Psychobabble's Psychedelic 500: #50 - 26

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 got the munchies from 50 to 26...

50. Nazz- "Forget All About It" (1969), in which if you haven't got time to rest then take the record off now... NOW!!

Psychobabble's Psychedelic 500: #125 - 101

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 following the White Rabbit from 125 to 101...

124. The Turtles- "You Showed Me" (1968), in which The Turtles take an old folk-rock tune The Byrds couldn't be bothered to release and turn it into something sinister and majestic.

Psychobabble's Psychedelic 500: #175 - 151

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 discovering the meaning of life in a blade of grass from 175 to 151...

175. The Incredible String Band- "You Get Brighter" (1968), in which The Incredible String Band create such a light and joyful psych-folk confection that even atheists get wrapped up in their chants of "Krishna!"

Psychobabble's Psychedelic 500: #325 - 301

 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 smoking a number from 325 to 301...

325. Os Mutantes- "Adeus Maria Fulô" (1968), in which Os Mutantes give the clearest possible response to the question, "Wait...so what exactly is Tropicália?"

Psychobabble's Psychedelic 500: #375 - 351

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 mellowing out from 375 to 351...

375. The Doors- "People Are Strange" (1967), in which Jim Morrison sings a jaunty little number about how you shouldn't be a weirdo, apparently without ever passing a mirror in the process.

Psychobabble's Psychedelic 500: #450 - 426

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 being beautiful from 450 to 426...

450. The Byrds- "Old John Robinson" (1968). in which The Byrds take a sort of old-fashioned folk tune and bring it up to date with a baroque string interlude and mega-phasing.

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: Audiophile Vinyl Reissue of Donovan's 'The Hurdy Gurdy Man'

The press loved to cop out and make trite Dylan comparisons, but Donovan was always a much more eclectic creature than that. Even during his early "folkie" days he was playing with jazz on things like "Sunny Goodge Street" that could never be mistaken for Bob. And once he remade himself as a sort of psychedelic-pop mystic, his albums started taking on unique and cohesive flavors quite unlike his initial solo acoustic guitar dominated albums. With his break through, Sunshine Superman, he crafted a fine and florid folk-raga record that made more extensive use of the sitar than The Beatles ever did. With "Mellow Yellow" he committed to coffee-house jazz for much of the record, and with A Gift from a Flower to a Garden, he created a children's record hippie parents surely stomached better than they would The Best of Burl Ives. 

Review: 'Decade of Dissent: How 1960s Bob Dylan Changed the World'

Bob Dylan has been narrow-sightedly lionized for his idealism, misrepresented as a protest singer, and denigrated as a disappointment for embracing beats and electricity. But despite his almost compulsive self-mythologizing, Dylan probably never wanted to be anything more than a successful songwriter, and no one's going to say he didn't achieve that. The number of powerful or timeless songs he wrote in the sixties alone is staggering. That so much of his autobiography was bullshit seems to matter little when you consider that the guy wrote "Like a Rolling Stone" and "Don't Think Twice It's Alright" and "My Back Pages" and "Positively 4th Street" and "Visions of Johanna" and so on and so on. 

Review: Vinyl Edition of The Animals' 'Retrospective'

Last spring ABKCO reissued The Animals' first four U.S. LPs with excellent mono sound, and the excellence of most of those albums rebutted any notion that The Animals were never much of an album group. As essential as those LPs are for British blues fanatics, The Animals were mostly a singles group who did their best work when slathering some Newcastle grit and growl over Tin Pan Alley tunes. One of their very best single sides, Atkins and D'Errico's "It's My Life", was not on a proper LP, so the first release of the 2004 compilation Retrospective would be a crucial compliment to those four proper LPs if "It's My Life" was its only track. 

Review: 'The Inner Light: How India Influenced The Beatles'

The influence of Indian culture on The Beatles' lives and music was far reaching. George Harrison's overwhelming love of Indian classical music drove him to study the sitar seriously, which helped to expand an appreciation for that music-- and his teacher, Ravi Shankar-- throughout the world. His interest in Indian philosophy led him and the rest of The Beatles to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, with whom they studied Transcendental Meditation (TM). The universal love philosophy that has more in common with Indian philosophy than western ideals was integral to The Beatles' psychedelic-era persona. After The Beatles, John Lennon sang about karma and George Harrison's worked to raise awareness of the suffering of India's neighbor Bangladesh. Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr continue to stump for David Lynch's TM promoting foundation today.

