Oh man – when I saw this at a local record store recently, I snapped it up with the enthusiasm and ardor of a starving bear perched at the side of the salmon stream. Just as we’ve deservedly celebrated the punksploitation magazines of the late 1970s – here, here, here and here – let’s now begin delving into any & all late 60s psychsploitation magazines we’re able to find, starting right here and right now with Freak Out, USA #2 from February 1968. I’ll find #1 in due time and give it the once-over, and that’s a promise.

Remember that before there were nationally-distributed newsstand magazines about rock music like Creem, Rolling Stone and Crawdaddy, much of rock & roll “journalism” was encased in these colorful, boy-crazy teen magazines, which, as Eddie Flowers, who bought them with Alabama-bred relish and  desperation, said in his recent podcast interview, “were pretty much for girls”. Accordingly, even this hippie cash-in from Warren Magazines is full of “great wallet pix of groovy guys” – including a totally doofy picture of teen heartthrob Van Morrison that I’m guessing was unanimously left intact by every teen girl who saw it. Freak Out, USA #2 was the second and final issue of a very short series that apparently didn’t perform at the newsstand. This bums me out, yet it’s also quite indicative of the liberal elites-vs.-silent majority morality play that led to Nixon being elected later that same year. (Cue Pauline Kael: “I can’t believe Nixon won – I don’t know a single person who voted for him!”). 

It’s possible there was some record company payola dumped into this thing, necessitating who got covered. In addition to the popular Young Rascals – “what they look for in a girl” – there are pieces celebrating The Blades of Grass, one of “the hottest and most personable groups ‘round”, who had one song chart at #87 and weren’t heard from again, as well as Harpers Bizarre, Jay & The Techniques and Every Mother’s Son. The latter go on and on about their exponentially absurd theories of what “love” means and why it’s so important. Remember, we were at peak LSD this year, and for thousands of young people it wasn’t just for concerts in the park, but perhaps also for interviews at Warren Headquarters at 22 East 42nd Street.

The Beatles – well, the Beatles were sort of a big band, and there perhaps wasn’t any payola involved there. The unnamed writer totally overdoes the recent death of Brian Epstein with purple prose and innumerable errors of syntax. “Suddenly, tragedy struck….the effect on The Beatles was devastating. Their once charmed lives could no longer be considered that. Death had reached out and touched very close indeed”. 

While there’s a bit of I-love-boys blather in most of the pieces, the non-handsome bands like Spanky & Our Gang just get goofy write-ups with silly photos, but no talk of cars and girls and theories of love. I guess The Fugs and Frank Zappa are in the issue before this one, and it’s a similar story there – and god bless the internet, baby, because you can read that whole issue right here. Then there’s “The exciting new flower-rock group NGC 4594. They’re well into the bead bag and can hold their own from the Haight-Ashbury to Tompkins Park”. Are you holding?

What makes this psychsploitation mag perhaps even more embarrassing than the punksploitation cash-ins is the grasping, desperate attempts to approximate the language of the times. The “Freaky Things” column is so representative of this mag I’ll just scan it at the bottom of this post so you can see it in all its glory. The Country Joe and The Fish piece is just a word jumble of hippie/psych nonsense (“Purple is the time for you”, “Shreds of red balloons that got caught in the tree-tops fly like little tattered flags”, “Sometimes, in April, you can smell the green” etc.), completely and totally out of line with the band’s plodding blues-rock. But I did enjoy a few things that traveled beyond my natural snark and condescension. The Doors piece is one of the few actual readable pieces, along with the thing on the Bee Gees, “Britain’s most promising new group”, which includes a whole bunch of quotes from Robert Stigwood, the band’s manager. I totally associate that guy with the disco era and all the pain it caused us, yet it turns out he was around way before that.

There’s an ad asking you to spend $2 to subscribe to the next six issues of Freak Out, USA – issues that were never written. I’ve hidden this punchline for you until now, so you’d read my hot take on this thing, but yes, thanks to the wonders of the internet, you can read the whole of #2 here as well.