The Candy Rock Generation "Super Rock"

(1969, Columbia Record Club) Is it super? Yes. Yes it is.  There was always a budget/cheapo record option, and while just getting every song free digitally is the ultimate triumph for cheap asses, to understand the knockoff budget covers album industry it's better to consider at the last gasp of physical CD sales. Imagine that instead of getting you a copy of Now! That's What I Call Music Volume Zillion with recordings of your favorite stars, your mom brought home a Kidz Bop comp of incorrectly covered versions of hits with the wrong voices and dumb changes made, but they didn't mention on the record cover that it was for kids or screwy cover versions on the cover. So back in the day there were hundreds of records that looked they might sorta be Beatles albums with deceptive covers, hell there were even 20 different groups of high pitched bugs and rodents recording a track actually called "The Chipmunk Song." So these records were not rare, and they were not weird or unusual. Until they Beatles got weird ad unusual, kids got high, record labels followed the trends, and Columbia House decided to release a 3 LP box set of the biggest hits of acid rock, psyche, mod, and weirdo sounds. So anonymous studio hacks got to recreate Deep Purple, Doors, Iron Butterfly,  Cream, and the Stones' ode to street fighting and revolution. Plus ALL the Beatles songs that fit the profile. Some of the stuff included here is from less subversive genres, with  a few bubblegum and Motown tracks. And more jarring are just some completely wrong inclusions ("Shake Rattle & Roll" between Bee Gees and Joni Mitchell tracks?).

Obviously it should be the instrumentation and guitar sounds that stick out as bizarre rather than the singing, but for me it's not. Sure, there is a circus organ call and response on the Beatles' "Birthday," , and they don't even try to get the production sound right on "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida," but for the most part getting professional studio musicians to play "Hush" or "Penny Lane" gets you pretty true to the sound of the recordings -- these dudes own all the pedals, and they can simulate freakiness, and they can sure fake rawness (what teen garage record has guitar and drumming that sounds garage-ier than "Stepping Stone"). In fact some of the productions are freakier than the originals ("Yummy Yummy Yummy" sounds a lot more psychedlic). But the vocalists ca't fake freaky. and wrong-sounding singing turns out to be really jarring. Having a normie croon "Fire" by "Crazy World of Arthur Brown" is...crazy! It sounds like a high school play actor trying to emote, and ends with a Daffy Duck-going-kookoo impression! I don't even know who sings on the actual "Shape of Things To Come," but I definitely can't deal with the smooth crooner taking over. And Jim Morrison should be easier to impersonate than he actually is, it seems.

My friend who originally made a CD-R of this for me really loves these knockoff collections and claims there is a Woodstock album recreation where they "cover" the spoken warning about bad acid. Since then I will buy this on vinyl whenever I see it and give it as a wonderful gift to friends. Because I am your mom and don't know any better.