Listen: Excerpt From A Teenage Opera / Keith West
Excerpt
Keith West, real name Keith Hopkins, had a budding psychedelic career in the 60′s, not only as a member of Four Plus One, The In Crowd and Tomorrow but also solo. When ‘Excerpt From A Teenage Opera’ charted in the UK, getting a copy became my mission. Luckily, my uncle’s jukebox vending office got a US promo pressing, and wow, it was even better than I’d imagined. Way too young to take, not to mention even find LSD, records like these became my way of tripping.
I would call our local Top 40, WNDR, relentlessly requesting this single. Basically, I was begging, completely convinced if only kids could hear it, even once, the record would instantaneously become a smash in America too. I’ll never know if the experiment would have gotten results, they never played it. Not once.
Thus began my suspicion, mistrust and ultimate despise of US radio.