Apr 152007
I just watched Avril Lavigne and band lip-synch their way through her new single on Saturday Night Live. Of course it’s pathetic that I would think get a bee in my bonnet over lip-synching on SNL these days, not to mention it’s pathetic I even have it on in the background, but watching Lavigne lip-synch this song, I got to thinking, in terms of how it would change rock and, perhaps, the world, what period in rock was a greater disappointment…
Punk rock?
Prog rock?
Or something else?
Avril’s my fave, man. Don’t go knocking her. She’s so hot, and so authentic. When her Greatest Hits comes out, I’ll be the first in line to get one, and to give copies to all my friends.
I feel betrayed by Avril. I mean, IMO the geeky girl with the red hair and glasses is like gr8, and how dare she pick on her acting all like an obnoxus (Spelling? OMG 🙂 ) metal chick. STFU Avril! LOL.
psychedelia is by far the biggest disappointment for me. has any movement ever hinted at more creative possibilities (think of Piper at the Gates of Dawn) that weren’t taken up?
Hey, Townsman Art, I’ve been waiting for that Future of Psychedelia piece you had in mind. Let us know if you think you can get to it. I’d love to open up discussion around what you’ve said here.
Townsman Mark, sorry for knocking on your girl Avril. I was just using her as a launching point.
I’m with the psychedelic movement ultimately being a disappointment. There are so few great psych albums. The ones that are great are soooo great but man by the time the Strawberry Alarm Clock got to it, which seems almost instantly, it was pretty much down hill. (Unless someone tells me otherwise about the SAC. I might be unfairly judging them on the one song.)
The affectations of psych (the “trippy” sounds) got copped by the Man who promptly took a dump on and smothered the movement.
I’d love to see a full blown psych discussion as I believe that the genre has little to do with the “sound”.
Also- Avril gives me an erection.
ps: i refuse to vote in the poll until “the crazy world of arthur brown” is added.
no, wait. moderator, i just saw your haranguing of me for not submitting my psyche thingy. so, i refuse to submit my psyche thingy until “the crazy world of arthur brown” is added to the poll.
I just watched SNL on TiVo, and though I am aware it’s off topic from the point you’re getting at, I can tell you that I’m nearly positive Avril wasn’t lip synching her way through her songs. Augmented in some way though they may have been, they were definitely sung live.
And I also think that picking on Avril for a discussion about what’s wrong with today’s music is a little like picking on Don Imus for a National conversation on racism. It’s too easy, it’s not really the problem, and in focusing on it all people get to do is continue to steer clear of all the actual important issues while they lay into the low hanging fruit.
Art, you are able to write in your own votes on the poll. Don’t let the initial selections limit you and give you further reason to delay!
Christian wrote:
I’ll have to review the first song again myself, but I distinctly remember a greatly different ambience – a live one – when she sang her second song. The first song had absolutely no “room” in the vocals, and I don’t think she was following through with some of her phrasing, if you watch her lips closely. The second song I thought was sung live, just with additional backing vocals.
A couple of things, and I really hope you respond, Christian, because you’ve got solid thoughts when you pitch in. Dig:
1) I wasn’t picking on Avril or what’s wrong with today’s music. I was positing that her reduction of punk rock to a level more shallow than even Billy Idol could have imagined may be a disappointing ending to the promise of punk rock. From there, I wondered if possibly another genre, such as prog, held more unfulfilled promise.
2) Please name an “actual important issue” in rock. Seriously. That’s why we’re here. I stated one of my concerns. It’s cool if you disagree that it’s worth bothering about, but give us something in return. I’m not trying to be confrontational, just trying to push the discussion – and broaden it. Believe me, discussion on RTH is always open to new ideas and directions. Thanks!
Can anyone out there define psychedelia for me? It seems a rather amorphous term.
Mr. Mod, this question got off on the wrong foot, since you struck an unexpected vein of Avril-sympathy with your offhand comment and so distracted us from the real issue.
