Goldberg
Misty Flats
Barry Thomas Goldberg was 23 in 1974, the year his Minneapolis power pop group, The Batch, split up. Rudderless, he set about recording solo album Misty Flats, and though few would hear it in its day, he hit on something very special indeed. "In 1974, the world was weary, the Vietnam War was ending, America was at this place where it didn't know where it was heading, it was the fumes of Watergate days," says Goldberg now. "I'd just left my band, and I didn't know where I was heading either. And that's what Misty Flats represents: neither high road nor low, but somewhere in between." Where The Batch were a harmony-drenched power pop band in the mold of Big Star and The Rubinoos, Misty Flats was an album of ecstatic desolation, an unhinged loner-folk gem that came from a unique place: "I wanted to make the first punk rock album, and if I'd recorded those songs with a band, maybe that's what it would've been," Goldberg says. The album was, instead, recorded in mono in a two-day recording binge on a two-track Ampex tape machine. It features just Goldberg and his friend Michael Yonkers, author of the cult 1968 LP Microminiature Love, playing guitar, bass, harmonica, and vocals between them.