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Jun 25, 2025 Web Exclusive By Frank Valish

Every so often, if you’re lucky, you stumble upon an unknown gem, a band that you’d never heard of, one that never got big, never had a hit, but somehow was much more than just a diamond in the rough. Max is such a band, its small-press 1974 release being reissued on vinyl here over 50 years later, supplemented by an additional LP of tracks from the band’s history.

Let’s back up a bit. Max was borne from the core of the ’60s group The Elastik Band, which gained cult status in 1967 with a song called “SPAZZ.” When The Elastik Band broke up, songwriter/vocalist/guitarist David Cortopassi and vocalist/guitarist Scott Williams decided to branch out from from the California psychedelic rock sound to a more expansive style of horn-infused rock fusion, and the duo formed Max, a seven-piece band that highlighted a range of instrumentation including baritone sax, tenor sax, alto sax, soprano sax, clarinet, English horn, oboe, flute, alto flute, piccolo, trumpet, flugelhorn, tenor trombone, bass trombone, and E-flat peck-horn, in addition to drums, Cortopassi’s bass, guitar, vibraphone, and keyboards, and Williams’ guitar and bass. The group was extant from 1970 to 1974 and played around California will all variety of well-known important bands of the day, but it never signed a record deal and never commercially released its sole album, Rodan, which was only self-issued in a run of 200 copies. Now, Cortopassi has properly released Max’s oeuvre here as Beyond Rodan, which features the original album and a second LP including eight additional tracks.

The album is a true revelation, a little heard gem of a record. It opens with the aptly titled “Epic,” an exhilarating blend of shapeshifting funk, soul, rock, and jazz, all in one five-minute track. “Rainbows” is an infectious mix of ’60s California pop with horn brilliance and furious drums. And “Music Man” highlights Cortopassi’s furious guitar. Of the extra cuts included here, “Aub de Baub” is funky and flute-filled with yelped improvisational vocals, and “Funky Is As Funky Does” is worthy of prime period Parliament/Funkadelic.

To a degree, describing the songs on Beyond Rodan is borderline ineffective at best. The easy comparison here is Chicago, but Max’s blend is more adventurous. Time changes abound. The bass is rich, the drumming powerful, with any number of horns skittering in and out of tracks throughout, with an occasional guitar blitzkrieg for good measure. Melodies weave in and out of the tracks’ mix of instrumental wonderment, ensuring that things never sound unnecessarily complex, despite arrangements that are obviously complex in nature. And the sound quality on this reissue is stunning, picking up every nuance, every obliterating drum figure, every spectacular horn line, with intricate detail.

It’s remarkable that Max’s Rodan has never been widely heralded as the lost masterpiece that it is. It is easy to see how this heady, experimental collection of songs was overlooked, at least to commercial audiences, in the mid-’70s, as the overall landscape was leaning more toward AOR and becoming we now popularly refer to as classic rock. And to that end, Rodan may have been simply an album out of its time. Thankfully, here it is again, in all its splendor, for larger audiences to avail themselves of what everyone missed at the time. (www.digitalcellars.com)

Author rating: 9/10