Everybody hates a mystery. Did Lee Harvey Oswald kill Kennedy? What became of Amelia Earhart? Did D.B. Cooper survive his immortal parachute jump, and who was he, anyway? And so it goes with the 1966 LP LSD Underground 12, recorded by an anonymous band of musicians and so mythical and hard to find that people questioned whether it even existed in the first place.
Well, it does exist, even if the writer Byron Coley wrote for Forced Exposure, “Virtually nothing is known about who, why, or how the album was created.” Well, the why is easily answered. Right on the very cool black-and-white cover, it says, “Music composed and played by LSD-influenced musicians the only record of this type available!”
Well, that “the only record of this type available!” is debatable—several LPs featuring people on LSD were released before this one, but they were mostly acid jibber-jabber with some music thrown in. Think Ken Kesey’s March 1966 LP The Acid Test or Alan Watts’ 1962 LP This Is It. And there’s strong evidence to support the notion that John Coltrane’s classic quartet (with the addition of Pharoah Sanders and two other sidemen) recorded the 1965 LP Om on LSD, although it’s never been fully corroborated.
Like Om, LSD Underground 12 is music and all music, and just as freaky-deaky as you’d expect. Not as free form as you’d expect—the musicians don’t just make random noises and go off on weird individualistic head-trip tangents. Or play like their faces are melting and their instruments along with them.
What amazed me about LSD Underground 12 is that nobody I read could tell me WHO played on the album. In short, who WERE LSD Underground 12? You won’t find their names on the album, but that 12 is a possible clue. Were a dozen musicians involved? I couldn’t find out. I couldn’t discover the names of ANY of the musicians involved. But we live in a world where you can find an answer to most questions, even if 90 percent of what I read about the album made this mystery sound insoluble.
And so I dug. And I dug. Somebody made the goddamn album, and it wasn’t like it was released in the 16th Century. And when I finally discovered who was primarily responsible for the album, it was a shocker. The mystery man was none other than Leon Russell. Aided and abetted (so far as I can tell) by Memphis blues rock musician Don Nix and Russell’s fellow Shindig house band musician, bassist Joey Cooper.
Side Note: Shindig (an American musical variety series which aired on ABC from September to January 1966 and featured the likes of The Beatles, The Who, and The Rolling Stones) had one hell of a house band. Leon Russell played piano. James Burton and Delaney Bramlett played guitars.
But who, if anyone, besides Russell, Nix, and Cooper, participated in the making of LSD Underground 12? The references I’ve seen say only “Leon Russell and friends.” I’m betting Leon Russell had a lot of friends, although it’s becoming increasingly doubtful we’ll ever know which and how many of them played on LSD Underground 12.
The album’s only promotion came in the back pages of a couple of underground free papers, most prominently the Los Angeles Free Press and (perhaps first of all) the Michigan State University underground newspaper. All you had to do was send five bucks (and a coupon) to 12457 Studio City, Ventura Blvd, Suite C, California—Russell’s place of business and/or home address, if the source I discovered is accurate. So far as I can tell, the album didn’t even have a label. Lysergia gets mentioned a lot, but they’re the Swedish label that re-released the album in 2014.
I love how on the front cover you read, “These long-playing stereo record albums will NOT be sold through record stores, supermarkets or department stores, for obvious reasons.” This makes me suspect LSD had become illegal, although it wasn’t when the album was recorded. The recording date I see mentioned is the summer of 1966. The law making LSD illegal in California (the first state to pass such a law) went into effect on October 6, 1966. That “obvious reasons” makes me think it was released post-October 6, 1966.
You will not find LSD Underground 12 listed on Russell’s discography. You won’t find it listed on anyone’s discography. Add the fact that Patrick Lundborg, who dedicated himself to researching and writing about psychedelic music, couldn’t even get his hands on a copy, and came to believe it was a myth until he finally found one. He must have felt like he’d discovered the Holy Grail.
LSD Underground 12 is free of almost all of the “psychedelic” trappings we’ve come to associate with music designed to either approximate or be listened to during a psychedelic voyage. It’s not “groovy” or “trippy,” and you won’t hear any sitars or songs about journeys to the center of your navel. This isn’t your grandad’s third-eye opener.
