Van Morrison denied ever being a hippie and he's so unfailingly grumpy that you might take him at his word. But this is surely pretty much the ultimate hippie album. None of its, yes twelve songs, sounds much like the other. It also doesn't sound anything else in my record collection and it spends most of its time on the shelf. Listening to it will take you to a time and place that really doesn't exist anymore, except perhaps in Goa or in communes in California or the like or within the confines of veteran hippie heads. This is probably inevitable. We really couldn't have continued acting this way except for those who made a conscious decision to drop out entirely and were fortunate or smart enough to be able to do so.
Parts of it are kind of beautiful in a beardy mystical way. It's consistently concerned with the far end of human consciousness and pondering on the human condition stretching towards other kinds of being. I'm slightly self-conscious even typing this stuff myself. It's music to take drugs to. The structures are unconventional and unpredictable. I imagine it's amongst many people's favourite albums but it's just too trippy to make me want to play it except very occasionally. Its best known song is probably Nature's Way which is the least far out thing on here. It was later covered on one of This Mortal Coil's albums. It's the song I'll return to most on here.
Their songs are written by a guy named Randy California which seems somehow appropriate. Their drummer was a shaven headed, extremely tall man called Jack Cassidy who had been born in 1923. He had a great CV having played with jazz greats Cannonball Adderley, Jerry Mulligan, Art Pepper and Roland Kirk amongst others. By contrast California was a child guitar prodigy who pre-deceased him by fifteen years, dying in 1997 aged only 45.
As I said I can't play it too often as it makes me slightly queasy. Bits of it remind me slightly of Steely Dan, both of them are inspired by jazz. This for example.
The rest of it seems to come from the time and place that gave birth to them. I hear bits of Beefheart, The Beatles Across the Universe, and the other psychedelic American groups. It's not typical of my tastes and though I can salute its sheer invention it doesn't speak to me in the way that Forever Changes, Astral Weeks, Piper at the Gates of Dawn, Os Mutantes and Safe as Milk do. Perhaps that's because it came out two or three years after all these records in 1970 when the hippie dream seemed a bit frayed and betrayed and a lot of the hippies had retreated to the hills. This sounds a bit like a missive dispatched from those hills. It lacks the beauty of all those records which all pretty much came at the dawn of the dream.
Still here's a review from someone who was there at the time and understands where it came from a bit better than I do:
'In 1973, I was an un-soldier stationed at a remote U.S. army outpost in South Korea. We lived in metal Butler huts (hooches), 12 people per hooch; and most of the guys in my hooch were draftees like me. We spent a LOT of time sharing aromatherapy materials and listening to all kinds of music, including Eddie Kendricks, Pharaoh Sanders, Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, Al Green, Donny Hathaway, the James Gang...and Spirit.
Many nights I would fall asleep with the Twelve Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus playing in the background, over and over again, on a small portable cassette player that had been left running because someone had been too stoned to turn it off. The player was set up to auto-repeat every time it reached the end of the tape, so this album was literally the soundtrack of my own dreams for months. I never got tired of it. It's magical music.
These songs have always been out there just sort of weightless, floating above all of the other tunes in my musical subconscious. I've never completely figured out the lyrics to "Nothing to Hide" or "Life Has Just Begun" -- the lyric translations submitted online are just laughable -- but it doesn't matter. My own personal soundtrack has changed over the years, so I hear different things now than I did when these 12 songs first got under my skin, 34 years ago. Sardonicus still gives me goose bumps today. '
So back on the shelf for my copy of Twelve Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus. It's probably best heard right the way through though you need to be of a certain disposition and specific tastes to do so. I'm currently hearing lot of hairy men harmonising 'life has just begun' at me from deep into Side 2 and think I need to replace it with something from a guitar group from the late seventies or early eighties when I developed my own tastes and groups informed by the more cynical punk years no longer felt they could do this to their listeners. Still, I don't altogether regret the hour spent with this record this morning. Give it a listen. You might like some of it.
P.S I've taken it off and put on the radio to be met by The Clash's London Calling which along with others wiped this stuff off the map for quite a while. There you go.
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