Not a 'necessary' record but the kind of album you'll find in the collection of any music obsessive with more money than sense. Err me. Bought who knows whe,n but almost certainly from a charity shop or at an extremely low price in a second hand record shop.
Tacoma Washington's The Ventures might be described as an American Shadows, both bands pretty much did the same thing on their respective sides of the Atlantic in the Sixties. Best known for their first hit single Walk Don't Run which reached Number 2 in the Billboard charts in 1960 and still sounds completely fantastic.
They never reached such giddy heights again, and became largely an albums band after this churning out one LP after another, generally pillaging whatever was in the charts at the time for undemanding instrumentals which they interspersed with compositions of their earth.
Super Psychedelics finds them in 1967, donning kaftans and trying to make their guitars sound like sitars. It's groovy I suppose, but only if you're a father of teenage kids who you embarass at every turn with your efforts to be down with the new sounds. They try their hand at Strawberry Fields Forever and A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You, and Happy Together, which understandably stand a level above their own stuff which makes up the rest of the record and is often slightly pedestrian
Nevertheless, it's an undemanding listen and a good one for first thing in the morning. The Ventures meanwhile went on to have a not inconsiderable influence on Television who lie perhaps at the opposite end of the hip spectrum music wise but were perfectly happy to namedrop them in interviews when journalists were expecting them to bang on about The Velvet Underground and The Byrds.
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