Psychobabble's Psychedelic 500: #150 - 126

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 meditating transcendentally from 150 to 126...

150. The Monkees- "P.O.Box 9847" (1968), in which Boyce and Hart finally get to produce a Monkees record again after a long hiatus but The Monkees take all the credit.

Review: Storm Thorgerson's 'Mind over Matter: The Images of Pink Floyd' Fifth Edition

Storm Thorgerson belongs to a very exclusive club of well-known album cover artists. Honestly, the only other one I can think of is Roger Dean, and just as Dean is closely associated with one band (Yes), Thorgerson is renowned as the photographer behind the light-refracting prism, the flaming handshake, and the field of hospital beds. Although he created covers for groups as varied as Def Leppard and The Cranberries, Thorgerson will always be remembered as Pink Floyd's favorite coverman.

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.

Review: 'Pink Floyd: Shine On'

An oral history is of no worth if there is no involvement from the principal players, and the most valuable sort includes original interviews with those characters conducted by the author. So right off the bat, Pink Floyd: Shine On remains true to its title words. 

Mark Blake, who has dedicated a good portion of his career to chronicling Pink Floyd, personally interviewed Roger Waters, Dave Gilmour, Nick Mason, and Rick Wright over a 33-year period, right up until last year when he completed his oral history. Well, Wright's involvement didn't last quite so long, as the keyboardist died in 2008, and it shows in the relative scarcity of his quotes, but he still gets his say.

Review: 'Pink Floyd: Behind the Music'

Mike Evans tends to pen the kinds of rock and roll books in which visuals take prominence over text. When some of his previous subjects include The Who and David Bowie, two of rock's most electrifyingly visual artists, the formula works as it should, and that Evans doesn't exude a ton of personality as a writer is not super consequential. 

Pink Floyd: Behind the Music is as visually oriented as Bowie Treasures or The Who: Much Too Much, but since the subject is a quartet of nondescript guys in t-shirts and jeans who tended to hunch motionlessly over their instruments, Evans has to haul more weight. 

Review: Robyn Hitchcock's Memoir, '1967'

Anyone who's fallen under the spell of Robyn Hitchcock's tombstone surrealism should be more than a little intrigued by his foray into the memoir world. The guy can write. Not that you'll necessarily find as much story in 1967 as you will in, say, "Underwater Moonlight". 

As the title trumpets, the narrative stays firmly planted in that year of psychedelic whimsy that would so influence Hitchcock's perspective when he began putting out his own songs a decade later. In '67 he was an unripe 14 year old consigned to boarding school, so do not expect 1967 to be the usual rock and roll bacchanal. Even as far as British schoolboy stories go, there isn't much story here. Young Hitch goes to school, where he encounters a few eccentric instructors, as well as his meathead and groover peers, none of whom we readers ever get to know too well. Clearly much more significantly for the lad, he falls in love with the likes of Syd Barrett, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, and The Incredible String Band. Then he learns to play the guitar.

Review: 'Pink Floyd and The Dark Side of the Moon: 50 Years'

If one album is deserving of an entire book honoring its fiftieth anniversary, that album might as well be The Dark Side of the Moon. With it, Pink Floyd redefined the LP as something that could be cinematic yet personal, flaunted the state of recording art, and shifted more units than those guys who wrote the Bible. Unlike much of Floyd's post-Syd Barrett work, The Dark Side of the Moon also manages to be arty without being insufferably boring, so why not celebrate the damn thing by giving it a spin while reading Martin Popoff's Pink Floyd and The Dark Side of the Moon: 50 Years?

Review: 'Melody Makers: Should’ve Been There'

Melody Maker was generally more significant for Barrie Wentzell’s striking B&W photos of sixties and seventies pop and rock stars than the depth of its reportage. So Leslie Ann Coles’s documentary Melody Makers: Should’ve Been There is a fitting tribute to the long-running UK music paper. The storytelling is as flimsy as a puff piece on Yes, but boy, those Wentzell photos that fill the screen throughout this film’s 88 minutes are impressive. Peter Gabriel resplendent in his daisy headpiece. Brian Jones cradling his sitar. Tina Turner commanding the stage as a Screaming Mimi in a mini.

