Psychedelic Jukebox: [1967] The Freak Scene - My Rainbow Life

 

The Freak Scene began in the mid-1960s not as a conventional band whose members toured under a fixed roster but as a deliberate studio project helmed by Rusty Evans (born Marcus Uzilevsky). In the spring of 1967 Evans oversaw the Columbia release Psychedelic Psoul, a record that placed Middle Eastern melodic gestures and modal motifs at the center of its arrangements and that presented the material as a crafted studio statement. The project’s provenance and its label placement on Columbia make clear that this was one of the company’s early titled moves into the then-fashionable psychedelic market, yet the record itself failed to find chart success and sank from mainstream view as the year closed.

Within that context My Rainbow Life emerges as a revealing case study of how a song could take two concurrent paths in the same metropolitan scene. On the Columbia LP the track appears as a concise piece of raga-tinged pop, where its modal lead line, droning harmonic underpinning and liberal use of reverb place it alongside other East-leaning album moments such as A Million Grains of Sand and Rose of Smiling Faces. That LP realization favors an effect-rich approach: the lead figure floats above a stabilized sonority created by layered studio techniques, and the lyric deploys color-filled visual images as the primary expressive device rather than depending on verse/chorus convention. The Columbia presentation thus reads as a polished studio interpretation of a piece that had simultaneous life elsewhere in New York’s single-driven garage economy.

The lyrical content of My Rainbow Life can be understood as exploring a state of perceptual expansion, reflecting the mid-1960s fascination with consciousness and heightened awareness without depicting literal events. Words are carefully chosen to maintain a balance between accessible pop phrasing and the aesthetic experimentation Evans and his collaborators sought: references to “flowing colors,” “shifting lights,” and “the world anew” recur, producing a cohesive image that threads through both the Columbia LP and the Third Bardo single versions.

Running in parallel to the Freak Scene LP was a circulation of the composition under a different banner: the New York group Third Bardo placed Rainbow Life on the B-side of their single “I’m Five Years Ahead of My Time” on Roulette (catalog R-4742) in 1967, a pressing that preserves a more urgent, guitar-forward reading of the tune. The Bardo flip is credited on label and in standard discographies to R. Evans and Victoria Pike and is associated in the single’s production paperwork with Teddy Randazzo’s arranging and producing activities, which ties the piece directly into Randazzo’s studio orbit and into the Pike–Randazzo household of writers. The Third Bardo pressing delivers a rawer energy—an up-front rhythm guitar and taut vocal delivery—where the Eastern scalar contour remains prominent but is presented with a garage edge rather than the smoother, studio-layered sheen of the Columbia cut.

The relationship between those two contemporaneous recordings is neither accidental nor coincidental: Evans carried a thread of ideas across sessions, and the same Manhattan studio matrix that produced the Third Bardo acetate runs and the Freak Scene album sessions explains why similar modal gestures and timbral choices recur in both versions. Sessions associated with Bell Sound and Bell Studios appear in the paper trail and in later recollections, and surviving acetates and reissue transfers point to Bell-sourced material surfacing in compilation series; these workshop conditions allowed Evans to treat instrumentation as an adjustable palette, substituting sitar-like guitar timbres, sustained drones and tape treatments for authentic Eastern instruments while keeping the melodic contours tied to Indian-derived modal shapes. In interviews Evans has emphasized that he conceived and directed the Freak Scene sessions and that his earlier experiments—most notably the work cut under The Deep name—functioned as a testing ground for the approaches later deployed on the Freak Scene LP.

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Sources:

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