Review: 'Ready Steady Go!: The Weekend Starts Here'

The most tragic consequence of the shortsightedness of the early television era is that scant footage from the 173 episodes of Ready Steady Go! survives. Only nine complete episodes, one Motown special, and a handful of clips remain. That anyone would have wipe 120-or-so hours of The Beatles, The Supremes, the Stones, The Kinks, The Animals, Martha and the Vandellas, The Zombies, Dusty Springfield, The Ronettes, The Four Tops, Small Faces, or series mascots The Who performing at the height of their powers is criminal, and the pain only stings harder when you read Andy Neill’s new book Ready Steady Go!: The Weekend Starts Here.

Review: 'Jon Savage’s 1965-1968: The High Sixties on 45'

In 2016, Rolling Stone writer Jon Savage began curating double-CD compilations for Ace Records in the UK. Each set was a sort of fantasy mid-sixties pirate radio playlist. His 1965 set mainly featured A-list rock and soul artists such as The Kinks (“See My Friends”), The Who (“Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere”), and The Supremes (“My World Is Empty Without You”), but there was also a sprinkling of more obscure luminaries such as Thee Midniters (“Land of 1,000 Dances Pt. 1”), The Spades (“We Sell Soul”), and Alvin Cash & the Crawlers (“Twine Time”). Each comp devoted to 1966 through 1968 followed a similar format.

To put all of these ace CDs onto vinyl would have required about twelve vinyl discs. Instead, Savage and Ace have opted to boil 192 tracks down to a sampling of 32 for a single, double-LP set. Although some of the big, big artists remain—Donovan with “Hey Gyp”, The Association with “Along Comes Mary”, James Brown with “Tell Me That You Love Me”, Gladys Knight and the Pips with “Take Me in Your Arms and Love Me”, Buffalo Springfield with “Mr. Soul”—Jon Savage’s 1965-1968: The High Sixties on 45 mostly spotlights the artists whose sides are less easy to find on vinyl. So while tracks by The Kinks (“Wonderboy”) and Aretha Franklin (“I Say a Little Prayer”) keep listeners oriented with familiar sounds, we can mostly concentrate on making some new discoveries, such as The Anglos’ infectious soul raver “Incense”, Norma Tanega’s quirky folk popper “Walkin’ My Cat Named Dog”, Ray Sharpe and the King Curtis Orchestra’s dance hall anthem “Help Me (Get the Feeling) Pt. 1”, Freaks of Nature’s garage burner “People! Let’s Freak Out”, and Kak’s psychedelic shaker “Rain”. There are also some relatively obscure numbers by well-known artists, such as The Chiffon’s “Nobody Knows What's Going On (In My Mind but Me)”, The Everly Brothers’ “Lord of the Manor”, and Sly and the Family Stone’s (as “The French Fries”) “Danse a La Musique” (aka: “Dance to the Music” in French).

Yes, some obscurities remain in CD limbo (alas, there wasn’t room for The Birds’ “Leaving Here”, The Blue Things’ “One Hour Cleaners”, Blossom Toes’ “Look at Me I’m You”, Tintern Abbey’s “Vacuum Cleaner”, or Dave Davies’ “Lincoln County”), but if this groovy distillation sells well enough, maybe Ace will some day pull the trigger on that twelve-LP box set we’re really craving.

Farewell, Peggy Lipton

In a town of cuckoos, criminals, murderers, and demons, Norma Jennings was the token normal person in Twin Peaks. Peggy Lipton played the owner of the R.R. Diner with both a soothing sense of calm amidst the chaos and a sort of quiet toughness when confronted with bozos like lunkhead husband Hank Jennings and crass capitalist Walter Lawford. 

Of course, Lipton's career started well before the 1990 debut of Twin Peaks. Perhaps her biggest claim to fame was her role as counterculture cop Julie Barnes on Mod Squad, but she'd also appeared in a multitude of other series such as Bewitched, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, and The Virginian. She had a side career as a singer, as well, releasing versions of Laura Nyro's "Stoney End" and "Lu" and Donovan's "Wear Your Love Like Heaven". 

Peggy Lipton was diagnosed with cancer in 2004, but following treatment, she resumed acting on series such as Rules of Engagement, Crash, and Psych, and even resumed the role that most endears her to Psychobabble when she returned to Twin Peaks as Norma Jennings in 2017. Sadly, Peggy Lipton died from cancer yesterday. She was 72.

Review: 'Groovy: When Flower Power Bloomed in Pop Culture'

In Mark Voger’s world, the lava lamp is always fired up, psychedelia and sunshine pop are always blaring from the jukebox, there are nightly screenings of Head and Easy Rider, the magazine rack is always stocked with the latest issues of Josie and the Pussycats and Zap Comix, and H.R. Pufnstuf, The Banana Splits, and Laugh-In are in constant rotation on the tube (and make no mistake, his TV has a tube… and rabbit ears). These are the things Voger defines as “groovy,” and these are the groovy things that he uses to build a groovy world in his groovy new book Groovy: When Flower Power Bloomed in Pop Culture.

