Above is a video of Andy Pratt's big hit "Avenging Annie", from 1973. The song was covered by The Who's Roger Daltrey on his 1977 album "One of the Boys". Rolling Stone Magazine raved that Pratt "has forever changed the face of rock."
Above is Roger Daltrey's version of "Avenging Annie". I thought it would be cool to put them side by side so people can hear both versions!
And here is an interesting write up from the LAWeekly blog I found....
TOP SURREAL MOMENT OF THE FESTIVAL: I'm in the coffeeshop today at 1 pm, waiting to meet up with a friend. The only available seat is near a lanky, white-haired man, who hunches over his table and sways slightly, like one touched.
I take a risk and grab the seat. Of course, he turns around and wordlessly places some sort of piece of paper on my table in slow-motion. I look at the photo on it, and I look at him. "Andy Pratt," it says.
Andy Pratt. Oh, if you only knew how I have hunted for Andy Pratt.
I first heard him while flipping around the radio dial seven years ago, one Sunday-night three a.m.; as it turned out, Jon Brion was guest-DJing on The Open Road, and playing something simple, and bizarre, and real. And beautiful. And incredible. And true. And it was Andy Pratt.
I hunted for Andy Pratt, ultimately ordering something difficult-to-find through a record store, called Resolution. This was all way before MySpace or iTunes were ever an option for me. He sits at a piano on the cover, looking like a much taller Lindsey Buckingham. I never heard anything on it as amazing as that stuff on the radio. Yet he seemed a charismatic figure. He'd later become a Christian. Sometimes, the really gifted ones, the ones who really face the music, and madness, do that.
You may hear Jon Brion talking at length about Andy Pratt, and playing three of his songs, here. He even "steals" my theory of musical time-travel, suggesting his influence on Radiohead and Beck.
Anyway. At one moment in history, Andy Pratt was the Next Big Thing. Andy Pratt was touted in Rolling Stone as some kind of genius, and his song "Avenging Annie" was a hit.
And I had his album, and I always wondered what had happened to him. Much as I'd wondered what had happened to Dory Previn, another '70s misfit whom I'd discovered once while taking a bath in my apartment in Hollywood. (I heard a sound of key-twisting melody and androgynous, strange vocals wafting through the open window. I yelled out the window, what is this music? (It was Mythical Kings and Iguanas.)
I'm in the coffeeshop, and Mr. Andy Pratt places a flier on the table. I tell him I know his music, I have his album. He smiles oddly, and says, "That's out of print now. Write about it so they'll put it back in print."
He then tells me he's doing a book signing, and he pulls out a book: A psychedelic-looking photo of him on the cover. Shiver In the Night, it's called. A memoir. I ask him to sign it, and he does: For Kate, Love, Peace, and Power.
"So you're writing articles?" he asks.
"I'm doing a blog," I says, adding (and hoping it's not insulting), "Do you know what a blog is?"
"Yeah," he says, smiling. "So, you write up your daily report and all your fans read it?"
"Um... I don't have any fans."
"OK, so no one reads it!" he says, chuckling.
"Yes, nobody reads it!" And then we both laugh.
And then he adds, almost off-the-cuff, "It's OK. I do lots of great stuff no one knows about."
Let me just savor that for a moment. "I do lots of great stuff no one knows about." He said it without bitterness, but also like someone who's not happy to be forgotten.
And nor should he be. Tonight, I've done a brief search, and found that he has a couple different MySpace pages, here and here.
His shit is incredible. And so of course MySpace is good for some things, and obviously The Open Road at 3 am is, too. But I couldn't ignore the irony of being stuck here in the mouth of the indie-hype-monster-machine, this event that launches the short-lived careers of next-big-things on an annual basis, and sitting surrounded at a cafe by young assholes in dark shades and cool haircuts, all of 'em hoping for that all-precious mantle of hype. And meeting this man with the crazed eyes and the unspeakably lovely music that not one in a hundred of these cats could hope to touch.
On the inside of the dust jacket, at the end of his bio, it says, "[Andy Pratt] is now happily married, and he is ready to rock."
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