CHAPTER 03
Acid Rock and Beyond
Acid, ragas and the psychedelic road to weight
27 works, in the order the book names them
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001/Album
Band on the Run
Paul McCartney & Wings
At his more recent concerts, Paul McCartney has recited the anecdote about Hendrix’s hastily thrown-together cover version after playing not the Beatles song in question but, rather, Wings’ ‘Let Me Roll It’ from 1973’s Band on the Run.
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002/Book/1954
The Doors of Perception
Aldous Huxley
‘Would a naturally gifted musician hear the revelations which, for me, had been exclusively visual?’ asked Aldous Huxley in The Doors of Perception (1954), but, as Rob Chapman points out in his history of psychedelia, until the mid-1960s, nobody did.
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003/TV series
Terry and June
BBC
Scolding TV writers for constantly misusing the phrase ‘on acid’ as lazy and unimaginative shorthand for ‘wacky’, Bailey proposed that ‘Terry and June . . . on acid!’ would actually consist of Terry examining the floral pattern on a plate for four days while going, ‘That’s quite interesting, that’s quite interesting, that’s quite interesting.’ This is not to knock the LSD experience, though.
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004/Album/1968
Electric Ladyland
The Jimi Hendrix Experience
Around the time of 1968’s Electric Ladyland, Hendrix had started referring to his style as ‘electric church music’.
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005/Album/1968
We’re Only in It for the Money
The Mothers of Invention
Zappa had no time for recreational drugs or the hippies who took them, sardonically mocking The Beatles, their followers and associated hippie happenings on We’re Only in It for the Money (1968) by The Mothers of Invention.
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006/Compilation
Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era
Various artists
Erickson sure does unleash some rapturous howls on the Elevators’ garage rock classic ‘You’re Gonna Miss Me’, but is that track significantly superior to the selections offered by some of the less well-remembered acts on Lenny Kaye’s famous compilation Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era?
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007/Book
Night of Light
Philip José Farmer
Pepper’s’ and unveiled their own apparently druggy milestone, ‘Purple Haze’ (a term more likely lifted from literature, specifically Philip José Farmer’s sci-fi novel Night of Light, though it also appears in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations), Jefferson Airplane released ‘White Rabbit’, a paean of sorts to hallucinogens, albeit one that owed a significant debt to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (as did The Beatles’ ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’, also in 1967).
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008/Book
Great Expectations
Charles Dickens
Pepper’s’ and unveiled their own apparently druggy milestone, ‘Purple Haze’ (a term more likely lifted from literature, specifically Philip José Farmer’s sci-fi novel Night of Light, though it also appears in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations), Jefferson Airplane released ‘White Rabbit’, a paean of sorts to hallucinogens, albeit one that owed a significant debt to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (as did The Beatles’ ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’, also in 1967).
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009/Book
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Lewis Carroll
Pepper’s’ and unveiled their own apparently druggy milestone, ‘Purple Haze’ (a term more likely lifted from literature, specifically Philip José Farmer’s sci-fi novel Night of Light, though it also appears in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations), Jefferson Airplane released ‘White Rabbit’, a paean of sorts to hallucinogens, albeit one that owed a significant debt to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (as did The Beatles’ ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’, also in 1967).
Open in Goodreads ↗ -
010/Album/1960
Sketches of Spain
Miles Davis
Slick had been listening to Miles Davis’s Sketches of Spain (1960) for 24 hours straight when she penned it, and the slow and atmospheric bassline was inspired by Maurice Ravel’s Boléro (1928).
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011/Composition/1928
Boléro
Maurice Ravel
Slick had been listening to Miles Davis’s Sketches of Spain (1960) for 24 hours straight when she penned it, and the slow and atmospheric bassline was inspired by Maurice Ravel’s Boléro (1928).
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012/Book
Alice in Wonderland
Lewis Carroll
Everybody reads their kids Alice in Wonderland, and there are drug references throughout it.
