Office Naps Winter 2008 Psychedelic Pop mix

The latest version of the psychedelic pop mix, streamlined and scratchier than ever.

If anything, people tend to remember the decade for the sitars and sunshine harmonies and fuzzed-out guitars. The reputation is not entirely undeserved. But I am here to say that it was echo, great heaping slabs of it, that really makes things go ‘round.

Anyway, there were a million deserving songs that didn’t make the mix, and we wish them good luck in their future pursuits.


Office Naps Winter 2008 Psychedelic Pop mix

Blair Smith, Vision of Molly (7”, Pompeii)
The Sunshine Trolley, Cover Me Babe (7”, Trump)
The Gallants, Robin's Blues (7”, Capitol)
Opus I, Backseat '38 Dodge (7”, Mustang)
Things to Come, Come Alive (7”, Warner Brothers)
The Gates of Eden, Elegy (7”, Warner Brothers)
Sagittarius, The Truth Is Not Real (Present Tense, Columbia)
The West Coast Workshop, Ode to Jackie, Dorothy and Alyce (The Wizard of Oz and Other Trans Love Trips, Capitol)
The Models, Bend Me, Shape Me (7”, MGM)
Unknown Korean Composer, Side 2 Track 4 (Heavenly Home Coming to Stars, part II soundtrack, SRB Korea)
The Parade, This Old Melody (7”, A&M)
Ian Freebairn-Smith, Other Hawaii (TV Track) (The Other Side of Clouds EP, Proud Bird)
6 7/8, Ski-Daddle (7”, Dot)
Ustad Vilayat Khan, Title Music: Tom's Arrival (The Guru soundtrack, RCA)
Click, Fat Lady in the Wicker Chair (7”, Laurie)
The Advancement, Child At Play (The Advancement, Philips)
Hearts and Flowers, Tin Angel (Will You Ever Come Down) (7”, Capitol)
Bill & Howdy, Misty Morning Confrontation (7”, Verve-Forecast)
The Pretty Things, My Time (7”, Fontana UK)
Somebody's Children, Shadows (7”, Uptown)
London Phogg, The Times to Come (7”, A&M)
The Relations, The Image (7”, Reena)
The Brain Train, Me (7”, Titan)
The Robbs, Castles in the Air (7”, Atlantic)
Evie Sands, It's This I Am, I Find (7”, A&M)
Ananda Shankar, Snow Flower (Ananda Shankar, Reprise)
The Fallen Angels, Most Children Do (The Fallen Angels, Laurie)
The Elite, I'll Come to You (7”, Charay)
The Vejtables, Shadows (7”, Uptown)
The Electric Tomorrow, The Electric Tomorrow (7”, World-Pacific)

Oh, Calcutta!

Oh! Calcutta! wanted to be provocative in the worst possible way.

Released Off Broadway in 1969, the musical revue featured sketches of various sexual neuroses and peccadilloes, and included frontal nudity - only the second major musical after Hair to do so. Oh! Calcutta! also had some avant-garde cred - respected British theater critic Kenneth Tynan conceived and assembled the program, with bankable names like Samuel Beckett, Jules Feiffer, Margo Sappington, Dan Greenburg, John Lennon, Jacques Levy and Sam Shepard contributing sketches.

Sometimes mere pedigree and nudity aren’t enough. Sometimes weak writing and silly, rigidly heterosexual humor will earn you a reputation as an inconsequential diversion. New York Times critic Clive Barnes concluded after the opening: “To be honest, I think I can recommend the show with any vigor only to people who are extraordinarily underprivileged either sexually, socially or emotionally.” Musical theater was only beginning to embrace the counter-culture’s possibilities, but others, like Stag Movie, The Faggot, or Let My People Come - or Hair, for that matter - would explore sexual politics more gracefully and more incisively. None of this deterred curious patrons, however, who made Oh! Calcutta! both an instant sensation and, over the course of its original run as well as a record-setting revival begun in 1976, a long-lasting tourist staple.

But the original cast recording for Oh! Calcutta! (originally released in 1969 on Aidart Records, a tiny affiliate of United Artists Records) is another story. Composed and performed by Robert Dennis, Stanley Walden, and the young Peter Schickele (of P.D.Q. Bach and Schickele Mix fame), operating here as the Open Window, the score consists of songs and instrumental interludes that accompanied and divided the revue’s sketches, rather than being full-blown musical numbers. It was similarly derided in contemporary reviews, and it did not sell well, but the original score stands up today as superior even to the great Hair score. There is excellent psychedelic pop to be found in among the heavily arranged chamber-rock.

