Day 211: Sir Lord Baltimore – Sir Lord Baltimore
Today’s album is lesser-known 1970s proto-metal that was named after a character in Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid and chosen because it was during the British invasion and they wanted to sound vaguely English. Arise, Sir Lord Baltimore! and playeth thy songs from thy self-titled album.
Album cover courtesy of Mercury Records
Sir Lord Baltimore was formed in 1968 by drummer John Garner and guitarist Louis Dambra, who met when they went to the same high school, as told by John Garner:
I met him and I said: ‘I heard about you.’ And he said: ‘I heard about you, too.’ So I got in his car and I said: ‘Well, let’s play. Let’s do somethin’.’ So we started rehearsing in my basement, just jamming. And then I read an ad in the Village Voice that said: ‘Heavy band needed for recording.’ So we responded.
They were joined by another school pal, bassist Gary Justin, and they auditioned for Bruce Springsteen’s manager Mike Appel shortly after they started playing together. They only had four songs, but Appel wanted to record them immediately, so he produced and co-wrote their 1970 debut album Kingdom Come. It received mostly favourable reviews and it was described by Creem magazine with a term that hadn’t been used in print before: heavy metal.
Their self-titled second album features a slower stoner rock sound with a more traditional hard rock lilt to it that sort of sounds like something guys who look like Maarten van Nieuwenhove listen to it when they’re on the cans. It opens with “Man From Manhattan”, a 10-minute epic, and half of the album features a theme of a “conceptual depiction of how Christ would be treated if he came back to New York in 1971”. One of the band members actually became a priest later in life.
They do sound a little bit like Led Zeppelin at times, but is it really that bad to sound like the best band of all time? I say no, especially as I’m unlikely to hear any new Zeppelin but very likely to discover new things that sound kind of like Led Zeppelin, so you know what, I’ll take it. And it’s not a blatant Zep rip off, just more done in the style of. I can name one contemporary band that I’d classify as a Led Zeppelin rip off band, and I bet you know exactly which one I’m talking about – they’re a bit too far for me, this isn’t.
Sir Lord Baltimore are somehow not as well-known as their contemporaries, and it seems to be a classic case of rock band what-if, with John Garner saying that “If nobody took drugs and if Louie wasn’t such an egomaniac, we could’ve been rich. All we had to do was stick together.” Unfortunately, they didn’t manage that. Granted, the sound on Sir Lord Baltimore feels a little half-baked, but you can hear how much they had to offer. And despite never becoming as big as some of their peers, they did still impact musicians that came after them.
These guys were ahead of their time and had the chops to go further than they did, especially considering how young they were at the time, they were only 18 when they got signed. The album is an enjoyable 7/10, but it’s clear that they did have a better one in them. Shame they never got there.