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In this country, the British singer-songwriter Roy Harper is best known as a song title — “Hats Off to (Roy) Harper,” on Led Zeppelin III, was named in tribute to him — and a legendary accident: In 1975, when Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters had trouble nailing the vocal on his record-biz satire “Have a Cigar,” Harper — a friend of the Floyd, making his own record next door — sang it to scathing perfection. Harper knew the sleaze and insult in Waters’ lyric more intimately than the Floyd or Zeppelin. His first albums of Dylanesque invective and pastoral sensuality — 1967’s Sophisticated Beggar and Come Out Fighting Ghengis Smith; 1969’s Folkjokeopus and 1970’s Flat Baroque and Berserk — came out on four different U.K. labels, and most of his nearly three dozen studio and live records were never formally released here. (more…)

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