The five best forgotten albums from 1967
Certain years in the last 70-odd years of popular music stand out in our collective cultural tapestry with a particular essentiality, albeit somewhat shaped by heritage industries and commercial nostalgia button-pushing.
Nonetheless, it’s hard for 1977 not to land in the mind with the impact of Jamie Reid’s famous Never Mind the Bollocks… cut-out collage font, immediately invoking the death of Elvis Presley and the height of punk’s insurrectionary bulldoze. Likewise, 1995 transports to a certain swaggering pop hedonism that scored the UK’s Britpop heyday, a year that flashes across the national affections when the last vestiges of the social contract ensured many a working-class band were able to sail to the top of the charts and dictate the zeitgeist.
Right up there with grunge’s 1991 or 1954’s rock and roll explosion is 1967’s much-lauded summer of love. Serving as the decade’s countercultural bloom, the hippy idyll that emanated across the world from San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighbourhood reached its fabled peak amid a seismically shifting political, sexual, and artistic terrain from the distant universe that was Western society less than a decade before.
Across both sides of the Atlantic, material conditions were such that one could ‘drop out’ and avoid the straight-laced life, LSD was still legally available for the most part, and the revolutionary ambitions of tearing apart the respective imperial machines were still fervently felt. The story of the 1960s would darken by the end, but for many of its bohemian veterans, ‘67 was the last time peace and love were unwaveringly pointed toward the shared utopia.
1967 is dominated by enduring records that soundtracked the era with fierce vitality. A point in the decade when the musical underground enjoyed a cosy proximity to the charts, The Beatles, Pink Floyd, The Doors, Jefferson Airplane, Cream, and Jimi Hendrix all dropped definitive records or thrilling debuts in those tumultuous twelve months. Outside of psychedelic rock, James Brown, Aretha Franklin and Stevie Wonder all pushed soul and funk to the album era, and New York’s The Velvet Underground & Nico offered an acidic counter with their avant-garde tales of urban decay and seamy character studies, paving the way for the ensuing garage rock and punk attacks to come.
However, 1967’s storied musical chapter is littered with buried gems and fringe artists who discreetly stand as an essential feature of the day’s cultural ecosystem. Enjoying less of a spotlight than the decade’s enduring icons but no less transportive, radical, and time capsules of a generation striving for new creative frontiers, we take a look at five records in no order from that heady year that may have slipped past your attention.
The five best forgotten albums from 1967:
The 13th Floor Elevators – ‘Easter Everywhere’
It’s quite the claim to have invented the term ‘psychedelic’, but the earliest instances of the label have been credited to Texan garage trippers The 13th Floor Elevators, who eagerly handed out business cards proudly flashing their acid-blues stylings. While mainstays of the Austin scene, Roky Erickson’s lysergic rock attack and Tommy Hall’s hypnotic electric-jug vibrations found a natural home in the country’s bubbling West Coast, Hall’s sleeve notes on the previous year’s LP debut explicitly extolling the spiritual benefits of LSD endearing themselves to the counterculture’s budding psychonaughts and all-round freaky types.
Released October 25th, Easter Everywhere furthers the trance-like proto-punk forged on The Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators but wanders pensively into more ruminative planes, slightly dialling down the Nuggets blast with detours into warped country and rustic, homespun, acoustic washes. The album’s big beast is its ‘Slip Inside This House’ opener, an eight-minute psych-seizure packed with radiating guitar licks and neural-frying jug ripples that still stands as the band’s most tripped-out and brilliant moment.
The Godz – ‘Godz 2’
While Lou Reed and his decadent provocateurs were scoring New York’s Manhattan milieu, The Godz were channelling some of the West Coast’s lysergic spirit but dwelling in the city’s grittier, cavernous dwelling. More freak than hippy, The Godz presaged post-punk by some ten years with a gleeful and steadfast assault of inside-out garage and compositional endurance tests smattered with confrontational anti-pop but always with a wry smirk on its face.
