Psychedelic folk

Much is made of Bob Dylan plugging in an electric guitar at 1965’s Newport Folk Festival. Less tends to said of either the ensuing folk-rock - young, post-Beatles groups like the Byrds and the Buffalo Springfield who merged folk’s lyrical aesthetic and harmonies with rock production - or the ensuing electrified folk of an earlier generation like Judy Collins or Richard & Mimi Fariña who experimented, maybe more uneasily, with electrified instrumentation.

Perhaps because folk-gone-psychedelic was, after Newport, less of a statement than folk-gone-electric - just more water under the bridge to the purist factions of ‘60s folk music. Perhaps because the commercial viability of psychedelia-tinged folk was only transitory. Either way, very little is said of the phenomenon of singer-songwriters, duos, trios, groups not only gone electric but gone psychedelic, folk musicians who imbued chiming 12-string guitars and pretty harmonies with mysticism, back-to-the-country beneficence and Eastern-tinged instrumentation.

The Byrds, the Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead - all groups with folk pedigrees - famously did so, and even “authentic” folkies like Fred Neil and Hearts & Flowers plugged in and turned on, albeit more at their producers’ behest. It was a diffuse, ephemeral phenomenon, though, and with the arrival of the ‘70s and the fragmentation of the previous decade’s counterculture, psychedelicized folk would be subsumed - along with psychedelia in general - by a wave of boogie-rock, confessional singer-songwriters and cocaine country.

But some proclivities - the deeply felt impulse for creative self-expression and the spiritual liberation of running around naked, stoned out of your mind - never quite lie dormant. Psychedelic-folk would fall from favor, certainly, but it never completely disappeared. It'd just retreated underground. From the late ‘60s onwards into the ‘80s, introspective, psychedelic records pressed in impossibly tiny quantities would continue to be produced by musicians like Michael Angelo, Linda Perhacs, Maitreya Kali and Bobb Trimble, latter-day folkies with cult followings in inverse proportion to their obscurity.

This week’s selections fall somewhere along that continuum, a chronology of psychedelic-folk from its flower power commercial peak to its subsequent home in the hinterlands of “outsider” vanity pressings, shrinking market be damned.

1. The Pre-Cambrian Lightning Bolt, Hey There Sunshine (NWI)
Though not quite the powerhouse rock ‘n’ roll region that it’d been five years previously, the Pacific Northwest’s scene was still fairly vibrant in the late ‘60s. Many of its original bands had dissolved, recasting themselves, true to the time, with longer songs, longer hair, bigger amplifiers and psychedelicized hippie-rock garb. Portland-based Douglas A. Snider, the drummer, vocalist and songwriter of “Hey There Sunshine,” would go on from the Pre-Cambrian Lightning Bolt to form Douglas Fir, a loosely psychedelic blues group; their sole 1970 full-length offering, Hard Heartsingin’, would embody the Pacific Northwest sound.

Much less is known of the Pre-Cambrian Lightning Bolt, however. They were not simply some one-off studio concoction with a baroque psychedelic name invented for the occasion: a 1967 poster reveal that the Pre-Cambrian Lightning Bolt were a real band, with real live shows. They played Portland’s storied Crystal Ballroom, and there’s nothing to indicate they weren’t a popular live draw. Then again, there’s nothing about the wonderfully strange “Hey There Sunshine” to indicate how exactly they could’ve been a popular live draw, either.

Either way, “Hey There Sunshine” and its flipside - a cover of Bonnie Dobson’s hoary “Morning Dew” - are hardly the stuff of ear-bleeding Northwest psychedelic rock. Snider is a bit reminiscent of folk eccentric Fred Neil, and the group sounds like unreconstituted folkies having the old college try at psychedelia and succeeding, at least, with an echo-bathed anomaly.

This was recorded in 1968, I’d guess.

2. Creme Soda, Roses All Around (Trinity)
A foursome hailing from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Creme Soda consisted of Art Hicks (drums, vocals), Ron Juntunen (lead guitar), Bill Tanon (guitar, vocals) and Jim Wilson (bass, vocals).

Their "Roses All Around" 45 was taken from Creme Soda’s sole album Tricky Zingers, released on the tiny Trinity record label. The sensibilities of Tricky Zingers are a dead ringer for the gentler side of ‘60s pop and psychedelic-folk, though tracks like "(I'm) Chewin' Gum" conjure trashy ‘70s-era punk as well. It’s truly an excellent album, stylistically everywhere. Everywhere but the year 1975, the year when, against all probability, it was actually recorded. A quick glance at the Tricky Zingers album cover gives them away: if you can’t judge a book by its cover, then facial hair.

Creme Soda did get some notice amongst underground rock cognoscenti - power-pop and ‘60s garage-rock champion and Bomp! magazine (and record label) founder Greg Shaw wrote the album’s liner notes - but their low fidelity and general obsolescence only increase their charm. “Roses All Around” - all of Tricky Zingers, for that matter - was a defiantly unfashionable statement in years of bar band rock ‘n’ roll and outlaw country. Too unfashionable, perhaps - Creme Soda were no more not long thereafter, though guitarist Bill Tanon would release a 1982 LP, Free Man’s Rainbow, also on Trinity Records.

