https://exchange.prx.org/pieces/386256-pe-2139
This is one of those shows that has no artists sets, instead featuring 32 tracks from 32 different artists, including half a dozen that have never been played on Stuck in the Psychedelic Era before. It does, however, include a new Advanced Psych segment with a decidedly garage-rock feel to it.
Artist: Beatles
Title: We Can Work It Out
Source: LP: Yesterday...And Today (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Writer: Lennon/McCartney
Label: Capitol
Year: 1966 (single released 1965)
From 1965 on very few Lennon/McCartney compositions were actually collaborations between the Beatles' two main songwriters. We Can Work It Out, released in December of 1965 as half of a double A side single, is one of those few.
Artist: Herbal Mixture
Title: Please Leave My Mind
Source: British mono CD: Insane Times (originally released as 45 RPM single B side)
Writer(s): Tony McPhee
Label: Zonophone (original label: Columbia UK)
Year: 1966
After a stint backing up John Lee Hooker, guitarist T.S. McPhee branched out on his own with a band called Herbal Mixture in 1966. The group only cut two singles for the British Columbia label, the second of which featured a song that McPhee wrote called Please Leave My Mind as its B side. Eventually Tony McPhee would gain greater fame as leader of the Groundhogs in the early 70s.
Artist: Masters Apprentices
Title: Hot Gully Wind
Source: Australian import CD: The Master's Apprentices
Writer(s): Michael Bower
Label: Aztec (original label: Astor)
Year: 1967
Formed in 1964 by guitarists Mick Bower and Rick Morrison, drummer Brian Vaughton and bassist Gavin Webb, the Mustangs were an instrumental surf music band from Adelaide, South Australia that specialized in covers of Ventures and Shadows songs. In June of that year the Beatles came to Adelaide and were greeted by the largest crowd of their career (around 300,000 people). The popularity of the Beatles among the locals prompted the Mustangs to add vocalist Jim Keays and switch to British-influenced Beat music. In late 1965, having been introduced to the blues through records by bands like the Yardbirds and Rolling Stones, the band changed its name to the Masters Apprentices, with Bower explaining that "we are apprentices to the masters of the blues—Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Jimmy Reed, Elmore James and Robert Johnson". The band decided to relocate to Melbourne in early 1967, taking on Steve Hopgood as the band's new drummer when Vaughton decided to stay in Adelaide. They released their debut LP in 1967, although the people at Astor Records mistakenly added an apostrophe to Masters on the album cover. Among the many Bower originals on the album was Buried And Dead, which was also released as the band's second single. Unfortunately, Bower suffered a nervous breakdown in September, and the band was left without a songwriter. By the end of 1967 the Masters Apprentices were on the verge of disintegrating, which led Keays to reorganize the band in January of 1968 with several new members, retaining only Gavin Webb from the original Mustangs lineup. He also ended up leaving the group due to stomach ulcers in April of 1968.
Artist: Steppendog
Title: I'm Feeling Down
Source: Mono CD: Lost Souls-volume 4
Writer(s): Benny Grigsby
Label: Psych Of The South
Year: Recorded 1968, released 2013
Benny Grigsby had already released one single as the leader of Benny And The Hittites for the Batesville, Arkansas label Zay-Dee sometime around 1965 or 1966 when he decided to take another shot at recording one of his own tunes in 1968. To do so he assembled a group of local musicians, mostly from a local group called Purple Haze and, using the tongue-in-cheek name Steppendog, recorded I'm Feeling Down. The song never got released, however, and for years the only copy was an acetate in the possession of lead guitarist Danny Dozier. The acetate has since disappeared, but Dozier had already made a cassette copy of it, which is now available on Lost Souls-volume 4, a collection of mid-60s garage/psych tunes from Arkansas.
