There were characters on the folk circuit, people who chose odd corners of music. In the folk days, Sol was a star - he was a performer. He had a unique thing. In an era of characters, he definitely stood out. Sol himself came across like this really strange, gypsy kind of guy, and had stories and everything that went with it...He could like take over a nightclub and take you on this journey. In the folk circuit, it's one quarter or one third dialogue, two thirds or three fourths music - you set up a song. Sol would say [imitating Sol’s crusty delivery] “This is a song that I learned the first time I went to Algeria, and I was with this woman and she was a redhead and redheads have red livers” – that’s the way Sol would talk. Then he’d play this weird song. In the folk world he did a very very unique thing…It was a real journey into the world of Sol Feldthouse. A genuine iconoclast, and a really unique person.

You know, some part of that touch that Sol had was lost with the band. When they did the band thing there’s just these guys up there on a stage sort of grinding out this music in 7/8, 22-note scale, or whatever, 17-note scale – people just weren’t ready for it. I played with them at various times in their short period of time. They were just too much for people. They were playing in 8/9 time or something, 5/7 or something. You’d have these hippy dancers trying to figure out what to do, who’d just stand there and look up at them, puzzled. They didn’t know what to do. It was a medium that was entirely unfamiliar to the audience… It was foreign. I don’t think anybody really understood it. These guys were too outside. Whatever they did, it was really good, but literally you’d see dancers who were dancing around and those guys would get up there and they’d just sort of stand there and look at them…I don’t know if they were ahead of their time, because I think they’d probably have a similar difficulty today, if that makes any sense, because what they were doing was so eclectic.

There’s Kaleidoscope playing in 7/8, happy as can be, and you have people looking at them like “When are you gonna play something we can dance to, man?” – you know what I mean, they have that look on their faces. And then of course there’s a couple of really stoned people who couldn’t dance anyways thinking this is really great, and they love it, and they’re the Kaleidoscope groupies, so to speak. ‘Cause it really is like a tapestry of sound, right? From a musician’s point of view there’s something extraordinarily special about the music they were making. Not only was it not like anything anyone else was doing, but it was really rooted in musical traditions that were really eclectic by comparison to the readily-accessible blues-rock/country-rock/folk rock bases of all the other stuff. These guys are like drawing from a deeper well, right?

Kaleidoscope could’ve happened, but that would have taken to the ‘80s to happen. You know what I mean when I say that. They were doing stuff that was, on a musicianship level, ahead. There were very few people who could compete with them musically back then. Because it was so inaccessible to the average listener, you would’ve had to wait for the sophistication of the listening audience to catch up with what they were doing.

Barry Melton, 7/04