HIGH MOON RECORDS PRESENTS
“AN EVENING WITH RANDY HOLDEN”
VISIONARY GUITAR HERO TO CELEBRATE
GROUNDBREAKING SIX-DECADE CAREER
WITH RARE ONE-NIGHT-ONLY LIVE CONCERT EVENT
SPANNING MUSIC FROM THE SONS OF ADAM AND BLUE CHEER
TO POPULATION II AND MILESTONE SOLO LPS
“HIGH MOON RECORDS PRESENTS AN EVENING WITH RANDY HOLDEN”
SET FOR WEDNESDAY, MAY 17
AT WEST HOLLYWOOD, CA’S THE PEPPERMINT CLUB
LIMITED TICKETS ON SALE NOW
“Randy Holden has one golden rule when it comes to playing music:
Play loud.”
– The Los Angeles Times
High Moon Records is proud to present “An Evening with Randy Holden,” a rare, one-night-only concert event showcasing the remarkable music of groundbreaking guitar god Randy Holden set for Wednesday, May 17, at West Hollywood, CA’s intimate Peppermint Club (8713 Beverly Blvd). Holden’s first live performance since 2019, the upcoming show will see the visionary guitarist performing songs from throughout his epic six-decade career, spanning legendary 1960s L.A. rock band The Sons of Adam and proto-punk/metal/heavy psych power trio Blue Cheer to his own epochal Population II and innovative solo work. Tickets for “An Evening with Randy Holden” are extremely limited and available now.
PURCHASE TICKETS TO AN EVENING WITH RANDY HOLDEN
“An Evening with Randy Holden” follows High Moon Records’ recent release of The Sons of Adam’s Saturday’s Sons: The Complete Recordings 1964-1966. All formats – including 180-gram vinyl, CD, and digital download – feature optimum fidelity, along with deluxe packaging, extensive liner notes, lavish artwork, a bounty of never-before-seen photos, and more. The Sons of Adam’s first-ever comprehensive anthology, Saturday’s Sons: The Complete Recordings 1964-1966 gathers the band’s complete studio output along with a blistering, rare and previously unreleased 1966 full concert performance from San Francisco’s famed Avalon Ballroom. Highlights include the still electrifying title track, “Saturday’s Sons,” joined by a psychedelically charged animated visualizer created by renowned musician/visual artist Martin Carr (The Boo Radleys, bravecaptain) and streaming now via YouTube.
“There was a fan who hunted me down and insisted that I start playing again,” Holden recently told Goldmine. “I refused for about a year. Then one night I finally picked up a guitar and got so angry, I kicked it across the room. After I calmed down, I thought, what is wrong with you? Just because the business treated you horribly, you still love playing the guitar. You play the hell out of it, and there are a lot of people who would love to see you back onstage again. So that's what I did and since then, I've been having a blast.”
WATCH “SATURDAY’S SONS” OFFICIAL VISUALIZER
LISTEN TO SATURDAY’S SONS: THE COMPLETE RECORDINGS 1964-1966
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PRAISE FOR THE SONS OF ADAM’S
SATURDAY’S SONS: THE COMPLETE RECORDINGS 1964-1966:
“Here it is at last, an instant contender for records of the year.”
- Ugly Things
“Saturday’s Sons finds the band blasting the cannons with full fury.”
- Bandcamp
“This long overdue tribute to a band far ahead of its time and deserving of a much better fate than it received will be of interest to fans of hard rock, psychedelic rock, surf rock, 1960s rock and classic rock and is highly recommended.”
- Psychedelic Baby Magazine
“So exciting and powerfully dynamic that few will be in doubt of
The Sons of Adam’s lost potential.”
- The Vinyl District
“superb… well-packaged, diligently mastered and put together, it goes into the full story in as much depth as possible. The Sons of Adam deserve this. They were not one of Sixties California’s most commercially successful bands but, as confirmed here, they were one of the best.”
- The Arts Desk
Hailed by the Los Angeles Times as “the great lost guitar hero of the 1960s, a performer who never got the wide recognition he deserved,” Randy Holden is a pioneering six-string visionary whose recordings with a host of outfits – including The Sons of Adam, Blue Cheer, Population II, The Other Half, The Fender IV – and as a solo artist follow the instrument’s evolution through surf and garage rock, British Invasion and first wave psychedelia, heavy metal, proto-punk, doom metal and stoner rock. Indeed, Holden’s explosive technique and experimentation with feedback and pre-amps set a new course for the guitar that would change the instrument forever.
Born in Pennsylvania but seemingly always on the move, Holden first took the stage in the late 1950s with Baltimore, MD’s rockin’ R&B covers band, The Iridescents. As the 1960s got underway, he became enthralled with the sound of surf guitar and moved to California where he founded the instrumental combo, The Fender IV.
Holden’s next band, The Sons of Adam were a lean, mean rock ‘n’ roll machine, lighting up the Sunset Strip alongside such groundbreaking icons as The Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, The Doors, and The Mothers of Invention. The band earned a reputation as a fearsome live act, known for blowing fellow artists off the stage with their high-energy performance and voluble power. The quartet enjoyed a brief but incandescent two-year career, fueled by a fervent fan following who flocked to such world-famous Hollywood haunts as the Whisky A Go Go, Bido Lito’s, and Gazarri’s to thrill to their explosive sounds and passionate intensity.
“We were constantly playing,” says Holden. “The band was the best live band there was. We could go onstage, and nobody could follow us.”
Holden – whose distinctive, reverb-drenched approach to the guitar saw him among the candidates invited to join The Yardbirds upon the 1966 departure of Jeff Beck – eventually moved on to found The Other Half, this time bridging blues, hard rock, and Eastern psychedelia with his signature virtuosity. Ever the journeyman, he next took up the mantle as guitarist in San Francisco’s famed power trio Blue Cheer. His three compositions, essential displays of fierce, yet graceful guitar playing, comprise the entire second side of Blue Cheer’s 1969 New! Improved! album. But the band’s “rock star” excesses and lack of focus during the ensuing tour, caused the disciplined guitarist to depart. Inspired to strip things down, Holden formed Population II, an atomic power duo that saw him expanding the possibilities of the guitar – and rock ‘n’ roll music itself – with experiments in amplification, tone, and power. Though the album went unreleased in its day, somehow, a small-but-unknown number of copies of Population II LPs managed to mysteriously find their way into record stores, spawning numerous bootleg editions over the next 50 years. Population II has since proven a much-revered, massively influential musical milestone, lauded by none other than the legendary Julian Cope as “a genuinely life changing experience…the most strung out, wrung out ambient hulk of metalwork to rise from the mystic portals that crossed the 1960s over into 1970.”
An accomplished painter and gallerist, Holden took a long hiatus from the guitar in the years that followed, returning almost a quarter century later with 1994’s Guitar God and its 1997 follow-up, Guitar God 2001. In 2010, Holden reimagined Population II as a future blues-driven trio, though once again, the band’s recorded output didn’t see the light of day until 2022, when Riding Easy Records released it as Population III. Two years earlier, Riding Easy had given the world the first-ever, official release of Population II, sounding far better than the multitude of bootlegs in its wake. Population II & III are available now via Riding Easy Records.
Now, with High Moon Records’ remarkable Saturday’s Sons: The Complete Recordings 1964-1966 and a revolutionary reputation that has only grown more influential in recent years, Randy Holden is returning to the stage as a rightfully celebrated giant of the guitar, a master musician whose far-flung body of work has truly taken his instrument to heretofore unheard height of invention, adventure, and sheer volume.
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