CULT HEROES PSYCHIC TEMPLE SPREAD THE COSMIC CALI GOOD VIBES
“COMPOSER. TRUCK driver. Cult leader.” Chris Schlarb’s old biography, written a few years ago, made for a droll summary of the Psychic Temple frontman’s skillset. During the week, the Long Beach native drove a truck, while at weekends he beavered away on an expansive vision of Californian music that could incorporate jazz, psychedelia, country, sunshine pop and much more. Then, about, six years ago, Schlarb “made a little bit of money from this video game soundtrack, Dropsy, that I’d done. I’ve been poor my entire life. That was the only time I had any money in the bank.”
The soundtrack paid for a studio, Big Ego, that has kept Schlarb busy as a producer: “From July 2019 to February 2020,” he says, “I was producing an average of two and a half albums a month.” But it also allowed the hyper-enthusiastic obsessive to indulge his Psychic Temple project. Over a series of fine albums (and a superb jazz big band reworking of Eno’s Music For Airports), he has lived out his fantasies as, if not exactly a cult leader, then a music guru capable of attracting many illustrious artists to his cause.
“It’s exactly what I dreamt about doing when I was in high school,” he says, “reading about the Muscle Shoals guys, reading about Stax and the Wrecking Crew. I was like, Wow, these guys make records all day!”
An attempt to recruit one Wrecking Crew alumnus, Carol Kaye, ended in disappointment. But Psychic Temple’s revolving cast has included superlungs Terry Reid, Muscle Shoals session legends David Hood and Spooner Oldham, Joni Mitchell bassist Max Bennett and Minuteman Mike Watt, among myriad others.
“Some of these great artists end up becoming trophies for younger people and they’re not,” explains Schlarb, “they’re brilliant individualists who really had to make a way for themselves.”
The concept has reached a new high on Psychic Temple’s fifth album proper, Houses Of The Holy, where each of the four sides find Schlarb joined by a different band: LA indierockers Cherry Glazerr; ’90s post-jazz luminaries and Tortoise affiliates the Chicago Underground Trio; Paisley Underground mainstays The Dream Syndicate; and, for side D’s Axelrodian orch-soul fantasia, rapper Xololanxinxo.
“I love collaborating,” says Schlarb. “Having been an outsider forever,
I felt deeply accepted by people whose art meant so much to me.”
The Houses Of The Holy title is “the punchline to a 10-year-long joke”, after
Psychic Temple’s previous full-length albums were titled I to IV. But the Led
Zeppelin tributes do not end there – Schlarb is about to become a father for the fourth and final time.
“I love my children and my family,” he says, “but fuck man, four is good.”
The boy’s name has been preordained: it is, of course, Coda.
John Mulvey
“Wow, these guys make records all day!” CHRIS SCHLARB, PSYCHIC TEMPLE