The penultimate number, an oddly-named pleasant piano-driven little groove called Goodnight Nelda Grebe, The Telephone Company Has Cut Us Off, has the Texas horns prominent again, before Powell reminds us that all is not lost. After all, The Kingdom of Heaven Is Within You. It's a brilliant closer, moody, spacy late night semi-jazz with muted trumpets and reeds with a gorgeous flute solo and soulful sax.
The album’s failure to sell anywhere near the number of copies it deserved to is difficult to comprehend. Play Mother Earth and you’ll more than likely get the same reaction as just about everybody who’s heard that last you’ve got to GO back to Mother Earth… Janis, one suspects, would have cracked around that GO. Tracy just keeps sliding upwards.
Everyone I’ve played the track to has been gob-smacked. It’s a performance that’s right up there with the very best around, and almost nobody knows the album but there are all sorts of possible explanations.
By the time the album appeared on the shelves the San Francisco scene was past its heyday. Other bands had grabbed the spotlight via Monterey Pop and the mainstream media and their careers were off and running long before Mother Earth was signing on the dotted line.
Maybe it would’ve helped if they’d signed to a major label rather than Mercury.
Other bands seem to have received more publicity for their recordings, though publicity didn’t always pay off the way it was supposed to. Take Moby Grape. Five singles off their first album, all released on the same day registered as extreme on the hip consumer’s hype-meter, but at least the band was heard of...
Even if it was for the wrong reasons.
Part of the problem may have been the need to figure out where to file the album. Deep Are The Roots was easy enough to file under Folk or Blues but Living With The Animals? Blues? Rock? Psychedelic? R&B? Assuming you knew of the album’s existence, whereabouts in the store were you going to find it? Tracy’s move to Nashville in 1969 certainly didn’t help either. Touring in support of Living With The Animals she and Travis rented a house there, and she later bought a small farm in the area where she has lived since 1973.