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Topic: The Enpsychlopedia, Or: Dr. Leary, Your Prescription Is Ready. (Introduction)

30th Jun 2021, 11:20 PM
	Break-In Master Member since Dec 2013 253 Points	I know nobody's gonna read this or pay any attention to it but, I just felt like writing about it. If you want to comment on anything that's here (or not here), go right ahead. I suppose I'll just talk about one CD in the series per day until I've got them all here. So far, there's at least 20. I grew up in the `60's and loved psych when it first came out but, to me, as with The Beatles, it was just another style of music and I never bothered buying as much of it as I could, just whatever I liked that was, for the most part, being played on the radio. To me, The Beatles were a great band but, no need to collect them now, they'll always be around and I can buy the rest of their records later. I hardly had any money so, I KINDA had to be picky about what I bought. Eventually, psych came & went and I got into other styles as they presented themselves to my ear buds. Pretty much anything BUT disco!! But, I WANTED PSYCH!!! Comes the `80's. I started noticing psych was making a come back around `84/5 and I remembered how cool a lot of it was back in the `60's! My bassist, at the time, was big into XTC, a band I'd never heard of before the American version of, "English Settlement". I went to his apartment to record some of his Beatle collection to cassettes, then he showed me this incredible psych album that just came out by The Dukes Of Stratosphear!! He suggested I might like it, played it for me, and I LOVED it!!! He played a few XTC records for me, too and I loved them!! I've been a huge XTC fan ever since! I found a few SUPPOSED psych comps in record stores and picked them up, only to find that most of the stuff on them was either garage or not psych at all! I like garage, too but, if I'm looking for PSYCH, I WANT PSYCH! Y'know, the GOOD stuff! Songs loaded with sitars, tabla, tamboura, mellotron, backwards tapes, weird sounds coming in from all over the place, wild panning stereo, tape manipulation, phase shifters set on Stun, etc. VERY creative music!! I set my standards pretty high, some of you may think. Can't help it! I want PSYCH!! I never really liked a lot of American psych. To me, it WASN'T psych! From what I can tell, Americans think that, all you need to make a psych record is a fuzzy guitar sound and strange lyrics! That just doesn't cut it for me! (Yeah, I'm American.) As nobody else was putting together such a comp (as far as I knew), I'd do it myself! My first attempt in the late `80's started out okay but, shortly into the single-cassette project, It became more of a collection of odd and even novelty songs rather than psych. In the mid `90's, I started finding REAL psych records and starting my soon to be huge psych collection.. Now, I WANTED to get a REAL psych comp going! One day, my band and I are in the studio recording tracks for our second album and I happened to have an audio cassette I made of the "Head" soundtrack. I had the engineer play some of it in the studio. He heard the opening, the part where The Monkees are about to jump off the bridge; on the album, it's called, "Opening Ceremony", and he went nuts!! He thought we recorded this and that it was one of the best psych things he'd ever heard! LOL!! I thought, "Hey! I should use that for the opener of my psych compilation when I get around to building it!" I finally DID get around to building it...about 5 years later! Around this time, somehow, I ended up talking on the phone with a guy that loves psych, too! We talked for at least an hour and he was telling me about these great psych tracks, some of which I'd never heard of before. At the end of the conversation, he mentioned the first album by Chicago was a great psych album!! WHAT??? HOW???? The ONLY track from it that I would even DREAM of considering as psych is, "Free Form Guitar Solo" and even THAT'S not psych!! Sometime, between then and mid `99, I started to list all the psych tracks I knew of that'd be great for this comp. In the evening of July 10th, 1999, I put a fresh cassette into my deck and started recording and the huge psych compilation I'd been wanting to make!! The start of "Opening Ceremony" was on the abrupt side so, I decided to start with a sort of fanfare that WAS, basically, psych. There were actually two opening tracks but, both were VERY short and not at all detractors from the main idea. After I'd made at least two cassettes full of this new comp, I bought a CD burner. It's like a cassette recorder, but it records to CD instead of tape. So, I transferred those tapes to CD's. In 2000 (I think) I bought my first computer and a year later, a music editing program by a company called, Magix. I've been using it ever since. At the moment, I'm using it to edit the Woodstock project. (There's a lot of stuff I have that's not on the 50th anniversary release so, I'm editing my extra stuff into it.) From the time I first started it, I wanted the tracks used to flow into each other.