Proud Larrys Presents... Rober Lester Folsom with Rambler Kane

March 26, 2025. Show: 9:00PM

A $5 underage fee will be charged to all patrons under 21.

ABOUT:
Sunshine Only Sometimes: Archives Vol. 2, 1972–1975 continues Anthology Recordings’ excavation, and

exploration, of southern singer, songwriter, and psychedelic serviceman Robert Lester Folsom’s bountiful

archives. Recorded across Georgia in various bedrooms, a barn, and a motel room with a reel-to-reel and a

revolving cast of whip smart studio musicians in the first half of a dazed and confused decade, Sunshine Only

Sometimes furthers Folsom’s place in the canon of long lost but eventually found independently spirited,

high-flying American folk rock.

When Anthology’s reissue of Music and Dreams, the sole contemporaneous album released in 1976 by

Folsom, surfaced in 2010, little else was known of Folsom’s nearly five-decade deep archive of unreleased

demos and fully formed studio recordings. Born and raised in Adel, Georgia—both then, and now, a sleepy

hamlet with a population of less than 5,000—Folsom was fortunate to be minded after extremely supportive

parents. Exhibiting a precocious affinity for music, things went widescreen when he observed the same ferry

from ‘cross the Mersey as many others of his generation, carrying the four musical moptops to their paradigm

shifting appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show.

Soon thereafter, Folsom began religiously absorbing every morsel of musical output The Fab Four offered, as

well as that of their contemporaries. Yet, it wasn’t long before observation transformed into a motivation to

create. Even a children’s record player bought by his parents as a gift to him was traded off to a neighborhood

friend for a stringless, disheveled guitar (which Folsom’s father shined to prime and function for him in short

order). As time went on, Folsom’s innate drive and field of vision broadened; he began enlisting

neighborhood friends, classmates, and family members to fulfill his small-scale musical dreams, which would

increase in weight with the passage of days.

Over the next several years, while employing ingenious, home brewed over-dubbing techniques with his “love

at first sight,” a Sears 3440 two-track reel-to-reel tape recorder, Folsom served as the de facto

producer/arranger for any and all scrappy garage band or aspiring singer songwriter in the radius of Adel.

Abetted by his mobile recording unit, across a number of unusual locations, and assisted by guitarist and

collaborator Hans VanBrackle, this period produced the bounty of Folsom’s self-penned compositions which

make up Ode to a Rainy Day and Sunshine Only Sometimes. And eventually, this period of woodshedding led

to the formation of his rural-tinged, progressive, southern rock outfit Abacus.

Though carrying Folsom’s own singular sound and vision, Music and Dreams, in equal measure, chartered the

seas of smooth West Coast AOR before the yachts to come, while tracing the distinctly Californian sound of

Laurel Canyon singer-songwriter soft rock Americana, which tussled on the waters before the large vessels

overtook the big blue. Folsom’s earlier compositions found on Sunshine Only Sometimes reflect a darker-hued

mixture of mellow folk, downer vibes, and rural tones, revealing his talent for melody and hook was intact far

before Music and Dreams, with a keen sense of introspection making the dark and light equally resonant.

Sunshine Only Sometimes offers up another sterling set of tonally-shifting, sub-underground, alternate

timeline classic rock. The C&W-influenced, sprightly-pop of George Harrison—whose Dark Horse Records is

one of a handful of record companies Folsom and VanBrackle submitted demos to—is invoked in the

uber-melodic “Ease My Mind.” “Julie” brings to mind Nixon-era ragged ‘n’ ramshackled country-blues from

the Glimmer Twins’ pen, and the semi-acoustic, heavily-flanged, out-of-time psych-pop of “Lonely Lovers” sits

somewhere between a forward-looking glimpse at Music and Dreams and a demo from a would-be Cosmic

American Music king.

Unlike similar iconoclasts with crystal vision who held forth with the oppressive thumb of a musical dictator,

Folsom was ever in service of song, standing equally aside his collaborators, which uniformly engendered

affinity and respect lasting to this day. While a tick higher than the second-tier, the mountaintop was always

narrowly out his grasp. Though, with the right set of opportunities, bolstered by talent and drive, Folsom, if

not as a stand-alone, star-quality artist, could have led the career of any number of songwriters behind the

curtain who rode the magical musical continuum across the decades with faceless success.

Perhaps it was Robert and company’s playing “weird spacey stuff and ballads,” as guitarist VanBrackle

describes, in small town Georgia skating rinks, bowling alleys, and school dances expecting Top 40

dance-ready hits which held them down. Perhaps it was simply location. Though, the music of Sunshine Only

Sometimes is composed of an intrinsic ability to hear the music truly playing, as opposed to the space in air

heard by the lay-ear, which places Folsom’s music in a timeless space primed for perennial (re)discovery.