Listen to the Colour of Your Dreams: Part Five

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Haight Street hippies, San Francisco, Oct. 26, 1967. From the Charles W. Cushman Photograph Collection.

Continuing the psychedelic mega-mix based on Jon Savage’s list of “100 mind-expanding masterpieces” (see this post). The fifth of the six mixes is the second visit to the USA, and features songs from the years 1967 to 1968 arranged in chronological order. As before, the selections from the Savage 100 are in bold, and I’ve added notes about my additions or amendments.

Savage’s selections for the USA can be more arguable than those in the UK list. As I noted earlier, UK singles are easily identifiable for being effects-heavy studio creations. The US scene evolved out of the dance halls of San Francisco, the same halls that also fuelled the demand for all the trend-setting psychedelic poster art. Some of the bands could be just as adventurous in the studio but the sound at this point is more a transcription of the live performance. In other songs the “psychedelic” quality is a result of context, as with Otis Redding who played at the Monterey Pop Festival, and is singing here about the San Francisco Bay, but isn’t really a psychedelic artist.

US Psychedelia, Part Two by Feuilleton on Mixcloud

Radio ad — The Trip
The Glass Family — House Of Glass (The first song on the group’s only album.)
Kaleidoscope (US) — Egyptian Candy (The multi-generic multi-instrumentalists recorded a number of Middle Eastern-style pieces. This is one of the more obscure ones.)
Park Avenue Playground — The Trip (The wildest trip song of them all.)
The Red Crayola — Hurricane Fighter Plane (One of the few actual songs in the psychedelic soup of the group’s first album. This version is from a compilation.)
Jefferson Airplane — White Rabbit
Tim Buckley — Hallucinations
The Chocolate Watchband — In The Past (The Savage 100 has Are You Gonna Be There (At The Love-In). This replacement is by the “fake” Watchband assembled by producer Ed Cobb to fill out a side of the group’s second album. Real or fake, I always liked the song.)
Big Brother and the Holding Company — Piece Of My Heart (The Savage 100 has Ball And Chain.)
The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band — Smell of Incense (A great song by a group who never sound as experimental as their name implies.)
The Third Bardo — Five Years Ahead Of My Time
Painted Faces — Anxious Colour
The Beau Brummels — Magic Hollow
Buffalo Springfield — Broken Arrow
The Strawberry Alarm Clock — Incense And Peppermints
Love — The Red Telephone
The Byrds — Change Is Now
Otis Redding — (Sittin’ On) The Dock Of The Bay
The Balloon Farm — A Question Of Temperature
Sly & The Family Stone — Dance To The Music
Quicksilver Messenger Service — Pride Of Man
The Monkees — Porpoise Song (The Monkees at their most tripped-out. A song by Goffin & King that plays over shots of Micky Dolenz swimming with solarised mermaids during the opening of their feature film, Head.)

Previously on { feuilleton }
Listen to the Colour of Your Dreams: Part Four
Listen to the Colour of Your Dreams: Part Three
Listen to the Colour of Your Dreams: Part Two
Listen to the Colour of Your Dreams: Part One
What Is A Happening?
My White Bicycle
Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake
Tomorrow Never Knows
The Dukes declare it’s 25 O’Clock!
A splendid time is guaranteed for all

Ptooff!

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There’s a sub-genre of the psychedelic album cover in which florid, unfocused and vividly polychrome doodles by friends of the band are used as the principal artwork. (The cover of The Parable Of Arable Land [1967] by The Red Crayola is a typical example.) The art which decorates the fold-out sleeve of Ptooff! (1967), the debut album by British group The Deviants, isn’t quite in the doodle league but it treads a narrow divide between drug-addled scribbles and American comic-strip art à la Jack Kirby. Someone named “Kipps” receives the art credit. Viewed today the swirls and explosions on the sleeve’s outer panels also seem to predict the graffiti art which would flourish a decade later.

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The Deviants were the first musical vehicle for writer and singer Mick Farren who died last week. At the time Farren was known as a journalist for International Times which explains the disembodied head of Theda Bara (from the paper’s logo) floating in the top right-hand corner of the front cover. The lysergic wildness continues inside with an incoherent scene and the promise that “APSARAS—is an Epic forthcoming—a marvel of the Universe—an illustrated saga of a Godwoman. On sale soon.” John Peel provided some sleeve notes. See the artwork at larger size here.

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Charles Shaar Murray penned a memorial note for Mick Farren last week. My favourite track from Ptooff! is the opening song I’m Coming Home, a number that demonstrates the group’s ability to combine humour with hard-rock freakout.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
The album covers archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
International Times archive