The Psych Rock Lounge

 

The sixties album that's seen as merely a bizarre psychedelic music "cult' oddity as opposed to releases by other nascent psych albums like the first two albums released by both the 13th Floor Elevators  and The Red Crayola. The Beat Goes On convoluted history is better told in this album review from Allmusic that also references Vanilla Fudge's quickly recorded follow up album Renaissance, which featured original compositions by the group for the first time as has been hailed as a Proto Prog favorite.
I feel that The Beat Goes On has a Zappaesque undercurrent to it that music media album reviews never touch upon. Perhaps that they were not to familiar with Zappa's output at that time.

 

 

"The expanded CD release of this second Vanilla Fudge album is much more accessible than the original vinyl version because of the inclusion of a number of cover tunes, most notably Beatles songs. The revealing liner notes that Sundazed project manager Tim Livingston adds to the reissues of these Atco albums helps put this influential band in a better light. The Beat Goes On is a difficult record, especially after the explosion that was their debut. The single from their previous album, Vanilla Fudge, originally charted in the Top 100 in the U.S. in 1967. (Britain was more hip to the group.) They finally hit in America in the summer of 1968, but had already begun to influence Deep Purple and the Rotary Connection, among others. The problem with this project is that they failed to influence themselves. Bassist Tim Bogert notes that "The Beat Goes On was the album that killed the band," while guitarist Vinny Martell adds "we had already started our second album when Shadow (Morton) had this other concept idea for The Beat Goes On." Morton had produced the Shangri Las, not the Beatles, and this creative effort was by a group with only two hit singles arriving on the scene around the time of Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band. Morton set before the boys a daunting task which needed much, much better execution. Renaissance, which they were recording simultaneous with this, at least included a Donovan tune, "Season of the Witch." The exotic wandering would have been better served by a reworking of "Strawberry Fields Forever" across a side of the disc instead of the keyboard notes which reference the tune. Even a killer guitar version of "The Beat Goes On" would have been more exciting than "18th Century Variations on a Theme by Mozart" or noodlings that can't decide if they are "Chatanooga Choo Choo" or "Theme to the Match Game." For a group of impressionable young kids out of high school, as referenced in the liners, this must've been extremely rough. The expanded CD has jam session versions of Elvis Presley's "Hound Dog" and the Beatles' "I Feel Fine," "She Loves You," "Day Tripper," "I Want to Hold Your Hand," and "You Can't Do That." Any of these extended à la "Eleanor Rigby" from their debut would be more desirable than the interview-type questions about sex; the Beatles' interest in "Indian meditation" (sitar enters here, and how would the VF know?); audio newsclips of John F. Kennedy, Hitler, and others, all a very strong argument against artistic control for some producers. Exploring the initial ideas that brought them fame was what was expected of Vanilla Fudge. What would you rather hear, readings from The Bible or the single from January 1968, "The Look of Love" b/w "Where Is My Mind"? Thankfully, Sundazed has included the Bacharach/David tune and two additional Mark Stein titles, "All in Your Mind" and the aforementioned B side, "Where Is My Mind," on the expanded Renaissance album, the real follow-up to the Vanilla Fudge debut. Historically important, listening to this archive piece is truly a labor of love, with the emphasis on labor."  (exerted from the Allmusic record guide website) 

 

 

Renaissance. 1968  Sundazed Rcords remastered edition.              

With much of the psych scene having negative consequences such as the deaths of Jimi, Morrison and Janis along with the acid casualties like Syd, Roky, and Brian Wilson, it's nice to have this non threatening and truly a "family fun" movie like 1968's The Beatles: Yellow Submarine.

 

A movie that's close to being an animated classic, that you can actually enjoy watching with your grand kids without being stoned out of your mind. Groovy.

and Melody Maker at my local record store (I still have a box full somewhere).

It was not uncommon to find differences in opinions about the same topic.

 

 

 

 

And that's the main difference between the Texas garage bands that sprung up in the mid sixties around The University of Texas in Austin where LSD was legally made and sold. These band's were not successfully established musical trendsetters. They played in garages and kid's clubs because many were to young to play in bars. Some were old enough to be drafted into the armed forces though. And this is basically how Texas became the Psych rock capital of the U.S. for a short time as both coasts were too caught up in the early sixties Folk revival.

 

While bands like The 13th Floor Elevators struggled to merge the acid experience into their garage rock sound, one Texas band, label mates and friends of The Elevators, were the eccentric art rockers known as The Red Crayola. Where The Elevators focused on their second album as an esoteric lyrical instruction to spiritual enlightenment, The Crayola were into audience participation, avant-garde sound collages, Anti rock noise, free form free out jams and minimalist compositions with some social relevance thrown in. 