Artist: Guess Who
Title: Laughing
Source: CD: The Best Of 60s Supergroups (originally released as 45 RPM single and included on LP: Canned Wheat)
Writer(s): Bachman/Cummings
Label: Priority (original label: RCA Victor)
Year: 1969
Following the success of their American LP debut, Wheatfield Soul (and the hit single These Eyes), the Guess Who headed back to the studio to record their fifth album, Canned Wheat. RCA Victor had a policy stating that groups signed to the label had to use RCA's own studios, whether they wanted to or not. The Guess Who and their producer, Jack Richardson, however, felt that RCA's New York studios were to inferior to A&R studios, where Wheatfield Soul had been recorded, and to prove their point secretly re-recorded two songs, Laughing and Undun, at A&R. They then sent dubs of the two new recordings to the shirts at RCA, who immediately issued the recordings as the band's next single, unaware that they had been recorded at A&R. By the time RCA realized what was going on, the single was already climbing the charts (eventually hitting the #10 spot), and ended up using the two new recordings on Canned Wheat. The remainded of the album was made up of the tracks recorded at RCA Studios. Their next album, American Woman, would be recorded at RCA's brand new Mid-America Recording Center in Chicago.
Artist: Doors
Title: Waiting For The Sun
Source: CD: The Best Of The Doors (originally released on LP: Morrison Hotel)
Writer(s): Jim Morrison
Label: Elektra
Year: 1970
The third Doors album, Waiting For The Sun, released in 1968, is notable for at least two things that were not on the album itself. The first, and most well-known, was the epic piece Celebration Of The Lizard, which was abandoned when the group couldn't get it to sound the way they wanted it to in the studio (although one section of the piece was included under the title Not To Touch The Earth). The second, and perhaps more obvious omission was the title track of the album itself. The unfinished tapes sat on the shelf until 1970, when the band finally completed the version of Waiting For The Sun that appears on the Morrison Hotel album.
Artist: Love
Title: Alone Again Or
Source: 45 RPM single (stereo reissue)
Writer(s): Bryan MacLean
Label: Elektra
Year: 1967
The only song Love ever released as a single that was not written by Arthur Lee was Alone Again Or, issued in 1970. The song had originally appeared as the opening track from the Forever Changes album three years earlier. Bryan McLean would later say that he was not happy with the recording due to his own vocal being buried beneath that of Lee, since Lee's part was meant to be a harmony line to McLean's melody. McLean would later re-record the song for a solo album, but reportedly was not satisfied with that version either.
Artist: Seeds
Title: The Wind Blows Your Hair
Source: Mono LP: Nuggets Vol. 9-Acid Rock (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Writer(s): Saxon/Bigelow
Label: Rhino (original label: GNP Crescendo)
Year: 1967
The Wind Blows Your Hair is actually one of the Seeds' better tracks. Unfortunately, by the time it was released as a single in October of 1967 the whole idea of Flower Power (which the Seeds were intimately tied to) had become yesterday's news (at least in ultra-hip L.A.) and the single went nowhere.
Artist: Rolling Stones
Title: Dandelion
Source: 45 RPM single B side
Writer(s): Jagger/Richards
Label: London
Year: 1967
If there was a British equivalent to the Beach Boys' Good Vibrations in terms of time and money spent on a single song, it might be We Love You, a 1967 single released by the Rolling Stones. To go along with the single (with its state-of-the-art production) the band spent a considerable sum making a full-color promotional video, a practice that would not become commonplace until the advent of MTV in the 1980s. Despite all this, US radio stations virtually ignored We Love You, choosing to instead flip the record over and play the B side, a tune called Dandelion. As to why this came about, I suspect that Bill Drake, the man behind the nation's most influential top 40 stations, simply decided that the less elaborately produced Dandelion was better suited to the US market than We Love You and instructed his hand-picked program directors at such stations as WABC (New York), KHJ (Los Angeles) and WLS (Chicago) to play Dandelion. The copycat nature of top 40 radio being what it is, Dandelion ended up being a moderate hit in the US in the summer of '67.
Artist: Simon and Garfunkel
Title: Bookends Theme/Save The Life Of My Child/America
Source: CD: Collected Works (originally released on LP: Bookends)
Writer: Paul Simon
Label: Columbia
Year: 1968
An early example of a concept album (or at least half an album) was Simon And Garfunkel's fourth LP, Bookends. The side starts and ends with the Bookends theme. In between they go through a sort of life cycle of tracks, from Save The Life Of My Child (featuring a synthesizer opening programmed by Robert Moog himself), into America, a song that is very much in the sprit of On The Road, the novel that had inspired many young Americans to travel beyond the boundaries of their own home towns.
