Howard Kaylan and Mark Volman, AKA Flo & Eddie, are two of the most unlikely popstars on the planet. Neither one was ever what you’d call a dreamboat and Volman was unashamedly fat and took great pains to point out that fact. They were also funny at a time when rock musicians took themselves way too seriously.

That could never be said of Flo and Eddie.

They started, of course, as the magic voices of The Turtles. “Happy Together,” “Elenore”, “Lady-O.” Then they performed with Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention for a memorable stint, including the 200 Motels film. Lending out their voices as session men, Volman and Kaylan’s distinctive harmonies can be heard on “Get It On (Bang a Gong)” by T. Rex, “Love My Way” by The Psychedelic Furs, Alice Cooper’s “Billion Dollar Babies” and Bruce Springsteen’s “Hungry Heart”. It’s nearly impossible to imagine any of those classics without their soaring vocals. They also contributed immeasurably to Blondie’s Autoamerican album.

For a long long time, most of The Turtles catalog and pretty much all of Flo & Eddie’s solo records were difficult to come by (Turtle Soup, their 1969 album produced by Ray Davies was a holy grail for me for several years). You could find low-fi needle drops of their albums on music blogs and specialist torrent trackers, but never proper sounding versions until Kaylan and Volman self-released their 70s albums on CD in 2008.

There’s one in particular that just floored me, The Phlorescent Leech & Eddie from 1972, recorded right after the twin mishaps of the fire at the Montreux Casino that claimed Zappa and the Mothers equipment (immortalized in Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water”) and seeing Zappa pushed off a stage in London into an orchestra pit by an enraged fan. Zappa was sidelined, in a wheelchair for the better part of the year and the band, i.e. the Mothers, became, for one album, Flo & Eddie’s back-up group. Dig the line-up: Jim Pons (of The Turtles and The Leaves) on bass. Don Preston on keyboards, Aynsley Dunbar on drums and Gary Rowles who had played in one incarnation of Arthur Lee’s Love on lead guitar.

The songs were very much in the style of The Turtles. In fact, the album was supposed to come out under The Turtles moniker, but legal reasons prevented it, hence they became “The Phlorescent Leech & Eddie.” It’s one of the great lost “classic rock” albums of the early 70s. Each song is nearly perfect in its execution and taken as a whole, the album is a stunner. No filler, it was probably my most listened to CD for all of 2009. I was excited to find footage of them performing one of the album’s standout tracks, “Feel Older Now” on Germany’s Beat Club television program.