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most psychedelic record you've heard?
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Hunter T Wolfe
Hunter T Wolfe
1700 posts

Re: most psychedelic record you've heard?
Feb 20, 2015, 10:57
Really good question. I'm going to have to think about it.

It did make me recall however how when I was at school out in the sticks in the 80s a bunch of us had just started smoking weed and went to the local record shop asking for the most psychedelic record he had. At the time we knew virtually nothing about the genre, beyond Relics and a few other things. Anyway he was pretty clued up and played us bits of all the usual suspects- I don't know, Dead, Airplane, Seeds etc- and it all just sounded like heavy blues to us. I think what we really wanted would have been some far out free jazz or something. Anyway we eventually left with Spirit's 12 Dreams of Dr Sardonicus on the strength of the title and the cover, even though it still wasn't what we were looking for. It took me years to appreciate how great that record is!

Also even though it may not be the "most" psychedelic record I've heard and is really obvious, 'Strawberry Fields Forever' still stands for me as an archetype of the form. It would almost certainly have been the first psychedelic record I ever heard, probably on Radio 2 when I was 5 years old or younger. It was just so obviously in a different universe to all the pop music and soft rock that surrounded it- it intrigued me and creeped me out at the same time. It seemed to descend into some forbidden dark underworld. The sneered vocals and the sense of ennui and rejection of society linked it to punk in my mind eventually. Psychedelia seemed to me to be like punk in that it was saying NO to a lot of what we take for granted. It wasn't until I actually took psychedelics that I realised it was also saying a big YES.
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