Dream pop

It’s possible, as Joseph Lanza did in his Vanilla Pop: Sweet Sounds From Frankie Avalon to ABBA, to trace an unbroken lineage of effervescent vocals from the Four Lads all the way to ABBA, counting groups like the Chordettes, the Lettermen, the Fleetwoods, Chad & Jeremy, the Sandpipers and the Carpenters along the way. Lanza argued, convincingly so, for such artists’ place along a continuum of smooth, ethereal studio pop. The vanilla pop continuum, that is.

It’s pretty easy, too, to dismiss unapologetically clean-cut harmoneers like the Lettermen. Uptempo choral fare like 1971’s “Everything Is Good About You” seems as impossibly square now as it did at the time. More than just their soothing qualities and intrinsic palatability, such groups intuitively understood the psychological potency of vocal harmonies, however.

The same crew, for instance, might deliver something at a slower tempo, and there the effect of the Lettermen was entirely different. A ballad like 1966’s “Our Winter Love” (hear excerpt here) is transcendent, its hypnotic lushness placing listeners somewhere between the Milky Way and their hi-fi. With a sympathetic engineer and a touch of languor to the production, groups from the Flamingos (“I Only Have Eyes For You,” excerpt here) and the Association (“Never My Love,” excerpt here) to the Anita Kerr Singers (“Forever,” excerpt here) could transform dog-eared ballads with a narcotic bath of cascading vocal syrup and studio echo.

This is one of the unappreciated beauties of harmony-pop: it can be pure celestial Valium. If late ‘60s psychedelic music sought to evoke the LSD experience, then harmony-pop had long done a similar thing for the tranquilized escapist, effortlessly summoning flights of twilight reverie and wistful romantic fantasia. Groups like the Love Generation and the Association, bedecked with hippie accoutrement for the Aquarian Age, were still part of this same pop constellation. The fact is that such sunshine harmonists, this week’s selections included, didn’t have to strive to sound like drugs. They already sounded like drugs.

The Ultra Mates, Mercy, and the Shannons may not be for everyone, but if you like your coffee with an extra swirl of frothy vanilla cream and your days lightly medicated, then this is your week, friend.

1. The Ultra Mates, Pitter Patter (CRC Charter)
A cold rain never felt so warm and inviting. Thunderstorm sound effects would have perfect on “Pitter Patter” but, really, you didn’t need them. Its dirge-paced tempo, eerie female harmonies and cavern of echo cannily evoke a dark-night atmosphere suited for Hollywood teen melodramas.

What can be said of Ultra Mates? Little, actually, except that they recorded this mysterious pre-psychedelic relic in Los Angeles around 1963. The songwriter here is likely the same Debbie Stanley responsible for another obscure girl-pop confection, 1964’s “Gary’s My Love” (with “It’s Him I Wanna Go With Mama” on the flipside). That may be the spectral coo of Stanley herself we hear.

CRC Charter Records was around for a few blips in the early ‘60s. A West Coast subsidiary of MGM Records, the label existed long enough for one hit, Johnny Beecher’s nocturnal instrumental “Sax Fifth Avenue.”

2. Mercy, Love (Can Make You Happy) (Sundi)
The Mercy saga began with a group assembled by Jack Sigler, Jr., who wrote this selection as a high school student in Tampa Bay, Florida.

The group’s biggest hit, "Love (Can Make You Happy)" was ultimately released in two different versions. The first version - this version - was recorded and released in 1968 on Sundi Records, a label run by Florida impresario Gil Cabot. At some point in their story, however, Mercy would attract the notice of the powerhouse label Warner Brothers, who signed Sigler and company on for a full-length album (1969’s Forever) while simultaneously releasing a remastered “Love (Can Make You Happy)” for 45 release. A somewhat ill-advised move on Warner Brothers’ behalf, perhaps, but both versions of the song proved popular, their cumulative sales landing Mercy the number two slot for a week on 1969’s pop charts.

