Now, here’s a thing, a bit of a holy grail really if you are a fan of Doug Sahm in his early incarnations, the leader of various line ups of The Sir Douglas Quintet. The Complete Mercury Recordings is a very cool (and comprehensive) box set which contains six hard to find albums recorded between 1968 and 1971 (Sir Douglas Quintet +2 = Honkey Blues, Mendocino, Together After Five, 1+1+1=4 The Return Of Doug Saldaña and Rough Edges) along with a plethora of additional material including a whole disc of singles delivered in their original mono majesty.

This compilation is a reissue of a set originally released in 2005 by Hip-O/Universal Music Group in a limited edition. If you check out Discogs you can buy a copy of that release for just 113 quid but those good folk at Floating World have just reissued the set at a far more reasonable price and with a brand new set of liner notes from Alan Robinson who lays out the chronology and dissects the music in a magisterial fashion. It goes without saying really that this is a must buy for any Sahm fan but it is also highly recommended for anyone interested in the roots of Americana music as Sahm dabbled (maybe not the right word but he did so quite excellently) in Texan blues, country music, psychedelia, jazz and Tex-Mex with the various line ups who constituted the Sir Douglas Quintet.

A child prodigy, Sahm was playing on Texas radio before he hit his teens and was reputedly on the bill at Hank Williams’ last show (in Austin in 1952, Sahm would have been 11). He recorded for local labels in his teens and formed a partnership with Augie Meyers playing in various bands. It was when The Beatles hit the USA that Sahm and Meyers got their first break when local producer Huey P. Meaux, desperate to cash in on this British invasion, fashioned a band around the pair who then posed as an English beat group, christened The Sir Douglas Quintet. Surprisingly they had a hit single with the infectious She’s About A Mover which was driven by Meyers’ Vox Continental organ stabbing riff and even managed to do a short tour of England in 1965, appearing on Ready Steady Go. As Robinson says in the liner notes, the fact that several members of the band were Hispanic didn’t seem to get in the way of the pretence that they were part of swinging London. A speedily recorded album with the cheeky title of The Best Of The Sir Douglas Quintet was released on Tribe Records, unfortunately it falls outwith the range of this collection which sticks to the albums recorded for Smash/Mercury Records.

Mid sixties Texas wasn’t a particularly safe place for long haired hippies and Sahm was snared in a drug bust along with several members of the band in 1966. Following this he moved to California where he embraced the burgeoning counter culture with its attendant weed, LSD and free love habits. It wasn’t until 1968 that a new, expanded version of the quintet (the Sir Douglas Quintet + 2) released Honkey Blues and it’s this album which kicks off the compilation. Sahm never went full blown psychedelic, he was way too much of a Texan for that, but Song Of Everything and Can You Dig My Vibration do have a San Francisco groove to them while You Never Get Too Big And You Sure Don’t Get Too Heavy and the excellent opening song Are Inlaws Really Outlaws prefigured the jazz/soul/rock vibes of bands such as Blood Sweat & Tears, albeit with Sahm’s groove at the fore. The album failed to make much commotion so its follow-up, Mendocino, found Sahm retreating to the original quintet sound with Meyers back in the organ seat. Result, a hit single with the title song and what is probably the band’s best and certainly best known album (a reissue on Opal Records in the UK in 1975 certainly helped). It’s hard to resist Sahm’s spoken word intro to the opening song Mendocino, “The Sir Douglas Quintet is back and we’d like to thanks all our beautiful friends all over the country and all the beautiful vibrations. We love you,” just as Meyer’s signature Vox organ weighs in. It’s a fabulous album, the centrepiece being At the Crossroads, Sahm’s ultimate tribute to his home state although it is given a close run by the slightly psychedelic stylings of Texas Me. Meanwhile I Don’t Want is a Gene Clark like folk rock number and Lawd, I’m Just A Country Boy In This Great Big Freaky City is a rollicking bar room honky tonker which finds Sahm somewhat overwhelmed by the bright light attractions of SF and just yearning to be back in his local bar drinking Lone Star beer. The add a reminder of their earlier success with a revisit to She’s About A Mover giving it a much wiggier and freaky workout.

