Coven – Witchcraft Destroys Minds & Reaps Souls (LP – New)

Limited vinyl LP pressing in gatefold jacket. We’ve reissued a lot of ‘cult’ albums at Real Gone Music. But of all the releases we’ve put out, this is the cult-iest of them all. That’s because it’s actually an occult album, the first record to bring Satanic themes to rock music. The upside down crosses, the ‘devil’s horns’ hand’s signs that are commonplace with metal bands both past and present – they all started here. Coven even had a bassist named Oz Osborne’and the first track on the album was entitled ‘Black Sabbath,’ for, er, heaven’s sake! So there’s no question that this 1969 album dealt with the devil first. While subsequent bands exploited demonic imagery and occult themes for commercial success and sensationalism, Coven were true (un)believers. Thus, the last track on the album, ‘Satanic Mass,’ is a full Black Mass, while the double-gatefold album jacket’which we have faithfully reproduced’not only displays a picture of Coven’s lead vocalist, Jinx Dawson, splayed naked across a ritualistic altar surrounded by hooded members of the band and it’s associates, but also includes the full text of a Black Mass along with lyrics to the unabashedly Satan-worshipping songs. In the end, Witchcraft was a little too far ahead of it’s time; coming out in 1969, at the height of hysteria about Satanism whipped up by the Manson Family murders, the album generated a firestorm of reaction, which turned into an inferno when Manson himself was photographed holding a copy of the record.