“The version of Summer Breeze that I grew up with was the Seals + Crofts original, which was an entirely okay in a 70s AM Top 40 sort of way. But the Isley Brothers (working through at least phase four of their multifaceted career) take things way further, navigating a much hotter breeze, feverish even, yet eminently cool in a soulful, latter day psychedelic sort of way. Did somebody say The Perfect Summer Song?” (Philip Random)
Two (or maybe three) in a row from Nektar‘s 1971 conceptual spectacular Journey To The Centre Of The Eye, one of those albums that deftly walks the line between so-called prog rock and so-called psychedelic rock, managing to be both mindblowing and reasonably precise. Frank Zappa was certainly impressed, so much so that he had plans to sign Nektar to his Discreet label, a plan that crumbled along with Zappa’s partnership with his manager (one of those long stories). Which perhaps explains why we never heard that much of Nektar over here in the Americas. Or maybe their first album was simply their best – an astonishing and ultimately harrowing voyage to the deep and high beyond within. In other words – an acid trip, the heroic kind, right through the centre of the eye to the dream nebula and beyond, all in the mind anyway.
“London’s Pretty Things were always there in the swinging 60s, in tune with the times, if not in time with them (if that makes any sense), which means that by 1968, they were launching into realms psychedelic and beyond with the epic tale of Sebastian F Sorrow, a full-on integrated cycle of songs that hit the culture many months before the Who’s Tommy would make the notion of a rock opera a genuinely big deal. No, SF Sorrow didn’t sell that well, doesn’t generally get name-checked when the experts are trying to make sense of the age, but for me anyway, it stands up better than Tommy, minute for minute, song for song, maybe because it’s only a one record set, with the high point coming on side two, when SF Sorrow encounters the mysterious Baron Saturday (intended to represent Baron Samedi of Haitian Voodoo notoriety), who ‘borrows his eyes’ for a trip through the underworld, with terrifying consequences.” (Philip Random)
This one’s found toward the end of side one of the first Steve Miller Band album which sort of stumbled out of freak scene San Francisco at a time when nobody at the business end of things really knew how to handle all the psychedelic weirdness, so they just got out of the way. Thank all gods for that. Because there are few better examples anywhere of just how delirious things were in those days. Songs broke down, evaporated into seagulls and drones, found some bluesy B.B. King riff, evolved into profound and visionary choruses, ended up getting titles that had nothing to do with anything you’d actually heard. Maybe you had to be there, but maybe we all were, in our way, and still are, we children of that madly accelerated past’s glowing future.
“There is no Steely Dan on this list, mainly because I figure you’ve already heard everything of theirs that I genuinely love (which to be honest, is almost all on their first album). Not that I’d deny they were an immensely talented crowd – they just weren’t for me. Too smooth and easy to listen to (albeit hard to play), too mid-70s soft rock and sophisticated and all tangled up with cocaine culture. Which Hypnotized captured perfectly, even if I didn’t particularly like what was getting captured, it was rendered beautiful anyway, and mysterious. Except I could never find the album it was from. Because it wasn’t Steely Dan as I finally figured out one day well into the 1990s. It was Fleetwood Mac, wandering through their vague middle period, lost somewhere between their late 60s psychedelic blues and their mid-70s supernova status. When Bob Welch was doing much of the steering.” (Philip Random)
“The memory is of Grade Seven, a kid named Malcolm Cale that I wasn’t supposed to hang with, because he was known to be bad. Except we both walked home from school the same way. So I inevitably ended up at his place, which was almost always empty after school, no parents or brothers and sisters around to stop us digging through his dad’s Playboys, having a smoke, sharing a beer, cranking the stereo loud. Which usually meant Malcolm’s fave, Steppenwolf‘s first album, the one with Born to be Wild, and The Pusher (God damn him – we loved that, actual swearing on record). But the track that stands up best for me now is Sookie Sookie, funky and hard, and at least as cool as John Kay‘s shades.” (Philip Random)
Randophonic 