Apart from a bizarre nocturnal session watching The Banana Splits and listening to Nana Mouskouri at a share house in 1997, I’ve never delved into the Greek psychedelic scene. For that reason, it was the name – Acid Baby Jesus – that attracted immediate attention. If Fred Nile was a minister of the Greek Orthodox Church, he’d have been leading a pack of incensed parishioners through the city streets in a blaze of confected outrage, demanding these tripped out hippies take their blasphemous instruments elsewhere.
But Acid Baby Jesus came, gazed, and bathed us in the wonders of psychedelic beauty. In an earlier incarnation, Acid Baby Jesus were a heavier, darker outfit, a Black Sabbath-inspired soundtrack for Homer’s Odyssey. Now they’re a more nuanced musical beast, infusing the classic three-chord foundation of garage rock with a Greek folk-psychedelic inflection.
The set started out in Californian ‘60s territory, all Country Joe and the Fish acid-spiked beauty and optimism. The cadences rolled away like images of love and hope, and that hippie bullshit that suffocated under the weight of drug abuse and egotistical obsession. Then it was into the garages of Tacoma and LA, equal parts The Sonics, The Seeds and The Wailers, overlaid with a syncopated Mediterranean rhythmic sensibility. Like The Black Lips, the intensity of purpose was counter-balanced by a subtle irrelevance – fuck artistic pretension, let’s have a good time.
Back in the day, The Electric Prunes advertised the ability of the Vox Wah-Wah pedal to make an ordinary guitar sound like a sitar. Tonight, we were sure we could hear a bouzouki somewhere in the mix. Like the best psychedelic music, this trip dragged you in, coloured your mind and took you on a journey where everything else didn’t matter. The rhythm accelerated, and the image of Anthony Quinn in a tie-dye kaftan hanging out with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters flashed subliminally through our consciousness.
We got an encore, and the journey continued. And it could have gone on forever, were it not a school night and the realities of the real world just a few strikes of the clock away. But what a fucking trip it was. Someone, please get these guys back again, very soon.
BY PATRICK EMERY
Loved: The fact it was possible to see an acid-psych band on a weeknight in Melbourne.
Hated: Having to pretend the next day that work is more important than psych music.
Drank: Not too much, thankfully.
