Monocled Alchemist

Psychedelic Trippers from late 1960s and early 70s America

Love, Peace & Poetry | American Psychedelic Music | Record collecting, in one form or another, has probably been going on since the first fellow lost sleep over a missing Edison cylinder in his collection. If you wanted to trace a history of rare record collecting (the quest for the “holy grail” the intoxicating aura of authenticity surrounding the “Impossible object”) it would likely lead you from the earliest Blues 78s, past seriously rare Rockabilly and C&W sides, down a hallway lined with ethereal and beautiful doo-wop 45s, into a library of gloriously snotty psychedelic garage-punk singles, and into a room full of psychedelic oddities so large you can’t tell where it ends.

Sometime in the late-70s, maybe just into the early 1980s, a collector’s community began to take shape around the loosely-defined category of private-press LPs. From the mid-60s on, the impact of records like “Surrealistic Pillow” (Jefferson Airplane), “Disraeli Gears” (Cream), “Axis: Bold As Love” (Jim’ Hendrix), “Revolver” (Beatles), “Freak Out” (Frank Zappa), “Blonde On Blonde” (Bob Dylan), and others upon art and culture is immeasurable.

Love, Peace & Poetry | American Psychedelic Music

One pretty direct effect was that tens of thousands of us (maybe more) took to our basements and garages with drums and guitars, cheap mics run through tiny PA systems, and made our own music.

Influenced by the incredible records that filled the bins at the local stores, many scraped together money from day jobs, borrowed some from families and friends and went into local semi-pro recording studios (or set up borrowed reel-to-reel recorders in makeshift basement studios). Just like a very stoned John Lennon playing the tape of “Rain” backwards, they made mistakes and incorporated their accidents into the music in their own giddy stoned reverie.

Some went so far as to order the minimum number of copies (sometimes 100 or less) from the nearest pressing plant, stuff them into homemade covers, sell them at local head shops and give them away to friends & strangers.

Private Press

Twenty or thirty years later. the bulk of what has emerged as the U.S. private-press collector scene is comprised of records that never had the polish and production values necessary for the wider commercial appeal of major label LPs. It isn’t polish and professionalism that will amaze you as you listen to the recordings on this compilation; it’s the wonderous sounds of LOVE, PEACE & POETRY —the sounds of a time and an innocence that won’t come our way again.

The best of these records were made by people who believed that music was capable of saying BIG things—capable of expressing BIG answers to BIG questions. Listen for the sound of the struggle for articulation as these musicians, often very young and semi-professional tried with all their might to connect the notes in ways that could shed light on, well . . . the meaning of life, the universe . . . everything.

Love, Peace & Poetry | American Psychedelic Music

From the smooth “my hair is perfect” California crooning of DARIUS to the rural Pacific Northwest vibe of the THE NEW TWEEDY BROS to the psychedelic gypsy strains of DAMON, you’re listening to a collection of some of the rarest records on earth (there are less than 10 known copies of over half the records on this compilation)

The origin and history of each LP on this collection is shrouded in various myth and legends, cloaked in layers of hype that must be peeled away like the layers of an onion to get to the truth which, as the saying goes, is very often stranger than fiction. There are some records, like JUNGLE, TRIZO 50, SIDETRACK, of which virtually nothing is known.

Others have stories that accompany them that provide a context that adds to the listening pleasure. My favourite is the story of Johnny Arcessi of ARCESIA, a big band singer in the 1940s who, when he was in his 50s in the 60s, went to L.A., took LSD and decided to make a DOORS album!

New finds

The ZERFAS brothers were the grandsons of a famous (and early) psychedelic chemist for whom a building on the campus of a midwestern university is named. THE BRAIN POLICE played on the same bill with many famous 60s psychedelic bands but their only LP never got beyond the demo album stage and wasn’t discovered until 1994.

LAZY SMOKE hailed from the Boston area and give us a sense of what THE BEATLES might have sounded like circa . . . “Magical Mystery Tour” if they’d never risen above a local obscurity.

With the cost of an original copy of any of the LP’s featured herein well beyond the ability of all but a handful of wealthy collectors to afford, the rest of us are fortunate that a growing number of small labels have emerged devoted to the reissue of these lost recordings on LP and CD.

This series of compilation LPs and CDs is designed to introduce a new audience of fans & collectors to the “lost chapters” of rock history. Uncovering, researching, collecting and listening to these records have given many of us great pleasure. In the words of the prophets, “We’d love to turn you on.” (Stan Denski, 1997)