Vying record labels meant that the band that toured as Mercy in the late ‘60s was not necessarily the same crew who recorded as Mercy, however. Furthermore, Gil Cabot, eager to seize upon the fame of his recently departed charges, rushed out a competing album attributed to Mercy (The Mercy and Love Can Make You Happy) that was comprised of cover versions, Jack Sigler demos and various odds and ends.

Mercy’s story, though complicated, was certainly not atypical in the exploitative tumult of the ’60s entertainment business. Nor was “Love (Can Make You Happy)” atypical of harmony-pop in general, and it’s impossible here to resist comparing it to another sunrise meditation, the Velvet Underground’s “Sunday Morning.". Both songs bubble with hypnotic instrumentation and a downtempo sensuality. One - “Sunday Morning” - of course, was world-weary and cynical, the other - “Love (Can Make You Happy)” - breathtakingly fresh-faced. But that pure narcotic thrill was shared by both.

3. The Shannons, Mister Sunshine Man (L&M)
Like the Ultra Mates, little is known about the Shannons, who released this confection around 1968. From its warm ripples of harmonies and tremolo guitars down to its dazzlingly naïve lyrics and vaguely Baroque touch of the harpsichord, “Mister Sunshine Man” is pure California sunshine pop.

Undoubtedly from Los Angeles, the Shannons’ “Mister Sunshine Man” was written by Johnny Cole, an obscure studio songwriter who also penned songs for the Sound Sandwich, a California psychedelic group (who also covered “Mister Sunshine Man” in 1968, incidentally).

I see lustrous, shockingly straight blonde hair. I see perfect white brilliant teeth and hiphuggers, too. The thing about a group named the Shannons is that, even if you didn’t know who they were, you knew what they looked like.

Latin funk

Funk and salsa, as musical forms, were both ascendant in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. They were forms, too, that were nourished within culturally aware, politically mobilized communities. And so, according to the tradition that America will always co-opt its most disenfranchised, it follows that for a few years in the ‘70s you couldn’t throw a brick at our popular music without hitting a syncopated bassline or a conga drum. Things got ever weirder as the decade went on and R&B and salsa’s musical components were further unhinged from their message. Easy-listening maestros Percy Faith and Ferrante & Teicher made funk records. Nashville’s timbaleros were booked for six months solid, I’ve heard.

It was inevitable that Latin music and funk would have converged, and without that much commercial debasement, at some point. And so they did. Latin funk was a diffuse phenomenon, though, less an extension of an earlier counterpart boogaloo (with its composite of vamping Afro-Latin rhythms and R&B attitude) than a part of the overall psychedelic cultural swirl that made crossover experiments so much fun in 1970. Ray Barretto and Joe Bataan - artists identified with the boogaloo - made popular Latin funk records. Tejano artists like Augustine Ramirez and Tortilla Factory made them, as did Los Angeles' El Chicano and Oakland's Azteca. So, too, did black artists like Jimmy Castor and War.

‘70s Latin funk can be a real mixed bag, however. Tracks like Ray Barretto’s “Together” and Ocho’s “Hot Pants Road” hold up extremely well today, pulsing with wild, psychedelized energy while similar experiments by Harlem River Drive and Malo seem dated and overly self-conscious. All, including this week’s geographically disparate artifacts, partook of the same spirit, though, diving headlong into that cauldron where Hammond organs, vibraphones and conga drums swirled in equal measure.

1. Johnny Zamot, Spaced Out (Gema)
Among New York City’s post-War Latin musicians you’ll find the occasional Tito Puente or Eddie Palmieri, that bandleader whose visibility extended beyond just the Nuyorican community. No less vital - and certainly a more representative remainder of their cohort - are names like Hector Rivera, Bobby Valentin and Louie Ramirez, talented musicians, bandleaders, arrangers and producers with long legacies largely circumscribed by the Five Boroughs.

Born in Puerto Rico, Johnny “Ray” Zamot is a versatile percussionist and bandleader and one of the more daring of the younger generation that forged their musical skills in the orquestas and combos of New York City’s fertile ‘60s Latin scene. Unlike their mentors (who generally disavowed the style), Zamot’s was a generation that was comfortably committed to the youthful, brash style of the boogaloo, though.

