Hail Atlantis: A Long, Strange Trip in the Life of the Psychedelic Garage Ensemble
It’s a busy night at the Old Town School of Folk Music, located in Chicago’s Lincoln Square neighborhood. Up a stairway decorated with artwork by R. Crumb, fans wait in line for a bluegrass concert in Szold Hall. Down the main hallway, past the display case boasting guitars once owned by John Lennon and Big Bill Broonzy, the school’s Soul Ensemble rehearses Stevie Wonder’s arrangement of “We Can Work It Out.” In the main lobby, where origami sheet music flowers adorn the walls along with musical instruments visitors are encouraged to play, the regular Thursday night jam session is underway with a singalong of “Red River Valley,” accompanied by guitars, banjos, mandolin, fiddle, and accordion. And in a room tucked just beyond the lobby, Cathy Norden and the Psychedelic Garage Ensemble are planning the setlist for their next gig.
Clad in a sparkly purple shirt that matches her purple hair, Cathy begins to list the class repertoire on the chalkboard. “Atlantis” by Donovan, “Open My Eyes” by the Nazz, “Journey to the Center of the Mind” by the Amboy Dukes. “On A Carousel” and “Care of Cell #44.” “For Your Love” and “Never My Love.” “Itchycoo Park.” “Incense and Peppermints.” The list goes on — it’s been a busy eight-week session. The challenge will be picking the songs that work best for this particular performance, a festival at a parochial school.
“Now, it’s gonna be at a church,” Cathy reminds the class, “and there’s gonna be kids there, so –”
“Lots of drug references?” someone jokes.
“Yup, lots of drug references, lots of swearing. They saw our name when they booked us. They knew they were getting loud and druggy.”
“That should be on our t-shirts. The Psychedelic Garage Ensemble: Loud and Druggy.”
By day, the people in this room are Responsible Adults, but that’s the beauty of the Old Town School: it’s a place where otherwise Responsible Adults get to come together and be rock stars, in an atmosphere where everyone is encouraged to learn in class and shine onstage. This is why I’ve been taking classes here since I moved to Chicago 12 years ago, and why I look forward to singing with my Psych Garage classmates every Thursday night.
The Psychedelic Garage Ensemble has its roots in several groups Cathy has taught over the years. “I’m always curious about who likes what I like,” Cathy tells me over coffee before class one night. “I’m always trying to find my people.”
Several years ago, during the school’s summer session, she ran a four-week long Beach Boys Ensemble, but found that a month was just not enough time for a class to master Brian Wilson’s complex harmonies. A year or two later, she taught another four-week class, this time on the Monkees — “and that stuck in a way the Beach Boys class didn’t.”
Cathy revived the Monkees Ensemble for a standard eight-week class in the summer of 2012, and that’s when the group that’s now the Psych Garage Ensemble started to gel. It was just a few months after Davy Jones’ death, and for a lot of us longtime fans, the class was a way for us to mourn and celebrate Davy together.
“I became a huge Monkees fan when I was in the fourth grade during their 25th anniversary,” recalls Jen Hartsig, a first-grade teacher who lends acoustic guitar and soprano vocals to the ensemble. “After Davy passed, I played some of their songs again, and I was amazed to hear just how terrific they were when I finally heard them as an adult. Then I joined the Monkees Ensemble and was delighted to see how fun the class was.”
Lisa Courtney, a fellow teacher, who plays ukulele and a mean pineapple-shaped shaker, says, “I’ve been a Monkees fan since the first MTV Monkees marathon in February 1986. Joining [Monkees Ensemble] was a no-brainer.”
As the surviving Monkees launched a reunion tour, the Ensemble met each week, finessing our harmonies, reveling in the joys of auxiliary percussion, and searching for those elusive moments where we could catch our breath among the rapid-fire verses of “Goin’ Down.”
Between songs, talk would often turn to Monkees trivia. It had been a while since I’d gotten to hang out with any fellow Monkee fans, let alone Monkees fans who geeked out about the music as much as I did, and it was a strange but wonderful feeling. Sean Courtney — web developer, test prep instructor, bassist and electric guitarist, and husband to Lisa — agrees: “I was pleasantly surprised,if not frightened, to find that there were other people in the world who knew what I meant by ‘the original version of “Mommy and Daddy.”‘”
When Peter Tork headlined at the Old Town School in June 2013, his opening act was Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn, & Jones, Ltd.: members of the Monkees Ensemble and the Old Town School’s Psychedelic Go-Go Dance class. And I’m not exaggerating in the slightest when I say that singing lead on “She,” the opening number of our set, in front of a room full of Monkees fans, was one of the top five moments of my life.
