About two months ago, I got a box set of the first seven Manfred Mann EPs. On the back cover of the seventh EP (As Was), there's a description of how the band formed. One of the sentences is "And it happened that they came one day upon the house of John the Burgess [their producer] who with soft words converted them to the cult of Elessdee." At first, I thought this referred to the drug (L.S.D.), but then I remembered Brian Matthew's comment about the song "L.S.D." on the first Live at the BBC album: "a cynical song about love of money, or as we call it, 'L.S.D.'"
Because of that added context (and because I happened to have read about British money around that time), I realized what "L.S.D." means. Those letters are the abbreviations for "pounds," "shillings," and "pence." They come from the Latin words libra, solidus, and denarius.
