Arcesia - Reachin'

unbelievable LP!!! the type of thing you'd read about and maybe not believe. 1940's crooner heads to LA in the mid sixties, drops acid, flips out, records nutsoid LP of psychedelic lounge lizard hack moves with all original songs and lyrics... ungodly cool. the guy's voice sounds pretty similar to father yod, which is somehow appropriate. 1968, on the Alpha label. has to be heard to be believed.

1. pictures in my window
2. soul wings
3. white panther
4. leaf
5. voice of love
6. reaching
7. summer love
8. mechanical doll
9. butterfly mind
10. desiree
11. rainy sunday

p.s. found the cover art for that long island high school LP i posted a few weeks back!

JADE STONE AND LUV

1. waiting for the rain
2. come home with me
3. working at the business of living
4. backroads of my mind
5. man
6. grab hold
7. take a look
8. so close
9. cool breeze
10. reality

try, try and not love this album! 1977 from ???.

where is he now?

grab bag you could knit a sweater with!!!

1. Love, love, love, love, love
2. combination of the two
3. if they left us alone now
4. to kingdom come
5. i don't like you anymore
6. any way that you want me
7. it was such a lovely night
8. the boy with green eyes
9. funky walk


purdy boss little workout on this one which wouldn't cost you a fortune to track down, but probably won't see a ceedee anytime soon... covers rule! dig that combination of the two! 9 minute funky walk! whoa!!! ABC 1969, i think produced by neil diamond!

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post mortem.
a few records I NEED... after perusing the great Waxidermy site.







here's a hot one!!!
if the rest of this album was as good as this song i'd totally need it!!! Ric Masten's "Are You Happy in Your Work" is a wild shit scree so hip and out and out demolishing, you gotta hear it to believe me. deserves a lyrics post...

also i've been listening to this over and over again!
fottutissima pellicceria elsa is probably my favorite thing scott s. has posted over at the great crud crud blog!

why not?

1971 from Long Island. it all seems to be happening at "The Zoo"


and in honor of bobby d's recent birthday... a ginu-wine imitation.

What's the Hurry?

p.s.s. mucho entertainment lately, right here!

$27 dollars might get you a snap on face

$27 snap on face - heterodyne state hospital

here's a fun one to be spun... yeah no reish here so yomp it up quick. i'll paraphrase a bit from the fellas at the acid archives: "Despite what you will read, this album is not psychedelic or progressive or hard rock, and has no fuzz guitar. It does not sound like Frank Zappa. It is, however, an interesting and reasonably worthwhile album that will appeal to a wide range of DIY and weird rock fans, as long as they listen to it with the proper expectations. This is one of many new wave-era private press records that got some attention from punk and new wave fans (and magazines) even though musically it’s basically mainstream rock and roll with no particular punk edge (Armand Schaubroeck, Dorian and Just Water are other similarly non-punk artists who gained a “right place at the right time” punk audience.)"
it's a wee bit long of an album for how much they had to work with, but aside from that you can bank on a few great kooky numbers like "Sleeping in a Technical Bed" which is an epic rambling song with a good groove and storytelling about a moronic trip to Reno. a couple songs fall into the "potty-mouth" camp, which of course can be done right and wrong. and here it leans a little bit on the wrong. if you want their catchy pop tune then "kicking around" is the song to download, and "tie your boots tight" is a raucous kick-off to the album which i'd agree with the reviewer above is the other choice cut. but i'd add a fourth, "mr. john" cause it uses accordion and gets a good thing going with the pipe organ. enjoy this one while she lasts... from sebastopol, california, circa 1977 on heterodyne records.


1. tie your boots tight
2. turn to glass
3. the decadents
4. two timer
5. i guess i must look the type
6. let's have an affair
7. kicking around
8. sally hitched a ride
9. mr. john
10. sleeping in a technical bed

come and have some tea...