3. The Friends of Mind, Not Much Lovin' (Insounds)
The Friends of Mind? The group - including its songwriter Ken Tumlin - seem to have come and gone with nary a trace.

The only salvageable connection here is arranger Bill Cheatwood, presumably the same Bill Cheatwood who was a founding member of the Wayfarers Trio, an Oklahoma City folk trio that released a Civil War-themed album - Songs of the Blue and the Grey - for Mercury Records in 1961. The trio also included guitarist Mason Williams (whose 1968 instrumental “Classical Gas” later topped the charts), and Cheatwood would wind up hanging out again with Williams, by then a hot commodity, in late ‘60s Los Angeles. Where, if I may bring all of this supposition full circle, Cheatwood had a hand in releasing this fascinating duet. “Not Much Lovin’” is the Friends of Mind’s plaint of this dog-eat-dog society of ours; a bum trip atmosphere and some very odd analog guitar effects are put to good use conjuring that same dog-eat-dog society. The Friends of Mind would never be heard from again.

Insounds Records was the tinier subsidiary of the tiny Los Angeles-based Accent Records label, home to some other excellent and obscure psychedelic and garage-band 45s by the Rob Roys, the Human Expression, the Peace Pipe and the Silk Winged Alliance.

Outré refugees

Dig a little below the surface and you’ll find in our cumulative 45 rpm output a discography of the strangest musical impulses. Rare were the financial returns great for the independently pressed 45 record but rare was its overhead, either. Its inexpensiveness has made it, since the early ‘50s, the first (and last, often) commercial frontier of America’s idiosyncratic visionaries and of its overlooked, exotic, homespun and most anti-social musical niches. I tend to rhapsodize endlessly about this relationship on Office Naps. Visionaries and musical niches, though: these are forces that redeem American culture.

Such dynamics, the subtle balance of economic and creative energies, were still going strong in the mid and late ‘60s. The 45 was still the predominant format in much of popular music, including rock ‘n’ roll - though not for much longer - and examples of unconventional 45 records were just as ample, if not more ample, in 1968 as they were in 1958. It’s simply that, of the unusual or nominally experimental records that were issued commercially, they were then more likely to be the work of rock musicians, psychedelic individualists like Syd Barrett and Roky Erickson and the Holy Modal Rounders. In the guise of psychedelia, their freakishness would even perversely capture a fleeting commercial potential.

That’s what’s different about the selections this week, all recorded and released in the mid- and late ‘60s, the psychedelic era. They are likely strange by most listeners’ standards. Nonetheless they are neither rock nor psychedelic. They seem to be from some different moment, like beatnik artifacts washed up in a later decade. Their anomaly only seems to increase the profundity of their strangeness.

1. Kali Bahlu, Lonely Teardrops (Terra)
The enigmatic Kali Bahlu was a young woman in 1967 when she released her Cosmic Remembrance LP on the then-foundering World-Pacific record label. A swirling tableau of gongs, sitars, tablas and Bahlu’s Buddhist chanting and fairy-tale ruminations, Cosmic Remembrance is an album known for its general incongruity and for testing listeners’ patience. For all of its faux-Eastern artifice and Bahlu’s voice - sometimes a feral soprano, sometimes a jarring, child-like babble - Cosmic Remembrance is nonetheless quite unique, a relic that stands apart from its era. (Hear an excerpt of the album’s “A Cosmic Telephone Call” here).

“Lonely Teardrops” - Bahlu’s first recording, I believe - is not wholly dissimilar from the otherworldly atmosphere of her Cosmic Remembrance LP. It’s just much better. It’s also Kali Bahlu singing from some grimmer place. The ominous rumblings, Bahlu’s naked, if indecipherable, emotion, the wonderfully stark gloom: those of us drawn to sunless, wintry tundras find much to love in the remarkable “Lonely Teardrops.” This is the reason bears hibernate. Brighter days lay ahead for Kali Bahlu, however - they could hardly get any bleaker.

Whether it was the Bahlu of “Lonely Teardrops” banging on a detuned guitar - or the beatific Bahlu rambling in sing-song tones about Lord Buddha and “clocks of never” on Cosmic Remembrance - this is clearly someone on a separate psychic plane. Often referred to as acid-influenced, that is perhaps a disservice to the peculiar experience of Kali Bahlu, whose Californian, pseudo-Buddhist cosmic consciousness just happened to synchronize with hippie sensibilities.

Kali Bahlu would later be involved in some capacity with a few hens-teeth-obscure ‘70s albums of Eastern-inspired singing and commune vibes by the Los Angeles hippie-rock group Lite Storm. Bizarrely, Bahlu was more recently spotted in Taiwanese filmmaker Mei-Juin Chen’s film Hollywood Hotel.

I’ve found no conclusive information on Terra Records or this selection’s producer, Michael O’Shanessey. I believe “Lonely Teardrops” was recorded in 1966 or 1967.

