The title of this 1973 release is certainly appropriate seeing as how many of its songs move in the direction of outer space where oxygen tends to be in short supply, and the band’s name seems borrowed from some B-flick about an intrepid spaceship commander doing battle with evil Gerkazoids somewhere in the environs of planet Krasznahorki, and what’s more the LP’s song titles continue the theme, and it would all be swell and futuristic if it weren’t for the fact that Sufficiently Breathless is, when all is said and orbiting Uranus, a second-rate NASA reject made up of scraps of musical styles salvaged from other, more aerodynamically sound bands.
Los Angeles’ Captain Beyond were one of those bands that got labeled a supergroup, and I suppose you can call them that if you squint long enough. Me, I wouldn’t call a band composed of former Deep Purple vocalist Rod Evans, a guitarist and bassist from Iron Butterfly, and a guy who used to pound the skins for Johnny Winter a supergroup. But hey, if the label helped them move so much as a single unit, god bless them.
If Sufficiently Breathless doesn’t leave you breathless period it’s because while the band plays an eclectic mix of acoustic and space rock, progressive rock and jazz fusion, originality, for the most part, isn’t their forte. They’re like that alien shape-shifter in a horror movie–you know, the one that’s Bob Dylan one moment then Bobby Flay the next, then Bob Hope the minute after that, then Bobby the Spazz down the street with the three left feet some thirty seconds later, but doesn’t have its own body it can call home. Except in Captain Beyond’s case they go from Santana to Yes to Pink Floyd. And they’re not very adept at getting away with their thievery—they’re always getting caught in a trap and can’t even chew off their left paw to escape because it’s the property of Carlos Santana.
The exception is the title track, a lovely up-tempo number featuring delicately picked acoustic guitar followed by an electric guitar solo (both by former Butterfly Larry Reinhardt) that thrusts you heavenward, and while Evans keeps repeating the words “nothing left to live for” you don’t believe him, not with all the wheeling stars in the song’s firmament. And two more, the mellow but upbeat “Bright, Blue Tango” and space fusion number “Distant Sun” aren’t completely derivative, although the dark shadow of Santana lingers over the latter like a malignant planet with exotic percussion.
And speaking of Santana, in a taste test 95 of 100 listeners identified “Drifting in Space” as Carlos and Company, while in the same taste test a whopping 82 percent of listeners did the same with “Everything’s a Circle,” which is conga-powered proof that life’s a drum circle, just like the one that used to wake me up at dawn on Sunday mornings when I lived by Malcolm X park in Washington, DC leading me to throw open the window and tell its constituents to find something better to do than wear Rasta hats and torture decent people with world music when they were trying to catch forty winks goddamn it.
“Starglow Energy” is Pink Floyd on their way to deciding which one’s pink, while the brief “Voyages of Past Travelers” is all space winds and black holes and an extraterrestrial voice from a distant solar system saying something to the effect of, “You know what? Spam isn’t half bad if you fry it and eat it with scrambled eggs.” That or, “We’ve come to pulverize your planet, you bunch of monkey-faced Smerks, except for the first Spooky Tooth album, which remains highly underrated.”
Captain Beyond were doomed to never leave earth’s orbit by their inability to develop a style they could call their own. In the sci-fi movie that was their career they were trapped forever in Derivative City, a sort of Interzone where their ilk were reduced to scrounging space age junkyards looking to salvage the scrapped sounds of other, better bands. I can just hear the good Captain telling a judge, “I swear I didn’t steal ‘Drifting in Space’ from Santana. It fell off the back of a truck.”
GRADED ON A CURVE:
D
