The Apostrophes - Ancient Melody

Описание: Before he was Lionel Kratz, desert mystic and reluctant architect of American psychedelic folklore, he was Leonel Carrasco — straight-A prodigy, first-chair everything, the kind of kid guidance counselors used as a brochure.

Chula Vista High School Class of ’65, valedictorian-bound.
Parents proud. Teachers certain he’d become a doctor, a lawyer, maybe a senator.
Music? A hobby. A phase.

Except it wasn’t.

Carrasco heard music the way some people hear prophecy. He didn’t just play guitar — he organized sound. Neighborhood kids drifted toward him the way iron filings drift to a magnet. By junior year he had assembled a band that, on paper, made no sense.

There was Pete Kelley, his childhood co-conspirator — surfer, beatnik, burnout, loyal to the bone. They’d been inseparable since third grade, when Leonel humiliated a bully so thoroughly that it became school legend. Pete didn’t talk much, but when he played guitar it sounded like light bending underwater — beautiful, warped, and coming from somewhere deeper.

Then there were Renny Ortese and Martin Del Vey, seniors recruited straight out of the school orchestra. String bass and piano prodigies. They could sight-read Stravinsky but had never plugged into an amp. Leonel introduced them to fuzz pedals and the Vox Continental.

Finally, rounding out the lineup, was Antonio “Toby” Raskin — technically Lionel’s cousin’s friend, a high school dropout who couldn’t read music but could feel a song before it happened. Toby had no formal training, but his timing was animal. He played like he was trying to outrun something — hard, fast, and never looking back. Where Lionel chased the heavens, Toby dragged everything back to earth with a fierce gravity.

The song that brought them together — the first thing that felt like The Apostrophes, even before they had the name — was written with a single goal in mind -first place in a local talent show. Three minutes, no solos, big ending. That was the brief, but unfortunately this becomes the psychological pivot that later fuels so much of the band's early volatility.

The version you’re about to hear isn’t a debut. It’s a survivor.

The tapes arrived brittle, shedding oxide like old skin. Some reels were warped, others partially erased by time, heat, or whatever misadventures befell them in the decades between motel rooms, glove compartments, and forgotten closets. We found multiple takes of two songs ("Ancient Melody" and "What I Know?") — some collapsing halfway through, some drowned in hiss, some distorted beyond recognition.

What remains here is the strongest complete performance of "Ancient Melody" — pieced together from several reels, stabilized, cleaned, and gently reinforced where the music had begun to vanish. No notes were added. No performances were replaced. Only what was already there was lifted back into the light.

— Blake Wexley
Found Sound Archive