Artist: Big Brother And The Holding Company
Title: Oh, Sweet Mary
Source: LP: Cheap Thrills
Writer(s): Albin/Andrew/Getz/Gurley/Joplin
Label: Columbia
Year: 1968
The only song credited to the entire membership of Big Brother And The Holding Company on their Cheap Thrills album was Oh, Sweet Mary (although the original label credits Janis Joplin as sole writer and the album cover itself gives only Joplin and Peter Albin credit). The tune bears a strong resemblance to Coo Coo, a non-album single the band had released on the Mainstream label before signing to Columbia. Oh, Sweet Mary, however, has new lyrics and, for a breath of fresh air, a bridge section played at a slower tempo than the rest of the tune.
Artist: Canned Heat
Title: Going Up The Country
Source: CD: The Very Best Of Canned Heat (originally released on LP: Living The Blues)
Writer(s): Alan Wilson
Label: Capitol (original label: Liberty)
Year: 1968
Canned Heat built up a solid reputation as one of the best blues-rock bands in history, recording several critically-acclaimed albums over a period of years. What they did not have, however, was a top 10 single on the US charts. The nearest they got was Going Up The Country from their late 1968 LP Living The Blues, which peaked in the #11 spot in early 1969 (although it did hit #1 in several other countries). The song was written and sung by guitarist Alan "Blind Own" Wilson, who died at age 27 on September 3, 1970.
Artist: Turtles
Title: Can't You Hear The Cows
Source: Mono CD: The Turtles Present The Battle Of The Bands (bonus track originally released as 45 RPM single B side)
Writer(s): The Turtles
Label: White Whale
Year: 1968
By late 1968 the Turtles already had their best times behind them. After a failed attempt at self-production (the record company refused to release all but one of the tracks they had recorded), the band went back into the studio to cut a Harry Nilsson tune, The Story of Rock and Roll. Can You Hear the Cows, sort of a twisted throwback to their days as the surf music band known as the Crossfires and sounding oddly like the mid-80s Beach Boys, appeared on the B side of that single.
Artist: Brigands
Title: (Would I Still Be) Her Big Man
Source: Mono CD: Nuggets-Original Artyfacts From The First Psychedelic Era (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Writer(s): Kris/Arthur Resnick
Label: Rhino (original label: Epic)
Year: 1966
Virtually nothing is known about the Brigands, other than the fact that they recorded in New York City. Their only single was a forgettable piece of imitation British pop, but the B side, (Would I Still Be) Her Big Man, holds up surprising well. The song itself was written by the husband and wife team of Kris and Artie Resnick, who would end up writing a series of bubble gum hits issued under various band names on the Buddah label in 1968.
Artist: Paul Revere And The Raiders
Title: Louise
Source: LP: Spirit Of '67
Writer(s): Jesse Lee Kincaid
Label: Columbia
Year: 1966
One interesting by-product of the popular (but hard to define) Los Angeles club band The Rising Sons being signed to Columbia in 1966 was that, although their album was never released, singer/songwriter Jesse Lee Kincaid did get the opportunity for his songs to be heard by people at the label, including producer Terry Melcher. This led to one of his compositions being recorded by Columbia's most successful rock band at the time, Paul Revere and the Raiders (also produced by Melcher). Louise was included on the Raiders' third top 10 LP of 1966, ironically titled The Spirit of '67.
Artist: Country Joe And The Fish
Title: Bass Strings
Source: Mono British import CD: The Berkeley EPs (originally released on EP)
Writer(s): Joe McDonald
Label: Big Beat (original label: Rag Baby)
Year: 1966
One of the more original ways to get one's music heard is to publish an underground arts-oriented newspaper and include a record in it. Country Joe and the Fish did just that; not once, but twice. The first one was split with another artist and featured the original recording of the I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-To-Die Rag. The second Rag Baby EP, released in 1966, was all Fish, and featured two tracks that would be re-recorded for their debut LP the following year. In addition to the instrumental Section 43, the EP included a four-minute version of Bass Strings, a track with decidedly psychedelic lyrics.
