Psychobabble's Psychedelic 500: #475 - 451

Welcome back to Psychobabble's Psychedelic 500, in which I count my personal fave psych songs from 500 all the way down to #1! Today, let's see what's freaking out from 475 to 451...

475. The Association- "Pandora's Golden Heebie Jeebies" (1966), in which you refuse to listen to today's song because The Association is the band that did the wretchedly sappy "Cherish" and because it's called "Pandora's Golden Heebie Jeebies", and I shout, "You're the one who's missing out!" just as you turn the corner and disappear from view forever.

Psychobabble's Psychedelic 500: #500 - #476

Here at Psychobabble, we love many genres, from punk to soul to new wave to jazz to alt rock to prog to goth. But no genre is dearer to your host's heart than psychedelia. The fanciful lyrics! The cacophonous yet dreamy music! The sitars! The Mellotrons! The unfettered Lewis Carroll references!

And so today begins a new series intended to be the mind-melting equivalent of licking a sheet of acid the size of the Sgt Pepper's gatefold. You will be counting along with me downward toward my personal choice for the single greatest psychedelic song of all time. Along the way, you will drift pass my 500th favorite psychedelic song, my 499th favorite, my 498th, my...well you get the picture. 

Each new installment will go live every Monday from now until it all wraps up in September or whenever (whoa, man, I'm way too high to do calendar math!).

I have limited my selections to the original wave of psychedelia, which means there will be nothing by very worthy later-day trip makers, such as Dukes of Stratosphear and The Flaming Lips, and much by those who did their doings between the years of 1965 and 1971. 

Although the years are limited, the artists will not be, though some are more favored than others because, to reiterate, these are my personal fave raves. So while you will encounter artists from NYC to LA, from Shepherd's Bush to Liverpool, from Brazil to Lebanon, you will not encounter The Grateful Dead. They're bullshit.

So slip into your cleanest Nehru jacket, flick on that lava lamp, fire up a joss stick, repeat "Namu Myōhō Renge Kyō" until you reach nirvana, turn to page 100 of The Wind in the Willows, and we will begin with our first batch of 25 lysergic anthems...

#500. Status Quo- "Pictures of Matchstick Men" (1968), in which a bunch of future pub rockers jump the psychedelic bandwagon with warped wah-wah guitars, a piercing yet infectious riff, and some nonsense about men made out of the sticks you use to light up smokes, though the average Status Quo fan is probably more inclined to light a Chesterfield than an herbal jazz cigarette.

Review: PJ Harvey's 'White Chalk' and 'White Chalk-Demos' on Vinyl

PJ Harvey tended to work in phases, beginning her career with a couple of psycho-blues breakdowns, continuing with a couple lusher, more somber productions, then onto two relatively traditional yet eclectic rock and roll records. Then came the outlier. There's nothing quite like White Chalk in Harvey's oeuvre, or any other rock artist's for that matter. White Chalk sounds like it was flown in from some hard-to-pinpoint era when people still lived in log cabins, lit the night with bonfires, and whispered of phantoms haunting the surrounding woods. Harvey plays ghost throughout every aspect of the record from her washed out image on the cover to her lyrics awash in death to her weightless vocals that never push into her trademark Beefheart bellow. Yet her banshee shrieks that climax the album will drag chills up your neck more assuredly than any of her earlier, more forceful stances. The archaic arrangements of hollow piano and acoustic guitar, dulcimer, zither, concertina, harp, and so on contribute immensely to the singular mood. Even on the odd occasion Harvey and co-producers John Parish and Flood opt for electricity, they use decidedly old-fashioned tools such as the Mellotron and the minimoog (courtesy of former Beefhearter Eric Drew Feldman). Harvey created specific sustained moods on each of her first four albums, but she had never done it as masterfully or specifically as she did on White Chalk. It's so specific that I'd feel as weird playing the album at any time but Halloween season as I would playing "Jingle Bells" in July. White Chalk is haunting, sincerely scary, beautiful, poetic, autumnal, gloomy, and my very favorite album by an artist who made several of my favorites.

White Chalk is so old-fashioned that it also feels wrong listening to it on any format but good old vinyl, and I've spent the last decade or so kicking myself for not grabbing the wax upon its 2007 release before it went out of print. So it's the album I've been most looking forward to since last year's announcement that the whole Harvey catalog would be remastered for vinyl. I'm not disappointed. Without any fanfare or even an indication on the LP jacket, inner sleeve, or labels, White Chalk spins at 45 rpms. It sounds fabulous. The vinyl is flat and quiet with a properly centered spindle hole. My copy has a series of unfortunately-placed scratches during the a capella opening of "Broken Harp", but this is more likely a flaw particular to my copy than a production error.

This release's accompanying disc of demos isn't radically different from the main feature. White Chalk - Demos sounds like White Chalk stripped of everything but Polly Jean's contributions. That means it's great because Harvey's work on White Chalk is great, but it's no substitute for the final album and no font of revelations either. It does make one fully appreciate the little ear-catching touches Harvey's collaborators added. White Chalk - Demos may have been of more interest to non-completists if it included the itunes-only bonus track "Wait", which is a really good song in the folk-rock mode Harvey had previously only attempted on "Good Fortune" from Stories from The City. Still, I'm glad it was not appended to the proper album because it strays so far from the utterly perfect mood of White Chalk.

