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.
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