Come and Have Some Tea - The Tea Company
what can i say? i love this album. it is a masterpiece of overindulgence. like reverb? just about every instrument has the rubber room cranked to ten. like sound effects? they even made a song consisting just of bubbling glorps. could they write? well, let's put it this way, if you appreciate the workings of a juvenile mind frothing in an array of noxious chemicals then this might be up your alley. i think its fantastic, and they let the madness unwind on two long tracks which are tres proto-kraut, if i do say so me-self. they're 8 minute take on "you keep me hangin' on" easily rivals their friends in reverb the Index, and i would say might win the category for most demented cover of a motown hit EVER. some people get down on this record, but i say why the fuck NOT? don't you like cough-syrup for breakfast too, johnny? for all the yap about the golden age of psychedelia in '67-68, i don't find that many records that are this psychotic from that period. it was still about the BEAT man. the lyrics are so blatantly, self-conciously bathing in day-glo that you couldn't help but love them. even the anti-war, give hippies a chance stuff, which i usually kind of yuk at. this came out on Smash records which wasn't exactly nobody, so i wonder if the engineer passed out from the ether fumes and these guys were able to run wild... at times sounds like a pack of wild chimpanzees were given guitars ("like ok man, i guess psychedelic is the new thing... that's cool... can we still chew on our guitar strings?"). the apex of everything moronic and great about the summer-of-love-ism, which for the average joe was in fact more about "too-stoned-to-move"-isms than some cosmic peak in awareness and society, so dig on this one for a while man....

1. come and have some tea
2. flowers
3. love could make the world go round
4. you keep me hangin' on
5. don't make waves
6. as i have seen you on the wall
7. make love, not war

what if space isn't the place?

nobody could quite bring the verve and chaos of the universe into music like sun ra. when he tore everything apart with the synthesizers and spastic drum runs and squealing saxophones that was asteroids being made! and light years taking place! and raw cosmic material unfolding in SOUND. so much of human music is tied to human emotion, and while ra is not devoid of this, his emotions are ethereal outward reaching ones. [ever read that quote about how an ethnomusicologist was asking the hopi why all their songs are about water, and the dude is like, well people sing about the things they don't have to make themselves feel better about it. that's why you white man sing so much about love!] here's one of the best boots i've heard of a ra live show, this one coming circa march '68 at the electric circus in new yawk city. sound quality is alreet, but this one runs so deep you won't even notice. there's so much being channeled here it kinda scares me. like the pharoahs rising from their graves, and the planets spinning backwards. (in a way this is the ultimate religious cult music... and i can say confidently that this blows every father yod record i have way out of the water in sheer POWER and VELOCITY.) if you really let your mind spin loose on these you'll see all the way to hades and impish toads running free on neptune. angels, demons, swamp-gas, plastic cacophony... it's all in here somewhere. let it find you...

1. lights on a satellite
2. unidentified
3. friendly galaxy - untitled improvisation
4. satellites are spinning pt. 1
5. satellites are spinning pt. 2
6. calling planet earth
7. somebody else's idea
8. spontaneous simplicity

velvets boot... rehearsals at the warhol museum

1. walk alone
2. instrumental
3. venus in furs
4. miss joanie lee
5. day tripper-boom boom boom
6. rockabilly instrumental
7. instrumental
8. heroin
9. there she goes again
10. green onions
11. there she goes again
12. heroin
13. i'll keep it with mine
14. european son


i wouldn't really call this bootleg a "barn-burner" but i like the wasted amateurish edge to it. things really get cooked on "miss joanie lee" which might be the stand out if you want one snot-cake to take home with you. "day-tripper-boom boom boom" is also totally nutsoid... and must be downloaded by you. take the rest for what you will.

this is the JELLY!

sorry for the slim-ness on posts the past coupla days... took off for ye olde hills of virginia. gonna put together a mini-playlist here, of just a few songs which i kinda feel like the album probably aint worth yer dough, but these songs are well worth your ears!



Cannabis - Serge Gainsbourgkick it off with ol' serge soaking your dome in cannaboidinous glammy sludge!!! there's something really anthemic about this song, like the hero struts across the screen each bellbottom slowly gyrating forward as he approaches a strip club or something. i actually have know idea what the film is about. or why its called cannabis. and i'm actually kind of lying about the rest of this album not being worth your money.... it's definitely GOOD, but that depends on what your definition of that word is. and if largely instrumental french nicotinous loungey love muscle 70s pump fits in that four lettered word somewhere for you, than pick this up. here's the one with serge's vocal too...


