Off the beaten tracks: Obscure rock'n'roll

BLUES: SUGAR PIE DESANTO

Of all the great artists to record for Chicago's legendary Chess Records, perhaps the most unfairly overlooked is Sugar Pie DeSanto. She stood no more than 5ft tall – but as she shouted in one of her better-known songs, "if you know how to use what you got, it don't matter about your size".

With her razor-sharp, don't-mess-with-me delivery, she was every inch a match for similar red-hot mamas such as Koko Taylor and Etta James, and was a far superior singer to Tina Turner, with whom she toured. She was a better dancer, too, with a famous stage routine that included acrobatic back-flips. James Brown was so impressed that he asked her to be his support act and kept her on the road with him for two years.

Born Umpeylia Marsema Balinton in San Francisco in 1935, she was dubbed "Little Miss Sugar Pie" by the bandleader Johnny Otis, who discovered her in a talent contest in the early 1950s. She eventually signed to Chess in 1960, but the label never really utilised her talent. In seven years on Chess, she recorded no more than 30 sides and released just one solitary LP.

It remains one of life's mysteries how such magnificent songs as "I Want To Know", "Soulful Dress", "Slip In Mules", "Do I Make Myself Clear" and "Use What You Got" remained so little heard. After parting company with Chess, DeSanto moved back to San Francisco where she remains a stalwart of the local blues circuit.

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ROCK: BLUE CHEER

When Eric Clapton was asked in 2005 whether Cream had invented heavy metal, he answered: "No, that was Blue Cheer." When the Cheer – named after a particularly potent strain of LSD – came roaring out of San Francisco in 1968, their fuzzed-up, stoner rock scaled new heights of distortion and volume. They were so cacophonously, gut-wrenchingly heavy that other Marshall-stacked power trios were made to sound like radio-friendly pop bands in comparison. One reviewer described them as "louder than God".

"We were second-generation punks with attitude and no skills," guitarist Leigh Stephens admitted in 2007. "Other bands tolerated us because it was San Francisco and nobody was into violence. Otherwise they would have kicked our asses."

One thing the Cheer did share with the other SF groups was a taste for hallucinogenic drugs, and their 1968 debut album, Vincebus Eruptum, appeared in a trippy-looking, embossed cover. "We were stoned on acid and thought, 'Wouldn't it be great if you could feel the album cover,'" the bassist Dickie Peterson noted years later. Inside was a riff-boiling sound to splatter your brains, driven by Paul Whaley's sledgehammer drums and Stephens's blues-drenched guitar noise. Outsideinside, their second, equally noisy album, had to be completed in the open air, according to legend, after the trio's shattering volume had destroyed the studio monitors.

After that, the tide turned against them. They were dismissed as "headbangers", and Grand Funk Railroad had arrived to steal their tumult. Along the way, though , they influenced everyone from Black Sabbath and Motörhead to Nirvana and Mudhoney – and those first two albums still contain some of the heaviest, crudest, most gratuitously excessive and joyously simple-minded rock'n'roll ever made.

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SINGER-SONGWRITERS: DAVID ACKLES

When David Ackles died in almost total obscurity in 1999, even the normally conservative Reuters news agency was moved to note that "he could have been another Leonard Cohen or Randy Newman".

Between 1968 and 1974, Ackles released four albums without ever bothering the charts. Yet the handful who did buy his records included an impressive coterie of fellow singer-songwriters who couldn't quite understand how they had made it huge while Ackles remained unknown. Elton John rates him a genius: when John first played in America in 1970, with Ackles as his support, he suggested that the billing should be the other way round. Phil Collins chose him on Desert Island Discs, and Elvis Costello claims to be "mystified" at the world's indifference to Ackles's "wonderful songs".

Born in Illinois in 1937, Ackles had been a child actor, a teenage jailbird and a private detective before recording his self-titled debut at the age of 30 in 1967, a masterful and mature collection of songs populated by stoical characters in various stages of desolation, presented with understated melodrama. Two years later came Subway to the Country (1969), which betrayed a debt to the stage composers Weill and Brecht and included a song about a child molester (not exactly the subject of the classic big-selling crowd-pleaser). American Gothic (1973) was hardly a rock record at all, more an extended piece of orchestrated musical art-theatre, which the music producer and Elton John collaborator Bernie Taupin has described as "almost Wagnerian". The albums stubbornly failed to sell and by the mid-1970s he had abandoned his recording career.

