The album is called Super Session with Al Kooper, Stephen Stills and Mike Bloomfield credited on the cover, but read the fine print and you’ll discover that all three never actually play together. But so what? It’s hot stuff anyway with the Stephen Stills, Al Kooper jam on Donovan’s creepy Halloween hit Season of the Witch going all kinds of cool places for a nice long time. Trippy in a word.
In which Sly + the Family Stone remind us that there was once a time in which all of life’s travails could be reconciled by the singing of a simple song. That’s what the mid-late 1960s were like apparently, particularly if you were in San Francisco, hanging with all the beautiful people, doing all the beautiful drugs, and you had the funk.
In which The Rolling Stones, at the absolute peak of their late 1960s form, wax artful, poetic, Dylanesque even as to the nature of life, the universe, everything – and conclude it’s all just a jigsaw puzzle more or less. But not before twenty-thousand grandmas are seen waving hankies, burning pension checks, shouting it’s not fair.
“I discovered Eric Burdon + The Animals‘ entirely OK take on Johnny Clash’s classic at least thirty years after the fact. But man, if the timing wasn’t perfect. Mid-1990s. Drinking too much, drugging too much, stumbling through some mid-life blues, it seems I was falling into my own ring of non-heavenly fire. But suddenly there was Mr. Burdon to not so much catch me as welcome me, sounding like a Tom Jones that was actually cool and experienced enough to get what the crazy psychedelic ’60s thing was all about – something to do with saving the entire universe by letting one’s freak flag fly, even if that meant going personally to hell in process. A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.” (Philip Random)
The Bonzo Dog Band (aka the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band) were never normal. They started out terrorizing jazz and Music Hall stylings, but as the 1960s hit their psychedelic peak, they were crossing over into rock and pop as well, showing up in the midst of the Beatles TV special Magical Mystery Tour and otherwise serving as resident court jesters of the British pop scene. Although sometimes the songs were so damned good, you almost forget they were supposed to be funny. We Are Normal solved this problem by being mostly just weird. And it rocked.
In which Julie Driscoll + Brian Auger + The Trinity score a big deal UK hit with a then unknown Bob Dylan song concerning a burning wheel about to explode and other suitably apocalyptic stuff. The time was 1968 and it turns out the song was one of very many to emanate from what would come to be known as the Basement Tapes, the fruit of Mr. Dylan’s previous year spent hanging out in the basement of a big pink house with the band known as The Band, just messing around, drinking wine, having loose, sloppy, sometimes brilliant fun. And then, inevitably, tapes started to proliferate, such that some decades later, Absolutely Fabulous (the TV show) would have itself a suitable theme song.
Randophonic 