RFI: Psychedelic Motown

Apart from a couple of R.Dean Taylor records, there was never ever such a thing as "psychedelic" Motown. The first ever truly psychedelic album by an African American act probably was Prince's "Around The World In One Day".

WTF!! Have you heard of George Clinton? Jimi Hendrix? Sly Stone?

If I had more time I'd point out the differences between the Temptations/Whitfield and JB approach. But since it's you Geir, I can't see the point.

Jimi Hendrix?
Stevie Wonder??
Funkadelic???
fucking DUB??????

make it stop, please

However Whitfield's role in giving Gaye the confidence to go out on his on, and to incorporate "rock" elements in his own work, is important.

Okay, let's agree that psychedelic does not mean exclusively Peppersesque Beatles. Now, on with the thread!

Dammit!

secondly: and although it's not motown, have you heard Muddy Waters "Electric Mud"? it's a great psychedelic blues funk album on Cadet Concept. muddy actually hates this album, thinking that he was tricked into doing something 'of the times' or 'for the kids'. but i love it. it's got fuzzed out guitar, heavy drums, even some flute. it's up there with eddie hazel and jimi hendrix. (my gf even asked me if it was jimi). and cypress hill sampled it.

13th Floor Elevators may have invented punk, but they didn't invent psychedelia. The first ever psychedelic piece of music was "Tomorrow Never Knows". That's when the psychedelic sound was created.

Other than The Beatles, Pink Floyd were making early psychedelic music, after those acts, the most archetypical psychedelic bands were (early) Traffic, Nirvana, Kaleidoscope and Idle Race. Even Rolling Stones made a brilliant psychedelic one-off album though, as did Zombies (who were great before that too, only not psychedelic)

And, yes, all of these acts were of course English.

Ha! I knew that echoplex I got would come in handy when I wanted to eventually play in a psych or funk band. (I guess I should cancel my orders on that sitar and the pink elephants now...)

R. Dean Taylor did release a couple of slightly psychedelic Motown singles in the late 60s though.

I'm surprised that there's so much love for Whitfield's Temptations productions. Maybe I'm not listening to them in the right way, or closely enough. But many of them have always felt overblown to me, cartoonish. That's something that's long bugged me about the Temptations: even a beautiful song like "Just My Imagination," in its most famous arrangement, seems to go over the top with the sound effects and hushed lead vocal. It mitigates the effect of the song for me. I prefer the Rolling Stones' cover (ducks).

AND THERE'S SITAR!!
(most famously sampled by ATCQ on bonita applebaum and the fugees on killing me softly.)

http://members.tripod.com/~lysergia_2/lamaEarlyPsychedelia.htm

please don't argue with Geir

B-b-but being fashionable isn't important as long as you have great MELODIES!

In my case, him or Ally or Tim Finney or...

Sigh. Why can't you go away?

It's got reverb galore, it actually uses the word "psychedelicized" (sp?) and to top it all off it's from 1967. Plus it grooves like a motherfucker and stirs up images of protestors, LBJ, and acid tests almost as vividly as "For What it's Worth".

http://www.tonygreen.com/images/stoned.jpg

I've got this cd
MOTOWN : THE HISTORY - VOLUME ONE - FUNKY PSYCHEDELIA
POLYGRAM 1997 CAT NUMBER : 5307122

it's great...but to be honest not much of it sounds pyschedelic to my ears...I mean - its got "ABC" on it.

coincidence : the CD I just threw on before I logged on and now listening to is :
MOTOWN MEETS THE BEATLES....full of gems !

is *aces...

I never think of the Mothers as psychedelic, just arty and weird like The Residents. It doesn't help that the leader/composer was anti-drug. I never got much out of listening to Zappa when I was on acid. In fact, I hated it.

One thing we were able to appreciate,even though the memories are calcified through advancing ravages of time, is that psychedelic music did not spring full formed from the breasts of Lennon/McCartney. They were influenced by things they had heard and certainly that included eastern ragas and musique concrete.

