Like the decade in which it unfolded, the West Coast – or California – sound started with breezy sunshine and ended in existential darkness. Consider how the Beach Boys summed it up. In 1962 they were loading up their woody with surfboards, singing their songs; by 1971 they were a cork in the ocean, lamenting the deep valley that “killed their soul”.
The surf-pop explosion that rolled in with Wipe Out and Surfin’ USA began a high-speed evolution with countless stylistic twists and turns, and bands that were both durable and dodos. But the cream of the West Coast sound was produced between 1965 and ’68, in a time when the light was first merging with the dark. In Los Angeles, that meant everything from The Byrds’ jingle-jangle and The Doors’ hippie poetry to the Flying Burrito Brothers’ cosmic country and The Ventures’ twangy themes.
Up the coast in San Francisco, Jefferson Airplane were supplying the fuzzed-out soundtrack to Ken Kesey’s acid-test parties, and the Grateful Dead were jamming to the pulsing blobs of psychedelic light shows. Spinning in their freak-out orbit were Moby Grape, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Big Brother & The Holding Company and It’s A Beautiful Day. And although California laid claim to 95 per cent of the West Coast sound, Portland, Oregon gets an honourable mention for memorable garage rock contributions from The Kingsmen and Paul Revere & The Raiders.
Even though these West Coast bands embraced the emerging LP format (with songs that were sometimes very long-playing indeed), many of their albums now have the feel of being musty time capsules. Over the years their legacies became better represented by singles. The lovely White Bird is enough to satisfy the It’s A Beautiful Day itch, and three minutes of Incense And Peppermints is plenty of the Strawberry Alarm Clock. So in assembling a Buyer’s Guide it seemed necessary to diverge from the well-worn, flower-strewn path and bring in a few lesser-known albums by such artists as The Seeds and the Gosdin Brothers.
Considering this rich, divergent catalogue of music 50 years on, the words of Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter seem more appropriate than ever: “What a long, strange trip it’s been.”
...and one to avoid
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