Farewell Aldebaran - Judy Henske & Jerry Yester

1968 Straight Records

There have been many albums that I became attached to over the years and Farewell Aldebaran certainly falls into that category.  I'm thinking of Van Morrison's Astral Weeks, The Kinks Village Green Preservation Society, The Left Banke's debut album and more tasty platters that provided a unique listening experience that went beyond what was popular on the charts and radio. 

The fact that albums, such as the ones I just mentioned, managed to penetrate an audience that was absorbed on Underground Radio which was born in the late 60's. 

Over the years of doing this blog, I often posted about albums like the ones I just mentioned, because many of them have been forgotten over the decades.  It's time to remember these sounds.

From Uncut magazine 2016: "On June 16, 1969, Frank Zappa’s wonderfully outré Straight label released two characteristically left-field albums. One was Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica. The other was Judy Henske and Jerry Yester’s Farewell Aldebaran. Which of them sounded more strangely unsettling and defiantly unsellable was a close run thing. Yet Trout Mask Replica went on to become canonically revered as one of the most adventurous albums in rock history, while Farewell Aldebaran “took a dive off the pier”, as Yester put it, hardly making enough ripples even to be regarded as a ‘cult classic’.  Its sheer eclecticism is disorienting – a wild pot pourri of folk-rock, acid dreams, psych-blues, sunshine pop, prog pretension, free jazz, baroque melodicism, proto-synth experimentation, gothic poetry and apocalyptic visions sung by Henske in a strident voice that sounds like an improbable cross between Odetta, Janis Joplin, Nico and Grace Slick and which one critic suggested could “shatter windshields”.  Dubbed ‘the Queen of the Beatniks’ by Jack Nitzsche, Henske was a veteran folkie who had begun singing in the late 1950s on the hootenanny circuit but had a second string as a ‘chanteuse for the Apocalypse’ performing blues, jazz and alternative cabaret, sometimes on the same bill as the likes of Lenny Bruce and Woody Allen. Her first LP appeared in 1961 and she inevitably gravitated east to Greenwich Village, where she became one of the multitude of folk singers rounded up in Washington Square and signed to Elektra, recording a memorable version of High Flying Bird, the arrangement of which was lifted wing, claw and feather by Jefferson Airplane on their debut album.  

By this time Henske was managed by Frank Zappa’s business partner Herb Cohen, and it was Zappa who suggested she should put to music some of the verse she was writing and record an album for his newly established Straight label. In one of the more bizarre juxtapositions in rock history, Yester was co-producing an album for Pat Boone with Yanovsky, and the crooner’s studio was commandeered to record Farewell Aldebaran with an eclectic bunch of backing musicians that included David Lindley and Solomon Feldthouse from Kaleidoscope, Moog pioneer Paul Beaver, jazz bassist Ray Brown and Tim Buckley’s early collaborator Larry Beckett, as sessions stretched out over a leisurely six months. 

Q&A: Jerry Yester and Judy Henske 

"How did the album title come about? 

JH: I was really sick. I had a high fever and my brain went to a whole other place. I was lying on a mattress on the floor and all there was for me to see was a bookcase with my set of Encyclopaedia Britannica. I pulled out the volume for ‘A’ and there was an entry on Aldebaran. It’s a red star. If you lived on a planet next to it, when the sun rose it would fill the whole sky. That was so scary. I wasn’t playing with a full deck! 

Why did the record fail to sell – was it too alien even for those weird times? 

JH: My mother, when I sent a copy to her, about a week later she called up and says, “Is everything OK? Are you guys all right?” 
JY: Of all the albums that I’ve been part of, this one has always stood out as being the most fun and free of constraints. I was expecting it to do a lot more, but it was pretty eclectic for its day… 

There’s something gloriously inappropriate about the fact it was recorded in downtime from the Pat Boone sessions you were simultaneously working on. 

