Where the action is: Dan Bazzy (middle) and the New Dawn in Reno, Nev., 1971. Right: Clipping from a show in Lincoln City, 1975.

Hearing Dan Bazzy speak now, you’d have no idea he was once the leader of a psych-rock band. The 63-year-old drummer and log-truck driver is soft-spoken and humble discussing his wild earlier days spent as a musician who never quite made it. In July of 1970, Bazzy and his group, the New Dawn­—which hailed from Willamina, a town known more for timber than fuzz guitar­—recorded a 12-song record called There’s a New Dawn, pressing only 500 copies. Until this week, the LP wasn’t only rare, but costly: In 2007 it fetched more than $2,000 on eBay. Twice.

“We never released it nationally,” Bazzy says. “We sold it in the clubs we played throughout the Northwest, but that was it. Somehow it ended up overseas and became an exclusive collector’s item. I had no idea at the time, but it probably could have paid for my grandkids’ college.”

That There’s a New Dawn is seeing the light of day is due to the love of one man. About a year and a half ago, Jackpot Records founder Isaac Slusarenko contacted Bazzy about orchestrating an elaborate reissue of the record on CD, complete with bonus tracks and 24 pages of photos, recollections and insight on one of the great lost records of our time.

“When I first heard the record I couldn’t believe how good it was,” Slusarenko says. “I had the record on bootleg and just knew I had to make this available to more than just people with the ability to bid thousands of dollars for a record online.”

The New Dawn was the first in a wave of Northwest “psych” bands, taking the bouncy garage-rock of the time—think the Kingsmen or the Sonics—slowing down the tempo, and adding a healthy dose of eerie, minor-key organ dirges. The music on There’s a New Dawn is primitive and trippy—it sounds like it was created amid a haze of marijuana smoke.

“Everyone expected you to be on drugs,” Bazzy says about people’s initial reaction to the band. “We basically weren’t a druggy band—we drank quite a bit, but drugs never really factored. There was a little bit of pot and some speed, but I was really adamant that if we were going to go anywhere we couldn’t get caught up in that. I was the wet towel that was bumming everyone out all the time.”

After three years spent in the Army, Bazzy was discharged in 1966 and moved with his family to Oregon. Guitarist Joe Smith and keyboard player Larry Davis began playing music together at parties around town. One day Bazzy heard “lots of noise” coming from a nearby garage, introduced himself, and became the group’s drummer and lead singer. A year later, bassist Bobby Justen joined, but the group never recorded any original material until second songwriter Bill Gartner became an official member in 1970. For a while, the New Dawn attempted to make it: The members all quit their day jobs, began writing weird compositions rich in distorted fuzz guitar and creepy organ tones. They even sent the record to Apple Records in an attempt to win the Beatles’ favor, and grew their hair long.

“People didn’t accept you as a musician unless you had long hair back in the late ’60s,” Bazzy says with a chuckle. “But once we grew our hair long, people wouldn’t talk to you. You’d see [another] long-hair coming down the street and he’d be jumping up and looking because it’s like he had a long-lost brother.”

From 1968-1971 the group toured incessantly, playing weeklong stints in California, Montana and Idaho. Gigs in Alaska were so well attended that the band often played until 4:30 am and saw nothing but daylight. But when ABC-Dunhill asked the New Dawn to audition in Los Angeles, manager Gary Neland decided against it, costing the band potential major label deal. The sting was so deep that after returning from tour, the band—now all married and starting to have children—decided to settle down in Polk County, get normal jobs and soon became what amounted to a weekend bar band. All the original members besides Bazzy eventually left, and the New Dawn became a vehicle for his new contemporary Christian songs. He released an album in 2006, Rekindled, to little notice.

“It’s good to know that somehow we became more than a footnote in history,” Bazzy says. “It just dazzles me that an album that was never released outside of a tiny town in Oregon made it around the world.”