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Editorial Reviews

It says a great deal about how pop records were made in the 1960s that the Cowsills' Captain Sad and His Ship of Fools was the third album the Rhode Island family band would cut within the space of just 12 months, and while most current bands would balk at the workload of cutting one album a year along with touring, 1968's Captain Sad suggests the Cowsills were handling their busy schedule very well indeed. Captain Sad doesn't feature as many hits as the Cowsills' first two long-players (though "Indian Lake" would chart high for the group), but the music is uniformly splendid, and for a group that featured members who were nine and 11, the material is mature, tuneful, and beautifully executed, with excellent harmonies from the siblings and imaginative production from Billy Cowsill and Bob Cowsill. The Cowsills only wrote four songs for Captain Sad, but they happen to be four of the album's standout tracks -- "Newspaper Blanket" is a prescient and poignant tale of a homeless man asleep on a snowy bench, "Make the Music Flow" is a great slice of sunshine pop, "Meet Me at the Wishing Well" is superior folk-rock, and the title tune is a playful exercise in psychedelic-influenced pop with an arrangement that edges into baroque pop. Elsewhere, "Who Can Teach a Songbird How to Sing" (written in part by Graham Nash) is a great showcase for the group's harmonies, "The Fantasy World of Harry Faversham" is a silly but effective story of one man's Walter Mitty-style fantasies, "The Bridge" gives Barbara Cowsill a rare and lovely lead vocal, and if "Indian Lake" seems a bit lightweight in this context, it still sounds like the perfect hit single it was. Captain Sad and His Ship of Fools is a marvelous artifact from the golden age of pop record-making, and offers more evidence (as if it were needed) that the Cowsills were more than another bubblegum act of the era -- they were one of the more gifted and ambitious groups to hit the charts in their day. [Captain Sad and His Ship of Fools made its belated debut on CD with a 2009 release from Cherry Red's Now Sounds imprint, and for the occasion six bonus tracks were added to the album. Unfortunately, five of them are monophonic single mixes of tracks from the album, and while obsessives who enjoy debating the merits of mono vs. stereo will be glad to have them, the single-channel mixes don't sound different enough to be of lasting interest to most listeners. The other added track, "Poor Baby," is a solid number that just missed making the Top 40 in 1968. For many fans, the best bonus included in this reissue will be the liner notes, in which Bob Cowsill offers his memories about all 12 of the original album's selections, and his thoughts on the music are witty and enlightening. The remastering is very good, and Cherry Red has clearly gone the extra mile in giving Captain Sad and His Ship of Fools the CD release it deserves.] Mark Deming, All Music Guide

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