I will vote for Prog as Greatest Disappointment, although I’m not sure it ever hugely disappointed me, exactly, since I never really believed in it. While I do play a King Crimson album now and again, with rare exceptions most prog urges can be fulfilled by post-65 jazz, where the instrumentation, ensembles and composition are all invariably better. There’s some good Prog, but when wanting rock not to be rock, it’s important to remember that other kinds of music are better at being not rock than rock is.
I’m not trying to be a smart-ass, honest!
psy·che·de·lia
Pronunciation [sahy-ki-deel-yuh, -del-yuh]
n. The realm or artifacts of psychedelic drugs, art, writings, or the like.
n. The subculture associated with psychedelic drugs.
n. The subculture of users of psychedelic drugs.
Wickipedia: Psychedelia in music (or also psychedelic music, less formally) is a term that refers to a broad set of popular music styles, genres and scenes, that may include psychedelic rock, psychedelic folk, psychedelic pop, psychedelic soul, psychedelic ambient, psychedelic trance, psychedelic techno, and others. Psychedelic rock is also commonly called acid rock.
Okay let me put it this way– What is most/least essential for psychedelic music?
Lyrics
Song structure
Trippy sound effects
Guitar tone
Rhythm
Arrangement
Use of drugs in creation, playing, and/or recording of music
Well, reasons for disappointment about psychedelic music have to do with the fact that lifestyle often became so much more essential than the music itself. So while in theory the use of drugs is least essential, in actual fact it was most essential.
Hey, is anybody else out there having all the strange technical troubles I’m having with the blog. It keeps logging me out, then drops my vote on the poll and lets me vote again. It’s very strange.
Dr. John asked:
Well, for me, before, during, and after any experiences with psychedelics themselves, it’s been about getting into a meditative state and seeing the world in a new way. Hendrix’s “Are You Experienced” (the song) is a perfect opening salvo: aggressively repetitive music with lyrics setting up the new dynamic. So rhythms that churn, whether aggressively or mildly, are a good starting point for me. The genre grew up around modal and Eastern touches, musically, and I think they are key for reaching this hypnotic or meditative state. After that, great lyrics that help me experience language in new ways can’t be beat. What better lyrics are there to accompany psychedelic music than those like “Strawberry Fields Forever”? Then, appropriate tones are a helpful way to tune in, but there are many ways to achieve that psychedelic vibe beyond standard fuzz riffs, sitars, and whatever other nonsense we’ve grown accustomed to. There can be acoustic psychedelic music, for instance.
The LEAST necessary element of psychedelic music is cliched lyrics about seeing with one’s mind’s eye and all that jazz. It can work, as in a solid song like Small Faces’ “My Mind’s Eye” or Amboy Dukes’ “Journey to the Center of Your Mind”, but boy it can stink out the joint if it’s overly cheesy and by the book.
Finally, I do think there’s psychedelic music that’s not stereotypically psychedelic. Similarly, I don’t think one has to take drugs to make psychedelic music.
Absolutely.
Absolutely not. Not only are drugs required to make it, drugs are required to fully appreciate it. It is difficult to defend the later but I’m up for being disproved on the former if anyone can provide an example. And don’t try Zappa as he’s so not psychedelic.
This needs a full blown post. Who’s up for it? Beuller, Beuller, Beuller…
What about Roy Wood, then?
“Not necessarily stoned, but beautiful.”
Mr. Maudlin fails to peak with:
And don’t try Zappa as he’s so not psychedelic.
I look at my hand, I mean really *look* at it, and say:
Get thee to an acid salesman, Mr. Maudlin! And bring your copy of (wait for it…) Uncle Meat clasped under your arm. At my band’s house, back in the halcyon Reagan era, the test to see whether the acid was kicking in or not was to see whether the lava was flowing through the skull on the back cover. Not psychedelic indeed! Are you sure you’re not thinking of Extasy, or St. Joseph’s Baby Acid?
Big Steve is on the bus:
“Not necessarily stoned, but beautiful.”