Zamot is today still an active part of New York City salsa, but it’s his run of hard-to-find releases of the late ‘60s through the mid-‘70s for which he’s more widely remembered. 1968’s The Latin Soul of Johnny Zamot or 1970’s Boogaloo Frog represent a typical, if not exemplary, late ‘60s blend of boogaloo, Latin jazz, mambo, cha-cha and guaguanco - son-based Latin styles that would soon all be formalized under the salsa rubric.

Even by Zamot’s fairly adventurous standards, though, “Spaced Out” is a strange one. If its snappy horn lines and pop sensibilities seem to place it somewhere in the previous decade, then that inverted bassline and echo-drenched waaah-chuck-chuck-chuck chorus seem to point to some indeterminate, loopy year in the future.

"Spaced Out" would also appear that same year on Zamot's self-titled album on the veteran New York City Latin label Gema.

2. Lou Garno Trio, Muy Sabroso (Very Tasty) (Giovanni)
“Muy Sabroso (Very Tasty),” as the story goes, was released as a promotional tie-in with Giovanni’s Italian restaurant/lounge in Phoenix, Arizona. It’s an unusual, though mutually remunerative, way to make a record, and the arrangement probably made Giovanni Furcini feel pretty good about himself in 1972. Not as good as the record collectors who keep coming across unopened boxes of this 45 some thirty-plus years later, of course - but still, pretty good.

Lou Garno, along with the trio’s organist (Larry Crinklaw) and drummer (Jim Golini), are all still active in Arizona jazz circles. It’s not entirely clear what role Garno played in this groovy bit of Latin-fired jazz, though, as he was and is a saxophonist and flautist. “Muy Sabroso (Very Tasty)” is not live, either, of course, despite the better efforts of our wonderfully canned emcee and audience. Nor is this actually a trio. Check your coats, slide into those garnet-colored leather banquette tables and order your drinks. It's just best to let Furcini deal with such trivialities.

A plumbing tool specialist now sits at the former site of Giovanni’s.

3. Tempo 70, El Galleton (Mericana)
Tempo 70 were a brief-lived group led by Argentinean-born Bebu Silvetti, a pianist and arranger whose career peregrinations took him to Spain, Mexico and Miami as a sort of international contractor in the world of Latin music. The early ‘70s found Silvetti in Puerto Rico, where he convened Tempo 70 for a few albums of polished salsa and Latin pop.

1972’s “El Galleton,” Tempo 70’s highpoint, somehow successfully steers between cuatro- and percussion-driven Afro-Latin rhythms, Hammond-fueled funk and jazzy piano runs - each with a section to itself: “El Galleton”’s charts could have been a disaster in less skillful hands. It must have been a technical bonanza for the band, of course, but hell for anyone on the dancefloor, as every premonitory surge of organ seemed to bring “El Galleton” into a drastic new decade.

This selection was taken from Tempo 70’s debut album (entitled El Primer LP), which also happened to the first full-length release of Mericana Records, the New York City Latin label operated (along with Caytronics Records, a Mexican pop clearinghouse) by the Cayre Brothers before they went on to found disco giant Salsoul Records.

Office Naps Middle Eastern Mix

The third installment of the Office Naps mix, and it’s all over the place. From Turkish wah-wah guitars and ’60s garage ragas to Yusef Lateef’s Mecca-wise wail, it’s Middle Eastern only in the loosest possible sense of the term. If there ever there was a darbuka to be struck or an argol to be wrangled, however, it’s probably in there. Enjoy.

