Dino Valenti: Dino Valenti
(Epic, 1969)

Having signed to Epic/ Columbia by Clive Davis in person but dissatisfied with the work of producer/arranger Jack Nitzche, Dino Valenti, of Quicksilver Messanger Service’s fame, had a second opportunity for recording his solo album, with producer Bob Johnston (Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash). The result “Dino Valente”[sic], was probably the best representation of Valenti's unique writing, singing, and guitar playing to get captured in the studio. 
Quoting Ritchie Unterberger’s words (from “Urban Spacemen & Wayfaring Strangers: Overlooked Innovators and Eccentric Visionaries of '60s Rock, Backbeat 2000) “the album's most arresting quality was the guitar playing, the 12-string guitar layered in shimmering reverb as it strummed the sad but pretty melodies Valenti was so skilled in summoning.  Dino's vocals, too, were bathed in echo, creating a hushed, one-man-alone-in-a-barely-lit-room atmosphere.  That ambience would also be the trademark of another low-selling cult acid folk album on Columbia in the late 1960s, Skip Spence's Oar. Oddly, his only hit single,"Get Together", was missing from the ten song list. 
While Spence invoked half-mad, ghostly echoes of country, blues, and folk that alternated between the angelic and the demonic, Valenti favored a sunnier if equally inscrutable vibe. 
Valenti was a notorious ladies' man, and many of the album's lyrics were trippy stream-of-consciousness one-sided conversations, seemingly directed toward a never-ending parade of beautiful but confused young hippie women. With valuable help from producer Bob Johnston, Valenti's 12-string guitar and voice was sometimes embellished with subtle but tasteful additional horns, strings, harpsichords, background vocals,  drums, and guitars, changing what could have been a solo acoustic album into a record that sat on the margins of psychedelic rock”.
When Ben Fong-Torres asked Valenti about the album for his Rolling Stoneprofile, Dino's reply was as elusive to grasp as the tunes themselves were. "Every song is different, like every day; a completely different thing, man. You sit down and something turns you on and you hear a timbre, a vibration because you're right this instant turned on about something. And it's in your mind that you hear it.  It may be soft, it may be fine, it may be heavy, it's just a certain set of tonalities, or sometimes it's just a set of chords that start going around your head...
The record was an artistic if enigmatic triumph, and as Tom Donahue (as quoted in Lillian Roxon's Rock Encyclopedia) proclaimed, "If every chick Dino's ever known buys the record, it will be number one."  That didn't happen; in fact, hardly anyone even saw or heard a copy, and the album quickly became nearly impossible to find.

Ernesto de Pascale