THE E-TYPES: Put the Clock Back on the Wall
by RICH ARITHMETIC
Editor’s Note: This is a somewhat updated version of a post that originally appeared in Darrell Draeger’s 1980’s Cassette Culture Blog.
One of my favorite musical eras were the days of psychedelia. At its peak, major artists like The Beatles and The Moody Blues and The Move and Jimi Hendrix were using the tools of the recording studio to lyrically and/or musically re-create an hallucinogenic acid trip.
It was one of Rock’s most creative eras.
But even garage bands without the money to afford an expensive studio were creating their own acid-tinged records — as evidenced in the oft-reissued multi-disc compilation album series of garage bands classics, Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era 1965-1968.
One of the best and most accomplished of those garage bands was The E-Types, a band who were highly successful in their home state of California, selling out dance venues and auditoriums nightly, but whose regional success unfortunately did not extend much beyond the California border. Nonetheless, their music managed to find me, a kid who spent the Sixties growing up in the middle of Kansas, and they influenced my own music. (I covered one of their singles, “She Moves Me,” on my shiftingears album in 2023.) Despite their small budget and tentative links to a sub-major record label, The E-Types recorded a garage-psych classic, Put the Clock Back on the Wall, which became a centerpiece of the soundtrack to a poorly distributed B-movie aimed at the hippie generation, Blonde on a Bum Trip (She’s Lovely, Sexy, Dangerous). Notice the initials of the sub-title?
Despite how bad the movie was, the soundtrack was pretty great and is currently being distributed by the fabulous Sundazed record label (picture above).