What it sounds like to me is avant-garde music, MANIC avant-garde music. Most of it’s a linear, rapid-fire drone, and many of the instruments are almost unrecognizable because whoever engineered the album liked to speed the tape up so that guitars sound not like guitars but synthesizers (for lack of a closer approximation) and the percussion sounds like chipmunks are playing it on speed.
Only at the beginning of side two—where Russell (I think) plays some classico-jazz piano to the accompaniment of a very reverb-heavy guitar—sounds like a song, and it’s very cool. Piano, followed by guitar, with some percussion thrown in—it’s nice, but gets stranger and stranger as it goes along. The several seconds of piano Russell (I think) plays at one point definitely sounds out to lunch, and it’s followed by Morse code blasts of guitar and some very free-form drumming.
Then they go into what sounds to me like a lysergic take on the Albanian National Anthem, not that I’ve ever heard the Albanian National Anthem. Randy Newman once set about writing the Albanian National Anthem, but it ended up being “Wedding in Cherokee County.” How he got from A to B is beyond me.
Then the drummers really cut loose, and this is truly some experimental shit. But it has propulsion. It’s not plink… pause… bonk… lost-in-space gazing-into-the-navel-of-God music. With each musician playing what he hears in his head, with no regard for what the others are doing. They’re listening to one another and keeping their shit largely together, and what it sounds like to me is avant-garde drone music from another galaxy. This is the sound of the cosmos in interstellar overdrive, and the cosmos must really dig percussion.
And so it goes for side one as well, without the welcome piano/guitar passage. You get lots more outer space music, most of it produced by a guitar that doesn’t sound like a guitar, what sounds like a bassoon but almost certainly isn’t (could be a sped-up bass, and I mean very sped up), and lots of alien bird sounds.
The album’s totally instrumental except for early on side one, when someone goes “Whoa!” Then somebody else says, “What was that?” and the first person replies, “I don’t know!” What they’re talking about, I don’t know. I don’t HEAR anything. Maybe they were hallucinating Phyllis Diller riding a bat. There’s another cry later on, just before what sounds like demented Scottish music. It doesn’t last very long. Maybe Scotland and LSD don’t mix. And then you get some cartoon squirrel jabber, which is as close as the album comes to sounding like what you’d EXPECT an album recorded on acid to sound like.
But first, you get some almost Middle Eastern stuff, but more linear—this isn’t your standard Middle Eastern psychedelia, all mind-expanding twists and turns. And everything definitely sounds sped up—nobody can play a bass (if a bass is what I’m hearing) that fast. Then you get more birds from Venus, everything gets scrabbled for a moment, then things get as slow as they ever get, as sparse as they ever get, no drums, no percussion—just weirdness from the fifteenth stone from the sun.
Byron Coley wrote, “Teasing apart the layers of action isn’t very easy, but it’s fun trying to figure out what’s going on, at what speed, and whether it’s meant to sound like this is all some massive joke.” I doubt it was a joke, but it was definitely a goof—the musicians were experimenting for experimentation’s sake, and selling the album had to be the furthest thing from their minds.
You can listen to psychedelic music until magic mushrooms come out of your ears, and you’ll never hear anything like LSD Underground 12, or at least I never have. Pink Floyd, the Grateful Dead, at their most free-form and experimental music coming out of New York City or London are the closest approximations, and they’re not even close. Coley writes, “… the music will not sound particularly revolutionary to anyone who’s spent time with the recordings of ensembles like Red Crayola, Intersystems, The Deep, Cromagnon, Gravity Adjusters Expansion Band, Citizens For Interplanetary Activity, and so on.”
Maybe not. But it sounds both like it was recorded on acid and wasn’t recorded on acid—the musicians maintain control throughout, and the music never dissolves into “every-man-on-his-separate-trip” chaos, but the album’s also twisted somehow. I find it odd that none of the musicians fell back on the kinds of music they traditionally played—given Russell’s body of work, he’s one of the last people you’d expect to be on this album, and the same goes for Nix, who is best known for his blues-rock standard “Going Down.”
It’s a truism that great art isn’t made on acid, and to the extent that this isn’t great music, the truism is true. But it’s fascinating music, and far more listenable than you’d expect. This album wouldn’t surprise me had it been recorded by, say, John Cale. As I’ve said before, it’s avant-garde stuff, and (very) rough approximates what was going on in the musical avant-garde at that time.
So turn on, tune in, and drop jaw. You’re in for a magic carpet ride, and you’d better hope the magic carpet is equipped with airbags.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A-
