Psychedelia = godlike (even when a bit mimsy-wimsy and instantly-dated)
Acid rock = arduous to the ear, for the most part
Psychedelia = the groups look good - lysergic dandies!
Acid rock = the groups look so shit - shaggy 'n' split-endsy, earthenware tones, white Afros, mustaches, beards
I thought for a moment there might be a UK psych / US acid rock divide but that doesn't really
hold
From the Byrds's most studio-shapely record, that is coming from the same blissed-blessed place as e.g. Tintern Abbey's "Vacuum Cleaner" b/w "Beeside"
There is a smidgeon of truth to the UK versus US thing, though - nicely illustrated by the Battle of the Kaleidoscopes
versus
The UK bands take their bearings from the Beatles; the US bands from the Beats.
Psych = studio-shaped versus acidrock = livejamfreakout ?
That works a lot of the time but it's not watertight - the US acid rock outfits had their dabbles in studio-weirdness
One band I'll never ever get into
I'm sure the subject has come up before, of San Francisco's relatively poor showing in terms of mythic epochal immensity at the time versus records you'd actually want to listen now
Folkies going electric without an intervening period of R&B = the problem
Mind you a lot of that SF lot started as essentially dance bands
I like the glassy guitar sound on this album - in the same vein as the best Airplane stuff
Sort of, "crystallized blues". (But the track actually called "Crystal Blues" is bluesy crud).
Apparently Country Joe + Fish were an influence on Tom Verlaine, which figures.
Now this lot I've never managed to get into though highly touted by cognoscenti
Nor have I ever succumbed to this one - America's own Syd
Love the cover of this record, the contents though...
This one I quite like
This lot rated by psych-scholar Jon Savage
A lot of acid rock is just feeble, as songwriting and singing
Psych always has a bit more POP! to it
First heard that on a tape I bought at my very first record fair (Oxford, early 80s - I had no idea such things existed - meaning, records fairs)
Everything else on it - except for Hombres "It's A Gas" - was absolutely shite though.
Things like this lot
And this bunch again
Somewhere I must still have it, with the Avalon Ballroom-poster style woogly graphics on the cassette inlay
1 comment:
‘Folkies going electric without an intervening period of R&B’
Hmmm. Robert Wyatt made the same complaint, funnily enough - although a period playlist put together by members of the Grateful Dead (the one big omission here, I note) shows tons of R&B: https://archive.org/details/gd67-04-xx.prefm.vernon.9261.sbeok.shnf
Even the blues are recent!
Certain elements of the SF scene (and by that I mean largely the founders of Rolling Stone) did have an anti-soul bias, but I wonder how much of it was just not wanting to compete on that turf as opposed to conscious animus.
(As opposed to UK pop, whose experiences with black America were secondhand and aspirational - something else Wyatt pointed out. Maybe the Canterbury Scene is the real equivalent to US acid rock, with R&B playing a far more obvious part?)
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