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013/Album/1970
Third
Soft Machine
Or they might plump for later recordings such as the handful of mammoth tracks that make up 1970’s Third.
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014/Album/1969
Trout Mask Replica
Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band
Their Trout Mask Replica of 1969 has to be one of the most widely purchased avant-garde rock albums of all time.
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015/Album/1999
The Mirror Man Sessions
Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band
For a looser, far less stiff and more transcendental experience, check out the expansive jams of offbeat acid rock at its finest that can be found on The Mirror Man Sessions, recorded in 1967 and released in a variety of forms thereafter.
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016/Album/1969
Armageddon
The Maze
Summing up the mood of 1969 and hinting at the San Fran band’s future (or, rather, lack thereof), The Maze’s sole album was titled Armageddon.
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017/Album/1972
Squawk
Budgie
His review of Budgie’s second album, 1972’s Squawk, for Let It Rock magazine opens with an account of the professional doors that would be slammed in the writer’s face if he was naive enough to reveal his love of Budgie to a prospective editor.
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018/Album/1976
Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap
AC/DC
Alan Sparhawk of moody slowcore harmonizers Low remembers Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap being one of the first records he ever owned, when he was yet to turn thirteen.
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019/Album/1980
Back in Black
AC/DC
Stuart Murdoch, leader of the polite Glaswegian indie group Belle & Sebastian, says that nothing gets much heavier than Back in Black.
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020/Album
Let There Be Rock
AC/DC
Even Angus Young himself had confessed, ‘A lot of people say we’ve made the same album eleven times, and really they’re lying because it’s actually the twelfth time.’ For Marszalek, there were AC/DC’S ‘Glam Rock Years’ (lasting from the band’s formation in 1973 to 1976’s Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap), the ‘Punk Rock Years’ of 1977’s Let There Be Rock, the ‘Disco Years’ (1978 to 1981), the ‘Mullet Years’ (1983 to 1990) and the ‘Britpop Years’ (when AC/DC noticed that many new bands had a throwback sound and so opted to become ‘a tribute to themselves’), and this made the way for the final ‘Heritage Years’.
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021/Album/1978
Powerage
AC/DC
Singling out the band’s most ‘experimental’ album, Michael Hann writes that on 1978’s Powerage, singer Bon Scott replaced the previous ‘seaside postcard bawdiness’ with grimmer observational material that read more like Jim Thompson short stories.
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022/Album/1979
Unknown Pleasures
Joy Division
‘There’s space in Unknown Pleasures,’ Dave Haslam wrote of Joy Division’s debut album, ‘like something’s missing, some silence at the heart of the music, dragging the listener in.’ On first listen, AC/DC and Joy Division seem worlds apart.
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023/Album/1973
Space Ritual
Hawkwind
A more appropriate starting point would be the double LP Space Ritual.
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024/Album
Quark, Strangeness and Charm
Hawkwind
As soon as Stranglers bassist Jean-Jacques Burnel heard the title track to Hawkwind’s 1977 album Quark, Strangeness and Charm, he wished he’d written it himself and kept trying to convince his bandmates to cover it.
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025/Album
Warrior on the Edge of Time
Hawkwind
When Brock appeared in a documentary in 2020, his delight in his group’s simple yet fruitful formula still hadn’t waned: ‘I mean, if you listen to “Opa-Loka” [from Warrior on the Edge of Time, 1975], basically it’s just a rhythmic sort of drum beat and us just plonking away on the guitars behind it with weird sounds going on.
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026/Album/2010
Heavier than a Death in the Family
Les Rallizes Dénudés
It is Heavier than a Death in the Family, as the title of one of those bootlegs puts it.
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027/Album/1970
Anywhere
Flower Travellin’ Band
Featured on their debut album Anywhere (1970), Flower Travellin’ Band’s repertoire included a rendition of ‘Black Sabbath’, the first song from Black Sabbath’s also self-titled debut album.
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