Featured Essay: Captain Beyond and the Hunt for Obscure 70s Vinyl

by Vincent T. Ciaramella

PART I: HOW DOES A MEMORY SMELL?

As a psychology teacher I can tell you this… smell triggers memory more than any of the other senses. Yes, you heard me right, smell. So, what has this got to do with this article? Well, if you’ve ever taken a whiff of an old vinyl, you’d know the aroma I am talking about. It smells like the past. It’s an olfactory time machine to the last century, to a place in the space/time continuum before MP3’s, CD’s, and even cassettes. I guess old vinyl and 8-tracks existed in the same era but unfortunately, the resurgence of 8-track is as unlikely as the ashes of Jerry Garcia coalescing together to play a farewell gig on the moon. But I digress. The smell. The smell of old vinyl reminds me of my grandparents’ basement. It reminds me of a place that is now gone to live in memory’s garden, a place that exists in the astral plane when I fluctuate between consciousness and sleep, a place that exists now only in the land of wind and ghosts. God, I miss that place!

PART II: CAPTAIN BEYOND 1998

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I worked at a record store. Yep, I had one of the coolest jobs a young 20-something year old could have. I got paid full time to work at Borders in the music department just outside of Pittsburgh in the South Hills. What really made the job fun was that WE…the staff, could pick the music. Of course that meant no Sex Pistols, NWA, or anything that had even a “damn” or “hell”. Ok, sometimes those words slipped in but to the best of my knowledge there were no complaints. Working there was an education in the esoteric. I heard music that I never knew existed, curated by the coolest crop of people to work with. I really got into Mahavishnu Orchestra, Bukka White, Elvin Jones, and CAPTAIN BEYOND!  Yep, all of those really became part of my psyche but Captain Beyond really wormed its way down into my brain and fused itself into my being. What I mean is, their self-titled debut album has stuck with me for almost three decades like my brain was the Seattle Gum Wall. How did I learn about them? From an old hippie, that’s how. I was playing Queens of the Stone Age’s first album and a hippie and fellow employee named Ed asked me who I was playing. I told him and he replied “these guys must have raided their older brothers record collection. They remind me of Captain Beyond and some other bands from the late 60’s and early 70’s.” Ok, who? I love Stoner Rock, and I love 70’s stuff but that name wasn’t on my radar. Well, being that I had this magical power to order stuff into the store, I quickly found the sku number in our archaic system and ordered a copy of it. Fast-forward, it arrived and changed my life. As soon as I heard the first track “Dancing Madly Backwards (on a Sea of Air)”, I knew this was an album that I was going to love. Its cosmic weirdness is the result of Rod Evans, vocalist of Deep Purple, Bobby Caldwell on drums, Larry “Rhino” Reinhardt on guitar, and Lee Dorman on bass. Oh, did I forget to mention that Lee and Rhino were in Iron Butterfly? Yeah, that is some psychedelic gumbo right there. So, now you know the backstory of why I love this album. I still have the original CD that I purchased many moons ago. Without having to go through the next 28 years of my life day-by-day, let me give you a quick summary. I went back to school, got married, became a teacher, became a father, became the father of a 9-year-old vinyl collector, and became the father of a kid that loves to hunt for obscure vinyl on a Sunday. And that brings us to the present.

PART III: “And there it is!”

Though I have no proof of this, I would bet dollars to doughnuts that the need to find things is hardwired into our DNA. Seriously, just think about the archetypal quests that proliferate from the minds of writers across the globe and across time. From the Arthurian quest for the Holy Grail, to Indiana Jones and the…well, again Holy Grail, you get what I mean. There just seems to be a need to find what has been lost. My son Enzo and I are hunters of rare vinyl. Now, you might say, “ever heard of eBay?”. Yep, and no thanks. I have no problem buying from eBay and I do quite often, but I like to find my vinyl in the wild. For the past year, we have been haunting record shops across the Pittsburgh area, looking for gems like the 13 Floor Elevators’ album Easter Everywhere to a first pressing of Cactus’ Restrictions. Then it happened, on Sunday March 9, 2025. 

Enzo and I, along with a friend and his nephew have started a new tradition called the “Pizza and Vinyl Crawl.” I’ll be writing about this in a future article. But anyway, on that particular day we arrived at a local record store called Preserving Underground in New Kensington, Pennsylvania. Now, if you want to go let me tell you this…there are two Preserving Underground’s within walking distance. The one located in the old church is where you’re gonna find your underground metal, punk, hardcore, and all things non-mainstream. This is also where the venue is for shows. The OTHER Preserving is located a little further down 5th Ave on the old “Main Street U.S.A” portion of New Kensington. This store has more of the mainstream as well as used records that have come in. Well, I think you can see where this is going. Enzo and I walked in and then the smell hit. Yes, that grandparent’s basement smell hit me harder than the opening riff of In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida. I knew I was in the right place. Now, I have been looking for the first pressing of Captain Beyond for quite some time and have always come up empty. Sure, there have been reissues but I don’t want that! Yeah, I mean, it would do in a pinch but why settle for a microwave pizza when you want a Lamborghini. Wait, that made no sense. Scratch that. You get where I am going.  Anyway, I had a gut feeling that “today was the day”. Without too much dramatic build up, I made my way over to the “C” section which gave birth to a day I would not soon forget. Sitting right up front was…yep, you guessed it, a first pressing of the Captain Beyond self-titled album. Like it was right there, right up front, as if it had been waiting for me. It wasn’t a vision like that of the Grail appearing before the Knights of the Round Table. Nope, it was there in this physical plane of existence. I grabbed it quickly and yes, I took a whiff. I was then off to my grandparents’ basement, passing through Thousand Days of Yesterday via the Myopic Void as the Mesmerization Eclipse of the quests ended in the theater of my mind. All for the low, low price of $19.99.

Vincent T. Ciaramella is a high school Psychology teacher by trade, Vince is also a published author with ten books and multiple articles under his belt including published works through SABR (Society for American Baseball Research), IBRO (International Boxing Research Organization), and History Magazine. His latest book is “A Shooting Star Across the Silver Screen- Olive Thomas: A Biography. When not writing or teaching, Vince and his vinyl hunting partner and vinyl collector himself, Enzo Ciaramella are out looking for some more titles to add to their collections.

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