JY: Sunwest, the studio was owned by Pat Boone. The studio manager got to like us, and recommended Zally and I as producers for an album Pat wanted to make, so we just kind of traded off. We were drifting back and forth, so it took a little longer than it normally would. It was good; it would give us time to let something rest and be able to listen to it"

With Farewell Aldebaran, Henske and Yester sought to follow their inspiration where it took them. That journey yielded one of the most unusual and compelling albums of its era.

Snowblind

From the loudersound.com site: "There are plenty of neglected albums that claim to be lost gold, but very few of them actually live up to their billing. Farewell Aldebaran is one shining exception, a bona fide classic that was roundly ignored when it was first released on Frank Zappa’s Straight label in 1969.  Whatever the reason, it wasn’t down to its creators’ lack of form or the A&R ear of their moustachioed label boss. Jerry Yester had already passed through the New Christy Minstrels, The Modern Folk Quartet and The Lovin’ Spoonful, as well as having produced Tim Buckley and The Association. Wife Judy Henske, meanwhile, had been a forceful presence on the Greenwich Village folk scene for some years, cutting a couple of albums for Elektra. But neither of their respective track records quite prepares you for Farewell Aldebaran, which occupies a weird and wonderful space somewhere between gothic folk and psychedelic church music. One of its most striking elements is Henske’s voice, a strident vehicle for her classically-leaning poetry. Snowblind is a prime exemplar, a rock’n’roll rattler with a formal lyric about the destructiveness of love and the fire of lust, with co-producer and Spoonful pal Zal Yanovsky on bass and guitar and Buckley cohort Larry Beckett on drums."

From the Rising Storm site: "The harpsichord laced folk ballad Lullaby is strangely alluring, with a puzzled, jarring edge that recalls how our great nation felt as the decade came to an uncertain end. Snowblind, opens the album with a boom, it’s really the oddball amongst a quiet group of songs but an effective, hard charging psychedelic rocker nonetheless. This composition really gives Henske room to stretch out and let her vocals roar with conviction and arrogance.  Henske and Yester welcomed co-producer Zal Yanovsky as well as musicians David Lindley, Paul Beaver (of electronic music duo Beaver and Krause) and jazz bassist Ray Brown along for the aural journey.  Every element of the tight album opener “Snowblind” is marked with aggressiveness: the grisly lyrics (“Love shall make us all go snowblind” is about the nicest sentiment expressed), the driving melody, Henske’s snarling lead vocal, Yester’s acoustic accompaniment, Yanovsky’s lead guitar, Larry Beckett’s drums.  It was selected as the album’s leadoff single, though a better choice might have been its B-side, “Horses on a Stick.”  While Henske’s lyrics cast a carousel in a new light (or a cloak of darkness, more accurately), its merry-go-round melody and bouncy arrangement, complete with happy harmonies, would have made it the classiest and most subversive slice of bubblegum pop circa late ’69."

Raider

Among the other contributors is Kaleidoscope (the US group) founder David Lindley, who adds five-string banjo to the magnificent Raider, which sounds like a lysergic bluegrass swinger. This unusual track epitomizes the album’s expansive musical experimentation, featuring guest David Lindley on bowed 5-string banjo and Solomon Feldthouse on hammered dulcimer joining Yester on piano, Jerry Scheff on bass and Toxie French on drums.

Judy Henske & Jerry Yester

An album of utter originality that still defies easy categorization, Farewell Aldebaran plays like the shadowy fever dream of two talented artists making music on their own terms.  Imaginative and impeccably crafted, it’s a spellbinding journey, alternately graceful and harrowing, that defies pop and rock conventions by embracing the fantastic.  Henske provided most of the lyrics with Yester contributing most of the melodies, yet the results of their collaboration were nothing like what one would have expected based on their other work.  The unusual cover, a solarized negative photograph of Henske, Yester, their daughter and cat, hints at the oddness within; the standard color positive of the bucolic photo can be found on the back cover.

