Fifty five years ago the Yardbirds released their follow up to "Shapes of Things",  "Over, Under, Sideways, Down",   The original featured Jeff Beck on guitar. Here is the band performing live with his replacement, Jimmy Page. Of their enduring hits, it was always the hardest to find in the vinyl and early CD eras.

I was surprised that Todd wasn't already in the the Hall. He's produced groundbreaking albums. He's produced hit albums. I think he's even produced some groundbreaking hit albums. Something/Anything is cited as a masterpiece, and while there's a good LP's worth of tunes there, I don't really get the slow piano/Laura Nyro style pieces. If I'm going to listen to him, I'm most likely to put on his first band, the Nazz. Although pushed as a teeny bopper band, they played a heavy, psychedelic power pop.  Their debut single - " Open My Eyes " - was arguably their best. It has it all and should have been a big hit. Maybe Todd agrees, he reworked the vocal line into " Who's That Man ". It is certainly their best known, having appeared on the original Nuggets compilation. The promotional video used to get some play as a "closet classic" back when MTV used to play music videos. The flip side was " Hello, It's Me ...

Nicky, Ricky, Roger, and Davey were in the van on a way to a gig on this day in 1968.  "Shall we pick Syd up?" one of them asked. "Let's not bother." was the answer. It's not like he was still an active member of the band. He had long since ceased to contribute both in the studio and on stage....unless his stage presence was supposed to provide a focal point for the freak show. After writing and singing most of their first album, he only wrote one song on the second and played on two more. Another pair of songs were recorded but for release as a single, but remained unreleased until 2016.  At first they discussed keeping Syd on as a non-performing member, writing songs like Brian Wilson did for the Beach Boys. What might that have sounded like? He only had one song on  A Saucerful of Secrets  , and it is debatable whether the inclusion of the unreleased single would have improved it.  What about  More ? It has a spacey, folksy songs interspersed with the ...

On this day in 1969, Brian Jones was found dead in his swimming pool. He'd been fired from the Rolling Stones, the band that he had founded and named, about a month earlier. While not an acid casualty, his drug abuse seemed to have played a role in his ouster. He wouldn't practice. He failed to show up in the studio. Sometimes the band would just unplug his amp when he did show up.... As the story goes, Brian had been dissatisfied with the commercial direction the band had been taking from, say, Satisfaction onward. He wanted the band to stay true to its R&B roots. Strange, that, as he was responsible for the marimba in "Under My Thumb," the sitar in "Paint it Black" and "Street Fighting Man." When the Stones return to their roots with Beggars Banquet he leaves most of the guitar playing to Keith. On Let it Bleed , he plays congas on one song, autoharp on another. On their least rootsy album, Their Satanic Majesties Request , he plays on e...

Probably the saddest of the acid casualties was the singer and frontman of the 13th Floor Elevators, Roky Erickson. We lost him just over a year ago. He and the other Elevators were open proponents of various psychedelics, deep in the heart of Texas. Roky himself purportedly dropped acid about 300 times. In 1968 he was hospitalized after an episode wherein he began speaking gibberish on stage. He was diagnosed with schizophrenia. In 1969 he was busted with a joint. In a move to dodge a 10-year prison term, he pleaded insanity and....um....won, subsequently being committed to a state psychiatric hospital. After several escape attempts, he was transferred to another facility where Nurse Ratched gave him shock therapy and Thorazine treatments. No lobotomy, thankfully, but he was released in 1974, a changed man. From then on, he labored in obscurity, producing a solid four albums worth your attention. Doug Sahm produced his first single release - "Two Headed Dog." CCR's...

Has there ever been a band that has collapsed as quickly as the Beach Boys did in the wake of "Good Vibrations?" Probably not, and they never really recovered, which is unfortunate. They produced some good music in the late '60s that moved them past their origins. For Brian Wilson, the pressure of trying to complete the SMiLE project and his use of psychedelics had brought on or exacerbated an underlying mental illness. Acid casualty #1. In May of 1967, he abandons the project and withdraws from the leadership of the band. The next three albums, Smiley Smile ,  Wild Honey  and Friends were recorded in his home studio. The swimming pool was drained and used for an echo chamber. A detuned piano placed in a sandbox in the living room (so he could twiddle his toes in it as he played). The cat did what cats do in sand. Gone are the songs about sun, fun, surfing and cars. The sound is stripped down and low-fi. With 1968's Friends , drummer brother Dennis emerges as no...

