not the freeze (purple + green)

A sunshine pop delight with equal parts psych, folk-rock, and even a little garage!

Taking its title from their mind-liquefying 12 minute psych opus, this expanded edition of Not The Freeze combines the cuts from the coveted sole LP pressing with additional tracks that were previously only available on CD. Your spiritual guide on this journey from the frontal lobe to the cerebellum is Mike Stax, the author of Swim Through The Darkness, his book about Craig Smith aka Maitreya Kali, leader of the Arkade!

While the first Sundazed release was being prepared, Don Glut discovered, quite by accident, a ¼” tape of the demo sessions that preceded the album. “Around that time, I was listening to a lot of my old reel-to-reel tapes,” he remembers. “I was looking for some old radio programs that I had recorded, and in this stack of tapes that I was listening to I came across something just labeled on the side of the box ‘Penny Arkade.’ I thought, ‘What in the world is this?’”

Don tried rewinding the tape and flipping it over, but couldn’t get the music to play forwards, so he sent it to Bob Irwin at Sundazed. Bob was able to play the tape, and discovered an entire cache of early Penny Arkade recordings. The unexpected find included alternate versions of “Swim,” “Voodoo Spell,” “Lights of Dawn” (with Nesmith on maracas), and “Century of Distance” (which Craig would later rewrite as “Love is Our Existence”), as well as a formative reading of what would later become “Not the Freeze.”

At this stage the innovative song suite—titled “The Freeze”—was pieced together solely from Ducey’s compositions, and clocked in at a more modest seven minutes. It was only later that some of Smith’s songs were incorporated into the piece. Even more interestingly the tape yielded four songs that the band had dropped from their repertoire before the Not the Freeze album: Craig’s snappy proto-power pop winner “Split Decision,” and three of Chris Ducey’s songs, “Sick and Tired,” the ragtime-flavored “You Couldn’t Conquer Me” and the superb “No Rhyme or Reason.”

“I’ve done a lot of things,” Don reflects. “I’ve written and directed movies, I've written eighty published books, I’ve written hundreds of comic book stories and TV shows and all that, but the thing I put the most pride in, the thing I get the most joy out of, is the music—playing it, listening to it… To me the most important thing was the music.”

His pride is not misplaced. More than a half century of distance later, the music of the Penny Arkade continues to sparkle and shine.
- Mike Stax

TRACK LISTING

• A1 Lights Of Dawn 2:55
• A2 Country Girl 2:53
• A3 Thesis 2:44
• A4 Swim 2:45
• A5 Color Fantasy 3:53
• A6 Voodoo Spell 2:16
• B1 Not The Freeze 12:39
• B2 Love Rain 2:37
• B3 Century Of Distance 2:14
• C1 Century Of Distance (Early Version) 2:22
• C2 No Rhyme Or Reason 2:19
• C3 Swim (Early Version) 3:01
• C4 Split Decision 2:21
• C5 Voodoo Spell (Early Version) 1:51
• C6 The Freeze (Early Version) 7:00
• C7 Sick And Tired 2:45
• D1 Year Of The Monkey 3:13
• D2 Sparkle And Shine 1:47
• D3 Face In The Crowd 2:49
• D4 Woodstock Fireplace 3:50
• D5 You Couldn’t Conquer Me 2:28
• D6 Lights Of Dawn (Early Version) 3:04