Blue Sandelwood Soap - Loring Park Love-Ins (Reissue) (1968/1996)

From the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, Blue Sandlewood Soap was one of relatively few '60s psychedelic groups from the region (though there were others, such as C.A. Quintet and, on some of their records, the Litter and T.C. Atlantic). They issued just one single, "Friends I Haven't Yet Met"/"Love !pirT" (sic), though that 45, plus a good deal of unreleased material from the time, appears on the CD Loring Park Love-Ins. Take the amateurish '60s garage rock that's filled up many a Pebbles-type compilation and add a good deal of acid-inspired lyrics, constant tempo changes, and odd fragmented song structures and you get Blue Sandlewood Soap. Like their name, it's an awkward mixture of ingredients, instrumentally dominated by Harley Toberman's Farfisa organ and some pretty clumsy drug flash journal lyrics. There aren't a bucketful of reissues of bands playing psychedelic music in such a garage-ish fashion, as there are innumerable reissues of bands playing the basic teen punk so common to garage bands of just a year or two earlier. That doesn't make it a notable record or Blue Sandlewood Soap a notable, imaginative group, though.