Gavin B.

The release date of the Psychedelic Sounds of 13th Floor Elevators is in dispute as I pointed out on the list, but it's very close (maybe even earlier) to the release date of The Deep's Psychedelic Moods, which I've heard and love. The March release of Eight Miles High by the Byrds is my own choice because it was the first song that attempted to depict the subjective experience of what taking LSD was like.

The word psychedelic was already a part of the medical nomenclature in 1966 and was first coined in 1957 by psychiatrist Humphrey Osmund as a medical descriptor for psychotherapy involving the use of hallucinogenic drugs. Osmond consulted Aldous Huxley. Huxley suggested the term "phanerothyme," from the Greek terms for "to show" and "spirit." In a letter to Osmond, he wrote:

To make this mundane world sublime,
Take half a gram of phanerothyme

To which Osmond responded:

To fathom Hell or soar angelic,
Just take a pinch of psychedelic

By 1965, a Harvard professor, Timothy Leary became a well known evangelist for LSD use and he's credited with bringing term psychedelic into popular usage. I was a kid back in 1965 but my father, who was in the music business, frequently used the term psychedelic describe both a state of mind and a specific kind of music played by the Leaves, the Seeds & Love, three unsigned Los Angeles bands band he first heard at Sunset Strip clubs when he visited Los Angeles late in 1965.

From my perspective, being the band that first used of the word psychedelic in an album or song title doesn't necessarily establish bragging rights to being the band that recorded first psychedelic song. In Part II of my Psychedelic Chronicles, there will be more information on the central role played by Ken Kesey & Owsley Stanley in introducing the word psychedelic into the pop music vocabulary.

NumberNineDream

Well, that was very enlightening.
Looking forward to read the sequels to the Chronicle.

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Bulldog

Great post there Gav (I'd expect no less), particularly as I know next to nothing about that area of music. For instance, I'd thought 'til I checked this thread that Eight Miles High was the first ever psychedelic record, so it shows what I know eh. I think I've only got something like 5-10 of those songs you listed there with my favourite probably being I Had Too Much To Dream Last Night (although Rain and Good Vibrations make it a close call).

Also, I only just noticed your list of notable new releases of 2010 list a few posts back just now, and it's gonna be useful to say the least when I go onm another new music binge, so cheers for that

Gavin B.

Seductive Electronica

Zero 7 is a seductive electronica ensemble that seems to reinvent itself on every studio album. For a couple of years, Zero 7 featured an unknown Australian songbird Sia as vocalist who has forged her own remarkable career as a singer and songwriter since leaving Zero 7.

Zero 7's most recent featured vocalist is another unknown singing sensation with a single word name, Eska. Eska has a winsome but soulful voice and she frequently uses off tempo vocal phrasing & will linger behind the downbeat to savor the final syllable of each lyric. Her unorthodox vocal style creates a leisurely, unhurried mood of seduction. Eska also plays a mean upright squeeze box accordion. Eska's spellbinding powers are well suited to Swing which is played in a jazzy 5/4 (or more correctly 3+2/4) time signature. Needless to say, I'm madly in love with Eska's voice.

Gavin B.

THE PSYCHEDELIC CHRONICLES: PART II

Ken Kesey, the Merry Pranksters & the CIA Funded "Acid Tests" at Menlo Park Veteran's Hospital


Ken Kesey: great American novelist, Merry Prankster, LSD evangelist, & cultural provocateur

Psychedelic music wasn't introduced as an element of of the LSD subculture until early 1965. From 1959 until 1965, the psychedelic subcultural landscape was populated by members of the literary and visual arts communities & a handful academics studying LSD use as a tool for psychoanalysis. The most notable academics were two Harvard professors, Timothy Leary & Richard Alpert, a pair of research scientists who presided over the Harvard Psilocybin Project. Psilocybin is a mushroom with psychedelic properties which Alpert obtained by piloting his own airplane to Mexico to obtain supplies. In 1963 Alpert & Leary were dismissed by Harvard for allegedly giving psilocybin to an undergraduate student. After their dismissal Leary & Alpert drifted to California and crossed paths with Ken Kesey a promising author and notorious advocate of universal LSD use.

It all began in 1959, when a talented and promising young writer named Ken Kesey decided to expand his creative horizons by enlisting as a subject in a CIA financed medical study on the effects of LSD. The study was conducted at Menlo Park Veteran's Hospital, San Jose California. At the time Kesey was a master's program candidate in creative writing at the prestigious Stanford University.

