Open Your Mind
In his first "Deep Cuts" column for Truth and Consequences, Ian Zimmerman takes a look at some far out Canadian electronic music and encourages you to open your mind!
I’ve been obsessed with records since before I can remember. As a three year old, my mother discovered me circling my kiddie record player, pumping my fist, to “Real Mad, Very Very Angry,” from a Sesame Street recording. At 9, I could be found air piano-ing to the musical explorations of the Café Carlyle house pianist, George Feyer. I bought my first album with my own money at 11 – John Lee Hooker “The Cream.”
For my column “Deep Cuts” I will be recommending some off-the-beaten path listens from the world of recorded music. I will do so while being separated from my vast collection of records, CDs, and reel to reel tapes. For family reasons, I’m currently cloistered in a small Nova Scotia fishing community, so I’m relying on streaming services and YouTube to aid in my musical curation.
In honor of my host country, I will be focusing on two groundbreaking psychedelic Canuck classics from 1968: “Peachy,” by Intersystems
and “Bedlam” from The Crazy People.
These are two very different head trips but they share a similar musical vocabulary. These records both contain spoken word and Musique concrète elements but their commonality is turning on the now generation - if you dig what I’m saying.
“Bedlam,” is a kaleidoscoped magic carpet ride that encourages you to “see the music and taste the colors,” but laugh and dance as well. It’s the creation of California jazz trumpet legend turned composer/arranger, Jack Millman, working under the pseudonym Johnny Kitchen. Jack was the owner and operator of Music Industries, a vast sound library located just off the Sunset Strip in West Hollywood. Music Industries provided the soundtracks to low budget exploitation pics, commercial films called industrials, UCLA student projects, and everything in-between. One day, Al Handelman, the young heir to a vast supermarket shelving fortune, walked into Millman’s office with a parrot perched on his shoulder. He wanted to make an album capturing the psychedelic experience. Millman looked at the parroted bohemian standing in front of him and remarked, “Everyone in this town is crazy!” From that The Crazy People were born! Soon after, Millman was contracted to produce a series of budget records for the Canadian based Condor Records and Millman and Handelman had the opportunity to bring the “Crazy People” project to life.
Digging into his vast sound collection Jack pulled out the most unusual material, recordings he’d collected but hadn’t known how and where to use. The end product is an irreverent and subversive collage, careening back and forth between fuzzed out acid rock, Dlyanesque folk/rock, Ellingtonian big band jazz, Latin jazz, Boogaloo, backyard chicken shack jams, and far out electronic transmissions from the world’s first “Interplanetary Space Society Band.” There are bits of John Cage-inspired prepared piano and even Ludwig Von Beethoven makes an appearance. These groovy vibrations are frequently augmented or interrupted by air raid sirens, cocks crowing, rockets blasting off, and other sounds of earth and beyond. Zappa-heads and devotees of outsider music will recognize the vocalizations of Wild Man Fischer who periodically bursts onto the scene chanting, “We’re the crazy people, We’re the crazy people!” There’s three spoken word pieces embedded inside the crazy quilt musical mash-up: an odd poem recited over light flute and piano jazz about a mythical Crete where “if you’re over six, you’re far too old.” A hilarious one-sided phone conversation that features a stuffed-up guy with a terrible “24 hour flu.” And finally, a sky-high pilot giving take-off instructions to a planeload of soon-to-be stoned passengers delivered alongside a Scarlatti harpsichord sonata.
“Bedlam” is an aural snapshot in time that features the sounds and pulsating energy of the Sunset Strip in 1968. Music from cutting edge bands like The Sound Machine and The Afro-Blues Quintet Plus One - bands that Jack produced - were already spilling out of the clubs up and down Sunset. Wild Man Fischer was just another character who ten minutes before he walked into Millman’s office was approaching strangers on the streets asking them, “Do you want to hear a new kind of song for a dime?” This was the “Bedlam” of Jack Millman’s world and it was wonderful.
If The Crazy People zooms right off the freeway, like one of Jack’s fancy sports cars, Intersystems is just the opposite.