 

The resultant album was the The Red Crayola's debut from 1967 titled The Parable of Arable Land.

Made up of six composed songs bridged be free form freak out jams that included up to fifty people being recording at one time.

 

The album starts off with Free Form Freak Out No. 1 which is a brief avant-garde sound collage using standard musical instruments combined with non standard studio sounds of clanging bells, police whistles, gongs, chimes, what sounds like someone beating on pots and pans and other oddities before dissolving into the first song proper titled Hurricane Fighter Plane, which is allegorical for an LSD trip because "you will never be the same after you land."

 

Free Form freak Out Jam no. 2 follows with the strange foreign sounds being amped up to include guitar feedback, heavy echo and  the like before the second song proper appears Transparent Radiation. This song

features ominous harmonica played by Roky Erickson himself (Roky also played Vov organ on the proceeding Hurricane Fighter Plane).

 

Lead vocalist and guitarist Mayo Thompson's neurotic vocals now morph into a paranoid feel with a song that references the effects of post nuclear fall out and/or explosion. The meaning is not clear, and frankly, doesn't need to be. Another free form freak out jam follows before Thompson's tirade against the Vietnam war with the song titled War Sucks in which he declares that he doesn't even have to explain why as it's something everyone really knows. Even the war mongers. The song concludes with a noisy rave up and is terminated with what sounds like a cartridge needle being abruptly lifted off a record.

 

More free form madness follows with Free Form Freak Out No. 4 which commences with studio altered warped guitar notes and vague vocal musings for the first time which sets up another catchy though simple song titled Pink Stainless Tail which is defined by it's driving reverbed six chord guitar phrase. Something that would make both early Roxy Music and Talking Heads feel embarrassed for not thinking of it first.

 

Another denser free form jam quickly signals the entrance of the album's title track. The Parable of Arable Land is a more sparse Stockhausen type sound collage that utilizes sounds that are still difficult to recognize today. There are obvious bells and chimes to go along with all manor of pitch shifted sounds in a song that starts off with something resembling echoed dripping water that you might encounter in a cave.

 

The magnum opus Free Form Freak Out No.6 includes everything including the kitchen sink as a revving Harley Davidson chopper can be heard amidst a noise fest that includes warped sounding player piano, a Rudy Valley type vocal recording, pull string talking children's dolls and god knows what else as you try forever to figure out the origin of all the sounds. Good luck.

 

The album ends with the chilling paranoid song titled Former Reflections Enduring Doubt. This song features just three piece band of guitar, bass and drums with Roky Erickson again supplying some eerie harmonica as Thompson laments that "he did to me". What ever "he" seems to have done is beside the point and Thompson knows it. He's doomed as the song builds to a crescendo and completes the album.

 

Strangely, The Red Krayola (now so called to avoid a lawsuit with the crayon maker) rejected the whole acid rock  music scene  with it's political and socially driven lyrics. The band's follow up album God Bles The Red Krayola and All Who Sail with Her was an extreme minimalist music adventure that was comprised of simpler than simple non political and non psychedelic songs that the band hoped would make an artistic statement similar to how the Velvet Underground was received. The album failed out right on that level but it is an amazing and shocking contrast to The Parable of Arable Land.

 

Strangely, The Elevators' last album was being recorded at the same time as The Krayola's God Bless album and even though the bands were friends, their musical approaches at that point could not be further apart. The Elevators, now under the direction of Stacy Sutherland, was fast becoming a blistering Blues rock band devoid of much psychedelia, like The Krayola, but were committed to improve themselves musically.

 

And this sums up the great divide of American Psych rock in the late sixties with everyone going out on their own separate tangent. Where British Psych rock was homogenous with bands having similar identifying sounds, the same could not be said for the disparate forms of American Psych that included The Doors, Jimi Hendrix, Vanilla Fudge, Frank Zappa, The Count Five, The Byrds, The 13th Floor Elevators and The Red krayola, along with many copycat bands like the Moving Sidewalks, The Golden Dawn as well as unsigned early Texas bands that made an impression in the California Bay area like Winter and Cangeroo.

 

If a band like The Doors had survived and would have went into Progressive Rock is always an academic question to me. There was simply too much diversity in the late sixties American Psych scene to predict such an answer.

 

 

God, I love that tune.

 

Anyway, to us, Jefferson Airplane was psych, Steppenwolf was acid rock. Pink Floyd was psychedelic, Iron Butterfly was acid rock. Country Joe and the Fish were psych, Blue Cheer was acid rock. Looking back, it all seems very convoluted. Probably because everyone was stoned.

 

 

 

 

 

So true.....and I still pull out those old albums like the Steve Miller ones and play them now and then.

 

 

What I really enjoy the most though are the old melody infused psych pop things from England and the US ...especially the one or two hit wonders.