Doooood, if you’ve been following this psychotic lo-fi series of posts all year, you’ve heard some hidden gems, some peculiar covers, some underground legends, and wacky side projects of people in more famous bands like the MC5. What you haven’t heard so far is some insanely obscure crazy psychedelic stuff from the 1960s, out-and-out relics that should have been left marooned on the Island of Bad Trips.

Well, today, I’m here to make up for that deficiency. Meet The Driving Stupid, whose couple smash hits (”smash” is relative to their other totally non-hits) included this gem, “Horror Asparagus Stories.” This is from Volume 3 of the Pebbles compilation series, which garage-psych addicts all know is one step obscurer than Nuggets.

Clearly the product of a k-hole (thanks, Hughes, for introducing me to that concept last week) or ingestion of some peculiar substance cut with rat poison or perhaps the same junk they make patchouli out of, this cut shows why so many thousands of obscure garage-psych songs never impacted the charts.

Of course, their total lack of chart success and our obsession with anthropological matters–and, let’s not forget, the record collector’s compulsive psyche–make them perfect for exploration here in 2008. Plus, even if it’s crap that never charted from the 1960s, I’m convinced (and I came of age in the 1980s, I’m no hippie relic myself) is about 20 times better than the crap on the pop charts today. At least they knew how to sing and play instruments, mostly.

Popularity: 4% [?]

My garage-rock/psychedelic collector-dweeb friends (and I am fairly dweebish in this regard, so don’t take that as some kind of slight) will accuse me of taking the week off, because this one’s a low-hanging plum to pick. But I’ll hazard a guess that few people outside the clique know the E! True Hollywood Story behind “The Magic Bus.”

The Who, it turns out, wasn’t the original recording artist. Tis true, Pete Townshend wrote the song somewhere around 1966. He cast it aside, completely consumed with this rock opera thing he was writing about some goofy Helen-Keller-as-pinball-messiah dude.

Some months later, while he was still engrossed in writing this damfool Rube Goldberg musical contraption, the label got a tad antsy about the fact there wasn’t much Who musical output. Oh bloody hell, Townshend said, and cranked out a series of singles to satisfy his band’s obligations, “Magic Bus” being one of them, and the rest is history.

In the meantime, a no-hit wonder band called The Pudding had recorded the first version, which came and went without much fanfare. Clearly, Townshend had published the song with a pretty clear and detailed arrangement, because it’s amazing how it’s not so far from The Who versions–and The Pudding had no single to mimic.

The Pudding and a blue million other unknown–but totally great–English garage-psych bands of the 1960s are memorialized on the Rubble Collection, a 20-CD set guaranteed to sate the appetite of even the most hardcore geek of the genre…at least for a few days. The set’s chopped into two halves; “Magic Bus” is on Rubble Collection, Vol. 1-10. The rest of the set, Rubble Collection, Vol. 11-20, is equally awesome.

Popularity: 8% [?]

After the MC5 fizzled out in a drug-addled puff of bad karma smoke–long before legions of music fans could make heads or tails of them, let alone put them in the rock pantheon, which they later did–the band’s members scattered to the four winds. Lead singer Rob Tyner re-emerged with a band briefly called “The New MC5,” a name with which he wasn’t very comfortable.

Soon rechristened The Rob Tyner Band, the group played here and there a few times, including a couple Detroit-area gigs captured on the hopelessly obscure but well-worth-the-chase Rock And Roll People. Just like MC5’s seminal “Kick Out The Jams,” these tracks a rough, live, and loaded with the same high-octane rock blast–and although they don’t have the same fire and brimstone of the Five’s double-barreled guitar attack that featured Wayne Kramer and Fred “Sonic” Smith, they are classics in their own right. Here’s the Rob Tyner band’s cover of “Tutti Frutti.” Do not play this song anywhere near an open flame; it’s pretty combustible stuff.

Popularity: 10% [?]

It’s been a long time coming. I’ve waited for some months to bring this pain, namely MP3s finely crafted from my new USB turntable. Mind you, we’re not talking just any MP3s, but obscure crap loved by the Seattle underground in the Prime Grunge Era of the early 1990s and highly sought-after by collectors today. Crap so obscure, a lot of it only came out on 45-rpm records. Crap that was sent to me back when the labels had adequate promotional budgets and I was still considered cool enough to comp with free vinyl.

And, I might add, this isn’t just any turntable I’ve acquired to inflict this beautiful music upon you, the Lo-Fi faithful. It is a $65 piece of trash I got off eBay. Especially for you. Before I plonked down the PayPal money for a turntable to digitize this essential music stranded on an obsolete medium, it occurred to me that a vintage Marantz or Thorens turntable with its perfectly balanced thousand-dollar diamond Groovitonium (TM) cartridge would totally defeat the purpose of this section of Popdose. You gotta match the tools to the job, right?

Without further ado, I give you “Go Away” by the Sinister Six, issued on 45 as eMpTy Records MT 187. If you’re lucky, you might get the even worse B-side down the road at some point.

Popularity: 9% [?]