Roast Beef Love - Earth Opera
i beg you to find any way you could possibly resist the following lyric:
"like your love cut my tongue like a razor, like your love swept my heart out with a broom, i gave you my love like a roast beef sandwiche!" it's like they made this to be a throw-away goofus ode to heart break and getting down by the riverside, but it wound up being the best fuckin song on Earth Opera's Great American Eagle Tragedy album. i think part of what kills is the weird sounds going on in the background like insects buzzing and an overall feel of bubblegumminess (especially on the breakdown) and fairy rock (though fairies aren't mentioned, there's a lot of talk of flowers and gardens and milk and honey...) goddam man. this song just RULES.

Paradox - Lacewing
our last song coems from kent, OH circa 1970 on a Mainstream release. this song is the lead-off song and hits all the right notes. the album as a whole is a bit spotty, mixing mommas and papas dynamics unsuccessfully with heavier rock dynamics. but this song, is just gorgeous, reminding me a bit of Big Star for some reason. a perfect folk-rock stunner to start your summer off.

house of leather - blackwood apology

1. song 1
2. song 2
3. song 3
4. song 4
5. song 5
6. song 6
7. song 7
8. song 8
9. song 9
10. song 10
11. song 11
12. song 12
13. song 13

here's an odd one i don't think anybody has snapped up for reissue yet... nor will they probably ever. it's a civil war concept album done by some ex-members of the Castaways (of "Liar, Liar" fame) in 1969 for the Fontana label. its a pretty poppy little jaunt into the civil war that comes out somewhere between khazad doom and the monkees. is it a great album? nah. but considering all of the above its got some interesting songs and a few bonafide cannonballs. check out song #6 por ejemplo. i also really like the proggy tick tock and hyper-emotive vocals on song #9, but they should have turned it into a power ballad about half way through and kicked out the jams like they do for a second at the end. it would have beat Queen to the punch by at least a few years... probably the only dyed in the wool psychedelic song is the killer guitar blow out on song # 10. gotta give em big points for the cover art though, because civil war concept withstanding they manage to sneak in a naked hippy chick painted with day-glo and a pack of newport cigarettes. AMERICA, man. i still can't exactly figure out what the House of Leather is. at first i thought it was a cat-house. but i don't really know. sorry there are no track names. i lost em. best, cary

holy smokes

1. risen savior
2. what shall we do
3. holy, holy, holy
4. passover
5. wicked
6. christian
7. dreamers
8. hosanna
9. jesus


are you ready for a severely strange experience? my brain is kinda scrambled right now. but this record might show you and me the way. mid-western living-room christian dementia that sounds like it was recorded sometime around 400 AD. swampy cheap synthesizers and cooing females bubble and grok as a light from above and above and above illuminates. rockers and floaters balance this thing out nicely. of course jesus liked electric guitars. magnificently eerie in its connection to some deep primordial strand of christian ethics. highly highly weird. Duncan Long, the main man behind this set, is now a published science fiction author. the whole thing was recorded on a two track, via bouncing tracks. Kansas, 1974, baby.
hey the whole story is here!

heavy duty shit

WXPN Pt. 1
WXPN pt. 2

these recordings of Sun Ra reading his poetry on WXPN in 1976 are some of the more convincingly "out there" spoken word recordings I own. really cerebral jive... backing band does a murky meteorite samba while herman blount breaks your conciousness in half. the gamma ray synths are reborn like strange echoes across the darkness. in its own way, extremely lysergic, though i doubt Ra was fussing with that stuff. a testament to a truly unique mind.

attack of the double pink covered albums

Oho - Okinawa --- 1974 baltimore


duva
the salient sickle sucker
ain't life so dumb
the dance of the ivy dog
a frog for you
the plague

if anything Oho weren't terribly serious. they thrive off of a shit spewing spirit that only a half-prog/quarter-proto-punk/quarter-kitchen sink outfit could possess. and its pretty gleeful by the seat of your pants kinda oomph. not all of it works on 1974's Okinawa, but alot of it hits spots you ain't never really heard before... in a strange way bits and pieces remind me of other fuck-it-all-we'll-try-anything units more of the post-punk era such as the Swell Maps. i gotta get their next release and see where all of this could possibly lead. in any case, its as riveting as any other homemade product of the era, and i think one might be able to draw some "Filth" paralells between this record and fellow Baltimoretonian John Waters???

because this has been reissued by the band i'm just offering up these tracks to get your appetites whetted.



