How To Choose A Psychedelic Record

So!

You like vinyl. You love psychedelic music. You want to hear something new &mdash something trippy, something out of its head. Something that will drive you totally bonkers and accompany you on some late night spacing.

But when you look through the listings of psych vinyl LPs for sale, they're full of albums you know you love, plus a lot of interesting-looking things that you are unfortunately totally unfamiliar with. Even Google searches turn up nothing about this unknown (to you) record or artist. We've all been there, and it's hard to spend money on something you are totally unsure of. So how do you choose?

In short, don't be so unsure — use what you have to help you decide. For one thing, you can read the seller's description. This will be highly subjective obviously (if provided at all), but you can often get a pretty good feel for the music inside. This is especially true if the seller is also a fan of psychedelia (you can just tell).

One helpful thing that sellers on eBay sometimes do is provide audio clips of the album or 45 they're selling. These auctions and sales usually have "LISTEN" or "HEAR" (and sometimes "CLIP") in the auction's title. (Go to any of the listings pages on www.psych-vinyl.com and type listen or hear in the search box and you'll see what we mean.) This is especially great for records that have never been released on CD, because if a seller knows how to play an LP into his computer to upload the clip to eBay, that seller also likely knows about records and quite possibly about psych records particularly, and is a serious, reliable eBayer besides.

One thing you have to keep in mind is to take the title of the auction or sale with a grain of salt. The word 'psych' is a big seller of vinyl, and lots of music that is only tangentially psychedelic, or not at all, can get called psych. (We recently noticed someone selling A Hard Day's Night by the Beatles as 'psych'. It's a fantastic record, the best of the early Beatles, but it isn't psychedelic and the seller knows it.) This seems to have come about due to mid-1960s garage rock morphing slowly into what could be called psych, and that was just extended backwards a few years to include any pared-down guitar group pop music. This also works in the other direction — even groups like Amon Düül got more commercial as they moved on from their manically psych/prog roots, and sometimes very un-psychedelic soft rock is labelled as psych by sellers and auctioneers on eBay and elsewhere. (This has been happening since even before the internet in record-collecting magazines.)

Sometimes the record itself makes it easy for you. If the sale's title is "Early psych-fuzz 45" but the group is called The Four Singing Sophomores and they're all dressed in identical sweaters, the 'psych-fuzz' description may be a bit unreliable. Then again, if an album is called Ptah's Audio LSD Lemonade and the artist is called the Toasted Sugarcubes, consider that might be a safer bet!

But! And here's the fun part. Once you've decided a seller seems to know what he's talking about (or you trust his listing for whatever gut-instinct reason), just go ahead and judge the book by its cover. That's right, look at the album cover, consider the band's name, or song titles, or whatever info you have. You don't have to do any research to choose a psych vinyl LP or 45, just go with what your instincts tell you. You may be wrong, and you may be right, so buy a few LPs that are $10 or less and give 'em a spin, decide how you feel about them, and go from there. (If you're lucky you can find one seller that is selling a few LPs you'd like to try, and you pay for only one shipping cost.)

And that's really what it all boils down to: using your gut instinct and prior experience with buying and listening to obscure psych vinyl to pick something new. Try to find psych vinyl LPs that have audio clips on the seller's page. If something catches your eye but has no audio clip, ask yourself what you think about the cover? The seller's description? And then ask yourself "Buying this album — Yes or No?" Because those are the only two options; if it's yes then go for it. If it's no, then keep looking. If you absolutely can't decide, take a chance.

And don't worry about any paucity of fantastic, new (to you) psychedelic music... there's way more way out there than you think.