The Seeing Eye Gods
The Seeing Eye Gods EP

Billy Pilgrim and Ripped Van Winkle were two freaks who, on sunny California afternoons, shared mind-bending space trips fueled by crack. In one of these trips, Billy "imagined" he could see things through the eyes of the gods. This bizarre idea, when communicated to his friend Ripped, took shape, and the afternoons flew by faster and faster as the two tried to capture all the hallucinations, attempting to bring them into the real world, that real world made of endless listens to Velvet Underground, Berlin-era David Bowie, Barrett's Pink Floyd... miles and miles above the Byrds' flying carpet or along the hippie beaches of Country Joe McDonald and Barry "The Fish" Melton. But it's 1985, and the two might seem a bit out of time and history, if it weren't for the Paisley Underground of Rain Parade, Dream Syndicate, and Mazzy Star from the City of Angels bringing back the psychedelic rock of the late sixties.

Billy and Ripped, armed with guitar, electronic drums, and lots of crack, decide to embark on the tortuous path of musical composition. What they manage to materialize from the other dimension, in which they increasingly found empathy, are these five (unique) acid drops. "Pictures Of Matchstick Men" is a stripped-down and visionary version of Status Quo's lysergic masterpiece. "Psychedelic Susy" and "Strawberry Girl" are fluorescent paintings that Billy draws for (and on) his girlfriend of the time, and besides this, the titles are more than exhaustive. The opener "The Only One" is the Jesus & Mary Chain at the end of their career playing at being the Spiders From Mars, even though it will be another 7 years before the Reid brothers realize the death of honey, while the concluding "Happy" is the deviant sadness of Syd Barrett confronting a hypothetical and melancholy sketch of Lennon excluded from the White Album.

It seems there are only a thousand copies of this EP, published in 1985 by Epitaph and almost impossible to find today; certainly not the definitive masterpiece of a genre that had its heyday over 15 years before "The Seeing Eye Gods" saw the light, but let me say that these are 5 moving tracks, if we consider them produced by the minds melted in crack of Brett "Billy Pilgrim" Gurewitz (yes, the very Mr. Brett of Bad Religion) and his friend and dealer John Bertini, aka Ripped Van Winkle.