Mandrake Memorial

The Mandrake Memorial formed in late 1967 when producer/promoter Larry Schreiber was asked to put together a house band for Manny Rubin's downtown Philadelphia club, The Trauma.

Schreiber started with Michael Kac (pronounced "Katz"), a folksinger/guitarist/banjoist/keyboardist who was already a regular performer at both The Trauma and Rubin's other club, The Second Fret.

Guitarist Kim King (of Lothar and the Hand People, another Trauma Club regular) told Schreiber about a drummer he knew in a similar situation.

Mandrake opened for The Doors, Big Brother and the Holding Company, Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention, Moby Grape, and Strawberry Alarm Clock, among others, and appeared on TV with Pink Floyd.

Soon Mandrake was performing college circuit clubs like Boston Tea Party, Psychedelic Supermarket, Electric Circus, New York's Cafe Au Go Go, the Second Fret and The Main Point.

Booked to tour the U.K. with Todd Rundgren's new band The Nazz, an English union disagreement prevented any American musicians from performing that summer.

To top that off, their completed "Mandrake Unplugged" album was deemed too uncommercial by Poppy label executives and never released — although the idea was to become a huge trend two decades later.

After disbanding Mandrake, Craig Anderton teamed up with Charles Cohen and Jefferson Cain to form an electronic trio called Anomaly.

Their only recorded legacy is the musical backing and production credits on three LPs by Philadelphia acoustic guitarist (and guitar teacher) Linda Cohen (no relation to Charles), Leda (1971), Lake of Light (1972) and Angel Alley (1973).

In the early 1980s, Charles Cohen and Jeff Cain went on to record and perform as The Ghostwriters (one LP, Objects In Mirrors Are Closer Than They Appear, 1981[6] and a cassette Remote Dreaming, (1986).

He wrote extensively for several music industry publications including Synapse and Keyboard, and was the editor of Electronic Musician magazine from 1980 until 1990.

[4] Already a graduate student in Linguistics, in 1971 Kac moved to Los Angeles to take his Ph.D at UCLA, then joined the faculty of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.