{psychedelia} – Page 31 – { feuilleton }

Elaine Hanelock’s Hollywood stars

The essay I wrote about psychedelic art for Communication Arts earlier this year had a word limit so there was little mention of the way the psychedelic style was swiftly co-opted by advertising and commercial art as a means of reaching a youthful audience. This is a really a subject in itself, the way in which an aesthetic that was countercultural in 1965 was becoming mainstream by 1968, and was still rippling through the world of graphic design in the early 1970s.

Elaine Hanelock’s posters of Hollywood stars of the 1920s and 30s were published by Royal Screen Craft Inc, Los Angeles, in 1968, and combine two trends: psychedelic art and the nostalgia for old Hollywood that emerged in the mid-60s. There are ten posters in the set: The Marx Brothers, Clara Bow (the “It Girl”), Mae West & WC Fields, Laurel & Hardy, John Barrymore, Charlie Chaplin, Clark Gable, Jean Harlow, Will Rogers, and Wallace Beery & Marie Dressler. Nobody seems to know anything about Elaine Hanelock’s career elsewhere but her posters continue to find an audience among collectors.

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LSD-25 by The Gamblers

A post last year concerned some of the songs that have flaunted their acid credentials by incorporating the letters L-S-D in their titles, the most famous being (of course) Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds. While it might be an idea to follow that post by tracking down songs with the word LSD in their title, a quick glance at Discogs shows an entire blotting pad of potential candidates. So I’ll let someone else do the leg-work on that one.

This post is less ambitious, prompted by a brief history of surf music in Rob Chapman’s Psychedelia and Other Colours. The Gamblers receive a mention for being the first group to record a piece of music with LSD in the title: LSD-25 was the B-side of their first single, Moon Dawg!, released in 1960. Moon Dawg! has the distinction of also being one of the first (if not the first) surf singles, and was later covered by The Beach Boys on their debut album, Surfin’ Safari (1962). With its hyperactive drums and twanging guitar Moon Dawg! certainly sounds like a surf number, whereas LSD-25 is more like one of Link Wray’s smouldering instrumentals. I’d heard the A-side on a Cramps-related singles compilation, Loose Lips Might Sink Ships, but hadn’t heard LSD-25 before so this is a welcome discovery. Someone had to be first with the LSD reference (chosen at random by a studio engineer according to Chapman), and we could have done much worse than this.

The Gamblers only recorded one more single before disbanding but guitarist Eliot Ingber had a distinguished career playing with Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention, Little Feat, Captain Beefheart (as Winged Eel Fingerling), and (I didn’t know this) as a member of The Peter Peter Ivers Band (sic) on Terminal Love (1974). You may not know Ivers’ name but you’ll probably know his voice when it appears in David Lynch’s Eraserhead in the guise of the Lady in the Radiator singing In Heaven.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• More trip texts
• Trip texts
• Acid albums
• Acid covers
• Lyrical Substance Deliberated
• The Art of Tripping, a documentary by Storm Thorgerson
• Enter the Void
• In the Land of Retinal Delights
• Haschisch Hallucinations by HE Gowers
• The art of LSD
• Hep cats

Us Down By The Riverside, a film by Jud Yalkut

More psychedelic freakery from American filmmaker Jud Yalkut. Us Down By The Riverside (1966) is short and sweet: three minutes of acid visuals accompanied by a muddy recording of The Beatles playing Tomorrow Never Knows. Groovy. For a very different take on John Lennon’s psych-out, see the penultimate episode of cartoon show, The Beatles.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The abstract cinema archive

Turn, Turn, Turn, a film by Jud Yalkut

I’m currently reading my way through Rob Chapman’s lysergic doorstop Psychedelia and Other Colours, a comprehensive study of a cultural phenomenon that’s well-represented on these pages. So expect more posts like this one which concerns another gem of abstract/psychedelic cinema. Turn, Turn, Turn (1966) is a collaboration between Jud Yalkut (visuals) and the Us Company aka USCO (sound). The latter receive several mentions in Chapman’s detailing of the early psych scene in San Francisco in the mid-60s; here they put a Byrds song through the mangler while Yalkut’s mechanical and other effects flicker and gyrate. The visuals are reminiscent in places of the film made by László Moholy-Nagy of his Light-Space Modulator, fittingly so when Chapman credits Moholy-Nagy’s machine with being one of the many forerunners of psychedelia in the art movements of the early 20th century.

The YouTube copy linked here has a bonus at the end with a truncated version of a later Yalkut collaboration with Nam June Paik, Beatles Electronique.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The abstract cinema archive

Weekend links 277

Sunday by Amanda Elledge.

• Coming from Strange Attractor this November: The Moons at Your Door, an anthology of strange tales selected by David Tibet. “The Moons At Your Door collects over 30 tales, both familiar and unknown from: Robert Aickman, Algernon Blackwood, DK Broster, AM Burrage, RW Chambers, Aleister Crowley, Sheridan Le Fanu, Elizabeth Gaskell, WW Jacobs, MR James, Vernon Lee, LA Lewis, Thomas Ligotti, Arthur Machen, Guy de Maupassant, Perrault, Thomas De Quincey, Saki, Count Stenbock, Montague Summers, HR Wakefield and Edith Wharton. The volume also includes extracts and translations by the author from Babylonian, Coptic and Biblical texts alongside poems and fairy tales.”

• Gay-rights activists give their verdict on Stonewall: “This film is no credit to the history it purports to portray”. The only surprise about this episode is that anyone expected Roland Emmerich to make a historically accurate film in the first place. Related: Edmund White’s first-hand report written a few days after the riots.

• “If you hate [Boom!], I hate you, and I could never be your friend or your boyfriend. Divine and I had seen Boom! right before we made Pink Flamingos, and it’s about Elizabeth Taylor, retired, writing her memoirs, which is what Pink Flamingos was too, in a way.” John Waters (again) gives Hayley Campbell some dating tips.

• “We moderns may too-often suffer from a mixing up of historical sequences, but better that, surely, than risk raising a population that is entirely not-arsed about its past.” Julian Cope explores the Celts: Art and Identity exhibition at the British Museum, London.

• “But I am talking about psychedelic music, and obviously some of that comes from early psychedelic rituals, which are all about losing yourself…and I did come back into the world in a different way.” Natasha Khan on her new musical project, SEXWITCH.

• At Dangerous Minds: Vincent Price teaches the dark arts on his 1969 album An Adventure in Demonology.

• A trailer for Salthouse Marshes, “a short, landscape obsessed ghost story” by Adam Scovell.

• Rare video of Young Marble Giants playing for 45 minutes in Vancouver, 1980.

• A collection of Ghost Box posters and flyers designed by Julian House.

• Mix of the week: Secret Thirteen Mix 163 by Ssleeping desiresS.

• Ministry, a new photo series by Ellen Rogers.

• Julia Holter‘s favourite albums.

• Boom Stix (1962) by Curley & the Jades | Things That Go Boom In The Night (1981) by Bush Tetras | Boom! (1991) by The Grid