Various Artists
Brown Acid - The Eighteenth Trip
RidingEasy Records
Brown Acid is the title for a series of compilations of undiscovered gems put together by LA record store Permanent Record's owner Lance Barresi, which have been hidden in plain sight for decades. Beginning in 2015, Barresi and RidingEasy Records began pulling together these collections of rare and weird tracks from rock’s past, using the umbrella term “Brown Acid”, with the tracks loosely fitting into three sub-genres: hard rock, heavy psych and proto-metal. Its now 2024 and we are up to the eighteenth 'Trip', subtitled 'Heavy Rock from the Underground Comedown', with no sign of them running out of steam any time soon. I can't describe this any better than the opening paragraph of the sleeve notes, so I will just quote them here. "If you survived trips 1-17 with one tiny speck of psychedelic sunshine intact, 'Brown Acid The 18th Trip' will be your coming of age nightmare. Vintage underground '70s hard rock, coming at you from bizarre angles, local scene wasteland America when everybody was out for themselves and the drugs went bleak. The guitars kill, the attitude is twisted, even the sex is headed down the wrong road. Real people, no compromise, pure and potent. Get stoked, take the 18th Trip and know that the artists will get paid for pulverizing your soul!"
That's almost poetry, and the music on this meets that promise every bit, with obscure acts such as 'The Smokin' Buku Band', 'Parchment Farm' and 'The Pawnbrokers' making you wonder why they never made it, yet Free, Led Zepplin, and others did. These are not even One Hit Wonders. Most only put out one 7 inch single which didn't even threaten to touch the charts. For whatever reason, the hits and recording contracts never came and members dissipated to other bands or day jobs, leaving these tracks forgotten until now. The man in Soundclash record shop who sold me this last week on yukky pink marbled vinyl promised me "you won't be disappointed". I wasn't.
