I don't really consider Millbrae, a town just down the Peninsula from my hometown, to be a hotbed of much of anything except inflated home prices, but apparently back in the 1960's it gave us the Vejtables, a fringe group in the prominent San Francisco music scene.
This collection, essentially the only readily available output by the group, demonstrates a remarkable transformation over just a few years. The early stuff with drummer/singer Jan Errico is fun and catchy, sort of a mish-mash of the Beatles and the folkier side of Jefferson Airplane. If anything of theirs was going to be a big hit, it should have been "I Still Love You", but two slightly-different releases couldn't make a dent in the market. After around the sixth track, Errico is gone (off to the increasingly inaccurately named Mojo Men) and the band turned into a more standard garage/psych outfit. (Meanwhile, the Mojo "Men" turned substantially lighter in tone.) The new Vejtables sported a devil-may-care attitude, dabbling in heavy psych and other assorted whimsy like "I Stole the Goodyear Blimp". By the time the last track, an extended instrumental version of "Hide Yourself", it is hard to imagine this is even the same band.
Needless to say, the band never broke big and broke up in 1966, barely a two-year-old phenomenon. Thankfully Sundazed pieced together the puzzle of releases and put out this compilation. A co-worker of mine was nice enough to make a copy for me to enjoy.
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