Hallucinations: Psychedelic Pop Nuggets from the WEA Vaults
Track six will determine whether you are man, woman or beast enough to look this compilation squarely in the eye. Check out the booklet illustration of the late 1966 Association, looking like a bunch of rotten old straighties with their 1964-length Beatle haircuts, matching suit-and-tie combos, and generic milquetoast expressions. Then play “Pandora’s Golden Heebie Jeebies”, and swoon to its aural simulation of psychoanalysis – an interior journey as bizarre as the then still unrecorded “Strawberry Fields Forever” and one that actually made the US top 40. Well, you certainly can’t judge a good psychosis by its cover.
Welcome to the world of major label psych: the records made by the musicians who didn’t have to grow their hair long to take acid, although they might have let things slip a little thereafter. Mainly featuring a sequence of long-forgotten 45′s, “Hallucinations” is that truly rare object: a compilation that uncovers a whole stratum of forgotten gold from 1966-69, one of the most over-exposed pop periods in existence. In doing so, it makes you look at the familiar in a new way: despite the claims of rock history, the long-hairs didn’t have an exclusive franchise on freaking out. Beneath the double-breasted jackets and the Jay Sebring haircuts, strange passions lurked.
The acid test here is, well, LSD. It doesn’t matter whether the musicians were actually experienced or whether they just filched the idea from “Revolver”, they all went for it in a big-budget way. Most of the 24 tracks featured here were recorded in large studios and were aimed at the pop market, which means that structure, melody and hooks underpin the sonic weirdness. Throughout, raga guitars are detuned, kotos are played backwards, psyches are shredded and reconstituted track by track. Disembodied voices sail on a lily-pad of loneliness, backed up by cellophane nightingales. The stereo is turned on, playing familiar songs you’ve never heard before. And who did throw the rocks through Miss Alice’s window?
Perceptual flourishes abound, like the gnarly guitar that swells to take over “It’s Love” by the Misty Wizards. Adrian Pride’s “Her Name is Melody” features near-Eastern scales produced by the Everly Brothers. The Tokens’ “How Nice” features barbershop harmonies, backwards percussion and lustrous acid raindrops. Kim Fowley’s “Strangers From the Sky” harnesses the rhythm from the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band’s “I’m A Rock” to a tale of extra-terrestrial visitation. The Holy Mackerel blend sitar and tabla with an ultra-phased vocal as they walk blindly through a field of wildflowers. The Monkees’ penultimate “Porpoise Song” features a string arrangement, by Jack Nitzsche, that achieves oceanic fusion.
Lyrically, the psychedelic experiences captured here run the gamut from simple idealism – ‘I can see the world the way that I would like the world to be,’ thank you Collectors – to the Gordian knots detailed in Tom Northcott’s “Who Planted Thorns in Miss Alice’s Garden”. Nothing is as it seems. An invitation can be a threat, like The Glass Family’s oddly new-wave “House of Glass”. Is it a good idea that, as the World Column sing, ‘your mind is dangling from a string?’ Astrology reveals incompatibilities. Sadness stalks the landscape levelled by LSD 25, as in the Electric Prunes’ “Antique Doll” and the WPCAEB’s climactic “Smell of Incense”. Jesus (“Man of Straw”) and ‘Lucifer” slug it out for the ascendancy over scrambled synapses.
“Hallucinations” emphasises the point that 1966 licensed a wide gamut of musical and mental exploration that was not confined to hip insiders. Anyone could join in. After all, they had nothing to lose but their minds. Thirty years after the first “Nuggets” lifted the lid on garage and sixties punk, this worthy successor redefines psychedelia. It’s not soft-sike – you can find that on the companion Rhino Handmade volume, “Come to the Sunshine” – but it’s as tough and as weird as anything produced by the more familiar canonical names. It’s always good to have your certainties questioned, and this labour of love will take you to places you might not have expected to go.