The success of the Monkees Ensemble, combined with the love many of us ensemble members also shared for the Beach Boys, led Cathy to resurrect the Beach Boys Ensemble in fall 2013. Cathy remembers, “I’d say the name ‘Beach Boys’ in Monkees class, and you’d all go like this” — here, she holds up her hands like paws and pants like an excited puppy. It’s a pretty accurate impression.
This time, however, she offered the class as an extended 16-week session — twice as long as a typical Old Town School class. It ended up being more successful than she might have expected.
“We had the extended format, and we had people familiar enough with the music and skilled enough as musicians to put together a performing group.”
Cathy recalls the night she asked if someone could bring in a copy of the song “Heroes and Villains,” and was met with a chorus of Beach Boys nerds (myself included) offering album versions, live versions, demos and outtakes, and sheet music. “Everybody in the class had way more Beach Boys recordings than I did,” she says.
As in the Monkees Ensemble, the class spanned three generations of fans: Boomers like Jack Whitney, who showed up for the first class with a well-loved vintage Beach Boys songbook; Gen-Xers like Lisa, who still recalls listening to her father’s eight-track recording of Endless Summer as a toddler; and the class’s Millennial representative, 21-year-old Luis Echeverria, who already plays more instruments and knows more rock music minutiae than most people twice his age.
“This is the first group of people I have ever played with that can out-geek me to the point of making me look like a beginner,” says drummer and middle school teacher Greg Crumpley. Beach Boys Ensemble was his first Old Town School experience. “[My wife] Amy had taken a couple of vocal classes, so we were on the mailing list,” he explains. “When she saw there was a Beach Boys ensemble, she signed me up as a birthday present.” Greg had been a Beach Boys fan since the release of Endless Summer, when he was in seventh grade. “Since then, if it’s Beatles, Beach Boys, Sixties, surf, or power pop, I’m there, saturated in it.”
Beach Boys Ensemble ended up running for two 16-week sessions, covering hits like “Help Me, Rhonda” and “Don’t Worry Baby,” hidden gems like “Sail on Sailor” and “Feel Flows,” and obscurities like “Be Here in the Morning.” Some instrumental improvisation was necessary, with Russell McGonagle handling many parts on his keyboard, my melodica standing in for the horn part on “God Only Knows,” and Lisa approximating the iconic tannerin line of “Good Vibrations” with her Bebot synthesizer app. The vocals, however, were the focus of the class. Cathy transcribed the vocal parts to each song and divided the class by vocal ranges, and Sean recorded each class and shared it in a Dropbox folder so we could practice our parts throughout the week.
As Beach Boys Ensemble wound down, we started talking about the possibility of a Zombies Ensemble (mentions in class of the band’s Odessey and Oracle album were often met by those same puppy dog noises). But a Zombies class seemed like it might have more limited appeal than the Monkees or Beach Boys, so, as Cathy explains, the question became, “What kind of excuse can we have to do as many Zombies songs as possible, while also keeping the class open?”
“I want to keep sticking more people onto our foil ball,” Cathy says, and the “psychedelic garage” genre includes enough variety to continuously attract new members and keep long-term members engaged. At the beginning of each session, Cathy asks members to name their favorite psychedelic or garage rock song, and members make frequent song requests on the class Facebook group as well.
Krista Ortgiesen, who manages the Old Town School’s education program, is hoping for “I Can Hear The Grass Grow” by The Move, “My White Bicycle” by Tomorrow, and anything by The Pretty Things. “And I have a choreography for that,” she jokes, referencing the impressive number of songs she’s created routines for as a go-go dance instructor. Vocalist Stephanie Reynolds confesses, “I don’t really know many psychedelic garage songs. That’s why I take classes: to learn new things.” But she seconds my choice of “Listen, Listen” by the Merry-Go-Round — she learned that song in one of the Old Town School’s go-go classes. Inspired by the most recent Monkees tour, Cathy is adding some songs from their movie Head. There are also enough requests for more Hollies and Who songs that Cathy plans to focus on those two groups during an upcoming session.
Cathy creates all the instrumental and vocal charts herself, and it’s a time-consuming job. “I’ll take a deep breath and block out a whole day for one song,” she says. “I only pick songs that I like and that everyone else will like.” There are practical considerations, too. She keeps in mind who will be in class each session, what instruments we all play, and how much time we can spend on our music outside class.
Take the time Sean suggested Pink Floyd’s “See Emily Play.” As much as Cathy wanted to do some early Floyd, she wasn’t sure about us taking on a song with such a challenging guitar part when we had only one electric guitarist, and he was already working two jobs. So Cathy revisited the band’s catalog, and she hit upon “Arnold Layne.”
“I loved the way he sang ‘a nasty sort of person,'” she enthuses. “And ‘doors bang/chain gang’ — it’s so vivid. I loved the chord progression, I loved the harmonies. I couldn’t stop listening to it. And I thought, if it has that effect on me, then everyone will have that kind of reaction to it.”
