New Zealand - the Sandoz years, 1967-72

Landfill psych of the antipodes

I felt terrible, and finally I couldn’t talk at all and slumped back onto the floor, closed my eyes and the music began to absorb me physically. I could smell it and touch it and feel it as well as hear it. Never had anything been so beautiful. I was a part of every single instrument, literally a part. Each note had a character, shape and colour all its very own and seemed to be entirely separate from the rest of the score so that I could consider its relationship to the whole composition, before the next note sounded. My mind possessed the wisdoms of the ages, and there were no words adequate to describe them.

~ Anonymous, Go Ask Alice, 1971

The Op Shop, in this case Henderson SPCA, is God’s gift to this music writer, and I often find examples of old music that, because I listen to, and make, new music, sound freshly exciting and just begging to be understood in brand new ways. Today’s revisionist review is of Volume 2 of the NZ psych single collection A Day In My Mind’s Mind, Fantasies, Polka Dots & Flowers. $2 for 27 tracks, mostly taken from 7” singles intended for radio play, because NZ’s small size didn’t really encourage LP releases - more on this later.

LSD’s psychedelic effect was discovered by its creator Albert Hoffman in Basle, Switzerland on bicycle day, 1943. A similar drug, mescaline, derived initially from the peyote cactus, was already in use in cult circles - Aleister Crowley, Jean Paul Sartre, and perhaps Katherine Mansfield were initiates, and the Nazis experimented with it in Dachau concentration camp, but the wider world only became aware of its meaning in 1954 when Aldous Huxley, author of best-selling novels of ideas like Brave New World and Point Counter Point, wrote about his mescaline trip in a short volume called The Doors of Perception. The music Huxley listened to under the influence, perhaps the first music ever mentioned in this context, was Mozart’s Piano Concerto in C - “left me rather cold” - then a madrigal by the (mad, bad, and extremely dangerous to know) renaissance composer Gesualdo, which roused thoughts most characteristic of the psychedelic state:
"…and yet it does not matter that he's all in bits. The whole is disorganized. But each individual fragment is in order, is a representative of a Higher Order. The Highest Order prevails even in the disintegration. The totality is present even in the broken pieces. More clearly present, perhaps, than in a completely coherent work. At least you aren't lulled into a sense of false security by some merely human, merely fabricated order. You have to rely on your immediate perception of the ultimate order. So in a certain sense disintegration may have its advantages. But of course it's dangerous, horribly dangerous. Suppose you couldn't get back, out of the chaos…”
And lastly, Alban Berg’s Lyric Suite, which Huxley found self-pitying and mocked “unfairly'“ (I would have chosen the Lulu Suite).

Not everyone needs to take psychedelics to experience or express such revelations. Wayne Coyne, who made the most psychedelic music of anyone in the noughties with The Flaming Lips, hasn’t tripped. And Huxley’s novels for decades prior to The Doors of Perception had include passages that read like acid visions, because Huxley was fascinated by both science and mysticism, and loved to imagine connections between the physical and metaphysical worlds. One of the things that hallucinogens do is to turn off the brain’s autocorrect, for example, that learned, default assumption that solid objects don’t ripple that fixes what our wobbly little cameras are really “seeing”. Put that ripple into a surface, and you’re creating a psychedelic effect, and the musicians and artists who took LSD very quickly developed a concept of “psychedelic” that included such non-drug effects. Today, everyone has been exposed to “trippy” music and lightshows, and anyone who can read can read convincing accounts of acid revelations if they want to. So I don’t assume that every artist on A Day In My Mind’s Mind Vol 2 had dropped a tab, but by golly every single one of them, including their producers, seems to have understood their mission, and there isn’t a single skippable track among the 27 on offer here. And this is the second volume of such work.
A Day In My Mind’s Mind Vol 2 begins with the ultimate 60’s psychedelic production effect, phasing, an effect never used by the Beatles or indeed any of the canonical psych acts to the extent it is on the first half of this CD. The Hi Revving Tongues’ cover of ‘Elevator’, originally recorded by Grapefruit (A London act signed to Beatles-owned Apple records) has many of the psychedelic tropes – it’s impressive how rapidly this musical language developed, and spread around the then less-connected world; the style first appears in 1966 and by 1967 the recipe is perfect and understood everywhere. Psych is an eclectic, syncretic genre, like nu metal or hyperpop, which it can seem to predict at times (e.g. We’re Only In It For The Money). Some of its elements include Indian raga, in the form of modal scales with regular steps, which might at times also be children’s songs (you hear this in Chemical Brothers jams from the 90’s), switches in style or alterations in dynamics, such as the insertion of a slow idyllic passage, unexpected instrumentation (harps, sitars, found objects in the studio), lyrical references to flying, being high, etc, uneven mixing (which mimics the way that one word or melodic part can jump out at you when you’re listening to music under the influence) and all the electronic effects available; there are no synths on ADIMMM2, but they’re hardly needed, sometimes everything sounds like a synth, what with the phasing, feedback, echo, feedback on the echo, wah-wah, fuzz, and, on the La De Da’s blazing ‘Find Us A Way’, a recording sound so bad that, to ears used to lo fi and glitch pop, it’s actually really, really good. ‘Find Us A Way’ and the next track, The Gremlins’ ‘Never You Mind’, are examples of freakbeat, the overdriven R&B pioneered by acts like The Who, and among the few tracks here showing a first-hand African American influence. A year before, these were mostly derivative R&B acts - psychedelia was white rock finding its own voice, and creating a style that would be influential on black music, a period of temporary independence and payback similar to the later krautrock and post-punk scenes.
Another element in psych was baroque orchestral pop songs, like the gorgeous mellotron, harp, phasing and string orchestra of the fairy tale song ‘Fantasy’ by Larry’s Rebels. Their singer Larry Morris would become NZ psych’s martyr in 1972, when he was arrested with LSD coming back from Tahiti and sentenced to six years, ultimately serving four in Paremoremo prison, where he lost the tip of one finger in a riot and was called “Stardust” by the other prisoners, after the acid-sozzled character David Essex played in Michael Apted’s 1974 classic film.

