The House of Leather, released in 1969 by Minneapolis sextet Blackwood Apology, is a Civil War-era concept album that morphed into a sellout rock musical, written by an ex-garage-pop hitmaker and powered by enough Hammond organ to set a chapel on fire.
To understand how House of Leather happened, you have to start with Dale Menten. By 1968, Menten was already a Minnesota music scene veteran, a guitarist and writer whose previous band, the Gestures, had cut “Run, Run, Run” in 1964, a snarling little Midwest garage classic. He’d stayed friendly with the Castaways (the Minneapolis quintet behind the immortal “Liar, Liar”) since the Gestures days, and one afternoon, as he tells it, they came to him with an offer. “One day, the Castaways approached me and asked if I’d like to do an album with them.” He played them what he’d been working on, a song cycle set in the Civil War era that he says “just seemed to flow out of me. I wrote it for me; I had no interest in recording it.” They wanted to record it anyway.
The resulting album, a vocal pop/rock concept piece queued up for national release on a major label, needed a band to take it on the road. Menten assembled one in Minneapolis, christened it Blackwood Apology (later shortened to just Blackwood), and brought along vocalist Dennis Libby, the only other player from the studio sessions.
The rest of the lineup were Twin Cities scene heads who could handle Menten’s originals plus blues and rock standards run through their own freaked-out arrangements. They worked. By late 1968 and into 1969, Blackwood Apology were headlining the New City Opera House, playing the West Bank’s Dania Hall, and opening for the Grateful Dead at the Labor Temple.
Then, in early 1969, Menten did something most concept-album writers only ever talk about: he took the record off the turntable and put it on a stage. In collaboration with a playwright, director, and producer, House of Leather became a full rock musical, with Blackwood providing the live score nightly.
“It sold out every night,” Menten remembers. “It was truly an incredible experience.” It ran first at the Cricket Theater in Minneapolis and then at the Crawford Livingston in St. Paul, a real, working, sold-out rock opera in the heart of flyover country, while Broadway was still trying to figure out what to do with Tommy.
As a record, House of Leather sits in one of the great ’69 sweet spots, that brief moment when sunshine-pop harmonies, Broadway-leaning ambition, and lysergic studio craft were all elbowing each other for the same console. There are ethereal ballads, mind-bending guitar solos, stacked vocal harmonies, and that gorgeous, churchy, ever-present Hammond.
If you’ve spent time with the Pretty Things’ S.F. Sorrow, the Kinks’ Arthur, the Millennium’s Begin, or any of the better psych-meets-musical-theater swings of the era, House of Leather slots right in beside them, but with a regional, Midwestern dialect that nothing else quite has. The Minnesota Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame inducted Blackwood Apology in 2007.
Fans of S.F. Sorrow, Tommy, the Millennium, Procol Harum, and the lost American concept records of the late ’60s should dig this one.
Check out The House of Leather by Blackwood Apology on Bandcamp here.
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