composed by John Phillips
This song used to scare the bejeezus out of me when I was about six, well before I could make out the words, and only slightly less so years later when I did. Most of this group’s hits were on its first album and this second album was painfully pieced together amidst affairs, break-ups, business hassles, and way too much dope. They got some interesting music out of it (despite a dogshit version of “My Heart Stood Still”), but these songs are just swimming in bad vibes and recrimination, making the overall effect something like an alternate version of Rumours dosed with heroin rather than cocaine. Close harmonies are recorded just a microtone off for effect (like they were on Revolver), and some of the parts were written so high you can tell that they had to be shouted in pitch and mixed down. This song is a somber chorale explicitly about acid – one year before “White Rabbit” – and it contains no rhetoric about “frontiers” or “consciousness.” The “girls” in this song are “offering their youth” and “hiding their madness,” all for the sake of The Trip. Where? Anywhere else but here. Unsentimental, but – most unsettlingly – not at all cautionary.
Note: 25 secular essays (each one exactly 200 words long) about 25 songs, to appear one per day during Advent (or so) from Nov. 27 through Dec. 21.
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