Psychedelic Psoul - The Freak Scene (1967) (1996)

The one and only Freak Scene record is just one chapter in the strange saga of entrepreneurial psychedelic pioneer/journeyman Rusty Evans, whose first album was the Deep's 1966 release Psychedelic Moods. Like that project, the Freak Scene was strictly a studio outing staffed by sidemen, not a full-fledged band at all. Nevertheless, Psychedelic Psoul's reputation as a psych-exploitation album is unjust; while the trippy themes and production techniques employed here would become clich?s of psychedelic-era rock, they weren't clich?s in 1967, when the style was still in its infancy. In fact, a strong case could be made for Evans being ahead of the curve. "Mind Bender," for instance, with its Dadaist recitations, throbbing pulse, and scrappy guitars, predated the Velvet Underground's very similar "Murder Mystery" by a couple of years. The combination of tape manipulation and exotic world music influences on the short instrumental "Grok!" seems rather prescient in retrospect as well. Besides, even if the most cynical opinions turned out to be true, and the backwards guitars, fuzztones, and "far out" effects overflowing from most of the tracks on Psychedelic Psoul were incorporated strictly in the interest of bandwagon-jumping, it was all done skillfully enough that it doesn't really matter, especially so many decades after the fact. Psychedelic Psoul stands as an evocative sonic time capsule, although "topical" spoken word pieces like "When in the Course of Human Events" admittedly haven't aged as well as the album's more conventional, melodic compositions. Followers of Evans' journey -- after the Freak Scene, he went on to make an excellent, atmospheric psych-folk album under the alias Marcus -- may be interested to note that Psychedelic Psoul's opening track, "A Million Grains of Sand," appeared in different versions on both Psychedelic Moods and the Marcus album.