Tuesday, September 3, 2019

Mom's Boys Blow Their Minds

Another in our much-vaunted (ever vaunted? try it some time - why not start your own Vaunting Club? Invite the gang around to your secret Vaunting Clubhouse and issue swell Vaunting Club pins and membership cards! Oh boy!) series featuring wholesome young fellows who fall in with the wrong "set" and enter a downward spiral of drug addiction, psychedelic "rock", and sexual promiscuity!


The Tokens you know about, uh-wim-o-wey  uh-wim-o-wey, but did you know that their moms got together and thrashed record label boss Jerry Blaine with their purses in his office, so enraged were they by the direction their boys were taking? "Those dames put me in hospital!" Blaine reminisced yesterday. "Me, an old man already! Still, I'm dead now and in Heaven, I should thank them. They was right - I ignored my duty of care. These were good boys!"


It's not only the world that was happening - The Happenings sure were "happening" when they made this album! Getting the taste for psychedelics recording Psycle [here somewhere - look for it yourself fer crissakes - what am I, a search engine? - Ed.] they decided to overdose with Piece Of Mind, which is exactly what their moms gave them. "You were so happy doing weddings! You looked so nice and made your mothers proud!" 


The Tradewinds were New York's premier surf group. They could often be seen waxing their boards at Coney Island or riding the Big Kahuna at Rockaway. Then some long-haired weirdo spiked their root beer with acid and look what happened - they took a Mind Excursion. But that hippie freak woke up to find himself at the bottom of the Hudson River, courtesy of a concerned uncle with "connections".

5 comments:

  1. I'll up these as soon as I come down from the contact high they gave me.

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  2. Nothing better than seeing the good kids go astray.
    Thanks!

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  3. The Tradewinds got to tour with the Rolling Stones in the summer of 1966...the McCoys and the Standells were also on the same tour. Including the local opening act, I heard 3 versions of "Gloria" that night.

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  4. Thanks for the comments!

    On re-listening, I should have given Piece Of Mind more credit. It's one of the great pop-psych albums. And it has a sense of optimism that's almost heartbreaking today. All that "change is coming, new day" stuff. You don't hear that anywhere in the bleak wastelands of contemporary pop. Somewhere along the line we had our future stolen from us - I remember when it was a good place to be. Albums like Piece Of Mind, so easy to dismiss today with a cynical sneer, were honest expressions of hope. Ask a Millennial about hope.

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