The Psych Rock Lounge

 

 

The proggy psych of SRC:

 

 

The Amboy Dukes with Ted Nugent, before he started hunting liberals for wall trophies:

 

 

 

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.

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.

 

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.

 

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