Customer Reviews

Psychedelic Lollipop / Electric Comic Book

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Another great 2 lp's-on-one CD release brought to us by the Collectables label.Some of you may not remember much about the Blues Magoos.They were a Bronxe five piece that played some decent psychedelic garage rock that released six lp's from 1966-70,with the first three probably being their best work.This 2-on-1 includes two of those three albums.A total of 22 songs,starting off with their only hit,"We Ain't Got Nothin' Yet" along with many of their other decently penned tracks,like "Gotta Get Away","One By One","Pipe Dream",their outstanding six-minute cover of "Gloria"(one of the disc's best tracks) and "Let's Get Together".Aimed at fans and collectors of '60's psych/garage rock.Will appeal to fans of Shadows Of Knight,Strawberry Alarm Clock,The Creation,The Leaves and Count Five.

If ever a band made psychedelic music fun and knew how not to take it or themselves so seriously as to come forth as a gang of self-righteous twits, the Blues Magoos were they. They jerked one classic cut into the top 40, "(We Ain't Got) Nothin' Yet," and if you were there at the time and could resist that dopey organ-and-bass riff which hook the whole thing in the first place, you just didn't know how to have a good time. These first two albums of theirs were pretty basic: psychedelicised garage-band R and B with tongues partly in cheek and about as unpretentious a way with it as you could ask in the middle of the haze. Influential beyond their years, in its way, too: on the one hand, their style seems to have been a soft curlicue to the striking and (admit it) even more dopey-fun bubblegum craze of 1969-72 (imagine the like of the Ohio Express - whose Kasnetz-Katz stable practically forged a career out of squishing up the Magoos' organ riffs - as Blues Magoos Lite, and with none of the Magoos' romping guts); on the other hand, the Magoos - especially "Gotta Get Away," the flip of "Nothin' Yet" - also runs a direct line to the garage-punk revival of the late 1970s-early 1980s (the Fleshtones, for one, probably owed as much to the Blues Magoos as they seemed to owe to the like of the Yardbirds or the Standells).

The rest of these tracks mostly romp the same road. "Tobacco Road" has kept the band's legacy alive, too, by way of its inclusion on the ancient, original "Nuggets" compilation and subsequent remakes thereof. The Blues Magoos actually got semi-serious a couple of years later - they cut a surprisingly spry, classically funky R and B set, "Never Goin' Back To Georgia," long lost but well worth the hunt to find it. But it's these two albums which will end up defining their real legacy: For a couple of years at the crest of the psychedelic era, the Blues Magoos managed to remind people not to forget that rock and roll was also supposed to be fun.

While they may not have been as technically proficient or original as bands like Quicksilver Messenger Service or Vanilla Fudge, the Blues Magoos wrote some catchy psychadelic tunes...fully equipped to enhance your journey to the center of the mind (illegal substance-induced or otherwise), or just to sit back and enjoy, maybe whip out a few of those dated dance moves.

Psych rock is interesting but a aquired taste ,even pink floyds 68-1970 stuff can meander. But there was a type of psych rock that was a mixture of garage band and psych and this is that type. These two discs rocked and were fun to boot. The band was less about being on acid than having fun and that's just cool. They made some of the best garage psych rock tunes ever. You have the hit 'we aint got nothing yet" and 'tobacco road" ( fm radio hit) , and the second one had some fm songs too. It's just good bouncy stuff that isn't too completely psych where you have a 20 minute space out song. and to be honest even though I like that acid rock stuff , I don't listen to it as much as this type of more accessible music. This band later went more solidly blues and those discs are great. But this is the band at their peak and they were good fun.

This collection,of their first 2 lps they released features their singles plus all their album tracks.It also comes with a precise history and pictures of the group, plus a reproduced sleeve of their electric comic book lp sleeve.This collection also includes a different version of one by one which is a bit slower but the words are more clearer on it. I have only given it three stars because even though they released some brilliant singles these 2 lps lack something.But still a collection worth having at a good price.