Thankfully, America’s easy listening bandleaders were not oblivious to the resilient groove of the title track. Alongside “Aquarius,” “Last Tango in Paris” or “The Windmills of Your Mind,” “Oh, Calcutta” was popular, albeit briefly, among those meisters still optimistic about bridging that cursed generational divide. Ferrante and Teicher did a swell job of it and so did, all things considered, Al De Lory: I suspect any version of “Oh, Calcutta” merits at least a casual listen.

1. The Dave Pell Singers, Oh, Calcutta (Liberty)
Born in New York City in 1925, saxophonist Dave Pell’s formative professional gigs were with Tony Pastor’s big band. Upon relocating to California in mid-‘40s, he’d join a succession of bandleaders: Bob Crosby, Bobby Sherwood, Bob Astor, and, finally - between 1947 and 1955 - Les Brown and His Band of Renown.

These were competent bands, popular but hardly the cutting edge of jazz. Indeed, Pell’s entire trajectory would be characterized by this sort of commercial orientation. In addition to a series of budget-oriented big band tribute albums, Pell released many decent-selling jazz records throughout the ‘50s with a smaller group - his popular octet (many of its members borrowed in turn from the young modernists of Brown’s orchestra). Even these dates, while sophisticated, were on the more conservative, tightly arranged side of West Coast jazz.

There has always been that pragmatic streak among certain jazz talents, the pull to the more reliable life of studio arranging, directing and producing. Post-War musicians like Shorty Rogers and Quincy Jones made big names for themselves thusly, while many others - the Bob Florences, Manny Albams, and Johnny Mandels of this world - toiled further from the spotlight. This pragmatism diminishes none of their art, necessarily - especially some of their wilder soundtrack moments - but it does open a certain distance from their “authentic” jazz roots. Dave Pell? Just part of the trend.

Pell’s years as studio musician (he would back Mel Torme and June Christy, among many others), octet leader, and budget record label producer (for the infamous Tops Records) led, by the early ‘60s, to a turn as a producer and A&R man at Liberty Records, then one of the more successful post-War California labels. Experience in the industry clearly had served Pell well. At Liberty he had produced pop records in a big way for artists like Gary Lewis, Bobby Vee, the Ventures, Martin Denny, Gene McDaniels and the young Vicki Carr. Pell’s time there also included a few of his own albums - two commercial pop/jazz records in 1963, and finally, in 1969, the Dave Pell Singers’ Mah-Na-Mah-Na LP. Everything about that album, including this glorious selection, was a quick study in studio-tempered grooviness, raining down sunshine down all over Orange County. What generation gap?

After the Liberty marque was bought by United Artists Records in the late ‘60s, Pell worked behind-the-scenes in the Los Angeles industry, scoring and coordinating music for the television shows Stand Up and Cheer and The Real Tom Kennedy Show as well as a rash of Burt Reynolds and Clint Eastwood vehicles: Sharkey’s Machine, Sudden Impact, Cannonball Run II, Honkytonk Man and Paternity. Pell would release two albums with his Lester Young tribute group Prez Conference in the late ‘70s. In more recent decades, Pell revived his octet and founded specialty labels Headfirst Records and Group 7 Records. Dave Pell is still active today.

2. The Milt Okun Arrangement, Oh, Calcutta (Decca)
Milton Okun, born in New York City in 1923, was a junior high music teacher and folk music fan when he joined Harry Belafonte as a pianist and singer (and later as arranger and conductor) in the mid-‘50s.

Okun parted ways with Belafonte in 1960, thereafter taking on various production and arrangement work around Greenwich Village’s burgeoning folk scene. Alongside several long-forgotten albums of his own folk song interpretations, Okun’s dozens of ‘60s production credits would include obscure singers like Lynn Gold and Ernie Sheldon as well as - thanks to good fortune and a good ear for commercial talent - many of the folk revival’s most popular artists: the Chad Mitchell Trio, the Brothers Four, Peter, Paul & Mary, and Miriam Makeba. The folk revival began foundering in the mid-‘60s; Okun forged ahead with his artists and with newer talents like Laura Nyro. His biggest protégé, however, would be John Denver, a Chad Mitchell Trio alum whom Okun mentored after the Trio’s dissolution, and whom Okun would continue to produce for another decade.