The Godz’s sophomore effort Godz 2 persists with their atonal japery, indeed, breaks of laughter seize the band on ‘New Song’s droning irk. Guitarist Jim McCarthy, bassist Larry Kessler, pianist Jay Dillon, and drummer Paul Thornton all deliver another shadowed bristle of psychedelic noise and healthy amateurism across warped beat numbers and atonal rock strut. Charged with iconoclastic energy, Godz 2’s most memorable moment is their deconstruction of The Beatles’ ‘You Won’t See Me’, a ghostly and stilted rendition which lapses into a weird studio cessation, the members’ recorded chatter and creative refocus captured in its bizarre break.
The Incredible String Band – ‘The 5000 Spirits or The Layers of the Onion’
Burnished in the UK folk revivalism of the early 1960s in Edinburgh, Robin Williamson and Clive Palmer expanded their acoustic duo outfit with an added rhythm guitar from Mike Heron and founded the influential The Incredible String Band in 1966. Following Palmer’s disbandment and a brief dissolution of the band, a reignited expansion introducing the elusive Licorice McKechnie on backing vocals and an array of exotic instruments from North Africa found the ensemble in good company among the era’s fascination with cultural sounds from outside the Western tradition, music professor Nazir Jairazbhoy’s use of the sitar thrusting The Incredible String Band to the counterculture’s upper echelons.
Dropped in July and boasting a trippy cover from Dutch art-collective The Fool, The 5000 Spirits or the Layers of the Onion saw The Incredible String Band pull their folk foundations toward a headier realm of colourful arcane, mining the British Isles’ rich folk heritage with a dash of the underground’s chemical flourish. While fans would laud their third and fourth LPs as the band’s creative peak, The 5000 Spirits or the Layers of the Onion stands as a pivotal entry in The Incredible String Band’s artistic journey, the sound of a band embracing the knocked-down peripheries the 1960s had brought to the music world and beyond.
Vanilla Fudge – ‘Vanilla Fudge’
Before Deep Purple’s heavy-organ riff attack, the seeds of metal were sown in the likes of The Doors or Iron Butterfly’s hefty-Hammond take on psychedelia, casting their chromatic wanderings with a dense keyboard fug that anchored the far-out happenings in a tougher and more intense aural swirl. Vanilla Fudge was no exception. Hailing from Long Island, the founding line-up centred on singer and organist Mark Stein, bassist Tim Bogert, guitarist Vince Martell, and drummer Carmine Appice would conjure a moodier slice of the hippy sound, plus lay the foundations for the future Beck, Bogert & Appice support-trio a few years later with the former Yardbirds guitarist.
Subsuming everything from The Beatles, Cher, The Impressions, and The Supremes, Vanilla Fudge’s eponymous debut borrows the hits of the day but feeds their pop and Motown covers through their heavy, cloudy maw and churns out thoroughly hard-rocking and dense organ swirl interpretations packed with proto-metal attitude. One of rock’s more interesting cover records and a gripping love letter to the stars who’d inspired them, Vanilla Fudge sounds ahead of its years even amid 1967’s pioneering musical petri-dish.
The Electric Prunes – ‘The Electric Prunes’
Shaped by Los Angeles’ first garage rock wave that found itself wavering toward psych in 1965, The Electric Prunes daubed their surf-inspired beat numbers with a novel coating of effects pedals and fuzzed-out buzz that spiked their psychedelic fancies with a sonic snarl. Teaming up with the Nancie Mantz and Annette Tucker songwriting team, The Electric Prunes’ inventive marriage of technology and compositional reach yielded one of the Billboard Hot 100’s strangest entries with ‘I Had Too Much to Dream (Last Night)’, a snapping and slithering din scoring confused dreams that presented psych at its most fraught and precarious.
Dropping their eponymous debut a few months later, The Electric Prunes rustled a strangely haunted take on the 1960s’ pop trends with their sonic twist, saturating baroque love songs, garage strutters, and old Hollywood film scores in spectral whooshes of sci-fi haunt. While eclipsed by some of the era’s biggest names’ radicalism, The Electric Prunes still shines with bluster and experimental naivety.
