However, the Chocolate Watchband were particularly good and energetic purveyors of same. I read in the liner notes to one of those comps that part of the fascination of their garage-styled material is the fact that the rhythm section just cannot get it together...ahead of the beat, behind the beat, on the beat but still wrong...(“...the beat goes on, and I’m so wrong...”)...the players just sort of clump around back there, yet in some mysterious way it all holds together. This is true.

In a separate but related development, I have also read that someone once tried to feed very early Rolling Stones into a computer to analyze it and figure out precisely what’s so magical about it all. Yes indeed, this has been standard practice with “pop” hits, done to determine if a melody is “hooky” enough for major record company investment capital to be put behind it. There’s a certain feeling of reassurance involved in hearing that this method will not work for punk and metal and grunge and garage and hardcore...the reason being that there ARE no melodies! Hahahahaha. I shit you not. The Stones track was out of tune, badly mixed, and contained nothing that anybody would be able to hum in an elevator. For just such reasons the computer was stumped. That mainframe is more fortunate than it will ever know, because if they’d fed an early Watchband tune into it, the resulting brownout would have affected the entire Eastern seaboard.

But what was memorable about the Watchband was their more maximally psychedelic material, which was more than hinted at on their first album but reached full fruition with The Inner Mystique. When two cultures collide, the stronger one must always consume the weaker; therefore, as 1966 gave way to 1967, the fuzztone and reverb had to yield to gongs, flutes, sitars, and the most incredibly cheesy horn charts ever to grace any pre-disco pop recordings. (Oops! I forgot all about ska. And so will you.) It was all in good fun.

My only bitch with this album: 26 minutes? With outtakes sitting in the can? How dare they!? Nowadays there are EPs longer than that! So often these truncated albums are among the very best, which is what’s so frustrating about them. Couldn’t they have coughed up another 10 minutes, somewhere? How difficult can it be?

Speaking of ten minutes, that’s just about the length of “The Inner Mystique,” the title track of the second album, an instrumental that just reeks of psychoactivity. A hypnotic bassline, gently shaken maracas, one-chord distorted rhythm guitar that seems to be saying “ommmmm” every four bars, some blissed-out flute here and a dash of sitar there--and the smell of incence fills the room. I gave a tape to a girlfriend once and (having never indulged) she noted that this music leaves nothing to the imagination--she now had a very good idea what it would be like to be stoned and was not at all averse. (We never indulged because I wasn’t into it either at that point, though of course I hope she availed herself eventually.) Coming on the heels of such garage-punk stompers as “I’m Not Like Everybody Else,” one had to wonder if it was at all the same band; most likely it wasn’t but this was one of those times when the studio musicians had at least as much of a right to be making this record as did the band themselves.

It would seem this was one more case of a new group rocketed to semi-stardom via the machinations of their producer, too young and naive to have held out for creative control--which often meant they were exactly young and naive enough to make some supernatural music. It being the 60s, none of the cigar-chomping old-schoolers had a clue what would sell anyway, so some of these kids managed to break free for awhile. If they were the Electric Prunes, they got to unleash an album like (The Electric Prunes Travel Up To The) Underground, which carved their legend in stone. If they were the Chocolate Watchband, they put out One Step Beyond, the third album in which the band got to do everything they wanted, exactly the way they wanted. It stiffed, and it sucked, and the band was no more. Sometimes the svengali knows best. One Step Beyond had neither the punk swagger that had brought them to attention nor the orgasmatronic extensions that launched a thousand trips--this was simply some serviceable, utilitarian, bland kinda rock muzak.

The direction they should have gone in had already been staked out in happier days, when they were on the horns of the punk/psych dilemma. There were moments when the two styles would meld, and you’d get something like their cover of Dylan’s “Baby Blue” (my favorite rendition of the tune, bar none), in which the transcendental-folkrock extravagantastic production is capped with a Jaggeresque-sneering vocal that Mick himself in the prime of his youth would never have dared attempting to top. (Even more endearing because they got some of the words wrong.) But these were as nothing compared to what they achived in their finest (half) hour. It’s the space tunes like “Expo 2000” and “The Inner Mystique” title track (which, minus the guitar, would probably pass for New Age today), that will live forever, echoing eternally between the synapses I no longer have.