Artist: Jefferson Airplane
Title: She Has Funny Cars
Source: CD: Surrealistic Pillow
Writer(s): Kaukonen/Balin
Label: RCA/BMG Heritage
Year: 1967
She Has Funny Cars, the opening track of Jefferson Airplane's second LP, Surrealistic Pillow, was a reference to some unusual possessions belonging to new drummer Spencer Dryden's girlfriend. As was the case with many of the early Airplane tracks, the title has nothing to do with the lyrics of the song itself. The song was also released as the B side to the band's first top 10 single, Somebody To Love.
Artist: Jimi Hendrix Experience
Title: Come On (part one)
Source: LP: Electric Ladyland
Writer(s): Earl King
Label: Reprise
Year: 1968
Despite being rated by many as the greatest rock guitarist of all time, Jimi Hendrix's roots were in the blues. One of his most performed songs was Red House (a track that was left off the US release of Are You Experienced?), and the Experience's debut US performance at Monterey featured an amped-up version of the B.B. King classic Rock Me Baby. For the Electric Ladyland album Hendrix chose a relatively obscure tune from Earl King, originally recorded in 1962. Come On (Pt. 1) was one of only two cover songs on Electric Ladyland (the other being Dylan's All Along the Watchtower).
Artist: Vanilla Fudge
Title: The Windmills Of Your Mind
Source: Mono LP: Rock And Roll
Writer(s): Bergman/Bergman/Legrand
Label: Atco
Year: 1969
Vanilla Fudge all but abandoned their early practice of slowing down and psychedelicizing pop tunes after their first LP, but by their fifth album, Rock and Roll, they were at it again, as this revisioning of The Windmills Of Your Mind (a US hit for Dusty Springfield and an even bigger UK hit for Noel Harrison) shows.
Artist: Music Machine
Title: Double Yellow Line
Source: CD: Beyond The Garage (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Writer: Sean Bonniwell
Label: Sundazed (original label: Original Sound)
Year: 1967
After the success of Talk Talk, the Music Machine issued a series of unsuccessful singles on the Original Sound label. Band leader Sean Bonniwell attributed this lack of success to mismanagement by record company people and the band's own manager. Eventually those singles would be re-issued on Warner Brothers on an album called Bonniwell Music Machine, along with a handful of new songs. One of the best of these singles was Double Yellow Line, which Bonniwell said he wrote while driving to a gig. This seems to be a good place to mention the rest of the original Music Machine lineup, which consisted of Mark Landon on lead guitar. Ron Edgar on drums, Doug Rhodes on organ and Keith Olsen on bass. This lineup would dissolve before the release of the Bonniwell Music Machine album but was nonetheless featured on the majority of tracks on the LP.
Artist: Moby Grape
Title: Omaha
Source: CD: Love Is The Song We Sing: San Francisco Nuggets 1965-70 (originally released on LP: Moby Grape)
Writer: Skip Spence
Label: Rhino (original label: Columbia)
Year: 1967
As an ill-advised promotional gimmick, Columbia Records released five separate singles concurrently with the first Moby Grape album. Of the five singles, only one, Omaha, actually charted, and it only got to the #86 spot. Meanwhile, the heavy promotion by the label led to Moby Grape getting the reputation of being over-hyped, much to the detriment of the band's career.
Artist: Baker Knight
Title: Hallucinations
Source: Mono CD: My Mind Goes High (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Writer(s): Baker Knight
Label: Warner Strategic Marketing (original label: Reprise)
Year: 1967
Although he never became a major star, Baker Knight had a long and productive career, beginning in 1956, when he opened for the likes of Carl Perkins. Knight also achieved success as a songwriter, particularly with the song Lonesome Town, which was a hit for Ricky Nelson. By the mid-1960s Knight was working with producer Jimmy Bowen and writing songs for Dino, Desi and Billy as well as recording songs like Hallucinations with his own band, the Knightmares.
Artist: Geronimo Black
Title: Siesta
Source: LP: Geronimo Black
Writer(s): Cahan/Cantrelli/Gardner
Label: Uni
Year: 1972
Q: When is a supergroup not a supergroup? A: When the group is made up of lesser-known members of well-known bands. Case in point: Geronimo Black, formed in 1972 by former Mother Jimmy Carl Black ("The Indian of the group") and named after his firstborn son. Other members of the group included:
• Andy Cahan, keyboards, from Dr. John & Richard Souther's bands.
• Tjay Contrelli (John Barberis), saxophone, from Love
• Bunk Gardner (John Leon Guanerra), horns, from The Mothers of Invention
• Buzz Gardner (Charles Guanerra), horns
• Tom Leavey, bass
• Denny Walley, guitar, from The Mothers of Invention and Captain Beefheart's Magic Band.
The band didn't last long, however, recording only one album for the Uni label before finding themselves banned from the studio for unruly behavior.
Artist: Shadows Of Knight
Title: I'm Gonna Make You Mine
Source: Mono LP: Nuggets Vol. 2-Punk (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Writer(s): Carr/Derrico/Sager
Label: Rhino (original label: Dunwich)
Year: 1966
Possibly the loudest rockin' recordings of 1966 came from the Shadows of Knight. A product of the Chicago suburbs, the Shadows (as they were originally known) quickly established a reputation as the region's resident bad boy rockers (lead vocalist Jim Sohns was reportedly banned from more than one high school campus for his attempts at increasing the local teen pregnancy rate). After signing a record deal with the local Dunwich label, the band learned that there was already a band called the Shadows and added the Knight part (after their own high school sports teams' name). Their first single was a cover of Van Morrison's Gloria that changed one line ("around here" in place of "up to my room") and thus avoided the mass radio bannings that had derailed the original Them version. I'm Gonna Make You Mine was the follow up to Gloria, but its lack of commercial success consigned the Shadows to one-hit wonder status until years after the band's breakup, when they finally got the recognition they deserved as one of the founding bands of garage/punk, and perhaps its greatest practicioner.
Artist: Doors
Title: The End
Source: CD: The Doors
Writer(s): The Doors
Label: Elektra
Year: 1967
Prior to recording their first album the Doors' honed their craft at various Sunset Strip clubs, working up live versions of the songs they would soon record, including their show-stopper, The End. Originally written as a breakup song by singer/lyricist Jim Morrison, The End runs nearly twelve minutes and includes a controversial spoken "Oedipus section". My own take on the famous "blue bus" line is that Morrison, being a military brat, was probably familiar with the blue shuttle buses used on military bases for a variety of purposes, including taking kids to school, and simply incorporated his experiences with them into his lyrics. The End got its greatest exposure in 1979, when Oliver Stone used it in his film Apocalypse Now.
Artist: Ohio Express
Title: Turn To Straw
Source: LP: Ohio Express
Writer(s): Jim Pfahler
Label: Buddah
Year: 1968
The story of the Ohio Express is one of the most convoluted tales in the history of pop music. It starts with a band called the Rare Breed that recorded a song called Beg, Borrow And Steal for Jerry Kasenetz's and Jeffrey Katz's Super K Productions, releasing it on the Attack label in 1966. The record was not a hit, and after a failed second single the band parted company with Super K, never to record again (at least not as Rare Breed). In August of 1967 Kazenetz and Katz remixed the original recording of Beg, Borrow and Steal and released it on the Cameo label under the name Ohio Express (which was wholly owned by Super K Productions). This time the song was a success, hitting the # 1 spot in Columbus, Ohio in early September. With the song starting to climb the national charts, Super K needed a band called the Ohio Express to promote the song with personal appearances and live performances. They hired a Mansfield, Ohio band called Sir Timothy And The Royals and renamed them Ohio Express (all the while maintaining ownership of the name). As the band was still based in Ohio, Kazenetz and Katz hired studio musicians to record the next Ohio Express single, a cover of the Standells' Try It that barely cracked the top 100. The first official Ohio Express album, Beg, Borrow And Steal, was released on the Cameo label in fall of 1967 that included a handful of songs recorded by the band itself as well as the above-mentioned singles and, oddly enough, a pair of songs actually recorded by a Kent, Ohio band called the Measles that was led by a young guitarist named Joe Walsh. The following year, following the demise of Cameo-Parkway, Kazenetz and Katz moved their entire operation over to Buddah Records, where they had great success as the purveyors of what soon came to be called "bubble gum" music. By then, songwriter Joey Levine had established a working relationship with Super K as both songwriter and vocalist, and from that point on was the lead vocalist on all the Ohio Express single releases, usually backed by studio musicians. The touring band, however, did provide a few tracks for the LPs released under the Ohio Express name, including songs like Turn To Straw, which was written by keyboardist Jim Pfahler and included on the first Ohio Express album for the Buddah label in 1968.
Artist: Van Der Graaf Generator
Title: People You Were Going To (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Source: Mono British import CD: Spirit Of Joy
Writer(s): Peter Hammill
Label: Polydor
Year: 1969
One of the rarest records ever released was Van Der Graff's debut single, People You Were Going To. The record was released on the UK Polydor label in January of 1969, but was almost immediately withdrawn due to the fact that the band's leader, Peter Hammill, had signed a contract with Mercury Records the previous year. The Mercury contract was so bad, however, that the rest of the band members refused to sign it, and for a while it looked like Van Der Graaf Generator would be little more than a footnote in the history of British Rock. Later that year, however, Hammill began work on a solo album that appeared under the name Van Der Graaf Generator, but only in the US. Nonetheless, it was enough to fulfill the terms of his Mercury contract, freeing Hammill up to reform the band and sign with the Charisma label, where they established themselves as one of the top progressive rock bands of the 1970s.
Artist: Them
Title: I'm Gonna Dress In Black
Source: Simulated stereo LP: Them
Writer(s): Gillon/Howe
Label: Parrot
Year: 1965
Although Van Morrison is now known as one of rock's greatest songwriters, at the beginning of his career he was known as much for his ability to create soulful interpretations of classic blues and early rock and roll songs as for his own compositions. This is evident on Them's first LP (titled The Angry Young Them in the UK and Them in the US), especially on standout tracks such as I'm Gonna Dress In Black.
Artist: Sons Of Champlain
Title: 1982-A
Source: CD: Love Is The Song We Sing: San Francisco Nuggets 1965-70 (originally released on LP: Loosen Up Naturally)
Writer(s): Steven Tollestrup
Label: Rhino (original label: Capitol)
Year: 1969
Bill Champlin is probably best known as the lead guitarist for Chicago from 1981 to 2008 (more or less). In his earlier years, however, he fronted his own band, the Sons Of Champlin. Like Chicago, the Sons were distinguished by the presence of a horn section, a trend that was just getting underway in 1969. Unlike most other bands of their type, however, the Sons Of Champlin were a San Francisco band, and one of the more popular local acts of their time. They did not show much of an interest in touring outside the Bay Area, however, and as a result got limited national exposure. The first single from the first of two album they recorded for the Capitol label was a tune called 1982-A. I really can't say what the title has to do with the lyrics of the song, but it is a catchy little number nonetheless.
Artist: Blood, Sweat & Tears
Title: Blues-Part II
Source: CD: Blood, Sweat & Tears
Writer(s): Blood, Sweat & Tears
Label: Columbia/Legacy
Year: 1969
Although it was the brainchild of keyboardist/vocalist Al Kooper, the band known as Blood, Sweat & Tears had its greatest success after Kooper left the band following the release of their debut LP, Child Is Father To The Man. The group's self-titled second LP, featuring new lead vocalist David Clayton-Thomas, yielded no less than three top 5 singles: You Made Me So Very Happy, Spinning Wheel, and And When I Die. For me, however, the outstanding track on the album was the thirteen and a half minute Blues-Part II, which takes up most of side two of the original LP. I first heard this track on a show that ran late at night on AFN in Germany. I had already heard the band's first two hit singles and was not particularly impressed with them, but after hearing Blues-Part II I went out and bought a copy of the LP. Luckily, it was not the only track on the album that I found more appealing than the singles (God Bless The Child in particular stands out), but it still, after all these years, is my favorite BS&T recording.
Artist: Iron Butterfly
Title: In The Time Of Our Lives
Source: LP: Ball
Writer: Ingle/Bushy
Label: Atco
Year: 1969
One of the most eagerly-awaited albums of 1969 was Iron Butterfly's followup to In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida. Although Ball was a strong seller, it overall left the listener feeling vaguely disappointed, and was the last album to feature Eric Brann on lead guitar. Subsequent albums did even worse, and Iron Butterfly is now mostly remembered as classic rock's first one-hit wonder.
Artist: Spirit
Title: Water Woman
Source: CD: Spirit
Writer(s): Jay Ferguson
Label: Ode/Epic/Legacy
Year: 1968
Water Woman is a song from Spirit's 1968 debut LP that sounds like it could have been written by the demigod Pan himself. In reality the song came from the muse of Jay Ferguson, who wrote most of the songs on Spirit's first album.
Artist: ? And The Mysterians
Title: 96 Tears
Source: 45 RPM single (reissue)
Writer(s): The Mysterians
Label: Abkco (original label: Cameo)
Year: 1966
Although his birth certificate gives the name Rudy Martinez, the leader of the Mysterians had his name legally changed to "?" several years ago. He asserts that he is actually from the planet Mars and has lived among dinosaurs in a past life. Sometimes I feel like I'm living among dinosaurs in this life, so I guess I can relate a little. The band's only major hit, 96 Tears, has the distinction of being the last top 10 single on the Cameo label before Cameo-Parkway went bankrupt.
Artist: Eric Burdon and the Animals
Title: The Black Plague
Source: British import CD: Winds Of Change
Writer(s): Burdon/Briggs/Weider/Jenkins/McCulloch
Label: Repertoire (original US label: M-G-M)
Year: 1967
One of the most interesting recordings of 1967 was Eric Burdon And The Animals' The Black Plague, which appeared on the Winds Of Change album. The Black Plague is a spoken word piece dealing with life and death in a medieval village during the time of the Black Plague (natch), set to a somewhat gothic piece of music that includes Gregorian style chanting and an occasional voice calling out the words "bring out your dead" in the background. The album itself had a rather distinctive cover, consisting of a stylized album title accompanied by a rather lengthy text piece on a black background, something that has never been done before or since on an album cover.
Artist: Paraphernalia
Title: Watch Out
Source: CD: An Overdose Of Heavy Psych (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Writer(s): Zanniel/Sirio
Label: Arf! Arf! (original label: St. George International)
Year: 1968
Virtually nothing is known about the band called Paraphernalia other than the fact that they released a single called Watch Out on the St. George International label in 1968. The song itself features some killer guitar work from the band that is rumored to be from somewhere in New England.
Artist: It's A Beautiful Day
Title: White Bird
Source: CD: It's A Beautiful Day
Writer: David and Linda LaFlamme
Label: San Francisco Sound (original label: Columbia)
Year: 1968
It's A Beautiful Day is a good illustration of how a band can be a part of a trend without intending to be or even realizing that they are. In their case, they were actually tied to two different trends. The first one was a positive thing: it was now possible for a band to be considered successful without a top 40 hit, as long as their album sales were healthy. The second trend was not such a good thing; as was true for way too many bands, It's A Beautiful Day was sorely mistreated by its own management, in this case one Matthew Katz. Katz already represented both Jefferson Airplane and Moby Grape when he signed up It's A Beautiful Day in 1967. What the members of It's A Beautiful Day did not know at the time was that both of the aforementioned bands were trying to get out of their contracts with Katz. The first thing Katz did after signing It's A Beautiful Day was to ship the band off to Seattle to become house band at a club Katz owned called the San Francisco Sound. Unfortunately for the band, Seattle already had a sound of its own and attendance at their gigs was sparse. Feeling downtrodden and caged (and having no means of transportation to boot) classically-trained 5-string violinist and lead vocalist David LaFlamme and his keyboardist wife Linda LaFlamme translated those feelings into a song that is at once sad and beautiful: the classic White Bird. As an aside, Linda LaFlamme was not the female vocalist heard on White Bird. Credit for those goes to one Pattie Santos, the other female band member. To this day Katz owns the rights to It's A Beautiful Day's recordings, which have been reissued on CD on Katz's San Francisco Sound label.
Artist: Janis Joplin
Title: Cry Baby
Source: CD: Pearl
Writer(s): Ragovoy/Berns
Label: Columbia/Legacy
Year: 1971
Janis Joplin's only hit single with Big Brother and the Holding Company was Piece Of My Heart, a song written by legendary songwriters Jerry Ragavoy and Bert Berns. For her 1971 album Pearl, Joplin went with an earlier collaboration between the two that had originally been a hit in the early 60s for Garnet Mimms. Within a few months Cry Baby had become so thoroughly identified with Joplin that few even remembered Mimms's version of the song.
