Psychedelic Jukebox: [1967] The Painted Faces - Anxious Colour

 

The Painted Faces’ Anxious Color arrives in listening as a small, urgent relic from mid-1967 that betrays more careful craft than casual hearsay about teenage garage bands of the era would suggest. The record’s provenance—an issue on Manhattan (Manhattan 808) with Anxious Color backed by Things We See, released in June 1967—places the band in the narrow window when American regional scenes were experimenting with modal guitar lines and lyric images that lean toward restless unease.

From the first seconds the track stakes out a mood: an insistent bass figure, clipped rhythmic guitar, and a lead line that favors minor-modal bends over conventional pentatonic rock phrasing, which pulls the ear away from the brighter, three-chord pop of many local acts and toward a cooler, more unsettled register. The arrangement is economical—verse and chorus alternate without an extended instrumental detour—yet the performance compresses a sense of mounting tension into a roughly two-and-a-half minute single.

Formed in Fort Myers, Florida, the band who recorded Anxious Color emerged from local circuits where young musicians cycled through small studios and short-run singles; the group’s lineup at the time of the Manhattan single consisted of Jack O'Neill (vocals), Jerry Turano (lead guitar), Harry Bragg (drums), John McKinney (rhythm guitar, later bass) and Craig Guild (bass) and George Schule. 

The song’s lyrics resist simplistic reading: images and turns of phrase suggest a speaker trapped in a restless perception, lines that foreground sensation and a searching tone. Paired with the guitar’s Eastern-tinged bends and the rhythm section’s forward motion, the lyrics create a feeling of anxious momentum—an emotion projected more by the record’s moves than by explicit explanation. 

The record’s local performance history offers another thread: in south Florida the A-side received significant airplay and topped local charts for multiple weeks, which helps explain how a relatively obscure Florida group registered on the wider collectors’ radar later. That local momentum seems to have been cut short by the same pressures that felled many American bands of the period—lineup instability and the draft—so the single’s initial reach did not translate into sustained national touring or further promotion on the scale required to break a band into the mainstream. 

The record’s afterlife is worth following closely because it reframes the original release without inventing provenance. Beginning in the 1980s and accelerating through reissues, the Painted Faces’ small catalog was anthologized for garage-collectors’ labels and compilation projects; a 1994 compilation titled Anxious Color and later reissues collected singles and unreleased studio cuts, which allowed new generations to assess the band’s work beyond the original 45.

    You might also be interested in following song from the Psychedelic Jukebox: "[1966] The Outcasts - Set Me Free".

Sources:

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Painted_Faces
2. https://cosmicmindatplay.wordpress.com/2013/08/02/classic-singles-50-the-painted-faces-anxious-color-things-we-see-1967/
3. https://www.discogs.com/release/1771460-Painted-Faces-Anxious-Color
4. https://www.rocklistmusic.co.uk/mojo_p2.html
5. https://www.allmusic.com/album/anxious-color-mw0000662204