Freakout USA

 

(Sidewalk,1967) I am not a super psychedelic rock collector/genius/fan, so someone else should be writing about this, but I just want to get it out there in the conversation. Not sure why this comp's title was in the ether, but Western (magnificent publisher of Famous Monsters of Filmland, Vampirella, and Help!) had a magazine of the same name the same year, and a year earlier there was a 45 by The Communication Aggregation that was a kind of Zappa/Dickie Goodman hybrid. Basically this seems to be a fake comp of mostly fake psyche songs by some semi-real-ish and some fake bands. The brief liner notes celebrate "Season of the Witch" cover as being composed by Donovan, but they also celebrate the title track being composed by Mike Curb, who at the time had the hip rep from his biker/skater soundtracks (a rep he's lose a few years later when as a record exec he fired every band that was freaking out in the USA in his first act in a long anti-drug campaign that he would eventually bring to the Reagan administration). So I think this is a Curb studio concept where he produced different session cats and called them bands, but a couple of these bands (or at least band names) were briefly used outside of this. The two famous covers are "Season of the Witch" and "Psychotic Reaction," recorded by The Mugwumps (I don't think it's Lovin' Spoonful/Mamas & Papas hybrid group, and neither does Discogs) and Hands of Time (one single, on same label), respectively, but neither even lead off a side of the record. Other "bands" featured include The Glass Family (one contemporaneous single same label, then a bunch of records but not sure it's same band), Mom's Boys (one other Curb comp single), The Jesters (Discogs lists one other single, might not be them), plus  International Theatre Foundation,  Afttermath, and Everybody's Children (this comp is it for all of "them"). Nothing is amazingly transcendent and nothing is laughingly bad, so I can see why this is not legendary (though a few tracks got Pebbles-era comped) but as a solid piece of psychesploitation this should be better known.