The Freak Scene

Unlike the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, or the Byrds, the Freak Scene never operated as an actual performing or collaborative unit. Instead, the project resembled the Monkees or the earliest incarnation of the Grass Roots, existing solely as a vehicle for whatever its producer-songwriter chose to realize.

Assembled entirely in the studio, the Freak Scene originated in the imagination of Rusty Evans, a former Greenwich Village folkie who had transitioned into production work. Early in his trajectory Evans had intersected with Bob Dylan and Felix Pappalardi before their paths diverged; later, as a producer, he conceived the Freak Scene as a one-off endeavor. David Bromberg became the first musician recruited for this in-house psychedelic outfit, which had been formed specifically to cut the album Psychedelic Psoul. That lone release stands as a period artifact, an attempt to generate timely psychedelic sounds during an era when Columbia lacked artists—apart from the Byrds and, in his distinctive manner, Dylan—capable of delivering such music with any real authority.