DC Share Revival: Review: Various Artists - Maximum Sitar '66-'72 (18 Sitar Classics From Psychedelia's Golden Age)

Rating: 90/100 - Genré's: Psychedelic Rock-Pop,
Psychedelic Folk, Sitarsplotation, Progressive Rock

Maximum Sitar ’66–’72, released in 2012 by the label Particles (catalog PARTCD4007), gathers eighteen sitar‑driven rock, pop and folk tracks recorded between 1966 and 1972 across the United States, United Kingdom, Japan, Norway and other locales. The compilation’s booklet features rare photographs and concise artist biographies, urging listeners to “turn off your mind and float Eastwards”. Its ambition is clear: to present not novelty, but a curated arc tracing the sitar’s musical and cultural journey at its peak.

The opening track, “Eight Miles High” by The Folkswingers, immediately establishes the album’s ethnomusicological foundation. From their 1966 Raga Rock album on World Pacific, led by Harihar Rao, a UCLA-trained disciple of Ravi Shankar, these sessions reimagine songs like “Paint It Black” and “Norwegian Wood” through true Hindustani modal frameworks rather than superficial mimicry. The personnel included studio‑scene jazz musicians from the Wrecking Crew: Hal Blaine, Larry Knechtel, Herb Ellis, Tommy Tedesco, and others; yet the rhythmic approach, drone, and ornamented phrasing framed Western melodies within raga structure, prefiguring the sitar’s rigorous assimilation in pop music scenes.

Following this, the track by The Poppy Family, “Free From The City”, introduces a Canadian singer-songwriter approach layered with quiet sitar ambiance. Click’s “Many Times Jimbo” brings a quirky, psychedelia‑informed folk aesthetic, while Shocking Blue offer “Water Boy”, blending European garage‑pop vocals with a sitar tone that adds exotic color rather than modal centrality. Merrell Fankhauser & HMS Bounty’s “A Visit With Ashiya” stands out for its California surf‑psychedelic feel, ambitious ambient drones, and sea‑inspired imagery aligned with the era’s exotica ideal.

The Norwegian band Oriental Sunshine contributes “Across Your Life”, recorded circa 1970, a rare early European example where sitar appears organically within local underground scenes. With Family’s “Face In The Clouds”, a UK art‑rock group active between 1966 and 1973, the sitar is layered as a flanged, hall‑like tone—soft, introspective, part of the band’s evolving sonic palette.

Tomorrow’s “Real Life Permanent Dream”, recorded in 1967 and released on Jonathan King’s imprint, is widely regarded as a touchstone of British psychedelia; the sitar’s drone and expressive string bends dissolve Western guitar patterns into modal tapestry. This devolves into deep tone drone—timeless, trance‑inducing sound that echoes the more experimental edge of the counterculture.

Further along the compilation, Saffron’s “All Your Ambition” and the US jazz‑rock group The Free Spirits with “I’m Gonna Be Free” signal the rising fusion tendency. The Free Spirits—featuring guitarist Larry Coryell, saxophonist Bob Moses, and bassist Jim Pepper—blend jazz freedom with sitar’s sustained resonance, foreshadowing the Indo‑jazz currents of the early 1970s.

The Virgin Sleep offer “Love”, a UK psych‑pop arrangement featuring sitar lines that glide between melody and ornamentation. Elmer Gantry’s Velvet Opera give us “Air”, wherein the sitar floats over swirling organ and echoed voice. Japanese act Flower Travellin’ Band bring “Dhoop”, a slow burning modal piece recorded in Osaka around 1970, combining fuzz guitar, sitar drone, and tabla-like rhythm to create unusual tonal expanses rarely heard outside Japan’s underground psych scene.

Blonde on Blonde contribute their version of “Spinning Wheel”, a delicate sitar‑interlaced take on David Clayton‑Thomas’s song, while British folk‑blues guitarist Wizz Jones performs “One Grain Of Sand” with subtly added sitar spice. The Truth’s “Thoughts” offers a tense folk‑psychedelic drift, sitar creating moody tension amidst acoustic guitar. Elyse Weinberg’s “Oh Deed I Do” gives soft-rock sheen with faint sitar coloration, and the closing track by Galliard, “Ask For Nothing”, anchors the compilation in a quietly ambitious folk‑psych realm with modal phrasing and subtle Indian resonance.

Historically, the sitar’s journey into Western pop began notably in late 1965 with George Harrison’s “Norwegian Wood”, widely credited as the spark for “raga rock” and the so called "Sitarsplotation"; Life magazine in 1966 reported on the phenomenon spreading through San Francisco and New York, noting how stores and bands began to adopt Eastern stylings en masse—a surge that Rao and Harrison both recognized, though Rao’s approach remained academic and purposeful rather than frivolous. Harrison’s formal study with Ravi Shankar began in June 1966, and historians like David Reck and Peter Lavezzoli have described “Love You To” (released 1966) as the first truly faithful assimilation of Hindustani form into Western pop: sitar, tabla, tambura replace guitars, and the composition is structured like an extended alap and jor. Reck called it “absolutely unprecedented”, and Lavezzoli called it the first conscious attempt in Western popular form to emulate non-Western music structurally.

While not all tracks on Maximum Sitar reach that level of structural fidelity, the compilation traces the instrument’s arc: from ritual novelty and surface exoticism in mid‑1966, through textural integration in acts like Flower Travellin’ Band, to modal agency and emergent fusion logic in jazz‑rock hybrids by circa 1970–71. Indeed, though Ananda Shankar is not on this set, his 1970 debut integrating sitar and Moog synth prefigures the late compilation tracks where sitar becomes part of a global musical vocabulary rather than a borrowed flavor.

From a sociological standpoint, the sitar’s widespread adoption between 1966 and 1972 corresponded to subcultural shifts: the hippie rejection of industrial modernity, the embrace of Eastern spirituality, and the quest for transcendental consciousness. Public perception of Ravi Shankar’s Monterey 1967 performance (estimated audience of 55,000; live film attendance tens of thousands more) transformed the sitar from curiosity to credible instrument in Western eyes. Press coverage followed a spike in sitar sales across London and California music instrument stores. Shankar later lamented that many imitators used the sitar blindly. Yet the deepest tracks on Maximum Sitar resist that superficiality

By 1972 the sitar’s moment in Western pop had largely receded. Progressive rock, heavy psych, and emerging synthesizer‑based textures displaced sitar’s once‑novel aesthetic. But Maximum Sitar ’66–’72 preserves the full arc: 1966’s first wave of academically informed covers, through UK psych‑pop and European obscurities, into late‑period fusion impulses. The album’s geographical breadth, with tracks from Sweden, Japan, the U.S. and U.K., illustrates that the sitar’s resonance was not confined to Anglophone centers but was part of an international psychedelic modernism.

Maximum Sitar ’66–’72 presents itself as more than a greatest‑hits platter of sitar‑tinged oddities. It is a coherent historical narrative in sound, revealing how the sitar evolved from exotic accessory to structural voice, from symbolic relic to musical agent of global stylistic change, and how between 1966 and 1972 one instrument helped reshape Western tonal imagination, subcultural identity, and ideals of East–West synthesis.

You might also like the Sitar-Tracks from the Psychedelic Jukebox.

Wednesday, July 23, 2025

Review: Various Artists - Maximum Sitar '66-'72 (18 Sitar Classics From Psychedelia's Golden Age)

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