Review: Vinyl Reissue of The Temptations' 'Psychedelic Shack'

When conservative Motown decided to dip its toes into the spiked waters of psychedelia, its LPs rarely committed fully to the genre's artiness and spaciness. For every "Reflections" there was a cornball cover of something like "Up, Up and Away". So it isn't surprising that Berry Gordy had some trouble wrapping his head around the more committedly conceptual works that artists like Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder served up in the seventies. 

What's interesting is that one of the label's most reliable hit-making groups and hit-making producers fused their minds to make a pretty far-out LP before Gaye and Wonder got all the credit for revolutionizing Motown. With Norman Whitfield behind the desk and The Temptations in front of the mics, Psychedelic Shack wasn't the one-foot-in-freaky-funk/one-foot-in-straight-soul affair that Motown's most recent records had been. The whole record is pretty trippy, from the raging smash title track to the improv epics "Friendship Train" and "Take a Stroll Through Your Mind" (whoa!). Even the fairly straight-forward ballad "It's Summer" floats around with flower-power imagery and sound effects. And the one track with the whiff of retread actually isn't one: in fact, the Temps were the first artists to record Whitfield and Strong's epochal and controversial "War"—more than a year before Edwin Starr took it to number one.

So, in short, Psychedelic Shack is a pretty great album, which makes it a worthy epilogue to Elemental Music's Motown reissue campaign I've been covering so closely here on Psychobabble since last year. Although the albums have been of varying quality, ranging from the so-so (Solid Rock, Neither One of Us) to the phenomenal (I Wish It Would Rain, Four Tops) and everywhere between, the audio and 140g vinyl quality have been outstandingly consistent. Sounds great, plays great. We'll miss you, Elemental's Motown vinyl reissue campaign. Adios.