Artist: Beach Boys
Title: Pet Sounds
Source: Mono LP: Pet Sounds
Writer(s): Brian Wilson
Label: Capitol/EMI
Year: 1966
Originally titled Run James Run, Brian Wilson's instrumental Pet Sounds was intended for a James Bond film, but instead ended up as the title track of the Beach Boys' most celebrated album (although it actually appears close to the end of the album itself). The track somewhat resembles a 60s update of the Tiki room recordings made by Martin Denny in the 1950s, with heavily reverberated bongos and guiro featured prominently over a latin beat. Although credited to the Beach Boys, only Brian Wilson appears on the track (on piano), with the remainder of the instruments played by various Los Angeles studio musicians collectively known as the Wrecking Crew.
Artist: Undisputed Truth
Title: Ball Of Confusion (That's What The World Is Today)
Source: British import CD: Nothing But The Truth (originally released on LP: The Undisputed Truth
Writer(s): Whitfield/Strong
Label: Kent (original US label: Gordy)
Year: 1971
Just about everybody is at least somewhat familiar with the Temptations' 1970 hit Ball Of Confusion. What most people don't realize, though, is that the instrumental backing track, performed by Motown's Funk Brothers, originally ran over ten minutes in length, and was cut down to less than four minutes for the Temptations' single version of the song. Now normally, in a case like this the album track would be the full-length version of the song, but, to my knowledge, no such version exists. This is because the only time the Temptations version of the song was released on an LP was on a greatest hits compilation, which of course used the hit single version. The producers of the track, Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong, did find a way to get the full-length version of the backing track on vinyl, however, albeit with a different vocal group entirely. The Undisputed Truth was a second-tier Motown group that recorded exclusively for Whitfield and Strong. They had a pretty big hit themselves in the spring of 1971 with a song called Smiling Faces Sometimes, but had been unable to come up with a strong followup single. Their self-titled debut LP, released in July, included the full version of Ball Of Confusion (That's What The World Is Today) heard here.
Artist: Strawberry Zots
Title: Pretty Flowers
Source: LP: Cars, Flowers, Telephones
Writer(s): Mark Andrews
Label: StreetSound
Year: 1989
Albuquerque's Strawberry Zots were led by Mark Andrews, who either wrote or co-wrote all of the band's original material. Their only LP, Cars, Flowers, Telephones, was released locally on the StreetSound label and reissued on CD the following year by RCA records. My personal favorite track on the album is Pretty Flowers, which starts off the LP's second side. Unfortunately the song is handicapped by its low-fidelity production, which may have been a deliberate attempt to emulate the sound of 60s psychedelia, but ends up sounding over-compressed (like much of the music of the 1980s).
Artist: Higher State
Title: I Suppose You Like That Now?
Source: CD: Volume 27
Writer(s): Paul Messis
Label: 13 O'Clock
Year: 2016
Formed in the town of Sandgate, Kent in the UK in 2005, the Higher State are one of the best examples of modern garage rock. The group, featuring Marty Ratcliffe on guitar, vocals and organ, Paul Messis on bass and guitar and Scarlett Rickard on drums, has four album's the their credit, including their 2016 release Volume 27. All the tracks on Volume 27 were written by either Ratcliffe or Messis, including this Messis song with the delightfully snarky title I Suppose You Like That Now?
Artist: Tol-Puddle Martyrs
Title: Two Hearts
Source: CD: Flying In The Dark
Writer(s): Peter Rechter
Label: Secret Deals
Year: 2011
The original Tolpuddle Martyrs were a group of farmers in the English village of Tolpuddle who had the temerity to try organizing what amounts to a union in the 19th century. For their efforts they found themselves deported to the penal colony now known as Australia. But that doesn't really concern us. What I wanted to talk about was the original Tol-Puddle Martyrs (note the hyphen), the legendary Australian band that evolved from a group called Peter And The Silhouettes. Well, not exactly. What I really wanted to talk about is the current incarnation of the Tol-Puddle Martyrs. Still led by Peter Rechter, the Martyrs have released a series of CDs since 2007 (including a collection of recordings made by the 60s incarnation of the band). Among those CDs is the 2011 album Flying In The Dark, which contains several excellent tunes such as Two Hearts. Thanks to Peter Rechter for sharing these CDs with Stuck in the Psychedelic Era.