It was de rigueur to have a Ravi Shankar lp as well as an Edgar Varese to toss on the turntable to enhance the mood. But we were too stupid to realize that we had to wait, here in America, for Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club to understand psychedelia.

Instead, we could hear the new sounds forming in the Yardbirds, Donovan, and yes, despite his anti-drug stance, Zappa's MOI Freak Out with its Help I'm a Rock, Who Are The Brain Police, and

One thing we were able to appreciate,even though the memories are calcified through advancing ravages of time, is that psychedelic music did not spring full formed from the breasts of Lennon/McCartney. They were influenced by things they had heard and certainly that included eastern ragas and musique concrete.

It was de rigueur to have a Ravi Shankar lp as well as an Edgar Varese to toss on the turntable to enhance the mood. But we were too stupid to realize that we had to wait, here in America, for Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club to understand psychedelia.

Instead, we could hear the new sounds forming in the Yardbirds, Donovan, and yes, despite his anti-drug stance, Zappa's MOI Freak Out with its Help I'm a Rock, Who Are The Brain Police, and Return of the Son of Monster Magnet.

I suppose if your idea of psychedelia is limited to lace bodice foppery, gamboling in a fen while contemplatinng the radiant beauty of Lady Farquar, Sgt. Peppers is the ideal vehicle.

Wait--loan me those tea shades of yours, they help one see so clearly...

Ahhhhh. Here are some antecedents of psychedelia, though not themselves psychedelic:

Karlheinz Stockhausen--Kontakte
Kristof Penderecki--Threnody
Ornette Coleman--Shape of Jazz to Come
John Coltrane--My Favorite Things
Moondog--Moondog (on Prestige)
Edgar Varese--Ionisation
The Byrds--Mr Tambourine Man
Donovan--Sunshine Superman
Harry Partch--Barstow/Petals Fell on Petaluma
Terry Riley--In C

That's ten, and I'm leaving out tons of precedents in jazz, rock, blues, and classical. Here's your glasses back, Geir. Go listen.

What about the Brothers Johnson, in "Strawberry Letter 23"? (Maybe also the Shuggie Otis version, who knows.) Though, obviously, equating "psychedelia" with "just Sgt Peppers" is still moronic.

If Maggot Brain /= Psychedelicized,
then solve for X where X=WTF planet are we on?

I've been inspired by this thread to make a mix CD of psychedelic Motown songs...I'll comb through my LPs and mp3s and hopefully come up with something great. I'll post my results here if anyone's interested (dunno if the OP is still around).

i know, i know, i know. It's just, sometimes I just gotta let little air out...

And what colour was he again Geir? Was he Norwegian too by any chance?

It made me curious enough to scrabble together a copy of The Temptations' 'Psychedelic Shack' and 'All Directions.' Fabulous stuff.

The sheer wrongness of Geir's posts and yet he still continues on.

For anyone who's bothering to look, here's a better link for the one upthread that doesn't work (for me, anyway): http://members.tripod.com/~lysergia_2

pulled out Quincy Jones' soundtrack to Body Heat and damn if those songs don't sound like lost whitfield produced Temptation songs.

bumping this thread because i don't feel like making a new one

was listening to an old recording of the jefferson airplane doing syl johnson's "dresses too short" and i feel like this is something i've maybe underappreciated over the years, "heavy" sixties rock bands doing old soul tunes, tunes that are pretty new for me because they didn't make it as part of the "classic rock" canon (ref recent thread about "got my mind set on you". like, for a long time i didn't know "lovelight" wasn't a dead song. and then you have those early zep concerts from their first us tour where they do a very, very zep style version of garnet mimms' "long as i have you".

anyway, i'm sure there's tons more examples like this but i just don't know enough about sixties soul. thoughts?

