing by the ocean. It was never planned as an album cover shot, but is just wonderful and captures the feeling of the recording incredibly well. 

To try to fill up the original six-track line-up to a full album-length endeavor I used some other songs and demos he recorded (probably, obviously there are no real recording dates or such listed) around the same time, but as the demos especially were kind of rambling, I edited both "Never With You" and "Let It Alone" for better flow and listenability, and better fit amongst its more polished brethren. Now, Blue Gold is still pretty short for an album, clocking in at nine tracks and a little more than thirty minutes, more or less barely getting to the industry standard of fifteen minutes of music per side. But, more importantly, it feels like a real album now. Then again, especially in country music (and in pop music, if you were the Beach Boys) groups and artists would still regularly bring in albums at less than 30 minutes. 

Manfredi's dreams of making it in the music business might have flown away on the ocen breeze, but the man always stuck with music, writing and occasionally homerecording, while the failure to make it as a music man unfortunately might have contributed to Manfredi's uneasy relationship with alcohol, which in turn probably contributed to his relatively early death in 1995. Al's son Alex Manfredi  - the very kid on the cover - grew up to be hip hop producer Exile. 

Blue Gold has touches of AOR (as on "Blue Gold"), as well as slight touches of psychedelia. Acoustic guitars dominate the recording. It's a wonderful, sunburned, blissed-out little record, sounding as unfinished as Manfredi's music career turned out to be, but also fresh and engaging. There might not have been much of Al Manfredi's music that made it out of his mind or his tape recorders, but what little did come out, is worth of rediscovery. So start (re)discovering now...