2. George Loa and Maui Loa (Little Brother), Polynesian Chant of Green Creation: Cosmic Climax (Green Power)
The brothers Loa, this week’s mystery artists.

This is Hawaiian cosmology reinvented for a headier moment in history. The flute and conga drum channel grooviness. Same for the sexual overtones of the selection’s spoken-word introduction and title. The haunting call-and-response chanting seems authentic enough, but whether or not it was a pre-coital dance of the Polynesian gods is anyone’s guess.

There’s nothing one can definitively point out as either a precedent or an obvious target audience for 1969’s “Cosmic Climax. “ One might have found it being sold from ads in the back of a Stag magazine or peddled to shell-bar tourists. It might have been handed to you at last summer’s gathering of the tribe. Whoa, thanks man. But let’s not mistake the 45 rpm record for a medium that demands market analysis or committed commercial vision. It can be many visions all at once. It can be a great mass of anthropologically incorrect, conflicting intentions.

“Cosmic Climax” was recorded in Hawaii or possibly Los Angeles.

3. Miriam, Catwalk (Tanqueray)
“Catwalk” is the handiwork of the Hollywood actress Miriam Byrd-Nethery and her husband Clu Gulager, an actor, too, and later an aspiring filmmaker.

Miriam Byrd-Nethery (born 1929 in Arkansas) and Clu Gulager (born a year earlier in Oklahoma) met in the theater department at Baylor University, married and found their first professional theater and television work in New York City. Relocating to Hollywood in the late ‘50s, Gulager would go on to distinguish himself as a prolific genre actor in both movies and television, including deputy sheriff Emmett Ryker in TV’s The Virginian, rig-hand-and-ladies-man Abilene in The Last Picture Show and contract killer Lee in The Killers. Starting with 1985’s Return of the Living Dead, Gulager’s work as horror movie stock character revived an acting career that continues today, albeit at a subdued pace.

Miriam, too, managed her own small-time acting career in Hollywood, but if it was Gulager who enjoyed the spotlight, theirs would first be a marriage, then family, energized above all by a spirit of collaboration and the noblest of artistic endeavors: filmmaking. Their obsession with producing films - including the family’s eight years in Tulsa trying unsuccessfully to realize their grisly serial killer horror noir Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! (its saga detailed in an engrossing 1997 LA Weekly article) - put them on the brink of starvation.

None of this does anything but increase the charm of this maverick and quintessentially American couple, whose lust for creative, budget-minded expression reached early fruition on “Catwalk,” a slice of pure Sunset Strip eccentricity from 1967. Ever wonder what really goes inside the actors studio? This is it.

Miriam Byrd-Nethery passed away in 2003.

Office Naps Fall 2007 Psychedelic Pop mix

This is the rose-colored soundtrack I strive to cocoon my life in, a CD-length metaphor for the first time you watched Solaris. Part of the ongoing Office Naps psychedelic pop mix series.

Office Naps Fall 2007 Psychedelic Pop Mix

The Punjabs, Raga-Riff (7", Prince)
The Deep Six, Rising Sun (7", Liberty)
The Buff Organization, Upside Down World (7", Original Sound)
Chip Taylor, You Should Be From Monterey (7", Rainy Day)
The Gordian Knot, Year of the Sun (7", Verve)
Celebrated Renaissance Band, Heavy Is the Sundown (7", Lion)
Hard Times, Blew Mind (Blew Mind, World Pacific)
Phil Cordell, Red Lady (7", Janus)
The Glass Family, Agorn (Elements of Complex Variables) (7", Warner Brothers)
Junior Parker, Tomorrow Never Knows (7", Capitol)
Mercy, Our Winter Love (The Mercy and Love (Can Make You Happy), Sundi)
The Group Therapy, Thoughts (7", Mercury)
English Setters, Wake Up (7", Jubilee)
Dave Miller Set, Mr. Guy Fawkes (7", Spin)
Art Guy, Where You Gonna Go (7", Valiant)
Smokey and His Sister, Creators of Rain (7", Columbia)
The Raik's Progress, Why Did You Rob Us, Tank? (7", Liberty)
The Federal Duck, Peace In My Mind (The Federal Duck, Musicor)
Sonny Bono, Motel II (Chastity, soundtrack, Atco)
Peter Pan & the Good Fairies, Kaleidoscope (7", Challenge)
The Collection, Both Sides Now (7", The Hot Biscuit Company)
Pipes of Pan, Monday Morning Rain (7", Page One)
Emil Richards and the Factory, No Place I'd Rather Be (7", Uni)
The Sandals, Coming Down Slow (The Last of the Ski Bums, soundtrack, World Pacific)
Thomas Edisun's Electric Light Bulb Band, Common Attitude (7", Tamm)
The Yardbirds, Glimpses (Little Games, Epic)
Eden's Children, Echoes (Sure Looks Real, ABC)
The Soundz, Freak Out, pt. 1 (7", Crown-Psychedel*lite)

The Aquarian dream

Three selections this week from the obscure, hazy end of ‘60s psychedelic pop

From generational icons like the Mamas & the Papas and the Association to lesser-known groups like Sagittarius and the Sunshine Company, the psychedelic pop phenomenon of the ‘60s would feed itself primarily on the turned-on folkies and harmony groups of Southern California. Psychedelic pop was more than young, longhaired vocal groups with electric guitars, though. Psychedelic pop took those soaring voices and yearning lyrics, harnessing them to visionary recording engineers and the shiniest Los Angeles studio gadgetry. The Aquarian dream would unfold in cascading harmonies, chimes, fuzztone guitars and great caverns of glorious echo.

