The cover of guitarist Steve Morgen’s first and only album anticipates the record’s mystery status. It features a monochrome reproduction of Edvard Munch’s The Scream, an equally iconic solid grey background, and a single word, small enough to go unnoticed against the colorful merry-go-round of late-'60s psychedelic balloon lettering: "Morgen," which is at once the artist’s name, the album’s title, and the German word for “tomorrow.” 1969 was the year of Woodstock, but it was also the year of Altamont, where a fan's murder at a Rolling Stones concert sounded the death toll of daisy-haired euphoria. If excess had been the rule of the turning decade, Morgen signaled the throbbing hangover that would accompany its listeners into the new one.
“Welcome to the void,” sings Morgen on the album’s vertiginous opener. If Munch’s The Scream rose to German philosopher Schopenhauer’s call for a pictorial art capable of capturing the sound of a human howl, “Welcome to the Void” provides its acid rock counterpart. Amid plunging baroque bass lines, careering fuzz guitars, and a drum gallop capable of whipping a retirement community into a band of Samurais, Morgen opens his flirtation with emptiness -- not with a scream, but with a single, arching, razor-sharp laugh. Not a Black Sabbath laugh, not an “Oh look how evil I am holding my pinky up to the corner of my mouth” kind of cackle, but one that actually hails from the far side of the borderline. Listening to this song for the first time is as disturbing and exhilarating as watching these four Long Island musicians taking an amphetamine-driven joyride to the top of a cliff, looking out into the star-studded black-yonder, and slamming down on the gas.
Which is perhaps one of the reasons why Morgen crashed and burned the second it hit the press, especially considering the band’s pairing with the subsidiary of a major label. Maybe Morgen and his bandmates simply scared radio stations stiff. But for all its inebriated thrill-seeking, its existential head-scratching, and its overblown guitar solos, Morgen offers a gentleman’s share of softer, more delicate moments. “Of Dreams,” the album’s second track, reincarnates the opener's braying Steve Morgen as a kind of sweet-voiced, sexless nymph, recounting a series of bucolic adventures with a woman whose “hair caressed the air and made it sing.” Suddenly, and almost by a stroke of magical luck, the cantering drums of "Welcome to the Void" weave their way back into the mix, revealing the secret logic of one song in the backbone of another.
Women and narcotics are definitely the central pillars of Steve Morgen’s search for metaphysical meaning, and sometimes it's difficult to tell whether he's courting the perfect high or the girl next door. Fortunately, the lyrical skirt-chasing doesn’t stop at embarrassing one-liners like “I want to fill you with my fire.” On “Purple,” “She’s the Nitetime,” and “Love,” the album’s closing trilogy, Morgen returns to the fatal cliff of the first song, jumps aboard a square of windowpane, and shuttles off into the kaleidoscopic night. At first, he begins to lose his sense of time. Then, he begins to panic. Finally, the stars assume the outline of the young woman he's been pining after, and he realizes that she's been sitting beside him the whole time, there on the cliff, guiding him down to earth with a pat on the back and a water bottle.
After three-and-a-half minutes of major key, up-tempo hot love, Maid Marianne slips through Robin Hood’s fingers yet again, and the album finishes on the same note of ecstatic horror that it began on. Not with a suicidal scream this time, but a long and murderous one, as Steve Morgen fords a black riptide of ascending bass triads, climbs atop a bridge of tumbling drums, and promises to “crush [her] to [him] madly/ smother [her] in kisses/ and wildly proclaim [his] love.”
As its top-ten ranking among many a collector and a blogger will attest, Morgen is more than a representative slice of the heavier side of 1960s psychedelia. And it's more than a showcase of some of the most top-notch electric guitar playing that never made it to Woodstock-Altamont, for people who like that kind of thing. Although it is simply overflowing with ’60s rock stereotypes, it takes the sound of its time to a kind of nail-biting, adolescent extreme, perhaps even to its breaking point. Some people might call it the beginning of hard rock.
