The Psych Rock Lounge

 

I definitely agree with you that the U.S. was more influenced by blues, country, folk, jazz, you name it, in order to produce our styles of both Psych and Prog. Hell, I can't even think of an early U.S. group that used a mellotron! It seemed to be only Vox, Hammond and Farfisa organs. Definitely not conducive to imitating the classics!  

 

 

 

 

No one can define a definitive and comprehensive reason for why British Prog evolved from Psych Rock into early symphonic Prog groups like King Crimson while early American Prog  evoved from Psych into artists like Captain Beefheart and the jazz musing/satirical commentary of Frank Zappa.

 

But I feel it's safe to say that although psychedelic drugs on the both sides of the Atlantic Ocean were the catalyst, the social  and cultural situations of the U.S. and the U.K. were extremely different. The U.K. was in a state of  cultural change while the U.S. was clearly in a state of anger, disillusionment, and rebellion due to the Vietnam War and racial tensions, along with  younger versus older citizen's conflicting views on the status quo.

 

In the U.S., the 1966 rock albums that kicked off  Psychedelic rock were initially Freak out! by the Mothers of Invention (until people became awhere of Zappa's anti hippie and drug stance) and the first album produced by The Thirteen Floor Elevators The Psychedelic Sounds of the Thirteen Floor Elevators.

 

The Elevators were only regionally successful, but their influence on the nascent San Francisco 'acid rock' scene cannot be understated as most of the major bands, such as the Jefferson Airplane, were originally part of the West Coast American Folk revival who quickly turned electric after The Elevators showed up to tour the Bay Area in 1966.

 

Where as the British took influences from The Beatles, The Zombies, The Moody Blues, Family, Pink Floyd and The Nice and were focused on musical progression, many U.S. bands were attracted to the rebellious sounds of Anti Rock noise, deconstruction of melody and the arty Avant Garde. All these U.S. interests were naturally comingled with counter culture lyrics that questioned conventionality and the American social problems of the day.

 

One of the must outré albums of this era was 1967's Red Crayola's musically reductive and Anti Rock noise "free form freak out' album The Parable of Arable Land. Using minimal studio effects but utilizing a whole lot of people to create noise collages that was placed between minimalistic songs about social issues such as the song War Sucks, while the vocal's were delivered in a neurotic deadpan style that would have made David Byrne envious.

 

 

 

Following this noisy Pyschedelic groundbreaker was an even more bizzare album  that surfaced in 1968 from the newly successful group Vanilla Fudge who had a big hit with a slow and heavy hard rock reworking of The Supremes mega hit You Keep Me Hanging On. 

 

Taking the advice of both their manager/producer and a top record executive, Vanilla Fudge made one the most bizarre outré albums of the late 1960s. Combining studio improvisation, sound collages, excepts of classical music, and short reworkings of Beatles songs into free form whole, all of this was interspersed with snippets of historical sound excerpts such as speeches by JFK and Churchill. The result of all this effort was the album The Beat Goes On.

 

Trashed by both critics and fans, it remains a black mark on the otherwise stellar work produced by Vanilla Fudge after the release of this debacle.

 

The bottom line to all this is that the zeitgeist of the sixties effected American rock music in different and, in some cases, bizarre ways. However, I think it gives a clue as to why American Prog, what little of it was produced, was radically different from what our cousins were producing across the pond.

 

 

 

 

But what a great age it was!!

 

Ineresting list.....has a few of my favorite psych /proto prog bands on it.......Arzachel, T2, Five Day Rain, and Love Sculpture.

 

 

 

By 1990, the Flaming Lips were signed to a struggling small indie label called Restless. They had made two previous albums before being informed that the record company would probably not last much longer, and that their contract would not be renewed after completion of their soon to be recorded third album.

 

The Lips had gone through several personal changes and were now down to just co-founding members Wayne Coyne (guitar and vocals) and Michael Ivins (bass). Joined with Jonathan Donahue on lead guitar (who go on to form Mercury Rev a few years later) and Nathan Roberts on drums, The Lips decided to go for broke and put out another loud noisy guitar driven psych rock album, but pepper it with lyrics based on Coyne's confusion and disillusionment with his Catholic religious upbringing. The album also featured some incredible folky acoustic songs that seemed to owe a great deal to both Pink Floyd's use of unusual minor chords as well as tuning from the Roy Harper school of harmonics.

 

The recording is the first one done with touring sound engineer Michael Freedman who used The Lips as his college senor sound engineering project. In fact, the band was recorded in Friedman's university sound lab.

In case you never seen one of these sound engineering schools, the're not  the cozy dimly lit professional studios that you see in magazines, books or on the net. Fluorescent lights illuminate the lab like décor and linoleum floor tiles are the norm.

 

As the band was heavily influenced by Shoegazers such as Sonic Youth, pedal power was the way to exotic guiter sounds for both sustained as well as random sounds that echo both Pink Floyd's spacy effects that the Floyd had created on their own albums with both guitars and sequencers. Sequencers are something the Lips didn't have so samples were utilized and altered or disguised by both recording signal manipulation and recording tape tricks like pitch shifting.

 

The resultant album titled In a Priest Driven Ambulance is without doubt one of the hardest hitting, angry, at times abrasive and brilliant albums The Flaming Lips ever produced. Unfortunately, Restless Records lost their distribution deal a few months later and few people have heard this masterwork. The album, plus outtakes and bonus material, was re-issued by Rykodisc Records in 2002 in a deluxe double CD edition titled The Day They Shot a Hole In The Jesus Egg . The title was taken from a line of lyrics from one of the album's songs.

 

This album is a long way from the sunshine psych pop of  later Flaming Lips albums like The Soft Bulletin, but it deserves to be heard on it's own merits.

39 Clocks was a German band of the late '70's to the mid '80's, mainly reckoned to be a dark psychedelic rock band. Uniquely, though, they were essentially part of the industrial scene of the time, very obvious from listening to their work, and such a listen will as well reveal heavy Velvet Underground influences.

Alongside Tago Mago, this band is one of the main pieces of evidence for the conclusion a few have reached that industrial music is at least in part just a horribly twisted descendant of classic psych.

West, Bruce and Laing: Why Dontcha 1971

 

The last super group rock power trio, ex Mountain men Leslie West and Cory Laing teamed up with ex Cream bassist the late Jake Bruce to produce this blues rock powerhouse of an album. Garnering absolutely no air play upon it's release, the album spread by word of mouth due to the band's pedigree, and was well received by fans of the group's former band's fans.

 

WB&L would produce one more studio album in 1972, the less impressive What Ever Turns You On, before rampant drug use caused them to brake up.