Journeying to the center of psychedelic rock, with author Jim DeRogatis

The genre of psychedelic rock began in 1966 with the release of Pet Sounds by the Beach Boys and then Revolver by the Beatles, writes rock critic Jim DeRogatis in 1996’s Kaleidoscope Eyes: Psychedelic Rock from the '60s to the '90s. That said, it took a lot of cultural touchstones outside the world of music to get to that point.

Here are some of the more interesting moments from the early part of the book:

Albert Hoffman discovered LSD in 1943 in his lab in Switzerland. He took a bike ride home, which resulted in a really bad trip before he was calmed down by his physician and began to see unprecedented colors and shapes. In 1953, Aldous Huxley took LSD and wrote The Doors of Perception. Soon stars began to take the drug, including Jack Nicholson and Cary Grant. By 1957, New York City’s underground scene, including Ken Kesey and Timothy Leary, had gotten ahold of LSD and further documenting of the drug's effects happened with Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo‘s Nest and Tom Wolfe‘s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. 

Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys claims to have only taken acid three times, but it coincided with a really bad time in his life, when bandmate and cousin Mike Love was allegedly having an affair with his wife. The acid combined with that trauma scared the living daylights out of him and caused him to go into hiding. The Beatles started taking acid especially around the time of what DeRogatis calls their psychedelic masterpiece, 1966’s Revolver. The Rolling Stones' absorption into the drug was relatively short lived, mainly observable on Between the Buttons and Their Satanic Majesty’s Request. But they went back pretty quickly into a bluesy rock feel that fit more closely with the rest of their catalog.

Legendary writer Lester Bangs notes that great musicianship could often be, counterintuitively, a hindrance to creating great rock n’ roll. In the 1960s, as kids started clearing out their garages to jam with friends, many hadn’t taken LSD, but they started buying the first guitar pedal, a Gibson fuzztone, and playing with other sounds. Many of the best of these bands were far from great musicians and were captured on the Nuggets compilations.

One hilarious story DeRogatis relates from the 1960s is how “Journey to the Center of the Mind” by the Amboy Dukes was one of the one-hit wonder (more or less) megahits. But future gun-toting conservative poster boy Ted Nugent, a member of the band, had no idea it was a reference to drugs and also didn’t know that a huge collection of pipes on their album art had anything to do with drugs. I guess once-illusional, always disillusioned.

Although California bands like the Grateful Dead and The Jefferson Airplane are the kinds perhaps most associated with the term psychedelic rock - and there's a section in the book about them and the other folk rockers transitioning to psychedelic rock - Lou Reed once called them “the most untalented bores that ever came up." Reed's motley Velvet Underground could certainly be placed - at least partly - in the same genre, with their playing throughout the late 60s in Andy Warhol’s trippy ballroom concert evenings.

Also, while those early psych bands were male dominated, DeRogatis argues that psychedelic rockers were much more in touch with their sexuality and femininity, with bands like the Feelies and My Bloody Valentine including female members not because they wanted token woman rockers but because they wanted rockers and that these women could rock. 

Many psych rockers would later go on to become entrepreneurs, farmers, hippies, and environmentalists because they could never go back to a 9-to-5 lifestyle. 

I've also written about one of DeRogatis's other books, Milk It: Collected Musings on the Alternative Music Explosion of the '90s, and he is a co-host of Sound Opinions, my favorite music podcast. Even though I often disagree with his opinions, Kaleidoscope Eyes, like everything he is involved with, helps make a solid case that he is one of the finest living rock critics.

Courtney Love dishes the gossip on 90s indie rock, plus my favorite Hole songs

Courtney Love and daughter Francis Bean

Writer Jim DeRogatis doesn’t disappoint with his Courtney Love essay in his excellent book Milk It. He of course comes right out of the gates saying Love would never top her band Hole’s album Live Through This, which, in my mind, is nowhere near as accomplished as the band’s next album Celebrity Skin.

