The Big Green House

Tuesday, December 02, 2003

 

Sgt. Pepper's Tales of Topographic Oceans

I'm sure that this has been painfully obvious to everyone else who's ever been interested in rock & roll, but I swear on my copy of The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway* that it never once occurred to me that prog rock evolved from psychedelia. Not until I read this month's issue of Mojo. How blind it that? Truly, I am as thick as a brick.

I mean, a simple glance at the career of, say, Pink Floyd, would have clued in even my ol' dear Granny, bless her heart, a woman for whom Lawrence Welk's salute to Gershwin was a little too far out. It's that unmistakable. The really odd thing is, I went through a prog phase in my late teens-early twenties (still like some of it, actually), and I've always enjoyed various aspects of American psych.** It's a very short hop sometimes between trippy and pompous, one that was eagerly made by countless bands in the post-Summer of Love murk. So how did I not see it?

My blindness in this respect stems, I think, from the fact that A) I tend to think of prog as being a mostly British phenomenon, and B) I don't generally think of the British as having had much in the way of psychedelic music. I know, I know, The Beatles, et al., blah blah blah. Please save your corrective emails and comments. You have to remember that I grew up in the Bay Area during the sixties, so Acid Rock, as I remember it being called at the time, is very much a San Francisco thing for me. The Beatles, in my little elementary school mind, were just a band I heard on my little transistor radio & saw occasionally on The Ed Sullivan Show. We didn't have any of their records in the house (shocking, innit?), so I never heard the more experimental bits until much later.

(Some of them I probably still haven�t heard. At the risk of incurring a heaping helping of scorn and derision, I've never been that much of a Beatles fan, beyond those AM radio hits of way back when. The Stones, The Who and The Kinks, yes yes and yes. The Beatles- eh. I don't hate them - aside from the vast majority of Paul's solo work, anyway. I've just never been that excited by them.)


*And yes, I'm pretty sure I still have my vinyl copy somewhere down in the basement. Wanna make something of it?

** A lot of what I've heard of British psych is just too damn twee for me.***

***Man, I'm all about pissing people off tonight.

bmarkey 12/02/2003 09:22:00 PM