A music-obsessed, retired San Francisco lawyer, and author of the rock & roll memoir Jittery White Guy Music (available on Amazon)... picking a random album or song in his collection every day or so and sharing a few thoughts.
There's obscure, and then there's obscure. The Seeing Eye Gods were a one-off home recording project from Brett Gurewitz, an on-again/off-again member of punk band Bad Religion and the founder of the Epitaph indie label. Their 1985 5-song EP was a lo-fi project, Gurewitz (under the Vonnegut-derived handle of Billy Pilgrim) playing retro-psychedelic songs over a primitive drum machine. Yet it was catchy and fun (the four originals bolstered by a laid-back cover of Status Quo's "Pictures Of Matchstick Men"). "Psychedelic Suzy" mirrored the sound of Paisley Underground acts like Rain Parade and the Things, a bare but hypnotic tune that could've been a 1968 obscurity unearthed for a low-budget Nuggets-styled compilation (drum machine aside).
Unfortunately, it's all but mythical at this point--the original vinyl EP (a gaudy pink & green picture disc) was issued in limited numbers (we were lucky to get one at the college station, where I played it like crazy); it's never been reissued and doesn't stream--all I've got is a low-bitrate mp3 version of the EP. And while the tune is here more for sentimental reasons than for its objective greatness, I really wish they'd give it a proper reissue one of these days.
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