Seconded on the Brit/American divide.

PS – Psychedelic and progressive rock… my heads going to explode. The American / British thing, it is what it is, and it’s all f***ing great to me.

Much LOVE

chris earl

I concur with his viewpoint on prog/psych. Where does psych end and prog begin? Are Can, Pink Floyd and Hawkwind psych or prog? I find the more proggy bands of the golden era, such as yes and ELP tedious these days, although I did once listen to them a lot. It seems more like musically proficient people showing off, rather than laying down great melodies and mind-expanding sounds.

For what it’s worth, here are my top ten psych sounds, and like Valis’ selections, they will change every 23 minutes!

1) Third Stone from the sun – jimi hendrix experience
2) Tomorrow never knows – Beatles
3) The Entire SF Sorrow album by Pretty Things
4) Path Through the forest – Factory
5) Eight Miles High – The Byrds
6) Rain – The Beatles
7) Mother Sky – Can
Who? – Brian Jonestown Massacre
9) Mohammad – The Dandy Warhols
10) I had too much to dream last night – Electric Prunes

Like most musical changes there is no one or easy answer. I think there is a tendency for keys to become more (pre)dominant than guitars in early prog (e.g. Eyes of Blue albums). Also, the idealistic experimental envelope pushing of Barret era Floydian psych is redrawn (a la King Crimson as is somewhere mentioned)as a measured and controlled attempt to elevate rock music to the position of classical music (Wakeman etc).

Interestingly, when prog is shoehorned into a 45rpm format and is forced to edit out the extended instrumental passages, the results are often (to my ears) a far more satisfying listening experience, in the early 70s at least. Psych of course came about in an era when the 45 was still a dominant muscial delivery medium and was as at home in that format as the LP. Anyway,thanks to Valis for a very interesting inteview an to HFoS for facilitating it.

Paul Martin, Shindig magazine.

I enjoyed reading Valis’ answers even if I was pretty much on the whole familiar with them all. Valis’ current top 10 could have been taken straight from my collection, hardly surprising given that he probably turned me on to at least 70% of the list in the first place.

Love the blog and will certainly keep tuned in from now.

Hopefully, this time around, it won’t blend into the sonic equivalent of a continuous grey blur.

Also TFTO – pompous – yes. Overblown- yes. absolutely brilliant – absolutely. You say its self indulgent. Of course its bloody is, its Yes for goodness sake not The bleedin’ Ramones

Well, I was raised on Sixties pop, rock, beat, prog, psych or whatever we now subdivide & call it…….and the ‘Floyd of ‘Piper at the Gates’ and ‘Saucerful’ WAS a different animal to what came after Barrett’s ousting…….not hard to see why when you consider that (1) any music to greater or lesser degree reflects the times it’s created in (Love, Peace & Freedom DID suffer a sort of post-coital depression after 1970 or thereabouts), & (2) when a band finds a successful formula after years of striving, there’s a huge temptation to re-create ‘within the box’ rather than risk failure through adherence to some provenly unbankable esoteric artistic vision, so to speak.

With Barrett out of sight and out of mind, the colour, creativity, risk and chaos all pretty much went with him….(not hugely different, actually, – in terms of the ushering in of a more ordered, structured, businesslike approach that lessened the likelihood of any spontaneous ‘high’ – to Wyatt’s departure from Soft Machine) …..although not immediately, it must be said. I bought the albums after ‘Saucerful’ in hope and stayed a fan up to about their fourth or fifth, before finally abandoning them.

A Wikipedia contributor cites Roger Waters as saying the failure of PF’s 3rd single – “Apples & Oranges” – the first of theirs to fail to chart in the UK – was down to poor production values not of his liking………..

This, for me, is maybe the crux of it all, because ‘Apples’ for me is just about my favourite single of all time! Huge, chaotic, wall-to-wall ‘garage-y’ guitar, trademark ‘Floyd atmospheric sounds, brilliantly ‘English’ Barrett-y vocals complete with a few weird psyched out-duck noises, the whole thing an absolute and utter gem….

…but a hit on ‘Top Of The Pops’ ? – never in an infinity of parallel universes!

Thanks for the find, and thanks for the heads up on the live double disc boxset. Might be a bit too later-era “jazzy” for my tastes, but like you say, certainly worth investigating.

* ‘New’ 1971 double CD & CD Rom now out on Reel Recordings – Soft Machine Live at the Henie Onstad Arts Centre, Oslo, Norway – may or may not be a good ‘un, but (with Hopper, Wyatt, Ratledge & Dean) certainly worth investigating….. *