The Flaming Lips, "One Million Billionth of a Millisecond on a Sunday Morning"

Here begins Part the Second of My Psychedelic, Sentimental Journey, and this is where we pick up speed. Lots of songs, lots of links in here. Try and keep up.

We left off last week in 1990, when I was digging into the Glove. Around the same time, bands in that late-’80s Madchester psych rock wave were first putting their sounds down on tape. The resulting records were just beginning to wash up Stateside, and for my gang of alt-rock misfits in Ohio, this would turn out to be a big freaking deal.

First among Madchester’s equals—and first to arrive on the CD racks of the Eastwood Mall—were the Stone Roses. If it’s possible to have a symbiotic relationship with a record, then I have one with the Roses’ first, self-titled LP. I don’t doubt that over the years I’ve played this album through more than any other in my library, yet it never feels tired, and its effect on me never diminishes. I hear [its] needle hit the groove, and straightaway I feel the Earth begin to move (Apple Music, Spotify): the Roses’ trippy tendrils bud in the folds of my brain and drop shoots down to my shoes, the music grafts itself on my hypothalamus, and my heartbeat falls into lock-step with Reni’s drums. With the benefit of hindsight, I can recognize that as much as the Glove’s extended finger pointed the way to a higher musical consciousness, it was the Roses who kicked in their spurs and started my slow, plodding progress down that path.

These were baby steps, at first. My gang and I were still smarting from whatever the hell Tears for Fears had just thrown at us. We had checkpoints set up and were carefully checking each new band’s papers. We stamped the Roses’ visas in part on the strength of their references: namely, Don and Joe, who worked at my grandfather’s restaurant and had impeccable taste. But more than anything, we accepted the Roses because they were incrementalists. On its face, The Stone Roses, particularly as first issued in Britain, is much more of a Merseybeat record than a psychedelic one. Tuneful songs, beautifully presented, with Ian Brown somehow singing on key, as he would fail to do live in the 35 years to follow. The CD we bought here in the US incorporated two later singles, “Elephant Stone” (Apple Music, Spotify) and “Fool’s Gold” (Apple Music, Spotify), both of which dropped far funkier beats than could be heard on the original album tracks, and that’s not to mention guitarist John Squire’s sudden committed relationship with the wah-wah pedal. They were turning up the temperature, song by song.

“I Am the Resurrection” (Apple Music, Spotify) could be my all-time favorite recording and will get its own writeup one of these days, if it doesn’t wreck its chances elbowing into every other post in the meantime. Starting in a British Invasion style, then transitioning through Squire’s glorious extended solo into a final, lysergic sunrise, “Resurrection” collapses the entirety of the 1960s into a crisp eight minutes. Aside from possibly this post’s title track, this last song on the self-titled record did more than any other to unlock my interest in psychedelic sounds.

Once the Roses broke on through, Happy Mondays, Inspiral Carpets, the Soup Dragons, and the Charlatans came hurtling through the breach. The Stone Roses’ cover art was an original work by John Squire in a Jackson Pollock style, with scattered lemon slices glued down over the splatter paint. It marked a departure from the 1980s neon and Gothic grays to which we were accustomed, but without pledging outright allegiance to Hendrix’s hippie freak flag. By contrast, the fractalized color swirl on the Soup Dragons’ Lovegod record put it all out on the table: Check out our computer-generated psychedelic swirlies! But I was mesmerized by the video for “Mother Universe” (Apple Music, Spotify) before I ever laid eyes on the album cover.

Suddenly I was growing out my hair and parting it in the middle to look like the Soup Dragons’ Sean Dickson. My sister was on an artsy-craftsy kick; she strung me a necklace of karma beads, as she called them. She’d bought them from Michael’s and not the Maharishi. In any case, I couldn’t have been more thrilled to wear them, even though a mere three months earlier I wouldn’t have stood for any of this nonsense.

