Sebastian :: “Head Roach” - Vintage Records
Legendary singer song-writer and fundamental punk of Cultural Revolution in both music and sound, Sebastian Agnello, hailed from Ontario, Canada, where he first came onto the bustling scene as a longtime member of the house-band that regularly performed at the Sound Canada Recording Centre under producer, label and studio owner, conductor and all around man of business, Arthur Sniderman in the mid to late 1960s. Having participated in a number of rock/pop/psych outfits throughout the decade, such as DT and The Phantoms, Nucleus (The Lords of London), The Cycle, formerly the Magic Cycle and Male Bagg, Agnello found himself cutting a new path in psychedelic process and prolific performance as the 1970s approached with vigorous intensity and historical impact. While being mesmerized by the steady wave of harmonious “happenings” from around the world, specifically in Canada and the US as the political projections of the genocidal war in Vietnam weighed on the youth and their unpredictable futures, music sincerely began to reveal its radical influence and iconic philosophy on the culture by demonstrating not only a sense of purpose for the people, but a subliminal soundtrack for the holy hysteria of both reality and the rhetorical questioning of life and death we all face day in and day out.
“The guitar is just a prop, so I can shoot my mouth off.”
Recorded at Sound Canada in Don Mills, Ontario, a mixed-use neighborhood in Canada, with the aid of Glenn Clarke, Martin Hurst, Art Snider and moral support from his parents, Agnello brought a metaphysical mixed bag of material, some being a parody based on the song "Carolina In The Morning" by Gus Kahn and Walter Donaldson, that sonically shook the Canadian community to its cosmic core. “Head Roach” significantly placed the young songwriter into the tonal threshold of both the exciting eccentricity of the times and its nerve center located in the soothing subconscious of Agnello’s generation of trailblazing efforts into greatness. Released on Vintage Records in 1971, a label that later produced infamous Canadian groups such as Triton Warrior, the album embodies the horizon of complicated consciousness and elaborate efforts into the more shocking side of songwriting that has been compared to the likes of Zappa and his lyrical latitude. Influenced by the iconism and humorous hemispheres of the great Randy Newman, “Head Roach” represents the counterculture in all its essence, while simultaneously reflecting the radical elements of rock' n’ roll glory and party paralysis. Featuring a fantastic flesh cover illustration by Brooklyn-based artist Risa Glickman, the album also came with, naturally, a psychedelic coloring book to help artistically absorb and supply the laughing lysergia contained within its comically-cracked up contents.
Agnello, who recently passed last September, seemed to have had a wonderful grasp on sonically charged subjects and though he goes virtually uncredited for the majority of his concrete contributions to the various artists and bands outside his own early works with friends and music colleagues, but one thing is for certain and that is his monumental debut and magnum opus of 1971 entitled “Head Roach” that to this day, still haunts not only the ears of his fans both new and old, but the rare underground/private press record communities around the world that are still in search of an original copy of this humorously existential masterpiece from one of Canada’s finest. Throughout the remainder of the 1970s, Agnello became an unstoppable force of fierce talent that would launch him into the solar stratosphere where he played over 300 shows and appeared on more than 200 albums from Jack Bailey and Diane Leigh to The Allan Sisters and Al Cherney. Eventually expanding his creative consciousness and the ever-changing narrative of peace, love, radical retribution and political injustice, Agnello released his acclaimed 1988 ska-punk classic “White Liberals On Reggae”, which he would later go on record to express that “No one has a sense of humor anymore”, and has since gone down in harmonious history as one of the country’s secret savants of song and sound.
