If You're Going To Detroit City, Be Sure To Wear Some Flowers In Your Hair Dept. - The Frost

I've ignored The Frost for decades because they're part of that sweaty, bare-chested, hard-rocking, gravel-voiced Michigan scene that passed me by completely, as culturally remote as Melanesian Root Music. I understand the appeal of, say, the Stooges, but I was never front n' center, never gobbled 'ludes, and never held down a real job (or real unemployment) in my life, so that whole scene is pretty much a closed book to me.

Color was made illegal in Michigan just after WWII, when an inexpertly-drafted law was passed and never revoked. "Public display and/or use of pigmentation in any form or media" was the blanket legal term, still in force today. In the late 'sixties, black-and-white T.V. coverage of the West Coast youth movement prompted many a teen to trek beyond the state line, and The Frost were among the first on the bus.

Their first album defines 'sixties psychedelia, from San Francisco dance hall freak-outs to swimmy raga-type trips. But the cover [left - Ed.], none more black at the band's insistence to allow sales in their home state, was totally misleading. If you've been as narrow-minded/discerning as I have, and missed out on this swell Pslab-o-Psych™, pick this up. Quality singing, for one thing, a surprise. Varied songs, for another, and everything as saturated with lysergics as this swell new cover, adapting a forgotten artwork by Rick Griffin, what I done yestiddy.

 

EDIT: A useful compendium of Vanguard psych, Follow Me Down, is added in the comments.

This post made possible thru th' patronage of Hymie's Hummin' Human Hymens©, Ann Arbor - "Th' Home Of Hummin' Hymens!"™