121. The United States of America - The United States of America (March 1968)

1. The American Metaphysical Circus*

2. Hard Coming Love

3. Cloud Song*

4. The Garden of Earthly Delights*

5. I Won't Leave My Wooden Wife for You, Sugar

6. Where Is Yesterday

7. Coming Down

8. Love Song for the Dead Che

9. Stranded in Time

10. The American Way of Love

-I. Metaphor for an Older Man

-II. California Good Time Music

-III. Love Is All

A

You may think there have been some weird, trippy albums so far, but not many things could compete with the USA's sole studio effort. Words can't do this album justice. A group of avant-garde musicians getting together to record a guitar-free psychedelic rock album integrating complex electronic and tape effects? A singer (Dorothy Moskowitz) who manages to sound like Grace Slick if she took a bunch of downers after being assimilated by the Borg? The electric violin as lead instrument? This is very much the sort of stuff I like.

This album really leads with its weirdest moment. "The American Metaphysical Circus" starts with a collage of fairground calliope music and patriotic marching band tunes, then suddenly warps into an electronics-heavy, stoned-out dirge in which Moskowitz describes the titular circus, a nightmarish place where you can bleed children (instruments provided!) and torture a bear into whistling "Londonderry Air", and where "the price of admission is your mind". The nightmare quality is accentuated by the way that Moskowitz's vocals are slowly twisted and distorted until they become an unintelligible metallic howl. It's an incredibly bold way to start an album, a sort of Burroughs-esque political satire that doesn't really sound like anything we've had so far (and really, only sounds like bands that have deliberately aped it since, such as Portishead and Broadcast). In some ways, the rest of the album can't match the promise of the first track. But it still manages to be pretty great.

You have rockers ("Hard Coming Love", with its great distorted keyboard lead), gentle psychedelia ("Cloud Song" and "Love Song for the Dead Che"), and humorous satire ("I Won't Leave My Wooden Wife for You, Sugar" is a pretty funny look at a comfortably suburban man who has neatly compartmentalised his sadistic relationship with a teenage girl; "Metaphor for an Older Man" is all about closeted buttoned-down types crusing the New York streets for transexual prostitutes). "Where Is Yesterday" tackles one of my favourite philosophical questions (how can the present moment be so vivid, only to decay into the vagueness of memory?). There's even a somewhat dodgy Beatles knock-off ("Stranded in Time", probably the only weak song on the album). And things wrap-up with "Love Is All", in which the music melts into a collage of music concrete that includes samples of all the previously songs on the album, over which singer-composer Joseph Byrd repeatedly intones a statement about how much fun we all had. It's all strange, challenging music, much of it quite original in conception. Music hall, Dixieland jazz, modern classical, music concrete, Frank Zappa, Country Joe and the Fish, Pink Floyd, and (most obviously) a solid foundation in the songs Grace Slick penned for Jefferson Airplane. It's heady stuff.

My favourite song on the album, however, (though probably not the "best", whatever that means) is easily "The Garden of Earthly Delights". When I think about psychedelic rock, this has long been one of the first tunes that springs to mind. It's easily the most "Grace Slick-y" song hear, a rave-up where Moskowitz's ice-cold vocals swoop and sweep in long, drawn-out phrasings as she describes a garden of poison mushrooms and omnivorous orchids. It's just an incredibly fun, trippy song. Really, I'm disappointed. Before I started this project I assumed more psychedelic rock would sound like "White Rabbit", or the Silver Apples, or the White Noise, or early Pink Floyd. But nope! It's mostly just been a lot of distorted guitars and sophomoric humour so far. Oh well. We're slowly crawling towards the early-to-mid-70s, which is one of my favourite periods of music, and there'll be a lot more of this sort of weird shit to come.

So, anyway. A lot of the albums you must hear before you die are really more "albums that are pretty OK, I guess", but The United States of America is a classic like nothing else of its time.