-DJ Little Danny

Office Naps Middle Eastern Mix

Rosko With The John Berberian Ensemble, Perfection (Music and Gibran: A Contemporary Interpretation Of the Author Of The Prophet, Verve Forecast)
Charles Kynard & Buddy Collette, Blue Sands (Warm Winds, World-Pacific)
The Freak Scene, Grok! (Psychedelic Psoul, Columbia)
Elias Rahbani, Dance of Maria (Mosaic of the Orient, EMI)
Fifty Foot Hose, Opus 777 (Cauldron, Limelight)
Mohamed "Mike" Hegazi and His Golden Guitar, Nouni (Belly Dance With Zeina, Emi)
The Off-Set, Xanthia (Lisa) (7”, Jubilee)
Lloyd Miller with the Press Keys Quartet, Gol-E Gandom (Oriental Jazz, East-West)
Fairuz, Yalla Tenam Rima (Bint El-Harass, soundtrack, Parlophone)
Istanbul Calgicilari, Sax Gazel (Disco Fasil I, Bip!)
T. Swift & The Electric Bag, Free Form In 6 (Are You Experienced, Custom)
1st Century, Looking Down (7”, Capitol)
Don Randi Trio, Tomorrow Never Knows (Revolver Jazz, Reprise)
The Kaleidoscope, Pulsating Dream (Side Trips, Epic)
Omar Khorshid and His Guitar, Guitar El Chark (Rhythms From the Orient, Voice of Lebanon)
Ozel Turkbas, Bovzovkia Solo (Dance Into Your Sultan's Heart, Elay)
The Devil's Anvil, Hala Laya (7”, Columbia)
Ganimian & His Oriental Music, Swingin' The Blues (Come With Me To the Casbah, Atco)
Okay Temiz, East Breeze (Drummer of Two Worlds, Finnadar)
Clyde Borly & His Percussions, Afromania (Music In 5 Dimensions, Atco)
Sabah with Chahine's International Orchestra, Hully Gully (Halli Galli Dabka) (Music From a Millionaire's Playground, Parlophone)
Yusef Lateef, Sister Mamie (Live at Pep's, Impulse!)
The Rotary Connection, I Took A Ride (Caravan) (Rotary Connection, Cadet Concept)
Dorothy Ashby, Soul Vibrations (Afro-Harping, Cadet)
Herbie Mann, Incense (Impressions of the Middle East, Atlantic)
Lalo Schifrin, The Snake's Dance (Lalo = Brilliance: The Piano of Lalo Schifrin, Roulette)
Tony Martinez and His Mambo Combo, Pharoah's Curse (7”, GNP)
Johnny Lewis Trio and Millie, Snake Hips (7”, Coral)
Sonny Lester & His Orchestra, Song of India (Little Egypt Presents More How To Belly-Dance For Your Husband, Roulette)

Struck wordless

You’d occasionally spot them on easy-listening records of the ‘50s and ‘60s, those theremin-throated songbirds, their voices swooning, wailing and wordlessly calling with celestial llllaaaahhhhhhhhs.

I’m talking, of course, about wordless vocalists. It is a bit like birdwatching, actually. Jungle exotica, easy-listening themes for outer space, atmospheric soundtrack pieces, and easy orchestral confections: these were their native habitats. They were sometimes heard clustered in groups, more often they were to be spotted crooning by themselves, their voices coloratura hovering somewhere between the South Pacific and the Crab Nebula. A primarily female phenomenon, wordless vocals were a sort of musical stand-in for the feminine mystique. Adaptable enough to conjure anything from seductive playmate and tropical siren to green-tinted moon maiden, wordless vocals relied on their musical context for their meaning.

There were a few albums that featured the wordless vocalist as a headlining star and soloist, but releases like Mary Mayo’s Street of Dreams (1953) and Leda Annest’s Portrait of Leda (1958) were extremely rare. Mostly the wordless vocalists were talented studio and background singers like Marni Nixon, Patricia (aka Petula) Clark, Loulie Jean Norman and the aforementioned Mayo.

Jackie Gleason used them, as did Les Baxter and Juan Esquivel. And so did this week’s artists. As is sometimes the case with Office Naps, the selections are joined by a shared musical device rather than their participation in any musical movement or fringe-dwelling sub-genre. This week’s selections were the phenomenon of independent minds thinking alike, mostly, but the net effect of was basically the same: instrumental music transformed into space-age reverie.