Review: 'Another Splash of Colour: New Psychedelia in Britain 1980-1985'

Pop music is cyclical, which was never more explicit than in late seventies/early eighties Britain when punk returned rock to the simplicity of the fifties before a new Mod scene indebted to the early sixties emerged. These scenes naturally led to a return of mid-sixties trippiness, and the New Psychedelic scene was barely underway when WEA was already putting it into historical context with a compilation of its very own. The thirteen tracks on A Splash of Colour did a pretty good job of laying out the guidelines of UK New Psychedelia. American garage psych groups such as The 13th Floor Elevators and The Electric Prunes were as influential as homegrown fare by The Beatles (always “Tomorrow Never Knows”) or Syd Barret’s Pink Floyd (always “Lucifer Sam”). Though the influences and attitude were unapologetically retro, drum machines, synthesizers that don’t require an engineering degree to play, and other eighties tools and toys were welcome at the Love In. The anti-war, pro-understanding sentiments parroted Summer of Love ethos but also served as contemporary statements against Thatcher/Reagan-era bellicosity. Consequently, the music often doesn’t sound any more stuck in the past than the latest discs by The Cure or Siouxsie and the Banshees, two seemingly super-contemporary bands that drew on sixties influences deeply.

35 years later, Cherry Red’s RPM Records is revising and expanding A Splash of Colour with a triple-disc set called Another Splash of Colour. With the exception of two tracks by The Doctor, all of the tracks from the 1982 compilation are on this new box set, although the running order is mixed up, shuffling the 11 remaining tracks with 53 additional cuts basically in the Splash of Colour spirit. Some of the new artists are bigger names than the ones on WEA’s comp: Robyn Hitchcock with and without The Soft Boys, Captain Sensible, The Damned in the guise of Naz Nomad and the Nightmares, Julian Cope, The Television Personalities, The Monochrome Set, The Attractions (without Elvis), The Dentists. Those bands all turn in reliably excellent tracks, while lesser-known acts supply the excitement of discovery, particularly when they don’t follow psychedelic tropes so doggedly. Knox takes a rather obvious cover choice—Syd Barret’s “Gigolo Aunt” — and makes it truly exciting by shooting it up with punk aggression. Magic Mushroom Band’s “Wide Eyed and Electrick” is another thrilling punk/psych fusion. Some of the best tracks would have sounded perfectly at home on Cherry Red’s Millions Like Us: The Story of the Mod Revival box, namely Kimberley Rew’s “Stomping All Over the World” and Squire’s “No Time Tomorrow”. 

There are only a couple of outright skippable tracks — Charlie Harper’s novelty “Night of the Jackal” and Blue Orchid’s grating “Work”— though Another Splash of Colour is not quite back-to-back gems otherwise. At times, groups get a little too trapped in the tropes, as when The High Tides waste their time and yours with a longwinded, sloppy jam in the middle of “Electric Blue”, a remnant of the WEA compilation. Some of the new selections sound like they don’t quite fit, such as Scarlet Party’s “101 Dam-Nations”, which is a bit jangly but generally indistinguishable from any other piece of eighties pop. However, as Miles Over Matter shout on “Something’s Happening Here”, “Just because the love generation did it, doesn’t mean we have to.” The fact that the mass of tracks on Another Splash of Colour do not merely copy psychedelia’s original wave but update it for their own age gives them a personality of their very own and makes them sound strangely contemporary today.

Review: 'Pink Floyd: Behind the Wall'

Having spent most of their career looking dour in T-shirts and jeans, Pink Floyd wasn’t the most photogenic of bands. Perhaps that’s why it has taken so long for someone to publish an image-heavy illustrated history of the band when there are already quite a number devoted to their brethren in The Beatles, Stones, Who, and Zeppelin. On the up side, they were always interesting to look at in their paisley garb during their most vital era with Syd Barrett and their stage sets were awe-inspiring enough in the later years to consume the eye.

