Stone Garden

The Speer brothers, Gary (guitar), Paul (guitar), and Neal (drums and piano), were at the core of what would eventually turn into Stone Garden. The Lewiston, Idaho, preteen siblings, from a musical family, took up their instruments in the early 1960s. Their father built them makeshift amplifiers out of old stereo equipment and the Three Dimensions were born. Still barely teenagers and already scoring paid gigs, the trio soon took on junior high schoolmate Dan Merrell as its full-time bass player, and with his addition adopted English-style ruffled shirts as well as a new name, Knights of Sound. The quartet made its first studio recording in 1965, and began to play routinely around Lewiston, eventually drawing the attention of aspiring manager Don Tunnell. With psychedelia in full flower, Tunnell renamed the group Stone Garden in 1967 after seeing a poster with the name. They began growing their hair long and traded in their Carnaby Street duds for Nehru jackets, and the quartet developed a repertoire loaded with songs by the Doors, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Cream, the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones as well as a smattering of its own original material. By 1969, Stone Garden was ready to record the latter, and a friend with a rather sophisticated basement studio helped the band to put out the "Oceans Inside Me"/"Stop My Thinking" 45 single, a pressing of 300 that actually earned significant local radio play and the notice of disc jockey Chris Adams, who became a vocal supporter of the foursome, eventually helping to get them time in a professional recording facility in Vancouver, Washington. While there Stone Garden recorded the remainder of its original material, which went unreleased until reissue label Rockadelic collected it for an eponymous 1998 LP. Gary Speer...