The Chocolate Watchband – The Inner Mystique (1967): Featured on the definitive garage rock/psychedelic rock compilation album Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era, 1965–1968 (1972), the Chocolate Watchband has an appropriately weird name and hailed from the San Francisco Bay Area. Like many if not most of the cult psychedelic rock bands of that era – the 13th Floor Elevators, Strawberry Alarm Clock, Tomorrow, etc. – the band wasn’t together for very long. This album sticks in my memory banks as one that I spent too much money to get (never mind how much), but original releases by these bands were really hard to come by. This is the Australian release, which commands a premium over their American LP’s. The Inner Mystique was the final album by the Chocolate Watchband and was cobbled together when the band was in the process of disintegrating; Side 1 was not even performed by the band at all, but by anonymous studio musicians. Two of the selections on Side 1 were written by Ed Cobb, a wide-ranging songwriter perhaps best known for writing the Standells classic “Dirty Water” and the 1980’s smash by Soft Cell, “Tainted Love”. But Side 2 more than makes up for that, with the opening song “I’m Not Like Everybody Else” being one of the finest covers of a Ray Davies song ever (he is the bandleader and chief songwriter for the Kinks). The final two songs are one of Bob Dylan’s best songs, “(It’s All Over Now) Baby Blue” – reportedly, “(It’s All Over Now) Baby Blue” was the song that Dylan played to close the first concert where he “went electric” and was booed – and “I Ain’t No Miracle Worker”, originally recorded by the Brogues. The latter song was written by two women, Annette Tucker and Nancie Mantz, who also wrote several songs for a more mainstream psychedelic rock band, the Electric Prunes, including one of the biggest hit singles in the entire psychedelic rock genre, “I Had Too Much to Dream (Last Night)” (1966), the opening track on the Nuggets double-album collection. “Dirty Water” is also on that album, as is “Let’s Talk About Girls” by the Chocolate Watchband.
