• O C T. XVI. • Coven — “Dignitaries of Hell”

WEEKEND DOUBLE-DOSE, PART II !


From the 1969 album Witchcraft Destroys Minds & Reaps Souls.

See what I did there connecting this old band with that black mass link in the prior post? That was pretty sly of me considering it's 3:00 in the morning and I've been up since 5:00 a.m..

Imagine, if you will, an alternate universe.
An alternate universe where Grace Slick was a hot blonde, and Jefferson Airplane  weren't a bunch of hippies singing about drugs, but were instead a bunch of hippies singing about Satan. Well, it turns out that you don't need to imagine that alternate universe, because Coven was exactly such a band!
 Plenty of great songs on this album to choose from, but this is probably my favorite. I love that Hammond organ in the right channel. It's a rare thing that evil ever gets to be this groooooooovy, man.

As an odd coincidence, they had a song called "Black Sabbath", and their bassist was named Oz Osborne, this despite releasing their album months before Black Sabbath's debut. They even beat Sabbath to the punch by a full decade when it came to "raising the horns" at their concerts, although in fairness to Dio, it never actually caught on until he started doing it with Sabbath.

Amazingly enough, despite the band's infamous pro-diabolical history, lead singer Jinx Dawson actually managed to make it to  the #17 spot on Billboard's Hot 100 in the fall of 1971 with her cover of Original Caste's anti-war song "One Tin Soldier" (credited to Coven, despite being just her and a Warner Brothers orchestra), which was used in the film Billy Jack.
Must have been some sort of magic...