As a convenience to myself now, in 2024, I wrote this album up in 2011, declaring myself a nostalgist yet perhaps more skeptical than I am now of Iron Butterfly’s wonderful bombastic ode to the Garden of Eden. That write-up basically says all I have to say, except now I think I like the long song more. I am back on board with it, like when I was 14, as an example of psychedelic music that thrilled and scared at once and in effect showed the way. I would call up the local underground FM station late at night to request it (“long version!”), no doubt another dopey kid to the DJs. My favorite, always (because I slept with the radio on all night despite my parents’ efforts to stop this terrible habit), was waking up to it or something like it (say, Led Zeppelin’s “Dazed and Confused”). One time I woke up just as the weird scraping noises of “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida,” circa 11:00, had started, for a certain peak psychedelic experience in my dark bedroom in the middle of the night. I thought I said I wasn’t a nostalgist anymore?
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