Much ink has been spilt over the 1968 Canadian garage, psychedelic album by the Plastic Cloud over the years and rightly so. Especially for fans of nonsensical , rambling fuzz guitar leads which dominate most of the tracks and seem at first self indulgent but soon after become crucial once your mind has been turned into jelly. A bit late in the day and/or lightweight for teen garage purists the Plastic Cloud still have punk appeal. There's also a glue sniffing reference in the track ' you don't care ' which must be the earliest of it's kind beating the Ramones ' now i wanna sniff some glue' by eight years. Radical shit .
Ok enough of the pioneering solvent abuse lyrics
Check out the groups schmutter. Chunky knits, chelsea boots, button downs, penny loafers { are we seeing a pattern here? } cool suede box jacket. But the chap on the right who i'm assuming is the main songwriter fuzz master Don Brewer has a style of his own.
Crisp Levi sta press , shirt tucked in, fab wraparound shades , regency style blazer complete with large badge saying what i don't know { please inform } and mysteriously holding a bizarre object in one hand to add to the psychedelic velocity and a fag in the other to keep things in the garage. Plus a cool side parting which is more 65 than 68 , hippy bores they ain't.
Don Brewer . Style icon , pioneer , Leader of Men.
The "thing" that Don Brewer is holding was the bands mascot, a furry pet spider named "gazoink" (don't even ask me what it means!)
ReplyDeleteBut yes, Don is really keeping it simple, like an updated version of the '66 punk style, looking at every band from '65 - beginning of '67, everybody looked like that; blazers, white button-down and pressed chinos.
A fag to keep things in the garage? that's a joke if I've ever heard it. A victory flame is nothing but a device to hold people down. Surprised these acid kids didn't realize that on their trip(s) but it goes to show now that the Baby Boomers went throught the spin cycle, wrote songs about how tuned in they were and then came out the other side to get lung cancer, become apathetic to their families valuing dollars over anything else essentially emulating the machine they also rap about in music -civilization machine - so what went wrong? Yes they left very interesting documents of the flash of their creativity but it all went to the wayside essentially. That's why so many of these unknowns were so shocked that this stuff was in demand - they changed so drastically with their worldview (good and bad) that they didn't realize they had hit upon something timeless when they were kiddies doing acid . Very few of those geezers continue the path of freedom and artistic invention . The rest just went back to work for the oil companies. This album is beyond garage punk fuzzers and more complex, hence your statement about it being light is way off base. There is a message in every song here.
ReplyDeletebtw , where does one find a blazer like Don wears even in this day and age that has Fractal patterns on it? that's a crazy blazer- if he took it off it would look like he's just one of the boys down at the 4H or glee club.
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