Artist: Kinks
Title: Apeman
Source: 45 RPM single
Writer(s): Ray Davies
Label: Reprise
Year: 1971
The Kinks, whose commercial success had been on the decline for a number of years, scored a huge international hit with Lola in 1970. They followed it up with another semi-novelty tune called Apeman, which took the back to nature approach to a bit of an extreme. The song was a top 10 single in the UK, although it was only moderately successful elsewhere.
Wednesday, August 27, 2014
Tuesday, August 19, 2014
Stuck in the Psychedelic Era # 1434 (B5) (starts 8/20/14)
Artist: Steppenwolf
Title: Draft Resister
Source: LP: Monster
Writer(s): Kay/McJohn/Byrom
Label: Dunhill
Year: 1969
By far the most political of Steppenwolf's albums was their 1969 effort Monster. Although there is a chance that a truly unperceptive person might miss the point of the title track that opens the LP, the next song, Draft Resister, makes a point that even a dedicated Rush Limbaugh fan would notice.
Artist: Spirit
Title: Mr. Skin
Source: CD: Best of Spirit (originally released on LP: Twelve Dreams Of Dr. Sardonicus)
Writer(s): Jay Ferguson
Label: Epic
Year: 1970
Mr. Skin, a song originally released on the 1970 album The Twelve Dreams Of Dr. Sardonicus, shows just how far Spirit had moved away from the jazz influences heard on their first LP in the space of only a couple of years.
Artist: Pink Floyd
Title: A Pillow Of Winds
Source: LP: Meddle
Writer(s): Waters/Gilmour
Label: Harvest
Year: 1971
Early in 1971, Pink Floyd began work on their sixth LP, Meddle, at EMI's Abbey Road studios. The group soon found the studio's eight-track equipment to be insufficient for their needs, and moved the project over to a pair of smaller studios, Morgan and AIR, which had recently upgraded to state of the art sixteen-track tech. Musically, the album has more variety than most Pink Floyd albums, including tracks like A Pillow Of Winds, one of the few soft acoustic love songs in the entire Pink Floyd catalog. Meddle was more successful in the UK than in the US initially, due in large part to a lack of promotion on the part of the band's US label, although catalog sales increased dramatically following the success of Dark Side Of The Moon and later Pink Floyd albums.
Artist: Kinks
Title: Tired Of Waiting For You
Source: Mono CD: The Best Of 60s Supergroups (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Writer: Ray Davies
Label: Priority (original label: Reprise)
Year: 1965
After a series of hard-rocking hits such as You Really Got Me and All Day And All Of The Night, the Kinks surprised everyone with the highly melodic Tired Of Waiting For You in 1965. As it turns out the song was just one of many steps in the continually maturing songwriting of Ray Davies.
Artist: Trade Winds
Title: Mind Excursion
Source: CD: Psychedelic Pop (originally released as 45 RPM single and on LP: Excursions)
Writer(s): Anders/Poncia
Label: BMG/RCA/Buddah (original label: Kama Sutra)
Year: 1966
The Trade Winds were a semi-studio band from New York that first scored in 1965 with the song New York Is A Lonely Town (When You're the Only Surfer Boy Around). A year later, they had their second and last hit, Mind Excursion, which holds up as one of the best examples of "flower power" pop ever recorded.
Artist: Jefferson Airplane
Title: How Suite It Is
Source: CD: After Bathing At Baxter's
Writer(s): Kantner/Casady/Dryden/Kaukonen
Label: RCA/BMG Heritage
Year: 1967
The second side of After Bathing At Baxters starts off fairly conventionally (for the Airplane), with Paul Kantner's Watch Her Ride, the first third or so of something called How Suite It Is. This leads (without a break in the audio) into Spare Chaynge, one of the coolest studio jams ever recorded, featuring intricate interplay between Jack Casady's bass and Jorma Kaukonen's guitar, with Spencer Dryden using his drum kit as enhancement rather than as a beat-setter. In particular, Cassidy's virtuoso performance helped redefine what could be done with an electric bass.
Artist: Hearts And Flowers
Title: Rock And Roll Gypsies
Source: LP: Homer (soundtrack) (originally released on LP: Of Houses, Kids And Forgotten Women)
Writer(s): Roger Tillison
Label: Cotillion (original label: Capitol)
Year: 1968
Led by singer/songwriters Larry Murray and Dave Dawson, Hearts And Flowers is best known for launching the career of guitarist/vocalist Bernie Leadon, who joined the group for their second LP and would later go on to co-found the Eagles (he is now a producer in Nashville). That second album, Of Houses, Kids And Forgotten Women, is generally considered the most accessible of the group's three albums, and included the song Rock And Roll Gypsies, which was included on the Homer movie soundtrack album in 1970.
Artist: Byrds
Title: Yesterday's Train
Source: LP: (untitled)
Writer(s): Parsons/Battin
Label: Columbia
Year: 1970
By 1970 the Byrds had gone through several lineup changes, including the departure of three of the band's most talented songwriters. The group was able to make up for the loss, however, with the addition of the prolific Gram Parsons, who, along with new bassist Skip Battin, provided the song Yesterday's Train for the band's ninth album. The double LP consisted of two sides of live material and two sides of new studio tracks. Called " Byrds (untitled)", the album is generally considered the best of the late period incarnation of the band.
Artist: Beatles
Title: Being For The Benefit Of Mr. Kite
Source: CD: Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
Writer(s): Lennon/McCartney
Label: Parlophone (original US label: Capitol)
Year: 1967
According to principal songwriter John Lennon, Being For The Benefit Of Mr. Kite was inspired by a turn of the century circus poster that the Beatles ran across while working on the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album. Most of the lyrics refer to items on the poster itself, such as the Hendersons and Henry the Horse.
Artist: Doors
Title: Love Me Two Times
Source: CD: The Best Of The Doors (originally released on LP: Strange Days)
Writer(s): The Doors
Label: Elektra
Year: 1967
Although the second Doors album is sometimes dismissed as being full of tracks that didn't make the cut on the debut LP, the fact is that Strange Days contains some of the Doors best-known tunes. One of those is Love Me Two Times, which was the second single released from the album. The song continues to get heavy airplay on classic rock stations.
Artist: Chocolate Watchband
Title: Are You Gonna Be There (At The Love-In) (originally released on LP: No Way Out and as 45 RPM single)
Source: LP: Nuggets Vol. 2-Punk
Writer: McElroy/Bennett
Label: Rhino (original label: Tower)
Year: 1967
It took me several years to sort out the convoluted truth behind the recorded works of San Jose, California's most popular local band, the Chocolate Watchband. While it's true that much of what was released under their name was in fact the work of studio musicians, there are a few tracks that are indeed the product of Dave Aguilar and company. Are You Gonna Be There, a song used in the cheapie teenspliotation flick the Love-In and included on the Watchband's first album, is one of those few. Even more ironic is the fact that the song was co-written by Don Bennett, the studio vocalist whose voice was substituted for Aguilar's on a couple of other songs from the same album.
Artist: Love
Title: You Set The Scene
Source: CD: Where The Action Is: L.A. Nuggets 1965-68 (originally released on LP: Forever Changes)
Writer(s): Arthur Lee
Label: Rhino (original label: Elektra)
Year: 1967
During the production of Forever Changes, vocalist/guitarist Arthur Lee became convinced that he was destined to die soon after the release of the album. Accordingly, he crafted lyrics that were meant to be his final words to the world. As the final track on the LP, You Set The Scene in particular reflected this viewpoint. As it turned out, Forever Changes was not Lee's swan song. It was, however, the last album to feature the lineup that had been the most popular band on Sunset Strip for the past two years. Subsequent Love albums would feature a whole new lineup backing Lee, and would have an entirely different sound as well. Ironically, Lee was still around at the dawn of the 21st century over 30 years later (dying of acute myeloid leukemia in 2006), outliving several of his old bandmates.
Artist: Who
Title: Call Me Lightning
Source: Mono Canadian import CD: Magic Bus-The Who On Tour (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Writer(s): Pete Townshend
Label: MCA (original US label: Decca)
Year: 1968
Although it sounds more like their earlier "maximum R&B" recordings, the Who's Call Me Lightning was actually recorded in 1968. The song was released only in the US (as a single), while the considerably less conventional Dogs was chosen for release in the UK. These days the US single is better remembered for its B side, John Entwistle's Dr. Jeckle And Mr. Hyde. Both songs ended up being included on the Magic Bus album, which was only available in North America and has never been issued on CD in the US (although it is available as a Canadian import).
Artist: Big Brother And The Holding Company
Title: I Need A Man To Love
Source: LP: Cheap Thrills
Writer(s): Joplin/Andrew
Label: Columbia
Year: 1968
Big Brother and the Holding Company recorded their first album at the Chicago studios of Mainstream records in 1967. Mainstream, however, was a jazz label and their engineers had no idea how to make a band like Big Brother sound good. When the band signed to Columbia the following year it was decided that the best way to record the band was onstage at the Fillmore West. As a result, when Cheap Thrills was released, four of the seven tracks were live recordings, including the Janis Joplin/Peter Albin collaboration I Need A Man To Love.
Artist: Rolling Stones
Title: Sympathy For The Devil
Source: CD: Beggars Banquet
Writer(s): Jagger/Richards
Label: Abkco (original label: London)
Year: 1968
Beggar's Banquet was a turning point for the Rolling Stones. They had just ended their association with Andrew Loog Oldham, who had produced all of their mid-60s records, and instead were working with Jimmy Miller, who was known for his association with Steve Winwood, both in his current band Traffic and the earlier Spencer Davis Group. Right from the opening bongo beats of Sympathy For The Devil, it was evident that this was the beginning of a new era for bad boys of rock and roll. The song itself has gone on to be one of the defining tunes of album rock radio.
Artist: Buckinghams
Title: Remember
Source: LP: Time And Changes
Writer(s): James William Guercio
Label: Columbia
Year: 1967
The Buckinghams were officially christened in early 1966, when the producers of a show called All-Time Hits that ran on Chicago's WGN-TV convinced their new house band, the Pulsations, that they should try a more British sounding name. The group soon got a contract with local label USA Records and recorded a dozen songs, many of which were released as singles. The most successful of these singles was Kind Of A Drag, which became a major US hit, spending two weeks at #1 in early 1967. This was soon followed by the band's first album, which included the group's previous singles as well. Around this time the band hooked up with producer James William Guercio, who got them a contract with Columbia Records. The band's first album for Columbia was Time And Changes, which included two hit singles, Don't You Care and Mercy Mercy Mercy, as well as several songs written by Guercio himself. Among the latter was Remember, which, like the other Guercio-penned tracks on the album, featured horns and strings arranged by the producer himself. The band recorded one more album with Guercio before creative tensions brought the whole thing to a screeching halt in 1968.
Artist: Circus Maximus
Title: Wind
Source: LP: Circus Maximus
Writer(s): Bob Bruno
Label: Vanguard
Year: 1967
Circus Maximus was formed out of the chance meeting of multi-instrumentalist Bob Bruno and guitarist Jerry Jeff Walker in Greenwich Village in 1967. From the start the band was moving in different directions, with Bruno incorporating jazz elements into the band while Walker favored country-rock. Eventually the two would go their separate ways, but for the short time the band was together they made some of the best, if not best-known, psychedelic music on the East Coast. The band's most popular track was Wind, a Bruno tune from their debut album. The song got a considerable amount of airplay on the new "underground" radio stations that were popping up across the country at the time.
Artist: Electric Prunes
Title: Dr. Do-Good
Source: CD: Underground
Writer(s): Tucker/Mantz
Label: Collector's Choice/Rhino (original label: Reprise)
Year: 1967
I have a theory that the decision makers at Reprise Records didn't bother to actually listen to this bit of weirdness from Underground, the second Electric Prunes album. Instead, they apparently just looked at the songwriting credits, saw that Dr. Do-Good was written by Annette Tucker and Nancy Mantz (the same songwriting team that had come up with the band's first big hit, I Had Too Much To Dream), and decided to issue it as the first single from the album, leaving everyone, including producer Dave Hassinger and the band members themselves, scratching their heads.
Artist: Blue Cheer
Title: Summertime Blues
Source: LP: Nuggets Vol. 1-The Hits (originally released on LP: Vincebus Eruptum)
Writer(s): Cochrane/Capehart
Label: Rhino (original label: Philips)
Year: 1968
If 1967 was the summer of love, then 1968 was the summer of violence. Framed by the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, both major anti-establishment movements of the time (civil rights and anti-war) became increasing radicalized and more violent. The hippies gave way to the Yippies, LSD gave way to crystal meth, and there were riots in the streets of several US cities. Against this backdrop Blue Cheer released one of the loudest and angriest recordings ever to grace the top 40: the proto-metal arrangement of Eddie Cochrane's 1958 classic Summertime Blues. It was the perfect soundtrack of its time.
Artist: Jimi Hendrix Experience
Title: Bold As Love
Source: CD: Axis: Bold As Love
Writer(s): Jimi Hendrix
Label: MCA (original label: Reprise)
Year: 1967
When working on the song Bold As Love for the second Jimi Hendrix Experience album in 1967, Jimi reportedly asked engineer Eddie Kramer if he could make a guitar sound like it was under water. Kramer's answer was to use a techique called phasing, which is what happens when two identical sound sources are played simultaneously, but slightly (as in microseconds) out of synch with each other. The technique, first used in 1958 but seldom tried in stereo, somewhat resembles the sound of a jet plane flying by. This is not to be confused with chorusing (sometimes called reverse phasing), a technique used often by the Beatles which splits a single signal into two identical signals then delays one to create the illusion of being seperate tracks.
Artist: Traffic
Title: Medicated Goo
Source: LP: Welcome To The Canteen
Writer: Winwood/Miller
Label: United Artists
Year: 1971
Traffic was still officially disbanded when a new live album, Welcome To The Canteen, was released. The front cover listed every musician who played on the album, including every past member of Traffic, and included several songs that had originally been recorded by the band, including Medicated Goo.
Artist: Neil Young/Crazy Horse
Title: Round And Round (It Won't Be Long)
Source: LP: Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere
Writer(s): Neil Young
Label: Reprise
Year: 1969
Round And Round, from Neil Young's 1969 album Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, was actually written while Young was still a member of Buffalo Springfield. The song features guest vocalist Robin Lane, as well as the members of Crazy Horse.
Artist: Bob Dylan
Title: Highway 61 Revisited
Source: CD: Highway 61 Revisited
Writer(s): Bob Dylan
Label: Columbia
Year: 1965
US Highway 61 is part of the old Federal highway system that was developed in the 1920s and 30s and has since been largely supplanted by the Interstate highway system. It was at a crossroads along this route that legendary bluesman Robert Johnson is said to sold his soul to the devil in exchange for a successful career. In 1965 Bob Dylan decided to revisit the legend and add to it for his landmark album on which he invented an electrified version of the folk music he had become famous for. His backup musicians included some of the top talent in the New York area, including guitarist Michael Bloomfield of the Butterfield Blues Band and organist Al Kooper, who also plays the police whistle heard throughout the title track of Highway 61 Revisited.
Artist: Simon And Garfunkel
Title: Punky's Dilemma
Source: CD: Collected Works (originally released on LP: Bookends)
Writer(s): Paul Simon
Label: Columbia
Year: 1968
Originally written specifically for the 1967 soundtrack of the movie The Graduate but rejected by the producers, Punky's Dilemma sat on the shelf until the following year, when it became the only track on side two of Simon And Garfunkel's Bookends LP that had not been previously released. The lyrics are about as psychedelic as Simon And Garfunkel ever got.
Artist: Music Machine
Title: In My Neighborhood
Source: CD: Beyond The Garage
Writer(s): Sean Bonniwell
Label: Sundazed
Year: Recorded 1968, released 1995
Sean Bonniwell has been quoted as saying that he had overproduced the original version of In My Neighborhood, due to having too much idle time in the studio. As a result, he chose not to release the song at all. Years later, Bonniwell and Bob Irwin remixed the track for release on the anthology CD Beyond The Garage.
Title: Draft Resister
Source: LP: Monster
Writer(s): Kay/McJohn/Byrom
Label: Dunhill
Year: 1969
By far the most political of Steppenwolf's albums was their 1969 effort Monster. Although there is a chance that a truly unperceptive person might miss the point of the title track that opens the LP, the next song, Draft Resister, makes a point that even a dedicated Rush Limbaugh fan would notice.
