T.Swift & the Electric Bag is yet another one of those psychedelic-era mysteries that has left barely a clue as to its true identity. The group's sole album doesn't contain any sort of playing credits, nor does it even own a precise release date, although it is a matter of public record that the LP originally appeared on Custom Records. Some sources list it as a product of the Summer of Love, but internal sources (and cooler heads) tend to place its appearance more realistically as sometime in the spring of 1968, which would have been a logical time frame corresponding with the cover of the Jimi Hendrix Experience's title song, as well as the less-than-subtle "interpolations" from the Box Tops and Classics IV that appear on the album. The more hopeful psychedelic devotees point to a conceivable connection with a band called Tom Swift & the Electric Grandmothers, who released a 45 on Sound Tex out of Houston in 1964. That connection is tenuous, at best, and not really even that. As none of the guilty parties has come forward in the decades since the album was initially recorded, it seems more likely that it is a product of cynical marketing rather than a product of genuine artistic exploration. Whatever the case, T.Swift is shrouded in a far-out haze that, at this point, is unlikely to lift. ~ Stanton Swihart