The Glove, "This Green City"

It’s taken thirty years to figure it out, and maybe forty before I could say it out loud, but it turns out I’m a sucker for psychedelic music. Lately I hear shouts and whispers of psychedelia in most everything I put on the platter. Sometimes I’ll actively seek it out. Give me Funkadelic, the Teardrop Explodes, Goat, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, Love, Cluster, Screamadelica all day long. Other times I’ll be playing a song I’ve loved for years—“Lips Like Sugar” (Apple Music, Spotify), for instance—and I’ll suddenly tune into psych-influenced and psych-inflected elements I’d never noticed before.

All this underscores that most likely I’ve always been attracted to psychedelic music, and I have been substantially delayed in putting the two and two and two together to make six. And maybe as a matter of principle I wasn’t going to rush to associate myself with hippie culture. See “Panis et Circenses” and generally below.

I grew up with new wave music, which I had always understood to have taken a sharp and welcome turn away from bullshit 1960s sunshine psychedelia and the druggy bum-outs of the 1970s. Sometime in 1977 a red button was pushed, and a trap door opened under all the pot-bellied hippies. Heads were shaved, downers were swapped for uppers, and peace and love gave way to “Hate and War” (Apple Music, Spotify). Year Zero, Rock ‘n’ Roll Reset, rip it up and start again (Apple Music, Spotify)—call it what you want. If you tumbled into the cultural slipstream in the early ’80s, falling for Flock of Seagulls, Devo, and Howard Jones like I did, then your experience of rock was entirely severed from the likes of Buffalo Springfield, Pink Floyd, and the Doors.

Except really it wasn’t. The notion that punk and new wave were sui generis, unencumbered by any ’60s heredity, is of course a fallacy. Johnny Rotten hated Pink Floyd, sure, but he loved Neu!. It took Iggy Pop’s pointing it out before I saw it for what it was, but there is in fact a “pastoral psychedelicism” underlying Neu!’s signature sound. At their cores Dinger and Rother were long-hairs, and at least for his part Dinger was no stranger to psychotropic drugs. Four years before Neu! tracks like “Hero” (Apple Music, Spotify) and “E-Musik” (Apple Music, Spotify) set the stage for the Pistols and Buzzcocks, Rother and Dinger were getting up to this with their pal Florian Schneider:

It’s certainly the case that there is no direct flight from Hendrix and Floyd to Wire and Gang of Four. But a one-stop itinerary through Neu!’s Dusseldorf or Iggy’s Detroit? That’s a manageable trip. Step out of blasting range of Malcolm MacLaren’s punk PR machine for even a minute to examine the substantial connective tissue between late ’60s acid rock and late ’70s punk, and it won’t seem at all outlandish that the Damned released an unironic cover of “White Rabbit” (Apple Music, Spotify). And it wasn’t a betrayal, either, for Johnny to spin songs by Can, Neil Young, Nico, and the Creation during a guest DJ shift with Capital Radio in the summer of ’77. All punk rock did was apply Ezra Pound’s Make It New™ directive to rock music. And Ezra will tell you that Make It New and Make from Scratch are two different things.

But enough about the roiling river of rock history, with its cross-currents and trippy tributaries. Let’s talk about me and my long, strange trip.

I first saw the word psychedelic on MTV. They were airing “Love My Way” (YouTube), and the bottom-left caption at the end of the video identified the recording artist as the Psychedelic Furs. I remember this moment very clearly first because the word was interesting and strange, and second because the bottom-left corner caption of an MTV video was an especially interesting and strange place for a word like that to turn up. I sit here today wondering how many other Children of the ’80s were first introduced to psychedelia by a band that, aside from the glorious first 2:08 of “India” (Apple Music, Spotify), were miles away from psychedelic in their sound. But I suppose they didn’t have or wear furs, either. Modernity, “the signifier and the signified,” etc., I guess.

In these early days of MTV, the VJs had in their arsenal a few dozen Closet Classics, which was the network’s designation for videos from the late 1960s and early 1970s. There were comparatively few of these on hand, because the Music Video Era didn’t begin in earnest until August 1981. Before that rocket launched there wasn’t much outlet or upside for rock film productions. So you tended to see the same Closet Classics over and over again.