I do agree with DeRogatis that Love sounds a lot like Joan Jett. The music is a “skillful synthesis” of the formula laid out by Louie, Louie: quiet, loud, quiet, loud, big ending. 

Hole’s first big American show after her husband Kurt Cobain and her bassist Kristen Plaff both died was in Chicago, “sandwiched between forgettable openers Marilyn Manson and over-hyped headliners Nine Inch Nails.” Love destroyed her guitar and amp and jumped into the crowd. The show was deemed a cathartic success and kicked off a shining time for Love and her band’s popularity.

Interesting gossip nuggets from the article include:

• She hated Vanity Fair for writing that she did heroin while pregnant (she clarifies it was only in the first trimester). 
• Love said Billy Corgan helped her through tough times and adds that he told her his Mellon Collie album was Gen X’s The Wall. She also claims the Pumpkins’ Siamese Dream LP is all about her.
• She said Trent Reznor was a homophone and, like his friend MTV’s Kennedy, a Republican. 
• She lived in Elvis Costello and his wife’s house for a while when she was 18. 
• She said Kurt hated Eddie Vedder. 
• She said Kurt admitted to having a crush on Kim Deal, and also possibly Juliana Hatfield. 
• She likes to project as crazy in interviews because, she says, in business, you do that and people write you a check. 
• She says she heard Tom Petty used to stab a knife into the table when he wanted to make a point with people.
• She claims there was once a poll “in some women’s magazine” that said she was second most likely to go into politics behind Tom Hanks. (That didn’t pan out very accurately.)

And finally, although obviously not part of DiRogatis' essay, my top 6 favorite Hole songs are:

6. Awful (Celebrity Skin, 1999)
5. Violet (Live Through This, 1994)
4. Doll Parts (Live Throught This, 1994)
3. Celebrity Skin (Celebrity Skin, 1999)
2. Miss World (Live Through This, 1994)
1. Malibu (Celebrity Skin, 1999)

Revisiting what it was like when Nirvana broke big

I’ve been revisiting Milk It by Jim DeRogatis, an opinionated, controversial journalist and the co-host of the very best rock podcast, Sound Opinions. It’s a compilation of his writing from the 1990s and is one of the definitive documents of the height of “alternative.” I’ll have more summaries over the book in due time, but here are the most interesting nuggets about Nirvana, which takes up a sizable portion of the start of Milk It.

• DeRogatis opines that Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl's releases with Foo Fighters - except for the band's debut - are trash. But 1997's The Colour and the Shape and 1999's There Is Nothing Left to Lose are hand's-down power-pop classics. (At first I wasn’t crazy about the FFs’ first release but it has aged very well into one of my favorites.)
• 1991's Nevermind was the first punk record to hit Number 1 and now stands as the 29th best selling album of all time.
• Cobain liked how Steve Albini used lots of mics around the studio to try to capture the sound of the band being right next to the listener on In Utero. But the one thing he regrets about the recording was not double tracking more of his vocals like Butch Vig had done with him on Nevermind. I agree that would have made In Utero even better.
• In Utero opener “Serve the Servants” has a guitar solo that sounds like Robert Quine but Cobain claimed to not know who that was. In actuality, his knowledge of punk was scattered because of his hard-earned music knowledge growing up in the sticks of Aberdeen, Washington.
• If you’re looking for the ultimate book about Cobain, DeRogatis recommends Charles Cross’s Heavier Than Heaven.
• Of all the riches Nevermind brought the band, Bassist Krist Novoselic was perhaps proudest of his two vinyl jukeboxes.
• Of course DeRogatis always has to be controversial in his tastes, with disses against Paul Westerberg and Pavement (two of my very favorites) included in the Nirvana section of his book.
• On Foo Fighters’ debut, Grohl played everything except for one guitar part on “X-Static” by Greg Dulli of Afghan Whigs.