My inheritance

A few of the psychedelic records from the 60s to make it into my
growing record collection to date.  I only started collecting
vinyl March, 2016.

My father didn't leave me much when he departed this world - a well-worn first edition of Ernest Hemingway's  For Whom The Bell Tolls, a stack of worthless comics, and a deep love for the psychedelic music of the late 60s, and early 70s.  It's no wonder I love that music so.  Thanks to a chemical imbalance that wasn't diagnosed properly until well into
my adulthood, I hallucinate, and even though I'm on a healthy dose of anti psychotics these days, I still see things that aren't there - did you see that mockingbird fly down the hallway?  Or that dragonfly in the shower stall? No?  Well, there you have it.

On the one-year anniversary of my father's death I sat  down with my iTunes and started building a modest play list containing the best psych tunes and garage rock I could muster from my sprawling collection of 60s and early 70s rock 'n' roll, ranging from The Amboy Dukes ("Baby Please Don't Go," "Journey to the Center of the Mind") to The Zombies ("Time of the Season," "Tell Her No") and everything in between.  When it was done it contained 466 songs and said it would last 1.3 days.

Plenty of Strawberry Alarm Clock, a personal favorite, particularly the deep cuts off of the second album Wake Up... It's Tomorrow, made the grade.  Songs like "They Saw the Fat One Coming," "Curse of the Witches," "Nightmare of Percussion," "Sit with the Guru," "Pretty Song From Psych-Out," "Tomorrow," and "Sitting on a Star" were shoe-ins. Dad gave me "Incense and Peppermint," I discovered Wake Up... It's Tomorrow on my own.

Dad was good for that.  He'd dole out the hits and leave it up to me to root out the deep cuts for myself.  Sure, "Roadhouse Blues" rocks, it absolutely gets the blood pumping, but "Peace Frog" is my jam off that album.  In the case of Strawberry Alarm Clock, the title track "Incense and Peppermint" was the chart topper for that band, but a track that didn't even make the cut, a Japanese bonus track, is among my favorite songs the SAC has ever recorded - "Birdman of Alkatrash."  Yeah, I had to dig deep for that one.

When I was a pre-teen/early teen, and after dad had re-married, we lived in the country in a quiet little place pleasantly named Forest City in the  foothills of North Carolina.  In the summer time dad would put the radio on some oldies station out of South Carolina or maybe Charlotte in the evening, poor himself a big ole glass of sweet tea and go out and sit in a rocking chair on the front porch, listening to those oldies, and the occasional buzz and KA-zap of the bug zapper, while my brother Jason, our neighbor Dingo (yes, our neighbor was named after an Australian wild dog), and I rode our bikes around the yard.  We got an education in the era of garage rock and psychedelia.  "Good Vibrations," "Set Your Controls For the Heart of the Sun," "Silver Machine," "Eight Miles High," "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds," "We Gotta Get Out of This Place," "White Rabbit," "I Had To Much To Dream (Last Night)," "Are You Experienced?," "The WASP (Texas Radio and the Big Beat)," "Supernatural Fairy Tale," "Sister Morphine," we're starting to get into the deep cuts now...

I remember one particular evening we were listening to a top 100 oldies countdown and I had glommed onto to the Raspberries minor hit "I Wanna Be With You" for some reason.  IT, I declared, would be the number one oldie.  Hell, IT was from 1972 and I don't know if IT even qualified as an oldie or not.  Dad humored me, "It's possible I guess, son."  If I recall correctly, "Hey Jude" was named number one at the end of that particular countdown.

At one point during said countdown a fox came rushing out of the overgrown Civil War gravesite that was fenced off in a field just beyond our yard.  It was strange.  The fox must have been bedded down in the overgrowth of blackberry vines and brambles that was thriving in the unkempt burial site and been spooked when dad turned up the volume for Paul Revere and the Raiders' hit "Indian Reservation (The Lament of the Cherokee Reservation Indian)."  The fox ran out into the middle of the gravel road leading to our landlord's home, looked at us for a few seconds, tongue lolling out in the summer night heat, then ran off into the nearby copse of trees across the road to never be seen again.  Nothing more than a memory I have with dad and that specific song - "Indian Reservation" - now.

In dad's feeble, infirm years I often found myself taking him to the doctor.  I would reset my play lists on my iPhone the night before each appointment, ensuring I had plenty of good old fashioned psych and garage rock loaded so we'd have something good we both could enjoy listening to while on the road.  (I'm a metal head by nature, and he is decidedly not.  But I have plenty of fond memories of growing up psych.)  It was on one of those outings that the tune "Time of the Season" by the Zombies came on.  A smile crept across dad's face.  "That was your mom and I's song," he said, as the song drew to an end.  "I enjoyed that.  Let's have that one again."  I'm so glad he shared that with me.  I love being able to listen to that song now and know there was a time, of the season if you will, that it gave my mom and dad some pleasure and comfort in their lives, even if my mom says she doesn't remember.

Dad didn't get into the more esoteric of the psychedelic bands such as Pink Floyd, the Pink Fairies, or Hawkwind so it was left to me to discover those groups on my own.  As one would expect, the first of those bands I came across was Pink Floyd.  I first encountered Pink Floyd's The Wall while in grade school still.  Granted, this was later day psychedelic, created in 1979, but most definitely a psych experience.  It was during a marijuana trip and I thought we were under attack by giant hammers. Yeah, I guess you could say it was a bad trip.   Dingo didn't help matters.  He pissed himself and sat in the corner with his hands around his knees gently rocking back and forth and crying about how he was going to get his ass beat for doing his dad's pot.  Like I gave a rat's ass, I was too busy dealing with Hitler's hammer's.  German's invading our sovereign nation took precedence over Dingo's hide.

Floyd and The Wall led me to Hawkwind which led me to the German band Amon Duul II, which led me to mind-expanding group Brainticket.

As I write this I dip back into that stream of consciousness that is the psychedelic iTunes play list I made with dad in mind. What does it have for me... "Kicks," "Tomorrow Never Knows," "19th Nervous Breakdown," "Hurry On Sundown," "We Could Be So Good Together," "Dogs," "Can't You Hear Me Knocking," "The House of the Rising Sun," "Pass Time With the SAC," "California Dreamin'," "1983... (A Merman I Should Turn to Be)"...

I miss my dad.  Where was I?

Dad, in the eternal Stones vs. Beatles argument, he was a Beatles man.  In high school he was in a band.  They played a lot of the Beatles' early stuff, "I Want to Hold Your Hand," "Love Me Do," "Ticket To Ride," stuff like that.  I would have loved for there to have been pictures to have survived, but to date nothing has turned up.  And recordings, but that's a pipe dream.  We are talking about the 60s here.  Personal recording devices were uncommon, hell down right rare back then.

Let's dip back into the stream one more time before I go... "Southern Cross," "L.S.D." "Tales of Brave Ulysses," "Horse Latitudes," "Burning of the Midnight Lamp," "Earschplittenloudenboomer," "Interstellar Overdrive," "Hey Jude," "Sympathy For the Devil,"  "My Sweet Lord" "Time"...

That's a good one to go out on...

"Every year is getting shorter never seems to find the time
Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines
Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way
The time is gone, the song is over
Thought I'd something more to say."