Sandy Bull along with Robbie Basho make up the second tier of American Primitive Guitarists from the sixties. The pair’s being relegated to that lower echelon isn’t based on talent as much as both performer’s inability to pull in as wide an audience as John Fahey, Leo Kottke and others associated with the movement. That being said, both Bull and Basho rank as two of the most talented players to record in experimental modes during the sixties – in America, with guitars, at least.

Whereas Basho and Fahey sought to incorporate Eastern sounds, the first winding up with a cheese ball approximation, Bull used the popular idea to guide further inclusions of California styled, sunshine pop and nascent garage stuff. It’s probably due to his unwieldy and sometimes confusing amalgam of sounds that Bull was incapable of making a huge name for himself.

Bull, during the early sixties, had been focused in mainly acoustic styles, but always worked to accompany himself on recordings by using a vast number pf overdubs to arrive at the desired result. This approach, while not widely used at the time by folks beyond Les Paul and Chet Atkins, also informed Bull’s recording of E Pluribus Unum in 1968.

The album, split into two side long compositions found the guitarist beholden to then current rock trends and immediately sounds distant from anything that Fahey and others were attempting at the time – Fahey’s America, released in 1971 sported drumming, but not until the nineties did he make use of electric guitars on his recordings.

Regardless of Bull’s adventurous nature, the tunes are immaculate representations of exploratory psych stuff that might come off as indulgent today. But again, it was 1968. “No Deposit-No Return Blues” is pretty much what its title portends. The entirety of the track is Bull’s dalliance with folk, rock and blues, his slinky electric guitar, not sounding too different than Paul’s at times.

What the album is best known for, though, is “Electric Blend,” which takes up twenty plus minutes of the album’s second side. Beginning in less obtrusive tones, the Eastern folk of the track’s introduction is a marked difference from “Blend,” a track included on an album released prior to E Pluribus Unum. While both efforts incorporate overt Eastern influences, this latter song winds up sounding reserved, if only for it’s eschewing percussion. Either way, another boss outing for a guitarist who deserves a bit more respect than he’s attained over time.