There’s a special place in my heart for the String Band; I’ve loved them for quite some time now. I’d loved any suggestion or hint of psychedelic music since my childhood way back in the 1960s. I still remember the day my oldest brother sat the entire family down in the living room and force-fed them In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida, figuring that if only they would allow themselves to experience the splendour, they would have no choice but to “get” it.

Even Dad? It was basically implausible, but not utterly so. Heavily catholic father + heavily catholic household + heavily catholic organ interludes in the tune = breakthrough/acceptance? Of course not, but it was worth a shot.

I can’t even remember how the family reacted, but as soon as I heard those fingers raking those guitar strings I knew I was hooked. It’s an embarrassing admission, but it’s no fault of mine that In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida was just about the hippest record in the house. If I had my way (retroactively) we’d have been well-stoked with everything from H.P. Lovecraft to Pearls Before Swine (or at least some Donovan fer chrissake), but there was nothing. A few Beatle albums, the first Vanilla Fudge, some Simon & Garfunkel, and that’s it. Later on, piles of British Blooze slop and a few Ravi Shankars that were so well hidden I didn’t know he’d been under our roof until the 80s. At the time, the only record that even hinted at what I wanted to hear was that dopey Iron Butterfly. I made do. I used to stone out with it as best I could betwixt headphones, even if phrases such as “stone out” weren’t even in my vocabulary yet).

Well into the mid-80s, it was depressingly difficult to find much of the stuff, beyond the obvious things like Sgt Pepper et al, most of which were too mainstream for me even then. There weren’t nearly enough truly weird old records back in print just yet. The psychedelic revival was just beginning to gear up and the CD revolution hadn’t quite begun yet either. I didn’t have access to too many used record stores, and when I did they were clogged with all the crappy British Blooze albums my brother’s friends had traded in years before. These things gradually changed, but not soon enough. In the meantime I worked in a supermarket, exiled among the grocery carts in the parking lot until the magickal day upon whence a kindly sire annointed me the visigoth of frozen food. I walked into the back room and found a co-worker unabashedly blasting the Stones’ Their Satanic Majesties Request (their greatest achievement) on his boombox. He had Floyd’s Piper with him as well. These being two of my favorite albums, and it being 1985, I figured we’d do well to pool our collections. (He also had a bad habit of scrawling Syd Barrett signatures and Donovan lyrics on the wall with an indelible marker, and tacking up pseudo-In His Own Write garble on the bulletin board, but I have my quirks too.) This all worked out rather well for a time, we fell into the habit of turning each other onto strange albums and finding better places to get them.

One day he mentioned he’d just picked up Seasons They Change (an import-only “Best Of” double LP), but felt he didn’t like their style--something about how Robin sings deliberately out of tune. I’d been curious about the ISB ever since reading of them in the Encyclopedia of Rock years before, but had only just copped a badly scratchy 5000 Spirits. I told him so, and that I found them “rather likeable. Charming, even!” So he borrowed that, gave it a good pharmacological listening and ended up agreeing with me. He then did the same with Seasons They Change, and liked it so much he gave me a tape of it. It blew me away so much I entitled the tape Cosmic Wow, bought every ISB album that ever came near me (and nowadays every CD that I can afford), and saw Robin in concert whenever he would came by (and it’s been far too long).

Many’s the time I found myself singing “May the longtime sun shine on you/All love surround you/And the pure light within you/Guide your way on” to myself like a mantra out in the parking lot as I retrieved the shopping carts. I soon learned that I could depend on this band for fun, frolick, uplift and wisdom; as a source of infinite comfort, and an invaluable component in my grand strategy for surviving the 1980s. Unfortunately for my friend, his musical tastes “matured” as the decade ground on. No matter how much acid he took, he was always a bit of a poseur--liking the right thing but for all the wrong reasons (to horrify his parents, say, or to impress gawd-only-knows-who, but they didn’t even have a frame of reference in which they could be impressed). He turned me onto a lot of music so I’ll be charitable, but I bet he hasn’t played the String Band for a good ten years. Right around the time I lost track of him he was listening to things like The Sugarcubes, but as for me, everything’s fine right now.

I could wax embarrassingly sentimental and downright mystical about how much joy this music has put into my life, and maybe I will another time. For now I’ll simply note as I must that they managed four or five phenomenal albums in the 60s (everything from The 5000 Spirits through Changing Horses, with Wee Tam my personal favorite), fueled by LSD, all manner of British whimsy, and the occult knowledge of a hundred secret traditions. They could do no wrong. They could get away with “A Very Cellular Song,” an 11-minute epic on the lifestyle of an amoeba, sung in the first person. They could write about a lovelorn cloud, ducks on a pond, or a log cabin home in the sky--and come out of it far more lovable than laughable. They could do anything.

Then disaster struck--the acid gave way to $cientology. Once they cleaned up their act, their act became much less interesting. The seeming ineptitude (a healthy offhandedness, anyway, about the occasional wrong note) that had been so charming in their early days soured into real ineptitude, sloppiness unredeemed. The lyrics had always had several layers of meaning, but the pithiest double-entendres had become code for various $cientology concepts and practices, leaving all the freaks, pagans and hippies-oh-my who were their core constituency out in the cold and wondering what the hell had happened to them anyway.