In June 1967 Moby Grape issued their debut album. It is one of the best albums you've never heard. They were a San Francisco band, usually discussed in conjunction with the Grateful Dead or Jefferson Airplane. If you like "Golden Road" or "Cream Puff War" from the Dead's first album, you'll probably like this one. Why haven't you heard it? It's complicated. The band began when Jefferson Airplane dismissed their manager and drummer, Skip Spence. The pair found Bob Mosley from a San Diego outfit called the Misfits to play bass, Jerry Miller and Don Stevenson from Seatle band, the Frantics, on lead guitar and drums, Peter Lewis, a Hollywood kid and guitarist for the Cornells  was recruited and Spence moved over to guitar. All five members sang and wrote. The band was a hit in San Fransisco and got a good record deal, but then things went wrong. For starters, 10 of the album's 13 songs were simultaneously issued as the A and B-sides of ...

June 5, 1975....45 years ago, Syd Barrett showed up in the studio, unannounced, during the recording of Wish You Were Here   announcing he was ready to do his bit. The band hadn't seen him in five or six years. He had shaved his head (like Pink in The Wall film) and put on a lot of weight. They didn't recognize him at first. He also brought a toothbrush and brushed his teeth while jumping up and down. It is one of the last sad, crazy Syd stories. After writing most of the first album, Syd only wrote one song to the follow-up and added some Zippo slide guitar to two of the others. After that, he made two solo albums. The Madcap Laughs , took over a year and three sets of sessions, produced, by Malcolm Jones, Peter Jones, and the last by Waters and Gilmore. The second, Barrett , was produced by Gilmore and Wright. Malcolm Jones tells a story of a lucid Syd, able to nail songs in one take. He expressed disbelief in the chaotic nature of parts of the album, insinuating tha...

It's a great, overlooked album. With Phil May's passing, you should give the Pretty Things'  Parachute  a listen. If you like Big Star, Badfinger, Todd - especially  Something/Anything? , or the Raspberries, you'll like it. Same thing if you like the VU's  Loaded , especially the pretty parts. It should have had a presence on the airwaves. At the very least, it should have been - if not in my record collection - in that of a friend so I could have made a tape. It's not just a lost classic. It's unheard. It's not even like their previous album, S.F. Sorrow , or  Oar, or the VU & Nico , albums that people know about even if they haven't actually listened to them. Aside from a couple of longish numbers - it was 1970 - on side two, 6 of its 13 tunes clock in at under two minutes...strung together, almost as a medley. That such an album should go unnoticed for 50 years is bad enough. What they had to do to get by while recording it and  S....

April Fools Day, 1985....and XTC releases 25 O’Clock , a six-song EP under the pseudonym Dukes of Stratosphear. Conceived 6 years earlier, the band got to work on the project in 1984. Modeled on 1967-68 British psychedelia, no more than two takes were allowed on any tune, vintage instruments   - including an old mellotron picked up on the cheap – were used when possible, and the madcapery was laid on thick . The joke, though, was on them, as the resulting EP – 25 O’Clock – outsold the previous XTC release, The Big Express . What we have today,  Dukes of Stratosphear & Sources ,  is the 25 O’Clock, coupled with the Dukes’ subsequent album, Psonic Psunspot. Each song is followed by the track (or tracks) that it evokes, at least for me. Some connections are instrumental, some thematic,  and yet others stem from the use of effects and treatments that were, as they say, “of their time.”

Nuggets and Little Tiny Rocks: the Psychedelic Singles: 1965-67 . I tried to put the songs in order of release. Again, if I only had a month for a release date, I put it in the middle of that month's releases. If I only had the year, I stuck it between June and July. What was that wave of performers listening to on AM radio during this time? Maybe it sounded like this. Follow on  Twitter Follow on  Instagram