A singer-songwriter needs something greater than the typical self-indulgent three-minute tune to distinguish him from the hordes of Dylan aspirants. Technical innovation, creative songwriting and inventive lyrical imagery all help to elevate the solo performer. Geoffrey de Mers had these in spades, as his notoriously rare LP Geoffrey (Concert Arts, 1972) makes abundantly clear. Part Roy Harper, part Sandy Bull, the record contains a selection of long, meandering songs chronicling spiritual journeys matched with some shorter odes to mysterious romances.

Geoffrey propels his songs with a flurry of guitar styles - the music accompanies his vocals instead of just providing a backdrop. The songs are complex, simultaneously engaging in their emotional warmth and alienating due to their complex structures.

Against his wishes, de Mers (b. 1947) started studying classical guitar at the age of ten. His mother, a concert pianist, tried to steer him toward classical music. He resisted somewhat but picked up a sense of composition that accompanies an academic understanding of this music. Of much greater interest were the newly emerging rock, R&B and folk music scenes, which de Mers followed closely through the first few years of the 1960's. He began to write songs during a two-year stint at the University of New Hampshire, where he also played his first coffeehouse concerts.

"I was into Peter, Paul & Mary at the time. I developed my finger style by learning songs partially by ear that contained various strumming and finger picking techniques. When I taught myself Peter, Paul and Mary tunes, I was attempting to combine both Peter Yarrow's and Paul Stookey's guitar parts together into one."

His folk influences, including Judy Collins, Joan Baez and the Chad Mitchell Trio, as well as Peter, Paul and Mary who de Mers cites time and time again, imply simplicity in songwriting completely absent from the songs on his record. It is, however, helpful to appreciate his intricate guitar work as an attempt to meld two lead parts onto one instrument. Much of de Mers's guitar schooling comes from a disciplined attempt to recreate Yarrow and Stookey's guitar parts note-perfect. However, as his forthcoming album would soon demonstrate, his songwriting style lands about as far from Peter, Paul and Mary as one could aim.

de Mers continued to develop his style and stayed abreast of developments in folk music throughout the mid-1960's, especially Joni Mitchell, whose open guitar tunings had a strong influence on his songwriting. After dropping out of college in 1969, de Mers returned to the Washington, DC area where he began collaborating with his sister on the coffeehouse scene.

"My sister Theodora and myself sang in a coffeehouse in Washington called the Iguana that was a real happening place. It was the coffeehouse in Washington, really. There was a period of time when everybody who was anybody in the folk scene in Washington came through there and played there."

de Mers then hooked up with Concert Arts, a small label nearby in Maryland.

"I knew Chip Davidow who was the president of the company. When I found out that he was involved with promoting and he had this little label and so forth, I sought him out and courted him a little bit."

Davidow was primarily interested in working with classical music, but the unique performance and songwriting appealed to him enough to commit to an album, which was released in 1972.

A bold gatefold ...

Recorded mostly live in two-track stereo, the simplicity of the production stands in sharp contrast to the complexity of the performance. In this regard, it sounds much like a coffeehouse performance where the minor technical flaws are simply part of the parcel. To capture this music using state of the art recording technology would be a disservice, pushing it toward the crisp insincerity associated with slick mainstream artists.

... and a wistful back cover.

Of the eight songs on the album, only one clocks in at under three minutes, the conspicuously nostalgic "Yesterday's Shoes." On the other end of the spectrum lies the epic "You, Me, and the Ghost Man," which just falls shy of the ten-minute mark. This standout track finds few points of concrete comparison; it shifts without notice from style to style, from one sequence of its ambling tale to another, without a readily evident structure.

"That one was one of the quickest songs to come together. I had just been up to New York and hadn't been there since I was a kid. I was so overwhelmed by the different sights and sounds and the hugeness of it all that I wanted to capture in music these images and feelings."

Other songs have a similarly drifting quality, such as "A Tale of the Banshee" which owes its distinct narrative style to traditional British folk music - imported and transposed by America's favorite folk trio - and the mythologies of William Butler Yeats.

