All or Nothing at All (feat. Father Yod)

While there is no such thing as a typical Father Yod/Yahowa record, All or Nothing at All, the last album billed to Father Yod & the Spirit of '76, is probably the least typical. Father Yod himself, for the first time, did not appear on the record (although he's on the cover), and the haphazard psychedelic improv of the previous three Father Yod outings had vanished. Instead there was timid singer/songwriter soft rock, written and performed by various members of the Yod clan (both men and women), from the sound of things (there are no credits with the disc). The preponderance of piano ballads leads one to believe that Neil Young's "After the Gold Rush" was a serious hit around the Yod camp. There are also obvious shades of Carole King, Joni Mitchell, James Taylor, Elton John, and Imagine-era John Lennon. Should someone ever decide to do a rarities compilation solely composed of rejected singer/songwriter demos submitted to major labels in the early 1970s, it would probably sound something like this: well-intentioned, derivative, benign, and relatively uninspired. Only on the jolly-to-the-point-of-idiocy singalong "Party Song" are there traces of the mania characterizing the Yod/Yahowa output. It's undoubtedly the Father Yod/Yahowa effort that will appeal least to the psych-heads who covet their rarities. Conversely, it's probably the only one (with the possible exception of Savage Sons of Yahowa) that mainstream listeners could stand to hear without demanding that it be taken off the stereo. The album has been reissued as one disc of the 13-CD God and Hair: Yahowa Collection box set, with four bonus tracks from non-LP singles. These sound like they were recorded around the same time, and are in the same subdued singer/songwriter style, with the exception of "The Great Woe," which sounds more like a hippie take on a Native American chant.