Supergroups have been a thing in rock since 1966, when Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker ditched their former bands to form Cream, named because each was the cream of the crop on his instrument. The trend picked up steam late in the decade after Crosby, Stills and Nash (and later Young) soared up the charts. Soon musicians from various broken-up bands were coming together in new combinations, often to explore genres they couldn’t in their previous groups. A few of these bands, like Bad Company, became ongoing concerns, but most were together for just an album or three.
Consider Captain Beyond. With Deep Purple singer Rod Evans, Johnny Winter And drummer Bobby Caldwell, and guitarist Larry Reinhardt and bassist Lee Dorman from Iron Butterfly, they had plenty of experience and the chops to pull off their hard prog/jazz fusion style. Their self-titled debut album from 1972 often sounds like harder-rocking, less weird Frank Zappa, other times like a jazz-inflected Jethro Tull, with most of the tracks flowing together without pause. It only reached No. 134 on Billboard’s album chart.
They tried a more commercial approach on their sophomore effort, 1973’s “Sufficiently Breathless,” which made it to No. 90. But all the group’s members were embroiled in lawsuits with their previous bands, Caldwell left before the second album to join Rick Derringer’s band, and when Evans departed after their tour to support the album, Captain Beyond disintegrated. They reassembled in 1977 at the record company’s request for a final album, but Evans had disappeared from the business, and “Dawn Explosion” topped out at No. 181.
That’s Captain Beyond at its most accessible. “Raging River of Fear” from their debut album is more representative.