I blissfully concur:
Isn’t that what the whole Ravi Shankar trip is about? Getting rid of the euro-temporal, the Euclidian? Replacing 4/4 with 1, man. Getting there straight. Without, hopefully, having gone batshit crazy trying to figure out where “there” is.
What about Roy Wood, did he not do acid? But that’s only part of the point… Andy Partridge claims not to have taken psychedelic drugs or smoked much if any pot. All he did, I believe, were those pills from his in his Mum’s cabinet.
Also, I was into psychedelic music long before taking drugs. Taking the drugs only helped me realize how bad my stereo was and how meaningless my life could be if I didn’t appreciate the things that make it meaningful. The psychedelic vibes were still there in the grooves.
Key word is “much” in regards to Mr. Partridge. It only takes a glimpse to change your perspective.
Sure, that’s not my point. The point is- look me in the eye and tell me you didn’t appreciate it more afterwards.
Zappa is “weird” and has all the elements but they don’t add up to a psychedelic experience.
Although I admit I’ve never heard Uncle Meat.
Sammy asked:
In some cases, of course, but I also appreciated things more after traveling to Europe or seeing Yosemite or getting laid or eating some hot sausage with fennel from Fiorella’s.
Case closed.
Please point out a specific psychedelic song that I will have a deeper understanding of after eating a sausage.
YOU know what I mean. The eagle’s eyes are turning inward….
When The Eagle looks within, he typically finds peace.
We can all only speak to our individual experience. I loved the music to Yellow Submarine when I was 5. I loved Sgt. Peppers when I first heard it a few years after that. But post-drug experience, I realized that The White Album is far more psychedelic. I know that Got To Get You Into My Life is a full blast of psychedelia REGARDLESS of the lyrics. I know that English Settlement is one of (if not the) greatest psychedelic album of all time.
Given that… Would I have come to the same conclusions by playing it straight? I doubt it, but maybe. The world will never know.
I pick eagles larger than yours out of my stools.
Does anybody really find his psychedelic music convincing AS psychedelic music? It always seems to me more like a pleasant game of imitating something that has nothing really to do with him.
Mr. Maudlin needs direction:
Please point out a specific psychedelic song that I will have a deeper understanding of after eating a sausage.
I oblige:
Donovan’s “Wear Your Love Like Heaven.” If sausage can’t help you with that one, nothing can.
I didn’t have a “sausage” per se but I did warm up a Jimmy Dean patty and cranked up the Donovan tune. Damn! if it didn’t help, with my hunger if nothing else.
mdw1322- I find the mid-period XTC very psychedelic. I find the Dukes a game, albeit a super fun one.
A propos of several recent threads, what’s the feelings here about Karen Dalton? I just got the album “In My Own Time.” I find it to win completely in spite of itself. It is both stylistically and sonically varied, and some of its more bluegrassy songs are very definitely psychedelic, without a sitar in the house. Psychedelic banjo, if you will.
[Did you know that it used to be psychodelic? Like psychological? Only people didn’t want it to be reflective of the word psycho. The spelling changed in the early sixties, apparently. Pince nez, anyone?]
So also, in the category of unhelpful critical comparisons, every critic seems to compare her to Billie Holiday. It’s not that her voice doesn’t remind you of Billie, and she no doubt was aiming there at least partially on purpose, but that very comparison causes more fog than it clarifies. Like throwing around archetypal sounds such as the Beatles or VU, it begs one to start finding shortcomings before the words are written on the [screen.] Ms. Dalton was a permanent and terminal junkie (-10 points), often sounds too tired to finish the song (-5 points), often mumbles (-10 points), and has some pitch issues (-5 points.) Yet I find this album a hit. How pleasant (the moreso in middle age) to have any cherished ideas stood on their heads convincingly, even if fleetingly.
You’ll have to specify, because my initial tendency is to disagree.
English Settlement from beginning to end. More than any other band, this era of XTC swallowed the majesty and psychedelia of The Kinks and bore something equally as strong and unique.