Artist: Spirit
Title: Mr. Skin
Source: CD: Best of Spirit (originally released on LP: Twelve Dreams Of Dr. Sardonicus)
Writer(s): Jay Ferguson
Label: Epic
Year: 1970
Mr. Skin, a song originally released on the 1970 album The Twelve Dreams Of Dr. Sardonicus, shows just how far Spirit had moved away from the jazz influences heard on their first LP in the space of only a couple of years.
Artist: Pink Floyd
Title: A Pillow Of Winds
Source: LP: Meddle
Writer(s): Waters/Gilmour
Label: Harvest
Year: 1971
Early in 1971, Pink Floyd began work on their sixth LP, Meddle, at EMI's Abbey Road studios. The group soon found the studio's eight-track equipment to be insufficient for their needs, and moved the project over to a pair of smaller studios, Morgan and AIR, which had recently upgraded to state of the art sixteen-track tech. Musically, the album has more variety than most Pink Floyd albums, including tracks like A Pillow Of Winds, one of the few soft acoustic love songs in the entire Pink Floyd catalog. Meddle was more successful in the UK than in the US initially, due in large part to a lack of promotion on the part of the band's US label, although catalog sales increased dramatically following the success of Dark Side Of The Moon and later Pink Floyd albums.
Artist: Kinks
Title: Tired Of Waiting For You
Source: Mono CD: The Best Of 60s Supergroups (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Writer: Ray Davies
Label: Priority (original label: Reprise)
Year: 1965
After a series of hard-rocking hits such as You Really Got Me and All Day And All Of The Night, the Kinks surprised everyone with the highly melodic Tired Of Waiting For You in 1965. As it turns out the song was just one of many steps in the continually maturing songwriting of Ray Davies.
Artist: Trade Winds
Title: Mind Excursion
Source: CD: Psychedelic Pop (originally released as 45 RPM single and on LP: Excursions)
Writer(s): Anders/Poncia
Label: BMG/RCA/Buddah (original label: Kama Sutra)
Year: 1966
The Trade Winds were a semi-studio band from New York that first scored in 1965 with the song New York Is A Lonely Town (When You're the Only Surfer Boy Around). A year later, they had their second and last hit, Mind Excursion, which holds up as one of the best examples of "flower power" pop ever recorded.
Artist: Jefferson Airplane
Title: How Suite It Is
Source: CD: After Bathing At Baxter's
Writer(s): Kantner/Casady/Dryden/Kaukonen
Label: RCA/BMG Heritage
Year: 1967
The second side of After Bathing At Baxters starts off fairly conventionally (for the Airplane), with Paul Kantner's Watch Her Ride, the first third or so of something called How Suite It Is. This leads (without a break in the audio) into Spare Chaynge, one of the coolest studio jams ever recorded, featuring intricate interplay between Jack Casady's bass and Jorma Kaukonen's guitar, with Spencer Dryden using his drum kit as enhancement rather than as a beat-setter. In particular, Cassidy's virtuoso performance helped redefine what could be done with an electric bass.
Artist: Hearts And Flowers
Title: Rock And Roll Gypsies
Source: LP: Homer (soundtrack) (originally released on LP: Of Houses, Kids And Forgotten Women)
Writer(s): Roger Tillison
Label: Cotillion (original label: Capitol)
Year: 1968
Led by singer/songwriters Larry Murray and Dave Dawson, Hearts And Flowers is best known for launching the career of guitarist/vocalist Bernie Leadon, who joined the group for their second LP and would later go on to co-found the Eagles (he is now a producer in Nashville). That second album, Of Houses, Kids And Forgotten Women, is generally considered the most accessible of the group's three albums, and included the song Rock And Roll Gypsies, which was included on the Homer movie soundtrack album in 1970.
Artist: Byrds
Title: Yesterday's Train
Source: LP: (untitled)
Writer(s): Parsons/Battin
Label: Columbia
Year: 1970
By 1970 the Byrds had gone through several lineup changes, including the departure of three of the band's most talented songwriters. The group was able to make up for the loss, however, with the addition of the prolific Gram Parsons, who, along with new bassist Skip Battin, provided the song Yesterday's Train for the band's ninth album. The double LP consisted of two sides of live material and two sides of new studio tracks. Called " Byrds (untitled)", the album is generally considered the best of the late period incarnation of the band.
Artist: Beatles
Title: Being For The Benefit Of Mr. Kite
Source: CD: Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
Writer(s): Lennon/McCartney
Label: Parlophone (original US label: Capitol)
Year: 1967
According to principal songwriter John Lennon, Being For The Benefit Of Mr. Kite was inspired by a turn of the century circus poster that the Beatles ran across while working on the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album. Most of the lyrics refer to items on the poster itself, such as the Hendersons and Henry the Horse.
Artist: Doors
Title: Love Me Two Times
Source: CD: The Best Of The Doors (originally released on LP: Strange Days)
Writer(s): The Doors
Label: Elektra
Year: 1967
Although the second Doors album is sometimes dismissed as being full of tracks that didn't make the cut on the debut LP, the fact is that Strange Days contains some of the Doors best-known tunes. One of those is Love Me Two Times, which was the second single released from the album. The song continues to get heavy airplay on classic rock stations.
Artist: Chocolate Watchband
Title: Are You Gonna Be There (At The Love-In) (originally released on LP: No Way Out and as 45 RPM single)
Source: LP: Nuggets Vol. 2-Punk
Writer: McElroy/Bennett
Label: Rhino (original label: Tower)
Year: 1967
It took me several years to sort out the convoluted truth behind the recorded works of San Jose, California's most popular local band, the Chocolate Watchband. While it's true that much of what was released under their name was in fact the work of studio musicians, there are a few tracks that are indeed the product of Dave Aguilar and company. Are You Gonna Be There, a song used in the cheapie teenspliotation flick the Love-In and included on the Watchband's first album, is one of those few. Even more ironic is the fact that the song was co-written by Don Bennett, the studio vocalist whose voice was substituted for Aguilar's on a couple of other songs from the same album.
Artist: Love
Title: You Set The Scene
Source: CD: Where The Action Is: L.A. Nuggets 1965-68 (originally released on LP: Forever Changes)
Writer(s): Arthur Lee
Label: Rhino (original label: Elektra)
Year: 1967
During the production of Forever Changes, vocalist/guitarist Arthur Lee became convinced that he was destined to die soon after the release of the album. Accordingly, he crafted lyrics that were meant to be his final words to the world. As the final track on the LP, You Set The Scene in particular reflected this viewpoint. As it turned out, Forever Changes was not Lee's swan song. It was, however, the last album to feature the lineup that had been the most popular band on Sunset Strip for the past two years. Subsequent Love albums would feature a whole new lineup backing Lee, and would have an entirely different sound as well. Ironically, Lee was still around at the dawn of the 21st century over 30 years later (dying of acute myeloid leukemia in 2006), outliving several of his old bandmates.
Artist: Who
Title: Call Me Lightning
Source: Mono Canadian import CD: Magic Bus-The Who On Tour (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Writer(s): Pete Townshend
Label: MCA (original US label: Decca)
Year: 1968
Although it sounds more like their earlier "maximum R&B" recordings, the Who's Call Me Lightning was actually recorded in 1968. The song was released only in the US (as a single), while the considerably less conventional Dogs was chosen for release in the UK. These days the US single is better remembered for its B side, John Entwistle's Dr. Jeckle And Mr. Hyde. Both songs ended up being included on the Magic Bus album, which was only available in North America and has never been issued on CD in the US (although it is available as a Canadian import).
Artist: Big Brother And The Holding Company
Title: I Need A Man To Love
Source: LP: Cheap Thrills
Writer(s): Joplin/Andrew
Label: Columbia
Year: 1968
Big Brother and the Holding Company recorded their first album at the Chicago studios of Mainstream records in 1967. Mainstream, however, was a jazz label and their engineers had no idea how to make a band like Big Brother sound good. When the band signed to Columbia the following year it was decided that the best way to record the band was onstage at the Fillmore West. As a result, when Cheap Thrills was released, four of the seven tracks were live recordings, including the Janis Joplin/Peter Albin collaboration I Need A Man To Love.
Artist: Rolling Stones
Title: Sympathy For The Devil
Source: CD: Beggars Banquet
Writer(s): Jagger/Richards
Label: Abkco (original label: London)
Year: 1968
Beggar's Banquet was a turning point for the Rolling Stones. They had just ended their association with Andrew Loog Oldham, who had produced all of their mid-60s records, and instead were working with Jimmy Miller, who was known for his association with Steve Winwood, both in his current band Traffic and the earlier Spencer Davis Group. Right from the opening bongo beats of Sympathy For The Devil, it was evident that this was the beginning of a new era for bad boys of rock and roll. The song itself has gone on to be one of the defining tunes of album rock radio.
Artist: Buckinghams
Title: Remember
Source: LP: Time And Changes
Writer(s): James William Guercio
Label: Columbia
Year: 1967
The Buckinghams were officially christened in early 1966, when the producers of a show called All-Time Hits that ran on Chicago's WGN-TV convinced their new house band, the Pulsations, that they should try a more British sounding name. The group soon got a contract with local label USA Records and recorded a dozen songs, many of which were released as singles. The most successful of these singles was Kind Of A Drag, which became a major US hit, spending two weeks at #1 in early 1967. This was soon followed by the band's first album, which included the group's previous singles as well. Around this time the band hooked up with producer James William Guercio, who got them a contract with Columbia Records. The band's first album for Columbia was Time And Changes, which included two hit singles, Don't You Care and Mercy Mercy Mercy, as well as several songs written by Guercio himself. Among the latter was Remember, which, like the other Guercio-penned tracks on the album, featured horns and strings arranged by the producer himself. The band recorded one more album with Guercio before creative tensions brought the whole thing to a screeching halt in 1968.
Artist: Circus Maximus
Title: Wind
Source: LP: Circus Maximus
Writer(s): Bob Bruno
Label: Vanguard
Year: 1967
Circus Maximus was formed out of the chance meeting of multi-instrumentalist Bob Bruno and guitarist Jerry Jeff Walker in Greenwich Village in 1967. From the start the band was moving in different directions, with Bruno incorporating jazz elements into the band while Walker favored country-rock. Eventually the two would go their separate ways, but for the short time the band was together they made some of the best, if not best-known, psychedelic music on the East Coast. The band's most popular track was Wind, a Bruno tune from their debut album. The song got a considerable amount of airplay on the new "underground" radio stations that were popping up across the country at the time.
Artist: Electric Prunes
Title: Dr. Do-Good
Source: CD: Underground
Writer(s): Tucker/Mantz
Label: Collector's Choice/Rhino (original label: Reprise)
Year: 1967
I have a theory that the decision makers at Reprise Records didn't bother to actually listen to this bit of weirdness from Underground, the second Electric Prunes album. Instead, they apparently just looked at the songwriting credits, saw that Dr. Do-Good was written by Annette Tucker and Nancy Mantz (the same songwriting team that had come up with the band's first big hit, I Had Too Much To Dream), and decided to issue it as the first single from the album, leaving everyone, including producer Dave Hassinger and the band members themselves, scratching their heads.
Artist: Blue Cheer
Title: Summertime Blues
Source: LP: Nuggets Vol. 1-The Hits (originally released on LP: Vincebus Eruptum)
Writer(s): Cochrane/Capehart
Label: Rhino (original label: Philips)
Year: 1968
If 1967 was the summer of love, then 1968 was the summer of violence. Framed by the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, both major anti-establishment movements of the time (civil rights and anti-war) became increasing radicalized and more violent. The hippies gave way to the Yippies, LSD gave way to crystal meth, and there were riots in the streets of several US cities. Against this backdrop Blue Cheer released one of the loudest and angriest recordings ever to grace the top 40: the proto-metal arrangement of Eddie Cochrane's 1958 classic Summertime Blues. It was the perfect soundtrack of its time.
Artist: Jimi Hendrix Experience
Title: Bold As Love
Source: CD: Axis: Bold As Love
Writer(s): Jimi Hendrix
Label: MCA (original label: Reprise)
Year: 1967
When working on the song Bold As Love for the second Jimi Hendrix Experience album in 1967, Jimi reportedly asked engineer Eddie Kramer if he could make a guitar sound like it was under water. Kramer's answer was to use a techique called phasing, which is what happens when two identical sound sources are played simultaneously, but slightly (as in microseconds) out of synch with each other. The technique, first used in 1958 but seldom tried in stereo, somewhat resembles the sound of a jet plane flying by. This is not to be confused with chorusing (sometimes called reverse phasing), a technique used often by the Beatles which splits a single signal into two identical signals then delays one to create the illusion of being seperate tracks.
Artist: Traffic
Title: Medicated Goo
Source: LP: Welcome To The Canteen
Writer: Winwood/Miller
Label: United Artists
Year: 1971
Traffic was still officially disbanded when a new live album, Welcome To The Canteen, was released. The front cover listed every musician who played on the album, including every past member of Traffic, and included several songs that had originally been recorded by the band, including Medicated Goo.
Artist: Neil Young/Crazy Horse
Title: Round And Round (It Won't Be Long)
Source: LP: Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere
Writer(s): Neil Young
Label: Reprise
Year: 1969
Round And Round, from Neil Young's 1969 album Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, was actually written while Young was still a member of Buffalo Springfield. The song features guest vocalist Robin Lane, as well as the members of Crazy Horse.
Artist: Bob Dylan
Title: Highway 61 Revisited
Source: CD: Highway 61 Revisited
Writer(s): Bob Dylan
Label: Columbia
Year: 1965
US Highway 61 is part of the old Federal highway system that was developed in the 1920s and 30s and has since been largely supplanted by the Interstate highway system. It was at a crossroads along this route that legendary bluesman Robert Johnson is said to sold his soul to the devil in exchange for a successful career. In 1965 Bob Dylan decided to revisit the legend and add to it for his landmark album on which he invented an electrified version of the folk music he had become famous for. His backup musicians included some of the top talent in the New York area, including guitarist Michael Bloomfield of the Butterfield Blues Band and organist Al Kooper, who also plays the police whistle heard throughout the title track of Highway 61 Revisited.
Artist: Simon And Garfunkel
Title: Punky's Dilemma
Source: CD: Collected Works (originally released on LP: Bookends)
Writer(s): Paul Simon
Label: Columbia
Year: 1968
Originally written specifically for the 1967 soundtrack of the movie The Graduate but rejected by the producers, Punky's Dilemma sat on the shelf until the following year, when it became the only track on side two of Simon And Garfunkel's Bookends LP that had not been previously released. The lyrics are about as psychedelic as Simon And Garfunkel ever got.
Artist: Music Machine
Title: In My Neighborhood
Source: CD: Beyond The Garage
Writer(s): Sean Bonniwell
Label: Sundazed
Year: Recorded 1968, released 1995
Sean Bonniwell has been quoted as saying that he had overproduced the original version of In My Neighborhood, due to having too much idle time in the studio. As a result, he chose not to release the song at all. Years later, Bonniwell and Bob Irwin remixed the track for release on the anthology CD Beyond The Garage.
Friday, August 15, 2014
Stuck in the Psychedelic Era # 1433 (aka B4) (starts 8/13/14)
Artist: Procol Harum
Title: A Whiter Shade Of Pale
Source: 45 RPM single (reissue)
Writer(s): Brooker/Reid
Label: A&M (original label: Deram)
Year: 1967
Often credited as being the first progressive rock band, Procol Harum drew heavily from classical music sources, such as the Bach inspired theme used by organist Matthew Fisher as the signature rift for A Whiter Shade of Pale. The song itself holds the distinction of being the most-played song on the British airwaves of the past 70 years.
Artist: Traffic
Title: Here We Go 'Round The Mulberry Bush
Source: Mono CD: Mr. Fantasy
Writer(s): Winwood/Capaldi/Wood
Label: Island
Year: 1967
For many years I was completely oblivious to the existence of a movie called Here We Go 'Round The Mulberry Bush. The Traffic song of the same name, however, has been a favorite of mine for quite some time (I have black and white video footage of the band performing the song on some old British TV show). The song was released as a single in 1967 and was not included on either the US or UK version of the Mr. Fantasy album (originally known in the US as Heaven Is In Your Mind).
