Canned Heat is an American rock band formed in Los Angeles in 1965. The group has been noted for its interpretations of blues material and for its efforts to promote interest in this type of music and its original artists. It was launched by two blues enthusiasts, Alan Wilson and Bob Hite, who took the name from Tommy Johnson’s 1928 “Canned Heat Blues”, a song about an alcoholic who had desperately turned to drinking Sterno, generically called “canned heat”. The music and attitude of Canned Heat afforded them a large following and established the band as one of the popular acts of the hippie era. Two of their songs – “Going Up the Country” and “On the Road Again” – became international hits. (More from Wikipedia)
“LSD-25” by the Gamblers is one of several surf instrumentals toward the end of the Pebbles, Volume 4 CD. This track dates from 1961; the allstar line-up includes Bruce Johnston, Larry Taylor (later in Canned Heat), Elliot Ingber (Fraternity of Man, Captain Beefheart, Little Feat, etc.), and famed drummer Sandy Nelson. According to the CD’s liner notes (by Nigel Strange): “Actually, surfers were the first subculture to embrace LSD, at a time when it was almost exclusively the plaything of the academics. With their footloose existence, and a sometimes mystical rapport with the ocean, the early surfers (we’re talking years before the craze, of course) were in many ways the true inheritors of the beatniks’ existential tradition, standing outside normal society and contemplating the void. In any event, this must surely be the first acid reference to appear on a record by several years.”
(December 2014)
