7 posts tagged “psychedelia”

I raved incoherently about these guys six months ago, and my conviction that they are the greatest thing since sex has only grown stronger and more incoherent. Last time I was too lazy to post actual songs actually, like, here; but now I'm gonna post songs. Great ones. And you will listen, and then you'll be incoherent too.

There are very few records I can listen to and not think "Yeah, I could beat that". "Georgia" is one of them. I can't think how it could be any more a perfect thing of its kind; I'm not sure anything else of any kind approaches any sort of perfection so closely. Plus, the lyric is absolutely filthy. It's good stuff.

The Rain Parade, from their first album, Emergency Third Rail Power Trip (1983). The video's from 1984. Holy Toledo, those guys were good. Looks like they made the video after David Roback left, but he was still in the band when they recorded the album. Kendra Smith sings in the background on this. I have a notion that she played additional percussion too, but I'm not sure why I think that, so discount it.

The Brian Jonestown Massacre, wow, holy crap, they ain't half bad, eh? When they don't suck, I mean.

If you've seen Dig!, you've got your own ideas about these guys, but like, whatever, I mean, as long as Anton Newcombe's not actually kicking me in the head, I'll enjoy the records. And if I go to see them, I'll stand out of range. And quite frankly by the end of the movie I wanted to track down those smug creeps the Dandy Warhols and fucking kill them, so Newcombe ended up seeming really sympathetic by comparison, even when he was punching out his guitarist onstage.

So these are from, I don't know, somewhere in their vast pullulating catalog of strange and terrible sounds. Dunno the year. Both are on the retrospective comp Tepid Peppermint Wonderland, is where I got them from. Not the hip record to have, no doubt, but fuck off. Lots of MP3s on their website, by the way. Haven't gone through those yet.

UPDATE: Extra bonus critical praise! (from the last review on that ill-conceived page):

In an era of introspective, pasty PC alt-rockers who claim to despise their own fame, it's refreshing to see someone who just wants to snort cocaine off a hooker's ass and Rock Out for a change.

Never had much use for XTC as such; they tried way too hard. But when they relaxed and made music to listen to, they revealed an eerie and unexpected knack for writing songs that were good, not just good for you. Notionally incognito as paleopsychedelic throwbacks the Dukes of Stratosphear, they did an EP, 25 O'Clock (1985) and an album, Psonic Psunspot (1987). Both are pretty damn good, and you can get the pair on a cheap two-fer.

Skip Spence played drums in the original Jefferson Airplane lineup. After they fired him, he played guitar and sang in Moby Grape. Things went along not un-swimmingly until the incident in the hotel with the fire axe. That was in New York, when the drugs really got a firm grip. Moby Grape were recording their second album, Wow. "Wow" is one word for it.

They put Spence away for six months in the criminal ward at Bellevue. When they let him out, Moby Grape didn't want him back (it was them he'd been after with the axe), but Columbia gave him an advance to make a solo album. He bought a motorcycle, rode it to Nashville, Tennessee, and wrote and recorded an album called Oar in six days. He played everything himself. Then he got back on the bike and rode off into the sunset. That was December, 1968. His next move was to live on the street for thirty years, and he capped that one by dying indigent.

Oar was a bit iffy in spots. Which spots? All of them. It's very... iffy. It's overrated, but not as overrated as you'd think, for a record a paranoid schizophrenic made by himself in a hurry. Much of it is eerie, compelling, and at times catchy.

I've never had much patience with people who think the world began in 1967, ended in 1969, and never extended much beyond the Bay Area. They're either incurably narcissistic, permanently infantile baby boomers, or the boomers' poor dumb clueless offspring they've browbeaten into worshipping them like they worship themselves. Dirty fucking hippies. We hates them! In truth, most of what happened there and then was just fashionable, self-indulgent crap. Not all, though.

Here's Skip in happier days with Moby Grape, and on one of the sadder but more coherent songs on Oar. It's not all gloomy. In the Moby Grape picture, Skip's the prognathous character on the far left. He was Canadian, by the way. Just as you suspected.

Yada yada, Sister Lovers, The Madcap Laughs, blah blah.

UPDATE

Here are "The Moby Grapes" [sic] on the Mike Douglas show with Spence still in the band. Truly horrendous sound, Spence's voice is nearly inaudible, really not worth watching. I offer it for whatever it's worth.

The Legendary Pink Dots, Hallway of the Gods, 1997. I don't know much about these guys, except that the singer/mastermind is a Brit named Edward Ka-Spell (if that is his real name) who lives in Amsterdam (gee, I wonder what drew him there of all places...), the eponymous dots appeared inexplicably on the keys of somebody's synthesizer, and the quality of their output is wildly uneven. But I'll wade through a mountain of gutter balls for a home run like "Lucifer Landed". Somebody told me this track is a fairly clinical transcription of severe depression. Errr... OK. He kinda perks up at the end though, doesn't he? Whatever; it's a cool song.

Shame about the sleeve, though. Like that on Viva Saturn's Soundmind, it's an artifact of the Early Photoshop Era of album art. Very grim years indeed.

Dig the funny negative review at the Amazon link: "If this isn't not music, then I don't know what isn't."

One of the great rock'n'roll catastrophes of the last thirty years is the inexplicably drooping career arc of Steven Roback, a leading light in the microscopic "Paisley Underground" LA scene in the early 1980s. They did get some hype, but not much, and very briefly. You may recall a beer commercial from that era featuring a band whose singer had a green/aqua-colored National/Valco/Glenwood res-o-glas "map guitar" (sooo cool); I only saw it once, but a guitar like that sticks in your mind. That was the Long Ryders, from the same crowd. They kinda sank without a trace, rightly unmourned, but the guy with the National, Sid Griffin, now has a career writing liner notes for Gram Parsons tribute albums.

Roback was in the legendary Rain Parade, of course, with his brother David. David ended up in Opal with Kendra Smith (ex-Dream Syndicate); Opal later degraded into Mazzy Star when Smith moved on.

After two great albums (Emergency Third Rail Power Trip and Explosions in the Glass Palace, in print on a majestic, indispensible two-fer with a bonus track), one very good one (Crashing Dream, out of print), and a semi-unreleased mess (Demolition; I've got it, don't bother (yeah, I paid a few bucks, but nothing like the three-figure outrages at that Amazon link)), Steven Roback formed a band called Viva Saturn with other ex-Rain Paraders (take that Trouser Press article with a grain of salt; they've got David Roback's departure mis-dated by several years). The RP's wonderful, mind-altering lead guitarist Matt Piucci dropped in now and again on the albums. He's all over this track.

So here's the title track from Viva Saturn's Soundmind (1991). Find the record if you can. It's great, glowing stuff, but it went nowhere, and two albums later their label wouldn't release them (Restless, rumored to have done the same to other bands). Why weren't these guys famous?