TRACK: Bill Stone – ‘Purple’: lost psych-folk nugget gets a reissue


A rare live shot of Bill Stone

YOU MAY think we’ve been there, got the T-shirt, seen it all where it comes to long-lost psych singer-songwriters of the Sixties and Seventies.

Yep, we’ve adored and come to revise the place of history for artists like Bill Fay, Vashti, Gary Higgins; Linda Perhacs. They’re embraced, lauded, careers rejuvenated. We’ve mined it dry; we love it, but we have the measure of it.

…. not so fast. Drag City, in partnership with Galactic Zoo Disks, have been digging really deep, and in March they’re gonna reissue the sole album from Maine singer-songwriter Bill Stone.

Who he? You enquire. Well, Bill started out playing in folk ensembles alongside the occasional solo gig, which led to the 1969 recording of Stone on a 2-track Panasonic tape recorder in a pottery studio in Boothbay, Maine.

It was a private press issue, and lucky you should be thanking the good folks of Drag City, since the original has been commanding around the $350 mark on Discogs of late.

Have a listen to the teaser track Drag City have revealed below, “Purple”; it’s a little raw, sure, but intimately so; and doesn’t it have that dusk mood of Tom Rapp and Pearls Before Swine? Sure does.

Bill Stone’s Stone will be reissued by Drag City/ Galactic Zoo Disks on mp3, FLAC and vinyl on February 12th; pre-orders are now open for business at Drag City and Bill’s Bandcamp.

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