Day: December 30, 2012

Lee Dorman of the '60s group Iron Butterfly died this week.
YouTube has a song with one of his characteristic bass lines, "Soul Experience" -- a time capsule of West Coast psychedelia, with heavy spring reverb and echo-delay.
Content-wise, it has one of the stranger disconnects between verses and chorus.
It's not hard to imagine the singer (Doug Ingle) being a Manson-type crooning to one of his women. In the verses he softly and sweetly tells her to "live a little" and "don't bother painting your face." Then in the chorus the music becomes atonal and weird and he starts wailing like a horror-movie psycho: "JUST BE YOURSELF" with everything about his intonation saying "Just follow me - and Charlie doesn't like snitches."
The song perfectly encapsulates the 1960s mix of groovy slogans and mind control.
Anyway, bittersweet tribute to a man who just passed away but this needed to be written down.

Update: R. Stevie Moore, characterized by AllMusic as mixing "classic pop influences, arty experimentalism, idiosyncratic lyrics, wild stylistic left turns, and homemade rough edges" did a cover version of "Soul Experience," so there you go.