Psychedelic pop in time grew fat on its own Southern California abundance, coming to resemble something that sounded very much like Bread or Seals & Crofts. That would still be years down the road, though. It would remain fresh and dewy for a few more years in the late ‘60s, with albums like the Mamas and Papas’ If You Can Believe Your Eyes and Ears defining something genuinely new, something that every landlocked, college-bound teenager could gently groove to. You could hear it somewhere in the flute solo, I think, that dream of spiritual fulfillment and golden Pacific splendor for those who weren’t quite ready to drop out of society and join the revolution.

1. Emil Richards and the Factory, No Place I’d Rather Be (Uni)
Though ephemeral, the Factory were, unlike so many ‘60s Los Angeles projects, an independent and fully functioning group of Los Angeles musicians.

Led by Lowell George, later the lead singer, guitarist and songwriter for classic rock stalwarts Little Feat, the Factory also included Warren Klein (guitar), Martin Kibbee (bass), Dallas Taylor (drums) and Ritchie Hayward (drums), musicians who’d shortly move on to form hippie-rock outfit the Fraternity of Man.

It’s George we hear singing dreamily on 1967’s “No Place I’d Rather Be,” and that’s likely Klein heard on guitar. The Emil Richards ostensibly fronting the group, on the other hand, would release some psychedelic ethno-jazz efforts of his own, like Journey to Bliss (1968), but ultimately he's best known as an extraordinarily competent session musician who’s played vibraphone and percussion on innumerable pop, jazz and rock music productions and soundtracks. Richards’s Indonesian percussion effects on this selection are hardly insubstantial, but his role in the Factory was ancillary at best. We’ll likely never know what dark upper-management motives would come to identify Richards as the Factory’s frontman on this 45 and, for that matter, whether other Factory members actually played on “No Place I’d Rather Be.”

But, whatever. The shimmering, resonating aesthetic of “No Place I’d Rather Be” works on all levels, effectively conveying that groovy 1967 pleasure of lying very, very still for very, very long hours at a time.

2. The Robbs, Castles in the Air (Atlantic)
The pride of Oconomowoc, Wisconsin, the Robbs were, at their core, the brothers Donaldson - Dee, Joe and Bruce - all of whom shared vocal and instrumental duties as a popular live band in the Great Lakes region. The Robbs’ recorded legacy began in the early ‘60s with a few surf and teen pop 45s on Chicago record labels. With drummer Craig Krampf solidifying their line-up, the Robbs fashioned themselves into a modern harmony pop-rock unit with the advent of the British Invasion, their initial recording forays catching the attention of Dick Clark, who eventually offered them a gig as the house band on his Where the Action Is television variety show.

The Robbs’ first record after relocating to Los Angeles, 1966's “Race With the Wind,” was a modest hit and exemplified their deft folk-rock arrangements and breezy harmony pop. Despite a subsequent string of jangly, radio-ready 45s along with an LP in 1967, despite major label distribution and national television exposure, the Robbs suffered from poor promotion, a somewhat lightweight reputation and what can only be regarded as an improbable stretch of bad luck.

One gets the sense that the Robbs were willing to try something a little different in 1968. And therewith would “Castles in the Air” be different from anything else they’d release. This wonderful elegy to escapism and self-delusion, with its chimes, African thumb piano and underwater vocal and guitar effects would be effectively different from anything anybody was releasing, moreover. The shift in tack was little avail, however, as “Castles in the Air” became yet another trophy for their mounting pile of commercial misses.

The Robbs soldiered on for a few more 45s. Renamed as Cherokee, they headed in a country-rock direction with their full-length album for ABC Records in 1970. It would as founders of the storied Hollywood recording studio, Cherokee Studios, opened in the mid-‘70s and still in operation today, for which the three Donaldson brothers would finally achieve enduring success.

3. The Voyage, One Day (Decca)
Hampered somewhat by awkward songwriting, longtime New York City pop producer John Linde nonetheless took the late ‘60s vogue for the Eastern exoticism and expertly combined it with the Baroque sensibilities of the Left Banke (of “Walk Away Renee” and “Pretty Ballerina” fame) for the Voyage's "One Day." The ensuing trippy drama would be one of many of Decca Records’ tentative gambles at 45 rpm psychedelia undertaken in the waning years of the ‘60s. Alas, it would be one of just as many that did nothing to reverse the label’s foundering fortunes.