Prior to 1959, Kesey appeared to be a paragon of the 1950s Eisenhower era version of the American Dream: Kesey was born & raised in small town Oregon; varsity wrestling star in high school; pledged to the Beta Theta Pi fraternity at University of Oregon; married his high school sweetheart shortly before graduating from U. of O., was awarded the prestigious Woodrow Wilson Scholarship to enroll in post graduate studies at Stanford University. On the surface Kesey appeared to be the incarnation of the all-American boy on the straight and narrow path to becoming a pillar of the community.

All of Ken Kesey's aspirations to traditional success by the conventional standards of the American Dream came to a crashing halt after his participation in the Menlo Park LSD study.

Perhaps the biggest paradox of the Sixties cultural revolution is that American’s primary agency of global imperialism, the CIA, unwittingly gave birth to the psychedelic culture by sponsoring the Menlo Park and countless other studies to evaluate the use of LSD as a truth serum to be used in interrogations of enemy agents.

Journalist David Price examined declassified CIA documents & summarized their contents: The CIA had discovered the existence of LSD from an unnamed insider at the Sandoz Laboratory where a chemist discovered the psychotropic properties of LSD in a lab accident.

LSD (shorthand for lysergic acid diethylamide) was an accidental discovery of research scientist, Albert Hoffman who was an employee of the Swiss based pharmaceutical company Sandoz Laboratories. Hoffman first synthesized LSD in 1938 as a medical remedy for respiratory and circulatory ailments and set aside the formula for five years without conducting any test studies. ON April 19, 1943, when Hofmann decided to reexamine his shelved LSD study. While re-synthesizing LSD, he accidentally absorbed a small quantity through his fingertips and serendipitously discovered its powerful effects. He described what he felt as being:
It was Hoffman's lab accident that gave birth to the psychedelic age.


A vial of Sandoz LSD 25

Ken Kesey was transformed into a psychedelic evangelist upon his first taste of Sandoz LSD 25 and hailed it's value as a tool of spiritual discovery and self enlightenment. Kesey wrangled a job sweeping the floors in the psychiatric ward of the Menlo Park Hospital which allowed him to hijack a large part the hospital's supply of 1.5 million doses of Sandoz LSD. Kesey simply waltzed his broom into the hospital's pharmaceutical supply room and stuffed his pockets with a couple dozen vials of LSD at every possible opportunity. Over three years Kesey estimates he liberated 500,000 doses from the uncounted inventory of LSD at Menlo Park. For the next six years Kesey passed out free vials of LSD 25 to thousands of chemically curious people along the California coast. Each vial yielded dozens of doses when diluted with water. Kesey used an eye dropper to dispense measured doses on sugar cubes, blotter paper or most notoriously in punch mixture Kesey called electric kool aid.

Most of the casual social users of LSD had no idea that Kesey was the source of all of those vials of Sandoz LSD that appeared out of nowhere at social gatherings all over California from 1963 until 1965. Sandoz LSD 25 was the fashionable drug of choice for artists, intellectuals & the social elites at the dawn of the Sixties. The music of choice in the early psychedelic era was improvisational bebop jazz of Monk, Miles & Coltrane which reflected the musical tastes of the Beat Generation peer group who were the earliest users of LSD 25. The psychedelic musical youthquake erupted relatively late in the game.

There's a sidebar story to Kesey's history at Menlo Park. In 1962, Kesey became a notable author when One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was published. Kesey's book drew largely upon his real life friendships with patients in the psychiatric ward at Menlo Park when he worked there as a janitor. Many of those mentally ill military veterans at the Menlo Park psych ward were recruited as Kesey's fellow guinea pigs in the LSD experiments at the hospital. Kesey was never a patient in the Menlo Park psych ward but the book's irrepressible central character Randle McMurphy, is Kesey's literary self-portrait.

As a result of his new found literary success Kesey was able to purchase a rustic mountain retreat deep in the remote woods of LaHonda in the Big Sur region of northern California. Kesey cultivated an entourage of eccentric LSD advocates he dubbed the Merry Pranksters who took up residence on the grounds of Kesey's property. Kesey and the Pranksters painted an old school bus in psychedelic colors and toured the coast of California spreading the LSD gospel and freaking out the local populous with their hit & run psychedelic pageants staged by Pranksters dressed in elaborate & colorful costumes.

Kesey invited his growing circle of literary & artist friends to his rural retreat to sample LSD in events he called "acid tests." One of the observers was Tom Wolfe, a New York based journalist with a growing reputation. Wolfe's fictional account of his escapades with the Merry Pranksters, The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test became a bestseller in 1968. Wolfe didn't even bother to change them names of Kesey and the real life Merry Pranksters in his fictional novel, which was 90% factual journalism & 10% speculative journalism. No journalist has been able to disprove the validity of Tom Wolfe's own claim that he has never taken LSD and only tried marijuana once.