The MC5 burned out and faded away so quickly, caving in under the weight of their own drug habits and personality conflicts in the early ’70s, that the punks they inspired couldn’t give them a proper burial. A couple years after their implosion, guitarist Fred “Sonic” Smith (trivia: he went on to star in the role of Mr. Patti Smith until he died of heart failure in 1994 at the tender age of 45) formed an underground supergroup called Sonic’s Rendezvous Band from the ashes of the Stooges, the Rationals, and the Up.

Sonic never let up on the gas pedal, playing fiercely in this band like he did with the Five. The band released only one single, “City Slang,” but left enough tape behind for Easy Action Records to issue a six-CD set of basement tapes and live recordings a couple years back, and it contains the stuff that legends are made of. (Bullz-Eye’s Una Persson, who hipped me to this box, calls it “slop rock.”) It’s a find that makes garage-heads revel in blistering distortion splendor.

So what if the mics aren’t quite dialed in or the crowd noise is a little too prevalent? What, you want clean digital sound? If that’s your bag, man, click the heck away from this feature that brags about being “lo-fi.” Perhaps check out Popdose’s “Clean Hi-Fi Boring Friday” instead. Oh wait, that’s so uncool no one’s doing it. Well, as long as you’re here, get a load of Sonic’s “Do It Again,” and if you think that’s a hunka righteous Dee-troit rock, check out the video for “City Slang” below.

Popularity: 7% [?]

Some no-compromise music fans — especially those with ears tuned to the blues-centric, distortion-fueled sound that comprises the DNA of all quality rock, ever — would say that Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks are not only are responsible for making pop music the Superfund cesspool that it is today, but they also poisoned what was one of the greatest blues-rock bands of all time. Other people might have a slightly dissimilar telling of the events we’ll call The Christine McVie-As-Yoko Theory.Still others might say that Fleetwood Mac founder Peter Green did it himself, squandering away his genius with drugs and letting his sometimes-fragile mental health go to seed. In this reality, his bandmates, left to their own devices, did what they had to do to stay in business, make a living, and dominate the world’s airwaves.

Whatever your take on the events that shaped Fleetwood Mac’s history — if you want to win a bar bet, ask “I bet you don’t know who wrote and originally recorded “Black Magic Woman”; that, my friend, would be Peter Green and Fleetwood Mac — it’s hard to dispute the contention that Peter Green played some aggressive, wonderfully grungy blues noise. You can bet Jon Spencer heard Green’s records more than a couple times before erecting his Blues Explosion — which sounds a lot like a tribute to “1.0″ Fleetwood Mac. (more…)

Popularity: 12% [?]

Before he busted into the mainstream with Live Bullet in 1976, Bob Seger was a slammin’ garage rocker out of Detroit, building his legend as a hard-working performer who played loud and hard. I kid you not, I worked alongside a vintage Segerhead at a furniture factory in Archbold, Ohio, for a few summers in college, and this guy swore Seger wrote “Turn the Page” because he was getting old and needed a blow during his high-energy shows of the era.

Seger’s career has two halves: the decade before Live Bullet, when he was tearing apart clubs on a nightly basis, and the decades since, featuring the peaceful, easy, kinder, gentler, mainstream Bob that most rock fans know. Here’s to the Old Bob and his regionally popular first band, the Bob Seger System.

Check out one of his early hits from the late 1960s, “Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Man,” below. This rendition features the stud himself playing, of all things, what appears to be a Vox Jaguar (sigh … but I ain’t sighing about “the Old Bob” — I’d love to have that keyboard). The show is called It’s Happening, a Dick Clark venture also known as Happening ‘68 in its first season and Happening ‘69 in its second, according to the Internet Movie Database.

Popularity: 9% [?]

The hilarious little rocker known as “Potato Chip” predates the current obesity crisis. Even though I know that, since I started listening to garage rock in earnest at about the same time I was walking off 57 pounds during the early 2000s, an alternate interpretation of this song strikes a chord: It really captures the allure of potato chips. They are sooo good. They rock. They make me, too, flip when I get my grip on a crunchy, munchy potato chip, that’s for sure.

That’s how Ruffles and Lay’s built their brands: They are so awesome to eat. Especially when coated with MSG-infested, day-glo orange, fake cheddar powder. But as the Shadows of Knight warn, these starchy little crisps have a dark side: They will turn you into a mass of class, a real gas — if you know what they’re getting at. From Pebbles, Vol. 1.

Popularity: 10% [?]

Rock really is three chords. Everything else is window dressing or some arranger getting cute. Or Steely Dan — which some people argue is, actually, far from rock.

In the case of “Alki Point,” a simple Seattle instrumental jam from a regionally popular band back in the 1960s, it’s three chords and one hell of a Wurlitzer piano (think Ray Charles’ “What’d I Say”) backed by a spot-on rhythm section. Dig it. From Northwest Battle of the Bands, Vol. 2 (Knock you Flat!).

Popularity: 9% [?]

Seattle spawned the 1980s-1990s garage rock revolution for good reason: Garage rock thrived out there during the 1960s, and record collectors will buy any compilation of any bunch of two-bit high-school bands that played sock-hops back in the day.

Why?

Dude, they rocked. Kurt Cobain wasn’t no slouch but The Sonics were the granddaddy of them all. They begat Green River, Mudhoney, and a billion flannel shirt sales. (more…)

Popularity: 13% [?]