Lite Storm - God Is Truth

Sometime around 1976, on the occasion of Sathya Sai Baba's fiftieth birthday, a California band called Lite Storm made him a record. The dedication runs right across the front cover: these songs are offered to "our beloved omnipresent divine mother and father, on your 50th earth birthday." The back cover calls what is inside American Bhajans, which is about as honest a description as anyone could ask for.

Lite Storm had already cut one album, God Is Love, for Beverly Hills Records in 1973. God Is Truth finds the group, credited on the sleeve simply as John, Corey, Alex and Dave, working the seam between West Coast psychedelic folk and Hindu devotional song. Side one moves through "Sai Rama," "Vishnu Hari Om," "Bliss Time" and "All Are Only One" before closing on a one-minute chant credited to Sai Baba himself. Side two opens out into "Love Is No Mystery," "Blue" and "Love Marches On." About twenty minutes a side, warm and unhurried, with none of the polish a real label would have insisted on.

Sai Sound Samitee was never a record company in the ordinary sense. It ran out of a PO box in Beverly Hills and published through an outfit called Divine Mother's Sound, and a samiti is a society or a committee rather than a business. Records like this one were pressed for a community instead of a market, which is why they surface so rarely. The back cover is its own reward: a dense blue photo collage of Jesus, Buddha, Shirdi Sai Baba, Vishnu, Ganesha and several dozen devotees, with a snapshot of the band and their amplifiers tucked into the middle of it.

Original private pressing on Sai Sound Samitee, catalog S.S.S. 10-50.

Used copy: VG vinyl / VG+ sleeve