Denver was perhaps his single greatest success, but Okun’s production duties extended to assorted improbables, including ‘70s soft rockers the Starland Vocal Band (of “Afternoon Delight” fame) and future tenor celebrity Placido Domingo in the early '80s. This is not to mention Okun’s written articles about folk music, his string of song books of the late ‘60s and ‘70s - among them Something to Sing About, Great Songs of the Sixties, Country Music’s Greatest Songs and Great Songs of Lennon and McCartney, or his music education magazine, Music Alive!, begun in 1981.

Okun’s was a broad, impossible-to-pigeonhole career, but fitting this languid 1969 version of “Oh, Calcutta” in somewhere is still a bit of a challenge. It’d been years since Okun had recorded under his own name. This sounded like a studio lark, and it probably was. Lucky record buyers didn’t care about any of that, though. They knew it’d still be life of their next party.

To a great extent, Okun’s business interests have now largely superceded his musical associations. The Cherry Lane Music Group, which Okun founded in 1960, is, as of 2008, a major player in the music publishing business, with publishing, print, digital and licensing divisions and a lucrative, if schizoid, roster that includes Will.I.am and Quincy Jones alongside Ralph Macdonald and Tom Paxton.

Okun is also still active as a director at the Los Angeles Opera.

3. Henry Jerome, Oh, Calcutta (United Artists)
Like Dave Pell and Milt Okun, trumpeter Henry Jerome was a working musician who found his eventual calling in the studio. Born in New York City in 1917, Jerome formed his first dance bands in his late teens. His band, Henry Jerome and His Stepping Tones, was familiar to late ‘30s audiences for its regular appearances along the northeastern ballroom circuit, and for its residencies at (and radio broadcasts from) New York City’s Edison Hotel.

Jerome, hitherto stylistically indebted to Hal Kemp’s dance orchestra, began to update his orchestra with hipper musicians in the early ‘40s. The band - including pianist Al Haig, saxophonist Al Cohn, drummer Tiny Kahn, trombonist/composer Johnny Mandel and guitarist Billy Bauer - would be something of a bop jazz cauldron, though the modernization was mostly for naught. The swing era drew to a close and Jerome finally dissolved his group in the late ‘40s.

After some forgettable mid-‘50s pop albums on MGM and Roulette Records (as well as themes for children’s show Winky-Dink and You in the mid-‘50s and for the Soupy Sales show a few years later), Jerome joined the Decca record label. There, in addition to his work as an A&R director and producer, he’d release a series of his Brazen Brass stereophonic project albums. By 1967, Jerome was at United Artists Records, where he recorded one more Brazen Brass-style album, and continued his pop productions. Along with pop and country crossover singer Bobbi Martin, these included, not insignificantly, his production of the original Oh! Calcutta! score.

From 1969, I believe this selection is the original theme’s very first cover version. More upbeat than the original, and set at least slightly in the future, this is “Oh, Calcutta” reimagined with a payload of tiny lights and chirping electronics, Destination 1999.

Jerome’s involvement with the record industry tapered off sometime in the very early ‘70s. Sadly, current information about subsequent activities or whereabouts is scarce.

Henry Jerome’s legacy still is known among two peculiar groups, however. Fans of early rock ‘n’ roll recall him for his somewhat unexpected involvement (under the pseudonym Al Mortimer) with Johnny Burnette and the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio, who waxed some intense rockabilly sides under Jerome’s watch in 1956 and '57. Fans of unrepentant deregulation, of course, remember Henry Jerome for his ‘40s orchestra, an organization that included not only future Nixon-era White House Counsel Leonard Garment on saxophone, but also future Chairman of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan on, against all logic, bass clarinet.

Cinema funky

Just as its antecedents in the mid-‘60s had their sitar interludes and fuzztone atmospherics, the hipper cinema of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s oozed with wah-wah guitars, jazz basslines and funky backbeats. And why not? Whatever Tinseltown's machinations, film had long been a dramatic and stylish medium, and its soundtrack composers were some of the coolest talents around. Movie and television scores afforded lucrative opportunities for a Lalo Schifrin or Henry Mancini to satisfy some serious interests in jazz and composition, if not to experiment with riffs from psychedelic rock or dark rhythms from funk.

