By Maribeth Keane, Collectors Weekly Staff (Copyright 2008)

In this interview David MacFadden-Elliot talks about collecting vintage psych records (folk, acid, garage, etc.) from the 1960s and 1970s. David is Assistant Editor of Crawdaddy! The Magazine of Rock, based in San Francisco.

How did I get into the psych genre and psych LP records? I’m a big American roots music type of person, so I personally like to listen to psych as an interpretation of the Blues and see what else people can do with it. So you take your 12 bars, 3 chords and you just run wild with it, that’s what’s fun about the psych movement. The other thing would be innovative production techniques, tape loops, playing tapes and solos backwards, slowing and quickening the sounds, cutting two tapes together. In a lot of ways you can even say those production techniques lead to Hip Hop. Psych is just a cornerstone that way.

Psych is both a small, garage band phenomenon and it also includes big names. There were garage bands with a completely different sound that did private pressings and then there are bands like The Beatles and The Beach Boys who both played a pretty big role in psych. I think it all starts with these bands like The Yardbirds taking an interest with R&B and Blues music and basically just dropping acid and combining those two.

My favorite band would be Os Mutantes from Brazil. From New York, there’s The Blues Project, and they sort of go in and out of psych, but they aren’t straight psych. A lot of people call them the East Coast Grateful Dead and they definitely injected their blues with psychedelic sediments. And the third favorite is a more recent neo-psych band, which is Brian Jonestown Massacre.

Collectors Weekly: What are some of the different sub-genres of psych records?

I think people really split hairs with that. Originally I think it was psych and garage, and then there’s what people like to call the second wave psych and third wave psych and then there’s psych-folk and that turns into freak-folk, which is the more recent genre basically started by Devendra Banhart who rediscovered an English psych-folk singer from the 70s named Vashti Bunyon. So he goes back into psych-folk music and puts his own spin on it, which is the same thing psych bands were doing with the blues.

Psych had its big moment in the sun in the late 1960s, but it never really disappeared, it just keeps changing into different genres. Throughout the 70s a lot of psych turned into Prog Rock or Kraut Rock. One of the original psych bands was The Thirteenth Floor Elevators from Austin, Texas. They attribute it to The Beatles and Bob Dylan coming through town and they had a hospital nearby where they were testing out psychedelics to see what effect it would have.

So in Austin they got that mixture of Beatles invasion R&B as well as the drugs, and it became an epicenter of psych. That quickly shifted over to San Francisco. Up in Detroit you got some of your garage rock bands, like MC5 and Amboy Dukes. I think there’s a clear distinction between psych and garage. Psych rock is tighter, more creative in a lot of ways, it’s a cleaner, production driven sound. Garage is just what it sounds like, real reverb laden, a progenitor of punk music, a lot sloppier and nastier, but with some of the same effects.

Collectors Weekly: Who are some of the most sought after psych bands from the 1960s and 70s?

MacFaddon-Elliot: The Thirteenth Floor Elevators were over looked until the Nuggets Collection came out in 1972, which defines the first wave of psych rock from 1965 to 1968. They had a hit single, “You’re Gonna Miss Me”, that was rediscovered on that compilation that really blew them up. Some other collectible names are bands like HP Love Craft, Chocolate Watch Band, Swamp Rats, Fairport Convention, you could even throw in Velvet Underground. The Andy Warhol work made that a very sought after record if you can find an original.

A lot of these psych bands had one record and one hit and then disbanded and you can usually only find that hit on a compilation somewhere, they’re pretty hard to find. But you have other bands that continued on into the 70s. If you look at the stuff Daevid Allen did, he was with a band called Soft Machine, but left Soft Machine and started a band called Gong, and their stuff is just way out there. Both of those bands survived well into the 70s and he’s still producing stuff today.

