Though they took enough acid to qualify as a psychedelic band, the Blues Magoos always had a foot in the garage.

The Blues Magoos — their old sound is pretty much intact. Photo: Alan Rand.

By Brett Milano

Early in the Blues Magoos’ set on Thursday, frontman Peppy Castro told a little story about touring in the ’60s: One evening the band looked out to find police standing at their dressing room door. Frantically they grabbed their tour can of marijuana, and managed to throw half of it into the toilet. So they wound up with an unflushable bowl of quicksand…and a few cops who’d only come to escort them to their show.

Then they played a song they’d written the morning after that incident, a bit of stoner humor called “The President’s Council on Psychedelic Fitness.” Was it silly? Sure—but the kind of good-silly that can only come from a ‘60s hippie band that just flushed half its weed down the toilet. Especially if they still have the other half.

The Blues Magoos are the second vintage ’60s band to hit local clubs within the last couple months; after garage-rock kings the Sonics who played the Brighton Music Hall in April. Like the Sonics, the Magoos came with a three-fifths original lineup (Castro, co-lead singer/keyboardist Ralph Scala and drummer Geoff Daking were joined by a new guitarist and bassist), and their old sound pretty much intact. They did, however, draw less of a crowd, with Johnny D’s about half-full with ’60s diehards—including Arts Fuse film critic Tim Jackson, who last saw the band when they played his junior-high prom.

Though they took enough acid to qualify as a psychedelic band (and wrote songs with acronym titles like “Love Seems Doomed” and “Albert Common Is Dead”), the Magoos always had a foot in the garage. Their one hit single, 1967’s “We Ain’t Got Nothin’ Yet” was a joyful bit of teenage bravado, and it didn’t seem a contradiction for the now-older band to play it this week; the gusto was still there in the delivery. There was also genuine camaraderie between Castro and Scala, the kind you don’t often see in reunion shows. One of the new songs they played was their silliest one yet — “Crapo del Stinko,” about a bad time in a Chinese restaurant — and you realized that the Magoos’ goofier moments probably happened so these two could crack each other up.

It wasn’t all yuks, however. The band played pretty much the same set it would’ve done in the ’60s, complete with obligatory closing freakout on “Tobacco Road” (Though a bit younger than the rest, guitarist Mike Ciliberto used delays and Echoplex for a convincing period sound). They played some credible blues on “Sometimes I Think About,” which harked back to the band’s beginnings in the Greenwich Village folk scene. They noted that their second single “Pipe Dream” was banned by radio stations who (correctly) assumed it was a drug song; otherwise it sounded catchy enough to be a psych-era hit. The core Magoos have done fine in later life—Castro became a successful jingle singer and Scala works in pharmaceuticals (insert your own joke here)—so this week found them playing for kicks, just like first time around.

Brett Milano has been covering music in Boston for decades, and is the author of Vinyl Junkies: Adventures in Record Collecting (St. Martins, 2001) and The Sound of Our Town: A History of Boston Rock & Roll (Commonwealth Editions, 2007). He recently returned from New Orleans where he was editor of the music and culture magazine OffBeat.