“Exhaustive” doesn’t even begin to describe the granular detail of this exploration of psychedelic music throughout the 1960s (and the overspill of its visual aspects into the broader culture in that time and the years that followed – I was watching psychedelic children’s cartoons on tv in the Seventies, CRYSTAL TIPPS AND ALISTAIR comes to mind). Chapman is chiefly a music journalist, and shows his crate-digger side, doing a paragraph on what seems to be every psychedelia-associated record of the period that was ever released.
Even Sun Ra got in on the act with a pseudonymous 1966 album called The Sensational Guitars of Dan and Dale, which featured the core of his exotically garbed Arkestra, along with members of Al Kooper’s Blues Project. Together they knocked out some splendidly convincing surf pastiche, over classical melodies by Chopin and Tchaikovsky.
Chapman goes really deep, down into the session musicians who created a river of off-brand psych-exploitation albums. REALLY deep:
the Fe-Fi-Four Plus Two, indisputably the greatest band name in this entire book.
Ed Cobb, the production svengali behind the Chocolate Watch Band, also wrote ‘Tainted Love’ for Gloria Jones and ‘Every Little Bit Hurts’ for Brend Holloway. If you listen to ‘Heartbeat’, the Cobb-penned follow-up to ‘Tainted Love’, it’s basically a garage stomper with gospel-soul vocals.
…another Michigan-based outfit, the Ruins – with the wonderfully titled ‘Take My Love (and Shove It Up Your Heart)’
It’s actually a lot of fun, in the way a good trivia book is. His broader points, about infantilism in the culture for example, get a little lost under the weight of all these research nuggets. The thing is, Chapman just can’t stop himself from sharing everything he’s learned:
That same year Lacey appeared with Ivor Cutler in the fondly remembered An Evening of British Rubbish. Times critic Bernard Levin laughed so hard he was physically sick. Peeping nervously through the curtain to see how the show was progressing, Lacey saw Levin writhing in his seat and assumed he was having a heart attack.
Al Kooper, the man who laid down the distinctive root-chord organ sound on Bob Dylan’s ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ and participated in numerous supersessions with the cream of his generation, also played in the Banana Splits’ house band…
In one of those barely believable instances of historical happenstance C. S. Lewis, Aldous Huxley and John F. Kennedy all died within a few hours of each other on 22 November 1963.
It’s an immense, even overstuffed, piece of scholarship, towering in its commitment to the fine grain of the period under study. It’s a great time.