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: #100 - 76

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 behind the Joke Wall from 100 to 76...

100. The Monkees- "Long Title: Do I Have to Do This All Over Again?" (1968), in which Peter Tork feels it's necessary to state the obvious.

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!"

Review: Vinylphyle Edition of The Band's 'Music from Big Pink'

When I last got my hands on a record in Universal Music's new audiophile series, it was the decidedly lo-fi The Velvet Underground and Nico. Despite the dodgy original recording, the Vinylphyle treatment—all-analog mastering from the original master tapes, pressing at the renowned plant RTI by Joe-Nino Hernes, a mastering engineer with an impressive track record—really brought out the the best in The Velvet's noisy, druggy, mesmerizing debut.  

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.

Psychobabble's Psychedelic 500: #275 - 251

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 sampling the brown acid from 275 to 251... 

275. The Byrds- "5D (Fifth Dimension)" (1966), in which The Byrds trip so hard that they pass right through the fourth dimension, which is vectors, and into the fifth one, which has freedom, which, honestly, is a much easier concept to grasp than vectors.

Psychobabble's Psychedelic 500: #300 - 276

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 getting hassled by The Man from 300 to 276...

300. The Doors- "Strange Days" (1967), in which The Doors play with some very strange echo effects and make their most legitimately psychedelic song in the proces.

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: #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: 'SMiLE: The Rise, Fall, & Resurrection of Brian Wilson'

For nearly forty years, Brian Wilson's SMiLE existed more as a myth than a piece of music you could actually listen to. Sure, there were scores of bootlegs, but the average Beach Boys fan doesn't go that very, very naughty route. So, aside from a handful of songs that skittered out officially here or there, the SMiLE story was one that existed more on the page than emanating from speakers. While it was covered in any Beach Boys bio worth its salt, the biggest dose of SMiLE lore was Domenic Priore's Look! Listen! Vibrate! SMiLE! a truly wonderful, zine-like anthology of period press clippings and new essays first published in 1988. 

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: 'Ghost of an Idea: Hauntology, Folk Horror and the Spectre of Nostalgia'

As a place for me to babble about my favorite rock music and horror movies of a century that only exists in the rearview, Psychobabble is nostalgic by definition. So a book like Ghost of an Idea, which ostensibly studies and derides the tendency of the horror film to look back with both fear and longing, probably isn't aimed at me. Nor is the almost willfully dense academic voice that dominates the first third of the book. 

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: 'God Only Knows: The Story of Brian Wilson, The Beach Boys, and the California Myth' (Remastered edition)

In 1977, The Beach Boys were still a going concern, but one that had recently released fluff like 15 Big Ones while playing the oldies festival circuit. The group's reputation was not strong. Mike Love was flapping his chicken wings and croaking "Fun, Fun, Fun" for the billionth time. Brian Wilson was shattered. His history of making progressive, futuristic music was not what the average person thought of when confronted with the name "Beach Boys."

Review: 'B-Side'

For every hit that makes it onto the radio or Billboard's Hot 100, there's something more obscure happening on the other side. It might be a piece of tossed off trash, but it might also be of exceptional quality ("Rain"), a chance to throw a less prolific band member some royalty cash ("The Inner Light"), or an excuse to get inspiredly loony ("You Know My Name [Look Up the Number]"). Some B-sides are even better than their smash A-sides... at least that's my stance on all those Beatles flip sides I referenced in the previous sentence. 

Review: 'The Best of the Trashmen'

In 1962, four Minneapolis kids decided to cash in on the surf craze, and a year later, they bashed out one of the genre's defining records. "Surfin Bird" has that wet, wild sound surfers craved more than the clean-cut harmonies of The Beach Boys and Jan and Dean. It is two and a half minutes of pure rock and roll insanity with its squawked chant, jackhammer pounding, and cheek-wobbling gibbering. It is punk fifteen years early, and a disc that drives my crazy in the best, best, best way.

Review: 'Sounds Of Summer: The Very Best Of The Beach Boys' Expanded Edition

There has certainly been no shortage of Beach Boys compilations throughout the group's 60-year history, but few have really looked beyond the biggest hits to provide a comprehensive and coherent overview of a group that released about thirty albums between 1962 and 2012. The two CD box sets, Good Vibrations and Made in California, actually do a good job, but for the vinyl cult, which has been growing rapidly in recent years, those aren't options. The 2003 CD Sounds Of Summer: The Very Best Of The Beach Boys did a fair job of collecting the usual big ones, and it did get a vinyl release in 2016, but it could hardly be called comprehensive since it exclusively focused on singles.

