Released August 1967 Label Atco (US)
Polydor (UK) | Length 42:41 Producer Shadow Morton | |
Genre Psychedelic rock
acid rock
hard rock
blues rock Vanilla Fudge
(1967) The Beat Goes On
(1968) | ||
Vanilla Fudge (Atco 33-224/mono, SD 33-224/stereo) is the first album by the American psychedelic rock band Vanilla Fudge. Released in summer 1967, it consists entirely of half-speed covers and three short original instrumental compositions.
Contents
The album was Vanilla Fudge's most successful, peaking at #6 on the Billboard album charts in September 1967. Parts of the original stereo LP were actually mixed in mono, including the entire track "You Keep Me Hangin' On". An edited version of "You Keep Me Hangin' On" was released as a single and also charted.
Track listing
Side 1 of the album ends with: "The following is a series of high-frequency tones..."
The letters in STRAWBERRY FIELDS only appear on the CD cover and not the original album release.
Reception
Allmusic's Paul Collins retrospectively rated Vanilla Fudge four out of five stars. He stated that "nobody could accuse Vanilla Fudge of bad taste in their repertoire" and that most of the tracks "share a common structure of a disjointed warm-up jam, a Hammond-heavy dirge of harmonized vocals at the center, and a final flat-out jam." However, he also said that "each song still works as a time capsule of American psychedelia."