Another thing that I am small enough to be annoyed by (and it is a little thing) about this Karen Dalton reissue is that it has an essay in the booklet by Nick Cave. They have the original producer say some things, and quotes by Dylan, et al. And then this 1971 alt-folk album is explained by the Prince of Dimness. I don’t want to bust too much on him, because mostly his post-Birthday Party work just leaves me neutrally unengaged, like Springsteen. But he always seemed like a acolyte existentialist, wanting to be deeply world-weary and understatedly profound, but missing the mark, IMO. His voice is supremely suited to his chosen vibe, and his lyrics are the kind of effectively facile shorthand for sensual bleakness that Norman Rockwell’s work was for nostalgic comfort. But in the inverse of this Kate Dalton record, he assembles fairly impeccable signposts for a rewarding musical experience, but I never get the payoff from him. So in the end, it’s like having liner notes to Billie Holiday by Diana Krall, or, I don’t know these new singers. So there it is. A kind of hister piling-on. I haven’t read it yet though, and I seem to remember Cave was trying to repackage himself as a writer? The New Celine of LA and Berlin or some such. Jesus! I sound like fucking Christgau here! I’m in a tired, pissy mood. Snotty horse’s ass hunched over my keyboard… (I guess I’m halfway to being a critic, there, at that.)
Actually psycho- as in psychotic. The idea was that these drugs produced effects, like hallucinations, that people in psychotic states experience. The OED says that psychologist Humphry Osmond coined the word in its current spelling (quoting a letter to Aldous Huxley dated 1957). Osmond said it meant ‘mind-manifesting.’ Psychotomimetic and schizophrenogenic were other words that were suggested around this time. Can you imagine those as musicological terms?
I’m partial to 13th floor elevators music… Here’s a weird interview with the elevator’s 2nd drummer, Danny Thomas, on the Tommy Hall (elevator’s jug player) site: http://www.tommyhallschedule.com/dannythomasinterview.mp3
How about The United States of America’s only album (Joseph Byrd’s project) – my friend picked up the album during a late 90s shopping trip at a record store in Detroit and we’d never both freaked out over liking a mysterious album so much. Who was this band? No guitar on it, either. Just the cover to go on. I think it’s been committed to CD in the past few years…
Psychedelic flamenco? I find Ricardo Baliardo/Manitas de Plata (Little Hands of Silver) to be really bizarre sounding and intense in that way – playing here to Brigitte Bardot:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Zx0Ta0uAEk
I haven’t heard Karen Dalton, but it sounds interesting…
Hey, Slokie —
I know *just* what you need. Right now, the WWE Divas are having a “fashion show” on WWE Raw, this week broadcast from Milan, Italy.. T&A everywhere — plus, in a minute, they’re likely to start whuppin’ on each other and tearing even more clothes off. Leave this rock and roll bullshit behind for a little while and fill your brain with shit that *really* mattters.
Your pal,
HVB
Hrrundivie Looks out for me:
Hey, Slokie —
I know *just* what you need. Right now, the WWE Divas are having a “fashion show” on WWE Raw, this week broadcast from Milan, Italy.. T&A everywhere — plus, in a minute, they’re likely to start whuppin’ on each other and tearing even more clothes off.
I appreciate:
The kind of generosity that makes RTH pay! Thanks for the psychic e-balm from the south. I am opting for passing out, but even the description should influence my dreams for the better!
p.s. Is that a network or what? Since moving out of our center city Philly digs, we have inherited a TV from my wife’s grandfather, but we can only watch DVDs. No cable, or even antenna. So life is simpler. And between that, getting out of retail a decade or so ago, and having children, my view of humanity has been steadily climbing out of the crapper. But I do see such fine programming as you refer to elsewhere from time to time.
