Ned Zeppelin (1972)

Summer, 1972.

Nobody knew horses quite like Ned.

In fact, according to local legend, most of his horses were named Ned too. There was Fast Ned, Slow Ned, Big Ned, Little Ned, and at least one horse simply known as Other Ned.

Raised among back roads, fence lines, and open fields, Ned spent much of the early 1970s riding across the Northern Ontario countryside with a guitar strapped to his back and a notebook full of half-finished songs.

The stories say he followed old stone trails beneath burnt-orange skies, chasing distant horizons, campfire smoke, and whatever came after the last bottle ran dry.

Like the folk singers before him, Ned borrowed freely from the music around him. Trail hymns. Camp songs. Barn-floor melodies. Tunes that had been passed from one generation to the next for so long that nobody remembered where they started.

Pressed in small numbers and quietly forgotten, Horses of the Holy became one of the strangest records ever to emerge from the Canadian underground music scene.

Part folk album.
Part rock record.
Part frontier mythology.

The songs felt ancient and familiar, as though they'd been riding the back roads long before Ned ever found them.

The records disappeared.

The stories didn't.

Recovered from the Bud Bungalow Archives.