For the band's 60th anniversary, UMe is reissuing Sounds of Summer on CD and vinyl but with a bold move toward comprehensiveness. Expanded from a 1CD/2 LP compilation of 30 tracks to a 3 CD/6 LP, 80-track monster, Sounds of Summer can't help but move beyond the obvious because as huge as The Beach Boys are, they didn't produce 80 mega-hits. So the new edition of Sounds of Summer can get a bit deeper into the brilliance of Brian Wilson's early harmony arrangements, his psychedelic-era flights of extreme creativity, and, for those who swing that way, the stuff the other guys produced after Brian basically checked out in the mid-seventies. 

Review: 'Everybody Had an Ocean: Music and Mayhem in 1960s Los Angeles'

A few months ago I reviewed Joel Selvin's Hollywood Eden, an interesting, well-written chronicle of the earliest days of L.A.'s fertile rock scene in the sixties. Because that book halted just as Brian Wilson created "Good Vibrations" and the scene was really about to take off, I described Hollywood Eden as "an extended prologue" and ended the review by suggesting that "further reading is required to learn the complete story of why LA was so important to sixties rock."  

Published four years before Hollywood Eden, Everybody Had an Ocean: Music and Mayhem in 1960s Los Angeles could be that further reading. William McKeen's book covers the same period Selvin's does (though with fleeter feet through the 1950s run-up to the main story and a lot less focus on dopey Jan and Dean), but then he moves beyond the point L.A. really exploded. Selvin cuts his tale short just as The Byrds and Mamas and Papas were getting together. Key L.A. artists such as Buffalo Springfield and The Doors and Joni Mitchell, never get to jump in Selvin's sandbox. However, they're all on board for Everybody Had an Ocean, and instead of Jan and Dean, the far more artistically and commercially pivotal Beach Boys become the track on which the narrative rolls. Natch, that narrative rolls into some pretty dark places as Brian Wilson loses his grip on his group and brother Dennis runs into a certain charismatic psychopath with a grudge against producer Terry Melcher.

McKeen's writing also brims with humor, vulgarity, and the willingness to confront the artists' myriad flaws--all the things a rock writer should bring to the table. I wish he'd given more attention to at least two key L.A. artists: Love, who (with the exception of Brian Wilson, and arguably, The Byrds) made better records than any of McKeen's mostly white main cast of characters, and The Monkees, a massively popular, massively weird group that could not have sprouted anywhere but L.A. Oddly, Selvin's two pages on Mike, Micky, Davy, and Peter are riddled with errors (he states that it took The Monkees a couple of years to take control of their music when it was closer to six months, suggests non-instrumentalist Davy Jones had "musical chops" Micky Dolenz lacked, and repeats Mike Nesmith's line that The Monkees outsold The Beatles and Stones combined as if it was fact, though Nesmith later admitted he was bullshitting). So maybe it's for the best the author didn't devote more time to them. These mistakes also made me question some of the other factoids McKeen lays down, but there's still no question that Everybody Had an Ocean is a highly entertaining read. It's now being published in paperback for the first time.

Review: 'Hollywood Eden'

LA was America’s rock hub in the mid-sixties. The Beach Boys, The Turtles, The Doors, Buffalo Springfield, The Monkees, The Mamas and the Papas, The Byrds, Paul Revere and the Raiders, Harry Nilsson, Frank Zappa, Nancy Sinatra, and Love are but a scoop of the artists who buzzed around the Sunset Strip, scored smash hits, and/or changed the face of rock and roll in America and beyond.

Farewell, Hal Blaine

A session musician becoming a household name is almost unheard of, but the name "Hal Blaine" is probably as close as it comes. This is the guy who thumped out what may be the most iconic beat of all: the two bass hits/one snare snap that launched "Be My Baby". That startling moment is just one of many, many startling ones. 

The list of songs Blaine helped bring to life is absolutely staggering. He was responsible for scattering majestic fills all over Simon & Garfunkel's "America". He brought orchestral grandeur to Pet Sounds and SMiLE. He funked up The Monkees' "Mary Mary". He pummeled out those rolls that make Neal Hefti's "Batman Theme" go POW! That's him on Elvis's "Bossa Nova Baby", The Association's "Along Comes Mary", The Beach Boys' "Good Vibrations", Paul Revere and the Raiders' "Hungry", Love's "Andmoreagain", The Mamas and Papas' "Go Where You Wanna Go", The Crystals "Da Doo Ron Ron", The Byrds' "Mr. Tambourine Man", The Vogue's "You're the One"... the theme from Three's Company! Phil Spector and Brian Wilson would have been nowhere without Hal Blaine. By his own estimation, he played on some 6,000 tracks.

Blaine was also a big personality, as evidenced in the numerous documentaries to which he contributed his memories, such as The Wrecking Crew! and Beautiful Dreamer: Brian Wilson and the Story of SMiLE. Sadly, the world just lost that beat and that personality because Hal Blaine died at the age of 90 yesterday. You can't say the guy didn't live a full life though.