Song Of The Day 8/29/2013: Roy Harper - "Committed"

Mental Health Week: British folk-rock pioneer Roy Harper, an older-brother figure to Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and a bunch of others more famous than he, is one of two artists featured on Mental Health Week to have done time in an asylum. (The other's coming tomorrow.) It's uncertain whether Harper -- who was raised as a Jehovah's Witness kid so I already "get" him -- was truly crackers when he had a nervous breakdown, or whether he was faking it to get out of the Royal Air Force. Either way he won a stay in the bridal suite of Lancaster's exclusive Moor Medical Institute, which came with a deluxe package of their very finest electroshock therapy treatments. He summed up his experience in "Committed" from his debut album Sophisticated Beggar. Harper's simulated disintegration in this song certainly sounds authentic, which is to say it sounds a lot like the AM/PM down the street at about 1:45 in the morning.