Hot Stamper Pressings of Hippie Folk Rock Albums Available Now
UPDATE 2026
Here is our 2012 review for this amazing sounding breakthrough pressing of Tarkio.
It’s records like these that are the payoff for all the money, time and effort you’ve put into your system.
This White Hot Stamper side one of our beloved Tarkio, Brewer and Shipley’s Folk Rock Masterpiece, is without a doubt the BEST SOUND we have ever heard on any pressing bar none. This side sets a standard that no other copy on any side could touch. True, we awarded a Triple Plus grade to an amazing side two copy, but this side one is still the better of the two. We could easily have called it Four Pluses but chose to go with the simpler A+++ and this explanation.
However you frame it, this side is OFF THE CHARTS in a big way. It’s amazingly rich, yet clear and transparent as any we played — what a combination!
This, like Dark Side and so many other White Hot Stamper records we offer to the discriminating audiophile, is ANALOG at its finest. To our knowledge there hasn’t been a single record mastered in the last thirty years with this kind of sound, and we know whereof we speak: we’ve played them by the hundreds.
A Desert Island Disc for me with wonderfully NATURAL sound. This copy had the ULTIMATE Side One (A+++) and a very competitive Side Two (A++), making it the King of our Shootout. If you love this record as much as you should, this is the copy to own. I would love to keep it for my desert island, but we know there is surely a deserving soul out there who will treasure it as much as I do, and probably play it a lot more often, so if you know the album at all this is your chance at greatness. (And I still haven’t found a desert island I’m all that partial to anyway.)
Not Really One Toke Over the Line
Please don’t assume that this album has much in the way of uptempo country rockers like One Toke Over the Line, Flying Burrito Brothers style. Nothing could be further from the truth. Practically every other song on the album is better, almost all of them are taken at a slower pace, with none of them having the “poppy” arrangement of that carefully calculated Top Forty hit. The rest of the music on the album, the music you probably don’t know, is much better than the music that you do know if what you know is that song.
Sonic Elements
This Bay Area Hippie Folk Rock has a lot in common with The Grateful Dead circa Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty (the latter recorded by the same engineer, Stephen Barncard), and like those superbly well-recorded albums, it lives or dies by the reproduction of its acoustic guitars and vocal harmonies.
Analog richness, sweetness and Tubey Magic are elements absolutely indispensable to the sound of these recordings. Without them you might as well be playing a CD. (Some of the reissue pressings actually do sound like CDs and are not part of the shootouts for this album anymore. Who wants a record that sounds like a CD? They may be pressed on vinyl but they’re no less an embarrassment to analog for it. As you can imagine we feel the same way about most of the Heavy Vinyl records being made today. They’re just embarrassing.)
The best pressings, on the other hand, are everything that’s good about the analog medium — smooth, sweet, relaxed and involving. You had best have a fast cartridge and not overly rich electronics to get the most out of this one. The richness on this record is already baked-in; no need to add more.
Side One
A++++, every bit as good as we said! Exceptionally quiet too.
Side Two
A++, with lovely clarity and lack of distortion. It’s present, with no smear, and Tubey Magical, but you will notice that side one is somewhat richer, and for that we docked it one plus. It will seriously trounce nine out of ten copies anyway, and side one will simply be unbeatable no matter how many copies you throw at it.
Years in the Making
This shootout has been a long time coming — our last one was in 2007! — for two reasons that every record guy and gal can relate to: bad sound and bad surfaces. So many copies of this album are noisy. Even the few that have survived being played by the average pot-smoking music lover, records with no obvious visible signs of abuse from the Garrards and ARs of the day, tend to be pressed on vinyl that leaves much to be desired.
Kama Sutra/ Buddah Records, home to The Lovin’ Spoonful, was no major label. It was a small independent just trying to survive. Audiophile pressing quality was simply not in the budget. Fortunately for us analog types they put good money behind high quality session players and state-of-the-art 16 track recording technology at Wally Heider’s renowned studio in San Francisco.