The Ultimate Spinach: Ballad Of The Hip Dead Goddess

03.24.2014
04:55 pm
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Music
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The Ultimate Spinach

The Ultimate Spinach were a “Bosstown” band signed to MGM Records with the most sixties-sounding name this side of Lothar and the Hand People (and like Lothar and the Hand People, they also utilized the theremin). The group was initially a duo, composed of keyboardist / guitarist / multi-instrumentalist Ian Bruce-Douglas and singer Barbara Hudson, although they became augmented by other players for their first album (which is the one to get). As you might expect, with a name like that, The Ultimate Spinach were… groovy, baby…

“Your head is filled with garbage creams and orange coloured sounds, you think that you are flying high, but you’re really coming down!”

Actually, as silly as that sounds, it was all a bit tongue in cheek. Like Frank Zappa, Ian Bruce-Douglas took a very jaded view of hippie culture, something that apparently went over the heads of many critics who thought The Ultimate Spinach were a “fake” psychedelic weirdo act from the musical backwaters of Boston trying to cash in on the latest fad (“real” psychedelic weirdo acts from San Francisco). In fact, heard from the perspective of today, the lyrical preoccupations of The Ultimate Spinach were often oddly paranoiac for the hippie era and focused on things like “mind games” and “head trips.”

Although their debut album is said to have sold over 100,000 copies within the first two weeks of its release—it hit the top 40—The Ultimate Spinach never made it, but they gained a bit of notoriety for their longer form feedback and reverb-laden psych freakouts, such as this eight minute and fourteen second-long gem complete with wicked theremin section and bloodless proto-goth female vocals:

“Ballad of The Hip Dead Goddess”

“Mind Flowers”—this reminds me a lot of The Velvet Underground’s “Ocean” meets 1972 Eno—and THAT FREAKING GUITAR. Holy shit is this one amazing (if yes, more than a little overlong...).