The Now Sound!

You could give it an exotic quality with chimes, flutes, and bongos. You could supercharge it with fuzztone distortion. You could purr, hum, and sing the word “groovy” all you wanted. Beneath the racy exteriors of this week’s selections, however, beat the cocktail-tippling heart of an older generation. Uniformly the work of veteran New York City and Los Angeles studio arrangers, composers, and musicians, they’re selections unconsciously calculated to appeal to a slightly older set - a set that was happy to acknowledge current pop culture, but that needed this pop culture to fade into the background, too, when necessary.

The Now Sound was just that. It did not suggest a whole countercultural lifestyle the way that, say, the wild and threatening strains of rock music might. Rather, the Now Sound accessorized, and, in doing so, it unwittingly gravitated to the more commercial end of the American musical landscape, eventually finding its proper home in ‘60s soundtrack and television themes, advertisements, game shows, and your bachelor uncle’s living room.

1. The Big Game Hunters, See the Cheetah (Uni)
Upcoming social occasion? Looking for something more festive than just another snappy beat and a catchy refrain? This groovy little number, with its roomy, wood-paneled interior, reclining bucket seats, bouncy sex kitten insouciance, and patented Zowie-Flute® will turn even the most sexless bachelor pad into a pulsating discothèque within seconds. Just push back the furniture, turn down the lights, blend the peppermint juice, and GO! Wall-mounted Hi-Fi? Yeah, you’re gonna need that too, pal.

As Pop art as a Lichtenstein print or any Batman episode, “See the Cheetah” was written by Alden Shuman (composer of the 1973 soundtrack to The Devil in Miss Jones), produced by Dave Pell (veteran West Coast bandleader, musician, producer) and Russ Regan (ubiquitous West Coast A&R man), and arranged by our guy Mort Garson. It was, in other words, a pure distillation of the Los Angeles studio world. These were the kind of session veterans who could sit down at a table in 1967, rub their hands together, and half an hour later records would be hurtling themselves into heavy rotation over at KHJ.

2. The Distant Galaxy, Blue Scimitar (Verve)
After the engineering fantasies of 1950s Popular Science-style articles and paranoid overtones of the early Space Race, galactic adventure assumed more stylish tones in the late ‘60s. If you watched Star Trek, you knew, for instance, that space was the place for a groovy extraterrestrial rendezvous. If you sat through the first two hours of 2001: A Space Odyssey, you vowed to be at least acutely stoned if you ever found yourself orbiting Jupiter. There were space stations out there with gleaming ensembles of mod, plastic-molded furniture. And, if the planets lined up just right, there’d be a Star Gate of swirling stroboscopia. It could be one heavy head trip, the cosmos. Think of the Distant Galaxy that way. Just none of that metaphysical business about higher consciousness, or returning to the earth as the Star Child. This Distant Galaxy was where you went to cool your head in the soothing light of the nebulae after, say, a night of Sake Bombs.

The Distant Galaxy was in reality the studio project of Don Sebesky, a composer and arranger best known for a fruitful series of collaborations with producer Creed Taylor. Their lush, commercial orchestrations for jazz artists were ubiquitous in the late ‘60s twilight of jazz’s mainstream currency. “Blue Scimitar,” which features Richard Spencer on soprano sax and the stinging fuzztone guitar of the young Larry Coryell, was taken from the 1968 Verve album of the same name, the first (and better) of two groovy, lightly psychedelic pop-jazz albums from Sebesky.

3. Marty Manning and the Cheetahs, Tarzan (Tarzan’s March) (Columbia)
Marty Manning was one of many New York City arrangers, composers, and musicians who might play the occasional jazz or pop date, or cut an album or two under their own name. Mostly, though, they toiled (and made their living) in the anonymity of their studio pop, jazz, and soundtrack work. Manning, one of the busiest, is nonetheless best known today as the creative genius behind 1961’s The Twilight Zone: A Sound Adventure in Space, a memorable one-off album that, though affiliated with Rod Serling’s television show, was truly its own entity: a conceptual assemblage of outer space melodies and moods, darkly scored by exotic percussion and the eerie croon of primitive electronic instrumentation and wordless vocals.

"Tarzan's March," likely recorded around 1966 as a tie-in with the NBC television show, is obviously something else altogether. It marches forward with fuzztone guitars, organ, and a spirit of justice and a manifest destiny-like sense of its own rectitude. It would have made a lot of sense as an updated theme for some Dragnet or Perry Mason morality drama. I guess it’s comforting, though, that this sort of righteous virtue was available to Tarzan Lord Greystoke as well.