The Incredible String Band - The Big Huge

Before i inherited this amazing collection of music, The Gorey End by The Tiger Lillies and Kronos Quartet was the strangest album in my collection. The two albums i have by Rotary Connection are at least as equally bizarre, but this next album blows them all out of the water.

Tonight we are listening to The Big Huge by The Incredible String Band. First, some context.

This is actually the second half of a double album. The original release was Wee Tam and the Big Huge, but the american form of humanity couldn't handle it all in one package, so it was released as two separate albums here. Their self professed influence upon some really big name musicians might be a tad overstated, but it is a chronological fact that the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, and Led Zeppelin knew The Incredible String Band and attended their concerts before their own well know excursions into psychedelia.

"Psychedelic music" is a very on the nose family of genres. All of it's various subgenres are explicitly "[musical genre] on drugs" (or for drugs, or about drugs, you get the idea). LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, DMT, the audio/visual "mind expanding" stuff. In general, though, you get the sense that the genre actually came first. Take Jefferson Airplane, for example. They are essentially a rock band that took a lot of drugs. Hendrix was a rock/blues guitarist who took admittedly way too much LSD. Even Syd Barret was a fully formed pop-folk singer before the methaqualone zombified him. I get the exact opposite impression from Robin Williamson and Mike Heron. I truly believe they were professional space cadets from the start, and they took up folk music because they just couldn't seem to burn out properly and got really bored. I also think people didn't really understand what they were actually hearing at the time. Let's be brutally honest, Bob Dylan liked "October Song" so much because he could hear himself mimicing it.

And Robin and Mike were super competitive with each other, maybe not Liam and Noel Gallagher fist-fight competitive, but not far behind either. As their career progressed, pretty much everyone felt like i feel right now: are they serious, or is this a joke? Yeah, that's the official critical response to this band and we'll never get an actual answer to that question.

There's a popular theory that when a musical artist "jumps the shark," to borrow that cliched Happy Days metaphor, it's because they actually took a leap of genius so big that no one else could possibly follow it for at least a couple generations. No. These guys rode in on a rainbow colored unicorn, and everyone's brains shut down and all they could say was "would your magic horse like some of our apples?"

I imagine that had Ravi Shankar himself heard 4 seconds of this album, all he could do would be to pinch the bridge of his nose and say, "i REALLY don't like it, but he's technically playing the sitar better than a couple of my own worst students." Yes, they are by definition multi-instrumentalists because they can do whatever you want to call that on any instruments you hand them.

Believe it or not, this is actually work for me to get through. I am a professional music listener, and this feels like a whole lot of unpaid overtime. Don't get me wrong, there are genuine moments of actual folk by Heron, but then Williamson prances in front of him in his jester's bells and the only possible response you can have is "what the hell?" because Mike just follows right along with him like it's completely normal. By the way, that's not hyperbole, it's literally side b:

MH: what a lovely caterpillar.
RW: i was a dragon child.
MH: well, i was born without a head, and the guard at the toll bridge murdered me, and it was glorious.
RW: ... and we fall down as stardust to fertilize the earth.

[End scene]

I cannot picture any of you good people liking this. I can picture you laughing, but not saying "ooh! How intriguing. Let me hear more."  I respect it, but it's right at the edge of my tolerance for weird. I don't want that to scare you off, though. This is just my reaction to it. Please please please go listen to it for yourself. You're more than welcome to disagree with me (i disagree with myself all the time, ha ha), assuming you do. The important thing is actually listening to it, or at the very least as much of it as you can stand.

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