Do you think it would be an imposition to mention my favorite charity in the article?"

It's a Friday night in July, and Richard Orange is relaxing in the living room of gary Simon Bertrand, the Lafayette artist, landscaper and drummer with whom he headed up such ledgends of Lafayette's 1960's rock scene as Thomas edison's Electric Lightbulb band and shackles. "We were also the Mafia for a moment" says Orange. "Remember that?"
Bertrand says no, but maybe he's just playing it safe; no need to get one's kneecaps broken. But about Orange's favorite charity: "It's a wonderful organization out of San Fransisco called bravekids.org" he continues. "A lovely girl named Kirsten Fitzgerald has started it and now it's helping families and kids that are in a lot of pain because of catastrophic illnesses"

Eager as he is to promote brave kids ("Kristen used to be a girlfriend of mine," he confides, "and I'm so proud of her for doing this") Orange whose shoulder length hair matches his surname hasn't driven from Memphis to Lafayette today for purely philosophical reasons - That is unless promoting Richard Orange & the Eggmen (Sun studio/706), his Big Orange Sun, is an act of goodwill.
.

Granted fans of such elaborately produced 60's pop masterworks as the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper and the zombies' Odessey and Oracle will feel charitable towards it. Actually, they'll go nuts over it. Recorded over the course of three years at Memphis's Sun Studio, it skillfully skims the cream off the top of the swirl of trippiness and hooks that's long made psychedelia the ear candy of choice among rockers with taste and whips it into a uniquely delectable froth.

From the chiming Rickenbackers of "All the way to China" to the full-fledged *lysergica of the nine-minute "Yuppie Pie No.5" Eggmen glints of enough history-of-rock brilliance to float a boxed set.

Not that Orange is planning one. As the long overdue follow up to Zuider zee (Columbia), his 1975 album with the group of the same name, Eggmen's clearly not the work of a man who values quantity over quality. Still, the fortysomething Orange doesn't want to make his audience wait another quarter of a century before seeing album No.3, "And I don't think I would want to see my audience 25yrs from now either" he jokes.

A native of dallas, Orange moved to Lafayette in 1965 during his seventh-grade year and enrolled at a school he knew simply as "Judice" "Everybody though Richard was Cary Colts" says Bernard
"Yeah," says Orange, "because I'd just come from Cary Junior High, and it's team was the Colts, so I had a sports bag that said Cary Colts, They all wanted to beat me up because I put my name on my gym bag! Every other day i was having fights in Beatle Boots-"