The Only Time Is Now

Blister-packed for your convenience, False Memory Foam© presents today four epochal albums as they very nearly might have been, from a past that's yet to come. There's nothing unfamiliar about The Kaleidoscope's Side Trips except the color cover. It's stereo (mono on request), no bonus tracks, mixing ... nada. Just this retina-blistering cover. It's a cornerstone album to anybody's psychedelic shack, from the time when there were no expectations, nothing to live up to or live down, and that spirit of innocence and bonkers experimentation runs through all these albums. It's almost impossible now to imagine a time when all this was being done for the first time - nobody was channeling [Millennial-speak for "copying" - Ed.] any other act, or ticking the boxes on a style menu like today's barrista bands. It was fresh, thrilling, and fun. And it still is.

Country Joe & The Fish's first album is here presented in the original mono, with the original, unused, cover. I've long maintained it's a better album than Sgt. Pepper (which I like well enough), to general snorts of derision. I like it better, then - will that do? It captures the swirliness of the times like a genie in a bottle. The mono is neither better nor worse than the stereo. On headphones, I'll take the stereo. Pumped through a JBL sound pod, the mono. However you listen to it, listen to it. Timeless beauty and wonderment.

The Charlatans' first album, on Kama Sutra, was never released, because the suits were uncomfortable with the anti-drug song Codine. Presumably they wanted a pro-drug song? Given their scanty discography, the band recorded a shitload of tracks, most of which eventually saw a legit release. But they only recorded nine songs for the Kama Sutra album, and they're collected here with the rarely-seen original cover - the label even got the slicks printed up before they got cold feet. I've avoided the current archival tendency to pile on tracks from other sessions, so it's a very short album. Also very great.

We're never going to please Grateful Dead purists, whom I'm sure will get very sniffy at this assemblage of pre-first album Warlocks tracks. But nuts to them and their setlists. This plays like a coherent (and decent length) album, and it's scarily good. Like the Charlatans, these guys were so ahead of the times they were invisible. Mindbending stuff. Mike Stax [Ugly Things Ed. - Ed.] once told me he couldn't stand the Dead, but this early incarnation came close to getting a nod of approval. I done a spiffy op-art cover incorporating the great Herb Greene photo and some primitive copy-shop type distortion. The title of this piece comes from the second song in this set.