I first discovered this LP in a Capitol Hill thrift store in the mid-90’s, when it was still fairly easy to find such LP’s in thrift stores. Thumbing through the Broadway musical soundtracks and Herb Alpert LP’s, I came across a battered copy of this curiosity. Its cover suggested a bunch of M.I.T. graduate students performing research on how to be in a rock band, and the musical credits listed on the back were even more perplexing. The bassist played a fretless; there was no guitarist but there was an electric violin player. (And just what the hell was a “ring modulator” anyway?) I couldn’t tell how old the record was, but the hairstyles and packaging suggested about 1968 (I turned out to be right). The $3 sticker was enough incentive, so I bought it. Playing it when I got home, my reaction to its aural content was that of even more bafflement. It was a strange and shifting cacophony from start to finish: calliopes, pounding drums, tape loops, haunting ballads about clouds and deceased revolutionaries, Gregorian chants, chamber strings, Zappaesque satire, Salvation Army brass bands, and a barrage of otherworldly electronic bleeps and warbles. At first I wanted to throw it across the room, but within a few days it was all I was listening to and all I would listen to for the next month. We all know about these records, records that we happen upon by accident and which we initially don’t understand but which end up changing the very core of our being and defining our musical tastes. For these records, “love it or hate it” isn’t an apt descriptor. Like organ transplants, they are either violently rejected or they become a part of us. For me, The United States of America’s sole LP is one such record. –Richard
Psych and Prog
David Axelrod “Song of Innocence” (1968)
Trying to put a tag on the music of legendary producer David Axelrod is almost impossible as his music, especially [when] early offerings such as this, straddles so many genres. You get funk, jazz, classical and rock all thrown into the melting pot to create a rather unique sound that has had a large influence on many people. Nowhere has this been more apparent than in hip hop and trip hop where this LP has been heavily sampled. If you are a fan of those two genres prepare to hear a lot of familiar breaks when you hear this record for the first time. The LP itself was heavily influenced by the poetry of William Blake hence there is a dark brooding feel throughout and Axelrod uses layers of strings playing minor keys to obtain this mood. The drums and percussion drive the music on and there are some fantastic guitar breaks. –Jon
Centipede “Septober Energy” (1971)
This ominous double LP has been sitting there in my record collection since 1973. I don’t know why I haven’t played it for ages, I used to play it a lot. So, the first of October is an apt day to play and review Septober Energy. It is a project assembled by Keith Tippett and produced by Robert Fripp (both members of King Crimson at the time). These two gathered virtually the entire creative British music scene – a who-is-who of some 50 musicians, horns, brass, strings, singers, Alan Skidmore, Elton Dean, Ian Carr, Alan Skidmore, Paul Rutherford, John Marshall, Robert Wyatt, Ian MacDonald, Boz Burrell, Julie Driscoll (Tippett at the time of recording), just to name a few. The music sounds as if Tippett and Fripp were struggling to find a home for their jazzier, freer ideas which they couldn’t incorporate into the King Crimson concept.
There are moments of grandezza, pathos, Jazz-Rock passages, Free Jazz – both loud and aggressive and soft and gentle, Bolero-like crescendos, concert music, sheet music, smashing arrangements and orchestrations, all of it played live in the studio and simultaneously recorded. Of course, due to the concept, there are also passages which don’t succeed or which are too long – I’m thinking of the finale. Septober Energy has been put down as megalomania, usually from King Crimson fans. I don’t agree. It’s difficult music, certainly. You have to make an effort to follow the music. It might just not be your taste. But that doesn’t make it a flop. Septober Energy is like nothing else from the early seventies, it’s an important musical document from one of the most exiting musical phases in the twentieth century. I’m glad I re-discovered this album. It’s out on CD and should not be overlooked. –Yofriend
Grateful Dead “Grateful Dead” (1967)
The Dead were never a studio band, and their first record is even overlooked by the most ardent Deadheads. It’s easy to see why; here they sound more like a garage band: raw, loud, way fast, and with only one drummer! Recorded in LA, it’s rumored that the band cut these tracks in just a few hours while hopped up on Ritalin (an irony considering the superhuman attention span required for the long-winded jams of their later years). The opener, “The Golden Road…” sets the momentum for a series of short, bluesy, breakneck tempo numbers that don’t slow down until the beginning of Side Two: a cover of Bonnie Dobson’s post-apocalyptic “Where is everybody?” ballad, “Morning Dew”. But even here there’s a sense of visceral urgency that the band seldom recaptured on stage or off. The closing prison song cover, “Viola Lee Blues”, more closely resembles the exploratory and improvisational sound that would soon become their stock in trade, but with just enough sloppiness and dissonance to keep things interesting. From here, the Dead would inarguably record and perform some more great music while vocalist/organist Pigpen still had his liver, but never again with such reckless abandon. –Richard P
The Kinks “The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society” (1968)