St. Nicholas Hall

The more sombre side of the album...is best served by the choral repose of St. Nicholas Hall ...

Three Ravens

...and the baroque beauty of Three Ravens. And nothing quite out-weirds the title track, an account of a flight from the titular giant star with Paul Beaver (of Beaver & Krause fame) on Moog synth.

Excerpts From a Goldmine Magazine interview with Judy Henske and Jerry Yester

"GOLDMINE: How exactly did you end up on Straight/Bizarre Records? 

JUDY HENSKE: Frank Zappa’s manager was Herb Cohen. He was my manager and Jerry’s manager. I had been an Elektra artist before that. 

JERRY YESTER: Herbie was the co-owner of Straight/Bizarre along with Frank. 

GM: Was “Farewell Aldebaran” a one-record deal? 

HENSKE: Nobody even thought of things like that, I don’t think. It wasn’t like, “Oh, I’ll go to this person’s office and see what he says.” Everybody was just going around together all the time. 

YESTER: We didn’t really sign a long-term contract; it was just that Herbie was the source of release for our stuff. We didn’t have any other offers. But when Frank heard “Farewell Aldebaran,” he said that he liked it very much. And that wasn’t easy to get out of him! But we both had a good relationship with Frank.“Rosebud” (the self-titled 1971 album made by Henske and Yester’s next – and for many years their last – project together) came out on the label, too. 

HENSKE: What was really neat about it was that nobody said, “Okay, go out there and make some money!” 

GM: Speaking of money, original copies of the album – if you can even find one – are quite expensive. What’s your understanding as to why “Farewell Aldebaran” has been unavailable for so long? 

HENSKE: (laughs) The reason it’s been unavailable is that nobody wanted it! 

YESTER: (Straight/Bizarre’s distributor) Warner Brothers stopped pressing it. For a long time, you could find it for either 10¢ or $150. But it did well in Europe; a lot better than Herbie told us. 

HENSKE: You know what I think really happened? Didn’t Alice Cooper’s first album (“Pretties for You”) come out right after it? [Ed.— Actually, four weeks prior. But close.] I think Herbie put everything behind Alice Cooper. I didn’t ever think that Alice Cooper was as interesting — musically or lyrically — as “Farewell Aldebaran.” But Herbie liked that “nyah-nyah-na-nyah-nyah” kind of stuff. So that one got all the attention, while ours died on the vine. 

GM: So how did this reissue finally come about? 

HENSKE: If it hadn’t been for Richie Unterberger’s piece in that book (1998’s “Unknown Legends of Rock ‘n’ Roll”), I don’t know if anything would have ever happened. But (Omnivore Recordings co-founder) Cheryl Pawelski was a fan of the record. As the years went by, I got to know Cheryl. And she always wanted to do something with it. It’s wonderful how circumstances come together like that; it’s one of those things that is meant to be. Maybe it’s now that this record should be out, and not 1969. 

YESTER: The first time I met Cheryl, she was with Rhino. She wanted to release “Farewell Aldebaran” there, but I don’t think she was getting a lot of cooperation. So when she started her own company, she did. And I’m very glad she did. 

GM: There aren’t really many hints in your previous material that suggested you’d ever make an album like “Farewell Aldebaran.” Jerry, you did produce Tim Buckley’s out-there music; that’s about the only thing that comes to mind. 

YESTER: If there’s a similarity between “Farewell Aldebaran” and (Buckley’s) “Goodbye and Hello,” it’s not in the material. Maybe it’s in the production techniques that I used when I produced Tim. There was kind of a similar feeling with both albums, that there just weren’t any rules. That was my whole approach to making albums: just go with your gut on everything. I always thought that was the best way to go, but the record companies often didn’t agree. 

HENSKE: I thought that Tim’s “Goodbye and Hello” was a wonderful record. It had some strange stuff on it, but it (deepens voice) wasn’t nearly as strange as “Farewell Aldebaran”! I did what I wanted, and that’s why those lyrics are the way they are. And I stand behind those lyrics. 