Artist: Bob Dylan
Title: It Ain't Me Babe
Source: LP: Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits (originally released on LP: Another Side Of Bob Dylan)
Writer: Bob Dylan
Label: Columbia/Legacy
Year: 1964
One of Bob Dylan's best known songs was It Ain't Me Babe, from his 1964 album Another Side Of Bob Dylan. The song was electrified by the Turtles the following year, becoming their first hit single.
Artist: Ban
Title: Bye Bye
Source: Mono British import CD: A Pot Of Flowers (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Writer(s): Tony McGuire
Label: Big Beat (original label: Brent)
Year: 1965
One of the first garage bands signed to Bob Shad's Brent label was The Ban (not to be confused with the basement group The Band). Based in Lompoc, California, the Ban was led by guitarist/vocalist Tony McGuire, who also wrote the band's original material. The group released their first single, Bye Bye in late 1965, and for a while it looked like the Ban had a legitimate shot at fame. In early 1966, however, it all came crashing down when McGuire received his draft notice. The remainder of the band regrouped, first in Hollywood as the Now and later (after moving to San Francisco) the Tripsichord Music Box.
Artist: Standells
Title: Dirty Water
Source: Mono LP: Nuggets Vol. 1-The Hits (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Writer: Ed Cobb
Label: Rhino (original label: Tower)
Dirty Water has long since been adopted by the city of Boston (and especially its sports teams), yet the band that originally recorded this Ed Cobb tune was purely an L.A. band, having started off playing cover tunes for frat parties in the early 60s. Lead vocalist/drummer Dickie Dodd, incidently, was a former Mouseketeer who had played on the surf-rock hit Mr. Moto as a member of the Bel-Airs.
Artist: Cream
Title: Mother's Lament
Source: Mono European import LP: Disraeli Gears
Writer: Trad. Arr. Cream
Label: Lilith (original US label: Atco)
Year: 1967
The shortest-ever Cream recording was an old English drinking song called Mother's Lament. Vocals on the song were led by drummer Ginger Baker, and the track was chosen to close out the Disraeli Gears album. By one of those odd coincidences of the music industry, the album was issued in Europe on the Polydor label (as were many cutting-edge bands of the time, including the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Procol Harum and the Who), which at the time did not issue records in the US. By the late 1980s, however, Polydor was well established in the US and all the Cream albums on Compact Disc were released under the Polydor imprint. The mono LP used here, however, is a more recent European pressing on the Lilith label.
Artist: Moby Grape
Title: Sitting By The Window
Source: Mono LP: Moby Grape
Writer: Peter Lewis
Label: Columbia
Year: 1967
Moby Grape's powerful 1967 debut managed to achieve what few bands have been able to: a coherent sound despite having wildly different writing styles from the individual members. One of guitarist Peter Lewis's contributions to the album was Sitting By The Window, one of those rare songs that sounds better every time you hear it.
Artist: Jefferson Airplane
Title: Comin' Back To Me
Source: CD: Surrealistic Pillow
Writer(s): Marty Balin
Label: RCA/BMG Heritage
Year: 1967
Uncredited guest guitarist Jerry Garcia adds a simple, but memorable recurring fill riff to this Marty Balin tune. Balin, in his 2003 liner notes to the remastered release of Surrealistic Pillow, claims that Comin' Back To Me was written in one sitting under the influence of some primo stuff given to him by Paul Butterfield. Other players on the recording include Paul Kantner, Jack Casady and Balin himself on acoustic guitars and Grace Slick on recorder.
Artist: Arlo Guthrie
Title: Coming Into Los Angeles
Source: CD: Woodstock: 40 Years On-Back To Yasgur's Farm
Writer: Arlo Guthrie
Label: Rhino
Year: Recorded 1969, released 2009
When the original Woodstock soundtrack album came out in 1970 it included a handful of recordings that were not made at the Woodstock festival itself. Among those was a version of Arlo Guthrie's Coming Into Los Angeles that segued directly out of a truncated version of Rock And Soul Music by Country Joe And The Fish. As can be heard on the box set Woodstock: 40 Years On-Back To Yasgur's Farm, the performance of Coming Into Los Angeles is marred by the sound system being adjusted throughout the song, resulting in instruments and even vocals fading in and out on the recording. Still, this is what the people in the crowd heard on that August day in 1969.
