PSYCHOTIC REACTIONS AND CARBURETOR DUNG

Best headline on a Lester story? I think so. And, like the pitch-perfect album titles within, not to mention the rest of the heads, subheads, and captions of his CREEM tenure, it was unmistakably Lester’s. This most famous of his exegeses, from a few years before I landed in the desk across, takes a half-dozen bumpy grafs to achieve escape velocity from a sci-fi conceit that features Lester as the crotchety septuagenarian he would never get to be, pontificating to contemptuous young’uns about 1965, starting with the Yardbirds, sprinkled with references to contemporaneous 2020-something phenomena like “Morphones” (headphones for morphing?), “Intra-Solar System package tours” (not coincidentally, Elon Musk was born the exact month/year this dropped), and “Lifetime Chainmail Bodyjeans” (pretty sure those came true—or am I thinking of a Robert Pollard song?), all while casting a thoroughly ochre eye on the future of humanity. But once he locks on the Count Five it’s all highway to bittersweet hilarity, behind Lester’s impassioned, indelible phrasemaking (e.g., a song is “a sprungrhythm essay in barbershop paranoia”). Along the way, there are cameos from my fave-raves, the Leaves and Question Mark and the Mysterians, plus a random nod to conductor George Szell, foreshadowing another to Georg Solti he worked into a headline when I was there, demonstrating that the Romilar-glugging shoe salesman from El Cajon got serious kulcher.

--ROBERT DUNCAN