Review: '1967: A Complete Rock Music History of the Summer of Love'

The intriguing progress Rock & Roll started displaying as soon as The Beatles busted out in 1964 hit an ecstatic, elastic, multi-colored peak three years later. Any existing rules were incinerated as the pop song busted well beyond its two-minute structure, guitars were regularly muscled aside to make room for Mellotrons and sitars, and love songs were often sidelined for tunes based on Joyce’s impenetrable Ulysses or ditties about gnomes named Grimble Crumble. The LP officially displaced the single; stereo started doing the same to mono, making way for the ritual of consuming high-concept albums through headphones…possibly while under various influences; and bland band portraits plastered onto jackets no longer sufficed. In other words, Rock & Roll became art with a vengeance in 1967.

Harvey Kubernik pays tribute to the auditory and visual arts of ’67’s revolutionary music in his new book 1967: A Complete Rock Music History of the Summer of Love. That title is actually misleading unless one regards 1967 as twelve months of summer—and the Californians Kubernik favors probably did. The book is actually a month-by-month chronicle from January through December, dropping details about the year’s major music releases, festivals, innovations, main characters, and attitudes in stand-alone chunks. The book is also something of an oral history, as Kubernik’s own observations are more than supplemented with old and new commentary from the likes of Andrew Loog Oldham, Mary Wilson, George Harrison, Barry Miles, Michelle Phillips, Pete Townshend, Lou Reed, Roger McGuinn, Ravi Shankar, Paul Kantner, Marty Balin, Ram Das, Ray Manzarek, and many others. There is little effort to link the multitudinous topics, but that’s to be expected when dealing with a year that was probably a puzzling jumble of disconnected ideas and events for a lot of its participants. You know what they say about people who remember the sixties.

A coffee table book at heart, 1967 supplies a vibrant lot of images from pop’s most imagistic year, though some of the year’s phantasmagorically rendered album covers would have made for an even more kaleidoscopic visual experience. Kubernik should still be commended for covering the vinyl within the sleeves as thoroughly as he does—referencing the obvious (Sgt. Pepper’s dominates the June topic along with the Monterey Pop Festival) and the more regularly overlooked (The Hollies’ Butterfly, Donovan’s A Gift from a Flower to a Garden, Captain Beefheart’s Safe As Milk, the Stones’ Between the Buttons, etc.) in kind. The one inexplicable oversight is his failure to even mention The Who Sell Out, my personal pick for the finest album of pop’s finest year. Maybe Kubernik has a hole in his memory where that album belongs because he had a little too much fun in ’67.

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 222

The Date: May 9

The Movie: Don’t Look Back (1967)

What Is It?: There was one hell of a swelled head under all that frizzy hair, and Dylan lets it take over the screen for better and worse in D.A. Pennebaker’s classic, warts-and-all documentary. As soon as you laugh at one of D’s clever snipes, you feel the sudden pang of guilt for the victim that he surely didn’t feel when this movie was shot in 1965. When that victim is dear Donovan (whom Dylan eviscerates by saying “That’s a really good song, man”!), the guilt stings all the worse. Still, this is who the guy was, and the fantastic music he performs in the film almost justifies the egomania. After all, he does finish off Donovan by playing “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue”.

Why Today?: On this day in 1965, Dylan plays the Royal Albert Hall concert featured in the film.

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 154

The Date: March 2

The Movie: All My Loving (1968)

What Is It?: One of the first documentaries to take Rock & Roll seriously. Perhaps too seriously. Along with some annoying sound effects, there’s great footage of Cream, Pink Floyd, Eric Burdon, Donovan, Hendrix, Zappa, various Beatles, and those classic pontificators Kit Lambert and Pete Townshend.

Why Today?: Today is 3/2, and “All My Loving” is track #3 on Beatles’ album #2.

Review: 'Bob Dylan: Don't Look Back" Blu-ray

OK, so just for a moment, put yourself in his Cuban-heeled boots. Imagine you’re exceptionally intelligent, exceptionally witty, exceptionally talented, and exceptionally self-conscious. Imagine the media has yoked you with the responsibility of being the voice of your generation and incessantly bombards you with inane questions like “What is your real message?” Imagine the media is also trying to find the next you, and when it does so, it’s a meek young man singing a fairly inane love song. Imagine you’re also a 23-year old kid. Well, then you might have come off a bit the way Bob Dylan comes off in Don’t Look Back.