Psychobabble's Psychedelic 500: #225 - 201

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 bogarting that joint from 225 to 201...

225. The Pretty Things- "Private Sorrow" (1968), in which S.F. Sorrow is drafted into the army and kicks off an adulthood of non-stop trauma.

Review: The Rolling Stones' 'Black and Blue' Super Deluxe Edition

After the Stones machine had ground down Mick Taylor enough for him to finally quit the band, they once again had to find a second guitarist. The process amounted to a series of jammy auditions with such axemen as Wayne Perkins, Harvey Mandel of Canned Heat, Robert Johnson (no, not the Robert Johnson...don't be daft), and one Ronald David Wood. We all know who got the job.

Not ones to miss a trick, The Rolling Stones decided to build a whole record around these auditions. Consequently, Black and Blue is the jammiest of Rolling Stones records, although it yielded a couple of their songiest songs: the lightly jazzy "Melody", featuring Billy Preston, and the wistful and cleverly structured "Memory Motel", which is long without ever getting indulgent. The record also boasts a couple of pleasingly concise rockers in the standard Stones mode: "Crazy Mama" and"Hand of Fate". 

Review: 'The Yardbirds'

Despite never making a widely revered LP and hammering out only a handful of truly enduring 45s, The Yardbirds will always be remembered as one of the key British bands because they were the petri dish from which the country's three top blues guitarists—Clapton, Beck, and Page—sprouted. Of course, for those who care to really listen to what the group left behind, The Yardbirds are more than the sum of two truly innovative and electrifying musicians and one would-be B.B. King clone so overrated that acolytes proclaimed him "God" in graffiti all over London. And really, the majority of the Page-led era is pretty execrable. But the Beck-era Yardbirds were indeed one of the best rock bands of mid-sixties Britain, as a listen to "Heart Full of Soul","The Train Kept A-Rollin'", "Over Under Sideways Down", or "Roger the Engineer" will settle. For the quality of such records alone, The Yardbirds would be deserving of a biography of their very own.