YESTER: We were really new into our writing partnership; there were no boundaries on that. Both of our imaginations just kind of ran wild, and it wasn’t like we had to stick to a certain format. We did what we felt like. Judy was an incredibly varied source of lyric material, and I didn’t stick to any patterns or formula on the music. 

HENSKE: Jerry liked to have music that sounded different all the time. He liked old instruments, unknown instruments. Jerry was a lover of poetry, too; he really liked that. And I liked writing about all different things. You get tired of writing that boy-girl stuff because you’re looking for success. I give credit to Nashville; besides boy-girl songs, there was a lot of strange stuff coming out of Nashville in the old, old days: “Ghost Riders in the Sky,” “Call of the Wild Goose.” 

GM: Did or do you view “Farewell Aldebaran” as the two of you pushing your musical boundaries, or was it simply a document of where you both were musically at the time? 

HENSKE: That record was what we both really liked doing. And that’s the reason that it’s so varied. 

YESTER: We had no objective. We started writing together. I can’t recall if “Three Ravens” was first, or a(n unreleased song called) “Ashes Have Turned.” We really liked the songs that we were writing. The summer after The Lovin’ Spoonful stopped, we spent three months writing at our farm in Remsenburg, Long Island. We talked to Herbie on the phone, and told him what we were doing. He said, “Get it together and we’ll make an album.” The only driving force was making an album of our new songs. There was no aim. 

GM: Every track on “Farewell Aldebaran” is a Henske/Yester original, with one a co-write between you two and co-producer Zal Yanovsky. Judy, I understand that Frank Zappa really encouraged your songwriting efforts. 

HENSKE: I was writing all the time. I had tons of things written on millions of pieces of paper. And Frank asked, “What are you doing with all that stuff?” I told him I was just putting ‘em away. He said, “If it was me, I’d make a record out of every one of those.” Because that’s what he did: whenever he started something, he made it into something! I don’t think there was any extra stuff. That’s a Zappa secret, manufacturing stuff out of everything you do. But I’m not like that. 

GM: David Lindley — then of Kaleidoscope — played on the track “Raider.” That track is a kind of psychedelic Americana. 

YESTER: And those aren’t fiddles in there: David was bowing the banjo, which gave it an amazing sound. David’s band mate in Kaleidoscope, Solomon Feldthouse played hammered dulcimer on “Raider,” too. And Jerry Scheff, Elvis’ bass player. It was just a great band. 

GM: Jerry, you and Paul Beaver played Moog synthesizer on several tracks. That would have been an early modular model, right? 

YESTER: Yes. The thing was about 4 by 5 feet. Paul got the sounds, and I played it. I’d tell him what sound I was looking for, or he’d say, “try this” and come up with some amazing sound. 

GM: Richie Unterberger’s story on you mentions that Ry Cooder played on “Farewell Aldebaran.” But his name isn’t listed in the credits on the original album or the new reissue. 

YESTER: No, I made a mistake. I think I told him that Ry played on it, and he didn’t. I was thinking of the album Zally and I produced at the same time, Pat Boone’s “Departure.” Ry played mandolin on that one. 

GM: Judy, you take most of the lead vocals on “Farewell Aldebaran.” The only one that features Jerry in a really prominent vocal role is “One More Time.” Why didn’t he sing more? 

HENSKE: Come on! He’s on all kinds of songs! “Farewell Aldebaran,” “Three Ravens,” “Raider.” Wait a minute … he isn’t on “Snowblind,” because he isn’t a rock ‘n’ roll singer. 

GM: Barry Alfonso’s liner notes mention that the birth of your daughter made it difficult to tour, and that a planned Hollywood Bowl concert fell through. So did you ever perform any of the “Farewell Aldebaran” material live? 

