Crazy Elephant
Listen/Download – Crazy Elephant – The Dark Part of My Mind
Greetings all.
How’s by you?
Sometimes, when I’m dipping back into the archive to select something for blog-i-fication, I let my mood steer me wherever it wants.
If I’m feeling like some sunshine pop, then sunshine pop you shall have.
Psychedelia, sure, why not?
However, sometimes, and it’s not often, which is why it bears explaining, my head and my ears get all crossed up and I must, without any doubt, whip a little skronk on you.
Skronk, you say?
What is being with that?
I’m not sure where I picked that particular word up, but the best guess is sometime back in the old print-shop zine days.
The definition, if not self explanatory, is thus: loud, aggressive, noise, presented of course in some form of musical context.
Early Stooges? Skronk for days.
Blue Cheer, Sabbath, some of your rougher, more primitive six-teez ponk zounds? Skronk-tastic.
I first had this bit of skronk kick in my earholes back during one of the Asbury Park 45 Sessions, when my man DJ M-Fasis let it drop (on account of the drums) and I was all ‘What the frick is that?’ and he flipped me the 45 and I was like ‘Crazy Elephant?!?’
I was momentarily poleaxed, and then excited, since this especially tasty, extremely weird chunk of psychedelic hippo stomp was sitting on the flipside of what could be described simply as a twenty-five cent garage sale wonder.
Turn over ‘Dark Part of My Mind’ and what you get is Crazy Elephant’s (another cog in the Kasenetz-Katz factory of wonderfulness) 1969 AM radio smasheroo ‘Gimme Gimme Good Lovin’, which is in and of itself a very nice bit of soulful rock, often mischaracterized, thanks to its provenance as ‘bubblegum’, which it ain’t.
That ‘Dark Part of My Mind’ is not at all like it’s musical Siamese twin may or may not have something to do with the assembly line nature of its birth.
Was Crazy Elephant a psyche band that got squeezed into a poppier vibe for it’s 45?
Were they a pop band that got dosed and went nuts in studio?
Were they even a band in the real sense?
Or was ‘Dark Part of My Mind’ a perverse joke of some kind, hidden on the B-side of a pop record, meant to freak out the squares when they least expected it?
Like the owl in the Tootsie Pop commercial, I must state that the world may never know.
And in the end, it doesn’t matter. The uniqueness of the song (which also appeared on the flip of a 45 by Captain Groovy and His Bubblegum Army) makes it a kind of sui generis bit of madness, known by few, but worshipped by those that know.
Skronk.
Peace
Larry
Iron Leg 
The interesting thing is that the two versions aren’t identical. The Captain Groovy cut (“Dark Part of My Mind, Part 1”) fades out just as the guitarist starts a solo. The Crazy Elephant version begins at that very point, which I guess would make it “Part 2” – although it’s not labeled as such on the 45.
In any case, we’ll probably never know who actually recorded it. Chances are, it was a bunch of a studio musicians hired by K-K.
Because one of their early projects was crippled in its progress up the charts by DJs playing the flip side instead, thereby diluting their promotional efforts and dividing the total number of airplays, Mr. Kasenetz and Mr. Katz made a point of using B-sides that were CLEARLY not hit material… a simple boogie-woogie instrumental with nutty theremin noises over it, say, or a backwards recording, or a dirgelike orchestral version of “Poor Old Mr. Jensen”, or a backwards recording of “Poor Old Mr. Jensen”, even. This certainly fit well into the guaranteed airplay-resistant category… though I know I played it more than once, but on college radio.
Devlin
That’s interesting, much like Phil Spector, (Spector protege) Sonny Bono (the Quetzal records) and god knows who else (there must be more).
Larry
“Zig Zag” on the B-side of original Buddah pressings of “Yummy Yummy Yummy” by the Ohio Express is a keyboard based instrumental version of “Poor Old (Mr. Jensen)” going backwards. On the re-issues, it’s played forward which is how I discovered it was “Poor Old (Mr. Jensen)”.