Edwards Hand - Stranded

Here I have Stranded, the second album by Edwards Hand, released in 1970. I never knew this existed. For decades I had been curious about the duo of Rod Edwards and Roger Hand. I first saw their names listed in the credits for Larry Norman's Only Visiting This Planet, and his follow up So Long Ago the Garden. Those two albums were recorded in England and produced by Edwards Hand along with Jon Miller. To say those two albums by Larry Norman were foundational to me is an understatement. I'd again see the same team mentioned again on a pair of albums by Malcolm & Alwyn: 1973's Fool's Wisdom and their 1974 follow up Wildwall. I discovered The two Malcolm & Alwyn albums in the early '80s and while both are very good, I was especially drawn to their first album.

This is a rather long preamble, but through these early albums I became aware a number of rather stellar musicians. John Wetton would of course go on to be a member of King Crimson, and later Asia, while others I wouldn't really see again outside of these albums, but their contributions were awesome nonetheless.

It was a few months ago when for my birthday we went out for brunch and then the kids took me to a record store. I have a list of things I'm on the lookout for, but I stumbled on a sealed copy of Edwards Hand's 1970 album Stranded. It was a little pricey, which to me is anything over a dollar, so it's all relative. It really wasn't that much, and I was pretty stoked to finally hear something by the duo.

The cover reminded me a lot of David Baerwald's 1993 album Triage. Apparently the original UK cover for Stranded was created by Klaus Voorman, who had done a pen sketch of a beer bellied police officer with his arms crossed. This was a reference to the track "Sheriff Myras Lincoln" and apparently wasn't suitable for North American distribution. It's a cool cover, but this is the one I have.

It's always interesting to me when people looking in from outside feel the need to write social commentary based on third hand accounts. These are English guys firing shots across the water about things that were at arms length. One can always argue that what happens in the US impacts everyone. We're all in the same bathtub so to speak. When someone is splashing about and making waves we all get wet. The first side is subtitled "Suite US" I suspect the guys were making observations based on what they were seeing and reading in popular culture as it reverberated through their own lives. More on that in a bit, I'm getting ahead of myself.

Edwards Hand as a recording act recorded three albums between 1969 and 1971. All of their albums were produced by George Martin, which should have counted for something. Oddly their third album was rejected by their label RCA and didn't see the light of day until 2015. Which must have stung.

Musically, this is a really strong album, and one very much steeped in the time it was made. Stranded is a really ambitious album, and one that's really devoid of a typical single. The lyrics are often as subtle as a brick to the side of the head. The album opens with a long diatribe against intolerance and railing against the established status quo.

"I have longed for the confidence of ignorance"

As I started to write earlier, the songs on the first side are braided thematically into what is dubbed "Suite US" and runs the gamut from dealing with racial inequality, the student uprisings, the cultural revolution and fear of being sent off to war. The standout is "Sheriff Myras Lincoln," a really dark song about a sheriff who essentially kept black people down and killed a stranger who had come to town that was giving the oppressed hope. It's a rather jarring song, and the opening language would be hard to get away with today, unless you're a black rapper. It was meant to be shocking ... it was then, and it is now.

While this is an album of pop sounding songs, it's not a collection of simple songs. The guys have interwoven a complex musical tapestry. It may not be to everyone's liking, and I'll be honest this is an album I've been listening to off and on for a few months. The first couple of times through I enjoyed it, more as a curiosity, but I kept coming back to it. Neither Roger nor Rod are particularly good singers. Their voices are a little thin and often on the weak side. However, most of the songs are sung in unison as a duo and there is a sweetness to their combined voices that really works.

Side Two is equally ambitious. The second side opens with "Stranded" and segues into "Winter" a short coda that to me felt like a call-and-response to The 5th Dimension's "Aquarius/Let the Sunshine" from 1969. Musically the songs are night and day, but every time I heard the song it kept tugging at me and when I paired them together it seemed to click. Of course I could be completely and unequivocally full of shit. The rest of the second side is taken up with "Death of a Man" an opus in five parts that runs over 12 minutes and gets better each time I hear it.

Here I am decades after Stranded came out hearing how much of their influence was brought to those early Larry Norman albums, and Malcolm & Alwyn's debut in particular. The music here is very much tied to the late '60s and what would echo through the first few years of the '70s. The production and George Martin's orchestral arrangements in particular really augment this ambitious collection of songs. I hesitate to call this a lost classic, but it does feel like an important album that deserved to be heard ... and wasn't.

I was going to work in a silly stranded reference to wrap this up, but it felt cheap. So I didn't but I still felt the need to tell you that I was going to but didn't as if that somehow makes it all better.