Easy Listening Acid Trip - by Joseph Lanza (Paperback)

About the Book

Pop music of the sixties and seventies embraced psychedelic youth culture yet appealed to listeners of all ages up and down the radio dial. Easy Listening Acid Trip explains the missing musical link between electric guitars and orchestral strings, from the Beatles to Lawrence Welk, and why we just can't help but liking songs we hear in the elevator.

Book Synopsis

In his acclaimed book Elevator Music: A Surreal History of Muzak, Easy-Listening, and Other Moodsong, author Joseph Lanza explored the forbidden beauty and social importance of an otherwise shunned musical category. Now, in Easy-Listening Acid Trip, he pushes the boundaries further by taking his subject into altered states, showing how psychedelic pop (as opposed to the ear-grinding jams of "acid rock") offered other worlds and strange sounds that took listeners through a mind-bending time travel back to vaudeville, Tin Pan Alley, British Music Hall, and the melodic traditions that made songs hits before your grandmother was born. These influences, in turn, inspired many easy-listening arrangers and conductors to reinterpret the songs into instrumental wonders that were often just as (if not more) surreal.
Easy-Listening Acid Trip takes readers on a journey that includes the Hollyridge Strings' haunting version of the Beatles' "Strawberry Fields Forever," Paul Mauriat's lush treatment of Scott McKenzie's "San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)," and Mariano and the Unbelievables' baroque-pop tribute to the Lemon Pipers "Green Tambourine. The book also provides numerous anecdotes, such as how quickly after the Strawberry Alarm Clock released their 1967 hit "Incense and Peppermints," Muzak recorded an instrumental version by Charles Grean and His Orchestra that kept the electric guitar but re-contoured the tune with harps, horns, flutes, a tambourine, and other effects for offices, restaurants, supermarkets, and of course, elevators.
Delving into the songs along with the international roster of composers, arrangers, and conductors who recorded them, Easy-Listening Acid Trip celebrates the trippy paradox linking psychedelia to easy-listening: a netherworld where the Beatles meet The Percy Faith Strings, where Donovan meets David Rose and His Orchestra, and where other flower-power-pop favorites meld with the likes of Ferrante and Teicher, Lawrence Welk, and the Mystic Moods Orchestra.

Review Quotes

"Author Joseph Lanza is an expert's expert on some of the more enigmatic corners of popular and unpopular culture... Lanza's work is quirky and unique. His latest book Easy-Listening Acid Trip: An Elevator Ride Through '60s Psychedelic Pop covers a musical genre that most people have no idea even existed." - Richard Metzger, Dangerous Minds

"[Lanza] examines how the exponents of easy-listening - producers, conductors, arrangers - adapted to the challenges presented by the musical currents of psychedelia to offer their listeners "an over-the-counter version of psychedelia's already synesthetic rapture." The book is full of smart analogies and turns of phrases like this that help explain and contextualize the paradox of psychedelic easy-listening." - Ugly Things magazine

"If you've ever read any of Lanza's cultural history lessons, you know to expect a heavily researched, but breezy tour filled with incredible sights -- in this case, full-color album art every few pages, potentially hallucinogenic and definitely addicting." -- Bookgasm.com

Easy-Listening Acid Trip: An Elevator Ride Through '60s Psychedelic Pop... is a cousin to Joseph's 1994 classic Elevator Music: A Surreal History of Muzak, Easy-Listening, and Other Moodsong, which went a long way in transforming the public's understanding and appreciation of various ignored music categories. - Music Journalism Insider

Elevator Music is a fascinating tour of the sonic inferno we all unconsciously inhabit.
---J. G. Ballard, author of Crash and Empire of the Sun

Lanza takes background music seriously as both music and social utility. In doing so, he's written one of the few pop-history books that won't put you to sleep - not to mention the only one that dares to probe the very real connections between shopping-mall music and Devo.
--Entertainment Weekly

Lanza's new work explores what happened when MOR and orchestral artists like Mike Curb, The Hollyridge Strings, 101 Strings, and James Last turned their attentions to the pop, rock, and psych hits of the era." - Shindig magazine

Snobby musicologists ignore this fascinating topic, but I learned a lot while being well-entertained by Lanza's delightful book.
--Wendy Carlos, composer, soundtracks for A Clockwork Orange and The Shining