When I was eight years old, my folks were ordering their 10 free records from Columbia Record Club and let my brother Jonathan and I pick one. We got Kicks by Paul Revere and the Raiders, which we quickly traded to a neighbor kid for Out of Our Heads.
The album is best known for the smash hits Satisfaction and the Last Time, and brilliant tunes like Under Assistant West Coast Promo Man, Play With Fire and Spider and the Fly, but it also marks the first time I heard a Marvin Gaye song (Hitchhike, decades later, a staple of IC3’s live set) or a Sam Cooke tune (Good Times), but here’s the kicker…
The album leads off with a cover of a relatively obscure American soul tune (barely cracked the top 40 in 1964), Mercy Mercy by Don Covay. Many, many years later, I learned that the guitar player on Covay’s version was an unknown kid named Jimi Hendrix.