Shiva’s Headband – Take Me To The Mountains – Vinyl LP

Back in the ’60s, when every town in America seemed to have its own burgeoning music scene, Austin was strangely quiet.

Not much at all — save for one group that all but dominated the scene from the late ’60s to the early ’70s. That group was the electric, country-fried psychedelic outfit known as Shiva’s Headband. Leader, violinist, guitarist, and vocalist Spencer Perskin was (and still is) the quintessential Austin hippie, who not only lobbied for city-based cultural support for local artists but also put Austin on the world-wide music map with the release of Shiva’s first major-label effort, Take Me to the Mountains on Capitol (the first ever major-label release by an Austin band). The album is formidable, and its influence on the “galactic cowboy” genre was as great as, say, Love’s Forever Changes was to the West Coast rock scene. It laid the groundwork for psychedelic twang and brought the world’s attention to the creatively diverse (yet firmly rooted) music that was beginning to blossom back in those Texas heyday