I reorganized the store last Tuesday. Not alphabetically—that's for customers who don't know what they want. I did it autobiographically. Records in the order I discovered them, the way they changed me, the way each one led to the next. Kid came in looking for "something psychedelic for running" and I handed him this playlist before I'd even thought about it. Then I went home and ran to it myself, trying to figure out why these fifteen tracks, why this order, why it felt like a confession I didn't mean to make.
The title gave it away. "This is just a tribute." Tenacious D, obviously, but also the most honest thing you can say about a psych-rock running playlist in 2024. We're not making "Interstellar Overdrive." We're not recording at Abbey Road with a broken Leslie speaker and a tab of questionable provenance. We're running around the lakefront in technical fabric, listening to bands who are themselves paying tribute to bands who were paying tribute to Skip Spence and Roky Erickson. It's recursion all the way down, and somehow that makes it more honest, not less.
SKATERS kicks it off with "Mental Case"—garage-psych that sounds like it was recorded in a basement because it probably was. Dan Auerbach's "Heartbroken, In Disrepair" follows with that Black Keys blues-rock DNA, but looser, more willing to let the fuzz breathe. By the time Jacuzzi Boys hit with "Happy Damage," you're three tracks deep into a very specific lineage: bands who know exactly what they're stealing and why it still matters. This isn't nostalgia. It's archaeology with better gear.
The middle stretch—Acid Dad through The Mystery Lights—is where the playlist stops apologizing. "Die Hard" has that locked-in motorik pulse underneath the psychedelic shimmer. WITCH (the Zambian rock band, not the Portland doom outfit) drops "Home Town" right in the center, and suddenly you're running through 1970s Lusaka via a 2010s reissue on Now-Again Records. This is what crate-digging sounds like at 131 BPM. J ember, Ok Otter—bands you've maybe never heard of, doing exactly what this playlist needs them to do: keep the tempo honest and the fuzz thick.
Then Schur appears twice in three tracks. "Lock Stock and Barrel" and "Tres Leches"—German psych-rock that sounds like Hawkwind if they'd discovered Neu! before discovering space. I looked it up: same label, same producer, recorded in the same sessions. You can hear it. There's a tonal consistency that acts like a reset button around mile 3, when your brain is trying to negotiate with your legs and failing.
Night Beats closes the whole thing with "Thorns" and "New Day," bracketing the New Candys double shot in between. By this point, the playlist has made its case: you don't need to reinvent the wheel if you can find new reasons to spin it. These bands aren't trying to be the Stooges or the 13th Floor Elevators. They're trying to figure out what those bands knew about momentum and distortion and the way a good bassline can make you forget you're tired.
I've been thinking about tributes a lot lately. The store is full of them—reissues, covers, bands with "ex-members of" in their bio. Running is a tribute too, in a way. You're not breaking records. You're not discovering new territory. You're just moving through the same miles, the same playlists, trying to find something that makes the repetition feel like progress. Some days it works. Some days it's just tribute. Some days that's enough.
