Jim Sullivan – U.F.O. (Light in the Attic)

A seventh son of a seventh son, Jim Sullivan was a West Coast should-have-been, an Irish-American former high school quarterback whose gift for storytelling earned him cult status in the Malibu bar where he performed nightly. Sullivan was always on the edge of fame; hanging out with movie stars like Harry Dean Stanton, performing on the Jose Feliciano show, even stealing a cameo in the ultimate hippie movie, Easy Rider. U. F.O. was a different beast to the one-man-and-his-guitar stuff Jim had been doing on stage; instead, it was a fully realised album of scope and imagination, a folk-rock record with its head in the stratosphere. Sullivan's voice is deep and expressive like Fred Neil with a weathered and worldly Americana sound like Joe South, pop songs that aren't happy - but filled with despair. The album is punctuated with a string section (that recalls David Axelrod), other times a Wurlitzer piano provides the driving groove (as if Memphis great Jim Dickinson was running the show). U. F.O. is a sliceof American pop music filtered from the murky depths of Los Angeles, by way of the deep south. Yet, the record went largely unnoticed, and Jim simply moved on, releasing a further album on the Playboy label. But by 1975, his marriage breaking up, Jim left for Nashville and the promise of a new life as a sessioneer in the home of C&W. That's where it gets hazy. We know he was stopped by cops for swerving on the highway in Santa Rosa. We know he was taken to a local police station, found to be sober, and told to go to a local motel to get some rest. Some time later, his car was spotted on a ranch belonging to the local Genetti family, who confronted him about his business there. The next day Jim's car was found 26 miles from town, abandoned. His car and his hotel room contained, among other things, his twelve-string guitar, his wallet, his clothes, and several copies of his second album, but no note, and no Jim. It was as if he had simply vanished into thin air. Jim's family travelled out to join search partie..