Review: Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band's 'Safe as Milk' Mono Edition

Less than two years before releasing Trout Mask Replica, the album that would forever endear them to overly intellectual Rock critics, Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band put out a record that was considerably less challenging and a lot more listenable. As someone who favors good old Rock & Roll over cacophony, I personally rate Safe as Milk as Captain Beefheart’s real masterpiece. Despite its comparative poppiness and wholesome title, Safe as Milk ain’t exactly Up, Up and Away. Don Van Vliet’s pre-Tom Waits frog howl is still way out there, and the Magic Band’s fuzzed-up and freaked-out interpretation of the blues is still some pretty heady shit. What really puts this album over the top is the totally consistent, totally eclectic songwriting, which finds the group getting muddy not just in the blues but in jangly garage rock (“Zig-Zag Wanderer”), thereminized psychedelia (“Electricity”), hippity-hoppity country pop (“Yellow Brick Road”), pseudo-Native American percussive insanity (the amazing “Abba Zaba”), slow-burn murk (“Autumn’s Child”), and slow-grind soul (“I’m Glad,” a song I’m convinced former neighbors of mine fucked to every Sunday morning).

For a long time, Safe as Milk has only been available in stereo, most notably in Buddha/BMG’s 1999 edition that affixed seven bonus tracks to the original album. Sundazed’s new mono edition loses those bonuses, which already found Beefheart traveling less accessible roads, but gains a cleaner, drier sound (though there’s still a lot of grit in the creases—“Call My Name” remains particularly filthy). Unlike a lot of audiophiles, I don’t have an aversion to stereo, and in a lot of instances, I prefer it. The stereo mix of Safe as Milk really isn’t bad. In his liner notes to the new mono edition, David Fricke suggests that Van Vliet’s voice was placed randomly in the stereo mix. While I do agree that the decision to often bury his voice in a single channel was a poor one, the movement of his voice to the center at certain moments is not random but a way to put extra punch behind choruses or bridges. The instrumental backing is pretty full in stereo too. So whether you prefer the mono or stereo mix of Safe as Milk will most likely depend on whether you prefer mono or stereo in general. Sundazed does its usual exceptional mastering—full of warmth and depth— on its new edition, so if you’re on the fence about which mix you want, that just might push you off it.

Psychobabble's 20 Greatest One and No-Hit Wonders of 1966!

1966 was the final year in which the 45 rpm single was the unchallenged dominating force in Rock & Roll. Although that year included such major statements as Revolver, Blonde on Blonde, and Pet Sounds, the L.P. didn’t become the ultimate Rock delivery system until the release of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in mid-1967. 1966 was a year flooded with amazing singles from Rock’s most popular artists—“Paperback Writer”, “Good Vibrations”, “Paint It Black”, “Substitute”, “Eight Miles High”, to name just a few—but groups that never achieved the celebrity of The Beatles or The Stones contributed just as integrally to the rainbow quilt of ’66 pop. Some of these groups went on to develop mighty cult reputations. Some sank into obscurity. But they all made at least one monumental statement, whether it climbed into the top forty or not. Here are twenty of the most incredible one-off hits and flops of 1966.

Note: I had to amend my original list when I learned that Question Mark and the Mysterians had a #22 hit in the U.S. with “I Need Somebody” and Los Bravos hit #16 in the U.K. with “I Don’t Care”. That’s why “96 Tears” and “Black Is Black” didn’t make the final cut even though they’re often remembered as the work of one hit wonders.

20. “Why Don’t You Smile Now” by The Downliners Sect

While Lou Reed and John Cale were infecting the New York underground with their new band, Twickenham’s The Downliner’s Sect were attempting to climb the charts on the other side of the pond. They’d heard “Why Don’t You Smile Now” in demo form, perhaps unaware it had already flopped for R&B group The All Night Workers. The Downliners’ reimagining of the song as a hard-driving, echo-laden variation on “Louie Louie” didn’t win them a hit either, but its status as an early co-composition by Reed and Cale, who’d been grinding out made-to-order ditties for the Pickwick label, guaranteed its place in history. Its relentless fuzzy funk guaranteed its status as one of the great misses of 1966.


19. “Fight Fire” by The Golliwogs

With its nagging riff, hip-shaking percussion, pulsing rhythm, and mid-song freak-out, “Fight Fire” is the quintessential 1966 rocker. Yet San Francisco’s Golliwogs failed to turn it into a hit. No matter. A 1968 change in name and musical approach resulted in one of the biggest and best bands of the late ‘60s/early ‘70s: Creedence Clearwater Revival. “Fight Fire” isn’t as monumental as “Green River”, “Fortunate Son” or “Up Around the Bend”, but it is early and convincing evidence of John Fogerty’s songwriting talents… especially when played alongside The Golliwogs’ otherwise weak output.


18. “Eventually” by The Peanut Butter Conspiracy

With their universal love philosophy and ultra-dated psychedelic moniker, The Peanut Butter Conspiracy seem like prime candidates for irrelevance. But

Farewell, Don Van Vliet

Long suffering from multiple sclerosis, Don Van Vliet died yesterday at the age of 69. As Captain Beefheart and leader of the Magic Band, Van Vliet laid down one of the skankiest, fattest, most eclectic blues-rock records of the ‘60s with Safe as Milk before following the more avant garde muse that led to him recording the album for which he is best known. With its crazed structures, cartoonish lyricism, and freaky fusion of Rock & Roll, blues, and free jazz, Trout Mask Replica (1969) has to be the most demanding record widely regarded as a Rock classic. He continued recording with the Magic Band through 1982 before retiring from music to pursue expressionistic art. Van Vliet left behind an incomparable legacy that influenced artists ranging from John Lennon to Tom Waits to PJ Harvey.