If you like: ‘70s private-press folk or cosmic country–the likes of Jim Sullivan, Nick Drake, Bob Lind, and Jeff Cowell–you’ll greatly appreciate the beauty of this lost and found gem.
About: Born into a musical family Al Manfredi started writing songs when he was a child. He performed his first composition in public at the age of 11. As a teenager in 1965, he formed the Nuts & Bolts in the small beach town of San Clemente, California. Inspired by the Kinks, the Beatles and the Byrds, the group separated themselves from the pack by also performing original material written by Manfredi and band mate Mike Ingram. They were soon playing before packed houses at local clubs like the Casino in San Clemente. In late 1966 they changed their name to the Lost & Found and relocated to Phoenix, Arizona, where they played with Alice Cooper’s early group, the Spiders, and cut a rare single, “Don’t Move Girl” b/w “To Catch the Sun,” which now commands high coin from ‘60s garage collectors. 
    When they returned to San Clemente in early 1967 their music had taken a more psychedelic direction. The Lost & Found were riding high that year, until tragedy struck. After which Manfredi gave up the band scene completely, retreating to his family’s music store. But alone, behind closed doors, Al kept writing songs and working on his music, recording hours of tapes, often tracking all the instruments himself. In 1973 he chose six of his best songs, some of them written back in the Lost & Found days, and had them custom-pressed as an LP. Only a handful of copies were pressed, and most of these were sent out to various record companies in the hope of landing a deal. Despite the outstanding quality of the music, there were no takers.
    Decades later, collectors discovered the Al Manfredi album and hailed it a West Coast rock masterpiece. In his Acid Archives book, Patrick Lundborg called its discovery a deus ex machina and compared it to David Crosby’s first solo album and Hawaii-era Merrell Fankhauser, “not just the acutely captured mellowness, but the self-confidence and the talent.”*^{via Now-Again Records}
A favorite track: Of The Sea