A bunch of on-line references question whether Warren S. Richardson Jr. is in fact former Tubes guitarist Bill Spooner. Given that Spooner’s website includes the album in its discography section I’d say the answer is yes. By the way, here’s the link to his website:
http://www.billspooner.com. As a word of warning, anyone expecting to hear something along the same lines as The Tubes patented weirdness is going to be majorly disappointed by this album …
In 1967 Richardson-nee Spooner contributed lead guitar to Michael Condello’s “Condello” LP. A couple of years later Condello apparently repaid the favour by producing 1969′s cleverly-titled “Warren S. Richardson Jr.”.
Richardson was credited with penning all six tracks and material like ‘Reputation” and ‘Shady Lady’ offered up a pretty good set of fuzz-propelled hard rock.
Mind you, nothing here is particularly original and you may well feel like you’ve heard some of this stuff elsewhere, but Spooner had a voice that was well suited to the genre and this was one of those rare albums that actually seemed to benefit from the addition of horns (courtesy of Owen Eugene Hale, Richard Lewis and Joseph Ray Trainer).
In case anyone cared, perhaps because it strayed a little bit from the predominantly hard rock formula, excluding the needless and seemingly endless drum solo, the psych-tinged ‘Wind and Rain’ struck me as the standout effort on the album.
