The Mysterious Lord Sitar
While sitars appeared on various Indo-Jazz recordings in the early 60s, they didn't really make serious inroads into western music until George Harrison (under Ravi Shankar's tutelage) added its haunting, exotic twang to several Beatles recordings. Other less-talented guitarists soon figured out that traditional sitars were damn hard to play, so electric sitars were produced to make it easier to get that faux-raga sound. Pretty soon, you couldn't turn on the radio without hearing a cheesy sitar riff layered clumsily on top of what would otherwise be a pretty standard pop tune.
However, there is one album of pure sitar pop that stands head and shoulders above crap like Green Tambourine and Hooked on a Feeling, and that album is Lord Sitar, an LP of cover songs with the lyric melodies played on the aforementioned eponymous instrument. The cover of the Who's "I Can See for Miles" is an instant exotica classic.
The question remains though, who exactly was "Lord Sitar"? Some declared that it was none other than the Mystic Beatle himself, others asserted that it could only be Shankar or one of his proteges. But the truth is probably more pedestrian. The man most likely to have been the alter ego of the enigmatic LS was British guitarist, Big Jim Sullivan who recorded Sitar Beat in 1967.