Three I remember vividly were Blue Cheer’s “Summertime Blues” (YouTube), Black Sabbath’s “Paranoid” (YouTube), and the Doors’ “Gloria” (YouTube). When I went to YouTube just now to pull these links, I saw that the Sabbath and Blue Cheer videos were posted there by Beat-Club, a German music TV program that ran from September 1965 to December 1972. The Kraftwerk video I embedded above? Also clipped from a Beat-Club broadcast. That’s a wild coincidence—or is it? If MTV was going to pull archival music video for these purposes, it needed to look to exactly this kind of source: bands playing variety shows on television.

Closet Classics were jarring and incongruous when they came on, because they looked and sounded strikingly different from everything else MTV was serving up. So different that when the network ran that little animation spot signaling that a Closet Classic was forthcoming, often as not you’d groan, mutter a mild oath to yourself, and wander off into the kitchen to pour out a bowl of Frosted Flakes. That I remember Blue Cheer, Black Sabbath, and the Doors—as opposed to so many other Closet Classics MTV inflicted on us—suggests to me that I probably liked these videos a whole lot more than, say, the Moody Blues or the Byrds.

“Summertime Blues” and “Paranoid” were especially memorable because they were fuzzed-out, in multiple senses of the word: long-hairs, frizzed and curly, playing in the red, with distorted guitars. As it wasn’t enough just to show them playing their instruments, the Beat-Club producers resorted to double exposures and other gnarly camera tricks to hold the viewers’ attention. The Doors video, produced in 1983, stitched archival band footage, candid and live, together with clips shot from the present day. The idea was to present as many of Morrison’s countercultural excesses as appeared on film, then reveal by implication what might have escaped the camera’s eye.

Sandwiched in between, I dunno, Lionel Richie’s “All Night Long” (YouTube) and Bowie’s “Modern Love” (YouTube), these videos and the aesthetics they expressed were entirely alien to a Midwestern kid of about my age. I am just old enough to carry in my mind dim impressionistic memories of the late 1970s.  Those years look, smell, and feel muddied orange and brown to me—burnt or burning out. By contrast, the Closet Classics were transmissions from times I had never seen, when fires were still burning, and much more brightly. The particular missives from Blue Cheer, Sabbath, and the Doors were especially dated and strange, documenting risks that residents of my world weren’t accustomed to taking. I won’t say I ate all this up at the time. Years would go by before I would come to love these songs. But the videos gripped me enough that I didn’t make cereal runs when they came on. I would watch them through, from beginning to end.

The ridiculous hippie characters in the Freedom Rock mail-order record set commercials probably did more to shape my perspective on the psychedelic era than anything else. Kinda sad, in retrospect, that when I was forming my understanding of what the 1960s were about, these Well, turn it up, man! goofuses trumped the bad-asses in Blue Cheer.

Sad, too, that 1987 treated me to six-second swatches of “Ramblin’ Man” (Apple Music, Spotify), “Somebody To Love” (Apple Music, Spotify), “Turn, Turn, Turn” (Apple Music, Spotify), “A Horse with No Name” (Apple Music, Spotify), and “Get Together” (Apple Music, Spotify) via the Freedom Rock ads, but decades would pass before I’d hear the entire songs.

(Come to think of it, the less heard from America (the band) the better.)

In the late 1980s, while all of us Stateside were rolling our eyes at Freedom Rock, something else was happening in Northern England. Kids in clubs in Manchester were taking ecstasy, and the music in town was organizing itself around and in furtherance of the resulting psychedelic experiences. Guitar bands—with the Stone Roses in the lead—reached back for acid rock sounds, while electronic acts like 808 State and the Shamen took the psych synth sounds of the ’70s, passed them through Detroit, and set them to funky beats. Groups like Happy Mondays and Primal Scream tried to do a bit of both.