A New York City production likely recorded in late 1967, little is otherwise known of the Voyage or Richard Klaskow, the songwriter of “One Day.”

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.

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)

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.

A black & white affair

It’s not the psychedelized, socially conscious soul of Sly & the Family Stone or Cloud Nine-era Temptations I’m talking about. Nor is it the tripped-out voodoo of the first Funkadelic record (Funkadelic) either, though that’s getting a bit closer to it. Jimi Hendrix was too much his own inimitable entity, and the Equals (of “Baby Come Back” fame) were British (via the West Indies) and just not very psychedelic.

If we’re discussing successful early prototypes of black psychedelic rock this week, it must be the Chambers Brothers’ 1967 “Time” (hear an excerpt here). A major pop hit, “Time” (along with its full eleven-minute album version) was an excellent example of early psychedelia, its demented weirdness matched, against all odds, by its commercial achievement. “Time,” like all of this week’s selections, was music realized in that brief window when, if they weren’t desperately casting about for new formulas in psychedelia’s puzzling tumult, major record labels were actually taking chances on new artists and configurations of artists. Marketed to mostly white audiences, this was a rare and fleeting form of psychedelia before soul evolved into the socially-, culturally- and politically-engaged funk, transforming everything irrevocably.

Sly, Funkadelic, “Say It Loud”-era James Brown: theirs was music that, like “white” psychedelia, had a conscience. Theirs was music that was countercultural, colorful, rhythmic, and long enough to permit extended flights of instrumental fancy. But theirs originated in African-American communities - rather than from external agencies like major label record companies. Even if it did enjoy crossover success, funk captured an ethos in a way that immediately obviated the sort of industry efforts that, no matter how good the intention, went into coupling R&B and soul singers with psychedelic instrumentation - like, for instance, this week’s ephemeral curios.

Of course, it’s just such ephemeral curios that I’m most interested in. So let’s take a look.

1. Larry Williams & Johnny Watson with The Kaleidoscope, Nobody (Okeh)
Maybe the most unlikely of an unlikely bunch this week, “Nobody” unites shimmering ethno-psychedelic rock with the world of rhythm & blues.

Larry Williams’s career began in the early ‘50s as a session pianist at Cosimo Matassa’s New Orleans recording studios. He briefly joined Lloyd Price’s band, and thereafter earned a name for himself as an R&B shouter with late ‘50s hits like “Short Fat Fannie,” “Bony Moronie,” “Bad Boy” and “Dizzy Miss Lizzy” on the great Specialty label. In the early ‘60s, Williams relocated to the West Coast, there working as a producer and A&R man for Okeh (Columbia Records’ R&B subsidiary) and a handful of other California labels. Never quite able to revive his early successes as a recording artist, Williams lived out the sort of disreputable life that you expect of the echt R&B musician, succumbing to a gunshot wound in 1980 that, depending on who you ask, was not necessarily self-inflicted.

When Williams’ friend, the multi-instrumentalist Johnny Watson, arrived in early ‘50s Los Angeles, he’d already gigged with Houston bluesmen like Johnny Copeland and Albert Collins. Still in his teens, Watson toiled in Los Angeles as a session guitarist and, a year or two later, he’d begin making - now as Johnny “Guitar” Watson - a string of gutsy R&B singles. These included, amongst many others, the stratospheric 1954 instrumental “Space Guitar,” his autobiographical “Gangster of Love” (re-recorded in 1963 and again in 1978), and his biggest ‘50s hit, the swamp pop-flavored “Those Lonely, Lonely Nights.” Watson would continue recording and performing in the ‘60s in a more uptown, sophisticated soul style. It wouldn’t be until the ‘70s that Watson would finally find his enduring fame, however, with his funky Southern blues persona: the “Gangster of Love.”

In the mid-‘60s Williams and Watson joined briefly together for a few fine duet releases on the Okeh label. There were obvious similarities in their career trajectories up to this point. Both were hardened, Gulf Coast-born R&B musicians. Both maintained ties to the criminal underworld: as a musician, Watson earned money on the side as a pimp (or vice-versa, according to Peter Guralnick), and Williams had a criminal record for dealing drugs and extensive involvement, it was rumored, in prostitution.

From 1967, their exceptional “Nobody” features the instrumentation of the Kaleidoscope, a preternaturally eclectic California group who, with varying degrees of success, were fusing elements of Middle Eastern music, folk, and psychedelia in the late ‘60s. Was it Kaleidoscope’s bohemian influence, or was it just the beatific vibes afoot in the Summer of Love? Either way, both Larry Williams and Johnny “Guitar” Watson were able to momentarily suspend their darker natures for this improbable Aquarian artifact.

Check out Richie Unterberger’s great interview with the Kaleidoscope’s multi-instrumentalist and founder Chris Darrow, who recounts the “Nobody” session in great detail.

