Somebody's Psychedelic Breakfast.

If nothing else this piece is quite colourful.

If nothing else, this piece is quite colourful. Who does not love a list? Well, this is not really a comparison job either. Not proper ratings. It is simply my favourite psychedelic pop and rock albums - up to a point. Always a popular if confusing topic, and an excuse to prattle on about music and life in general.

I suffer from unconscious bias in most aspects of life, music in particular. Very often the same names and albums prevail. It may have been a long time ago, but for me it has been an ongoing continuum, (a continuous extent, succession or whole, no part of which can be distinguished from neighbouring parts except by arbitrary division). Not my words, I looked that up.

I don’t listen so much these days, but they play on inside my head from time to time, in unguarded moments on the edges of sleep. Like ghosts in a suitcase I must carry towards the vague outline of a destination where the music still rumbles on in the distance. Just like the Grateful Dead said it would.

So here’s my list of desperate contenders, or simply things that I like now or have enjoyed in the past. Tastes change, you know. Life’s a bit of a long song. And these offerings are set in no particular order:

Love – Forever Changes
Magnificent and head scratchingly brilliant. Some of the greatest and strangest songs ever put together in a single collection. The band’s back story before, and trajectory after this album have become one of rock’s enduring and peculiar myths. But when they were good, they were great. Kings of 60’s oblivion. There is no doubt that inside the mind of Arthur Lee something odd was always going on. A manic spirit that could not be contained and had to create. That was the thing that made the difference.

Jefferson Airplane – After Bathing at Baxter’s
Lazy and peculiar, and very much of it’s time. Trippy and sprawling in an awkward way. A walk down a San Francisco street that only existed in the addled minds of these revolution hungry believers. Nobody talks fondly of this record now. It may be seen as a dud. But I always liked that dirty, cheap guitar sound they had, the sense of wandering and just shouting within the music. Then the lyrical search that, like most lyrical searches, really ended up nowhere. Now that things have moved on we could say, “that was the whole point”. Eventually, like most of us, they just stopped believing in day dreams and did other things. In the end it was Elon Musk who hijacked the starship. We couldn’t have seen that coming. It was just a clunky and simple airplane to begin with, now it’s a weird billionaire movement.

Pink Floyd – Ummagumma (studio LP mainly)
The four solo studio tracks on disc two are remembered by critics for being mostly terrible. I would disagree. Do not laugh. History needs a rewrite. Of course these surreal tracks are self indulgent. The band tried to pull together too many ideas that did not stack up. Maybe the result of no control and too much of everything else. Money, drugs and alcohol … and studio time. But it is a proper stylish exploration of some sort. They did this so no one else had to go there. The material almost works and they kept faith in the mission. Like a polar adventure where nobody gets to the actual pole. It was only about the adventure and the journey, the whole time. I am not sure if anyone has done anything quite like it since. The live tracks on disc one are listenable enough too. There is some fine stretching and playing going on and I like the quirks you find in live jams and recordings of that era. In the end the unknown enigma that they once were is somehow perpetuated by this album.

Kula Shaker – K
Their debut album and a barnstorming psych fest from some overly Eastern influenced posh boys, all drunk on the mystic syrup, but who actually knew a thing or two about a thing or two. It is a great album despite everything being over the top, mostly in a good way. The cover art has not aged so well. Now it looks strangely like some AI home laptop publishing attempt.

Tyrannosaurus Rex – Prophets, Seers and Sages, The Angels of the Ages
I often wonder how things would have turned out if Mark Bolan had stayed within the unique little groove he created for Tyrannosaurus Rex. The folky, fantasy, weird warble. Acoustic, drummy, garbled nonsense full of pretend wisdom and classical name dropping. It was other worldly and strangely wonderful and innocent way. I recall hearing this and thinking that it fitted into no genre or style I had encountered before, and that was fine. Mark decided to take another road, however, but still leaned back into garbled nonsense at times thanks to his ongoing way with words. We will never know how differently his music and career might have turned out if he had still gone electric but stayed away from the big bop, pop and glam side of things and just pushed on for an odd ball obscurity. Be careful what you wish for.