After Mendocino, Sahm never bothered the charts again but the quintet ploughed on. 1970 saw two albums released, Together After Five and 1+1+1=4, neither of which garnered too much attention and, as such, have been difficult to grab a hold of until now. Thankfully they are both included here and while neither approaches the level of Mendocino they are both well worth a listen. Together After Five opens with the splendid Tex-Mex wham which is Nuevo Laredo and Sahm sings again of his exile in California on the plaintive acoustic lament which is I Don’t Want To Go Home. Magic Illusion resurrects the Vox Continental organ stabs with some success and Sahm closes the album with a rough edged medley of Dylan’s One Too Many Mornings and his own Got To Sing A Happy Song which prefigures his collaboration with Dylan on Sahm’s solo debut on Atlantic Records. 1+1+1=4 is a more rounded album which maintains the elements of the quintet, especially on the opening number Yesterday Got In The Way while Be Real is a fiddle driven country number and Catch the Man On The Rise sneaks its way into very early Little Feat territory with its snakelike guitar and bustling rhythm. There’s also a hint of Lowell George in the dusty country rock of Tortilla Flats.

Sahm returned to Texas to record The Return Of Doug Saldana, the last of his “official” albums on Smash/Mercury and he goes out with a bang. Another album which has remained in purgatory for far too long it’s here in its entirety and most welcome it is. Released in 1971 the album is perhaps the epitome of the stoned groover returning home and revisiting his saloons with a wide grin and a pack of ace musicians in his back pocket. She’s Huggin’ You, But She’s Lookin’ At Me is greasy Texas bar room blues at its best while Keep Your Soul is a splendid country styled song which knocks similar attempts by bands such as The Byrds out of the park. The hippie California days are recalled in the epic Stoned Faces Don’t Lie but Texas is at the forefront on the stripped back acoustic song Oh Lord, Please Let It Rain In Texas. Texas musicians get a shout out on Sahm’s rendition of T Bone Walker’s Papa Ain’t Salty (a song he revisited on his Atlantic Records debut) and Freddy Fender’s Wasted Days And Wasted Nights with Sahm’s introduction to the song reciprocated by Fender when he played it there afterwards.

The last album to be collected here is Rough Edges, a rag bag assortment of songs released by Mercury in 1973 to capitalise on Sahm’s ascendancy when his Atlantic records album (featuring Dylan) created waves. Far from being rock bottom, it’s actually quite a grand listen and it opens strongly with the double whammy of Sir Doug’s Recording Trip, an autobiographical song which smokes with Meyer’s organ driving the song along, along with You’re Doing It Too hard, a Seeds’ like punk rock sneer of a song with a wicked and outrageous guitar solo. These songs were far too good to lie in an archive; sure enough they are rough edged but all the better for that. The remainder of the album is almost as good with Hello Amsterdam another trip into autobiography while The Homecoming is up there with At The Crossroads. As with all of the albums collected here, Rough Edges has been difficult to find in the wild so it’s inclusion here rights a mighty wrong.

Aside from the albums there is a plethora of additional songs. There’s a four song EP featuring Spanish versions of Mendocino and three others along with a brace of Doug Sahm productions, two songs by legendary Texas musician Roy Head , recorded in 1968 with Lovin’ Man On Your Hands quite an extraordinary slice of soulful southern rock, and four by bluesman Junior Parker. Topping all this is the fifth disc in the box set which gathers mono versions of the A and B sides of the Quintet’s singles from 1968 until 1972, 22 songs in all. This is the icing on the cake on a reissue which cannot be faulted and should be essential listening for anyone interested in roots and Americana music.

Buy it here