Were You Experienced?
Gear Fab's Psychedelic States
by Reid Mitchell

Now it's '68 and nothing has changed
Every day someone's going insane
They keep fooling your imagination
Looking like a red invasion
Here comes the red invasion
---"The Red Invasion," the K-Pers

In Orlando, Florida, Roger Maglio dreams his solid-stoned dream: to reissue all worthy garage psychedelic records from the mid-sixties through early seventies, no matter how obscure. Gear Fab has already started with Alabama, Florida, Georgia, New York; Colorado and Tennessee are next in line. You may have believed that psychedelia kept itself to the vicinity of San Francisco Bay, but Gear Fab proves that fuzz guitar, swirling organs, and trippy lyrics spread through the nation like...well, like marijuana and LSD. This is the stuff they want to tell you now was limited to the hippies in San Francisco and college kids at big universities, the stuff that wasn't supposed to have made it to the heartland.

Bullshit.

Gear Fab's Psychedelic States series is a whole alternative history of America in the psychedelic era.

Go to Gear Fab's website. The stuff indexed there is already amazing. Do your own personal search. Search the site -- search your soul. Remember where you were in 1968. OK, try to remember where you were in 1968. Remember when the high school surf band started tripping out. Look for those songs, the ones recorded locally. You may even remember you played in one of those bands. Hey geezer, were you experienced?

What I have in my cd player is Psychedelic States: Alabama in the 60s, Vol 1. Volume 1, dig that. Volume 2 is already en-route. These Alabama bands were cranking out psychedelia down south even when Captain America and the other Easy Rider were motorcycling through the countryside. Did you Yankees know that?

The cd starts off with the Versatiles' 1967 release "Cyclothymia," [cyclothymia, n., "a temperament marked by alternately lively and depressed moods"]. The Versatiles played in Mobile -- often with go-go dancers -- but dressed like they shopped on Carnaby Street in Swinging London: The lyrics are about as socially conscious as the Monkees' "Pleasant Valley Sunday," but "Cyclothymia" sounds, well, pretty groovy and more than a little druggy, with a bluesy guitar solo over a choppy, hypnotic bass line:

You're wondering
Why your ambitions can't come true
You're wondering
With your life what will you do
You're like an artist
Trying to paint a dream

The K-Pers's "Red Invasion," the rockin'est cut on the cd, combines a 1960s groove-out with something of Billy Lee Riley's "Flying Saucer Rock & Roll." This is the over-the-top raver. But maybe the standout is a Birmingham group, the Dedications, doing what I think might be an original, "Midnight Gray." Surely they listened to the Doors, and probably the Animals too -- the organ solo is particularly fine on this cut.

Midnight you're lighting me
I have visions of ecstasy
I'm trying to reach to show that I care
I clutch at the shadows but you're not there
I try to hold you
Embrace and enfold you
But all I see are the Grays and Blacks
I shout your name
But you're not there
I long for your eyes
And the scent of your hair

Of course, overall the emphasis might better be placed on the "garage" in garage psychedelic. Much of the music on this cd reflects southern boys adopting the sound of the British Invasion. And somewhere behind that lurks the loving ghost of Buddy Holly, the original garage band rocker. Let's confess that there are certain similarities about Alabama garage music. You better like the type of guitar solo played most famously in the Kingmen's cover of "Louie Louie." You better love organs playing bouncy block chords. You better find something goddam charming about Alabamians trying to sound English.

The K-Optics sound Kinky, with their song "I'm Leaving Here" probably inspired by "You Really Got Me." Sheffield's Gate do the Zombie's "Tell Her No" with every English inflection so faithfully reproduced you wonder why anybody recorded it at all; I assume it got them plenty of bookings and plenty of swooning alcoholic rubdowns at the time. You might think Micky Buckins and the New Breed are trying to sound like Procal Harum as they perform "Reflections Of Charles Brown;" the same charge was made against Rupert's People when they performed the original. The Movement, with their oddly titled "Green Knight" -- the title's the most psychedelic thing about the recording -- seem to have been a Midfield, Alabama, reincarnation of the Animals. Doubtless, though, The Rolling Stones, particularly Mick Jagger's vocals, are what influenced these Alabama cats the most. It's quite a relief to report that despite their name, the Tories probably studied the Rufus Thomas original "Walkin' the Dog" as well as the Rolling Stones' markedly inferior cover; they certainly blow the Stones version away.

I came across Gear Fab's Alabama in the 60s through a casual conversation with Louisiana musician Coco Robicheaux (about whom I hope to be writing more soon.) Coco croaked at me, "You know, I was in a psychedelic band in Mobile in the Sixties. Fab Gear Records released one of our singles. Fab Gear, like the Beatles, dig it? Like Liverpool." It was close enough for me to track down the cd.

Now, with a little help from your friend, you can do the same. And if you were experienced, contact Gear Fab, particularly if you played in one the bands featured on a Gear Fab reissue.

The Psychedelic States series is available from Gear Fab www.swiftsite.com/gearfab/index.html



Contact Reid Mitchell at: reid-at-rockzilla.net

 
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