If Lovegod was a strong enough record to inspire these adjustments to my personal style, the Mondays’ Pills ‘n’ Thrills and Bellyaches and Primal Scream’s Screamadelica called for an outright paradigm shift and the abandonment of our anti-’60s prejudice. Rock records first and foremost, but with added dance elements, these LPs pulled from the Roses on one side and from acid house electronics on the other. The Mondays’ “Donovan” (Apple Music, Spotify) riffed on “Sunshine Superman” (Apple Music, Spotify) as only Shaun Ryder could—Sunshine shines brightly through my arsehole today!¹ Screamadelica was more of a split-personality record, borrowing heavily from the Stones for the likes of “Movin’ On Up” (Apple Music, Spotify) and “Damaged” (Apple Music, Spotify), then going full Hacienda on dance tracks like “Don’t Fight It, Feel It” (Apple Music, Spotify) and “Slip Inside This House” (Apple Music, Spotify). And of course we’ve already talked about “Loaded” (see “Loaded”/ “Sorted for E’s and Whizz”). I ate these records right up, too, with no thought of an apology to any Earlier, Aghast Iteration of Self watching all this through a crystal ball from 1987.

As Manchester’s Second Summer of Love metastasized across England, Liverpool bands got in on the action, too. Echo & the Bunnymen and the Wild Swans were staples in my cassette collection well before I’d ever heard of the Stone Roses. I had kept in heavy rotation both the Bunnymen’s 1985 hits comp, Songs To Learn and Sing, and the self-titled record that followed it. The Sire Records music sampler CDs, Just Say Yes and Just Say Yo!, promoted two beautiful songs by the Wild Swans, yet their LP, Bringing Home the Ashes, was almost impossible to find. If I’d had the chance to meet Seymour Stein before his death last year, I’d have demanded to know why he took the trouble to turn all us late-’80s kids on to so many terrific bands through the Just Say … samplers, when he couldn’t get their records shipped to our stores. In any case, I finally did find a cassette copy of that Wild Swans album while on vacation in Florida, during I think my junior year in high school. I will treasure the searing melancholia of Bringing Home the Ashes up to and through the day my children bring home mine.

Not long ago I learned that before they fronted the Bunnymen, the Wild Swans, and The Teardrop Explodes, respectively, Ian McCulloch, Paul Simpson, and Julian Cope were all members of the same trippy Scouser band, called A Shallow Madness. For his part, Cope was a student of acid rock in the ’70s and is now one of its foremost scholars.² No one else in the 1980s except possibly the Flaming Lips looked harder and wider for psychotropic inspiration than Julian Cope did, and you can hear this right from the jump on the Teardrops’ first and best LP, Kilimanjaro. But don’t sleep on Ian or Paul, either. Hot take: Bunnymen opus “The Killing Moon” (Apple Music, Spotify) is as mystically and powerfully charged as—and just flat better than— anything the Doors ever recorded. And cribbing equally from the sounds of the Smiths and the Byrds, Swans songs like “Archangels” (Apple Music, Spotify), “Mythical Beast” (Apple Music, Spotify), and “Now and Forever” (Apple Music, Spotify) offer a lesson to jam bands the world over: you could have songs like this, too, if you would just stop jacking around.

Lovely as they were, I took as given the lush arrangements on my Bunnymen cassettes and Paul Simpson’s soaring spirituality on Ashes. The tracks, traces, and seasonings of the late ’60s were hiding in plain sight on these recordings—I just wasn’t looking for them. Then Madchester landed, and both these bands went into psychedelic overdrive. Ian went on hiatus from the Bunnymen, Will Sergeant and Les Pattinson recruited vocalist Noel Burke as his replacement, and the band moved forward with November 1990’s Reverberation, whereon all subtlety was abandoned. In order of familiarity, Reverberation features mellotron, harmonium, sitar, tambura, cimbalom, and dholak—which is to say, a fair chunk of it could have been recorded live from an opium den in 1880s Bombay. And Burke’s stentorian delivery, now brooding, now ecstatic, was a terrific fit for these revamped, retro Bunnymen. I especially dig what he does on “Senseless” (Apple Music, Spotify).