2. Junior Parker, Tomorrow Never Knows (Capitol)
Born Herman Parker in the blues mecca of Clarksdale, Mississippi, Junior Parker cut some raucous R&B sides early in his career as “Little Junior Parker” for Memphis’s Sun Records (in the label's pre-Elvis, pre-rockabilly years). It was a prolific stretch at Houston’s Duke Records in the ‘50s and early ‘60s, though, that showcased the smooth, warm vocals and brassy R&B for which Parker is still best known.

In the mid-‘60s, Parker was recording in a more soul-inflected style for the Mercury label. In 1970, when this selection was recorded, it was an era of aging bluesmen like Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf making some pretty dire psychedelic rock albums. Parker’s version of the Beatles’ “Tomorrow Never Knows” appeared on what was marketed by Capitol Records as Parker’s “heavy” record, Outside Man. Outside Man was actually more a sort of funky electric blues album, however - and not a bad one at that. Still, “Tomorrow Never Knows” was easily its highpoint.

When Parker intones, "Listen to the color of your dreams,” it sounds like some stark moonlight incantation. If “Tomorrow Never Knows” was the Beatles at their most blindingly experimental, then Parker (with the help of veteran jazz and pop arranger Horace Ott) manages to do the impossible by retaining the original’s spookily psychedelic flavor and transforming it into something entirely his own.

3. Pepper & the Shakers, Semi-Psychedelic (It Is) (Coral)
This group, at least according to my sources, is thought to be the same Pepper & the Shakers who cut a rare Doo-wop record for Kentucky’s Chetwyd Records in ’59.

I’m not entirely sure it’s the same group. I’m not entirely sure this was an African-American - or integrated, at least - group, for that matter. It puts me in the somewhat problematic position of assaying the race of a singer from the sound of his voice, but for the sake of a complete post and a satisfyingly obscure theme, I’m including “Semi-Psychedelic (It Is).”

Actually, the whole concept of "semi-psychedelic" seemed a bit problematic for me at the outset. A few paroxysms of fuzztone and Echoplex delay later, though, and I had a much better sense of it.

This relic was recorded in 1967.

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 this time ‘round. You may not know some of the artists, but it’s got an odd overall tang which you sitar-obsessed collector-types should intuitively 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)

Psychsploitation

Three Kandy-Kolored Klassics from the golden age (1967-1970) of psychedelic exploitation this week. Psychedelia was in its first full, gaudy blossom in 1967, and Los Angeles, entertainment engine of the solar system, was right there to capitalize. These particular instrumentals weren’t made for movie soundtracks, but they could have been; any of them would have made comfortable additions to fare like The Acid Eaters or The Love-Ins and those moments when you needed a panning shot of longhairs frugging on the Strip and some stern narrator intoning about bad trips and “the scene.”

While Los Angeles may have been pop culture ground zero, it’s still a bit difficult to see why these three selections got made, however: there just wasn’t much commercial precedent for psychedelic instrumentals in the late ‘60s. Perhaps their existence owes more to the fact that a 45 rpm release was a low overhead investment in 1967, and that there were reserves of session musicians ready to grind out this sort of thing on a moment’s notice (and have a lot of fun while they were doing it, too).

I tend to go on and on about Los Angeles and the crass commercialism of the ‘60s; to describe my relationship with the history of pop culture opportunism as love/hate is misleading, though, as it’s mostly love. It may not be obvious why these three got made, in other words, but I’m glad they did.

1. Peter Pan & the Good Fairies, Kaleidoscope (Challenge)
Welcome, strangers, to the chilly, rarified reaches of the stratosphere. There’s no oxygen up here, just the shimmering cosmos and harpsichords and fuzzboxes criss-crossing like satellites.

There are no guitars here, either. As a pure studio concoction, the question of what a group named “Peter Pan & the Good Fairies” might have looked like in performance is gracefully eliminated as well. The futuristic “Kaleidoscope” was in reality the brainchild of Jim “Jimmy” Gordon, a session bassist (I believe) who recorded a few other ‘60s instrumental freakouts on the Challenge label.

This gem was released in 1967.

2. The Electric Tomorrow, The Electric Tomorrow (World Pacific)
It’s almost too easy to poke fun at the florid excess of ‘60s psychedelic names. Still, though, it doesn’t get much better than “Electric Tomorrow.” Forecast for next week: Chocolate Whenever.

Co-writing credit here goes to Clem Floyd, a British guitarist who played with David Crosby in the early ‘60s as one half of - you guessed it - Crosby & Floyd. Jack Millman, the producer, is perhaps better known as a jazz trumpet player; he mostly labored in anonymity as a capable Los Angeles jazz session musician in the ‘50s and ‘60s. How they wound up together for this for stroboscopic artifact is beyond me; I suppose anything could happen in all the shared excitement of cashing in.

Either way, the addition of the funky electric piano was at Millman’s behest, I suspect. I suspect, too, that the queasy sound of “The Electric Tomorrow” is the “speed” knob on an early flange pedal turned way up for maximum seizure-inducing effect.

The flip side of “The Electric Tomorrow,” by the way, is entitled “Sugar Cube.” Duh.