Artist: Chocolate Watchband
Title: Are You Gonna Be There (At The Love-In)
Source: Mono CD: More Nuggets (originally released as 45 RPM single and included on LP: No Way Out)
Writer(s): McElroy/Bennett
Label: Rhino (original label: Tower)
Year: 1967
The Chocolate Watchband are unique in that they managed to attain legendary status in spite of their record label or even their own management. The band started off well enough; a group of guys enrolled at Foothills Junior College in what would become Silicon Valley forming a band to play mostly covers by such hard-edged British bands as the Kinks and the Rolling Stones. The problems started when they signed a management contract with Ed Cobb, who also managed and produced the Standells and other garage-punk bands. Cobb, at that point, was looking to make inroads with the crowd that was buying records by the Seeds and other flower power groups, and tried his best to reshape the Watchband into a more psychedelic sound. Unfortunately, the band was really not suited to what Cobb wanted, so Cobb brought in studio musicians to present his musical vision. The result was a pair of albums that both sounded like they had been recorded by two entirely different groups...because they had (some tracks even deleted Dave Aguilar's original lead vocals in favor of those provided by studio singer Don Bennett). One of the few true Watchband tracks is Are You Gonna Be There, a song written and recorded in one day for use in the cheapie teenspliotation flick the Love-In and included on the Watchband's first album. The irony about this track is the fact that the song was co-written by none other than Don Bennett..
Artist: Jefferson Airplane
Title: D.C.B.A.-25
Source: LP: Surrealistic Pillow
Writer(s): Paul Kantner
Label: RCA Victor
Year: 1967
One of the first songs written by Paul Kantner without a collaborator was this highly listenable tune from Surrealistic Pillow. Kantner says the title simply refers to the basic chord structure of the song, which is built on a two chord verse (D and C) and a two chord bridge (B and A). That actually fits, but what about the 25 part? [insert enigmatic smile here]
Artist: Jefferson Airplane
Title: How Suite It Is
Source: LP: After Bathing At Baxters
Writer(s): Kantner/Cassidy/Dryden/Kaukonen
Label: RCA Victor
Year: 1967
The second side of After Bathing At Baxters starts off fairly conventionally (for the Airplane), with Paul Kantner's Watch Her Ride, the first third or so of something called How Suite It Is. This leads (without a break in the audio) into Spare Chaynge, one of the coolest studio jams ever recorded, featuring intricate interplay between Jack Cassidy's bass and Jorma Kaukonen's guitar, with Spencer Dryden using his drum kit as enhancement rather than as a beat-setter. In particular, Cassidy's virtuoso performance helped redefine what could be done with an electric bass.
Artist: Jefferson Airplane
Title: Comin' Back To Me
Source: LP: Surrealistic Pillow
Writer(s): Marty Balin
Label: RCA Victor
Year: 1967
Uncredited guest guitarist Jerry Garcia adds a simple, but memorable recurring fill riff to this Marty Balin tune. Balin, in his 2003 liner notes to the remastered release of Surrealistic Pillow, claims that Comin' Back To Me was written in one sitting under the influence of some primo stuff given to him by Paul Butterfield. Other players on the recording include Paul Kantner and Balin himself on guitars, Jack Casady on bass and Grace Slick on recorder.
Artist: Cream
Title: Passing The Time
Source: LP: Wheels Of Fire
Writer(s): Baker/Taylor
Label: Atco
Year: 1968
Although Jack Bruce is generally acknowledged as the member of Cream that provided the most psychedelic material that the band recorded, drummer Ginger Baker gave him a run for his money on the studio half of their third LP, Wheels Of Fire. Perhaps the best of these was Passing The Time, which alternates between a slow, dreamlike section notable for its use of a calliope and a fast section that rocks out as hard as anything the band performed live in concert.
Artist: Big Brother And The Holding Company
Title: Oh, Sweet Mary
Source: CD: Cheap Thrills
Writer(s): Albin/Andrew/Getz/Gurley/Joplin
Label: Columbia
Year: 1968
The only song credited to the entire membership of Big Brother And The Holding Company on their Cheap Thrills album was Oh, Sweet Mary (although some copies credit Janis Joplin as sole writer). The tune bears a strong resemblance to Coo Coo, a non-album single the band had released on the Mainstream label before signing to Columbia. Oh, Sweet Mary, however, has new lyrics and a "dreamy" bridge section played at a slower tempo than the rest of the tune.
Artist: Public Nuisance
Title: America
Source: CD: Love Is The Song We Sing: San Francisco Nuggets 1965-70 (originally released on CD: Gotta Survive)
Writer(s): David Houston
Label: Rhino (original label: Frantic)
Year: Recorded 1968, released 2003
Looking and sounding a lot like the Ramones would in the late 70s, Public Nuisance found itself the victim of unusual circumstances that led to the cancellation of their only LP in 1968. Producer Terry Melcher, who had risen to fame as producer of Paul Revere and the Raiders, had made the mistake of rejecting tapes sent to him by a wannabe rock star named Charles Manson. When Manson achieved the fame and notoriety that had eluded him as a musician (by killing a bunch of people), Melcher felt it prudent to go into hiding, shelving the Public Nuisance project in the process. The album was finally released 35 years later on the independent Frantic label.
Artist: Albert Collins
Title: Pushin'
Source: LP: Underground Gold (originally released on LP: Love Can Be Found Anywhere (Even In A Guitar))
Writer(s): Stephen Hollister
Label: Liberty (original label: Imperial)
Year: 1968
Albert Collins was a Texas bluesman who had been recording for various Houston-based labels over a period of ten years when he was approached by the members of Canned Heat, who offered to help him secure a record deal with Imperial Records in 1968. Collins soon relocated to first Kansas City and then Palo Alto, California, where he recorded the album Love Can Be Found Anywhere (Even In A Guitar). The album's title was taken from a line used by Robert Hite in Canned Heat's Fried Hockey Boogie and included several strong tracks, including Pushin'. Hite also wrote liner notes for the album, which was released in November of 1968.
Artist: Amboy Dukes
Title: Journey To The Center Of The Mind
Source: CD: Nuggets-Classics From The Psychedelic 60s (originally released as 45 RPM single and on LP: Journey To The Center Of The Mind)
Writer(s): Nugent/Farmer
Label: Rhino (original label: Mainstream)
Year: 1968
Detroit was one of the major centers of pop music in the late 60s. In addition to the myriad Motown acts, the area boasted the popular retro-rock&roll band Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels, the harder rocking Bob Seger System, the non-Motown R&B band the Capitols, and Ted Nugent's outfit, the Amboy Dukes, who scored big in 1968 with Journey To The Center Of The Mind.
Artist: Grass Roots
Title: Feelings
Source: LP: Nuggets Vol. 9-Acid Rock (originally released on LP: Feelings and as 45 RPM single)
Writer: Coonce/Entner/Fukomoto
Label: Rhino (original label: Dunhill)
Year: 1968
The Grass Roots had their origins as the San Francisco band the Bedoins, but by 1968 had lost all but one of the original members and had become pretty much a vehicle for the songwriting team of Jeff Barri and P.F. Sloan. They released three singles in 1968, the third of which was Midnight Confessions, the group's only certified gold record. The song immediately preceeding it was Feelings which failed to chart (possibly because it was not written by Sloan and Barri). Of course that means I play Feelings fairly regularly. Midnight Confessions? Not at all.
Artist: Outsiders
Title: Time Won't Let Me
Source: Mono CD: Nuggets-Original Artyfacts From The First Psychedelic Era (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Writer(s): King/Kelly
Label: Rhino (original label: Capitol)
Year: 1966
From Cleveland we have another local band signed to a major label, in this case Capitol Records, which at the time was having great success with both the Beatles and the Beach Boys. Lead vocalist Sonny Gerachi would reappear a few years later with the band Climax, singing a song called Precious and Few, which is one of the greatest juxtapositions of artist names and song titles ever.
Artist: Yardbirds
Title: Over Under Sideways Down
Source: Mono CD: Over, Under, Sideways, Down (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Writer: Dreja/McCarty/Beck/Relf/Samwell-Smith
Label: Raven (original US label: Epic)
Year: 1966
The only Yardbirds album to feature primarily original material was released under different titles in different parts of the world. The original UK version was called simply The Yardbirds, while the US album bore the Over, Under, Sideways, Down title. In addition, the UK album was unofficially known as Roger the Engineer because of band member Chris Dreja's drawing of the band's recording engineer on the cover. The title cut was the last single to feature Jeff Beck as the band's sole lead guitarist (the follow-up single, Happenings Ten Years Time Ago, featured both Beck and Jimmy Page).
Artist: Standells
Title: Barracuda
Source: CD: The Best Of The Standells (originally released on LP: Try It)
Writer(s): Ed Cobb
Label: Rhino (original label: Tower)
Year: 1967
Although Standell's producer Ed Cobb had his faults (among them an inability to full appreciate the talents of the Chocolate Watchband, whom he also managed), he did write some truly cool songs for the band, including Dirty Water, Sometimes Good Guys Don't Wear White, and an overlooked classic called Barracuda. One of the last of Cobb's songs to be recorded by the band, Barracuda, from the 1967 LP Try It, could be said to represent the culmination of the entire garage-rock movement, as a lighter style of pop music (the title track of the album itself being a good example) that would be known as "bubble-gum" was already starting to appear.
Artist: Them
Title: What's The Matter Baby
Source: Mono LP: Now And Them
Writer(s): Otis/Byers
Label: Tower
Year: 1968
Following the departure of Van Morrison, the remaining members of Them returned to their native Belfast and recruited a new vocalist, Kenny McDowell, before relocating to California and recording two albums for the Tower label in 1968. The first of these albums, Now And Them, contained songs from a variety of sources and performed in a variety of styles. Among the notable songs on the LP was a cover of Timi Yuro's What's The Matter Baby done in a blue-eyed soul style.
Artist: Animals
Title: I'm Crying
Source: Mono LP: The Best Of The Animals (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Writer(s): Price/Burdon
Label: Abkco (original label: M-G-M)
Year: 1964
Like most groups in the early 1960s, the Animals started their studio career by recording a mixture of songs provided to their producer by professional songwriters and covers of tunes previously recorded by other artists. Their first self-penned single was I'm Crying, a tune by vocalist Eric Burdon and organist Alan Price which was released in September of 1964. The song made the top 10 in Canada and the UK, but stalled out in the lower reaches of the top 40 in the US, falling far short of their previous international hit, House Of The Rising Sun. Producer Mickie Most decided from then on that songs written by the band itself would only be released as album tracks and B sides, a policy that stayed in effect until the Animals changed producers in 1966.
Artist: Beatles
Title: I've Just Seen A Face
Source: LP: Rubber Soul (originally released in UK on LP: Help)
Writer: Lennon/McCartney
Label: Capitol (original UK label: Parlophone)
Year: 1965
Consider the case of Dave Dexter, Jr. Dexter was the guy at Capitol Records who decided in late 1962 that there was no profit in Capitol releasing records by the hot new British band known as the Beatles that had just been signed to their UK partner label, EMI. After he was finally persuaded to issue I Want To Hold Your Hand as a single in late 1963, he became the guy responsible for determining which songs got released in what format: LP or 45 RPM single. He also set the song lineups for all the Beatle albums released in the US up to and including Revolver in 1966. In 1965 he decided to change the entire tone of the Rubber Soul album by deleting the more soulful numbers and substituting a pair of more acoustical tunes that he had left off the US release of Help. This was a deliberate attempt to tie in the Beatles with the folk-rock movement, which at the time of Rubber Soul's release was at the peak of its popularity. Oddly enough, there are still people out there who prefer the US version of the album, from which this track (one of the two songs from the UK version of Help) was played.
Artist: Who
Title: Happy Jack (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Source: Mono CD: Meaty, Beaty, Big And Bouncy
Writer(s): Pete Townshend
Label: MCA (original label: Decca)
Year: 1967
Happy Jack was originally released as a single in the UK in late 1966. It did not hit the US airwaves, however, until the early months of 1967. (I heard it for the first time on KLZ-FM, a Denver station whose format was a forerunner of progressive rock. KLZ-FM didn't call themselves a rock station. They instead marketed themselves as playing the top 100, as opposed to the top 60 played on KIMN, the dominant AM station in the city.) Although the song was not intended to be on an album, Decca Records quickly rearranged the track order of the Who's second album, A Quick One, to make room for the song, changing the name of the album itself to Happy Jack in the process. This rechanneled stereo mix of the song (using a much more realistic process than Capitol used with the Beach Boys' records) came out on the LP Meaty, Beaty, Big and Bouncy in the early 1970s, but when the album was reissued on CD the original mono master was used instead.
Artist: Country Joe And The Fish
Title: Love
Source: LP: Electric Music For The Mind And Body
Writer(s): McDonald/Melton/Cohen/Barthol/Gunning/Hirsch
Label: Vanguard
Year: 1967
It is a little known fact that, for a short time in early 1967, Country Joe McDonald and Janis Joplin were lovers. This could very well explain why Joe sounds just a bit like Janis on the song Love, from the first Country Joe And The Fish album, Electric Music For The Mind And Body, which was released in May of that year.
Artist: Left Banke
Title: Barterers And Their Wives
Source: 45 RPM single B side
Writer(s): Brown/Feher
Label: Smash
Year: 1967
The Left Banke made a huge impact with their debut single, Walk Away Renee, in late 1966. All of a sudden the rock press (such as it was in 1966) was all abuzz with talk of "baroque rock" and how it was the latest, greatest thing. The band soon released a follow-up single, Pretty Ballerina, which made the top 10 as well, which led to an album entitled (naturally enough) Walk Away Renee/Pretty Ballerina, which featured several more songs in the same vein, such as Barterers And Their Wives, which was also released as a B side later that year. An unfortunate misstep by keyboardist Michael Brown, however, led to the Left Banke's early demise, and baroque rock soon went the way of other sixties fads.
Artist: Vagrants
Title: Respect
Source: Mono LP: Nuggets Vol. 2-Punk (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Writer(s): Otis Redding
Label: Rhino (original label: Atco)
Year: 1967
Sounding a lot like the Rascals, the Vagrants were a popular Long Island band led by singer Peter Sabatino and best remembered for being the group that had guitarist Leslie Weinstein in it. Weinstein would change his last name to West and record a solo album called Mountain before forming the band of the same name. This version of Respect is fairly faithful to the original Otis Redding version. Unfortunately for the Vagrants, Aretha Franklin would release her rearranged version of the song just a few weeks after the Vagrants, relegating their version of the tune (and the Vagrants themselves) to footnote status.
Artist: Sly And The Family Stone
Title: Woodstock Medley
Source: Woodstock: 40 Years On: Back To Yasgur's Farm
Writer(s): Sylvester Stewart
Label: Rhino
Year: 1969
Listening to the Woodstock: 40 Years On: Back To Yasgur's Farm CD and comparing it to the original Woodstock soundtrack album, you might notice that there were a few minor tweaks made for the original release. Overall, though, this was one of the least altered recordings used for the original soundtrack album. It's easy to see why. Sly Stone managed to assemble a band that was at the same time tight and chaotic, with an infectious energy that kept the crowd going throughout the entire 17 minute medley. No mean feat, considering the altered mental state of much of the audience that night.
Artist: Jimi Hendrix Experience
Title: Fire
Source: LP: Are You Experienced?
Writer(s): Jimi Hendrix
Label: Legacy (original label: Reprise)
Year: 1967
Sometime in late 1966 Jimi Hendrix was visiting his girlfriend's mother's house in London for the first time. It was a cold rainy night and Jimi immediately noticed that there was a dog curled up in front of the fireplace. Jimi's first action was to scoot the dog out of the way so he himself could benefit from the fire's warmth, using the phrase "Move over Rover and let Jimi take over." The phrase got stuck in his head and eventually became the basis for one of his most popular songs. Although never released as a single, Fire was a highlight of the Jimi Hendrix Experience's live performances, often serving as a set opener.
Artist: West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band
Title: Watch Yourself
Source: LP: Volume III-A Child's Guide To Good And Evil
Writer(s): Robert Yeazel
Label: Reprise
Year: 1968
Although the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band usually wrote their own material, they occassionally drew from outside sources. One example is Watch Yourself, written by Robert Yeazel, who would go on to join Sugarloaf in time for their second LP, Spaceship Earth, writing many of the songs on that album.
