The hinterlands

Psychedelic pop wasn’t just the unique provenance of greater Los Angeles and San Francisco in the 1960s. That's right: This week we pack our books-on-tape and almond nut thins for the long trek to the hinterlands. Times being what they were, no corner of America was free from the bands which sprang forth, fungus-like, to fulfill those long-dormant desires for backwards guitars and cellophane flowers.

1. Jazz Bend Me Blues Band, Lady Weaver (Algar)
Things were different in the late 1960s, when many musical varieties of hippie flora and fauna flourished.

There was a gentler variety which appropriated images of hookah-smoking caterpillers, and which suggested that the coolest LSD experience was, ultimately, the Renaissance Faire.

Then there was the woolier, bearded, post-commune variety. It makes me think of a band that has recently staggered from the woods after a long winter with only a beat-to-shit copy of the Chronicles of Narnia. Enter the Jazz Bend Me Blues Band. Where does one geographically place off-kilter tremolo guitar and xylophone? I'm not sure either, but I get the vague sense that this bit of ramshackle weirdness was a product of the Pacific Northwest.

2. West Minist'r, Carnival (Razzberry)
West Minist’r was a Midwestern group, with a reputation as a sort of Beatles-by-way-of-the-Breadbasket. The two (of at least three) West Minist'r 45s that I own definitely carry a pronounced Anglo influence.

This is a personal favorite. And proof, too, that, with some chemical fine-tuning, anything - even carnivals - can be made psychedelic. It just takes the right combination of backyard production, blissed-out harmonies, and church organ.

It's that walloping drumbeat which really sets “Carnival” apart for me, though. This is from 1969.

3. King Biscuit Entertainers, Pride (Burdette)
"Pride" is chiming, uncharacteristically quiet fare from the King Biscuit Entertainers, an accomplished bunch who built a reputation from years of energetic live shows on the Pacific Northwest’s ballroom circuit.

It doesn’t matter here that only fifty percent of their lyrics are decipherable, and that the rest are blurred into oblivion by that fascinating '60s studio gadget, the Echoplex tape delay. (The Echoplex could ascribe an hallucinogenic haze to the sound of silverware clattering to the floor, and it sometimes did.) What really matters here is the stoned buzz that the King Biscuit Entertainers achieve in a mere two minutes. That's the charm of deftly produced psychedelic pop. It got right down to the business of getting mellow.