Meanwhile, I work on my reality show pitch, “The Dog Hollerer,” and my cable idea: the Ass Channel. An entire channel, with all kinds of programming, news, sit-coms, talk shows, but the camera is never not focussed on women’s asses. I realize fully the peurile low this represents, and also its simultaneous goldmine potential. “Well there’s a winter advisory across the midwest, and lake effect snow…” but the whole time you don’t see the map. You generally don’t see the footage of the candidate, or the national tragedy, beyond what you can see beyond the ass on the screen. Detective shows where there is always a justification, however flimsy, for a woman’s ass to be present. It’s kind of the logical extension of those Latino soap operas and game shows, isn’t it? I really feel I could just sit here and let the money waft over me for this one.
hmmm…. kinda feel like I’m watching “the ass channel” right now – do I owe you anything – slocum? hvb?
…!;)
Couple of quick things before I run off to present something at work:
I’ve only heard one Karen Dalton song, and I was surprised at how much I liked it.
I agree that English Settlement is a highpoint of post-Beatles-style psychedelia. The repetetive, off-kilter riffs; the often “cosmic” lyrics; and the throbbing bass put me in the state of mind I get out of classic British psych without feeling like I’m listening to a pastiche of the real thing. Partridge and company would later do that on the Dukes stuff (to sometimes great effect) and elsewhere (often to lesser effect).
Awesome. That van de Graaf clip was like watching someone trying to assemble a ship in a bottle while wearing boxing gloves.
In terms of what each movement set out to do, prog failed because no one liked it. Punk failed BECAUSE people liked it. Therefore it lasted long enough that it became acceptable, even nostalgic, thus, eventually, popular.. Which led to the inevitable popular compromises, which destroyed what it was supposedly supposed to be.
WARNING: Deeper consideration of the contradictions in and of this thesis inexorably lead to the question “Well, what IS punk rock anyway?” And no one ever lay on their death bed thinking “I wish I’d spent more time discussing what punk rock really is.”
P.S.: I like the Avril single. You got something against The Runaways?
P.P.S.: Don’t knock the emu.
So you’re saying that this is Avril’s Cherry Bomb?
Mr. Massimo assesses:
That van de Graaf clip was like watching someone trying to assemble a ship in a bottle while wearing boxing gloves.
A phrase that will never leave my head, was watching the opening band at Dobbs back in the day, on the big screen upstairs, and James Frost says, “My God! It’s like… running through the sewer, with mops on your feet…!” Thought I’d share.
He biases:
In terms of what each movement set out to do, prog failed because no one liked it. Punk failed BECAUSE people liked it. Therefore it lasted long enough that it became acceptable, even nostalgic, thus, eventually, popular.. Which led to the inevitable popular compromises, which destroyed what it was supposedly supposed to be.
No one liked prog? Is this a revelation of undue youth on your part? I don’t know how old you are. But the fact is our nation’s landfills are choked with Yes belt buckles, figure-eight-shaped bong shards, various Escher prints, Roger Dean mirrors, twelve-string guitar bits, and other detritus of a movement which, I’ll grant, has a particular resistance to nostalgic return. When I see wee children on South Street in museum-quality period garb from 1977, I think they are charming, but about as potent as a racoon coat, pennant, and megaphone. But while punk rock was selling its original modest pressings, and kick starting the DIY movement through lack of airplay, Yes was still selling out multiple nights at arenas doing their rotating stage bit. Prog was in *heavy* rotation for a good five years or more on the commercialest radio going, with its advertising-unfriendly song lengths to boot! Prog, however much it has devolved to one of those vestigial organs like the gall bladder, was quite successful in its day. Punk rock started out as a cancre sore, and has, like the shark, not evolved much to the present day, in some respects.
Townsman Rick is within our age demographic. Nice imagery re: prog’s artifacts, General.
I have to say, I’m not quite convinced. I’m a big fan of English Settlement, and I see that it has a number of effects on it that come out of psychedelia. But I don’t know; there’s no druggy wooze about it. It’s more like psychedelic music for people who AREN’T on drugs. Straight-edge psychedelia. And maybe I’m coming around to thinking that such a thing is indeed inherently a contradiction.
One thing about those little white boxes, aside from not knowing how to do them, is they tend to be unattributed. But someone said:
There’s some good Prog, but when wanting rock not to be rock, it’s important to remember that other kinds of music are better at being not rock than rock is.
