My grade school was very small and unusual, I’ll maybe get into that another time, it was outside of Denver, in a kind of cinderblock building connected to a church, I think. Anyway for a while we had a music teacher named Michael Stanwood. As far as I remember, he just showed up and played acoustic guitar or autoharp and sang songs and talked about the songs? This would’ve been like 1980.

A couple years prior he had put out an album with another dude named Bruce Bowers under the name Fingers Akimbo, and he played us a few songs off that LP and then he…sold us copies of it? I must’ve been in fourth grade, I didn’t have any money, so I guess I coerced my folks into shelling out some cash for this thing? I wasn’t too into the music but I think I was starstruck that this guy had made an actual album and his picture was on the back.

So it joined my very exclusive record collection which consisted of Magical Mystery Tour, the first Cars album, Elton John’s Greatest Hits (“Rocket Man” was my favorite song) and maybe Queen’s Flash Gordon soundtrack. Not to brag or anything but that is a flawless record collection for a stupid little kid.

Two or three songs off the Fingers Akimbo album—called Cowtowns and Other Planets—are forever etched in my mind, or at least snippets of them. And yesterday one snippet emerged from the grainy beige paste that is my brain these days, a lyric that went, inexplicably: “Ding dong howdy and an abracadab.”

I wondered if this extremely obscure LP existed anywhere on the internet and was gobsmacked to find the whole thing on YouTube. It’s so 70s. It’s kind of folksy, proggy, bluegrassy. Again, the primary instrument is the autoharp. Michael’s singing sounds like, I dunno, Cat Stevens vs the guy from Jethro Tull. There’s a whole story on the back cover about how the band is the reincarnation of an ancient troubadour who is back to spread peace and wonder through song.

The song I liked the most, both as a kid and yesterday, is the 10-minute finale called “The Buttonwillow.” It has this kind of hippie sci-fi story and then goes into an epic electric violin freakout that I remembered every note of.

Anyway it was all a heavy trip, man. Sometimes the internet delivers the goods.