Writer Hugh Fielder seems pretty consumed by those sets, spending quite a bit of time discussing the logistics of setting them up in Pink Floyd: Behind the Wall. Otherwise, his text is a broad-stroke history of the band. Fielder is definitely not writing for my fellow Syd cultists, summing up Syd’s albeit brief tenure in the band in about thirty pages and giving the bulk of his attention and accolades to Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall. For the majority of the book, Fielder is not very critical of the music one way or the other, saving his album-by-album assessment for an appendix as safe as the rest of it. My favorite part was a two-page spread on the wacky Wizard of Oz/Dark Side connection. More fun side roads such as these would have been welcome.

Review: 'A Very Irregular Head: The Life of Syd Barrett'

Syd Barrett fans tend to fall into one of two camps. There are those who have a genuine appreciation for the innovative, imaginative music he created as both the short-lived leader of Pink Floyd and an even more impulsive solo artist. Then there are those who worship him as some sort of loony-toony acid guru known to hail airplanes as if they were checkered cabs and mash a homemade tonic of Brylcreem and Mandrax into his obligatory Hendrix perm. The latter fan will likely be disappointed by A Very Irregular Head: The Life of Syd Barrett. Despite its title, Rob Chapman’s biography is anything but a sensationalized trot through crazy old Syd’s craziest moments. Quite the opposite, in fact. As a fan who has absolutely nothing but respect for Syd-the-artist, Chapman makes his goal to debunk the most outrageous Syd myths, including the infamous Brylcreem and Mandrax tall tale, which despite being completely devoid of evidence, has been repeated so many times it is taken as face-value truth by many biographers.

Chapman’s Syd is a human being, not an acid-guzzling comic book character. He is a serious painter with serious talent, who also displayed a flair for music, had a go at it while it suited his interests, and largely walked away because he couldn’t deal with pop stardom any longer. Yes, our author acknowledges that his subject developed mental problems, and he discusses them with neutrality that does not make any sweeping, doomed-to-fail diagnoses about the cause. Was Syd the textbook “acid casualty?” Was he schizophrenic? Chapman doesn’t pretend to know because, well, no one does. He sticks to the facts, which he researched with precision and a knack for weeding out the bullshit. The end result is a story that may not produce a bunch of wild new tales to titillate the ghouls but may comfort the true fans because Syd’s life was not quite as sad or tragic as the most sensational biographers would have us believe.

Lucifer Sams and Satanic Majesties: Cult Sects of Rock Gods

Who is Pink Floyd? Cold experiments and saxophones. Twenty minute opuses and barren atmosphere. Faceless, immobile, serious musicians. Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall.

Who are The Rolling Stones? Sleazy sex and heroin. Mick’s lips and strutting. Blues, booze, and Berry. Exile on Main Street and Some Girls.

Who are The Beach Boys? Surf and sun. Hot rods and bikinis. Prancing old Reaganites in Hawaiian shirts. “Surfin’ U.S.A.” and “Surfin’ Safari”.

Who are The Who? Rock operas and ponderous proto-metal. Bluster and bashing. Classic Rock radio staples and Broadway bounders. Tommy and Who’s Next.

Four of Rock’s institutions as they’re understood by the masses. When their congregations file into the hallowed halls of their local stadiums to hear the hits, the hits are what they most often receive. A sacrament of the familiar, fulfilling essential stereotypes, banishing the obscurities to torchlit basement gatherings where the freaks and obsessives huddle around turntables to spin gouged copies of Their Satanic Majesties Request and fifth generation bootlegs of SMiLE. Bruce Johnston calls them “the one percenters”: the one-percent of The Beach Boys’ fans who hope to never hear “Kokomo” again but cannot get enough of “Mrs. O’Leary’s Cow” and “Do You Like Worms?”

Classifying these acts as cult bands is a far-fetched stretch. They are among the most enduringly popular in Rock history. The Beach Boys were the biggest white American Rock band of the ‘60s, scoring three number one hits in their hey day and another some 25 years after their debut. Pink Floyd are responsible for one of Rock’s all-time bestselling and most iconic records. The Stones and The Who may only fall behind The Beatles and Led Zeppelin in the British Rock race. Yet within each of those band’s expansive histories lay genuine cult items; recordings that the majority of their fans and the bands, themselves, generally ignore. The cultists these oddities have attracted feel decidedly stronger about SMiLE, Their Satanic Majesties Request, The Who Sell Out, and The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. We are the one percent.

