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What made them so remarkable was the guitar playing of Spathas. Even today listening to the solos he played in 1972 I still can’t believe the music he was making.

Brent Lambert of Kitchen Mastering, quite a guitar player himself, after hearing several Spathas solos from thirty years ago said “If this guy had come to America he would be a guitar hero and everyone would know his name.” If you liked the way Hendrix, Ritchie Blackmore, Jimmy Page and Eddie Van Halen play you will love Spathas and if you play guitar yourself you will wonder “If this was thirty years ago and he is still playing how good must he be now?”

Socrates made two albums as a three-piece, both pretty awful because of poor mixing and mastering though the songs and performances were good. In those days producers had no idea what to do with a group like Socrates. It would be like recording Rage Against The Machine after spending 20 years doing Herman’s Hermits. Later the group added a lead singer and different variations of guitarists, keyboards. At one time both Spathas and Tourkoyorgis played guitars. Vangelis Papathanasiou, otherwise known as Vangelis joined them for an album or two and made them more of a progressive-rock band with lots of keyboard, synth and guitar interweavings. But the three-piece version of the band’s first two albums and the original rock-blues style was probably their best shot at world fame.

In December of 2003 I took the first album which had been re-mastered to CD, to Brent Lambert at Kitchen Mastering and asked him if there was something we could do to make it sound better. He listened to it and told me there was. By isolating frequencies, equalizing and compressing he was able to take several songs from the CD and make them sound pretty good, almost as they should sound. If we had the original source tapes of course we could have done a lot more but the songs are certainly listenable and you can get an idea of what a great band Socrates was and what an amazing guitarist Yannis Spathas was then and is now. He may become an international guitar hero yet. He certainly deserves to be.

Socrates still plays. They are again a three-piece with Spathas and Tourkogiorgis joined by -Makis Gioulis, a fine drummer in the traditon of the band. Asteris Papastamatakis plays keyboards on some material and a female vocalist named Markela Panagiotou, harmonizes and does duets with Tourkogiorgis and sings a couple songs on her own. Still the best part of the night for me is when the band strips down to the core of guitar-bass-drums and they play the old songs from the Kittaro or jam on some Hendrix tunes. Maybe I am just nostalgic but I can’t help listening to them and thinking of what might have been. Had it not been for the fact that they were at their prime during the dictatorship then maybe Greece might have been known as the country that gave us Socrates instead of Yanni. Then again oppression can breed great art as an instrument of rebellion. Socrates with their long hair, beards and high-energy blues and rock and roll were a window on the world outside and the reason people crammed into the Kittaro every weekend. For that reason they belong alongside the great bands of Rock and Roll History.

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