Bubble Puppy - Lonely

Bubble Puppy

Listen/Download – Bubble Puppy – Lonely

Greetings all.

Here’s hoping that the new week finds you all well, and in the mood for a little armadillo-inflected, Texas psyche-o-modelica.

If you were to walk into a crowd of music snobs and casually dropped the names 13th Floor Elevators and Bubble Puppy, some folks might know what you were talking about, but very few would be able to fill you in on the fact that although the Elevators – one of Americas greatest bands of the 1960s – are rightly legendary and emulated the world over, it was in fact the latter band who brought the storied International Artists label its biggest hit.

That song, ‘Hot Smoke and Sassafrass’ hit the Top 20 in early 1969, a minor masterpiece of pop psychedelia gone wild, is not the song I bring you today.

Rather, in the tradition of all things Iron Leggy, your truly has flipped the disc over to bring you the very groovy B-side, ‘Lonely’.

The Bubble Puppy – posessors of one of the goofiest band names in an era overflowing with them – first came together in San Antonio, TX in 1966.

They signed with IA the following year, and just about a year after that, ‘Hot Smoke and Sassafrass’ was unleashed upon the world.

‘Lonely’ is very much along the lines of a kind of vaguely pop inflected heaviosity that was entering the cultural bloodstream toward the end of the decade, with the Blue Cheers, Grand Funk Railroads, Amboy Dukes (I even hear touches of Moby Grape and Kak in the mix), wherein the lysergic-ness in the air was dissipating just the tiniest bit, and the guitar-toting longhairs were engaged in experiments engineered to discover just how much volume a human eardrum could bear.

This is not to say that the Bubble Puppy were as proto-metallic as some of their brethren, but that they were dipping their toes in the same basic stream, that being the one that goes up to eleven.

They lacked the bluesy base of so many of their contemporaries, and they were certainly not whipping up any hippy dippy stew back at the crash pad. What the Bubble Puppy were playing was louder than many, dumber than some (in a good way) and on more of a DMT trip than anything light and transcendental.

The band recorded an LP for IA, but left the label and moved to Los Angeles in 1970, where they would change their name to Demian and recorded an album under that name.

I hope you dig the sounds, and I’ll be back later in the week.

Peace

Larry

 

PS Head over to Funky16Corners for a tribute to yet another fallen soul giant.

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