I guess by "old soul tunes" you mean old in 2022, because "Dresses Too Short" was more or less contemporary to the Airplane, and "Long As I Have You" would only have been four or five years old?
The first thing that came to mind was James Gang doing "Stop" by Howard Tate on their first album, and that song had only been out for a year. Also, the Beach Boys weren't heavy, but they did cover "I Was Made to Love Her" in 1967.

check out the animals covering eddie & ernie's "outcast"

Alot of the Airplane archival albums credit "Dresses..." to Balin, so imagine my surprise when I heard the Syl for the first time at the local "Soul Night" and thought it was the Dap Kings or somebody doing JA!

The Dead also did "Hard To Handle".

Paul Butterfield (not the heaviest) did "Get Out of My Life, Woman" (by Lee Dorsey) and "One More Heartache" (by Marvin Gaye) when they were brand spanking new singles.

Vanilla Fudge lords over all with "You Keep Me Hangin' On".

Al Kooper & Mike Bloomfield did "Stop" as an instrumental on Super Session.

Jesus Christ @ the extra-ignorant Geir posts itt.

I guess by "old soul tunes" you mean old in 2022, because "Dresses Too Short" was more or less contemporary to the Airplane, and "Long As I Have You" would only have been four or five years old?
The first thing that came to mind was James Gang doing "Stop" by Howard Tate on their first album, and that song had only been out for a year. Also, the Beach Boys weren't heavy, but they did cover "I Was Made to Love Her" in 1967.

― Halfway there but for you

"Dolly Rocker, it's called Dolly Rocker
It's an old make of dress
Well, months old, you know
That sort of thing"

mccain otm re: vanilla fudge + "hard to handle." good jams.

Vanilla Fudge also did "Shotgun" (Junior Walker). Deep Purple did "River Deep, Mountain High" (Tina Turner). The Small Faces did "Every Little Bit Hurts" (Brenda Holloway). The Jimmy Page-era Yardbirds did "My Baby" (Garnet Mimms). Of course Janis Joplin/Big Brother did "Piece of My Heart" (Erma Franklin) which became a hit + part of the classic rock canon, so I guess it's disqualified... likewise "(I Know) I'm Losing You" (The Temptations) by Rod Stewart with the Faces. Janis Joplin also did "Tell Mama" (Etta James) and various other soul tunes. The Who did James Brown songs and "Heat Wave" (Martha & the Vandellas) but that was early in their career. I thought the Velvet Underground might have done "Hitch Hike" (Marvin Gaye) but I guess they just swiped the intro of it. The MC5 did "It's a Man's Man's Man's World" (James Brown).

"Of course Janis Joplin/Big Brother did "Piece of My Heart" (Erma Franklin) which became a hit + part of the classic rock canon, so I guess it's disqualified"

no that's exactly the sort of thing i'm thinking of, i never heard the erma franklin version. a lot of the soul covers i _know_ them from oldies radio, but someone like garnet mimms, nah

the velvets were unique for the era in that they didn't _do_ covers, there's a recording of them doing "green onions" on the andy warhol tapes i think but that's about it.

It's interesting that Jerry Ragovoy seems to be involved with many of these songs as a songwriter. He wrote or cowrote the Garnet Mimms songs and "Stop" by Howard Tate and "Piece of My Heart."

His Wikipedia entry lists several other compositions of his that fit the original question.

Yes, that is interesting. Wonder if he and Rudy Clark ever crossed paths. #onethread

XP He played piano on the James Gang's version of "Stop" too.

Speaking of Rudy Clark, the Dead also did "Good Lovin'" (originally by the Olympics and popularized by the (Young) Rascals).

Ha!--The Olympics' "Good Lovin'" (which had different lyrics from the actual original by Lemme B. Good) was produced by Ragovoy!

Paul Butterfield (not the heaviest) did "Get Out of My Life, Woman"

Also covered by Iron Butterfly on Heavy.

(which is also not the heaviest)

Al Kooper & Mike Bloomfield did "Stop" as an instrumental on Super Session.

Remembering too that they also did a straight vocal version of Gene Chandler's Curtis Mayfield-penned "Man's Temptation" on that same album.

...and speaking of Curtis, Vanilla Fudge did "People Get Ready" and later on Beck Bogert & Appice addressed "I'm So Proud".