Early on, the psychedelic counterculture appeared to primarily be a literary phenomena, like the Beat movement of the 50s. The earliest participants in Kesey's acid tests were authors like Hunter Thompson, Tom Wolfe, Generation Beat icon Neil Cassidy, Beat poet Allen Gingsberg and of course Kesey whose promising debut novel made him the lion of the literary world in 1962. For his part, Kesey seemed more interested in being an LSD evangelist and agitprop performance artist for the psychedelic counterculture, rather than basking in the glory of his new found literary success.

Sometime in late 1964 or early 1965 Kesey's pilfered supply of Sandoz LSD was running out and he was in the market for a chemist to mix unlimited supplies of LSD for the acid test events held on his LaHonda ranch property. This is where the real fun begins and Kesey's encounter with the mysterious chemist Stanley Owsley will be the subject of my next installment.


Next Installment: The Psychedelic Chronicles Part III- Owsley, the Grateful Dead & the Psychedelic Music Explosion

Gavin B.

My Favorite Musical Eccentric


Neil Hannon frontman and director of the Divine Comedy, a musical orchestra specializing campy Bacharach style Sixties pop.

Neil Hannon is a pop star that I'm at a rare loss of words to adequately describe. The 39 year old Irish musician has been a mainstay on the fringe of the British indie pop music scene for two decades and I still don't know what to make of his campy musical project, the Divine Comedy. I became aquainted with the Divine Comedy with the release of the album Casanova in 1996. Neil Hannon has also involved himself in projects with other avant garde & electronica artists primarily as a featured vocalist. As of late the Divine Comedy has become a bit less campy and plays a highly polished version of Britpop that has influences in the baroque orchestral music of the Beatles, Brian Wilson and Love.

The first Neil Hannon song that caught my ear on Casanova was Becoming More Like Alfie which was a campy response to Burt Bacharach's song Alfie which he wrote for the sountrack of the 1966 movie with the same name. The Oscar nominated movie strarring a young Michael Caine was about an unrepentant ladies man in swinging London who is forced to come to grips with the consequences of his lifestyle choices. Neil Hannon's Alfie themed song is his own tongue-in-cheek rebuttal to original Bacharach song. This performace of Becoming More Like Alfie features Hannon in a live performance with his Divine Comedy orchestra backing him.




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My second selection is live performance of Hannon with the Yann Tiersen Orchestra. The song is from Tiersen's brilliant score to the French film Amelie. Those familiar the music of Amelie will recognize Les Jours Tristes as the breathtaking main theme played by the Tiersen Orchestra in the film score. The addition of Neil Hannon's lyrics and his vocals are icing on the cake. Unfortunely the copyright police won't allow the visual portion of this live performance on YouTube




Hannon's secret musical weapon is his multi-octave tenor which soars to the upper reaches of the musical scale. His voice had made a featured singer on albums by Air, Yann Tierson, Charlotte Gainsbourgh, God Help the Girl & Scott Walker, a British singer with whom Hannon's voice is frequently compared to.

In my final embedded video Neil performs a show stopping version of David Bowie's Life on Mars as a featured vocialist with the orchestra of French musical icon Yann Tiersen. Tiersen is a kindred spirit and close musical associate of Neil Hannon. Tiersen's thematic noodlings on a pair of toy pianos is the perfect counterpoint to Hannon's expressive voice. I was stunned by Hannon's effortless mastery of the operatic upper register scale and he sings every note without once using falsetto. By some good fortune both the audio and video portion of this live performance was available on YouTube.



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Divine Comedy- A Complete Discography

Fanfare for the Comic Muse – July 1990
Liberation – August 1993
Promenade – March 1994
Casanova – April 1996
A Short Album About Love – February 1997
Fin de Siècle – August 1998
A Secret History... The Best of the Divine Comedy – August 1999
Regeneration – March 2001
Absent Friends – March 2004
Victory for the Comic Muse – June 2006
Bang Goes the Knighthood - May 2010

Thanks to Right Track, Urban Hatemonger, Loathsome Pete & Freebase Dali for their able assistance in helping me get the YouTube embeds fully functional on my blog again.

jackhammer

Kudos for your Neil Hannon post. He is such an underrated musician and lyricist. The Frog Princess is as good as anything Syd Barrett ever did or that Noel Coward wrote lyrics for yet he barely gets a nod in fans circles which is a shame.

As for Zero 7. I personally find them one of the most hit and miss bands out there. Their debut is sublime and as good as Air's Moon Safari in terms of recent dinner table ambience but their follow on When It Falls was very patchy and lacked direction for me. Because of this I never checked out The Garden which was a return to form according to many reviews.