"'Tale of the Banshee' came from my fascination with Irish folk music at the time. I had a book by William Butler Yeats of Irish folk tales that included a description of the banshee, a female, witchlike apparition, with the upper part of her body naked. She would be seen pulling her hair out and wailing, accompanied by something called 'Coach a Bower' which was drawn by black headless horses forewarning death. So I just created a song around it. It was also inspired by memories from my childhood of the atmosphere of the Walt Disney movie Darby O'Gill and the Little People."

This influence of American popular culture makes the music distinct from the British ballad interpreters of the day, who were aiming for a more accurate recreation of song styles past.

"I think I had a Gothic flair. I enjoyed the idea that a song would tell a story. It would start at one point, then go through some processes and changes, and something would happen within the song. Through this, it would become something else as it transformed itself, ending circularly where it began, but when you get to the end, you have a different feel than when you started at the beginning. This is in a sense what happens with jazz music or classical composition, when you develop a theme and then redevelop it and go explore different directions with it. There was a period of time after this album when I got heavily into Celtic music. I bought the collection of Francis James Child's English and Scottish Popular Ballads, songs he collected in the 1800's and compiled into five volumes of books, all verses of songs handed down by word of mouth."

Unlike the Child ballads, de Mers's lyrics avoid an overt narration, instead relying on more abstract imagery serving primarily to establish a mood. When dealing with matters more personal, de Mers's open-ended lyrics avoid the triteness that often accompanies overindulgent self-reflection. The album also contains a few love songs leaning mercifully toward the ambiguous, notably the plaintive "Rainbow Lady," to which the back cover art pays tribute.

"'Rainbow Lady' is a vague song. It was about a relationship, and also a kind of dreamy hopefulness. It's not so much about the one person as an idea. I think a lot of the song came about from a naïve hope, as opposed to the concreteness of life experience, dealing with the details of a relationship"

The song acts as a tribute to this romantic ideal, apparently fulfilled at the time by its subject but certainly open to change. Such is the ideal love song, sung ultimately not in tribute to the object of love but instead to love itself.

The closing cut, "Poor Little Girl Song," belongs to that scarce genre of tributes to an incarcerated lover (next to the Zombies' "Care of Cell 44"), opening with the tragic, if slightly corny, "Let me see your poor face through the prison bars." This and other cuts such as "Hope is Today" have a tone of blind optimism rarely present in singer-songwriter material (outside of the Contemporary Christian community).

"'Hope is Today' was the first song I ever wrote. It's another one of those ethereal, hopeful, naïve kind of things. That's what really bothers me today - too much of the sensitive young man, too introspective, maybe not coming from enough life experience. I don't think I had all the grounding there to do it."

Paralleling the songs' thematic complexity, de Mers's music composition indicates well-trained and well-versed ears. His songs proved difficult to master, yet harder to remember.

"I realized I had to practice hard to maintain some of these songs, because if I didn't practice every day, things would slip through the cracks. At the time, because I didn't know the correct names, I made up chord symbols, and my own names for the chords in order to remember the song arrangements."

Perhaps the best way to sum up the album is that of folk music that necessitates creative transcription, with a libretto penned by a Gothic poet. Due to its limited pressing and promotion, the record failed to make de Mers a superstar - besides, in 1972, the charting musicians closest in spirit were Danny O'Keefe and Jonathan Edwards. He retreated for a few years to teach guitar, formed several folk groups along the way, until he met Meagan Lane in 1976. Together they founded 2nd Story, later to become the 2nd Story (World Beat Blues) Band, which perseveres to this day.

Due to the scarcity of the Geoffrey album, which today lists for upwards of $300, few have been able to investigate this masterful work without a serious commitment to tracking a copy down only after putting a few treasured items in hock. A pointlessly limited repressing of the album a few years back only served to increase the mystique around this lost masterpiece. Contemporary unreleased recordings exist on tape and acetate, so someone should get around to a proper rerelease before erosion sets in on the masters.