LSD Underground
Item #4627
1966, USA. (Not On Label)
LSD was still legal until the late Fall of 1966, and was a media event
and a moral panic throughout that year that is difficult to understand
these days when gourmet psilocybin chocolate bars are being passed
around at upscale Hamptons summer parties. If you were young and hip,
LSD was what you wanted to ingest, if you were old and out of touch, it
terrified you. If you were in between, curious yet frightened, clueless but
still with a rebellious sideburn length, well then by 1969 you might be
the target market rube for an LP of Hank Williams covers recorded “in
modern acid-rock sound” as the sleeve says.
The excellent chronicler of psychedelic culture Patrick Lundborg was
obsessed with the LSD Underground 12 LP. He claimed that it was
the frst example of a LP recorded under the influence of LSD, and
that it pre-dated the notorious Ken Kesey Acid Test LP. Far be it from
me and my straightness to issue any opinion on this, but of the two
LPs, LSD Underground 12 provides a true sense of the otherness of
the psychedelic experience, in a similar fashion to the Alan Watts LP
mentioned earlier. Ken Kesey as a psychedelic Tristan Tzara set against
the lugubrious and didactic Bretonesque Timothy Leary is crystal-clear
on the legendary Acid Test LP – these throwaway recordings of stoned
insider jokes and Grateful Dead strictly b-roll bluesy noodling manages to
provide a Folkways-esque audio insight to what was cooking in the hippie
skillet before the grease had congealed. You get a sense of the nonformulaic nature of American hippie prior to Monterey, prior to Woodstock, prior to rebellious-length sideburns and the stale sounds of an acid rock
Hank Williams covers LP.
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