While it may be easy to poke fun at the Blues Magoos (the quintessential one-hit-wonders who could double as the Hee-Haw of psychedeia), the band put together, at the very least, one good album side of respectable 1960's rock. The sum of their production was one massive hit, 1967's 'We Ain't Got Nothin' Yet', which checked out at number 72 for the year, and number five at its peak in January. The band hailed from the Bronx in New York, but first gathered a following as residents at the Night Owl Club in Greenwich Village. They started out as The Trenchcoats, evolved into the Bloos Magoos (true to their psychedelic persona, though it's hard to believe any of this music is truly tripped-out), and became the Blues Magoos at the insistence of their manager, though the blues are hardly the band's forte, which appears to be recording garage-rock covers.

Aside from their singular hit, which leads off the first of two studio albums offered on this CD, the Magoos best work consists of cover songs, which fortunately are also the lengthiest tracks. The vocals on track three, the familiar 'Tobacco Road', sound much like the original version by The Nashville Teens, which hit number 14 in 1964. Though also covered by the likes of Eric Burdon, Rare Earth, and Jefferson Airplane, this version by the Magoos more than holds its own, and at four and 1/2 minutes is the second longest number performed. 'Psychedelic Lollipop' also features robust covers of David Blues 'Queen of My Nights', James Brown's 'I'll Go Crazy' (the lead song on Brown's famed 'Live At the Apollo' disc), and a sincere attempt at Maceo Marriweather's 'Worried Life Blues', although the Farfisa organ lines and vocals that don't bleed tend to mock rather than sing the blues. Their only other attempt at the blues, 'Sometimes I Think About', only serves to reveal the irony of the band's namesake. Another song of note on 'Psychedelic Lollipop' is 'One By One', a nice pop tune released as a follow-up single to 'Ain't Got Nothin' Yet', but which never cracked the Top-40 (a cover of Alan Gordon's 'Gotta Get Away', with its great chorus of "Gotta get away, gotta get away, gotta get away... I wanna be free!", probably had a much better shot at success).

Tracks 11-22 on this disc were originally released on vinyl as the band's sophomore effort, 'Electric Comic Book'. It is, in some respects, a novelty album (tracks 15, 'Intermission' and 22, 'That's All Folks' aren't really songs, but bookends intended to give the unrelated compositions a sense of cohesion; and the liner notes are actually a fold-out mini-poster featuring black and white comic book-like panels featuring the band members as characters). Another novelty track appears on the disc, 'Life Is Just a Cher O' Bowlies', which really makes little sense at all. The gradual deterioration of the compositions on 'Elecric Comic Book' reveal the lack of substance the band possessed. Side two of the original vinyl offered tracks which are just a cut above disturbing aural chaos, 'Albert Common Is Dead', and 'Take My Love'. Clearly, something is amiss by the time 'Rush Hour' begins delivering the questionable lyric "take my love and shove it up your heart". While some of the tracks may have represented passable attempts at late-1960's psychedelia ('Summer Is the Man' and the vibrato-lined sounds of 'Baby, I Want You', which are heavy on sunshine, flowers, and love), the cumulative effort here makes one wonder why the band ever got a shot at a third album, which I'm too afraid to hear. The band might have really had something going had they stuck to covers, such as their rich rendition of Van Morrison's 'Gloria' (which the Shadows of Knight took to number ten in 1966), track fourteen on this disc, which at just over six minutes is also the longest number. The song features some bold variatons on the original organ and guitar lines. If the Vanilla Fudge could subsist on cover songs, why not the Blues Magoos? I should have been a manager...

This two-fer 'Blues Magoos' disc is a fun CD to pop into your player for one or two listens, and there are some redeeming tracks, but by-and-large there is way too much filler here to make this a staple of any respectable music collection. It is an interesting artifact, indeed a caricature, of what was considered fashionable in the late-1960's rock scene. This band performed with neon tubes outlining their bell bottoms, and lava lamps decorating the stage. It's op-art, both visual and auditory. If you're a synesthete, you can probably smell and taste psychedelia all over this one, too. If you truly "dig" this, you either took the 1960's way too seriously, or way too superficially. I'm not sure which is the greater error, but a mistake it is.

THESE ARE TWO GROVEY ALBUMS, THE BLUES MAGOOS ARE A WONDERFULL
BAND. IF YOU LIKE PSYCHEDELIC MUSIC YOU LOVE IT