No one is supposed to like Reverberation, but I really did. AllMusic, my go-to resource for record reviews, heaps praise on the album—literally, it has nothing bad to say about it—but then assigns it 2.5 stars simply because, in the writer’s view, “Echo & the Bunnymen doesn’t exist without the distinctive voice of Ian McCulloch.”

One last note on Reverberation: I distinctly remember playing some of this album in my dorm room for—possibly to, probably at—Kate on the night I met her. Maybe I like it as much as I do because it has sentimental value. Or it earned that sentimental value because it’s just that good and so, at that moment in November 1991, it seemed like an entirely appropriate LP to woo her with.

The Wild Swans put out Space Flower in 1990. This was another hard lean into psych rock—perhaps cynically so, though there’s no arguing with the result. The opener, “Melting Blue Delicious” (Apple Music, Spotify) is exactly as it sounds—a decadent swirl of wah-wahs laid over a knock-off of James Brown’s “Funky Drummer” (Apple Music, Spotify) beat. It was “Fool’s Gold” with the mystery removed and the joy-meter pushed to 12. Aside from the hard-charging “Tangerine Temple” (Apple Music, Spotify), the rest of the record is more subdued. “Space Flower” (Apple Music, Spotify) and “Sea of Tranquility” (Apple Music, Spotify) never made sense to me in the ’90s. But they really hit home earlier today over my headphones, while I was mopping the living and dining room floors. Having recently plugged into the space rock of early Pink Floyd, Tangerine Dream, and Cluster, I am able now to hear and appreciate what Paul et al. were up to on these tracks. Or maybe in the moment I was just especially susceptible to anything that might lift my consciousness during a Saturday morning house-cleaning.

What about the Cocteau Twins, with their synesthetic swirl of synths, guitars and Elizabeth Fraser’s singing in tongues? Or for that matter all the shoegaze bands that came trailing in their wake? I ran out and bought Chapterhouse’s Whirlpool LP in 1991 after seeing “Falling Down” (Apple Music, Spotify) on MTV. I could write an entire post about the Boo Radleys and Giant Steps … but wait: I already did (see “Lazarus”). Like the Boos, Jane’s Addiction drew from a range of influences that included psych rock. I fell for the Nothing’s Shocking record because it was one of exactly two alternative rock records in the CD jukebox of Charter Club, where I took my meals and played a thousand hours of pool during my junior and senior years at Princeton. The unmistakably psychedelic signals of “Up the Beach” (Apple Music, Spotify) and “Ocean Size” (Apple Music, Spotify) blew right by me, unregistered until, I dunno, maybe three or four years ago? [face-palm]

When Oasis landed in 1994, I finally had reason and permission to dig into the Beatles. The Magical Mystery Tour and Sgt. Pepper were terrific, but Revolver put them to shame. The latter two records were so much a part of the lore of the psychedelic ’60s that their characters, settings, and themes—Victorian circuses, Egg Man and Walrus, tangerine trees and marmalade skies and all you need is love—feel maybe a bit stale to me today. Look: I don’t question that they were dynamic and original upon first release. It’s just by the time I was tuning into rock culture, Peter Frampton, the Bee Gees, and apparently George Burns were making a claim on the IP:

By contrast, most everything I heard on Revolver was new to me. And it held the trump card, which is “Tomorrow Never Knows” (Apple Music, Spotify).