Mayo Thompson - Corky's Debt to his Father --- 1970

ok, some may know this one purdy good. my take? the best indie rock record that time travelled back to 1970 and made no splash. why do i say this? well, to these ears, mayo nails the singer-songwriter "project" album au perfection, and also manages to come off laying down bricks for the twee arty introvertedness that a million fey goofuses would try to make waves with 25 years later (yeah, gads, ya might see this wind up on a wes anderson soundtrack 4 years from now...). i don't mind certain acts from the indie-itis, but most of that stuff ain't really "rock" and this IS, so if you can dig that angle, then you will heartily dig this. better than the red krayola too, so if that doesn't get your juices flowing, i don't know what will!

around the home
dear betty baby
fortune
horses
oyster thins
worried

this was also reished... so no full album.
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and for our "suck this down, lest ye be a sinner" 1 song niche filler, we hit the christ companionship angle and the best song from the album on Earthen Vessel's 1972 debut "Hard Rock"! opinions mixed on this record, i think for the most part it is pretty boring. but how can you resist "Get High on Jesus"??? from lansing, MI.

touch the hem

i've been wanting to embark upon a christian pilgrimage with this website for a while. there's so many interesting, barely heard christ-rock obscurities which are more often than not just as good as any acid-head private press LP of those days gone by. the length to which these characters adapt a full "rock sound" varies. in my opinion the best LPs sound uniquely religious while employing a few touches of the moderne... for me the crown jewel, and maybe one of the more acknowledged records, thanks to a reissue and lip service in hep circles is the Search Party's Montgomery Chapel lp. the reissue was pretty limited though, and your odds for finding one of the 1968 originals is just about nill. so i'm gonna post the album here. i'm gonna save my babble and just say download it if you haven't heard it. the MONSTER track is the 9 minute "So Many Things Have Got Me Down" which is like tripping with a roman catholic priest as he questions the church, his life, and the very thread of your mutual existences. the great thing about the Search Party is that they hit all those creepy snaking little acid-folk spiderwebbed wooden corners, but give it a pathos and verve that most starry eyed dreamers of the love generation couldn't even imagine.

1. speak to me
2. renee child
3. melanya
4. when he calls
5. so many things have got me down
6. you and i
7. all but this---i will remark, is this not a most uncanny sound alike to the airplane's "comin' back to me"???
8. poem by george
9. the decidedly short epic of mr. alvira
10. he news is you

"affectionately described in the album’s liner notes as “a demonstration of these five people’s concern for you.” Recorded at the San Francisco Theological Seminary’s own Montgomery Chapel, this acid-folk gem is the brainchild of the Rev. Nicholas Freund of Mount Saint Paul College in Waukesha, Wis. (which closed in 1970). Having left Wisconsin in the late 1960s to join a burgeoning West Coast religious scene, Freund and a handful of others spent considerable time in Sacramento before making their way to San Francisco in 1968 to lay down this one-off."
---good article on sacramento x-ian bands.

and don't miss the professorial curator of jesus music's unbeatable web resource. mr. ken scott!!!

pretty sweet psychedelic folk web page!!! lots of reviews and in depth information! very on top of their shit!

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and in what i hope to be a continuing feature here, is the "don't need the whole album, but dig this FUCKIN' song right now!" column. and today's nugget, is from the Canadian band Churls self titled album, their song Time Piece. not to say the rest of the album is bad... i just feel like this one song sums it up, and you could probably play it a couple a times over and not get tired of the unrelenting badassity. cover art is pretty cool too!

LSD - menace or gift of the gods?

Original release: Capitol 2574, US 1966
Produced by Alan Livingston and Lawrence Schiller
Recordings and interviews by Lawrence Schiller
Narrated by Dick Clark (uncredited)
Medical consultant Sidney Cohen, M D

once upon a time LSD was new... i ain't no proponent (well i wouldn't discourage anyone either), per se, not in the catch-all sense, but if ya want some good sound bites from the freaks, the law, the old heads, the men in the white coats, the feds, and whoever else was in on the fix when the fixin was good... this record is a good look all around. look forward to a few more spoken word/docurama trips to come.

