Dr Simon Reads...

  The third studio album from Donovan Leitch, and a movement into a more psychedelic rock sound. Donovan was friends with The Beatles and Brian Jones, somewhere on this album there may be Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones playing, he wrote one track (Fat Angel) for Mama Cass Elliott, another for Bert Jansch (Bert’s Blues) and namechecks Dylan, Janis [Joplin] and Jefferson Airplane in Fat Angel, and it seems like he was everywhere in the British and Californian music scenes of the time. There are essentially three types of track on this album; some troubadour/chanson ballads, usually featuring wizards and queens and knights (e.g. Legend of a Girl Child Linda, and Guinevere), or they’re more upbeat, genre-defying mixes of psychedelia, folk and rock, often with quite a funky tempo. The title track is a good example of this form, as is The Trip and what is probably my favourite track from the album, Season of The Witch. The timbre of Donovan’s voice is not so good for carrying the bal...

  Seeing this coming up, I had in my head for some reason that it was Saucerful of Secrets and that Dimery was skipping the debut album, the only one to feature the ill-fated Syd Barrett. But my mistake, this is the first Pink Floyd album released, but probably not the last on the list. This early Floyd is a different animal(s) from what they will become; here the psychedelia is ramped up to full. Other albums on this list so far, especially for 1966-7, belong within the psychedelia genre, but other than a bit of backwards overdub on Sergeant Pepper, none have really come close to sounding like an acid trip. Here the Floyd take us into some very wierd soundscapes. I described the track Help I’m a Rock from the Mothers of Invention album Freak Out! as sounding like jazz if the solo instrument was animal noises; here, Pink Floyd go further with a track like Interstellar Overdrive, which starts off a bit like some Hawkwind space rock but devolves into sound effects and general strange...

A San Francisco band named after an 18 th century English dandy, this is their fourth studio album and by this time they were reduced to a trio, hence the name of the album I guess. The music is a country rock/beat pop/psychedelia crossover that has a lot of variety to the style of the songs. Some tracks, such as Triangle or the Randy Newman cover Old Kentucky Home are in much more of a country style, while It Won’t Get Better is much more laid-back and bluesy. Are You Happy Now is a bit of lively folk/pop while Only Dreaming Now slows things down and brings in a bit of gypsy accordion. More psychedelic elements (inevitably for 1967) occur in the longer tracks (most of the tracks on here are of the two-and-a-bit minutes of the classic pop sing), with The Painter of Women being a bit baroque with harpsichord, and its parade of archetypal characters is both very Dylanesque and also prefigures elements of prog. The Keeper of Time manages somehow to sound like a mix of a lushly orches...

  The Young Rascals are included, I think, as an exemplar of the “blue-eyed soul” genre; soul music played by white people, in other words. Imagine if The Monkees played covers of Dusty Springfield songs, and that’s kind of what we get here. Some tracks, such as A Girl Like You and I’m So Happy Now are upbeat, punctuated by horns, very poppy soul, sounding a little like Happy Together by The Turtles, while others are slower, like Find Somebody and How Can I be Sure?, but still souful. And, actually, what I said in the opening paragraph is reversed, as it was Springfield who did a cover of How Can I Be Sure. It also sounds like Cilla Black could have sung it, with its waltz beat and traces of French accordian. Bits and bobs of other musical influences can be found as well – Sueno uses Spanish guitar, while the title track Groovin’ uses laid-back Latin beats. If you’ve heard any tracks off this album, chances are that it’s Groovin’, which was one of the Rascals’ biggest hits. The...

  Beefheart, real name Don van Vliet, is known to me as being somewhat Zappa-like (he and Zappa work together quite a lot), but this, his debut album, starts off fairly straightforward, with the hard rock/blues Sure ‘Nuff ‘n’ Yes, I Do, then onto more psychedelia rock with Zig Zag Wanderer and Call on Me. There’s more blues in Plastic Factory and Where There’s Woman. Since the album features a young Ry Cooder it’s perhaps not surprising that there are a lot of blues. Dropout Boogie is much more like a Zappa track, a chant-like exaggerated vocal over a mix of hard grind and twinkly breaks. Like Zappa, it’s fundamentally a good tune that kind of satirises itself by going over the top – Beefheart has a slightly quavery voice like he’s putting on a silly voice, but I think this is his natural singing voice. As does I’m Glad, which is a kind of slow rock and roll/soul number. Electricity is a fun track featuring a theramin, and here Beefheart’s tight-throat vocals really work with the...

  The next batch of albums feature three artists I’ve never heard of, and one that I have heard *of* but (aside from a collaboration with Frank Zappa), I’ve never heard (Captain Beefheart). But first, Moby Grape, part of the San Francisco sound, and maybe a little like Jefferson Airplane in sound, but more towards country rock and less psychedelic. And they’re good, by gum, when they’re good. I’m picking up a bit of Wishbone Ash as well, which is unsurprising perhaps as both groups have multiple inter-weaving lead guitars. Maybe a little like another overlooked group, Fanny (yes, British readers, that was their name). The trajectory of Moby Grape is a sad one, because they could have been much bigger than they were, could easily have been a familiar name like many of the other groups arising from the Summer of Love. But they were beset with mental illness, legal and money problems, lengthy disputes with a grasping manager, but they somehow limped on into the start of the twenty...