I've developed a kind of flinch whenever I encounter the word 'garage'. This is the result of dredging through thousands of tracks of mid-sixties psychedelia, in connection with which the g-word is a fairly reliable indicator that listening to the musical artefact in question is going to be a miserable experience.
I'm not referring to the quality of the music for the most part. Ninety per cent of it is excrement, but this is entirely predictable given that during the period in question if you had long hair and love beads and were not too tripped out to tell one end of a guitar from the other, record company representatives would be queueing up to sign you, your neighbours, your mad grandmother and your dog, with a chauffeured limousine parked on the street waiting to whisk you to the recording studio. What results is simply proof that enthusiasm is no substitute for ability.
No, the chief cause of pain is not the quality of the music but the quality of the recorded sound. I mean one is prepared to forgive the technical shortcomings of a recording of some blues guy playing a cardboard guitar held together by string and captured on a wax cylinder on his back porch in the middle of a torrential downpour, but these kids were using decent instruments and state of the art recording equipment and it still sounds as though they're playing inside an oil barrel from which no-one has bothered to remove the oil. I'm at a loss to explain it, although I suspect large-scale dope consumption by all concerned plays a part.
Another thing: how do the Velvet Underground make it on to psych compilations? Or Nico? In fact, how does Nico make it on to anything? She looked great for sure, but what she does is to singing what falling out of a window is to flying. It's horrible.
I think I'd better stop before I succumb to the urge to stick a knife into Captain Beefheart – next time, maybe.
So, after all of this research I have concluded that most – but blessedly not all – of what was unknown to me deserved to remain unknown. The great 'lost' psychedelic album is (with appreciative nods towards the C.A. Quintet and Mad River) still the Pretty Things' 'S.F. Sorrow', and the most lovable one is 'H.P. Lovecraft II'.
