THE GUARDIAN: Trimble made a grand total of two albums in his early 20s: the last was released in 1982. He never had a record deal. The albums were privately released in minuscule quantities: he can’t remember whether there were 300 or 500 copies pressed of his debut, Iron Curtain Innocence, but either way, there weren’t many takers for his brand of lush-yet-disquieting Beatles and Pink Floyd- influenced psychedelia in early-80s New England. He never performed live outside of the central Massachusetts area. “We just played Worcester County, we didn’t even play Boston,” he says.The problem was Trimble’s habit of employing backing bands largely staffed by schoolchildren: fearing for their liquor licenses, clubs were disinclined to book Trimble if he insisted on working with the Kidds, whose average age was 12, or the Crippled Dog Band, with their 15-year-old rhythm section. “A few places let us in that sold alcohol, but it was like pulling teeth, it really was, they told us to get the hell out when we were done,” he says. He doesn’t sound like he sees anything 
unusual about a 23-year-old man forming a band with a bunch of 12-year-olds, either, although the parents of the Kidds apparently begged to differ, pulling the plug on the band.
And yet, despite his nonchalance, there is something telling about Bobb Trimble’s conversation. His most-used phrase is “believe it or not”, which seems fitting, given the implausible coda to his career. Twenty-five years after hawking his last album around local radio stations and record stores, Trimble finds himself in the unlikely position of being a globally acclaimed singer-songwriter. Both Iron Curtain Innocence and its follow-up Harvest of Dreams are about to be commercially released for the first time by Secretly Canadian, home to Antony and the Johnsons. His work has been garlanded with praise by fellow musicians – Animal Collective affiliate Ariel Pink is a fan, and after hearing Trimble’s work, Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore was moved to comment that music “doesn’t get much realer than this” – while one British heritage rock magazine was so startled by the quality of Iron Curtain Innocence that it wondered aloud how anything so good could be so obscure, and whether somebody wasn’t making the whole story up MORE
Bobb Trimble plays The Rotunda tonight with Brother JT and Kutschy Rye Ergot