1. Yusef Lateef, Titoro (Riverside)
The pre-‘70s discography of multi-instrumentalist Yusef Lateef is one of jazz’s most fascinating and otherworldly. Born in Detroit, and long identified with that city’s post-War jazz scene, Lateef grew up playing tenor saxophone; his early musical apprenticeship would culminate with a stint in Dizzy Gillespie’s bebop orchestra of the late ‘40s. Studies in composition and flute followed, and when Lateef’s own recording career as a leader began in 1957, his eastward proclivities were already intact. The next ten years would produce a singular body of work on jazz labels like Savoy, Riverside, New Jazz, and Impulse.

Yusef Lateef could, and did, play straight ahead with the best of jazz’s heavyweights. It’s his Eastern-themed albums and compositions, however, which represent his most interesting work. From Lateef’s earliest dates, albums like Jazz and the Sounds of Nature, Prayer to the East, Eastern Sounds, Jazz ‘Round the World showcased an interest in African, Asian, and, most importantly, Middle Eastern music. Compositions like “Iqbal” and “Mahaba” were, at the time, essentially unique, the reedman’s unabashed exoticism matched only by his acquisitive tastes in unorthodox solo instruments. In addition to being one of era’s most respected jazz flautists, Lateef blew bassoon and oboe. He blew shenhai and argol, too, with a muezzin’s fervor. He even blew theremin (“Sound Wave” on 1966’s A Flat, G Flat and C).

Though always well regarded by his peers, Lateef is, even today, rarely championed by jazz’s critical and historical establishment. It’s no fault of their own, I suppose, but they have long confused exotic with kitschy.

Perhaps critical reception was the reason why this 1961 version of Billy Taylor’s “Titoro” (which was cut during the sessions for Lateef’s The Centaur and the Phoenix album) was only released on 45 in its day. “Titoro”’s vision of jazz is more Afro-Latin exotica than serious bop, more Playboy than Downbeat.

After a late ‘60s switch to Atlantic Records, Lateef’s records were marketed to a younger audience with great crossover success but less originality. Yusef Lateef is today long retired from the commercial record business. At the age of eighty-six, he has remained very productive, inspiringly so, dividing his time between academia, composition and his own record label, YAL.

2. Rita Moss, Daydream (Rozell)
A Los Angeles-based pianist and singer, Rita Moss began her recording career as a pop and jazz soloist in the mid-‘50s, but would release material only sporadically thereafter. She was pictured on her first album (1956’s forgotten Introducing Rita Moss) singing while simultaneously playing, one hand on each, piano and bongos. A later stretch at Los Angeles-based Dot Records produced three late ‘60s albums with Moss singing in lusher orchestrated pop territory. It would be Moss’s sung theme to 1968’s Rosemary’s Baby (her vocals are heard only in the movie, I believe) and a smallish cult hit the same year, “Just a Dream Ago,” that represent her lasting claim to fame.

Then there is this obscurity, likely recorded in the early ‘60s, and produced in Hollywood, mood machine to the world. “Daydream” is as much blank canvas as it is Ellington standard. Dusky reverie? Beachfront siesta? Anonymous guestroom rendezvous? “Daydream” was any of these, really, a vessel for whatever shadowy phantasm or narcotic vision we wanted to project upon it. That is mood music.

3. Big Jox Orchestra, Cut-A-Loose (Valencia) What “Cut-A-Loose” lacks in refined musicianship, it makes up for with beatnik insouciance. There but for the grace of wordless vocals go thee: this might have been just another sloppy jazz 45.

With infamous producer and record impresario Leo Austell’s writer credit here - as well as the city’s characteristic rough honking saxophone sound - it can be reasonably adduced that “Cut-A-Loose” was recorded in Chicago. Otherwise, we’re dealing here with a mystery group, a group that will, I suspect, always remain so, no matter how many times we google “big” and “jox” together over the coming decades.

