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| The Enpsychlopedia, Or: Dr. Leary, Your Prescription Is Ready. (Introduction) |
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| 30th Jun 2021, 11:20 PM | #1 REPORT | |
 | 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. |
| 30th Jun 2021, 11:20 PM | #2 REPORT | |
| Break-In Master Member since Dec 2013 253 Points | I don't like how most psych comps are just a random collection of songs with no forethought at all about where each song takes the listener. I get it, they ARE just random collections of songs and aren't interested in a flow, but, I am! So, I tend to let the end of track one dictate where track two is gonna continue from there. I'd NEVER put something like Strawberry Fields Forever next to a song like Penny Lane! SFF is kind of a "dark' song so, it needs to be followed by a dark song, or at least one that starts out that way. I try to match the feel of each song with the one before it. If song 2 ends up with a lighter feel, song 3 will start with one, etc.. Around CD 15, I got the idea to even start cross-fading tracks JUST A LITTLE to make it more continuous. I HATE when people cut off the end of a song or fade it out early or start one already into the song!! So, I'll make SURE I include THE WHOLE SONG, but, let's say a song ends with water fading out, I'll start the next song with water fading in, no more than a second or two before the end of the first and it'll sound like it's a single piece.so, you GET the entire first track and there's only a tiny portion that's got the next track added to it. Also, I've burned every track to be used onto a huge collection of CD's (120, so far) that I call, The Psych Demos. This is mostly for the songs I'm not completely familiar with, yet, in hopes that, listening to this collection a number of times will GET me familiar with them. There's a much smaller version called, The Psych Masters. These are songs I know quite well and have already cleaned up the sound on so, when they get added into the project, I don't need to clean them up (removing noise, pops and clicks, etc.), they can just go right in! When I'm in need of the next track, I will usually spot check the start of every one of those thousands of songs to see which ones will be good to go in, next. Once I get all of those together, I just have to pick the ONE I want to use next that fits best. On the original cassette version, one more song ended the side but, when recording this to CD, that song ran about 10 seconds too long and had to be put onto the second CD! Since I started this project, I've also copied it over to hard drive, SD card and open reel tape. I bought a 10" deck that plays and records in both directions so, I can get over 3 hours without a break!! I don't have a way to play SD's on my stereo, yet. Because I don't want to be so used to this comp that I know what's coming next through the entire thing, I only play it once or twice a year, usually in the Spring, usually only on a day that has a kind of silver blue tint in the sky during a very sunny day. And now, without further ado, here's the running order of the tracks I used on the first CD. How About A Little Fanfare / Todd Rundgren Carney / Leon Russell Opening Ceremony / The Monkees The Porpoise Song / The Monkees Dose / Bela Lugosi & The Monkees 25 O'Clock / The Dukes Of Stratosphear Bike Ride To The Moon / The Dukes Of Stratosphear My Love Explodes / The Dukes Of Stratosphear Over, Under, Sideways, Down / The Yardbirds Turn To Earth / The Yardbirds Don't Miss The Turn / The Trees A Question Of Temperature / The Balloon Farm (I Had) Too Much To Dream Last Night / The Electric Prunes We Ain't Got Nothin' Yet / The Blues Magoos Don't Leave Me Tired / Vibrasonic Into The Deep / Kula Shaker Dr. Marvello / Klaatu Wonderlove / Claudine Longette Lazy Day / Spanky & Our Gang The Rain, The Park & Other Things / The Cowsills Maybe In A Dream / The "Sopwith" Camel 2000 Light Years From Home / The Rolling Stones Now, a sort of song by song description but, not for EVERY song; it's not needed. i only used the opening 6 seconds of Fanfare rather than including the electronic bits that followed. I just wanted it to kind of announce what was about to come. Although, not EXACTLY psych, "Carney" fit in well AS the fanfare. Partly because of the song and partly because, from what I can tell (at least it's my theory), the whole track was performed via mellotron! I'd always thought it was just a lot of sounds edited together via tapes but, it suddenly hit me a few years ago that it COULD'VE been done entirely on a mellotron by recording a different sound onto each stretch of tape used in the mellotron! Leon, correct me if I'm wrong! And, like I said, it took the edge off the abrupt start of the next track. Opening Ceremony is from the original mono source of the movie soundtrack, not the soundtrack album. If I remember correctly, Porpoise Song is, too. And, as Porpoise song is joined to the next scene in the movie, the kissing contest, I left that on, too and, at the very end, tacked on the coda of the 7" version. I didn't really WANT to add the kissing bit but, I couldn't see any way to get around it. "Dose", is also from the soundtrack but, since i didn't use the entire track, only about half of it, I just called it, "Dose". In a way, it sounds like Bela has just drugged the listener and claims it will be effective, soon. As Mike Nesmith them says, "Hey, now wait just a minute...!", I figured then best track to put next should start with a ticking clock, as if to say we're GOING to wait a minute! So, I used 25 O'Clock! As the three tracks on that side of the Dukes album are connected, I left all three as they are on the album, As, "My Love Explodes" was based on the next track, I added it in next. I thought a good follower for "Turn To Earth" would be this obscure track by The Trees. (I recently discovered that two of the guys in The Trees eventually recorded for Apple records as Lon & Derek Van Eaton.) The Balloon Farm just HAD to follow, next!! I never went out and bought that record, it just ended up in my collection one day, probably when I was given or bought a large lot of records at a garage sale. Not long after that, someone at our local progressive rock station (which stopped progressing at all a couple years later) was doing a lunchtime show for an hour every day called, Psychedelic Psnack. One day, I called in to the jock doing the show, I knew them all by then, and told him I had this record. He asked if I could get him a recording of it because he's been looking for it for some time! So, I made him one and he used it on the show. The next few tracks kinda speak for themselves. I KNOW! I KNOW! Kula Shaker, Klaatu, the Dukes and Vibrasonic (and others) are not from the `60's but, I don't care WHAT era a record was made in, as long as it's good psych, it'll eventually show up here! There's even a couple tracks from the early `60's that fit in quite well!! "Claudine Longette???", you say? Yes! For that one track, anyway. Another one I never went out and bought, it just ended up in my collection and I had no idea what it was until years later in the mid `90's when I first played it while archiving my singles to open reel tape, something I've been wanting to do since the mid `70's when I still only had about 3000 records in my collection. As it has a nice sunny Summer day in `67 feel to it, I had to follow it with a couple slices of sunshine psych! |
| 30th Jun 2021, 11:24 PM | #3 REPORT | |
| Break-In Master Member since Dec 2013 253 Points | I remember when both of these songs first came out. I was 8 to 10 years old and was hanging out at the kiddy pool on the hill where teen agers where our life guards they'd play this stuff over the .P.A. in the cove. So, every time I hear these two songs, it takes me right back to those days!! Music is my time machine!! This lone "Sopwith" Camel track that I used in the collection felt like a great follow up and, because it kinda moved the mood into a darker realm, that lead me to the next song. More on the follow up next time. |
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Vinyl Albums : Live Music : 78 RPM : CD Albums : CD Singles : 12" Singles : 7" Singles : Tape Media : Classical Music : Music Memorabilia : Cinema : TV Series : DVD & Blu-ray : Magazines : Books : Video Games : Create Your Own World
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