The Scene

The Trip

read the liner notes if ya will.

p.s. found another huge cache of things of psychedelic and folky. AGAIN wish these folks would write a bit and try to only post true obscurums and not their entire record collections, but hey, ya need electric sitar mega-watt eye ball spinners number 9? then this be the place to find it.

from Rockville, Long Island!!!

i don't have the record of the South Side Senior Highschool Choir from 1970, which i present to you in mp3 form here. in fact i don't even know which way these tracks are supposed to be ordered. i had heard one or two of these snippets on wfmu and was intrigued when i saw it for download on soulseek. there's zilch for info on the net, and obviously no reissue to speak (and i don't really see why there would be one either)...it's such an odd niche anyway... a highschool senior project lp that encompasses everything BUT what the school-funded orchestras and stage bands were up to... instead you have stoned goofery, heartfelt piano croons, local garage units, and just plain unclassifiable sound bits. make your own mixtape outta this and just enjoy the atmosphere. if anybody has more information just let me know.



augurs of spring - piano diddlings

cheeseburger lament - AMAZING nerd grunt rant about fast foods, over a harpischord classical piece. kind of like a theatre-kid in the heat of a duel onstage over the merits of mcdonalds vs. burger king.

epstein's disgruntlement - you tell me what this means.

forest green - folky high pitch 50s-style.

gertrude - electro-psych ala mothers-ish sped up mockery of "sweet" licks...

happy mother's day - kinda like the fugs with acne.

hide your love - tuff-girl garage swagger on par with the daisy chain!

interlude (big george) - ???

it's a fashion - garagey mover with a piano. kinda beatlesy.

linda is beautiful - cracking voice over pianos gets wistful and moody about someone special.

melancholy - flute and piano interlude.

paula - piano schmaltz.

pickengratchen - like a joe meek highschool science fair project. AV club plays with the new synths and effects pedals... really gets rocking in weird teenage death-ray distortion bursts turns into concrete art somewhere in the middle, and steals a few braincells by the end. fry that modulator!!!

radio show intro - UN-fucking-BELIEVABLE. teenage send-up of new Yawk high society over big band ballroom swoosh, on W-THC radio. i hate to use a word like "precious" but it kind of is.

rainbows - folky strummer with vocals trying to be more mature than they actually are.

the end - yes...

the plastic idyll - great acid-jumble teenage poetry. "mommy, why is that man chopping down the broken cow? it's a polaroid window, silly!"

the unfinished symphony - ???

the wishbone - more teenage poetry in a long island accent. genius.

washington at valley forge (the amalgamated pickle plant and home distillery) - country joe-styled rag. goofy fellas...

p.s. here's a really cool article on the shaggs/the new creation! very well written. and that new creation disc is a must if you haven't heard it!!!

so, we push forth

and fer the tofu and love beads quotient...

Bob Smith's The Visit - 1970, California
this has been killing me lately. imagine a more expansive DR Hooker, a more mature Zerfas, or bay area bands who moved out to the foothills and added flutes and synths but kept the core of what the '67 acid meltdown was all about. yeah you got it honeysuckle rose. in spades. this double LP nails a lot of things to the wall with an above average quality in musicianship and songwriting. it really aint totally a peace and love bag though... more like visionary conciousness ego-trip rambling ala Hooker or Damon. and thats cool by me... cause that's a cheese i can heartily grok to. a couple of inner space noodlings may turn off the casual fan, but i say three cheers for white-boy raga and modulated synth bumblings over tablas and saxophone. and with every shimmering obelisk at dawn, Bob Smith's Visit will improve on tender ears. dig in.

1. please
2. don't tell lady tonight
3. constructive critique
4. ocean song
5. the wishing song
6. can you jump rope
7. latter days matter
8. india slumber
9. source you blues
10. sunlight sweet
11. of she, of things
12. mobeda dandelions
13. the path does have forks
14. try, try to understand yourself



p.s. features ex-mother of invention, don preston. yeah, he was the one who played louie louie on the gigantic pipe organ at royal albert hall.

p.s.s. there's a huge cache of rapidshare files at this here little blograma. now this is kinda all a bit much, but he has some hard to find reissues and genuinely obscure items up for download so check it out. again, i'd rather see these types of blogs focusing on out of print stuff and writing their own reviews, but if a few more people might wind up listening to bruce hamana or primevil or truth and janey because of it... well... what can ya say?