Everything about “Cut-A-Loose” suggests an early- to mid-‘60s release. Again, total speculation.

Sitars! (part two)

(Ed. note: This is the second installment of, God willing, an ongoing series on sitar 45s. The saga originally began here. - Little Danny)

Starting with its early and perhaps most famous pop appearance on the Beatles’ “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown),” the sitar was the right instrument at the right moment. Its drones, its flurries of exotic scales - the sitar inherently sounded psychedelic while simultaneously evoking India, that composite Western fantasy of all things mystical and heightened-consciousness. The sitar captured a wayward counterculture’s imagination to such an extent that to hear the instrument today, even in the hands of classically trained musicians, is to evoke hazy visions of beads and flower child gullibility.

It’s always the ‘60s bands we hold dearest which we believe to have played their own instruments. Everybody knows the Monkees were a prop, we can accept that. We still want the Byrds to have played their own instruments on “Mr. Tambourine Man,” however, and Love to have done the same on their Forever Changes album. But they didn’t. With so much ‘60s pop, it’s not always easy to discern the genuine article from the handiwork of studio surrogates.

No such confusion with sitars in play however. By 1967 any hip record producer would have been keenly aware of the nascent subcontinental fetish and would have coveted the sitar correspondingly. Of course, being unwieldy instruments, fragile and complicated to tune, sitars were - when procured at all - played by trained studio musicians like Bill Plummer, Vinnie Bell or Mike Deasy. Many American '60s garage bands probably coveted sitars, too, but they were one hundred times likelier to have guitars that they played like sitars than they were to possess the article itself.

Heard in a '60s pop song, that is, the sitar can basically mean only one thing: played by professionals. Sitars would remain almost categorically an instrument of the big studios. This week on Office Naps, we again examine the sitar, celebrating its pop music masquerade as much as we scratch out heads at it.

1. The Ceyleib People, Changes (Tygstl) (Vault)
“Changes (Tygstl),” from 1968, comes to us from a loose-knit group of Los Angeles session musicians that, when not maintaining a hectic schedule in the studio world, was indulging in some serious unencumbered grooviness.

The young whiz Ry Cooder, for one, played guitar on this selection. So too did stalwart session guitarist Mike Deasy, who, along with the sitar duties here, co-wrote this under the pseudonym of “Lybuk Hyd”. Deasy and Cooder would be joined by Joe Osborne (bass), Larry Knechtel (bass and keyboards, later in Bread), Jim Gordon (drums, later in Derek & the Dominos), and jazz keyboardist Mike Melvoin. Even in 1968 these names unlikely evoked little beside blank stares. Reading charts for a Mancini film soundtrack one week, interpreting Brian Wilson’s incoherent instructions the next, these guys loomed large, however, as core members of the “Wrecking Crew,” the peerless and infamous studio group who, amongst their thousands of sessions, played on some of the classic Phil Spector and Beach Boys productions.

“Changes (Tygstl)” is the highlight of the Ceyleib People’s Tanyet LP, an entire album of Eastern-inspired meanderings from 1968. Was their Tanyet a purely creative response, an experiment, a means to exorcise the demons that had laid long stifled by too many Jan & Dean sessions? Or was Vault Records (which served mostly as a West Coast subsidiary for R&B and jazz giant Atlantic Records) simply attempting to cash in on the vogue for all things Aquarian? Like so much in ‘60s Los Angeles pop music, the answer isn’t straightforward. The answer lies somewhere in those cracks between opportunism, dissolution and creativity.

This would be the sole 45 culled for release from the Ceyleib People’s Tanyet album.

2. The Believers, Soul Raga Cookin’ (Capitol)
Of Capitol Records’ two most reliable moneymakers, the Beach Boys had made themselves basically irrelevant by 1969, and the Beatles, with their newly founded Apple Records, had negotiated their Capitol contract down to a distribution-only agreement a year earlier. Capitol simply hadn’t navigated the straits of ‘60s pop with the same savvy as West Coast label rivals like Warner Brothers, A&M, Reprise, Dunhill and Uni. So here we were, 1969: Pink Floyd wasn’t yet the stoner nation powerhouse, and Grand Funk Railroad had just made an entirely forgettable debut album. What other pop artists did Capitol have? Joe Cocker? The Band?