I think artist's such as Bonobo, Jose Padilla and Cinematic Orchestra have cornered that particular market with more gusto.

Awesome write up's as usual though

Divine Comedy at their very best I feel:

__________________

Gavin B.

Stars' Latest Album Deserves a Fair Hearing From Indie Pop Fans


Stars has relocated from Tornoto, to New York & more recently Montreal over the past decade.

Both Pitchfork & AMG gave a mixed review to the Stars' new album The Five Ghosts dismissing the band as moment in 00s indie rock that has passed. Indie pop has lost a lot of ground to electronica over the past decade, but it's hardly on it's last legs. I've never lost my taste for early twee music or some of the more baroque sounding indie pop groups like the Hepburns, Louis Philppe, the Acid House Kings, the Monocrome Set & the Field Mice. The music of those artists is timeless echo chamber of the Sixties pop masters like Burt Bachcarach, Serge Gainsbourg, & Lee Hazelwood. The best music of Stars elevates pop music from commerical product to high art, in the same manner of those early masters of baroque pop.

It may a decade or so but eventually Stars' music will be reassessed in a more favorable light by the music opinion makers.

I've liked The Five Ghosts as much as any other album release of 2010. I particularly like the mysterious & elegantly crafted lyricism of the album's opening cut Dead Hearts.



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The Five Ghosts isn't quite the unequivocal masterpiece as 2005's Set Yourself on Fire, but it comes close. It was my own introduction to the Stars as a band and I only bought the cd because the album title was irresistible to an aging punk nihilist like myself. I wasn't disappointed and the Orson Wells declaration at the opening of the song Your Ex Lover Is Dead was one of the finest moments in rock music at the dawn of the 21st Century.



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Bulldog

I'm not exactly an acolyte of the last ten years of indie music (be it pop or not), but I like the sound of these guys. It's certainly the newer song you posted that impressed me the most - dunno about anyone else, but I can hear a more mystical version of Belle and Sebastian in there. Based on the first listen anyway.

I'll keep an eye out for the new one then. Cheers for the heads-up, and thanks again for this little goldmine of a thread

Gavin B.

Bulldog's comparison of Stars to Scottish low-fi folk heroes, Belle & Sebastian is apt. I've always been a big fan of B&S member Isobel Campbell whose solo career has impressed me more than her contributions to B&S. On 1998's The Boy with the Arab Strap, Campbell delivered her first lead vocal, "Is It Wicked Not to Care?" She's my featured artist for today.

Life After Belle & Sebastian

Moderator cut: image removed
Isobel Campbell was a founding member of Belle & Sebastian

Time is Just the Same is from Amorino, Ms. Campbell's second solo effort. At first the orchestra arrangements of her folk music reminded me of the commercialized hootenanny folk music of Sixties artists like Bob Lind, Glenn Yarborough & Tim Hardin. The video even looks like a knock off of an old Sixties music video. The quirky songs on Amorino are alluring and after a few listenings the off-kilter orchestral tracks begin to have their own unique charm.



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In 2006 Isobel Campbell began a musical partnership with Mark Lanegan the front man for the Screaming Trees. They were an unlikely duo, Isobel, the classically trained cellist with the ethereal voice & her striking wholesome Jean Seberg inspired fashion look, was a sharp contrast to Lanegan the scruffy, gravel voiced singer for the grunge era band, the Screaming Trees. It those sharp contrasts that made the Campbell & Lanegan such a compelling pair of performers. On the haunting Black Mountain, Isobel sings and plays the cello part.



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The bluesy Come On Over (Turn Me On) demonstrates how Lanegan's Nick Cave-like baritone provides an erotic counterpoint to Isobel's soft and breathy vocals.



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Hawk which was released last Tuesday is the newest release from Isobel Campbell & Mark Lanegan. I haven't spent enough time with the album to give it a proper review but so far I'm impressed with a couple of the three or four songs I've selectively listened to.

Complete Discography of Isobel Campbell

With Belle & Sebastian
Tiger Milk (1996)
If You're Feeling Sinister (1996)
The Boy With the Arab Strap (1998)*
Fold Your Hands Child, You Walk Like a Peasant (2000)
Storytelling (2002)

Isobel Campbell Studio albums
The Green Fields of Foreverland (1999) (as The Gentle Waves)
Swansong For You (2000) (as The Gentle Waves)
Amorino (2003)*
Milkwhite Sheets (2006)*

Studio Albums With Mark Lanegann
Ballad of the Broken Seas (2006)
Sunday at Devil Dirt (2008)*
Hawk (2010)

* indicates the most notable album releases