The Jim Sullivan Story

In March 1975, Jim Sullivan mysteriously disappeared outside Santa Rosa, New Mexico. His VW bug was found abandoned, his motel room untouched. Some think he got lost in the desert. Some think he fell foul of a local family with alleged mafia ties. Some think he was abducted by aliens. By coincidence — or perhaps not — Jim’s 1969 debut album was titled UFO Released in tiny numbers on a private label, it too was truly lost, until Seattle’s Light In The Attic Records begun a years-long quest to give it the full release it deserves — and to solve the mystery of Sullivan’s disappearance. Only one of those things happened. For record collectors, some albums are considered impossible to get hold of, records so rare you could sit on eBay for years and not get a sniff of a copy. UFO is one of those albums. A seventh son, Jim Sullivan was a West Coast should-have-been, an Irish-American former high school quarterback whose gift for storytelling earned him cult status in the Malibu bar where he performed nightly. Sullivan was always on the edge of fame; hanging out with movie stars like Harry Dean Stanton, performing on the Jose Feliciano show, even stealing a cameo in the ultimate hippie movie, Easy Rider. Friend and actor Al Dobbs thought he could change all that, and founded a label — Monnie Records — to release Jim’s album, enlisting the assistance of Phil Spector’s legendary sessioneers The Wrecking Crew to do so. That’s Don Randi, Earl Palmer and Jimmy Bond you can hear …