But Capitol Records was by anybody’s standards still an industry powerhouse. Among other late ‘60s sellers, the label enjoyed the unrivalled popularity of a host of Southern-inspired pop-country artists. Bobbie Gentry (“Ode to Billie Joe”), Glen Campbell (“By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” “Wichita Lineman”), and Joe South (“Games People Play”) belonged to a group of artists that was in some ways a stylistic vestige of Capitol’s pioneering “Bakersfield Sound” country sound and that, in other ways, engendered a hipper, unclassifiable brand of Southern pop-country.

Joe South wrote and produced this particular selection. Born in Atlanta, South was already a rising phenom in the early ‘60s, a seasoned country and R&B session guitarist in Nashville and Muscle Shoals who would later develop into a talented singer-songwriter. A series of solo records on Capitol commenced for him in 1968, and so, too, did the crossover hits. South compositions like “Games People Play” and “Walk a Mile In My Shoes” defined his idiosyncratic, country-flavored blend of soul, folk, and pop. With their occasionally psychedelic and electronic production, they were improbable hits then, and odd, if highly enjoyable, relics today; South is remembered better for covers of his own compositions. “Hush” (Deep Purple), “Down In the Boondocks” (Billy Joe Royal), “(I Never Promised You a) Rose Garden,” anybody? Joe South compositions all.

“Soul Raga Cookin’” came from the sessions that comprised South’s third LP, 1969’s Games People Play. This trippy selection was excised from the same jam that served as the backing track for South’s “Hole In Your Soul” (hear excerpt here) and attributed to “The Believers.” (Named, I’d guess, for another Joe South opus, “Be a Believer”).

“Soul Raga Cookin’” is many things: psychsploitation artifact, boogie raga with Bo Diddley beat, cosmic swamp brew. Capitol obviously tossed this single out there in the hopes that at least one of its component parts might stick.

For all that “Soul Raga Cookin’” is, though, that isn’t a real sitar we hear. It was an electric sitar, an instrument that looked very much like a guitar, that was played very much like a guitar, and that generally lived up to its name. The electric sitar would eventually come to signal "mellow groovin' situation" on smooth ‘70s soul hits like Stevie Wonder’s “Signed, Sealed, Delivered, I’m Yours," much the way the real thing had signaled "inner-voyaging situation" a few years earlier.

Joe South is today semi-retired from the music business. Check out a vintage clip of him - with electric sitar, happily - at his website.

3. The Flower Pot, Wantin’ Ain’t Gettin’ (Vault)
The Flower Pot was, like the Ceyleib People, a Mike Deasy vehicle.

Deasy must have felt very strongly about this composition. Its Dylan-inspired free associations and funky, flower-power aesthetic made just enough loopy sense that Deasy prevailed upon West Coast sunshine popsters the Association to cover it on Insight Out, their third album. The two versions are nearly identical, and it’s not clear whose - the Association’s or the Flower Pot’s - was released first. There’s always that third possibility, too, namely that everything happened at once, man, all at the same time.

It isn’t clear, either, who is singing on “Wantin’ Ain’t Gettin’,” whether they were a “real” group or, more likely, a studio composite. It is undoubtedly Deasy who we again hear on sitar, though, and again he is mashing the hell out of the instrument’s drone strings. He was probably joined here by some of the same session players - like Joe Osborne and Larry Knechtel - who’d played with him on “Changes” (and on the Associations’ version of “Wantin’ Ain’t Gettin’,” as well).

This artifact was released in 1967. Deasy, with California sunshine pop producer/arranger extraordinaire Curt Boettcher, would release yet another full-length album of budget-priced rainbow thrills the same year with his Friar Tuck and His Psychedelic Guitar LP on Mercury Records. Its recent reissue includes Deasy’s two singles from the Flower Pot.