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INDIE: CHROME

"Regular humans such as myself always wore oven gloves when handling their discs for fear of death via some hitherto unknown space disease," Julian Cope (of The Teardrop Explodes) once said of Chrome. It was intended as the highest compliment to the duo of Damon Edge and Helios Creed, who emerged from San Francisco in the 1970s to create LSD-inspired music with a metallic otherworldliness – in effect, inventing post-rock some 15 years before the term had been dreamed up.

Inspired by a dual obsession with sci-fi movies and warping sound, the apocalyptic intensity of their dense, vivid epics travelled way beyond anything imagined by even the most audacious of the 1960s acid-rock bands. Theirs was an awesome fantasia of dense, mechanical noise, flanged and phased guitars and twisted voices drawing on such influences as the Kraftwerk-esque German band Neu! as well as Pink Floyd and Hendrix. It was memorably described by one critic as "like the Stooges playing Can in cyberspace". Their masterpiece, 1977's Alien Soundtracks, was a concept album that purported to be the music for a strip show set in a space-age totalitarian state. It included a song about sex with an android.

Edge and Creed parted company in 1983 after four extraordinary albums. Edge continued releasing less experimental records with a new band under the Chrome moniker, but by the time he died in LA in 1995 he'd become a sorry, reclusive figure; his corpse lay undiscovered in his apartment for a month.

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AMERICANA: JOHN FAHEY

"I was creating for myself an imaginary, beautiful world and pretending that I lived there," the American guitarist John Fahey said of his music in one of the last interviews he gave before his death in 2001. It was a world in which country, blues, folk, ragtime, hillbilly, jazz, Episcopal hymns and classical forms were uniquely corralled into a finger-picking style that led to such soubriquets as "the guitarist's guitarist" and "the original American primitive".

Born in Maryland in 1939, he bought his first guitar at the age of 14 and fell in love with the ghostly sound of the pre-war acoustic blues. His debut album Blind Joe Death (1959) pretended to be a collection of "lost" 78s by an old bluesman, with Fahey's name on one side and his fictional character on the other. Further albums such as Death Chants, Breakdowns and Military Waltzes (1963), The Great San Bernardino Birthday Party and Other Excursions (1966) and The Voice of the Turtle (1968) drew on an almost impossibly eclectic set of musical influences. One typical piece combined a motif borrowed from a Vaughan Williams symphony with a Skip James blues riff and Gregorian chant.

Inevitably, the only person ever to play him on the radio was John Peel. In later years, his life was blighted by ill health and personal problems. By the early 1990s, he had allegedly pawned his guitars before a spate of reissues and the championing of such alt.rock figures as Sonic Youth and Jim O'Rourke revived interest in his work.

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PROG ROCK: HENRY COW

Among the first batch of releases on Richard Branson's Virgin Records in 1973 was not only Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells, but also Legend (aka Leg End), a strange and demanding set of art noise by a militant tendency of highbrow, avant-garde experimentalists called Henry Cow. Tubular Bells sold millions; Henry Cow proved to be the least commercial signing in Virgin's history.

Yet, arguably, the abstruse, uneasy listening of Henry Cow has proved the more influential, feeding an immense European genealogy of genre-defying music at the radical margins where the distinctions between rock, jazz, classical and freeform improvisation blur.

Formed at Cambridge University in 1968 by the guitarist Fred Frith, and describing their music variously as "dada blues" and "neo-Hiroshima", they made their live debut supporting Pink Floyd and played art-rock that drew on such influences as Soft Machine, Captain Beefheart, Frank Zappa, Bartok and Messiaen. Their erudite boast was that they wrote music so difficult that they could not play it. The challenge was to learn how. Perhaps that's why they had to wait until 1973 to make their recording debut. Their first two albums, Legend (1973) and Unrest (1974), were defiantly anticommercial, full of weird time signatures and discordance but shot through with moments of odd beauty, in spite of their apparent contempt for conventional notions of tone and rhythm.

They later merged briefly with the equally oddball Slapp Happy, and kept their finest moment to last on In Praise of Learning (1975), their definitive statement of radical freeform noise. They split up shortly after, but reformed in 1998 to record the album Ca Va.