A Toronto based arts collective and multi-media group, Intersystems consisted of four members: composer John Mills-Cockell, kinetic sculptor Michael Hayden, poet Blake Parker, and architect Dik Zander. Intersystems was born when Michael Hayden, an up and coming artist and impresario of psychedelic happenings hired Parker and Mills-Cockell to integrate sound into his light sculptures. This collaboration expanded and Intersystems’ presentations became full sensory experiences. One such event was a 10-room installation of sights, sounds, and smells called the Mind Excursion which became the centerpiece attraction of Festival ’67 at the University of Toronto. The event was organized by Hayden ostensibly as a celebration of psychedelia. Invited guests included Alan Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, The Fugs and noted promoters and practitioners of LSD use and other hallucinogens.
“Peachy” pairs Mills-Cockell’s music with Parker’s words. While its roots are firmly planted in the sounds that were coming out of electronic music programs on college campuses at the time, it expands far beyond it. In 1968, the MOOG synthesizer hit the scene. It had a keyboard and wasn’t just dials and jacks like earlier synths. “Peachy” is one of the first records to incorporate the MOOG. The album features an original mix of synthesized sine waves and oscillations, heavily altered live instrumentation, and tape manipulations. It opens and closes with two instrumental tracks. Parker arrives somewhere in the middle in the role of hipster poet-priest, spinning out three parables about men who walk from an urban center, through the outer suburbs, and into the country where they find a cave. Bits of Parker’s poetry and prose are woven throughout, but these darkly humorous fables are his primary contribution to the record. In the mind's eye, one can visualize the dramas unfold, almost in the style of the primitively animated educational or religious film shorts of the era, bouncing happily alongside Parker’s protagonists until there’s an abrupt conclusion, after which you are left slightly bewildered and ultimately bemused until the curtain falls.
Mills-Cockell’s compositions are a highly abstracted sound impression of these locales (city, suburb, country) and some of the “inner music” of the characters. You hear the echoes of the cave, the distorted voices and laughs of the people, snippets of a radio broadcast, perhaps from an open window. It’s a soundtrack of squiggles, gurgles, clangs, muffled percussion, rattling, sweeping noises, machine-like pulsations, eerie organs, detuned strums, drips, chimes, and satellite bleeps and bloops - each one a leitmotif that comes and goes throughout the journey. Unlike some electronic music of the period, one isn’t brusquely confronted by the sounds. You’re drawn in. You are buoyed in a dark but warm space, gently rising and falling as these sounds enter and exit. They are your helpful guides, not angry little goblins.
Think of each sound element of “Peachy” like paintings or sculptures in a gallery. They are part of a series and should be experienced both individually and placed into the context of a larger body of work. The record doesn’t contain traditional melodic and harmonic structures, making it less accessible to most musical ears. There are no catchy lyrics or anthemic choruses. The enrichment one gains from listening to “Intersystems” is achieved through letting go and meeting the music on its own terms. It relies on the listener being able to let themselves go and open their mind to a music in a very non-traditional form.
There’s been a great deal of ink spilled on the explosion of creativity that erupted musically in the late sixties. The popular narrative was that it reflected the seismic cultural shifts happening in society at the time. Indeed, just a few years earlier Musique concrète was presented at World Expos as the “music of the future.” Yet, these recordings were still consigned to the classical sections in record stores, where few younger listeners found them. However, as mind expanding drugs seeped into North America’s bloodstream from college campuses and bohemian enclaves, the mind expanding “music of tomorrow” joined the party. Like anything on the vanguard, its moment had arrived and the people were finally ready.
Ultimately, what links these two seminal works, isn’t just that they are psychotropic mind-benders but they are both products of serious composers creating a finished product by splicing magnetic tape with a razor blade. Millman and Mills-Cockell were masters of the mix. These relatively unknown classics laid the groundwork for the multi-platinum blockbusters of following decades. Public Enemy's “It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back” a blend of hip and hop and Musique concrète is just one example. “Peachy” and “Bedlam” are two unadulterated, unfiltered, uninterrupted musical trips that are well worth taking.
Intersystems’ “Peachy” is available on CD and LP through Alga Marghen Records. All three of Intersystems records can heard on Spotify and other streaming services.
The Crazy People’s “Bedlam” is available on LP, CD. and on Spotify and other streaming services. It was reissued in 2000 on LP and CD by Gear Fab Records. There have been several official and unofficial releases since then.
Further listening:
Edgar Varèse – Poem Electronic
Negativland – Helter Stupid
Igor Wakhévitch - Docteur Faust
Public Enemy - It Takes A Nation of Millions To Hold Us Back
A special thanks to Jack Millman and John Mills-Cockell for taking the time to engage with me for this article. They are not only great composers but exceptional humans too.