Photograph of the Romanovs, family of Nicholas II of Russia from Yale's Beinecke Library, c. 1910
When the '60s band H.P. Lovecraft named themselves after the author who popularized the genre of "alien horror", they must have known that listeners would expect their songs to summon images of tentacle-faced horrors from other dimensions. This would prove to be a challenge for the Chicago-based band, whose jazzy psych-rock only occasionally proved to be evenly vaguely horrific, usually when directly paying tribute to their namesake on songs like "The White Ship", "At the Mountains of Madness", and "Keeper of the Keys". Filling the remaining space on their albums with folk-rock covers, vaudeville-style numbers, and somber ballads was an odd choice, and as a result their LPs can be a little confusing to listen to.
Their oddest song choice was to cover Chet Powers' hippie anthem "Let's Get Together", a song most people my age first heard as the intro to Nirvana's "Territorial Pissings". Their sprightly, flute-tastic version of the song is not too far from the famous version by the Youngbloods, which was released around the same time. The harmonies are nice, and the Dave Michael's organ-playing is pretty cool, but the song's sound and lyric are so directly at odds with the band's name that it hurts my head. I find myself pelted with mental images of Shub-Niggurath, the Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young, cavorting about a sunny glade with tambourine in hand. As the Necronomicon says, "Y'AI'NG'NGAH - YOG-SOTHOTH - H'EE-L'GEB - F'AI TRHODOG - UAAAAH!"
"Let's Get Together" by H.P. Lovecraft
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