Flip Your Id! It's Astro Sounds from Beyond the Year 2000!

February 23, 2006 5:00 PM

From Inner Sounds to Astro Sounds Session guitarist Jerry Cole made several albums of instrumental surf rock as the leader of Jerry Cole & His Spacemen, but after playing on sessions that produced the Byrds' Mr. Tambourine Man and the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds album, he realized he had to adapt to new musical trends. In the summer of '66, Cole responded by bringing several session buddies together to record The Inner Sounds of the Id, a psychedelic studio creation that was at least a year ahead of its time. The story might have ended there if the producer hadn't stolen the Id's session outtakes... (more inside)
posted by jonp72 (8 comments total)

Producer Paul Arnold made a quick buck by passing on the outtakes to Alshire Records, a budget label run by Al Sherman and D.L. Miller. Alshire then released material from the outtakes to the Id sessions under the name of a fictional group, the Animated Egg. From then on, the material from the Id sessions mutated as the penny-pinching Alshire Records recycled it in almost endless variations. Because Alshire was already the home of the anonymous easy listening group, the 101 Strings, D.L. Miller decided to squeeze out another 101 Strings album by putting strings on top of the Animated Egg album, running the drums through an analog phaser, then shoving everything through a Leslie speaker. The result was Astro Sounds from Beyond the Year 2000, a record designed to cash in on Barbarella and 2001: A Space Odyssey, but that instead became a cult classic. Other cast-offs squeezed out from the Id outtakes include Sounds of Today, the Exotic Sounds of Love (with heavy breathing added by electronic composer Bebe Barron), at least two fake tribute albums to Jimi Hendrix, and an attempt to synthesize "acid rock" and Hank Williams. Ironically, Jerry Cole remained ignorant for decades that his outtakes had been used for all this material, including samples by Public Enemy and Fatboy Slim, until PopMatters finally interviewed Cole about it.
posted by jonp72 at 5:02 PM on February 23, 2006

The story might have ended there if the producer hadn't stolen the Id's session outtakes...

That is so unfair!

(And could you please indicate which links have mp3 downloads?)
posted by StickyCarpet at 5:21 PM on February 23, 2006

Holy Crap - did the AskMe thread on Robot Songs drop the ball or what! The astro-sounds record appears to actually have a song called:

A dissapointing love with a desensitized robot

Awesome! I want to hear it!
posted by freebird at 5:36 PM on February 23, 2006

Unlike me, they spelled it correctly - even from the depths of their Astral Freakout...
posted by freebird at 5:38 PM on February 23, 2006

Nice one, jonp72. Looking forward to getting my teeth into all them links.
posted by Len at 5:40 PM on February 23, 2006

Sorry, there's not many mp3s in the original post. This BitTorrent link will get you some mp3s of Astro Sounds, including A Disappointing Love with A Desensitized Robot.
posted by jonp72 at 5:44 PM on February 23, 2006

I've got both Astro Sounds and the Purple Fox Hendrix tribute on vinyl. No means of ripping 'em right now, though. I can tell you "Astro Sounds" is a pretty trippy little slice of cheese, though, and the Purple Fox one is mostly sorta-OK Pebbles/Nuggets-style garage, but a couple of tracks have drum intros that'd make decent breakbeats for all you hip-hop/jungle types. I had no idea about the whole Perry Cole story until now, though.

There are quite a few "what were they thinking?" moments to be had in thriftstore vinyl bins--one of my favourites is a Beatles tribute that not only is mostly post-Beatles solo tunes, but actually features a Yoko Ono cover!
posted by arto at 6:22 PM on February 23, 2006

I've heard a lot of the Animated Egg stuff. It's all good garage psych.
posted by destro at 9:13 PM on February 23, 2006