I think it’s a misunderstanding of prog to say it wants not to be rock. It rocks much of the time, while stretching the various parameters sometimes beyond recognition. There is an article in the last New Yorker by Alex Ross, I think, about the current phenomenon in “New Music.” Where alternative and conceptual stuff in jazz, post-post-punk, “classical” have all blurred into each other so that not only is it hard to tell what genre or background a group is couched in, or coming from (which in itself I am 100% behind!), but they are also doing a lot of venue-bending, at least in NY. He mentions that it is generally a good thing that these genres don’t achieve, or can’t achieve, complete transmographication. But the stretching and blurring of genre lines is useful and a sign of vitality long looked for in the noise arts. Now, I’m not saying this is what prog was trying to do. Indeed, the fact that they were so generally invested in keeping it “rock” enough was one of the things lending it so much awkwardness. Like a one-year-old just reaching that walking stage known in our house as the Frankenstein Period, prog rock was incredibly clumsy as a form, even while its musicians were generally possessed of a high degree of craft and musicality and technique. I think the development Ross writes about in New York is one of the ideological Neanderthals to prog’s cro-magnon. Not a direct descendant, but a parallel improvement, perhaps.
What do you mean?
It isn’t the effects specifically that make it psychedelic as it is the essence of the music that taps into that feeling and state-of-mind of a “psychedelic” experience. Not the “look at the colors” experience as much as the “it is found on another plane” experience.
Well, I was being sarcastic, but nonetheless your post here does point to many of the issues at hand. Incorporating non-rock elements into the music, many of these prog musicians weren’t always able to handle those other musics with as much subtlety as needed to make them convincing–and as you’re saying, the need to maintain enough rock to make it recognizable as such failed as often as it worked.
I’m in general a fan of expanding musical boundaries, General, and I was also suggesting that I do like some prog a lot–Crimson, Procol Harum, early Soft Machine, Uncle Meat without the movie soundtrack that kills the CD (no Yes need apply). But the discussion was greatest disappointment–and I think there’s a big gap here between the possibilities implied by prog, and the actualities that resulted. None of the groups above, even when I like them, make any kind of list for me of the greatest bands in rock and roll.
Getting back to the original question, I nominate 1959-1963 as the most disappointing era in rock history. ‘Now’ works for me too.
Steve says:
I nominate 1959-1963 as the most disappointing era in rock history.
I agree:
But a decent period for country, as well as jazz. The winding up of Dolphy, et al, and the whole soul-inflected “Sidewinder” school of pop-jazz, and the whole post-straight-ahead jazz wing, aiming at (in my mind) the apex of Coltrane’s Vanguard recordings. But I have to say it has always seemed baffling to me that rock and roll burst out in the later mid-fifites, and then seemed to go on sabatical until the Brits brought it back home. But you’re sure right about the rock vacuum, there.
I hate to be a pain (well no, not really), but I just don’t see that with this album. Like much of XTC’s best music, I see a lot of political/consciousness raising stuff with references to history and mythology, all of it very smart, but most of it focused on the things of this world. I would indeed be willing to be corrected here–where’s the other plane you’re talking about? Like the Kinds they’re often painting these scenarios with sociopolitical consequences. Consciousness raising, sure, but consciousness bending? Help me out here.
Sammy Maudlin sed:
“I know that Got To Get You Into My Life is a full blast of psychedelia REGARDLESS of the lyrics.”
You must be on drugs. I think revolver may be the most purely psychedelic of Beatlles’ albums, but that song? Nah! PU.
mwall posits:
“I was also suggesting that I do like some prog a lot–Crimson, Procol Harum, early Soft Machine, Uncle Meat…None of the groups above, even when I like them, make any kind of list for me of the greatest bands in rock and roll.”
Pretty compelling argument to me for Prog as the greatest disappointment.