Title: A Whiter Shade Of Pale
Source: 45 RPM single (reissue)
Writer(s): Brooker/Reid
Label: A&M (original label: Deram)
Year: 1967
Often credited as being the first progressive rock band, Procol Harum drew heavily from classical music sources, such as the Bach inspired theme used by organist Matthew Fisher as the signature rift for A Whiter Shade of Pale. The song itself holds the distinction of being the most-played song on the British airwaves of the past 70 years.
Artist: Traffic
Title: Here We Go 'Round The Mulberry Bush
Source: Mono CD: Mr. Fantasy
Writer(s): Winwood/Capaldi/Wood
Label: Island
Year: 1967
For many years I was completely oblivious to the existence of a movie called Here We Go 'Round The Mulberry Bush. The Traffic song of the same name, however, has been a favorite of mine for quite some time (I have black and white video footage of the band performing the song on some old British TV show). The song was released as a single in 1967 and was not included on either the US or UK version of the Mr. Fantasy album (originally known in the US as Heaven Is In Your Mind).
Artist: Chocolate Watchband
Title: Are You Gonna Be There (At The Love-In)
Source: Mono CD: More Nuggets (originally released as 45 RPM single and included on LP: No Way Out)
Writer(s): McElroy/Bennett
Label: Rhino (original label: Tower)
Year: 1967
The Chocolate Watchband are unique in that they managed to attain legendary status in spite of their record label or even their own management. The band started off well enough; a group of guys enrolled at Foothills Junior College in what would become Silicon Valley forming a band to play mostly covers by such hard-edged British bands as the Kinks and the Rolling Stones. The problems started when they signed a management contract with Ed Cobb, who also managed and produced the Standells and other garage-punk bands. Cobb, at that point, was looking to make inroads with the crowd that was buying records by the Seeds and other flower power groups, and tried his best to reshape the Watchband into a more psychedelic sound. Unfortunately, the band was really not suited to what Cobb wanted, so Cobb brought in studio musicians to present his musical vision. The result was a pair of albums that both sounded like they had been recorded by two entirely different groups...because they had (some tracks even deleted Dave Aguilar's original lead vocals in favor of those provided by studio singer Don Bennett). One of the few true Watchband tracks is Are You Gonna Be There, a song written and recorded in one day for use in the cheapie teenspliotation flick the Love-In and included on the Watchband's first album. The irony about this track is the fact that the song was co-written by none other than Don Bennett..
Artist: Jefferson Airplane
Title: D.C.B.A.-25
Source: LP: Surrealistic Pillow
Writer(s): Paul Kantner
Label: RCA Victor
Year: 1967
One of the first songs written by Paul Kantner without a collaborator was this highly listenable tune from Surrealistic Pillow. Kantner says the title simply refers to the basic chord structure of the song, which is built on a two chord verse (D and C) and a two chord bridge (B and A). That actually fits, but what about the 25 part? [insert enigmatic smile here]
Artist: Jefferson Airplane
Title: How Suite It Is
Source: LP: After Bathing At Baxters
Writer(s): Kantner/Cassidy/Dryden/Kaukonen
Label: RCA Victor
Year: 1967
The second side of After Bathing At Baxters starts off fairly conventionally (for the Airplane), with Paul Kantner's Watch Her Ride, the first third or so of something called How Suite It Is. This leads (without a break in the audio) into Spare Chaynge, one of the coolest studio jams ever recorded, featuring intricate interplay between Jack Cassidy's bass and Jorma Kaukonen's guitar, with Spencer Dryden using his drum kit as enhancement rather than as a beat-setter. In particular, Cassidy's virtuoso performance helped redefine what could be done with an electric bass.
Artist: Jefferson Airplane
Title: Comin' Back To Me
Source: LP: Surrealistic Pillow
Writer(s): Marty Balin
Label: RCA Victor
Year: 1967
Uncredited guest guitarist Jerry Garcia adds a simple, but memorable recurring fill riff to this Marty Balin tune. Balin, in his 2003 liner notes to the remastered release of Surrealistic Pillow, claims that Comin' Back To Me was written in one sitting under the influence of some primo stuff given to him by Paul Butterfield. Other players on the recording include Paul Kantner and Balin himself on guitars, Jack Casady on bass and Grace Slick on recorder.
Artist: Cream
Title: Passing The Time
Source: LP: Wheels Of Fire
Writer(s): Baker/Taylor
Label: Atco
Year: 1968
Although Jack Bruce is generally acknowledged as the member of Cream that provided the most psychedelic material that the band recorded, drummer Ginger Baker gave him a run for his money on the studio half of their third LP, Wheels Of Fire. Perhaps the best of these was Passing The Time, which alternates between a slow, dreamlike section notable for its use of a calliope and a fast section that rocks out as hard as anything the band performed live in concert.
Artist: Big Brother And The Holding Company
Title: Oh, Sweet Mary
Source: CD: Cheap Thrills
Writer(s): Albin/Andrew/Getz/Gurley/Joplin
Label: Columbia
Year: 1968
The only song credited to the entire membership of Big Brother And The Holding Company on their Cheap Thrills album was Oh, Sweet Mary (although some copies credit Janis Joplin as sole writer). The tune bears a strong resemblance to Coo Coo, a non-album single the band had released on the Mainstream label before signing to Columbia. Oh, Sweet Mary, however, has new lyrics and a "dreamy" bridge section played at a slower tempo than the rest of the tune.
Artist: Public Nuisance
Title: America
Source: CD: Love Is The Song We Sing: San Francisco Nuggets 1965-70 (originally released on CD: Gotta Survive)
Writer(s): David Houston
Label: Rhino (original label: Frantic)
Year: Recorded 1968, released 2003
Looking and sounding a lot like the Ramones would in the late 70s, Public Nuisance found itself the victim of unusual circumstances that led to the cancellation of their only LP in 1968. Producer Terry Melcher, who had risen to fame as producer of Paul Revere and the Raiders, had made the mistake of rejecting tapes sent to him by a wannabe rock star named Charles Manson. When Manson achieved the fame and notoriety that had eluded him as a musician (by killing a bunch of people), Melcher felt it prudent to go into hiding, shelving the Public Nuisance project in the process. The album was finally released 35 years later on the independent Frantic label.
Artist: Albert Collins
Title: Pushin'
Source: LP: Underground Gold (originally released on LP: Love Can Be Found Anywhere (Even In A Guitar))
Writer(s): Stephen Hollister
Label: Liberty (original label: Imperial)
Year: 1968
Albert Collins was a Texas bluesman who had been recording for various Houston-based labels over a period of ten years when he was approached by the members of Canned Heat, who offered to help him secure a record deal with Imperial Records in 1968. Collins soon relocated to first Kansas City and then Palo Alto, California, where he recorded the album Love Can Be Found Anywhere (Even In A Guitar). The album's title was taken from a line used by Robert Hite in Canned Heat's Fried Hockey Boogie and included several strong tracks, including Pushin'. Hite also wrote liner notes for the album, which was released in November of 1968.
Artist: Amboy Dukes
Title: Journey To The Center Of The Mind
Source: CD: Nuggets-Classics From The Psychedelic 60s (originally released as 45 RPM single and on LP: Journey To The Center Of The Mind)
Writer(s): Nugent/Farmer
Label: Rhino (original label: Mainstream)
Year: 1968
Detroit was one of the major centers of pop music in the late 60s. In addition to the myriad Motown acts, the area boasted the popular retro-rock&roll band Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels, the harder rocking Bob Seger System, the non-Motown R&B band the Capitols, and Ted Nugent's outfit, the Amboy Dukes, who scored big in 1968 with Journey To The Center Of The Mind.
Artist: Grass Roots
Title: Feelings
Source: LP: Nuggets Vol. 9-Acid Rock (originally released on LP: Feelings and as 45 RPM single)
Writer: Coonce/Entner/Fukomoto
Label: Rhino (original label: Dunhill)
Year: 1968
The Grass Roots had their origins as the San Francisco band the Bedoins, but by 1968 had lost all but one of the original members and had become pretty much a vehicle for the songwriting team of Jeff Barri and P.F. Sloan. They released three singles in 1968, the third of which was Midnight Confessions, the group's only certified gold record. The song immediately preceeding it was Feelings which failed to chart (possibly because it was not written by Sloan and Barri). Of course that means I play Feelings fairly regularly. Midnight Confessions? Not at all.
Artist: Outsiders
Title: Time Won't Let Me
Source: Mono CD: Nuggets-Original Artyfacts From The First Psychedelic Era (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Writer(s): King/Kelly
Label: Rhino (original label: Capitol)
Year: 1966
From Cleveland we have another local band signed to a major label, in this case Capitol Records, which at the time was having great success with both the Beatles and the Beach Boys. Lead vocalist Sonny Gerachi would reappear a few years later with the band Climax, singing a song called Precious and Few, which is one of the greatest juxtapositions of artist names and song titles ever.
Artist: Yardbirds
Title: Over Under Sideways Down
Source: Mono CD: Over, Under, Sideways, Down (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Writer: Dreja/McCarty/Beck/Relf/Samwell-Smith
Label: Raven (original US label: Epic)
Year: 1966
The only Yardbirds album to feature primarily original material was released under different titles in different parts of the world. The original UK version was called simply The Yardbirds, while the US album bore the Over, Under, Sideways, Down title. In addition, the UK album was unofficially known as Roger the Engineer because of band member Chris Dreja's drawing of the band's recording engineer on the cover. The title cut was the last single to feature Jeff Beck as the band's sole lead guitarist (the follow-up single, Happenings Ten Years Time Ago, featured both Beck and Jimmy Page).
Artist: Standells
Title: Barracuda
Source: CD: The Best Of The Standells (originally released on LP: Try It)
Writer(s): Ed Cobb
Label: Rhino (original label: Tower)
Year: 1967
Although Standell's producer Ed Cobb had his faults (among them an inability to full appreciate the talents of the Chocolate Watchband, whom he also managed), he did write some truly cool songs for the band, including Dirty Water, Sometimes Good Guys Don't Wear White, and an overlooked classic called Barracuda. One of the last of Cobb's songs to be recorded by the band, Barracuda, from the 1967 LP Try It, could be said to represent the culmination of the entire garage-rock movement, as a lighter style of pop music (the title track of the album itself being a good example) that would be known as "bubble-gum" was already starting to appear.
Artist: Them
Title: What's The Matter Baby
Source: Mono LP: Now And Them
Writer(s): Otis/Byers
Label: Tower
Year: 1968
Following the departure of Van Morrison, the remaining members of Them returned to their native Belfast and recruited a new vocalist, Kenny McDowell, before relocating to California and recording two albums for the Tower label in 1968. The first of these albums, Now And Them, contained songs from a variety of sources and performed in a variety of styles. Among the notable songs on the LP was a cover of Timi Yuro's What's The Matter Baby done in a blue-eyed soul style.
Artist: Animals
Title: I'm Crying
Source: Mono LP: The Best Of The Animals (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Writer(s): Price/Burdon
Label: Abkco (original label: M-G-M)
Year: 1964
Like most groups in the early 1960s, the Animals started their studio career by recording a mixture of songs provided to their producer by professional songwriters and covers of tunes previously recorded by other artists. Their first self-penned single was I'm Crying, a tune by vocalist Eric Burdon and organist Alan Price which was released in September of 1964. The song made the top 10 in Canada and the UK, but stalled out in the lower reaches of the top 40 in the US, falling far short of their previous international hit, House Of The Rising Sun. Producer Mickie Most decided from then on that songs written by the band itself would only be released as album tracks and B sides, a policy that stayed in effect until the Animals changed producers in 1966.
Artist: Beatles
Title: I've Just Seen A Face
Source: LP: Rubber Soul (originally released in UK on LP: Help)
Writer: Lennon/McCartney
Label: Capitol (original UK label: Parlophone)
Year: 1965
Consider the case of Dave Dexter, Jr. Dexter was the guy at Capitol Records who decided in late 1962 that there was no profit in Capitol releasing records by the hot new British band known as the Beatles that had just been signed to their UK partner label, EMI. After he was finally persuaded to issue I Want To Hold Your Hand as a single in late 1963, he became the guy responsible for determining which songs got released in what format: LP or 45 RPM single. He also set the song lineups for all the Beatle albums released in the US up to and including Revolver in 1966. In 1965 he decided to change the entire tone of the Rubber Soul album by deleting the more soulful numbers and substituting a pair of more acoustical tunes that he had left off the US release of Help. This was a deliberate attempt to tie in the Beatles with the folk-rock movement, which at the time of Rubber Soul's release was at the peak of its popularity. Oddly enough, there are still people out there who prefer the US version of the album, from which this track (one of the two songs from the UK version of Help) was played.
Artist: Who
Title: Happy Jack (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Source: Mono CD: Meaty, Beaty, Big And Bouncy
Writer(s): Pete Townshend
Label: MCA (original label: Decca)
Year: 1967
Happy Jack was originally released as a single in the UK in late 1966. It did not hit the US airwaves, however, until the early months of 1967. (I heard it for the first time on KLZ-FM, a Denver station whose format was a forerunner of progressive rock. KLZ-FM didn't call themselves a rock station. They instead marketed themselves as playing the top 100, as opposed to the top 60 played on KIMN, the dominant AM station in the city.) Although the song was not intended to be on an album, Decca Records quickly rearranged the track order of the Who's second album, A Quick One, to make room for the song, changing the name of the album itself to Happy Jack in the process. This rechanneled stereo mix of the song (using a much more realistic process than Capitol used with the Beach Boys' records) came out on the LP Meaty, Beaty, Big and Bouncy in the early 1970s, but when the album was reissued on CD the original mono master was used instead.
Artist: Country Joe And The Fish
Title: Love
Source: LP: Electric Music For The Mind And Body
Writer(s): McDonald/Melton/Cohen/Barthol/Gunning/Hirsch
Label: Vanguard
Year: 1967
It is a little known fact that, for a short time in early 1967, Country Joe McDonald and Janis Joplin were lovers. This could very well explain why Joe sounds just a bit like Janis on the song Love, from the first Country Joe And The Fish album, Electric Music For The Mind And Body, which was released in May of that year.
Artist: Left Banke
Title: Barterers And Their Wives
Source: 45 RPM single B side
Writer(s): Brown/Feher
Label: Smash
Year: 1967
The Left Banke made a huge impact with their debut single, Walk Away Renee, in late 1966. All of a sudden the rock press (such as it was in 1966) was all abuzz with talk of "baroque rock" and how it was the latest, greatest thing. The band soon released a follow-up single, Pretty Ballerina, which made the top 10 as well, which led to an album entitled (naturally enough) Walk Away Renee/Pretty Ballerina, which featured several more songs in the same vein, such as Barterers And Their Wives, which was also released as a B side later that year. An unfortunate misstep by keyboardist Michael Brown, however, led to the Left Banke's early demise, and baroque rock soon went the way of other sixties fads.
Artist: Vagrants
Title: Respect
Source: Mono LP: Nuggets Vol. 2-Punk (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Writer(s): Otis Redding
Label: Rhino (original label: Atco)
Year: 1967
Sounding a lot like the Rascals, the Vagrants were a popular Long Island band led by singer Peter Sabatino and best remembered for being the group that had guitarist Leslie Weinstein in it. Weinstein would change his last name to West and record a solo album called Mountain before forming the band of the same name. This version of Respect is fairly faithful to the original Otis Redding version. Unfortunately for the Vagrants, Aretha Franklin would release her rearranged version of the song just a few weeks after the Vagrants, relegating their version of the tune (and the Vagrants themselves) to footnote status.
Artist: Sly And The Family Stone
Title: Woodstock Medley
Source: Woodstock: 40 Years On: Back To Yasgur's Farm
Writer(s): Sylvester Stewart
Label: Rhino
Year: 1969
Listening to the Woodstock: 40 Years On: Back To Yasgur's Farm CD and comparing it to the original Woodstock soundtrack album, you might notice that there were a few minor tweaks made for the original release. Overall, though, this was one of the least altered recordings used for the original soundtrack album. It's easy to see why. Sly Stone managed to assemble a band that was at the same time tight and chaotic, with an infectious energy that kept the crowd going throughout the entire 17 minute medley. No mean feat, considering the altered mental state of much of the audience that night.
Artist: Jimi Hendrix Experience
Title: Fire
Source: LP: Are You Experienced?
Writer(s): Jimi Hendrix
Label: Legacy (original label: Reprise)
Year: 1967
Sometime in late 1966 Jimi Hendrix was visiting his girlfriend's mother's house in London for the first time. It was a cold rainy night and Jimi immediately noticed that there was a dog curled up in front of the fireplace. Jimi's first action was to scoot the dog out of the way so he himself could benefit from the fire's warmth, using the phrase "Move over Rover and let Jimi take over." The phrase got stuck in his head and eventually became the basis for one of his most popular songs. Although never released as a single, Fire was a highlight of the Jimi Hendrix Experience's live performances, often serving as a set opener.