Some of the problem--$cientology encourages its followers to be lucid communicators and good businessmen, and the String Band seemed to feel they were merely applying sound business principles. They now did their utmost to be ever more accessible, so as to maximize market share. Toward the end, they even gave up on most of the musical idiosyncracies, discarding most of their hundred ethnic instruments; veering toward a conventional 70s rock format and production values, downright slick eventually. To some extent they were doing exactly what they wanted to do (what Mike wanted to do--he was the rocker and Robin the folkie), and to some extent they were doing what they had to do to survive. In the end, though, they illustrated as well as anyone how sad a thing it can be to sell out, only to find no-one willing to buy.

My younger brother used to opt for whatever flavor-of-the-month was the current metaphysical buzz. (The New Age, remember that? The String Band in their prime were the thing itself before the term existed!) I’ll never forget the time he read the Ruth Montgomery paperback on “Walk-Ins” (enlightened souls who “walk in” to the body of some poor schmuck who’s had enough and just wants outta here) and decided that he was a “Walk-In.” Except he was confused because there were things in his life that didn’t quite fit the profile. So he wrote Ruth, asking her to ask her Guides for guidance. She returned a postcard saying that her Guides wouldn’t be able to answer individual queries but she was sure he’d find his answers if he bought her new book. (For which I don’t particularly sneer at her. She was morally superior to all the Robert Tilton types my older sister wrote to for her guidance!) At least she admitted she didn’t know, and that was the last I ever heard on the subject of “Walk-Ins.”

I’ve never had anything to do with $cientology, and I have the negative example of the String Band to thank for it, so that’s one more I owe them. But one day, sure enough, my brother suddenly commenced to talk up $cientology and all the wonderful things he’d heard it can do for people. *sigh*

He couldn’t be swayed by the obvious objection, i.e., isn’t it a little embarrassing to sing the praises of a church founded by a sci-fi (Not “science fiction.” There’s a difference) hack writer who often boasted to his friends that the way to make real money was to start a church? Naaah, you can never point out the obvious flaw; there’s already a defense mechanism in place to neutralize whatever point you care to make, no matter how correct. So I told him about the String Band instead (and two or three other half-remembered tales of degradation involving other ex-cultmembers). If I’d been feeling really sadistic I’d have played him No Ruinous Feud, but it never came to that. He never brought it up again.

All of the above notwithstanding, I have a perverse fascination with bands past their prime. I listen to Street-Legal far more often than to anything Dylan did in the 60s. Some of the reason is that he tries so much harder, and with so much stacked against him. My natural love for the underdog takes over and I want him to get whatever he’s after, even though I know perfectly well he never will because it no longer exists. I can’t help him with his problem, but I can listen to the damn album, and it’s a good thing because nobody else ever does, poor thing. It therefore follows quite naturally (from empathy, not masochism) that I’ve listened a lot to some of the dreaded 70s ISB material.

There’s something sad and soulful about all those forlorn 70s albums by people like Spirit, the Pretty Things, Donovan and the String Band that keeps me involved no matter how dire the music gets. Five or ten years after the fact, a million miles removed from everything that put them in a position to make albums in the first place, and utterly clueless how they got from there to here much less what’s left to write about now they’ve arrived--they’re stuck. Whether they’re capable or not, they have no choice. Against their will, almost (certainly against their better judgment), they sling some kinda LP into the bin and then have to go out and face their fans and play the tunes. People like Julian Cope and Robyn Hitchcock can crank out a dozen brilliant albums in a row nowadays and get better as they go along, because they have no Glorious Past to live up to, a cult audience is all they ever have, and all they’ll ever have to answer to. But the oldtimers who showed them the way? They have no rest, they receive no mercy.

There’s something about seeing an artist so utterly boxed in yet still trying to do something that warms my heart, no matter what they come up with. Sometimes it’s self-parody, other times it’s some grotesque “new direction” (I’m still waiting for somebody to invent reggae-classical fusion). On rare occasions you see something extraordinary. You catch a glimpse of them improving in stasis--they pull themselves together (as together as the times and their own ravaged lives will allow) to create, and find themselves doing better work than whatever made them famous. Whatever they may have lost in vitality is compensated for by everything they now know, everything that killed their 20-year-old selves off so that their 30-year-old selves could live at all. Worst of all, as often as not they paint a latter-day masterpiece and then find, to their horror and chagrin, that nobody will ever even know. So chained are they to the expectations of their past; it's just one more album tossed on the big grey pile, and what the hell ever happened to that band anyway?

What did the String Band do in the 70s? Self-parody, new directions, some degree of consolidation and improvement--all of the above, and often on the same album. Mostly things got very dreary, but the light never went out entirely. No matter how pedestrian things eventually became, they never completely lost their touch. Each of their lesser and latter albums had at least one stunning track, and there is a generous sampling of hidden jewels scattered throughout to reward the careful listener. Arguably, 1972’s Liquid Acrobat As Regards the Air contains material even more adventurous than what they’d been doing on acid. Their final album, Hard Rope and Silken Twine, sounds so good today it gets nearly as much play from me as their 60s peaks. If you like that sort of thing.