Before funk became an obligatory element of every post-Shaft blaxploitation picture, though, before it became a cliché on primetime television fare like CHiPs, there were this week’s selections. Some of these were written for movies. Some of them weren’t written for the screen but wound up there. Some of these were versions of soundtrack themes that exceeded the original. At one end of town, circa 1970, there were serious young men with serious pedigrees from music conservatories sitting in studios with handfuls of annotated charts. At the other end of town, the poorer part of town, churning funk music spun out in endless iterations. And, in that planetary stretch in between, these selections happened.

1. Roy Budd, Carter (DJM)
Roy Budd was a British musical prodigy who began his professional career as a jazz pianist at the tender age of sixteen. It would be his later soundtrack work for movies like Kidnapped (1971) and The Wild Geese (1978), however, for which Budd would find his lasting fame.

Budd imparted a chilly minimalism to “Carter,” his theme for 1971’s Get Carter, a British thriller starring Michael Caine. One can run down the possibilities all day and still never account for how Budd managed, with only a motley ensemble of bass, Indian tablas, and electric harpsichord and piano, to create a tableau so perfectly redolent of both the stark landscape of northern England and of the gangsters who went shooting about there with characteristic disregard.

Budd passed on in 1993. He was forty-six.

2. Julio Gutierrez, Last Tango in Paris (Vico)
The great Julio Gutierrez emigrated from his native Cuba in the late ‘50s, pursuing his calling in both Miami and New York City with freelance stints as a composer, session pianist and musical director. Despite two very hip ‘60s Latin jazz LPs, Progressive Latin and Havana B.C., Gutierrez would never regain the stature he’d enjoyed in Cuba, where, in addition to leading the legendary Cuban Jam Sessions series, he’d been among his country’s best known modern bandleaders and composers.

1972 would perhaps represent the crowning year for the pornographic movie in its brief-lived moment of mainstream chic, and few soundtrack themes would better encapsulate its adults-only art-house cachet than Argentinean saxophonist Gato Barbieri’s “Last Tango in Paris.” 1972 would also mark one of the final years of Gutierrez’s recording career, but if his would hereafter be one of diminishing visibility, it wasn’t for lack of audacity. Other Latin bandleaders like Mongo Santamaria, Willie Rosario and Tito Puente would tackle Barbieri’s continental boudoir anthem, but no one else would inject it with the same groovily psychedelic flair.

Gutierrez died in New York City in 1990.

3. The Johnny Harris Orchestra, Footprints On the Moon (Warner Brothers)
British-born Johnny Harris first made a name for himself in the mid-‘60s writing arrangements for pop singers like Petula Clark and Jackie Trent. Later in the decade, Harris would produce and arrange sessions for Tom Jones, Englebert Humperdink, Shirley Bassey and other pop acts including the Flirtations. His career arc would also include turns in the late ‘60s touring with Tom Jones and serving as musical director for British singer Lulu’s brief-lived variety show Happening For Lulu.

We are not discussing a serious jazzbo or renegade experimentalist here. Harris’s, rather, was a professional kind of hip, a kind that distinguished itself as a turtleneck-and-beads-wearing young talent in the somewhat staid end of the British pop studio system.

While an ear attuned to the latest in the pop charts meant getting served with unenviable tasks like resuscitating Paul Anka’s career, it also afforded its share of fringe benefits. Like John Schroeder, Harris would release a handful of LPs and 45s under his own name. Albums like 1970’s Movements were uneven affairs, certainly, with polite, state-of-the-art covers of “Light My Fire” and “Give Peace a Chance” along with some more adventurous moments like the funky “Fragments of Fear,” “Stepping Stones” and this selection.

Inspired by the Apollo moon landings and subsequently used for the British ITV Network coverage of NASA’s lunar missions, “Footprints on the Moon” follows in the great tradition of Les Baxter’s Space Escapade or Dick Hyman and Mary Mayo’s Moon Gas, albums where the moon’s surface was imagined more as luminescent lovers’ playground than science's new frontier. Each reverberating piano note of “Footprints on the Moon” seems to bring the listener one gravity-defying step closer to their astrological love destiny. Careful, Libra, your love investments will soon pay off, but watch for a calculating Capricorn to step across your earth shadow.

Since 1972 Johnny Harris has lived in Los Angeles, working mostly in television composition, most famously for Buck Rogers in the 25th Century and Wonder Woman.

(Thanks go to this site for much of the information on Johnny Harris.)