Artist: West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band
Title: Watch Yourself
Source: LP: Volume III-A Child's Guide To Good And Evil
Writer(s): Robert Yeazel
Label: Reprise
Year: 1968
Although the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band usually wrote their own material, they occassionally drew from outside sources. One example is Watch Yourself, written by Robert Yeazel, who would go on to join Sugarloaf in time for their second LP, Spaceship Earth, writing many of the songs on that album.
Tuesday, August 5, 2014
Stuck in the Psychedelic Era # 1432 (starts 8/6/14)
In the spring of 2011, less than one year after Stuck in the Psychedelic Era became a syndicated program, I received word that WEOS (where Stuck in the Psychedelic Era is produced) would be soon vacating the wood frame house on Hamilton Street in Geneva, NY that it had occupied since the early 1990s. The problem was that nobody seemed to know just where the station was moving to. Nonetheless, I decided that it would be a good idea to record some backup shows, just in case the station found itself without functioning studios for a few weeks. However, nobody could agree on an acceptable location for the new WEOS studios and the entire move was put on hold. As it turned out I ended up needing a couple of those backup shows in December of 2012, when I found myself temporarily incapacitated by the good doctors at the Buffalo VA hospital. There are still, however, several more of these backup shows parked on various hard drives, which is a good thing, since the promised eviction of WEOS from the house on Hamilton has finally come to pass. Happily, a location for the new studios that was acceptable to all involved has been found. Not so happily, the new studios are nowhere near functional (and in fact are still under construction at this point). This of course means it's finally time to pull out those backup shows, starting with this one, which was recorded on June 9, 2011. The official catalog number for this week's show is B3, although it will now and forever be remembered as show # 1432 as well. Enjoy!
Artist: Rare Breed
Title: Beg, Borrow And Steal
Source: Mono CD: Nuggets-Original Artyfacts From The First Psychedelic Era (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Writer(s): DiFrancesco/Zerato
Label: Rhino (original label: Attack)
Year: 1966
Rare Breed was one of the first bands signed to the Kasenatz-Katz stable of artists and one of the first to leave that organization as well, citing a stifling of creativity. The band left the fold shortly after the release of their only single, Beg, Borrow And Steal, and was never heard from again, at least as Rare Breed. Jerry Kasenatz and Jeff Katz, however, would become quite successful the following year as the primary architects of the "bubble gum" movement, so it's not difficult to see why a legitimate band would have problems with them.
Artist: Eric Burdon And The Animals
Title: A Girl Named Sandoz
Source: Mono CD: The Best Of Eric Burdon And The Animals (originally released as 45 RPM single B side)
Writer(s): Burdon/Briggs/Weider/McCulloch/Jenkins
Label: Polydor (original label: M-G-M)
Year: 1967
The original Animals officially disbanded at the end of 1966, but before long a new group, Eric Burdon And The Animals, had arrived to take its place. Unlike the original Animals, this new band wrote nearly all their own material, with credits going to the entire membership on every song. The first single from this new band was a song called When I Was Young, a semi-autobiographical piece with lyrics by Burdon that performed decently, if not spectacularly, on the charts in both the US and the UK. It was the B side of that record, however, a tune called A Girl Named Sandoz, that truly indicated what this new band was about. Sandoz was the name of the laboratory that originally developed and manufactured LSD, and the song itself is a thinly-veiled tribute to the mind-expanding properties of the wonder drug. It would soon become apparent that whereas the original Animals were solidly rooted in American R&B (with the emphasis on the B), this new group was pure acid-rock.
Artist: Vanilla Fudge
Title: Moonlight Sonata/Fur Elise
Source: LP: The Beat Goes On
Writer(s): Ludwig Van Beethoven
Label: Atco
Year: 1968
The mid-1970s saw a proliferation of art-rock bands that incorporated elements of classical music. Most of these bands, such as Emerson, Lake and Palmer and Yes, were European in origin. They were predated, however, by a group of Long Islanders calling themselves Vanilla Fudge. Although they played around with snippets of classical pieces on their debut LP, it was on the follow-up, a concept album called The Beat Goes On, that the band took the full plunge, creating a rocked out medley out of two of Ludwig Van Beethoven's best known piano pieces, Moonlight Sonata and Fur Elise. Roll over Beethoven indeed!
Artist: Mahavishnu Orchestra
Title: Open Country Joy
Source: Stereo 45 RPM single
Writer(s): John McLaughlin
Label: Columbia
Year: 1973
John McLaughlin. Billy Cobham. Rick Laird. Jan Hammer. Jerry Goodman. All were destined to become jazz-rock fusion stars by the end of the decade, but in 1971 the term fusion, as applied to music, was not yet in use. Yet fusion was indeed the most appropriate word for the Mahavishnu Orchestra, whose five members came from five different countries: England, Ireland, Panama, Czechoslovakia (as it was then known) and the US, respectively. The members came from a variety of music backgrounds as well. McLaughlin (who wrote all the group's material) and Cobham had met while working on Miles Davis' Bitches Brew album, while Goodman had recorded two albums with the Chicago-based Flock. The Mahavishnu Orchestra was known for its ability to quickly shift between music styles on such tracks as Open Country Joy, which appeared on the group's second LP, Birds of Fire, as well as being released as a single.The original group disbanded after only two albums, but McLaughlin would later revive the band with a different lineup in the 1980s.
Artist: Kinks
Title: Dead End Street
Source: 45 RPM single
Writer(s): Ray Davies
Year: 1967
The last major Kinks hit in the US was Sunny Afternoon in the summer of 1966. The November follow-up, Dead End Street, was in much the same style, but did not achieve the same kind of success in the US (although it was a top five hit in the UK). The Kinks would not have another major US hit until Lola in 1970.
Artist: Steve Miller Band
Title: Going To The Country
Source: LP: Anthology (originally released on LP: Number 5)
Writer(s): Miller/Sidran
Label: Capitol
Year: 1970
The Steve Miller Band started recording for Capitol as part of the San Francisco explosion, but didn't achieve true stardom until the mid 1970s with the release of The Joker. In the intervening years they cranked out a series of fine albums that got most of their airplay on progressive FM stations. Among those was their fifth LP, appropriately titled Number 5, which included the tune Going To The Country.
Artist: Grateful Dead
Title: Dark Star (Excerpt)
Source: LP: Zabriskie Point soundtrack
Writer(s): McGannahan Skjellyfetti
Label: 4 Men With Beards (original label: M-G-M)
Year: 1969
Zabriskie Point is generally considered by critics to be among the worst films ever made. At the same time the soundtrack album for the film is a cult classic, with an eclectic mix of music from such diverse artists as Pink Floyd, Patti Page, John Fahey and Jerry Garcia, both with and without the rest of the Grateful Dead. Although Garcia's solo tracks were written specifically for the film, it is likely that the short (less than three minutes) excerpt from Dark Star was lifted from the 1969 LP Live Dead, although documentation to prove it is pretty much nonexistent. Still, it sounds like the Live Dead version...
Artist: Cream
Title: White Room
Source: LP: Progressive Heavies (originally released as 45 RPM single and on LP: Wheels Of Fire)
Writer(s): Bruce/Brown
Label: United Artists (original label: Atco)
Year: 1968
In order to get songs played on top 40 radio, record companies made it a practice to shorten album cuts by cutting out extended instrumental breaks and extra verses. This version of the Cream classic White Room, clocking in at just over three minutes, is a typical example.
Artist: Jimi Hendrix Experience
Title: Voodoo Child (Slight Return)
Source: LP: Electric Ladyland
Writer: Jimi Hendrix
Label: Reprise
Year: 1968
Although never released as a single in the US, the last track on the Jimi Hendrix Experience's last album, Electric Ladyland, has become a staple of classic rock radio over the years. Voodoo Child (Slight Return) was originally an outgrowth of a jam session at New York's Record Plant, which itself takes up most of side one of the Electric Ladyland LP. This more familiar studio reworking of the piece has been covered by a variety of artists over the years.
Artist: Monkees
Title: Valleri
Source: CD: Greatest Hits (originally released on LP: The Birds, The Bees And The Monkees and as 45 RPM single)
Writer(s): Boyce/Hart
Label: Rhino
Year: 1968
The last Monkees top 10 single was also Michael Nesmith's least favorite Monkees song. Valleri was a Tommy Boyce/Bobby Hart composition that the group had first recorded for the first season of their TV show in 1966. Apparently nobody was happy with the recording, however, and the song was never issed on vinyl. Two years later the song was re-recorded for the album The Birds, The Bees And The Monkees and subsequently released as a single. The flamenco-style guitar on the intro (and repeated throughout the song) was played by studio guitarist Louie Shelton, after Nesmith refused to participate in the recording.
Artist: Sonics
Title: Strychnine
Source: LP: Nuggets Vol. 2-Punk (originally released on LP: Here Are The Sonics)
Writer: Gerry Roslie
Label: Rhino (original label: Etiquette)
Year: 1965
From 1965 we have a band that maintains a cult following to this day: the legendary Sonics, generally considered one of the foundation stones of the Seattle music scene. Although the majority of songs on their albums were cover tunes, virtually all of their originals are now considered punk classics; indeed, the Sonics are often cited as the first true punk rock band.
Artist: Turtles
Title: Grim Reaper Of Love
Source: Mono CD: Where The Action Is: L.A. Nuggets 1965-68 (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Writer(s): Portz/Nichol
Label: Rhino (original label: White Whale)
Year: 1966
The Turtles had some early success in 1965 as a folk-rock band, recording the hit version of Bob Dylan's It Ain't Me Babe and PF Sloan's Let Me Be. By 1966, however, it was getting harder and harder for the group to get a hit record. One attempt was Grim Reaper Of Love, co-written by Turtles lead guitarist Al Nichol. Personally I think it's a pretty cool tune, but was probably a bit too weird to appeal to the average top 40 radio listener in 1966. Grim Reaper Of Love did manage to make it to the # 81 spot on the charts, unlike the band's next two singles that failed to chart at all. It wasn't until the following year, when the Turtles recorded Happy Together, that the band would make it back onto the charts.
Artist: Electric Prunes
Title: I Had Too Much To Dream (Last Night)
Source: LP: Nuggets Vol. 1-The Hits (originally released on LP: I Had Too Much To Dream (Last Night) and as 45 RPM single)
Writer(s): Tucker/Mantz
Label: Rhino (original label: Reprise)
Year: 1967
The Electric Prunes biggest hit was I Had Too Much To Dream (Last Night), released in early 1967. The record, initially released without much promotion from the record label, was championed by Seattle DJ Pat O'Day of KJR radio, and was already popular in that area when it hit the national charts (thus explaining why so many people assumed the band was from Seattle). I Had Too Much To Dream (Last Night) has come to be one of the defining songs of the psychedelic era and was the opening track on both the original Lenny Kaye Nuggets compilation and Rhino's first Nuggets LP.
Artist: Big Brother and the Holding Company
Title: Down On Me
Source: CD: Love Is The Song We Sing: San Francisco Nuggets 1965-70 (originally released on LP: Joplin In Concert)
Writer: Trad. Arr. Joplin
Label: Rhino (original label: Columbia)
Year: 1968
Big Brother And The Holding Company's first album, featuring the single Down On Me, was recorded in 1967 at the studios of Mainstream Records, a medium-sized Chicago label known for its jazz recordings. At the time, Mainstream's engineers had no experience with a rock band, particularly a loud one like Big Brother, and vainly attempted to clean up the band's sound as best they could. The result was an album full of bland recordings sucked dry of the energy that made Big Brother and the Holding Company one of the top live attractions of its time. Luckily we have this live recording made in early 1968 and released in 1972 that captures the band at their peak, before powerful people with questionable motives convinced singer Janis Joplin that the rest of the group was holding her back.
Artist: Uriah Heep
Title: All My Life
Source: Stereo 45 RPM single B side (originally released on LP: Demons And Wizards)
Writer(s): Byron/Box/Kerslake
Label: Mercury
Year: 1972
Uriah Heep is a hard band to define. Their roots were firmly in the psychedelic era, yet they are often identified with both progressive rock bands like Yes and early heavy metal bands such as Black Sabbath. The band's best-known tune was Easy Livin', a single taken from their 1972 Demons And Wizards LP. Perhaps even more typical of the group's sound at that time was the song chosen for the single's B side, All My Life (also from Demons And Wizards).
Artist: Chambers Brothers
Title: Fallin' In Love
Source: CD: The Time Has Come (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Writer(s): Willie Chambers
Label: Columbia/Legacy
Year: 1967
The Chambers Brothers were an eclectic band with a gospel music background that dated back to the mid-50s, when oldest brother George finished his tour of duty with the US Army and settled down in the L.A. area. His three brothers soon followed him out to the coast from their native Mississippi, and began playing the Southern California gospel circuit before going after a more secular audience in the early 60s. After signing to Columbia in 1966 the group got to work recording several singles for the label, including an early version of the song that would eventually make them famous, Time Has Come Today. Columbia refused to release the song, however, and instead went with a more conventional tune written by Willie Chambers called Fallin' In Love. The record was released in early 1967 but failed to make a splash.
Artist: Bob Dylan
Title: Tombstone Blues
Source: Mono CD: The Best Of The Original Mono Recordings (originally released on LP: Highway 61 Revisited)
Writer(s): Bob Dylan
Label: Columbia/Legacy
Year: 1965
One of the most influential albums in rock history was Bob Dylan's 1965 LP Highway 61 Revisited. Although he had experimented with adding electric guitar, bass and drums to some of the songs on his previous album, Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited was his first LP to feature electric instruments on every track. Of these, the most notable was probably the guitar work of Michael Bloomfield, who would soon come to prominence as lead guitarist for the Butterfield Blues Band. Bloomfield's work is most prominent on blues-based tracks such as Tombstone Blues, which follows the classic Like A Rolling Stone on side one of the original LP.
Artist: West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band
Title: Unfree Child
Source: LP: Volume II
Writer(s): Markley/Harris
Label: Reprise
Year: 1967
For those who are not familiar with reel-to-reel tape technology, here's a quick primer. As with all tape tech, a recording is created by a magnetic head imprinting patterns onto magnetic tape. This tape travels across the head at a predetermined speed. There were actually several speeds used over the years, all of which were standardized by measuring the length of tape travelling across the head in one second. In addition, each standard speed was exactly one half of the one above it, with the fastest having the highest quality. The fastest known speed was 30 inches per second (only used by computers, as far as I know), with 15 ips being the standard speed for studio recordings. Radio stations generally had machines that ran at either 15 or 7 1/2 ips, while home units ran at either 7 1/2 or 3 3/4. Dictating machines, which were virtually useless for recording music, used 1 7/8 or even 15/16 (which had so much tape hiss you could barely hear the recording itself). The advantage of halving the speed (besides the obvious economic advantage) is that the original key of the music is the same, albeit an octave lower. This made it possible to deliberately record something at the wrong speed, then play that recording back at the regular speed in the same key (but at half or double tempo). As the technology developed it became possible to put multiple tracks onto the same strip of tape, with first two, then three, four, eight and even sixteen tracks running parallel along the tape. This is what made it possible to record overdubs (by putting the original recording on one track and play it back while recording more stuff on another one), and to record in stereo. Unfree Child, which starts off a set of 1967 tracks from L.A. bands, has an intro that was actually recorded at a higher speed then played back at the next one down, giving it a deep growling sound. This type of effect, combined with backwards masking (created by playing the tape back to front and recording something on one of the unused tracks) is what got some heavy metal bands into trouble for putting hidden "Satanic" messages on their records.
Artist: Ultimate Spinach
Title: Plastic Raincoats/Hung Up Minds
Source: LP: Ultimate Spinach
Writer(s): Ian Bruce-Douglas
Label: M-G-M
Year: 1968
If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then Country Joe McDonald's ears must have been burning when the first Ultimate Spinach album hit the stands. Indeed, many of Ian Bruce-Douglas's compositions, such as Plastic Raincoats/Hung Up Minds, sound as if they could have been written by McDonald himself. Still, it was the 1960s and jumping on the bandwagon was almost a way of life (witness the dozens of Mick Jagger soundalikes popping up across the country in the wake of the British Invasion), so perhaps Bruce-Douglas can be forgiven for at least trying to copy something a bit more current. Unfortunately, M-G-M Records decided to tout Ultimate Spinach as part of a "Boss-Town Sound" that never truly existed, further damaging the group's credibility, and after a second LP, Bruce-Douglas left the band, which, strangely enough, continued on without him for several years, albeit in an entirely different musical vein.