3. The Relations, The Image (Reena)
A theme in search of a B movie, a post-“Out of Limits” instrumental for the Now Generation, “Image” is more from our friend Del Kacher, the Los Angeles inventor and guitar whiz (see Vox Wah Wah promo). Such was Kacher’s clout - and such was the expediency of the 45 rpm record in the ‘60s - that he might have put this record out merely to hear himself wrangling a recently arrived fuzzbox.

I imagine that there are other obsessive music fans out there with a favorite year (or years) when everything in music, if not popular culture, was golden. Mine would be the late 1960s, of course; if Del Kacher wanted to put out a vanity record in 1967 with a riff he’d invented five minutes before recording, then, for better or for worse, I'll want to sit down and write about it.

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

Sunshine, sunshine

Porpoises, candy canes, flowers, rain, flowers in the rain. Such images were tossed around pretty indiscriminately in the pop music landscape for a few blissful years, thanks in part to West Coast vocal harmony groups like the Mamas & the Papas and the Association. More than mere vogue words, these images suggested the very mecca of warmth and good feeling that California had become by the mid-1960s. Most of all, though, it was sunshine (replaced shortly thereafter by the more countercultural love), which prevailed as this music’s dominant lyrical image. Bright, warm, harmonious, yellow, basically harmless, and, like David Crosby, hurtful to your eyes if you stared at it too long: sunshine was the perfect metaphor for this self-invented Pacific Eden, and the perfect summation of its beatified version of pop music.

Filled with hip Aquarian accoutrement like chimes, flutes, fuzz tone guitars, sitars, and tambourine and, of course, distinguished by its soaring and sunny vocal harmonies, it was a form of pop music which seemed to resonate with starry-eyed, suburban adolescents everywhere. Perversely, its easygoing sophistication resonated with an older generation as well, swingers who respected the idea of cultural currency but who might have otherwise been scared away by the more aggressive and increasingly political strains of rock music.

See also this early post for more sunshine.

1. The Gordian Knot, The Year of the Sun (Verve)
I’ve never heard it, but San Francisco’s Gordian Knot released a full length album (from which this ethereal 45 was taken) that seems to be regarded with near-universal disdain by enthusiasts of ‘60s psychedelia. Due in part to a sensitivity to mellow candy cane vibrations, however, I’ve welcomed “The Year of the Sun” into my own life. I hear lines like “The rhythm of the summer wind calls me again” and I do exactly as I’m told. You just have to learn to feel the flute.

2. Chapter V, The Sun is Green (Verve Folkways)
“The Sun is Green” was the first and best of two psychedelic pop 45’s produced by Chapter V in 1968. They seemed to have been a vehicle for then-Toronto native (and future country producer and husband of Emmylou Harris) Brian Ahern, but little is otherwise known about Chapter V. You’re also not alone if you’re wondering what one takes to make the sun turn green, and where you can score some.

3. The Hard Times, Sad, Sad, Sunshine (World Pacific)
This particular sun seems to be a reminder of love lost. Further details are somewhat hazy, however, since the Hard Times obscured their lyrics in a blanket of gorgeous, echo-splashed harmonies. Obviously they realized the importance of paying lip service to the sun somehow, and, satisfied that they’d fulfilled that obligation, the Hard Times relax on “Sad, Sad, Sunshine,” enjoying their God-given right to jangle.

From San Diego, the Hard Times released one fine, eclectic album and a handful of 45s between 1966 and 1968.

Great Britain

No clever themes unite this week’s 1960’s psychedelic pop selections. Beyond being unapologetically British, that is.

1. Phil Cordell, Red Lady (Janus)
Phil Cordell was a British folk-popster & songwriter who found greater (or, rather, relatively greater) fame in the 70’s with an idiosyncratic pop project called Springwater.

The effervescent “Red Lady,” remains, however, his crowning acheivement - a chugging tour de force of bohemian languor, sung with all the veiled drug references and quasi-mysticism appropriate for 1969. Fading out in a kaleidoscopic hum of sitar-like slide guitar (which Cordell, a multi-instrumentalist, is himself presumably playing), harp, cymbalum, and the obligatory “wailing forest maiden,” you, like me, may wonder whether there was a downside to all this narcotic bliss. Unless you count the bloodshot eyes, there wasn’t.

“Red Lady,” originally released on the Warner Brothers UK label, was released stateside on the Janus label (pictured here).

2. The Societie, Bird has Flown (Deram)
The Societie were a Scottish group, with the Hollies’ lead vocalist Allan Clarke handling production on this oddly loping pop chestnut from 1967. Further research reveals little else on who the Societie were, unfortunately. Further research reveals little else about subtleties of the lyrics of “Bird Has Flown,” too, as I inevitably seem to get derailed by all that cavernous echo. There are moments when I honestly can’t even tell whether the drums are running backwards or forwards. Really, who cares? It's echo, for God's sake.