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)

Agent Double Oh No

The James Bond character is one of the 20th Century’s great fictional heroes. Ian Fleming’s literary conception of the character (Casino Royale, 1953) and, later, its cinematic adaptation (starting with Dr. No in 1962) galvanized the whole spy genre and captured the imagination of a modern, post-War demographic.

I’m not here to restate the Bond phenomenon’s cultural impact or argue its continued relevance, though. Written by British composer Monty Norman, and performed and arranged by his countryman John Barry, the “James Bond Theme” did as much to invent a whole new musical genre as Dr. No did to invent a silver screen archetype. Heavy on the brass, strings and high drama, Barry’s ‘60s Bond themes were agile and stylish, their moments of deadly surf guitar and churning organ suggesting motion, danger, and international hijinx.

A wave of Bond-inspired soundtracks albums logically followed, with unlikely artists from Count Basie (Basie Meets Bond) to Ray Barretto (Señor 007) all channeling their inner 007s and investing themes like “Thunderball” and “From Russia With Love” with their particular musical pedigrees. From R&B novelties and surf music to easy-listening instrumentals, Bond (and Bond-inspired) themes were everywhere in ‘60s pop. Office Naps duly snorkels into that great backwash of imitators, pet sharks and underwater peril this week. Grab your wetsuit.

1. Sounds Incorporated, Bullets (Columbia)
Sounds Incorporated formed in Kent, England, around 1960. Theirs from the start was an unenviable lot. An instrumental combo with a twin, saxophone-led sound, Sounds Incorporated were neither gritty enough to be absorbed into London’s R&B scene nor really modern enough for the British Invasion. They could claim a few minor hits in the UK, but it’s usually the group’s association with the Beatles (they shared manager Brian Epstein, opened for the Beatles on some mid-‘60s tour dates, and assisted the group on “Good Morning Good Morning”) and their backing work for touring Americans like Gene Vincent, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis or Sam Cooke for which they’re best remembered.

In 1964, though, Sounds Incorporated stepped briefly from their role as arbiter of all things brassy, brash, and British, and into the spy netherworld of “Bullets.” “Bullets,” with its hipster aesthetic and Roland Kirk-style over-blown flute, is not what you’d hear in an opening Bond sequence. This was what you heard from the doorway to that grotto nightclub down at SPECTRE headquarters.

If they’d persisted a few more years, they might have been Britain’s answer to Chicago or Blood, Sweat and Tears, but, after several years of residency in Sydney, Australia, Sounds Incorporated called it quits in 1971.

2. Stan Kenton and His Orchestra, 007 (Capitol)
Kansas-born jazz bandleader, arranger, composer and pianist Stan Kenton formed his first big band in Los Angeles in the early ‘40s. Many of West Coast jazz’s young lions would come to pass through the Kenton Orchestra almost as a rite-of-passage, especially during its experimental and creative peak of the late ‘40s and throughout the ‘50s. Heavyweight soloists like Art Pepper, Bud Shank, and Shelly Manne and hip jazz arrangers/players like Bob Cooper, Gerry Mulligan and Bill Holman all cut their teeth on Kenton’s incongruous “progressive jazz” concept, which put across the harmonic innovations of bebop with a surprising measure of swing - and commercial success.

Changes in size and configuration notwithstanding, the Kenton Orchestra became less an innovative force over the following decades and more, somehow, like a transatlantic ocean liner: needlessly extravagant and decreasingly relevant. In the mid-‘60s, the orchestra still had at least one thing going for it, though: size. It was gigantic, almost ridiculously so, and still very much capable of the dizzying drama and bombast that it was renowned for.

The Stan Kenton Orchestra was, in other words, an orchestra in search of the James Bond theme. Kenton never recorded his own version of the Bond theme, however. A few years later Kenton would be recording “Colored Spade” and “Walking in Space” for his 1967 version of the Hair soundtrack, but when his original “007” was recorded, Kenton might have still dismissed anything so crassly commercial as an entire spy-themed album. I’m afraid this selection is as close as we’ll ever get.

Incidentally, 1965’s “007” is more product from David Axelrod, here in his fruitful ‘60s residency at Capitol Records and successfully working in that trademak psychedelic guitar and chunky bass and drum sound.

