Most psychedelia dates like milk; listeners born a week after an album's release won't experience its high. As most of us are too cheap to afford crap, and too young to lean on nostalgia for appreciation, here's your best bet: avoid the psychedelic bands who made money. Jefferson Airplane, for instance, are forever a sixties band because they were humorless slogan-mongers who sang for that day's weather report.

Count Danny Ben-Israel as a tremendous exception within the genre; he knew where the wind blew then, and he knew where it was going to blow in the future. The Kathmandu Sessions is a reissue of his second (and last) studio album. It is his only recording in English -- the first, Bullshit 3 1/4, was in Hebrew -- and appropriately starts with a "tongue twister" sentence ("The stone train on the white cliffs -- oh fuck"), which he struggles through. Songs like "Bad Trip" soar with nearly mystical choral chants, and the satire is still sharp enough to resonate.

This is a thoroughly "living" musical document today for the same reason that Zappa's first records still resonate; its long compositions are still rich with ideas! Ben-Israel's material, although based upon heavily-structured concepts, also recycles countless songs of the period, twisting them inside out with a playful vengeance. In "Kathmandu", the lyrical jokes often come from inserting the word "kathmandu" over another noun, but the composition itself is never just a basic delight. It knocks Ben-Israel's peers' melodies around like tennis balls; they mutate, lactate and vacillate beneath his acid sky. "Kathmandu" is the record's unforgettable 13-minute centerpiece, going from crazed Joplin to opium-craving spoken word, then into a netherworld of dream states, play dates and melodic fates. Just like Zappa, the twists and turns go beyond mere parody, and are rooted in classical concepts. The song approaches the brilliance of Liszt's own hilarious "Hungarian Rhapsody #2", and throughly surpasses the efforts of the Fugs and other celebrated satirists of the period.

 Ben-Israel was not popular enough to inspire speculation regarding his abrupt departure from the music scene. This very lack of popularity, of course, is one reason he left psychedelia to return to stage musicals. Another is the residue of sadness that permeates The Kathmandu Sessions' last track, "The Hippies of Today are the Assholes of Tomorrow". This scary, mournful song was recorded in 1970, two years after all the other tracks, and reads like a disillusioned summation of the sixties ("The righteous of today are the bigots of tomorrow"), and of sons who fear their destiny ("Oh dear mother, save me from becoming an asshole like Father"). Like "Kathmandu", you'll always remember it, and you'll never need a pill to enjoy it.