Beyond the Calico Wall

When a 60s garage/psych compilation includes a track called “Susie’s Gone” featuring a lead vocalist intoning a heavily echoed word or two at a time over a spooky skeletal jam that simultaneously sounds like a haunted house and a trip to space – and then later features a dimly-echoing song called “Burritt Bradley” from a totally separate group set to a heartbeat and with its own spoken word lyrics running “I once had a physical body…and then I gave it up when I died” – you know you’re in for a good time. 1990’s Beyond the Calico Wall was compiler/liner note writer Erik Lindgren’s first of many notable Nuggets-style deep dives he oversaw over the decades and he absolutely came in strong, adding a bit of indulgence with a new project of his own, the Demons of Negativity. With an organ-crazed and feedback-laden rampage by Park Avenue Playground, “The Trip” (not the Kim Fowley song) starting the mania, it barely breaks for air throughout, including the blazing “Up In My Mind” by the Spontaneous Generation and a somehow even more insane version of “I Had Too Much To Dream Last Night” by Rasputin & the Mad Monks. Killer line from the Flower Power’s “Mt. Olympus”: “Mt. Olympus stands like a rock in the sea/And nothing makes it real except reality.”