3. Peter Sarstedt, Blagged! (World-Pacific)
Maybe it’s that British pop songwriter Sarstedt seems today to be regarded as a somewhat frivolous period relic. Maybe it’s the era’s general production philosophy that the more flanging, the better. (Flange is the distinct “phasing” effect heard on the drums). Maybe it’s the lush sound reminiscient of the early Bee Gees records. Well, whatever; I find this to be an endearing specimen of the British psychedelic baroque.

Though it’s more identifiably psychedelic, “Blagged!” also bears comparison to some of the seemier fare of the cult 60’s crooner Scott Walker. Sarstedt projects a similar, cynical kind of masculinity - a posture which his weary bravura rescues from being merely corny.

“Blagged!” was recorded in 1968. Like “Red Lady,” the 45 pictured here was the American issue of the record.

Sitars!

In that weird gray zone where American popular taste comingled with “ethnic” music, anything - even sitars - could happen. It may have been the Beatles who introduced it to the popular consciousness, but only the American record industry could so effectively turn the sitar into a cliché. The sitar signified India, which, to the teenaged demographic, signified, of course, drugs. But the sitar was a democratic cliché. For a brief year or two, it could be spotted droning away in the background of albums of everyone from Jackie Gleason to Sammy Davis, Jr. Thus assuring their parents that they, too, were still relevant.

1. Beautiful, Walters’ Dream (Cyclops)
Notorious Los Angeles-based producer and impresario Kim Fowley came to London in 1967 and managed to insert himself behind the controls for the first recordings of future jazz-rock eggheads the Soft Machine, then darlings of the nascent London psychedelic music scene. Sneaking the tapes, still piping hot, back to Los Angeles, Fowley released two of these songs under the fabricated name Beautiful on the one-off Cyclops label.

Apparently the consensus was that no matter the duplicity involved - and no matter how rudimentary the playing - the American public was going to get its sitars.

2. The Love Sitars, Paint It Black (Soul Galore)
Straight from the end sequence of The Party to you, this version of “Paint It Black” proved that uniting the two dominant cultural vectors of 60’s Pop America - rock ‘n’ roll and sitars - was no harder than coming up with the right Olde English font for your label.

No conclusive information on the Love Sitars. Their name pretty much tells you everything you need to know, though. This had to have been the work of studio musicians from Los Angeles. No other city in the 60’s was so prepared to knock out a few inauthentic notes with such a guileless lack of embarrassment.

3. The Punjabs, Raga-Riff (Prince)
This scrappy twenty-five watts of sitar power is a personal favorite of this lost sub-sub-subgenre, and the reason my heart races when I see “Sitar with Orchestra - Instr.” printed on a record label.

It’s pretty easy to trace the trajectory of “Raga-Riff." Written and recorded in an afternoon. Casually handed out to some turned-on Los Angeles deejays. Played once. Maybe played once. And - like the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, or fur vests - immediately locked away in storage and forgotten about.

The hinterlands

Psychedelic pop wasn’t just the unique provenance of greater Los Angeles and San Francisco in the 1960s. That's right: This week we pack our books-on-tape and almond nut thins for the long trek to the hinterlands. Times being what they were, no corner of America was free from the bands which sprang forth, fungus-like, to fulfill those long-dormant desires for backwards guitars and cellophane flowers.

1. Jazz Bend Me Blues Band, Lady Weaver (Algar)
Things were different in the late 1960s, when many musical varieties of hippie flora and fauna flourished.

There was a gentler variety which appropriated images of hookah-smoking caterpillers, and which suggested that the coolest LSD experience was, ultimately, the Renaissance Faire.

Then there was the woolier, bearded, post-commune variety. It makes me think of a band that has recently staggered from the woods after a long winter with only a beat-to-shit copy of the Chronicles of Narnia. Enter the Jazz Bend Me Blues Band. Where does one geographically place off-kilter tremolo guitar and xylophone? I'm not sure either, but I get the vague sense that this bit of ramshackle weirdness was a product of the Pacific Northwest.

2. West Minist'r, Carnival (Razzberry)
West Minist’r was a Midwestern group, with a reputation as a sort of Beatles-by-way-of-the-Breadbasket. The two (of at least three) West Minist'r 45s that I own definitely carry a pronounced Anglo influence.

This is a personal favorite. And proof, too, that, with some chemical fine-tuning, anything - even carnivals - can be made psychedelic. It just takes the right combination of backyard production, blissed-out harmonies, and church organ.

It's that walloping drumbeat which really sets “Carnival” apart for me, though. This is from 1969.

3. King Biscuit Entertainers, Pride (Burdette)
"Pride" is chiming, uncharacteristically quiet fare from the King Biscuit Entertainers, an accomplished bunch who built a reputation from years of energetic live shows on the Pacific Northwest’s ballroom circuit.

It doesn’t matter here that only fifty percent of their lyrics are decipherable, and that the rest are blurred into oblivion by that fascinating '60s studio gadget, the Echoplex tape delay. (The Echoplex could ascribe an hallucinogenic haze to the sound of silverware clattering to the floor, and it sometimes did.) What really matters here is the stoned buzz that the King Biscuit Entertainers achieve in a mere two minutes. That's