Like many Old Town School classes, each session of Psychedelic Garage culminates in a graduation performance. Cathy also looks for other performance opportunities for the group, such as the school carnival, and newcomers to the class are warned that there will be a lot of singing, occasionally onstage. It’s a testament to the school’s supportive atmosphere, and Cathy’s gifts as a teacher, that people who’ve never performed in public before often end up belting out lead vocals from the concert hall stage in just two months.
“I really feel that the Beach Boys Ensemble gave me my first experience with real singing,” says Lisa. “I have a better understanding of the different parts, and I feel that when given a song, I can find my place in the harmonies where I can sing comfortably. I also feel that I’ve gotten better at matching the pitch of certain notes. I never felt that I was good at singing — and still don’t most of the time! — but this was the first time I ever felt encouraged to try. It feels good!”
Krista had done a little singing before, with the school’s Tom Waits Ensemble. But she says the Beach Boys and Psych Garage ensembles taught her “that I really do have the courage to sing in front of people, and that my voice isn’t as bad as I thought it was.”
Jen’s no stranger to performing in public — she sang in choirs growing up, and has performed with the Old Town School’s Women’s Choir as well as many other ensembles — but she’s also learned a lot from the class. “I feel like my musicianship as a whole has improved as I’ve learned to be more relaxed in my playing and singing while still taking risks. Even though I’ve been in many other ensembles, this is the first time that I’ve felt like a member of an honest-to-goodness band, and it’s addicting.”
Jen’s not the only one who feels like there’s something special about this ensemble. Sean relates that he stuck around for Psych Garage not just for the opportunity to play songs from Odessey and Oracle, but also “because of the awesome people I [get] to hang out with on a regular basis.” Classmates take a genuine interest in each other, arriving early to chat before class, sharing favorite music, and getting together for concerts and movie nights. When my dad passed away this summer, Psych Garage was there for me every week with friends who supported me and music that never failed to lift me up.
Greg says, “I wouldn’t have likely joined this class if it had been another teacher or another group of people involved. It doesn’t sound like this group has the egos that some of the other classes do. This group just gets excited hearing what we do when we play together. It’s a gas, man.” Amy agrees, “What I’ve learned is to let go, have fun, and know that with a great group I will sound okay. Letting go and getting out of my head has been the best lesson. This class resets my brain.”
On a sweltering Sunday afternoon, the Psychedelic Garage Ensemble takes the stage at the St. Helen’s school carnival. Besides the usual sea of tie-dye and paisley, Greg’s in a diving mask, Amy’s sporting a giant hat shaped like a crab, and Krista, Jen, Lisa, and I carry puppets and stuffed toys shaped like sharks, starfish, dolphins, and other underwater creatures.
“The continent of Atlantis was an island,” Sean intones, “which lay before the great flood in the area we now call the Atlantic Ocean.”
Donovan’s epic “Atlantis” is a bold choice for a set opener. Bold — and ridiculous. Even if the audience manages to stick it out through the opening monologue, they’ve still got approximately 300 repetitions of the chorus to survive before they get to hear something they know. But if an audience stays through the whole song, we’ll know we’re golden — and we’ll know they’re definitely our kind of people.
Then again, we’re playing at a Catholic elementary school carnival. Our audience is a few friends, my husband, some families from the school, and the next band on the schedule. And judging from the last performer, a solo accordionist who just closed his set with the surf classic “Miserlou,” we may not even be the weirdest thing the audience has heard in the last hour.
Sean’s still relating the Atlanteans’ backstory, and my mind wanders a bit. I’m thinking about When We Get to Surf City, journalist Bob Greene’s account of his years in Jan and Dean’s backing band, and of the friendships he developed through music. There’s a scene in the book where the guys are on their way to a gig, and they pull off the road to follow a sign promising peach dessert specials at a Big Boy restaurant. Greene writes, “It was a moment that meant nothing and that meant everything, and we didn’t have to say a word about it, or about how much we would miss days like this if somehow they were taken away.” That’s how I feel right now, and how I feel every time the Psych Garage Ensemble gets together.
The monologue’s wrapping up now. We’re waving the ocean animals in the air. There may even be some hippie-style space dancing going on, both on and offstage. Greg comes in on the drums, and we all come in on the endless chorus. It’s a typical festival sound setup — I can’t hear anything, even Krista, who’s sharing a mic with me — but it doesn’t stop me from singing my heart out. I’ve volunteered to take care of ad-libbing Donovan’s interjections about his antediluvian baby, yeah yeah yeah, and I’m going to do it as loud as I can. And I’ll probably cringe when I see video later, but right now, I’m having too much fun to care. We all are.
“Savor every day, every summer night,” Bob Greene urges his readers, because every chance to share music with friends is a true gift.
Or, to put it in Psych Garage terms: Hail Atlantis.
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Gretchen Unico