Sometimes?all right, usually?there’s no justice in this rock’n’roll world. Kaleidoscope, formed from the ashes of various jug bands by the brilliant David Lindley, were so much more daring, playful and genre-splicing than their more successful SoCal contemporaries-the Dead meet the Magic Band, in essence. Every song on 1967’s Side Trips could be by a different band?which was doubtless the problem. Follow the path from Solomon Feldthouse’s proto-worldbeat “Egyptian Gardens” through Chris Darrow’s more accessibly psych-folk “Keep Your Mind Open” to the Cab Calloway and Dock Boggs covers and you’ll be hard put to find a thread of stylistic logic. But it all sounds extraordinarily fresh and thrilling.
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