As the century turned, the Flaming Lips stepped forward into prominence. Turns out they had been playing with borrowed psychedelic sounds and tropes for fifteen years, but outside of “She Don’t Use Jelly” (Apple Music, Spotify) cracking the charts, few listeners above ground had noticed. The fully-realized and unique aesthetics on display in The Soft Bulletin (1999) and Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots (2002) showed that the Lips had finally gained the upper hand on all the chemicals they’d ingested over the years—and now they could put them to work. I adored these records, but AllMusic was telling me the Lips’ earlier recordings were just as good. So I reached back and tapped into Transmissions from the Satellite Heart (1993) and Clouds Taste Metallic (1996).

These were wilder, noisier, stranger: more of what I wanted. The fried guitars and slamming drums on the back half of “The Abandoned Hospital Ship” (Apple Music, Spotify); the scratched-to-ribbons, everything-at-11 “Lightning Strikes the Postman” (Apple Music, Spotify); the hooks and lurch and She’s got helicopters (Yes she has!) of “Pilot Can at the Queer of God” (Apple Music, Spotify)—

Hm. I may have the inklings of a plan to survive the next soul-crushing work week, after all.

So let’s talk about “One Million Billionth of a Millisecond on a Sunday Morning” (Apple Music, Spotify). In the summer of 2005 I bought a copy of Q Magazine. It came with a mix CD attached to it called Here Comes the Sun—The Ultimate Summer Playlist. “One Million Billionth” was the last, climactic track on that CD. The Lips released this song in 1987, and more than one critic has noted its similarity to Pink Floyd’s “Careful with that Axe, Eugene” (Apple Music, Spotify). Both are triple-length songs with long wicks and a psychedelic edge to them, and when they blow: hoo-boy, those are some trippy fireworks.

Pink Floyd took their swing at this first, which might suggest that what the Lips did here was just a knock-off. But I have two quibbles with that line of thinking. First, Quentin Tarantino has made a career of producing knock-offs that are better than the originals. So it can be done, if you’re just skilled enough, and as it turns out, the Flaming Lips were that skilled, even as babies. Second, I had opened my mind considerably by 2005, but even so, there was no way in hell I was going to listen to a nine-minute Pink Floyd track, whatever any trusted source might have told me about how much it rawked. I’d heaped far too much scorn on the Floyd in college—what is this? whale noises?—to make a heel-turn on the question only a decade later. All I had to do was dial up one song, and Pink Floyd Glenn would teleport into the room to feed me that crow. I’m over this now, but only just.

“One Million Billionth of a Millisecond on a Sunday Morning,” splayed out over nine minutes, twenty-one seconds, details a good trip gone bad.

Early in the morning, just before the dawn, I turn my TV on and watch the fuzz.

This could be the sunrise—I could be wrong. Sometimes what looks like the sunrise turns out to be an atom bomb.

BOMBS DON’T COME IN CEREAL PACKAGES …

The build here is measured and defensible. Long enough to make a call upon your patience, but the wait isn’t unreasonable, either. The guitars are delicate and foreboding, and the drummer contents himself with rim shots counting down the seconds—or if you’re the zonked narrator, attoseconds—to contact. When the sun-bomb comes, shrapnel rains down on all sides and the shock wave is everything you’ve ever wanted from rock ‘n’ roll. At its core, this is a psychedelic guitar jam, and it’s times like this I curse the day God smote the Tower of Babel and condemned us to the limits of language, because the same three words could as easily conjure up 18 minutes of plinking bullshit from John Mayer on an outdoor amphitheater stage in late May.

This here, though, is powerful. Authoritative. The Flaming Lips fell out of bed in 1987, forgot to play punk rock for a minute, and recorded one of the best psychedelic guitar jams in history. Is it any wonder I heard this and found my way to Can, Maggot Brain, Amon Düül II, and [gasp] “Interstellar Overdrive” (Apple Music, Spotify)?

Coming next week: third gear.

1. It bears mentioning that Shaun had a baby with Donovan’s daughter, Oriole Nebula.

2. On this question, look no further than his 1995 Krautrocksampler monograph, which Carla and I quote to death on our podcast.