YESTER:We didn’t really think about it; we just wanted to make the album. And then no one seemed interested in booking us, and neither of us was a great business person. It wasn’t until “Rosebud” got together that we did any performing. We did do “Snowblind” in the Rosebud shows; we opened with it a lot. And during those shows, I would do “One More Time, or “Mrs. Connor” as we called it. 

HENSKE: Jerry is coming here to L.A., and we’re performing this record. We’re doing it at the Grammy Museum on August 11, and at McCabe’s on the 12th. We’re gonna try to make it as true as we can. I’d love to do “St. Nicholas Hall” with real singers. (The album version features wordless vocals played on a Chamberlin, a sort of cousin to the grand-daddy of sample playback instruments, the Mellotron.) But I don’t know if we could; it would probably be a pain in the ass. 

YESTER:We’ll do six or seven songs at the release party on the 11th. And at McCabe’s, I’ll do a set, Judy will do a set with Craig Doerge (keyboard player and Judy’s husband), and Judy and I will do a set together. For those — because there’s so much going on in those original recordings — along with guitar and vocal, we’ll be using tracks that I’m making in my studio at home. Our daughter and my daughters — four all together — will be singing background on one of the songs we’ll do. I’m really looking forward to that. 

GM: After “Farewell Aldebaran” and then “Rosebud,” you both went on separately to make a lot more music and play a lot of live dates. In all those years — Judy as a solo artist and with Craig; Jerry with re-formed lineups of the Modern Folk Quartet and The Lovin’ Spoonful — has either of you ever heard an audience member shout out a request for “Horses on a Stick” or “Rapture”? 

HENSKE: (laughs heartily) No! No! No! No! Nobody even knows about “Farewell Aldebaran”; it’s completely unknown! 

YESTER: Certainly not at a Lovin’ Spoonful show; it’s a little … eclectic for that audience."

TRACK LIST 

"Snowblind" (Henske, Yester, Zal Yanovsky) - 3:07 

"Horses on a Stick" - 2:10 

"Lullaby" - 2:55 

"St. Nicholas Hall" - 3:35 

"Three Ravens" - 3:30 

"Raider" - 5:12 

"Mrs. Connor" - 2:17 (also listed as "One More Time") 

"Rapture" - 4:09 

"Charity" - 3:17 

"Farewell Aldebaran" - 4:21 

STUDIO CREDITS 

Larry Beckett - drums (track 1) 

Ry Cooder - mandolin ? (6? - credited in Unterberger's book but not by Yester) 

John Forsha - 12 string guitar (2,5,9) 

Toxie French - drums (6,7,10) 

Judy Henske - vocals 

Eddie Hoh - drums (2,9) 

Bernie Krause - Moog synthesizer programming (10) 

David Lindley - bowed banjo (6) 

"David's friend" (Solomon Feldthouse ?) - hammer dulcimer (6) 

Joe Osborn - bass (2,9) 

Dick Rosmini - guitar (2,9) 

Jerry Scheff - bass (6) 

Zal Yanovsky - bass (1,10), guitar (1,10) 

Jerry Yester - vocals, guitar (1,2,8,10), piano (2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10), harmonium (2), toy zither (3), Marxophone (3), Chamberlain Tape Organ (4), orchestra (5,10), organ (7,8), banjo (8), bass (10), Moog synthesizer (10) 

Produced by Yester/Yanovsky for Hairshirt Productions 

Recorded at Sunwest Studios - Hollywood 

Recorded and Mixed by Gary Brandt - except Farewell Aldebaran: mixed by John Boylan 

Executive Producer: Herb Cohen 

Cover Photo by Ed Caraeff 

Special Effects: by Litholab 

Album design by John Williams

Looking back in the decade during which this classic album was created amidst the Vietnam war and civil rights confrontations, the world was looking for answers.  You can feel the pain in the music on Farewell Aldebaran.  After the failure of the album, Henske and Yester regrouped under the band name "Rosebud" in 1970 and after releasing an album under that moniker, the group broke up.

Here are the sounds of this majestic album

LISTEN!

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