It would be at least another year before any of these new-old sounds penetrated the American Midwest. So when Tears for Fears washed up Stateside in the summer of ’89, with their new “Sowing the Seeds of Love” single (Apple Music, Spotify) and video—all 1967 Beatles references, sunshine, trumpets, and New Age schlock symbology—we had no sense of the underlying context in England. We had no recourse but to rise from our couches and shake our fists at the MTV logo on our screens, demanding to know JUST WHAT THE HELL IS THIS?!?

Five years earlier these two had called upon listeners to air their grievances. Let it all out, and so on (Apple Music, Spotify). In that spirit, then, it’s exactly this bullshit we can do without. Come on, Roland and Curt. We’re talking to you.

If psych music was going to worm through our defenses and burrow into our hearts and minds, it had best not come clomping up the front steps in a tie-dyed T-shirt, reeking of weed and yammering on about peace and love. Enter the Glove, then, by stealth, through a side door, and leaving no fingerprints on the knob. The Glove recorded and released their one LP, Blue Sunshine, back in 1983, but our gang first got word of it upon its 1990 reissue on CD. Spin Magazine advised that the Glove was a one-off joint venture of Steve Severin of Siouxsie & the Banshees and the Cure’s Robert Smith. Based on the supergroup lineup alone, Blue Sunshine was a must-buy.

Per the lore, the Glove project was inspired by acid trips and horror movies, and it took its name from the giant autonomous flying glove creature in the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine film. Not a horror movie by designation, Yellow Submarine, but if you were like me and you’d seen that movie in first grade—at a school assembly, no less—it had certainly flooded your dreams with bad-trip imagery.

My gang read, and took due note of, the word psychedelic in reviews of the album, but even so we pressed ahead. Robert Smith was a partner in this enterprise, after all, and in the wake of 1989’s Disintegration, he could do no wrong—even retroactively. On the Severin side, Siouxsie and the Banshees had been dipping their toes in these trippy waters for years. For God’s sake, they had covered at least two songs from the White Album, one of which I’ve made the subject of another post (see “Helter Skelter”). We weren’t aware of the Banshees’ Beatles obsessions and exotic/ mystic tendencies, because none of us were especially into them at the time. It was enough that they looked, dressed, and sounded the Gothic alt-rock part. Unlike, say, Tears for Fears, who were by now well settled on the Naughty List.

I learned yesterday that Blue Sunshine took its name from a 1977 cult movie wherein a bad batch of LSD sits latent in its users’ systems for ten years, then resurfaces to trigger alopecia (!), psychosis (!!), and unchecked killing sprees (!!!). WARNING!, the Blue Sunshine movie promo posters wrote:

IF YOU ARE ONE OF THE MILLIONS WHO TOOK HALLUCINOGENS IN THE LATE 1960’s … YOU MAY BE A HUMAN TIME BOMB about to explode into a bloody nightmare of uncontrollable killing. Think back: Did you ever hear the words BLUE SUNSHINE[?] TRY TO REMEMBER. Your life may depend on it!

Reefer Madness meets Body Snatchers meets Night of the Living Dead. I need to find this somewhere and stream it.

The CD longbox and cover art featured a cultural collage-style design that was self-evidently modeled after Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, replete with images of Jackie Kennedy, Fellini, Mick Jagger, and Jane Fonda from (I think) Barbarella. This might have been further warning to us that some objectionable ’60s psychedelicism was in the offing, but we blew right past that signpost, too. And thank God we did, because this record is awesome, and I believe it did important work softening me up to receive and treasure other forms of psych rock, which I’ll cover in the next post.

Blue Sunshine sounds like what could have been, if the punks hadn’t labored so hard to sever the thru-line from acid rock and Krautrock electronica into the 1980s and beyond. Actually, strike that. Blue Sunshine sounds like what happened when two psych-rock acolytes took custody of that thru-line, brought it safely through those touch-and-go days in 1977, then, once the threat had abated, carried it forward with their own referential compositions, updated equipment, and modern mixing techniques.

