Reply #69: Once upon a time

[Squeech]

I owned one of these-- the Fireballet album. It was almost as lame as it looks.

There used to be a company called JEM Records, who made a fair amount of money importing LPs from England and Europe. Especially in the area of so-called "progressive" rock, there would often be a delay of some months between a record being released in England and in the USA, and rabid fans would be unwilling to wait for the American edition (and/or they believed that the import was a better pressing), so they'd happily pay a premium for the import. And some of these records never came out in America (e.g. King Crimson's Earthbound).

Eventually they made enough money doing this that they started their own record company and put out their own records, and Fireballet was one of their artists. They were prog-rock wannabes, and the story was that one of them worked in JEM's mail room (so he could hear the new stuff early). So if you're just dying to hear weak imitations of King Crimson, Yes, Van der Graaf Generator et al, this is the record for you! (As the title sort of indicates, this was their second record. The first one was better-- or at least the imitations were better imitations.)