dubkitty wrote:old-school San Francisco psychedelic bands: 1. Grateful Dead 2. Jefferson Airplane 3. Quicksilver Messenger Service 4. Santana--ignore the commercial crap from the last 20 years: Abraxas, III, and Caravanserai will blow your head off if you listen to them with open ears 5. Big Brother and the Holding Company--universally slated in 1967-68 for being out-of-tune, unprofessional, and generally not the tight soul-blues package the business wanted for Janis Joplin, they were actually a charmingly loopy ensemble with an astoundingly wild lead guitarist in James Gurley, possibly the craziest pure-sonics guy in the original scene. check his insane breaks on "Combination of the Two" and "Ball and Chain."
Wot, no Country Joe and the Fish?
that's a fair point. the truly sniffy taxonomist would say "CJ&TF were from Berkeley" but if we're going to be that fussy Quicksilver were from San Jose. CJ&TF made more official albums than Big Brother (i'm counting the Big Brother album on Mainstream they did before Cheap Thrills so BB made two albums with Janis), but Electric Music For The Mind And Body was really the only decent album CJ&TF did. to me, they were more a meme generator than a band; they generated some excellent political memes for the time, full credit there, but for me their music doesn't hold up as well as the other bands. the Fish fall into that grey area between serious psychedelic jamming and 1965 garage noodling for me. not that there's anything wrong with that, but San Francisco psychedelia was--or more accurately became: if you listen to the first GD record there's a fair bit of faux Stones/Them going on, and the first Quicksilver ladles on the syrupy harmony pop e.g. "It Won't Be Long")--the next stage beyond that. and there's a certain sense of abandon central to the SF psychedelic ethos that i don't get from the Fish. they never seem to let entirely go of their form, which is i guess to say that they lack the free jazz influence that the other SF bands share.
Last edited by dubkitty on Mon Jun 11, 2012 6:20 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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FIFTY YEARS OF SCARING THE CHILDREN 1970-2020--and i'm not done yet
Relatively short lived British prog/psychedelic bands
1. Dreams 2. Caravan 3. Spirit 4. Janus 5. Ekseption 6. Beggar's Opera 7. Suck 8. The Gods
"Throw-back" Bands
1. Purple Overdose - Greek psychedelic band from the 80's going back to the 60's/70's 2. The Cult - 80's rock band going back to the 70's, influenced heavily by the Doors in terms of vocal style, phrasing, and tonality (I'm sure there are more)
Bands that have black in their name (a theme, not a genre) 1 The Black Angels 2 Black Mountain 3 Black Sabbath 4 The Black Keys 5 Black Moth Super Rainbow
Observation: you couldn't see a thing. Conclusion: dinosaurs. -Carl Sagan
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