I still feel, thirty or so years on, that Punk was one of the most important moments in rock history. Although it was largely derided in its early days and somewhat coopted by the time it caught on in any way, be that the ’78/79 era of “New Wave” or the 90’s era of Green Day, it recalibrated the aestehetic of rock’n’roll to recapture a sense of simplicity and wonder. This idea was popularized far beyond the immediate punk audience and became a tenet of not only of critic speak, but really the rock audience at large.
Sammy’s under fire!
I’m not the most articulate bloke in the hall and it is difficult for me to explain the feeling that I get when I hear Andy warrble “it’s tooooo, late, in all your hurry, you accidentally locked the gate.” Like the gate to a thought or a life that you had in your grasp but is gone for good and you can only remember a fraction of the sense of it as it evaporates forever.
The way he prolongs it without being out of time or perhaps just a fraction off. The way a minute can seem like a lifetime or how sometimes reality feels out of synch (good or bad) while every nucleus of every cell vibrates with the universe’s maximum amperage.
And Got To Get You Into My Life is seemingly all silly McCartney pop but heavy below the thin surface with a heart beating bass thumping the blood to your head. And the ooohs and the volume rising single-note horn climaxes come together to form the ohhh soooo perfect dose of here-comes-the-trip positivity.
I think of Revolver, in drug terms, as their best pot album. When it comes to psychedelia, not much beats The White Album, if even only for Dear Prudence.
I’ll be even a bit more controversial here at the extreme risk of further being unable to defend notions and emotions- I don’t think anyone who hasn’t ever tripped can have a valid discussion on true psychedelic music.
Mind you- I’m not advocating anything here. That’s just like my opinion man.
Supposedly, Got to Get You Into My Life is about Paul’s love of pot. And the lyrics, I would say, are definitely psychedelic: “I took a ride I didn’t know what I would find there / Another road where maybe I could see some other kind of mind there.”
I don’t know how prog-rock could be a disappointment when it was practically doomed from the start. For me, the biggest disappointment was the co-opting of indie rock. When I hear Urge Overkill’s “Sister Havana” and think about a once great band trying to shift units for their major lable overlords, it brings tears, of sadness, to my eyes.
Paul McCartney could be singing a first-person narrative of the fourth dimension on imaginary instruments through a haze of hash smog and still sound like the lovable (yet hatable) mop-top he has always been. Got to Get You Into My Life is a nice little song, but, to me, as superficial as it gets. It’s a classic McCartney creation, in that you could hum it jauntily to yourself while going down the hall to the room in the rest home where they have you play slowly with huge beach balls and the like. It would have *rocked* on that Sinatra/Basie record, with those arrangements! But if highness is a compnent, then, when I was high (decades have passed), it’s Tomorrow Never Knows or She Said, from that record.
Though I don’t think actual highness is a prerequisite for making, or hearing, psychedelic music. It certainly helpsshorten the commute, but you *can* get there without. I had a pretty literal out-of-body experience once while working as a security guard in a Washington Sqare apartment house. It was caused directly by hearing Steve Reich’s “Come Out to Show Them” on the radio. Like a heavy dose of drugs, it seems now something I would only have done in my 20s. I would *never* listen to that shit at a job where I had to interact with the public. THAT music is psychedelic. Paul McCartney indeed!
I feel it useful to point out, here, that we are having at least 2 or 3 conversations in this thread, often interchanging meanings and parameters. I’m not complaining, I’m just saying, if there’s anyone who’s linnearity is being stifled…
Well then, I can think of at least one person on this list who probably shouldn’t be participating on this thread–but that person hasn’t been. And there are certainly some people here whose past habits in this regard I don’t know. As for the rest of us…
Dr. John, the expectations and conversation around prog at the time of its rise practically defined high expectations, which is why it gets my vote here. Critics throwing around, “classical, jazz, rock, compositional experimentalism, true genius,” in one goddamned sentence–and the result is something like ELP. I see what’s being said about 59-63, but what expectations of that degree that existed at the time were dashed by the failures of the music?
I’m not saying Got To is the most or the best. In fact I used it as an example of a song that although “about” drugs has never really been considered “psychedelic” but post-drug experiences for me, was very clearly a trippy song, regardless (or in spite of) the lyrics.