3. The John Schroeder Orchestra, Agent 00-Soul (Cameo)
History, despite recent attempts to recast him as a sort of icon of mod cool, will mostly invoke John Schroeder’s name as part of the younger generation of producers and composers who reinvigorated British easy listening music for the Swingin’ ‘60s. Like other British producers, Schroeder had hipper tastes in American music than most Americans, and it was Schroeder’s good fortune as a popular producer to release numerous albums under his own name (as well as under the Sounds Orchestral and City Of Westminster String Band monikers) well into the 1970s. They had their odd and groovy exceptions, but these albums were generally comprised of pallid instrumental fare like Schroeder’s best-known hit, a cover of Vince Guaraldi’s “Cast Your Fate to the Wind,” and polite covers of some American soul numbers like “Papa's Got a Brand New Bag" and “Rescue Me”

Schroeder’s 1965 version of Edwin Starr’s “Agent 00-Soul” is one of his better moments. Here he transforms - with an arranging assist from fellow British studio maestro Johnny Harris - this Detroit soul chestnut into a cheeky nightclub caper. If half the game in ‘60s instrumental pop was production, then Schroeder, clearly besotted with the possibilities of bottomless studio echo, was the right man for this job.

Office Naps Mix Spring 2007

The second installment of the Office Naps mix. More of my favorite ‘60s soft psychedelics and electronic pop, the mix perhaps steering towards the former. You may not know some of the artists, but it’s got an overall tang you sitar jockeys should recognize.

Office Naps Mix Spring 2007

Millennium, Prelude (7”, Columbia)
Appletree Theatre, Hightower Square (7”, Verve Forecast)
Joyride, Childhood's End (Friend Sound, RCA)
J.K. & Co., Fly (Suddenly One Summer, White Whale)
Bobby Christian, Mooganga (Vibe-brations, Ovation)
Critters, Awake in a Dream (Touch ‘n Go With the Critters, Project 3)
White Noise, Firebird (An Electric Storm, Island)
Beautiful Daze, City Jungle, pt. 1 (7”, RPR)
Network, The Boys and The Girls (7”, Spar)
Chapter V, The Sun is Green (7”, Verve Folkways)
Human Touch, I Can Imagine (7”, Warner Brothers)
Lee Mallory, Many Are the Times (7”, Valiant)
Shadow Casters, Going to the Moon (7”, J.R.P.)
Rouges, Secondary Man (7”, Thunderbird)
Ceyleib People, Changes (7”, Vault)
July, The Way (7”, Columbia)
World of Oz, Like a Tear (The World of Oz, Deram)
Ken Thorne, Sadie's Theme (The Touchables, soundtrack, 20th Century Fox)
Chamaeleon Church, Camillia is Changing (Chamaeleon Church, MGM)
Don Robertson, Why? (Dawn, Verve)
Lewis & Clarke Expedition, Why Need They Pretend? (7”, Colgems)
Antonio Carlos Jobim, Children's Games (Stone Flower, CTI)
Young Idea, Colours of Darkness (7”, Capitol)
David McCallum, House of Mirrors (Music: It’s Happening Now!, Capitol)
Beach-Niks, Last Night I Cried (7”, Sea-Mist)
Electric Prunes, I (Underground, Reprise)
Freeborne, Land of Diana (Peak Impressions, Monitor)
King Biscuit Entertainers, Pride (7”, Burdette)

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.

Office Naps Mix 2006

Dreamy pop psychedelia, soundtrack gadgetry, and '60s electronics: my version of the holidays. Merry Mix-mas!

Office Naps Mix 2006

Johnny Harris Orchestra, Footprints on the Moon (7", Warner Brothers)
Scott Walker, It's Raining Today (Scott 3, Smash)
West Minist'r, Carnival (7", Razzberry)
John Barry, Something's Up! (The Knack... and How to Get It, soundtrack, United Artists)
Buffalo Springfield, Expecting to Fly (Buffalo Springfield Again, Atco)
Sound Vendor, Mister Sun (7", Liquid Stereo)
13th Floor Elevators, May the Circle Remain Unbroken (Bull of the Woods, International Artists)
Electric Flag, Peter's Trip (The Trip, soundtrack, Sidewalk)
Peepl, Freedom (7”, Roaring)
Chad & Jeremy, Distant Shores (Distant Shores, Columbia)
Oracle, Don't Say No (7”, Verve Forecast)
Bruce Haack, Super Nova (The Electric Lucifer, Columbia)
George Harrison, Greasy Legs (Wonderwall Music, soundtrack, Apple)
Moon, Brother Lou's Love Colony (Without Earth and the Moon, Imperial)
Societie, Bird Has Flown (7”, Deram)
Sergio Mendes & Brasil '66, Celebration of the Sunrise (Stillness, A&M)
John Wood, Maiden Voyage (Turn of the Century… And I’ll Come Back, Ranwood)
Poppy Family, There's No Blood in Bone (Which Way You Goin’ Billy?, London)
Phil Moore, Jr., A Now Thing (Right On, Atlantic)
Organ Grinders, Mirror Images (7”, Smash)
Fred Weinberg, The Keen Machine (The Weinberg Method of Non-synthetic Electronic Rock, Anvil)
Hooterville Trolley, No Silver Bird (7”, Lynnette)
United States of America, Clouds (United States of America, Columbia)
Electrosoniks, Orbit Aurora (Electronic Music, Philips)
Quincy Jones, Threadbare (The Slender Thread, soundtrack, Mercury)

