Discussions → Psychedellic Swamp, anyone?

It's currently not released. If you haven't read these yet, these are some snippets of interviews of Scott discussing the album:

1. You were talking about psychedelic music before, I had read an interview where you had mentioned an accompanying album to go with your first album, The Psychedelic Swamp, which now out of print, is that still in the works?

SCOTT: It’s in the works as far as; we’re definitely going to do it. It’s just a matter of time. It wouldn’t be very hard to find the time to do it. It wouldn’t be very hard because what’s required of us to complete it is conceptually built in to be very simple and kind of live rock and roll without any bells and whistles or tricks, without any psychedelia really, that’s the idea. The accompanying record to The Psychedelic Swamp would be a very very straightforward and direct, not psychedelic, translation of the whole garbled psychedelic record into just garage rock basically, that’s sort of the reason of what the whole about is about. It’s kind of a long story behind that record, but in a nutshell the idea behind it is that we didn’t make it. Dr. Dog didn’t make The Psychedelic Swamp. It was sent to us by a character named Phrases, who used to live on Earth, but escaped Earth and escaped all his woes to go to the psychedelic swamp as a means of release from all the troubles he was having in life. Then he gets there and at first he’s really excited and wowed and amazed at the lack of logic and lack of order to the universe. But he shortly thereafter realizes that the same issues and same problems persist. That his choice to just escape reality was not by any means a solution. He starts to get desperate and realizes this mistake he’s made but at the same time he’s spending all this time there and losing perspective on how to communicate with his former self and the former world that he was apart of. So the record becomes increasingly more and more incoherent. But he has this strong message that he really wants to spread to people so he chooses Dr. Dog to be the band to take this album that he’s made, it’s not even like an album, it’s kind of like a document of his experience in the swamp.

At points it feels like a radio show, there’s a DJ leading you through these places.

SCOTT: Exactly, it’s kind of this multimedia experience you’re hearing of the psychedelic swampland. You’re hearing what it’s like to listen to the radio there. You’re hearing advertisements. You’re hearing sort of the ambience of him being at work. You’re hearing the news. Yea. A lot of it is interspersed with sort of narrative songs. So he chooses Dr. Dog to translate this mess into an American pop context, so that his message could be heard and understood. So now we just have to do the thing of taking all the songs that are on there and like I said playing them very straightforward and recording them very simply so that they’re not manipulated at all, just straight to the point. When we do that prophecy will be fulfilled, and our job will have been done and we can release it. It seems silly for us to release it before we can do that because it’s a part of the whole concept. Also there are kind of pipe dreams about a movie. If we could ever one day turn it into a movie, that would be so great. Aside from the logistical nightmare of making a movie, it’d be pretty easy. The narrative is all there. In our heads it’s so fleshed out from point A to point B. It’s so visual in how involved we were getting into it at the time, talking about it and watching the story unfold before our very eyes on the 4-track. It’s all kind of there. It would just be a matter of getting involved with people who know about making movies and could help translate it. It’s still a work in progress. It’s something that we definitely still intend to get done one day it just becomes a question of when.

2. Have you ever thought about creating a Dr. Dog musical?

SCOTT: That would be really awesome. We did this album, Psychedelic Swamp a long time ago, and we’ve always had dreams to make it a traveling piece of theater. There’s a real strong narrative throughout the album and it would be pretty easy and really fun to try and make it into a sort of low-budget theater production. But even a movie of that…

Is Psychedelic Swamp available anywhere? I’ve tried to find it before and haven’t had any luck.

SCOTT: No, it’s not. The problem is… we would have put it out already, but the concept on the album is that we didn’t make it, we got it in the mail. So the packaging is an envelope with our address on it. The idea is that we got it—this cassette tape—from this dude who used to live on earth, but escaped into this psychedelic parallel universe, as an effort to escape all the problems he was having on earth.. And when he got there, initially he was like, “Wow, this is awesome! Everything is so weird, and everything is upside down, with psychedelic aesthetics—nothing is predictable!” But over time, as he gained his frame of reference there, he realized that the same problems persist and there’s no real escape other than accepting and dealing with these issues that you have in your life. So he wants to make this album and send it back to earth to spread that message, like, “I’ve made this mistake, I thought I could escape but now I’m just trapped here. Everything’s the same.” And he appeals to us, saying, “Can you be the band that’s going to translate this music into modern American pop music, so that the message is understood?” He’s becoming so detached from reality the more he’s there, his ability to communicate and his way of going about representing information is becoming more and more garbled and detached and that’s why it sounds like a very psychedelic album.. The reason we haven’t put it out yet is because before we do that, I want to do what he’s asking us to do, which is to take all the music and re-record it as a live rock band with no psychedelic elements whatsoever. Very straightforward, immediate delivery, just like he wants it to be—a translation of his psychedelic mess. So when we do that, we’ll put ‘em both together and it’ll be like a double album.

3. Favorite album?

SCOTT: Seeing as I’m in the business of making albums in a way, I’ll say our concept album, ‘Psychedelic Swamp’. The making of that album was so amazing to us…not the greatest album to listen to, far from it, but the existence of that album makes it my favorite.

-------

Anyway, I talked to someone who claimed to have heard it and he said it was "just noise" and that I wouldn't want it. Scott did say, though, that they would release the original with the rerecorded version as a double album and the way he's talking about it sounds fairly assured. We'll probably hear it one day.

Darn, it doesn't work for me.

Did you mean "can"? If you did, thanks it advance. That would be awesome!

..are you done yet?