Artist: Pink Floyd
Title: Interstellar Overdrive
Source: CD: The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn
Writer(s): Barrett/Waters/Wright/Mason
Label: Capitol (original label: Tower)
Year: 1967
Syd Barrett was still very much at the helm for Pink Floyd's first LP, Piper At The Gates Of Dawn, released in 1967. The group had already released a pair of Barrett-penned singles, Arnold Layne (which was banned by the BBC) and See Emily Play. Piper, though, was the first full album for the group, and some tracks, notably the nine-minute psychedelic masterpiece Interstellar Overdrive, were entirely group efforts. On the original UK version of the LP Overdrive tracks directly into a Barrett piece, the Gnome. The US version, issued on Tower records, truncated Overdrive and re-arranged the song order.
Artist: Rolling Stones
Title: She's A Rainbow
Source: CD: Their Satanic Majesties Request
Writer: Jagger/Richards
Label: Abkco (original label: London)
Year: 1967
The only song from Their Satanic Majesties Request to get significant airplay in the US was She's A Rainbow, released as a single in the fall of '67. Another song from the album, In Another Land, was released only in the UK and touted as the first Bill Wyman solo song (although still a Rolling Stones record). 2,000 Light Years From Home, the B side to She's A Rainbow, did get some international airplay as well.
Artist: Rory Gallagher
Title: It's You
Source: LP: Rory Gallagher
Writer(s): Rory Gallagher
Label: Atco
Year: 1971
Rory Gallagher was one of those people generally refererred to as a "musician's musician". His first band, Taste, never had any great commercial success, yet was well-known among their peers for its eclectic repertoire and superb musicianship. When Gallagher decided to put together a new band for his 1971 solo debut LP he first considered Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell, jamming with the two former Experience members at a practice room in his native Belfast before deciding instead to go with two local musicians, Gerry McAvoy and Wilgar Campbell, instead. The album, like virtually every release by Gallagher, was only a moderate success, despite being filled with fine tunes such as the country flavored It's You.
Artist: E-Types
Title: Put The Clock Back On The Wall
Source: Mono CD: Nuggets-Original Artyfacts from the Psychedelic Era (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Writer: Bonner/Gordon
Label: Rhino
Year: 1967
The E-Types were from Salinas, California, which at the time was known among travelers along US 101 mostly for it's sulfiric smell. As many people from Salinas apparently went to nearby San Jose as often as possible, the E-Types became regulars on the local scene in the latter town, eventually landing a contract with Tower Records and Ed Cobb, who also produced the Standells and the Chocolate Watchband. Since the Standells were already known as a garage-rock band (although they were really a bar band), Cobb tried positioning the Watchband as a psychedelic band (they were really more of a garage band) and the E-Types as a pop-rock band (although they were probably the most psychedelic of the three), hooking them up with the same Bonner/Gordon songwriting team that would soon be receiving fat royalty checks from songs like Happy Together and She's My Girl, both hits for the Turtles. Put The Clock Back On The Wall was actually titled after a popular phase of the time. After a day or two of losing all awareness of time (and sometimes space), generally due to the influence of certain mind-altering chemicals, it was time to put the clock back on the wall, or get back to reality if you prefer. The song was originally released in early 1967, shortly before Happy Together hit the charts.
Artist: Paul Revere And The Raiders
Title: Kicks
Source: Greatest Hits
Writer(s): Mann/Weil
Label: Columbia
Year: 1966
Kicks was not the first pop song with a strong anti-drug message, but it was the first one to be a certified hit, making it to the number four spot on the US charts and hitting number one in Canada. It was also the biggest hit for Paul Revere and the Raiders until Indian Reservation went all the way to the top
five years later.
Artist: Moody Blues
Title: Legend Of A Mind
Source: CD: In Search Of The Lost Chord
Writer(s): Ray Thomas
Label: Deram
Year: 1968
The Moody Blues started off as a fairly typical British beat band, scoring one major inteernational hit, Go Now, in 1965, as well as several minor British hit singles. By 1967 lead vocalist Denny Laine was no longer with the group (he would later surface as a member of Paul McCartney's Wings), and the remaining members were not entirely sure of where to go next. At around that time their record label, Deram, was looking to make a rock version of a well-known classical piece (The Nine Planets), and the Moody Blues were tapped for the project. Somewhere along the way, however, the group decided to instead write their own music for rock band and symphony orchestra, and Days Of Future Passed was the result. The album, describing a somewhat typical day in the life of a somewhat typical Britisher, was successful enough to revitalize the band's career, and a follow-up LP, In Search Of The Lost Chord, was released in 1968. Instead of a full orchestra, however, the band members themselves provided all the instrumentation on the new album, using a relatively new keyboard instrument called the mellotron (a complicated contraption that utilized tape loops) to simulate orchestral sounds. Like its predecessor, In Search Of The Lost Chord was a concept album, this time dealing with the universal search for the meaning of life through music. One of the standout tracks on the album is Legend Of A Mind, with its signature lines: "Timothy Leary's dead. No, no, he's outside looking in." Although never released as a single, the track got a fair amount of airplay on college and progressive FM radio stations, and has long been considered a cult hit.
Artist: Yardbirds
Title: Too Much Monkey Business
Source: LP: 16 Rock Guitar Greats (originally released in UK on LP: Five Live Yardbirds)
Writer(s): Chuck Berry
Label: Trip (original label: Columbia)
Year: 1964
The first Yardbirds album consisted entirely of live tracks, most of which were covers of old blues and rock and roll tunes. It was the only Yardbirds LP released in the UK with Eric Clapton on guitar, although there were also several singles and an EP or two released by the same lineup. The album was not released in the US, although several tracks did appear on the US-only LP For Your Love in 1965. One of the tracks that never saw a US release was the album's opening song, a cover of Chuck Berry's Too Much Monkey Business that shows off Clapton's guitar and Keith Relf's vocals and harmonica work equally.
Artist: Dick Dale/Stevie Ray Vaughan
Title: Pipeline
Source: CD: The Best Of Dick Dale And His Del-Tones (from the soundtrack of the movie Back To The Beach)
Writer(s): Spickard/Carmen
Label: Rhino
Year: 1987
Although most people associate surf music with vocal groups such as the Beach Boys and Jan & Dean, the true king of surf was guitarist Dick Dale, who pretty much invented the entire genre. Dale was the first choice of Leo Fender to test out the new Fender Reverb amplifier, which he did while touring the West Coast extensively during the early 1960s. Although surf music itself was somewhat sidetracked by the British Invasion of 1964, Dale continued to play live gigs until forced into retirement by rectal cancer in the latter part of the decade. He was able to beat the cancer, thanks to the support of many friends (including Jimi Hendrix, whose famous line "never hear surf music again" was actually meant as words of encouragement), but did not become musically active again until the 1980s. In 1987 he teamed up with Stevie Ray Vaughan to record and perform a cover of the Chantay's Pipeline in the movie Back To The Beach, and in the years since has begun to receive the recognition for his contribution to rock music that he so richly deserves.
Artist: Blues Image
Title: Take Me To The Sunrise
Source: LP: Blues Image
Writer(s): Blues Image
Label: Atco
Year: 1969
Formed in Tampa, Florida, in 1966, Blues Image originally consisted of singer-guitarist Mike Pinera, singer-drummer Manuel "Manny" Bertematti, singer-percussionist Joe Lala, keyboardist Emilio Garcia, and bassist Malcolm Jones. They were later joined by keyboardist Frank "Skip" Konte when Emilio Garcia left the band to become a pilot. The band relocated to Miami in 1968, where they became the house band at the legendary club Thee Image. While performing at Thee Image, the members of Blues Image became friends with members of several bands that played there, including Cream, Jimi Hendrix, and the Grateful Dead. It was Hendrix that convinced them that a move to Los Angeles would be to their benefit, and sure enough the Blues Image landed a contract with Atco shortly after their arrival there. Their debut album, which starts off with the track Take Me To The Sunrise, was released in February of 1969. After two more albums and one hit single (Ride Captain Ride), Blues Image split up in 1970, although several of the band's members stayed active with other bands for many years.
Artist: Clefs Of Lavender Hill
Title: Stop-Get A Ticket
Source: Mono CD: Nuggets-Original Artyfacts From The First Psychedelic Era (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Writer(s): Travis & Coventry Fairchild
Label: Rhino (original label: Thames)
Year: 1966
The Clefs Of Lavender Hill were a band from North Miami that featured not one, but two sets of siblings: the brother and sister team of Travis and Coventry Fairchild (both of which sang and played guitar) and the Moss brothers, Bill (bass) and Fred (drums). The first single from the band was a song called First Tell Me Why, but it was the B side of the record, a Beatlesque tune called Stop-Get A Ticket that became a hit on Miami radio stations. The song was picked up by Date Records and peaked nationally at # 80. Subsequent releases by the Clefs failed to crack the Hot 100 and the group (after several personnel changes) finally called it quits in 1968.
Year: 1966
Artist: Rare Breed
Title: Beg, Borrow And Steal
Source: Mono CD: Nuggets-Original Artyfacts From The First Psychedelic Era (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Writer(s): DiFrancesco/Zerato
Label: Rhino (original label: Attack)
Year: 1966
Rare Breed was one of the first bands signed to the Kasenatz-Katz stable of artists and one of the first to leave that organization as well, citing a stifling of creativity. The band left the fold shortly after the release of their only single, Beg, Borrow And Steal, and was never heard from again, at least as Rare Breed. Jerry Kasenatz and Jeff Katz, however, would become quite successful the following year as the primary architects of the "bubble gum" movement, so it's not difficult to see why a legitimate band would have problems with them.
Artist: Eric Burdon And The Animals
Title: A Girl Named Sandoz
Source: Mono CD: The Best Of Eric Burdon And The Animals (originally released as 45 RPM single B side)
Writer(s): Burdon/Briggs/Weider/McCulloch/Jenkins
Label: Polydor (original label: M-G-M)
Year: 1967
The original Animals officially disbanded at the end of 1966, but before long a new group, Eric Burdon And The Animals, had arrived to take its place. Unlike the original Animals, this new band wrote nearly all their own material, with credits going to the entire membership on every song. The first single from this new band was a song called When I Was Young, a semi-autobiographical piece with lyrics by Burdon that performed decently, if not spectacularly, on the charts in both the US and the UK. It was the B side of that record, however, a tune called A Girl Named Sandoz, that truly indicated what this new band was about. Sandoz was the name of the laboratory that originally developed and manufactured LSD, and the song itself is a thinly-veiled tribute to the mind-expanding properties of the wonder drug. It would soon become apparent that whereas the original Animals were solidly rooted in American R&B (with the emphasis on the B), this new group was pure acid-rock.
Artist: Vanilla Fudge
Title: Moonlight Sonata/Fur Elise
Source: LP: The Beat Goes On
Writer(s): Ludwig Van Beethoven
Label: Atco
Year: 1968
The mid-1970s saw a proliferation of art-rock bands that incorporated elements of classical music. Most of these bands, such as Emerson, Lake and Palmer and Yes, were European in origin. They were predated, however, by a group of Long Islanders calling themselves Vanilla Fudge. Although they played around with snippets of classical pieces on their debut LP, it was on the follow-up, a concept album called The Beat Goes On, that the band took the full plunge, creating a rocked out medley out of two of Ludwig Van Beethoven's best known piano pieces, Moonlight Sonata and Fur Elise. Roll over Beethoven indeed!
Artist: Mahavishnu Orchestra
Title: Open Country Joy
Source: Stereo 45 RPM single
Writer(s): John McLaughlin
Label: Columbia
Year: 1973
John McLaughlin. Billy Cobham. Rick Laird. Jan Hammer. Jerry Goodman. All were destined to become jazz-rock fusion stars by the end of the decade, but in 1971 the term fusion, as applied to music, was not yet in use. Yet fusion was indeed the most appropriate word for the Mahavishnu Orchestra, whose five members came from five different countries: England, Ireland, Panama, Czechoslovakia (as it was then known) and the US, respectively. The members came from a variety of music backgrounds as well. McLaughlin (who wrote all the group's material) and Cobham had met while working on Miles Davis' Bitches Brew album, while Goodman had recorded two albums with the Chicago-based Flock. The Mahavishnu Orchestra was known for its ability to quickly shift between music styles on such tracks as Open Country Joy, which appeared on the group's second LP, Birds of Fire, as well as being released as a single.The original group disbanded after only two albums, but McLaughlin would later revive the band with a different lineup in the 1980s.
Artist: Kinks
Title: Dead End Street
Source: 45 RPM single
Writer(s): Ray Davies
Year: 1967
The last major Kinks hit in the US was Sunny Afternoon in the summer of 1966. The November follow-up, Dead End Street, was in much the same style, but did not achieve the same kind of success in the US (although it was a top five hit in the UK). The Kinks would not have another major US hit until Lola in 1970.
Artist: Steve Miller Band
Title: Going To The Country
Source: LP: Anthology (originally released on LP: Number 5)
Writer(s): Miller/Sidran
Label: Capitol
Year: 1970
The Steve Miller Band started recording for Capitol as part of the San Francisco explosion, but didn't achieve true stardom until the mid 1970s with the release of The Joker. In the intervening years they cranked out a series of fine albums that got most of their airplay on progressive FM stations. Among those was their fifth LP, appropriately titled Number 5, which included the tune Going To The Country.
Artist: Grateful Dead
Title: Dark Star (Excerpt)
Source: LP: Zabriskie Point soundtrack
Writer(s): McGannahan Skjellyfetti
Label: 4 Men With Beards (original label: M-G-M)
Year: 1969
Zabriskie Point is generally considered by critics to be among the worst films ever made. At the same time the soundtrack album for the film is a cult classic, with an eclectic mix of music from such diverse artists as Pink Floyd, Patti Page, John Fahey and Jerry Garcia, both with and without the rest of the Grateful Dead. Although Garcia's solo tracks were written specifically for the film, it is likely that the short (less than three minutes) excerpt from Dark Star was lifted from the 1969 LP Live Dead, although documentation to prove it is pretty much nonexistent. Still, it sounds like the Live Dead version...
Artist: Cream
Title: White Room
Source: LP: Progressive Heavies (originally released as 45 RPM single and on LP: Wheels Of Fire)
Writer(s): Bruce/Brown
Label: United Artists (original label: Atco)
Year: 1968
In order to get songs played on top 40 radio, record companies made it a practice to shorten album cuts by cutting out extended instrumental breaks and extra verses. This version of the Cream classic White Room, clocking in at just over three minutes, is a typical example.
Artist: Jimi Hendrix Experience
Title: Voodoo Child (Slight Return)
Source: LP: Electric Ladyland
Writer: Jimi Hendrix
Label: Reprise
Year: 1968
Although never released as a single in the US, the last track on the Jimi Hendrix Experience's last album, Electric Ladyland, has become a staple of classic rock radio over the years. Voodoo Child (Slight Return) was originally an outgrowth of a jam session at New York's Record Plant, which itself takes up most of side one of the Electric Ladyland LP. This more familiar studio reworking of the piece has been covered by a variety of artists over the years.
Artist: Monkees
Title: Valleri
Source: CD: Greatest Hits (originally released on LP: The Birds, The Bees And The Monkees and as 45 RPM single)
Writer(s): Boyce/Hart
Label: Rhino
Year: 1968
The last Monkees top 10 single was also Michael Nesmith's least favorite Monkees song. Valleri was a Tommy Boyce/Bobby Hart composition that the group had first recorded for the first season of their TV show in 1966. Apparently nobody was happy with the recording, however, and the song was never issed on vinyl. Two years later the song was re-recorded for the album The Birds, The Bees And The Monkees and subsequently released as a single. The flamenco-style guitar on the intro (and repeated throughout the song) was played by studio guitarist Louie Shelton, after Nesmith refused to participate in the recording.
Artist: Sonics
Title: Strychnine
Source: LP: Nuggets Vol. 2-Punk (originally released on LP: Here Are The Sonics)
Writer: Gerry Roslie
Label: Rhino (original label: Etiquette)
Year: 1965
From 1965 we have a band that maintains a cult following to this day: the legendary Sonics, generally considered one of the foundation stones of the Seattle music scene. Although the majority of songs on their albums were cover tunes, virtually all of their originals are now considered punk classics; indeed, the Sonics are often cited as the first true punk rock band.
