The times, they a-changed in 1967. Here's a collection of crazy garage music and early psychedelia, culled from my memory and the wonderful world of youtube. Thanks, youtube! You've saved me late fees at my local movie store. I've got two I like. One is Clinton Street Video, a smallish store that has a very good selection of obscure music plus lots of Italian movies. The other is Movie Madness, a much larger place, whose owner goes to Hollywood auctions and stocks his display windows with Rita Moreno's nightie from West Side Story or Tony Curtis' flapper hat from Some Like It Hot. But I digress...
Starting off we've got maybe the greatest recording of the 20th century. This tune and its flip side are fairly decent. For those of you who don't know, this group formed in Liverpool, England and....what? You already knew?
If the Beatles were tripping and making trippy music then the Rolling Stones were right behind them. This is from the underrated Their Satanic Majesties Request. My buddy Ike had a great furnished attic that was perfect for "experiencing" this.
Groups started coming up with awfully funny names like "The Electric Prunes". You can tell that they were a rocking bluesy band before weirdness set in.
And a companion tune from the Seeds. Another garage sound turned druggy.
There was the onrushing part of a trip, as shown by the previous two songs. I guess maybe some acid was cut with speed, eh? But there was also the dreamy part and here's a hit from that year. Some people think this is the greatest single ever made, although I'm sticking with that Penny Lane/Strawberry Fields thing.
Here are the Byrds at the height of their creativity. Soon they would change into something else, a countrified sound, but before that happened they came up with gems like this.
people are strange
These fellows were short Mods (my heroes!) who once kicked a guy out of the group because he was too tall. How perfect is that? :-)
The Move is nearly forgotten now, I think. They were barely known in the U.S. and if anything about them registers it's that one of the guys in the group at the time of this song was Roy Wood, who later worked with Jeff Lynne of ELO and Traveling Wilburys fame. In fact, Lynne was in the very last incarnation of the Move before he and Wood left to do something not as good...in my humble but accurate opinion.
To finish off the week I was looking for some Procol Harum and couldn't decide which of these two to include so added them both. I saw them perform twice and both times they were fantastic. Once in New York at the time that A Whiter Shade of Pale was riding high and then a couple of years later in Cincinnati. What a sound!
And as we all know, 1967 only got weirder.....
(and if you're in the mood...check out my 60s style tune I posted at my Doohickey Dinkle page. It's called Switched On Girl and it's the usual kind of thing I like doing)