When I saw David Bowie’s 1978 concert at Western Springs, Larry Morris was his support act. That, finally, felt just.

Psych would mutate into prog, an album-oriented, intellectually pretentious, and expensive-to-record genre that would eventually help destroy the market for innovative pop singles by working class bands in New Zealand. There’s at least one track on ADIMMM2 that predicts the shape of things to come, Timberjack Donaghue’s ‘Dahli Mohammed’ (1972), wherein Jack’s spookily theatrical vocal resembles the tones of Split End’s Phil Judd, the most psych-savvy of NZ’s prog rock generation. As Timberjack, Jack Donoghue’s outfit had scandalized local TV audiences in 1971 with their (very metal) video for a cover of Black Widow’s ‘Come To The Sabbat’, which is actually less metal and more like the witch chant music that Kiki Rockwell is making here today.

Another glimpse of the future can be found in the La De Da’s ‘Tales Of The Nile’, from their rock opera The Happy Prince, which sounds exactly like a Matthew Bannister song.

Several of these songs are covers, made soon after the originals reached New Zealand; the La De Da’s even got their UK-recorded cover of ‘Come Together’ (like ‘Come To The Sabbat’, not on ADIMMM, but not far away) into the shops before The Beatles’ version, and it’s pretty good; these Kiwi artists understood the songs they recorded, sometimes better than the original artists, who might have written them in the studio or recorded them within days of writing them, and there’s no finer example of this than the cheekily named Tomorrow’s Love’s version of Love’s ‘7 and 7 Is’, which adds a joyful sense of confidence to Arthur Lee’s proto-punk classic - he was angsty about feeling this way, but Tomorrow’s Love are loving it.

As far as I can tell there’s only one woman on this collection, Anita Crocker, who, as half of the psych-folk duo The Tunespinners with husband Geoff, sings the Doc Pomus/Wes Farrell composition ‘You Were Born For Me’ (recorded by Wahanui “Wyn” Wynyard, the producer responsible for many of NZ’s “garage” recordings). For psychedelic reasons, her breathy 2-3-4 count (her accent here sounds positively Californian) has been edited in, with reverb and compression, on top of the mix, at the beginning and end, a devastatingly modern touch in a song that sounds like something that The Jefferson Airplane might have played if they hadn’t known Fred Neil.

As the pioneering class in an otherwise backwards land, it is almost always men that we’ll hear front this blatantly drug-influenced genre (there were female pop artists, of course, in 67-72, and the glorious Kiri Te Kanawa was also in the charts). Yet there was a capable female artist dropping LSD, munching mushrooms, smoking marijuana, and paying attention to the psych sounds around her, and in 1971 Jenny McLeod, Professor of Music at Wellington’s Victoria University, created a gigantic “happening” for the city of Palmerston North, and included a local rock group she’d been jamming with, The Forgiving, to back Act 4, and sing her song “Shadow People”.

Cast and crew of Under The Sun: front row L-R, Morva Croxon, Peter Tulloch (dr.), Jenny McLeod

McLeod was curious and well-read, and soon to convert to whatever the Divine Light Mission represented, and her impressive text for Under The Sun evokes the sprits of Charles Darwin, T.H. Huxley (grandfather of Aldous), and H.G. Wells as well as Marshall McLuhan and contemporary sci-fi writers, and really should be heard to be believed; in places, it sounds like the populist version of what Hawkwind, with Michael Moorcock, were attempting at the same time.

A Day In My Mind’s Mind Vol 2 ends with The Fourmyula’s ‘Nature’, the one song of the 27 that’s still played regularly on radio today, and voted “best song” in the NZ music polls, but there’s at least one composition here that sounds equally as earworthy, The Avenger’s ‘Everyone’s Gonna Wonder’, written and sung by travelling minstrel Chris Malcolm, a Kiwi-born musician whose family had moved to the USA, where he heard The Lovin’ Spoonful and was inspired to write and perform songs on the autoharp. Sometimes he composed songs on the spot based on his audience, and when the Avengers producer Nick Karavias heard ‘Everyone’s Gonna Wonder’ - as it was being written about a couple in a Wellington coffeehouse - he invited Malcolm into the studio to meet the band, teach them the song, and record it with them.

It’s a story pretty much unique in the history of rock, and the ADIMMM2 booklet is full of such stories, told by Graham Reid. They’re very (working-class) Kiwi stories, and none is more typical of the uphill battles these groups faced than the story of The Music Convention’s ‘Good Clean Fun’, which was getting good airplay and moving up the charts when the band tried to help their chances by advertising it on their van. Radio DJs noticed the van, clicked that the record wasn’t from the USA or the UK, and stopped playing the single.
I haven’t mentioned most of the songs and stories on A Day In My Mind’s Mind Volume 2, there just isn’t space or time for the wildest surf instrumental you’ll ever hear outside a King Loser album, or a version of the Byrds’ ‘Why’ that’s so freaked out that I didn’t recognize it and only learned its identity from the liner notes, but there isn’t a song here that I won’t be playing soon for a fourth time. Top marks to compiler Grant Gillanders, and to Graham Reid and the others who’ve helped make these flashbacks intense.

Algorithmic calendar - Bicycle Day Special by Mona Evie