Biography
The Magic Mushrooms issued their standout early psychedelic garage single "It's-A-Happening" toward the end of 1966. Screeching, heavily distorted guitars opened the track in explosive fashion, while the verses surged forward in a rave-up style that seemed poised to collapse like an overwound timepiece. Abrupt interruptions from fuzz-driven guitar phrases and scrapes punctuated these sections, after which a spoken voice delivered lines of lysergic insight such as "spray the weed, a zephyr breeze, a mushroom hangs above the ground." It remains uncertain whether the performance represented earnest, chemically addled psychedelia or a deliberate send-up. Still, the recording stood out for its forward-looking production values, above all in the guitar textures, and it climbed to #93 on the charts via A&M Records.
Given how obsessively fanzine researchers typically track down former garage-band participants, remarkably scant concrete details have surfaced about the Magic Mushrooms, even though "It's-A-Happening" appeared on the seminal Nuggets anthology. The Nuggets box-set notes indicate the single was cut in New York and that its writer/producer Sonny Casella operated out of Philadelphia. Lenny Kaye's original annotations add that the group also issued singles on East Coast and Philips, while Mike Stax's accompanying essay states that two albums followed. Additional cuts have surfaced on lesser-known garage-psych anthologies, among them the hard-charging, rapid blues-inflected "Never Let Go" from You Gotta Have Moxie Vol. 2 and the comparatively conventional "I'm Gone."
Given how obsessively fanzine researchers typically track down former garage-band participants, remarkably scant concrete details have surfaced about the Magic Mushrooms, even though "It's-A-Happening" appeared on the seminal Nuggets anthology. The Nuggets box-set notes indicate the single was cut in New York and that its writer/producer Sonny Casella operated out of Philadelphia. Lenny Kaye's original annotations add that the group also issued singles on East Coast and Philips, while Mike Stax's accompanying essay states that two albums followed. Additional cuts have surfaced on lesser-known garage-psych anthologies, among them the hard-charging, rapid blues-inflected "Never Let Go" from You Gotta Have Moxie Vol. 2 and the comparatively conventional "I'm Gone."
Albums