Artist: Max Frost And The Troopers
Title: She Lied
Source: CD: Shape Of Things To Come
Writer(s): Beckner/Martin
Label: Captain High (original label: Tower)
Year: 1968
The first thing you need to know about Max Frost And The Troopers is that they were a fictional rock band featured in the film Wild In The Streets. Sort of. You see, in the movie itself the band is never actually named, although Max (played by Christopher Jones) does refer to his followers as his "troops" throughout the film. The next thing you need to know is that Shape Of Things To Come was a song used in the film that became a hit record in 1968. The song itself was written by the Brill building songwriting team of Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil (who also wrote Kicks and Hungry for Paul Revere and the Raiders) and was recorded by studio musicians, with vocals by Paul Wibier. The song, along with several other Barry/Weil tunes used in the film, was credited not to Max Frost and the Troopers, but to the 13th Power on the film's soundtrack LP, which was released on Capitol's Tower subsidiary label. After Shape Of Things To Come (the song) became a hit, producer Mike Curb commissioned an entire album by Max Frost And The Troopers called, naturally, Shape Of Things To Come. The 13th Power, who had already released a couple of singles on Curb's own Sidewalk label, ghosted the album, writing most of the songs on it, including She Lied, themselves. The name Max Frost And The Troopers popped up in a couple more film soundtracks before being permanently retired by the end of the year.
Artist: Status Quo
Title: Pictures Of Matchstick Men
Source: Simulated stereo CD: British Beat (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Writer: Francis Rossi
Label: K-Tel (original label: Cadet Concept)
Year: 1968
The band with the most charted singles in the UK is not the Beatles or even the Rolling Stones. It is, in fact, Status Quo, quite possibly the nearest thing to a real life version of Spinal Tap. Except for Pictures of Matchstick Men, the group has never had a hit in the US. On the other hand, they remain popular in Scandanavia, playing to sellout crowds on a regular basis (yes, they are still together).
Artist: Hollies
Title: Not That Way At All
Source: 45 RPM single B side
Writer(s): Allan Clarke
Label: Epic
Year: 1969
After the departure of Graham Nash in December of 1968 the Hollies continued to find success on the British charts with Terry Sylvester (formerly of the Swinging Blue Jeans) taking Nash's place in the band. The first post-Nash single by the group was Sorry Suzanne, which hit the #3 spot on the UK singles chart. The B side of that record was an Allan Clarke composition called Not That Way At All that is stylistically consistent with the Hollies' older material.
Artist: Millennium
Title: I'm With You
Source: LP: Begin
Writer(s): Lee Mallory
Label: Columbia/Sundazed
Year: 1968
Curt Boettcher, despite looking about 15 years old, was already at 24 an experience record producer by early 1968, having worked with the Association on their first album, as well as co-producing Sagittarius with Gary Usher and producing his own group, the Ballroom, in 1967. Among the many people he had worked with were multi-instrumentalist Keith Olsen, drummer Ron Edgar and bassist Doug Rhodes, all of which had been members of Sean Bonniwell's Music Machine in 1966-67. Following the release of the debut Eternity's Children album, which Olsen and Boettcher had co-produced, the two formed a new group called the Millennium. In addition to the aforementioned Music Machine members, the Millennium included guitarist/singer/songwriters Lee Mallory (who wrote I'm With You), Sandy Salisbury, and Michael Fennelly, all of who Boettcher had worked with on various studio projects, and Joey Spec, who would go on to form his own Sonic Past Music label many years later. Working on state-of-the-art 16 track equipment at Columbia's Los Angeles studios, they produced the album Begin, which, at that point in time, was the most expensive album ever made and only the second (after Simon & Garfunkel's Bookends) to use 16-track technology. The only problem was that by the time the album was released in mid-1968, public tastes had changed radically from just a year before, with top 40 listeners going for the simple bubble-gum tunes coming from the Buddah label and album fans getting into louder, heavier groups like Blue Cheer and the Jimi Hendrix Experience. There was no market for the lavishly produced Begin album, which failed to chart despite getting rave reviews from the press. A second Millennium album was shelved, and the members went their separate ways. In more recent years the album has attained legendary status as, in the words of one critic, "probably the single greatest 60s pop record produced in L.A. outside of the Beach Boys".
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