Head Shop

The Head Shop

In an industry filled with eccentric and enigmatic
figures, few are as mysterious as the producer/
songwriter/performer Milan Radenkovic, best known
by his mononymous title Milan, The Leather Boy. A
character described as so stylized he could have been
created by Andy Warhol, Milan was a fixture of garage
and psychedelic rock production despite never
attaining a commercial hit, and despite very little being
known about him. In spite of the confusion surrounding
his background (Or as a result of it, more likely.)
Milan has entered music history as one of the
great anomalies of the industry, and singles and
albums that he has either performed on, wrote for, or
produced have often sold for high prices on the record
collectors' market.
The Head Shop is one such project. An otherwise
obscure New York garage rock unit that would release
a single, self-titled album, one that would become
among the final projects that Milan worked on before
his early death from brain cancer. A sparse and
dystopian affair, The Head Shop is an acid trip of a
garage album, featuring heavily layered psychedelic
fuzz dementedly fused with spacious, and
agoraphobic arrangements, with the intent of merging
then-modern music with those of experimental
classical sounds. As expected, the album was far too
bizarre for contemporary audiences, but it became
enormously sought after among crate diggers,
and stands out as one of the stranger productions
of the 1960s.