Artist: Turtles
Title: Grim Reaper Of Love
Source: Mono CD: Where The Action Is: L.A. Nuggets 1965-68 (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Writer(s): Portz/Nichol
Label: Rhino (original label: White Whale)
Year: 1966
The Turtles had some early success in 1965 as a folk-rock band, recording the hit version of Bob Dylan's It Ain't Me Babe and PF Sloan's Let Me Be. By 1966, however, it was getting harder and harder for the group to get a hit record. One attempt was Grim Reaper Of Love, co-written by Turtles lead guitarist Al Nichol. Personally I think it's a pretty cool tune, but was probably a bit too weird to appeal to the average top 40 radio listener in 1966. Grim Reaper Of Love did manage to make it to the # 81 spot on the charts, unlike the band's next two singles that failed to chart at all. It wasn't until the following year, when the Turtles recorded Happy Together, that the band would make it back onto the charts.
Artist: Electric Prunes
Title: I Had Too Much To Dream (Last Night)
Source: LP: Nuggets Vol. 1-The Hits (originally released on LP: I Had Too Much To Dream (Last Night) and as 45 RPM single)
Writer(s): Tucker/Mantz
Label: Rhino (original label: Reprise)
Year: 1967
The Electric Prunes biggest hit was I Had Too Much To Dream (Last Night), released in early 1967. The record, initially released without much promotion from the record label, was championed by Seattle DJ Pat O'Day of KJR radio, and was already popular in that area when it hit the national charts (thus explaining why so many people assumed the band was from Seattle). I Had Too Much To Dream (Last Night) has come to be one of the defining songs of the psychedelic era and was the opening track on both the original Lenny Kaye Nuggets compilation and Rhino's first Nuggets LP.
Artist: Big Brother and the Holding Company
Title: Down On Me
Source: CD: Love Is The Song We Sing: San Francisco Nuggets 1965-70 (originally released on LP: Joplin In Concert)
Writer: Trad. Arr. Joplin
Label: Rhino (original label: Columbia)
Year: 1968
Big Brother And The Holding Company's first album, featuring the single Down On Me, was recorded in 1967 at the studios of Mainstream Records, a medium-sized Chicago label known for its jazz recordings. At the time, Mainstream's engineers had no experience with a rock band, particularly a loud one like Big Brother, and vainly attempted to clean up the band's sound as best they could. The result was an album full of bland recordings sucked dry of the energy that made Big Brother and the Holding Company one of the top live attractions of its time. Luckily we have this live recording made in early 1968 and released in 1972 that captures the band at their peak, before powerful people with questionable motives convinced singer Janis Joplin that the rest of the group was holding her back.
Artist: Uriah Heep
Title: All My Life
Source: Stereo 45 RPM single B side (originally released on LP: Demons And Wizards)
Writer(s): Byron/Box/Kerslake
Label: Mercury
Year: 1972
Uriah Heep is a hard band to define. Their roots were firmly in the psychedelic era, yet they are often identified with both progressive rock bands like Yes and early heavy metal bands such as Black Sabbath. The band's best-known tune was Easy Livin', a single taken from their 1972 Demons And Wizards LP. Perhaps even more typical of the group's sound at that time was the song chosen for the single's B side, All My Life (also from Demons And Wizards).
Artist: Chambers Brothers
Title: Fallin' In Love
Source: CD: The Time Has Come (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Writer(s): Willie Chambers
Label: Columbia/Legacy
Year: 1967
The Chambers Brothers were an eclectic band with a gospel music background that dated back to the mid-50s, when oldest brother George finished his tour of duty with the US Army and settled down in the L.A. area. His three brothers soon followed him out to the coast from their native Mississippi, and began playing the Southern California gospel circuit before going after a more secular audience in the early 60s. After signing to Columbia in 1966 the group got to work recording several singles for the label, including an early version of the song that would eventually make them famous, Time Has Come Today. Columbia refused to release the song, however, and instead went with a more conventional tune written by Willie Chambers called Fallin' In Love. The record was released in early 1967 but failed to make a splash.
Artist: Bob Dylan
Title: Tombstone Blues
Source: Mono CD: The Best Of The Original Mono Recordings (originally released on LP: Highway 61 Revisited)
Writer(s): Bob Dylan
Label: Columbia/Legacy
Year: 1965
One of the most influential albums in rock history was Bob Dylan's 1965 LP Highway 61 Revisited. Although he had experimented with adding electric guitar, bass and drums to some of the songs on his previous album, Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited was his first LP to feature electric instruments on every track. Of these, the most notable was probably the guitar work of Michael Bloomfield, who would soon come to prominence as lead guitarist for the Butterfield Blues Band. Bloomfield's work is most prominent on blues-based tracks such as Tombstone Blues, which follows the classic Like A Rolling Stone on side one of the original LP.
Artist: West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band
Title: Unfree Child
Source: LP: Volume II
Writer(s): Markley/Harris
Label: Reprise
Year: 1967
For those who are not familiar with reel-to-reel tape technology, here's a quick primer. As with all tape tech, a recording is created by a magnetic head imprinting patterns onto magnetic tape. This tape travels across the head at a predetermined speed. There were actually several speeds used over the years, all of which were standardized by measuring the length of tape travelling across the head in one second. In addition, each standard speed was exactly one half of the one above it, with the fastest having the highest quality. The fastest known speed was 30 inches per second (only used by computers, as far as I know), with 15 ips being the standard speed for studio recordings. Radio stations generally had machines that ran at either 15 or 7 1/2 ips, while home units ran at either 7 1/2 or 3 3/4. Dictating machines, which were virtually useless for recording music, used 1 7/8 or even 15/16 (which had so much tape hiss you could barely hear the recording itself). The advantage of halving the speed (besides the obvious economic advantage) is that the original key of the music is the same, albeit an octave lower. This made it possible to deliberately record something at the wrong speed, then play that recording back at the regular speed in the same key (but at half or double tempo). As the technology developed it became possible to put multiple tracks onto the same strip of tape, with first two, then three, four, eight and even sixteen tracks running parallel along the tape. This is what made it possible to record overdubs (by putting the original recording on one track and play it back while recording more stuff on another one), and to record in stereo. Unfree Child, which starts off a set of 1967 tracks from L.A. bands, has an intro that was actually recorded at a higher speed then played back at the next one down, giving it a deep growling sound. This type of effect, combined with backwards masking (created by playing the tape back to front and recording something on one of the unused tracks) is what got some heavy metal bands into trouble for putting hidden "Satanic" messages on their records.
Artist: Ultimate Spinach
Title: Plastic Raincoats/Hung Up Minds
Source: LP: Ultimate Spinach
Writer(s): Ian Bruce-Douglas
Label: M-G-M
Year: 1968
If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then Country Joe McDonald's ears must have been burning when the first Ultimate Spinach album hit the stands. Indeed, many of Ian Bruce-Douglas's compositions, such as Plastic Raincoats/Hung Up Minds, sound as if they could have been written by McDonald himself. Still, it was the 1960s and jumping on the bandwagon was almost a way of life (witness the dozens of Mick Jagger soundalikes popping up across the country in the wake of the British Invasion), so perhaps Bruce-Douglas can be forgiven for at least trying to copy something a bit more current. Unfortunately, M-G-M Records decided to tout Ultimate Spinach as part of a "Boss-Town Sound" that never truly existed, further damaging the group's credibility, and after a second LP, Bruce-Douglas left the band, which, strangely enough, continued on without him for several years, albeit in an entirely different musical vein.
Artist: Pink Floyd
Title: Interstellar Overdrive
Source: CD: The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn
Writer(s): Barrett/Waters/Wright/Mason
Label: Capitol (original label: Tower)
Year: 1967
Syd Barrett was still very much at the helm for Pink Floyd's first LP, Piper At The Gates Of Dawn, released in 1967. The group had already released a pair of Barrett-penned singles, Arnold Layne (which was banned by the BBC) and See Emily Play. Piper, though, was the first full album for the group, and some tracks, notably the nine-minute psychedelic masterpiece Interstellar Overdrive, were entirely group efforts. On the original UK version of the LP Overdrive tracks directly into a Barrett piece, the Gnome. The US version, issued on Tower records, truncated Overdrive and re-arranged the song order.
Artist: Rolling Stones
Title: She's A Rainbow
Source: CD: Their Satanic Majesties Request
Writer: Jagger/Richards
Label: Abkco (original label: London)
Year: 1967
The only song from Their Satanic Majesties Request to get significant airplay in the US was She's A Rainbow, released as a single in the fall of '67. Another song from the album, In Another Land, was released only in the UK and touted as the first Bill Wyman solo song (although still a Rolling Stones record). 2,000 Light Years From Home, the B side to She's A Rainbow, did get some international airplay as well.
Artist: Rory Gallagher
Title: It's You
Source: LP: Rory Gallagher
Writer(s): Rory Gallagher
Label: Atco
Year: 1971
Rory Gallagher was one of those people generally refererred to as a "musician's musician". His first band, Taste, never had any great commercial success, yet was well-known among their peers for its eclectic repertoire and superb musicianship. When Gallagher decided to put together a new band for his 1971 solo debut LP he first considered Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell, jamming with the two former Experience members at a practice room in his native Belfast before deciding instead to go with two local musicians, Gerry McAvoy and Wilgar Campbell, instead. The album, like virtually every release by Gallagher, was only a moderate success, despite being filled with fine tunes such as the country flavored It's You.
Artist: E-Types
Title: Put The Clock Back On The Wall
Source: Mono CD: Nuggets-Original Artyfacts from the Psychedelic Era (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Writer: Bonner/Gordon
Label: Rhino
Year: 1967
The E-Types were from Salinas, California, which at the time was known among travelers along US 101 mostly for it's sulfiric smell. As many people from Salinas apparently went to nearby San Jose as often as possible, the E-Types became regulars on the local scene in the latter town, eventually landing a contract with Tower Records and Ed Cobb, who also produced the Standells and the Chocolate Watchband. Since the Standells were already known as a garage-rock band (although they were really a bar band), Cobb tried positioning the Watchband as a psychedelic band (they were really more of a garage band) and the E-Types as a pop-rock band (although they were probably the most psychedelic of the three), hooking them up with the same Bonner/Gordon songwriting team that would soon be receiving fat royalty checks from songs like Happy Together and She's My Girl, both hits for the Turtles. Put The Clock Back On The Wall was actually titled after a popular phase of the time. After a day or two of losing all awareness of time (and sometimes space), generally due to the influence of certain mind-altering chemicals, it was time to put the clock back on the wall, or get back to reality if you prefer. The song was originally released in early 1967, shortly before Happy Together hit the charts.
Artist: Paul Revere And The Raiders
Title: Kicks
Source: Greatest Hits
Writer(s): Mann/Weil
Label: Columbia
Year: 1966
Kicks was not the first pop song with a strong anti-drug message, but it was the first one to be a certified hit, making it to the number four spot on the US charts and hitting number one in Canada. It was also the biggest hit for Paul Revere and the Raiders until Indian Reservation went all the way to the top
five years later.
Artist: Moody Blues
Title: Legend Of A Mind
Source: CD: In Search Of The Lost Chord
Writer(s): Ray Thomas
Label: Deram
Year: 1968
The Moody Blues started off as a fairly typical British beat band, scoring one major inteernational hit, Go Now, in 1965, as well as several minor British hit singles. By 1967 lead vocalist Denny Laine was no longer with the group (he would later surface as a member of Paul McCartney's Wings), and the remaining members were not entirely sure of where to go next. At around that time their record label, Deram, was looking to make a rock version of a well-known classical piece (The Nine Planets), and the Moody Blues were tapped for the project. Somewhere along the way, however, the group decided to instead write their own music for rock band and symphony orchestra, and Days Of Future Passed was the result. The album, describing a somewhat typical day in the life of a somewhat typical Britisher, was successful enough to revitalize the band's career, and a follow-up LP, In Search Of The Lost Chord, was released in 1968. Instead of a full orchestra, however, the band members themselves provided all the instrumentation on the new album, using a relatively new keyboard instrument called the mellotron (a complicated contraption that utilized tape loops) to simulate orchestral sounds. Like its predecessor, In Search Of The Lost Chord was a concept album, this time dealing with the universal search for the meaning of life through music. One of the standout tracks on the album is Legend Of A Mind, with its signature lines: "Timothy Leary's dead. No, no, he's outside looking in." Although never released as a single, the track got a fair amount of airplay on college and progressive FM radio stations, and has long been considered a cult hit.
Artist: Yardbirds
Title: Too Much Monkey Business
Source: LP: 16 Rock Guitar Greats (originally released in UK on LP: Five Live Yardbirds)
Writer(s): Chuck Berry
Label: Trip (original label: Columbia)
Year: 1964
The first Yardbirds album consisted entirely of live tracks, most of which were covers of old blues and rock and roll tunes. It was the only Yardbirds LP released in the UK with Eric Clapton on guitar, although there were also several singles and an EP or two released by the same lineup. The album was not released in the US, although several tracks did appear on the US-only LP For Your Love in 1965. One of the tracks that never saw a US release was the album's opening song, a cover of Chuck Berry's Too Much Monkey Business that shows off Clapton's guitar and Keith Relf's vocals and harmonica work equally.
Artist: Dick Dale/Stevie Ray Vaughan
Title: Pipeline
Source: CD: The Best Of Dick Dale And His Del-Tones (from the soundtrack of the movie Back To The Beach)
Writer(s): Spickard/Carmen
Label: Rhino
Year: 1987
Although most people associate surf music with vocal groups such as the Beach Boys and Jan & Dean, the true king of surf was guitarist Dick Dale, who pretty much invented the entire genre. Dale was the first choice of Leo Fender to test out the new Fender Reverb amplifier, which he did while touring the West Coast extensively during the early 1960s. Although surf music itself was somewhat sidetracked by the British Invasion of 1964, Dale continued to play live gigs until forced into retirement by rectal cancer in the latter part of the decade. He was able to beat the cancer, thanks to the support of many friends (including Jimi Hendrix, whose famous line "never hear surf music again" was actually meant as words of encouragement), but did not become musically active again until the 1980s. In 1987 he teamed up with Stevie Ray Vaughan to record and perform a cover of the Chantay's Pipeline in the movie Back To The Beach, and in the years since has begun to receive the recognition for his contribution to rock music that he so richly deserves.
Artist: Blues Image
Title: Take Me To The Sunrise
Source: LP: Blues Image
Writer(s): Blues Image
Label: Atco
Year: 1969
Formed in Tampa, Florida, in 1966, Blues Image originally consisted of singer-guitarist Mike Pinera, singer-drummer Manuel "Manny" Bertematti, singer-percussionist Joe Lala, keyboardist Emilio Garcia, and bassist Malcolm Jones. They were later joined by keyboardist Frank "Skip" Konte when Emilio Garcia left the band to become a pilot. The band relocated to Miami in 1968, where they became the house band at the legendary club Thee Image. While performing at Thee Image, the members of Blues Image became friends with members of several bands that played there, including Cream, Jimi Hendrix, and the Grateful Dead. It was Hendrix that convinced them that a move to Los Angeles would be to their benefit, and sure enough the Blues Image landed a contract with Atco shortly after their arrival there. Their debut album, which starts off with the track Take Me To The Sunrise, was released in February of 1969. After two more albums and one hit single (Ride Captain Ride), Blues Image split up in 1970, although several of the band's members stayed active with other bands for many years.
Artist: Clefs Of Lavender Hill
Title: Stop-Get A Ticket
Source: Mono CD: Nuggets-Original Artyfacts From The First Psychedelic Era (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Writer(s): Travis & Coventry Fairchild
Label: Rhino (original label: Thames)
Year: 1966
The Clefs Of Lavender Hill were a band from North Miami that featured not one, but two sets of siblings: the brother and sister team of Travis and Coventry Fairchild (both of which sang and played guitar) and the Moss brothers, Bill (bass) and Fred (drums). The first single from the band was a song called First Tell Me Why, but it was the B side of the record, a Beatlesque tune called Stop-Get A Ticket that became a hit on Miami radio stations. The song was picked up by Date Records and peaked nationally at # 80. Subsequent releases by the Clefs failed to crack the Hot 100 and the group (after several personnel changes) finally called it quits in 1968.
Year: 1966
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