Will
music be forever caught in a uroboros of eternal return to the 1960s? If this
means more albums like The Church's Forget Yourself and The Sand Pebbles'
Ghost Transmissions, I hope so. The exotic vibe given off by such fine
albums, grown from the germ of psychedelia, is potent enough to blast away
all memory of that ersatz Manchester tie-dye crud of the early '90s. Admittedly,
this show had its superficial kitschy elements, from Black Cab's 'Summer of
Love' to the Pebbles' nothing chills the summer in my heart, to reverberations
of sitar and jarring flashback echo effects, but the overall feeling I got
from it reminded me of Dennis Cooper talking about some old Donovan albums,
and how their very kitschness accurately translates the tone of an LSD high:
"Beneath their lame "period" surface", Cooper writes,
"I can detect an eerie hint of enlightenment's siren". Would anyone
care for a sugar cube?
What better way to inaugurate the siren's call to new shimmering
psychotropic pastures than Black Cab's Altamont soundtrack? They included a
Jerry Garcia cover and alluded to the black gospel vocals in 'Sympathy For the
Devil' with their sinister little whoo hoos. But it was especially with the
powerful assault of their two odes to the Hells' Angels that this band did a
convincing job of conveying, or reinterpreting, the menace of psychedelia, the
glowering Charlie Manson face beneath the yellow cartoon sunbeams. Their drummer
is a bona fide, certifiable freak, and watching his fevered head jerk from side
to side against the background footage of the infamous festival, made me realize
that whatever happened back then, there was real madness right here and now.
The Sand Pebbles brought us out on the other side of the shadow
of the valley of death, with only bass player Chris Hollow's combat helmet still
hinting at the heart of darkness. Altamont turned into Woodstock, and the good
vibrations of Speed and Intensity steered the trip into more life-affirming
territory. Their songs are basically about good lovin' and good drugs, in the
best traditon of wholesome, feel-good head-rock with plenty of ba da baa's,
la la la's and do do do's thrown in and a kind of brown mescaline fuzz around
the edge of everything, one that became more prominent with 'Big Left'. Here,
the siren stirred beneath the paisley: what exactly is it that's comin' in
waves, feel it coming on/As we turn our faces to the sun? This was more
than the re-enactment of a dead genre. You know it's a great show when people
don't give way even slightly for you to get to the bar because they are just
standing, transfixed, like static obelisks, and this was what is was like during
the Pebbles' finale, which nicely summed up their themes at the same time as
showing off their musical diversity. 'Ghost Girl' is a whisper of discarnate
amorousness, laced with twinkle-twinkle mysticism, 'Black Sun Ensemble' a bass-heavy,
wigged-out tour de force with a lyric which has love and drugs feeding one another
in a cyclical whirl, and Julian Cope's 'Out of My Mind on Dope and Speed' speaks
for itself. Who needs the MC5 with this kind of quality around?
- Mark Stockdale