Cult items are natural products of any long and fruitful career. Perhaps The Beatles and Zeppelin are the only top Rock bands of the classic era who don’t really have any, which is likely because both had relatively short careers that produced relatively few records. Had The Beatles continued making music for another decade, it is possible that at least one of them might have dipped through the cracks. It was inevitable that The Beach Boys and The Stones would make their cult records, because they both created tremendous bodies of work (as of this writing, The Beach Boys have made 30 albums; The Stones made 22 and are apparently at work on another) and are both confined by most people into tight compartments. Those people include the artists, themselves. Brian and Dennis Wilson were the only Beach Boys who really seemed to recognize the genius of the stereotype-defying SMiLE, with its fragmented structures, whimsical humor, and stoned avant gardism. Mike Love famously (perhaps apocryphally) warned Brian to not “fuck with the formula” of surf and hot rod songs. He hated Van Dyke Parks’s poetic, cryptic lyrics and most of the guys claimed they felt degraded by being forced to simulate barnyard noises and orgasms by a giggling, LSD-infused Brian during the sessions. Keith Richards is similarly embarrassed by the blues-eschewing, psychedelic onslaught Their Satanic Majesties Request, dismissing it as “flimflam” in his autobiography. Mick’s embarrassment seems to cloak a genuine affection for the record, constantly vacillating between deeming it “nonsense” and “lovely” throughout the years.

Review: 'Pink Floyd: The Story of Wish You Were Here' (Classic Albums series)

The Classic Albums series has dealt with Pink Floyd before in its 2003 dissection of the groundbreaking Dark Side of the Moon. Nine years later it has taken the next step to cover the band’s follow up L.P., Wish You Were Here. Like most episodes of the documentary series, all surviving players get to say their piece, from Roger, Dave, and Nick (Rick makes appearances through older clips) to backing singer Venetta Fields (who admits to not being a fan of the band’s music and approaching her work with them from a purely professional stance) to “Have a Cigar” guest-vocalist Roy Harper to promo-film animator Gerald Scarfe to cover photographer Storm Thorgerson to stuntman Ronnie Rondell, who had the privilege of being set on fire for that iconic sleeve portrait. The one voice that is silent throughout the film, even as his presence resonates over it all, is that of Syd Barrett, the subject of the album’s two-part super-epic “Shine on You Crazy Diamond”. As is the case in so many Pink Floyd documentaries, Syd’s disintegration casts a poignant, somber pall over the story, and that famous photograph from when he wandered into the Wish You Were Here sessions, bald and overweight, is trotted out again to grim effect.

While Wish You Were Here is a good album, this documentary mostly made me wish that we were finally allowed a celebration of Syd’s shining brilliance rather than another elegy to his decline. It would be nice if the Classic Album series could break out of its focus on the ‘70s a bit to give us a view of the Piper at the Gates of Dawn sessions. It’s a much better album than Wish, too.

Piper dreams aside, the documentary we do have is produced with the care and professionalism that goes into all installments of this series. The holes in the tale are more down to the interviewees than the documentarians. Apart from addressing how they had diverging concepts for Wish You Were Here, Dave Gilmour and Roger Waters don’t delve too deeply into the rift that first developed between them during the album’s creation. An ingenious sequence intercutting Dave's solo performance of the title track with Roger’s says more about the distance between them than anything the guys actually say in the film.

March 10, 2010: Feed Your Baby Acid: 14 Psychedelic Songs Aimed at Kids

A rather odd off-shoot of all the chemical experimentation going down in the mid-‘60s pop scene found groups embracing their new found, pin-pupiled “innocence” and brewing up psychedelic kiddie tunes. Like Captain Kangaroo after a hit of Orange Sunshine, The Beatles, The Stones, Pink Floyd, and just about anyone who was anyone leaped onto the trippy toddler choo choo. In his book 33 1/3: The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society, Andy Miller describes this short-lived genre as the “something far-out in the nursery strand of British psychedelia.” The dominant influences were, indeed, English eccentrics like Lewis Carroll and, to a much lesser extent, Kenneth Graham and nonsense guru Edward Lear. As was the case with most things British and trippy, The Beatles led the way with…

1. “Yellow Submarine” by The Beatles (1966)