This album still grows on me every time I listen to it! In the title track the Kinks sing ‘God save Donald Duck, Vaudeville and Variety’ and in this collection they do their best to immortalise all kinds of things. If all the world’s music except for this album were suddenly to disappear the Kinks would single-handedly have preserved some simple but catchy pop tunes (“Johnny Thunder” and “Animal Farm”), Vaudeville (in the form of “Sitting By The Riverside”) and Music Hall (“All Of My Friends Were There”) as well as the Village Green. Quite an achievement. But they don’t stop there. They capture the sound of The Grateful Dead and Dylan on “Last Of The Steam-Powered Trains” and is that Hendrix I hear in “Big Sky”? Then there’s the darkly psychedelic “Wicked Annabella” and the latin “Monica”. They do their own take on the “Under My Thumb” Rolling Stones theme in “Starstruck” and the ridiculous in “Phenomenal Cat” (who sounds as if he’s all set to eat the equally ridiculous Donald D). Is there no end to their conserving? “Picture Book” and “People Take Pictures Of Each Other” make sure that our nearest and dearest aren’t forgotten. Rest assured – we’re in safe hands. Taken on their own, many of the songs are rather simple. But put together I believe they amount to an artistic masterpiece – a preserved musical and poetic patchwork of past and present, itself reflecting the patchwork of the countryside that is home to many a village green. –Jim
Syd Barrett “The Madcap Laughs” (1970)
I have no idea what Syd Barrett’s mental state was like when he recorded this album (going on what I’ve read, though, it obviously wasn’t good), but we should emphasise this doesn’t sound like music from a man who was sick. It’s confident, playful (if also darker and more serious than his Floyd material), whimsical and open. It’s also not very “psychedelic”, in the sense that Piper was; the music, pared back to its core, reminds me more of, say, post-Cale Velvets than the Floyd. It’s an album with its own, defiantly personal way of doing things; it’s something you’ve never heard before, totally individual, and there’s no meeting it halfway — you either open your heart to it, or you don’t. Myself, I love it to pieces. –Brad
The Holy Modal Rounders “The Moray Eels Eat the Holy Modal Rounders” (1969)
Acid folk? Nope. This is something far stranger: acid country-rock. Acid bluegrass, even. Basically it’s like someone took Live/Dead, Workingman’s Dead, American Beauty and Aoxomoxoa and decided to stick ’em in a blender, then play them all simultaneously, while smoking prodigious amounts of dope and running Easy Rider backwards so a bunch of dead hippies get brought back to life by rednecks with magic rifles. But better. –Brad
Circuit Rider “Circuit Rider” (1980)
This private press pot of insanity from 1980 literally sounds like hell’s angels covering L.A. Woman. There’s no record label, the catalog number is 666, and it was maybe recorded in the early seventies, but no one really knows. Where did this come from? Connecticut actually, but it sounds a lot more like a deep swamp field recording. A lot of music sounds druggy, this one seems to top it all. The density of the haze within the grooves is thick enough to make you want to take a shower. At times it sounds like Funkadelic with no drums, at others it touches on more of a Canned Heat aesthetic, but always laced with heavy doses of lucid blanketing. The singer has some sort of biker/shaman/howling dog formula that, besides making the lizard king sound like Tom Jones in comparison, doesn’t bore the listener with cheesy trippy organ either. In fact the listener is way too frightened to be bored. It basically sounds like what you think of the sixties in your head, even when most actual sixties music sounds like the soundtrack to pictures of somebody’s goofy dad wearing bellbottoms. –Alex
Frank Zappa “Freak Out!” (1966)
This is a true album for freaks. Back in 1967, Zappa must have felt left out of the hippy dippy counterculture because his musical interests seemed to extend beyond flowers in your hair, acoustic guitars and sitting barefoot in the park. So with this debut he in turn created a counterculture to the counterculture – an album for all the freaks and “left behinds” as he refers to them in the opening track Hungry Freaks Daddy. The music is frequently upbeat, jazzy and conventional, at least by Zappa’s standards. He had not yet started his long guitar explorations of later albums, and the only real “surreal” tracks are Who Are The Brain Police?, Help I’m A Rock, and the truly whacked out closer The Return Of The Son Of Monster Magnet. It’s these more experimental tracks that most intrigue me just in their sheer ludicrousness. They all sound like drug induced paranoia with their screaming, sound effects and seemingly made up language. –Neal
Caravan “In the Land of Grey and Pink” (1971)
Incredible String Band “The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter” (1968)
The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter. Where to start? The lyrics are full of imagination, but almost devoid of sense. In that respect, this is almost the ultimate psychedelic album. Though Heron and Williamson lack the lyricism of Dylan, they come up with some nice music. “Koeeoaddi There” starts the album in classic psychedelic style. There aren’t two related sentences there. Sometimes there aren’t even two related clauses within a sentence. It all becomes too much when Williamson sings ‘Ladybird, ladybird, what is your wish? Your wish is not granted unless it’s a fish’. This is followed by the equally weird “The Minotaur’s Song” which is sung in the style of a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta. The classic line this time: ‘I can’t dream well because of my horns’. The best song is “A Very Cellular Song”. Even this is best appreciated with an unnaturally open mind. It starts off in sort of hazy fairground style, then breaks into a touching spiritual. This is followed by what I can best describe as spoof-baroque. Next is some kind of folk interlude, before the spoof-baroque resumes. The music then takes the back seat as some strange lyrics about slithering and squelching take the foreground. The final section sees a return to fairground music accompanying some mystical mantra or something. Remarkable, but totally bizarre. –Jim
Nektar “Down to Earth” (1974)
Temporarily abandoning the extended suite forms of their previous releases, Nektar turn in an accessible, almost pop-flavored collection of shorter songs with Down To Earth. Although it orbits in a sort of Euro-hippie galaxy, and features a vague circus concept running throughout, don’t let that scare you away, as this is a focused album with consistently strong songs. My favorites include the giant-sized “Nelly The Elephant,” (which sounds more than a little like part of Pink Floyd’s “Echoes”), animated “That’s Life,” expressive ballad “Little Boy,” and insistent “Show Me The Way,” but even the lesser stuff is pretty great. A refreshing, successful departure from the norm for Nektar. –Ben
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