Music Machine Upstages Blues Magoos 'PSYCHEDELIC MUSIC' STIRS BOPPERS

By Catherine Watson
Minneapolis Tribune Staff Writer

The Blues Magoos played their "psychedelic music" in a concert with four other groups Sunday afternoon in the St. Paul Auditorium arena.

It wasn't really psychedelic, but nobody cared. Mainly because it wasn't a concert, either.

It was a full-dress social event for the teeny-bop set, 6,900 kids showed up for it, wearing the flashy mini-skirt and bell bottomed pants expected of them.

The music, all of which was loud and some of which was good, was almost incidental to the scene.

THE KIDS at the "Fourth Annual WDGY Winter Carnival Spectacular" knew that the group with the biggest billing always appears last at teen music events.

While they waited for the Magoos, they wandered around the arena floor, smoked, made friends, occasionally paired off and generally acted oblivious to the music from Danny's Reasons and the T.C. Atlantic - both local groups - washing over them.

The "spectacular" was half over before the audience warmed up enough to cheer the radio station's name when "Wonderful WDGY's" disc jockeys told them to.

Things picked up when The Music Machine, five black - clad, page - boyed men from California, drifted on stage.

THEY WERE the only group on the program that tuned up.

B. Mason Dean one of the disc jockey's, said they tuned up because they'd studied different sorts of music and were "more experienced than other groups." The lead singer, he said, had perfect pitch.

Their musical experience showed, however, in Latin American and Near Eastern overtones in several numbers, and they did some haunting things with an electric organ and a flute.

Higher in pitch and more discordant than most modern music, their sound was startling in the huge arena. Even the wandering semi-bored teeny-boppers stopped wandering to listen.

ODDLY, the Music Machine did what the Blues Magoos promised but later failed to achieve: the Music Machine produced a pschedelic effect that was almost eerie.

Of course, not all of it was their fault.

A psychedelic experience, by the way, is supposed to be sort of "mind expansion" like the produced by hallucinatory drugs.

In other words, like the Machine's performance, it's unreal.