So who is Terry Masters anyway? Well if you start digging around the ole' World Wide Web, you'll discover that he had one 45 released under the avoid-at-all-costs name of Terry Masters at the Organ. You can hear one of the 3 tracks on YouTube (not bad really, guessing a 1970 provenance). Beyond that, what you'll find is Masters was basically a nightclub crooner. You can see and hear live clips on YouTube from 1983 of him sitting at the keyboards and singing Hall & Oates, Bob Seger, that sort of thing. Apparently he was playing Vegas shows, as well as performing lounge music in his native Minneapolis. This ties in with the narrative we then read on the back of this private press (which shows a forlorn Masters in a toga made from what looks like an old bathrobe): "Many people ask Terry to do the music he really enjoys, but limited to dance music on the job, he is not always able to play from the heart. Now, accompanied by John Calder on the drums, Terry creates the music everyone has requested and shows his great versatility on the organ, bass and mellotron. We hope this completely instrumental and spontaneous album will give you a new insight into the "other side" of Terry Masters."
Ummm... something tells me this isn't what his fan base had in mind. When I purchased the LP, the seller fortunately photo'd the back cover so I could read the above quote. Without that I would not have taken the chance. An instrumental album with mellotron can't be that bad I figured. I actually thought this was going to be an electronic rock album with drums, similar to perhaps Klaus Schulze on Moondawn, but without synthesizers and more organ. Nope. It's an instrumental prog rock album all the way! Just two side long excursions titled rather predictably 'Thesaurus I' and 'Thesaurus II'. The music is very free form, loose in structure, but not noisy or avant-garde in the slightest. It's very engaging I must say. And it is absolutely slathered in mellotron. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say this album has more mellotron than any 1970s era album discovered in the last 20 years. The album really has no obvious comparisons. Of course one could pull out ELP as a desperate attempt, but that's really scratching the surface. Probably the closest comparison I can come up with is Siloah on Sukram Gurk, but more professional sounding than that would imply. Perhaps also The Trip at the time of Caronte, if one considers the instrumental work, and replaces guitar for mellotron. John Calder is going nuts on the drum kit, playing in an almost jazzy manner, but clearly on amphetamines. Calder incidentally was the drummer for none other than Podipto, a relatively well known country rock band from northern Minnesota who had one major label release in 1970.
Finding info about this album is nigh impossible, though there have been a handful of sales on ebay, as archived by Popsike. Mostly not expensive either. One dealer called it "folk psych", clearly they did not take the time to hear the album, as it is of course, neither. Other auctions call it a "synth" album. None of those either (though some people do erroneously call a mellotron a "synth").
An album truly out of nowhere. Not brilliant or the greatest lost album of our time, but certainly excellent on the whole. If for nothing else, worth hearing for its unique sound crafted inside a more familiar terrain. Sadly, Terry Masters passed away in the summer of 2018. Hopefully he got to tell his story to someone, or wrote it down somewhere. I certainly would like to know more.
Ownership: LP: 197? Tektra. Recent online acquisition. As private as they come. The album cover is quite cool actually. Comes in a brown textured single sleeve with indented red lettering spelling Masters name. The back cover we described above. The labels are plain black, with little info beyond what you see here.
There is no date listed anywhere. Judging by his look, the way the album is presented, and the instrumentation, I would think 1973 is about right. Perhaps 1975 as heartland America always had these nutty outliers. But these are pure guesses on my part.
Other than one rating on RYM (of course from a friend of mine - obscurists to a fault we all are), and the aforementioned Popsike references, Thesaurus has no historical record on the internet. I will be adding the album to Discogs and Gnosis shortly. Looking forward to learning more here.
2/2/19 (new entry); 1/3/22
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