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.
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