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PSYCHEDELIA: 13th FLOOR ELEVATORS

"Like Buddy Holly on acid," REM's Peter Buck once noted of Roky Erickson, frontman with the 1960s Texan pyschedelic warriors, the 13th Floor Elevators. Erickson reckoned that the peace and love generation represented the dawning of a new, enlightened age. "The new system involves a major evolutionary step for man," the liner notes of the Elevators' 1966 debut album proselytised. "The new man views the old man in much the same way as the old man views the ape."

Inside was a record that married driving garage rock to sturdy folk-rock tunes and hazy psychedelia, led by the band's classic hit single "You're Gonna Miss Me". As an early hippie manifesto, it's a better record – and more convincingly psychedelic – than the debuts by the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane and Big Brother & the Holding Company; all were more blues or folk-based.

The Elevators' progress up the skyscraper of rock'n'roll fame was rendered erratic owing to the mental state of the band's yelping, semi-crazed singer Erickson, whose self-destructive tendencies were exacerbated by his copious drug use. Various busts and bust-ups meant the summer of love was over by the time they re-emerged at the end of 1967 with their second album, Easter Everywhere, a psych classic that included the great "I Don't Ever Want To Come Down". By the end of the decade, Erickson had been committed to a mental institution. His later solo career has been similarly unhinged, but fired with an intermittent brilliance that has conferred on him semi-mythic status, alongside Syd Barrett and Skip Spence, as one of rock's great crazies.

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REGGAE & WORLD: THE CONGOS

So what is the most righteous reggae album ever recorded? Many connoisseurs will tell you that it's an obscure record by a vocal duo called The Congos. The reason so few ever got to hear Heart of The Congos has much to do with convoluted politics and feuding – as so often in the Jamaican record industry. The LP should have come out on Island, but at its recording in 1976, the producer Lee "Scratch" Perry was in dispute with the label. So, instead of being racked in every shop in Britain and America, it trickled out of Jamaica on Scratch's label. You had to track it down in specialist shops. But when you did, through the crackle of sub-quality vinyl, sublimity awaited.

The group consisted of falsetto Cedric Myton and tenor Roydel "Ashanti" Johnson. Their sound was unique; high and mercurial, their harmonies were almost airborne. They wrote potent songs, rooted deep in Jamaican mythology and ritual, with titles such as "Ark of the Covenant", "Sodom and Gomorrow" and "Solid Foundation". Perry added top session players and a sympathetic, gauzy dub-haze to create what was by some way the most consistent, breathtaking and beautiful record his erratic genius ever produced.

Yet the album is a glorious one-off. Myton made three more LPs as The Congos without touching the same heights, while Johnson laboured on as Congo Ashanti Roy. It took nearly two decades for Heart of The Congos to appear on CD, reissued by the Blood and Fire label in 1996. In remastered high fidelity, it sounds even more spectacular.

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MISFITS: BOBB TRIMBLE

Bobb Trimble made a grand total of two albums in his early twenties, the second released in 1982. He never had a record deal. The albums were privately released and he hawked them around Massachusetts record stores and radio stations himself. He can't remember whether there were 300 or 500 copies pressed of his 1980 debut, Iron Curtain Innocence. Either way, there were few takers.

In the 1990s, the original albums started changing hands on eBay for ridiculous sums. Trimble himself sold his last remaining copy of one of them for $500. Finally, in 2007, Iron Curtain Innocence and its follow-up Harvest of Dreams were reissued and Trimble suddenly found himself feted in rock magazines as a lost genius.

That he inhabits a world of his own is clear. Out of the cover of his debut album stares a rather earnest-looking, fresh-faced young man sitting on a stool, with an electric guitar lying across his lap. In his right hand he's holding aloft a machine gun. The music similarly suggests a troubled soul. Influences drawn from The Beatles, Pink Floyd, David Bowie, psychedelia and prog rock are woven into unhinged sound collages on mysterious songs of loneliness and desperation with such disturbing titles as "Night At the Asylum" and "Killed By the Hands of an Unknown Rock Starr [sic]".

In the sleeve notes for Harvest of Dreams (1982), he wrote: "As people of world peace, we must join together and confront the Opposition of Indifference with the Spirit of Totality". On its reissue, he claimed the record still has the same message for our own times.

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'The Best Music You've Never Heard' by Nigel Williamson is published this week by Rough Guides