Psychedelic Jukebox: [1967] The Id - The Inner Sound Of The Id

 

The Id arrived in 1967 as an odd, deliberate creation: not a conventional garage band album but a studio project assembled around Jerry Cole, steered and packaged by Paul Arnold, and issued by RCA as a single LP whose centrepiece is the extended closing track The Inner Sound Of The Id. 

The backstory helps explain the record’s look and tone. Jerry Cole was already a first-call Los Angeles session leader who moved between surf instrumentals, television house bands and high-profile studio work; his résumé and impulse to gather trusted sidemen shaped the project’s personnel and execution. The players credited, Glenn Cass (bass, backing vocals), Norman Cass (rhythm guitar, backing vocals) and Don Dexter (drums, backing vocals) alongside Cole — are the practical core of what listeners hear.

Recording activity sits in the mid of 1966 (July–August), with the finished LP brought to market by RCA in the early months of 1967. That timing helps explain why critics at the time perceived the album as a mid-sixties studio artefact even as it arrived in a year that would see more celebrated psychedelic landmarks; the record itself was assembled from a larger batch of tapes, pared down to ten tracks for the RCA release. Paul Arnold’s role as conceiver, arranger and credited composer on several items complicates authorship: printed credits name Arnold as the creative impresario while Cole and Glenn Cass appear on composition credits for at least the title piece.

That provenance is not clean. The documentary trail shows a tangled paper and tape history: appropriations, repackagings and the circulation of alternate masters across budget labels became part of the record’s afterlife. Outtakes and masters connected to the Id sessions were folded into a raft of low-profile releases — from Alshire/101 Strings orchestral overdubs to bespoke budget LPs with invented band names — which scattered source material across the marketplace and created archival confusion that reissue producers would later have to undo. Cole himself voiced anger about the handling of those masters in interviews: “Paul Arnold absconded with the RCA royalties from The Id and then proceeded to sell that other material to a lot of people at various labels. It really got out of hand ... .”

Against that legal and commercial fog, the music remains the reason the album survived as a cult item. The centerpiece song, The Inner Sound Of The Id, occupies roughly ten minutes and functions as an extended centerpiece for the LP: a collage-like, long-form piece that refuses conventional verse/chorus payoff and instead exploits repetition, layering and small instrumental gestures to create a sustained state. The track’s instrumental pallet is compact but stretched: Cole’s electric guitars supply single-note shards and occasional yardbird-inflected outbursts; the low bass locks into cyclical ostinatos; drums are frequently placed back in the mix; organ and keyboard washes provide bedrock colors; and a sitar part appears not as disciplined raga but as an exotic drone and ornament. Listening closely, the parts are recorded and mixed to overlap as blocks of sound that interlock and rub against one another rather than to spotlight continuous solos. 

Harmonic practice on the piece favours pedal points and modal planes over pop chord progression, so the music’s motion is generated by repeated fragments and color shifts instead of functional cadences. Rhythmically, the song foregrounds persistent ostinati and small metric quirks that sustain forward motion rather than conventional drum fills or obvious tempo changes. The sitar is used as a coloristic device—an aural hue—rather than as evidence of authentic Indian performance practice, a choice that places the piece within the era’s widespread Sitarsploitation without implying technical fidelity to Hindustani technique. 

The spoken word vocals on the title track function chiefly as an additional instrument: lines are sparse, chant-adjacent and fragmentary, deployed to increase density and trance-like repetition instead of carrying extended storytelling. The vocal material is an atmospheric utterance. The human voice here is woven into the aural layering and alternates between close, intimate placement and distant, highly-treated rendering; echo, tape layering, and deliberate toggles between dry and heavily-processed presentation ... . The production is one of the song’s most telling features: engineers and producers use echo and tape overlays to create a push-and-pull effect in which instruments move in and out of focus, producing a felt interiority that matches the conceptual psychedelic claim of the material. 

Placed in the wider 1960s field, the title piece sits where West Coast studio professionalism met the period’s appetite for long duration forms and Eastern timbres: it connects to mid-60s raga-tinted pop and to other experiments that stretched short-form songs into sustained passages, yet it retains an American, session-band workmanship that keeps solos clipped and grooves tight rather than allowing extended live improvisation to dominate. 

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Sources:

1. https://www.discogs.com/release/2921988-The-Id-The-Inner-Sounds-Of-The-Id
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Cole
3. https://www.discogs.com/release/2142721-The-Id-The-Inner-Sounds-Of-The-Id
4. https://www.popmatters.com/060220-astrosounds-2496104391.html
5. https://www.allmusic.com/song/the-inner-sound-of-the-id-mt0011856128
6. https://sundazed.com/the-id-the-inner-sounds-of-the-id-the-alternate-sounds-of-the-id-2cd.aspx
7. https://www.discogs.com/release/25946284-The-Id-The-Inner-Sounds-Of-The-Id
8. https://www.discogs.com/release/2838941-The-Id-3Projection-Company-The-Inner-Sounds-Of-The-Id
9. https://worldinsound.com/index.php/releases/relics-from-the-past/the-id
10. https://www.discogs.com/master/236498-The-Id-The-Inner-Sounds-Of-The-Id
11. https://rockasteria.blogspot.com/2012/06/id-inner-sounds-of-id-1967-us-acid.html
12. https://clubdiva.ee/The-Id/Inner-Sounds-Id/70412
13. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_Wood_%28This_Bird_Has_Flown%29
14. https://www.albumoftheyear.org/user/snwflkavalanche/album/521946-the-inner-sounds-of-the-id/
15. https://www.rockadrome.com/store/id-the-the-inner-sounds-of-the-id-lp-reissue.html