Ograf
Tom Olson and Mitch Larson, childhood friends in Granite Falls, Minnesota, headed to Fargo in the fall of 1972 to study animal husbandry at North Dakota State. They ended up spending most of their time teaching each other Jim Croce covers and playing a precursor to Dungeons and Dragons. In the spring of 1973, their lives changed after a chance encounter with Zach Schmidt, the evening clerk at Vince's Vinyl, one of two independent record stores in town. Schmidt had dropped out of State three years earlier to pursue his passion--a very large drum kit--and kicked around with several local bands without much success. Deciding to get together to jam, the trio discovered an unusual chemistry--one that propelled them to develop better than average technical skills and a highly complex musical philosophy.
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Naming itself Ograf (Fargo spelled backward), the trio released a single in late 1973; "Penguin Song" (backed with "Interstellar Lunch") received some local airplay, but no label interest. Undeterred, they focused their attention in early 1974 on crafting their masterpiece, a suite of four songs. The resulting self-produced gatefold double album "Druids, Awaken" was released in the summer of 1974. An overnight DJ at the university station took a liking to the album (mostly because he could let the thing run and eat up more than an hour of air time), but otherwise the effort was a complete failure. Music historians have cited at least two possible reasons. First, although Schmidt was a highly proficient and technical drummer, he only was capable of playing in 7/8 time, lending a certain "sameness" to the songs. Second, the band was exclusively instrumental. (Their one vocalist tryout was ruled a "disaster" when Katherine "Kittykat" Johnson refused to sing in any language other than Norwegian.) As a result, it was essentially impossible for the listening audience to grasp the depth of Ograf's thematic concept (for example, the premise of "Druids, Awaken" centered on a shape-shifting space priestess who summoned long deceased inhabitants of Celtic lands for an epic lightship journey to populate a distant desert planet orbiting a red dwarf--or something like that). Ograf folded shortly after the album's release.