****

Thank you to everyone who's written, commented, contributed to, complimented, recognized, criticized, linked to, and otherwise read and enjoyed Office Naps in 2006!

-Little Danny

Moogs!

The Moog synthesizer wasn’t the first electronic instrument to work its way into the context of post-War pop music. There was the theremin, for example - that white swan of electronic instruments, heard for a few spectral bars on certain space-themed exotica and soundtrack albums of the 1950’s & 1960’s. The Moog, on the other hand, jostled and squawked, calling attention to itself with loops and shrill blasts like some complicated, hyperactive kid. It was, unlike the theremin, a distinctly Pop art creature. I’ve found consequently that Moog synthesizers - or, at least, Moog synthesizer records - tend to alienate people. To be fair, the problem lay not so much with the technology but rather with the use of it; Moog pop records carried with them a heavy novelty factor. When they weren’t dishing up classical standards or making corny pop hits like “Aquarius” even cornier, they often wound up as vehicles for their own gadgetry, as if wacky electronic effects alone could sell records. Well, actually, wacky electronic effects did sell a lot of records.

Either way, below are three of the more listenable exceptions.

1. The Hip Sound, Far Out (Limelight)
It sprang from the mind of Pierre Henry, the French 20th century electronic composer and artist known to the serious music community for his role in the development of musique concrète. As with his similar and much-loved (and sampled) “Psyché Rock,” “Far Out” is a demonstration of Henry’s penchant for pop. Bending Moog and French go-go brio to the will of his own collagist aesthetic, “Far Out” finally became - clanking and buzzing and squelching - something akin to Pop art. Or it became at least its own futuristic form of discotheque music.

Recorded in the late 1960’s in France, this was released domestically on Limelight records, a subsidiary of Mercury which, in addition to its jazz releases, was home to some of the more experimental music of the 60’s.

2. The Time Zone, Space Walker (White Whale)
Mort Garson was an arranger/composer type with a long track record in the Los Angeles studio world, and the mastermind behind some truly grandiose synthesizer albums of the late 60’s/early 70’s: kitschy concept albums with paranormal and astrological themes, and titles like The Unexplained: Ataraxia. Whatever increasingly occult shape his personal obsessions assumed in the 70’s, Garson’s most memorable recordings remained his (earlier) productions of the late 60's, however. The psychedelic “Space Walker,” for example: a genuinely inventive construction forged from go-go drums, fuzz tone distortion, squawks, glissandos, finally zapped into life and sent hurtling towards the American record buying public in 1967 - where, promptly, it did nothing.

“Space Walker” also bears a passing resemblance to Garson’s equally wonderful Zodiac Cosmic Sounds LP (see Richie Unterberger’s feature on Zodiac Cosmic Sounds, a true Aquarian relic).

3. Dick Hyman, Strobo (Command)
One of the names synonomous with the Moog, Dick Hyman - unlike other popular Moog advocates such as Jean-Jacques Perrey or Walter Carlos - came to the instrument not through a background in “serious” academic music but, rather, from many reliable years as a session pop and jazz musician. With a few exceptions (like his eight minute long “Minotaur”), Hyman’s late 60’s Moog records tend to give the sub-genre a bad name in my book, as they can come across a little too consciously wacky sometimes. “Strobo,” however - with its dense patter of mechanized rhythms (courtesy of the Maestro Rhythm Unit) and a series of shrill keyboard runs that could have been picked up on the moon - has its own futuristic charm. Easily the moogiest of this week’s bunch, its title in fact describes it perfectly.

This song only appeared on 45.