Segment 33

Right about now you may wanna take your protein pills, put your thinking cap on, and sharpen your number two pencil, because it’s time for another Way Back Studios pop quiz. Here’s today’s question: What do a Swiss scientist and an inventor from the Midwest have to do with some of the most famous songs in the Deep Tracks? The answer? Plenty. Lester William Polsfuss was born in Waukesha, Wisconsin in 1915. He went on to invent the solid body electric guitar, the instrument that made possible the sound of rock and roll. Lester was also a pretty fair guitar player who went by the name of Les Paul. As for the Swiss scientist, Albert Hoffman’s contribution to the Deep Tracks was a little something we call LSD, which he first synthesized in 1938 around the same time Les Paul was working on the multi-track recording process. Flash forward about thirty years and we find John Lennon taking acid and writing “I Am the Walrus” a song that was on Magical Mystery Tour, an album that wouldn’t have been possible without multi-track recording or LSD.

The same can be said about In Search of the Lost Chord, the Moody Blues album that gave us the track at the heart of today’s trippy batch of All Hand Mixed Vinyl. A lot of people think the song is called “Timothy Leary’s Dead,” when the actual title is “Legend of a Mind,” even though those words aren’t in the lyrics. Never one to leave well enough alone, I’ve broken the song into three parts and used the natural transitions between the parts to create some great segues, so get the wax out of your hearing holes and get ready for those. We’ll hear one going from a Ray Thomas flute solo into a trippy little flute part from Ian Anderson. The other two segues involve tracks from Magical Mystery Tour. One, “Your Mother Should Know” and then, at the end of the set, that song about the large amphibious sea mammal. But first, speaking of psychedelic, here’s the guy who gave us “Purple Haze.”

The story goes that John Lennon took parts of three different songs he was working on and cobbled them into that one about the corporation t-shirts and stupid bloody Tuesday. Around the same time he heard that a teacher at his former school was having students analyze Beatles’ lyrics, an idea John seems to have considered ridiculous, so he took some nonsense lyrics from an old nursery rhyme, added them to the song and said, “Let ‘em work that one out.” Before the Walrus, we had our way with one from the Moody Blues, one of those bands whose records could make a deejay kinda jumpy, at least back in the day when we were still playing vinyl on turntables. That’s because the songs on their albums tended to segue into one another, sometimes pretty abruptly. If you weren’t on your toes you could slip from one track into the next after you’d started another record, and the whole thing was an aural disaster. Here, instead of getting all jumpy, we just took advantage of it, and did our own segues.

First, we waited for one of tempo changes in the Moody Blues track “Legend of a Mind” and instead of allowing it to happen, we made the transition to the Beatles, “Your Mother Should Know.” Later, during Ray Thomas’s flute solo in the middle of “Legend of a Mind” we took the easy way out and slid over to Ian Anderson’s fluty intro for “With You There to Help Me.” But my favorite segue was at the end of “Legend of a Mind” where it sounds like a downward buzzing airplane that mixes perfectly with the swooping string intro of “I Am the Walrus.” Now, in keeping with the psychedelic nature of the set, we opened with Jimi Hendrix playing a space alien by the name of Mr. Paul Caruso. And we followed that with an instrumental by Shawn Phillips called “The Only Logical Conclusion OR Get Up Off Your Ass and Dance.” Well, I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together in the Way Back Studios. I’m Bill Fitzhugh, thanks for listening. I’ll be back with a fresh batch of All Hand Mixed Vinyl next time and I hope you’ll join us, right here in the Deep Tracks.