Vocals on the record were handled principally by Jeanette Landray, who according to Discogs never appeared on another record, before or since.¹ It was a calculated risk to walk away from Robert Smith on vocals—he sings on just two of Blue Sunshine’s tracks—but it pays off brilliantly, because Jeanette takes full command of these songs. She has a forceful, reginal energy and ultimately comes off like a cross between Siouxsie and the Queen of Hearts. This take occurred to me in bed last night, just after she sang the lines hide her heart and lose her happy head into my headphones. A minute ago I considered that “Looking Glass Girl” (Apple Music, Spotify) is a song title on the tracklist, so yeah: there’s a fair bit of Lewis Carroll here.

Which brings me to the lyrics, which are forcibly trippy, for sure, but also charming and not so far off from Cure songs like “Lullaby” (Apple Music, Spotify) and “Charlotte Sometimes” (Apple Music, Spotify).² From the aforementioned “Looking Glass Girl”: The casino man is laughing. He wears a shivering hat. We peel away like tinsel, stuck like splinters to the wall. I can dig that. These lines, too, from “Orgy” (Apple Music, Spotify):

A disease is under my fingernails. It stains me like a tattoo. Overgrown senses prickle and spark—the flesh is in the palm of my hand. And we could swim, my little fishes and me.

Some of the other stuff pushes the limits. Mr. Alphabet says, “Smile like a weasel, as I cover you in treacle.” Miles away in Cambridge, Syd Barrett’s ears were most definitely twitching when Robert laid these lines down on tape. And I most certainly had Glove songs in mind two years later, when I wrote these goofy lines for a Poetry class in college:

Peanut-buttered grapefruit rolls along my tongue. Soprano hamsters in my shoes, librettos still unsung.

I submitted eight stanzas of this dreck to our residential college’s quarterly magazine, and they actually published it. Shortly after that, a guy I knew who played guitar sought me out to write songs with him. I went away for a few days and came back to him with a song about a girl getting yelled at by her mother in a doctor’s office. I had witnessed this incident firsthand, and for reasons that escape me now it had made a big impression on me. This Morrissey/ Marr partnership collapsed that same day, and I remember thinking we’d have done better if I’d stuck to soprano hamsters word salad. Who knows? I might have been the next Robert Smith.

Aside from the odd lyrical foot-fault, Blue Sunshine is a brilliantly conceived and gorgeous record, top to bottom. The liner notes disclose that it was mixed using the “fish-panning” method developed for the glove by Mr Waverley. This could be an entirely made-up conceit, but there is something in the mix here that makes this album feel different from any other I have in my collection—something that coils up in the liminal space between the listener’s conscious and unconscious mind, just out of reach. The Glove’s pointer finger is showing you exactly where to find it, but you can’t put a finger of your own on it. Or at least not without a chemical aid.

I could write another thousand words parsing out the many and various sounds on this record. You can definitely hear a lot of Cure in this—take the bass line and closeout synths of “Like an Animal” (Apple Music, Spotify), for example, or the guitars in “Sex Eye Make-Up” (Apple Music, Spotify). But that’s just the base layer. Built over top are Glove-specific structures: intricate, ornamented spaces for Jeanette to pour her voice into. Which she does best in the single, “Punish Me with Kisses” (Apple Music, Spotify), and not at all, in the stunning “A Blues in Drag” (Apple Music, Spotify) instrumental. Each song is a distinctive work with its own unique ingredients: here, strings, an old piano, and a whomping bass drum; there, a manic programmed drum beat, synth chimes, and strummed acoustic guitar.

The song I chose today is “This Green City” (Apple Music, Spotify). Good God, those frenetic and relentless synth-sequences and soaring guitars. Parked here in our guest room on a Monday morning, with naught in my system but some toothpaste I inadvertently swallowed and a Cumberland Farms cinnamon bun, I feel all-seeing, all-knowing, and all-powerful, for as long as this song is playing through my speakers.

More on this journey next week.

1. The parallels between Jeanette and Dawn Muir of Brainticket are striking—feral songstress appears from nowhere on a trippy-as-hell record, then leaves the stage, never to be heard from again. Maybe Jeanette’s career was a long-game homage to Dawn’s. In any case, we’ll get to Brainticket soon.

2. Add these two to the list of Songs Brad Belatedly Realized Were Psychedelic.