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ALBUM REVIEW BY BILL SHUTE! FIRE AND ICE, LTD.-THE HAPPENING (Capitol Records)

This 1966 Capitol album (a grey-market CD is available on UK Kismet, although copies of the original LP can easily be found for what you’d pay for a new CD) is for me a classic of the psych-sploitation genre. It contains five trippy jams ranging between 2:48 and 9:56 (one of which uses Gershwin’s “Summertime” as its basis) with spontaneous beat-poetry vocal interjections (the kind parodied by Kim Fowley on his OUTRAGEOUS album and on the track “Is America Dead” on the DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL album, but not full poems like the immortal Christopher Columbus poem recited by John Drew Barrymore in the film HIGH SCHOOL CONFIDENTIAL.

The music mixes beatnik flute, garage-band organ, and trebly guitar riffing not unlike such exploito outfits as T. SWIFT AND THE ELECTRIC BAG or THE ANIMATED EGG. Except for the “Summertime” adaptation, each track takes a basic riff and uses it as a framework for the soloists and vocalists to work themselves in and out of the audio fabric, and then after a certain period, it fades out. In 1967, the tracks would have been longer and more tribal, but this was still 1966, and there is a heavy beatnik vibe wrapped around the whole thing….with 60s garage band organ and guitar swirling in and out of the audio collage. As one era fades out, another one fades in…

This collective gave at least one public performance, as there are two video clips you can watch at Getty Images with silent footage of a Fire and Ice, Ltd. “happening” performance on the Sunset Strip in 1966, with a banner of the Capitol album cover in the background (see B&W pic).

The perfect audience for this album would be someone who enjoys the Velvet Underground’s long Exploding Plastic Inevitable jams and also albums like BEAT OF THE EARTH, but who also has a sense of humor and enjoys cheapo exploito-psych cash-in albums like the previously mentioned T. SWIFT AND THE ELECTRIC BAG. Also, if you’ve heard the obscure Louisiana 60’s single “An Experimented Terror” by THE GREEK FOUNTAINS and consider it one of the all-time greats (available on the compilation BEYOND THE CALICO WALL), then you will love THE HAPPENING by FIRE AND ICE, LTD. as much as I do. While it’s clearly a psych cash-in on the part of Capitol Records, it could also be performed at some gallery in Venice, CA, to a “serious” audience sipping espresso or wine (see the 1966 video footage of the live performance mentioned above) who would politely applaud and pronounce it as “exciting and going beyond boundaries” or “an action painting in sound that’s NOW!”, but at the same time, some stoner who stumbled in off the street could jerk his head up and down to it and exclaim, “far out, maaaaaaan” at the climax of some loud passage. It takes a master-stroke to hit all those bases at once. Don’t be expecting The Red Crayola’s FREE FORM FREAKOUT passages or anything transcendent—you could play this album before a screening of the 1966 Spanish-made film THE HALLUCINATION GENERATION with George Montgomery to get the audience in the mood (hey, I should do that some time!). There are probably other performances of this sort documented on reel-to-reel tapes or private press LP’s of the day, but until you find something like that, this major-label COMMERCIAL EQUIVALENT will do just fine.