Fascinating. Where and how to catch up? There’s no way, really. I will say that “Got to Get You Into My Life” is one of my least-favorite Beatles song. The lyrics are just the sort of self-conscious psych lyrics I tend not to like, and the music is the foundation for Blood, Sweat & Tears and Chicago. Yuck. Otherwise, it’s a catchy little song. I’ll be getting my share of BS&T soon enough.
Mark, for me the tie in to psychedelia with English Settlement has to do with what the music unlocks more than anything. That said, there somes a point when great music is great music, OK music is OK music, and bad music is bad music. These tags, like psychedelia, soon lose their meaning. Does the song unlock something in your psyche? If so, it’s as psychedelic as anything. The music of Jefferson Airplane was supposed to be psychedelic, but to my ears much of it dulls my psyche. SO who’s to say…
Ah, Mr. Mod! English Settlement, to my ear, is great music, no doubt. I wasn’t contesting that–but that wasn’t the discussion either. I was contesting whether it was psychedelic music. In any case, no, it didn’t unlock anything in my psyche. But it added to it, profoundly. It was fantastic to hear that music at the same time that I was absorbing The Clash. All those Brits, rocking hard, with their precise sociopolitical scenarios. I’m very glad someone made English Settlement–and as an American, I feel like I needed to hear it, badly.
On the other hand, Airplane did unlock my psyche. I’m sure it was time and place, subjective, etc. But for me, it exploded the limits of what was possible in “pop” music in a way that neither XTC or prog rock did. It was associative, anti-linear, loose, just plain fucked up. I’m certainly making no more than a subjective claim here. Airplane blew my mind; XTC extended the history of Brit Art that I had already been studying my whole life. You know, Dickens, and all that. Great Expectations=The Clash. Surely y’all see what I mean.
Anyway, on another subject, if you acknowledge that the Beatles, Stones, Kinks, VU, Airplane, the Byrds, the Pretty Things, Creation, many others, and even, may they rest in peace at a great distance from me, the Grateful Dead, all participated in psychedelia, then it’s very hard for me to feel disappointed.
As usual, Mark, we see enough of each other’s points to rest easy tonight. I’m more convinced than ever that the more we talk about psychedelic music, the less psych it becomes. I apologize to all of rock ‘n roll for adding to this problem.
Once, at our band house in Germantown (the Hungry Brain, it was called, after the club in that Jerry Lewis from space movie,) we had all taken acid, and were just hanging out listening to music and what not, when Andre (Smith, the sound man who works at 8th Street now, or did) put on his favorite Funkadelic record. It played for about a song and a half, and everybody, including Andre, just thought it sounded awful. All wrong! Facile, shallow, god, get that crap off. Someone put on Bach’s concerto for four harpsichords (a minor), and everybody was blown away by it. Including Andre, who constantly used to mock classical music (“Turn off that pussy bullshit! &c.”) He just stared at the record going around, and laughed and kept saying “Holy shit!!” Later, Chris Pastore put on Bartók’s Music For Strings, Percussion, and Celesta, and it was heavy and scary, and deep as all get out. Chris met the number four, apparently.
This is partly to say that whether on drugs or no, if you’re thinking on that plane, mind-openningness is where you find it. It’s like giving a 1 year-old a toy, and all they want to play with is the box. When somebody writes a song with the kind of lyrics Mr. Mod refers to, they are writing a toy with all their might, like Incense and Peppermints. Other people write a good box, which is why I would say VU or Steve Reich or Bach over most of that stuff.
Townsman General wrote:
Those of you who visit here and scoop of the riches, take note: what you give is what you get. Look where this thread has gone, and people wonder why I’m picking on Avril and avoiding rock’s “important issues!”
After that perfectly eloquent response by The General, I will fold my tent. My inability to articulate notions and emotions have cursed me once again.
I shall now resume my puerile role as the degenerate of the hall. Please see my vital comments today regarding breasts and classic American footwear.