The 1960s psych era really ended with the death of the Flower Generation which people like to pin at Altamont in December, 1969, just 4 months after Woodstock. When the Rolling Stones played Altamont and when the Hells Angels killed that guy, people say that’s sort of the end of the Flower Generation, the carefree psychedelic movement. I think that’s when you could say you get a lot more of the garage and punk rock taking over. It pissed people off.

Collectors Weekly: Why the recent surge of collector interest in obscure psych LPs?

MacFaddon-Elliot: There’s a certain cache to it, they’re rare and its exciting to hear it in its original format. A lot of these records are being re-released on 180 gram vinyl and sold for twenty bucks a pop, so having the original is something special and unique. The reissues are having the effect of letting more people know about psych.

The cover art is also beautiful in many cases, and adds to the appeal. The 12 inch is a beautiful canvas, a lot better than anything we have today with CDs or MP3s, we don’t have that focus on the artwork today. The cover art is exciting, and often worth more than the record itself. This is especially true for 45s because you often see stacks of 45s without any sleeves. The cover is an artifact.

Some of the cover art was commissioned by the people creating the concert posters, and I imagine that on some of the really do it yourself private pressings they would do their own cover art. There were so many fantastic artists doing concert posters at this time, there was definitely a plethora to choose from.

Collectors Weekly: What about the psych movement outside the U.S.?

It definitely thrived in Britain, where we got The Beatles and The Stones. The Beatles’ first psych record was a single called Rain in ’66, which was a flip side to Paperback Writer and Revolver a little bit later on. Norwegian Wood is a great example of early Psych-folk and the Rolling Stones only dove into it with one record called Satanic Majesties Request. And then you have The Yardbirds which turned into Led Zeppelin and so forth. So Britain produced a lot of the big popular Psych bands, especially psych-folk. As far as German psych goes, you have to go straight to a band called Can. They added a heavy electronic beat that turned into Kraut Rock, so they have this minimalist aesthetic.

Collectors Weekly: How have you learned about psych records, and what resources can you recommend to collectors interested in this genre?

MacFaddon-Elliot: First and foremost, I’ve just dug through a lot of records, reading reviews of reissues and re-releases, definitely paying close attention to liner notes. In popular film, if you look at High Fidelity, the first song in it is The Thirteenth Elevator’s hit, so there are people out there who never forgot about this stuff and are trying to get it back into popular consciousness.

To learn about the more obscure psych bands, I’d definitely recommend people check out the Nuggets Compilations, they were what kept psych music alive when everybody else forgot about it. Also, take a look at what other musicians are paying homage to. There are bands like Brian Jonestown Massacre who pay homage to the Stones by naming one of their records Satanic Majesties Second Request. Their competitors called The Dandy Warhols, a few years after that, put out a record called Welcome to the Monkey House that pretty clearly paid homage to the Andy Warhol Velvet Underground cover with the banana.

In terms of buying and collecting vintage psych records, you have to figure out if the scarcity of it is important to you or if you are just going to listen to it. If you’re someone that wants that artifact, you want to know the serial numbers or the pressing numbers to make sure you’re getting the original, not some bootleg. There is some inferior product out there so just make sure you know what you’re buying.

Collectors are definitely focused on the psych records from the 1960s and maybe 70s, the first waves, when Psych was mainstream. Psych has continued on up through the present, and some of the new spin off genres like Freak-folk have found moderate mainstream success, but it’s more of an independent kind of thing. Same for recording companies like the Elephant Six Collective, which has put out tons of psychedelic records since the 1990s. They’re very popular on the independent circuit, but they don’t tap into the mainstream consciousness the way that first wave of psych did.

Images in this article appear in the following order:

1. The Thirteenth Floor Elevators - The Psychedelic Sounds of The Thirteenth Floor Elevators (1966)
2. Magic - Enclosed (1969)
3. RO-D-YS - Earnest Vocation (1968)
4. Chocolate Watch Band - No Way Out (1967)
5. Flat Earth Society - Waleeco (1968)

Filed under topics: interviews, media, vintage