McDonald and Giles – McDonald and Giles
This is a fairly gentle on the ear outing compared to the bombast that fellow travellers and collaborators King Crimson were serving up. The “concept” second side, Birdman, is that proper, very English and whimsical psychedelia piece that formed the natural language and source material of all the early prog rockers. A glittering generation of story tellers and would be poets. Syd Barrett, Ray Davies, The Zombies and The Small Faces being among the chief architects. It probably was the best time ever to be in a band. Any combination of instruments, vocals and music styles could, for a brief time, be made to fit together and be seen as cool.

Pink Floyd – Atom Heart Mother
Here we find some kind of monstrous mother ship of a construction that carried the then fashionable blending of rock band, choir and orchestra to it’s limit, at the time anyway. There is a laconic strangeness in the side two title piece, a long, rolling and flowing sheet of sounds and textures that is like nothing else. I have never grown tired of it either. I do not know how much credit is due to Ron Geesin. Perhaps it is his best and most famous piece of journeyman assistance. Those grumpy old Floyd boys might disagree. Side one is also entertaining, an easy, slightly disturbing collection of suitably peculiar songs. It also contains the track with the “final groove forever non-fade” dripping tap, Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast. There may be other vinyl examples out there. I do not know. I have not done the research.

Tears for Fears – The Seeds of Love
From a jagged period in their history which I will not bother to go into comes the Seeds album. Arguably a masterpiece, but not everyone’s cup of tea. Not enough catchy hooks but clever and mature. Bloated and overproduced to within an inch of it’s life. I am not completely sure why it belongs on this list, but it is here now and simply refuses to move. Some albums are a snack, some a meal. This one is a banquet. Exhausting to listen to. There is so much going on. Your ears will hurt. It may be the final full, ultimate definition of unintended psychedelia overload in any chunk of music. Everything is over the top, sensory saturation if you want it. It is the beans. Also the cover (far above this para) should have won the Turner Prize.

The Jimi Hendrix Experience – Electric Ladyland Part 1

So I’ve left the best till last. Something that almost defies description but is considered a true classic of the psychedelic rock era by other people “in the know”. An album that, when it came along and my fifteen year old self saw and heard it, scarred me for life, both visually and sonically, in a good way. This is, of course, Electric Ladyland Part 1 by the Jimi Hendrix Experience. The first part of the double album that contained the full range of Electric Ladyland material and comprised this set of studio tracks (Sides C and D) and a live jam (with a list of famous guest players) along with other studio material (Sides A and B). You could buy the album as a double, with the infamous naked ladies on the cover, or as two single LPs. Part 1 had the cover above, while Part 2 had something more simple - a Jimi photo. For what it’s worth, in my opinion Part 2 was the weaker album, but in reality, and compared to anything else ever, both are equally fierce.

I had a copy of Part 1 long before I owned, or even heard, Part 2. Part 1 was heavy enough. The cover was far out. Everybody said that. The music was red meat all the way. It took a lot of digesting. It was my first encounter with Jimi’s full blown wah, Uni Vibe, feedback and Fuzz Face tones, brushing onto these spiritualised sound paintings. Baked in by Eddie Kramer’s skilled studio precision. Mitch Mitchell on massive drums, Noel Redding on sympathetic bass. I quickly went back to discover Are You Experienced and Axis: Bold as Love and suddenly it all made sense. As far as anything ever does. Then, a few weeks later, Jimi was dead at twenty seven. Twelve years older than me.

It still stands as Hendrix’s best work. He covered a lot of writing, recording and playing ground in his short career and it comes together here. There is, of course, genre bleed. Blues, jazz, rock, roots, eastern and folk music meet up on this unlikely NYC street corner and manage to work things out. Some might say they triumph and break new ground, once in a while they crash and burn. The business of music is a twisted and a twisting road.

Maybe that kind of artistic diversity is the secret of all psychedelic music, and why people still love it. It’s a cosmic soup where a bad idea can become good because it is suddenly there among other strange, unexpected ingredients and somehow it works out. It’s a context that doesn’t need to explain itself because you had to fry your brain to get there, so there are no rules. I don’t know much more. You need to find your own answers - that’s the rule.