Artist: Jefferson Airplane
Title: Blues From An Airplane
Source: Mono LP: Jefferson Airplane Takes Off
Writer(s): Balin/Spence
Label: RCA Victor
Year: 1966
Blues From An Airplane was the opening song on the first Jefferson Airplane album, Jefferson Airplane Takes Off. Although never released as a single, it was picked by the group to open their first anthology album, The Worst Of Jefferson Airplane, as well.
Artist: Electric Prunes
Title: Train For Tomorrow
Source: CD: I Had Too Much To Dream (Last Night)
Writer(s): Lowe/Tulin/Williams/Spagnola/Ritter
Label: Collector's Choice/Rhino (original label: Reprise)
Year: 1967
Although the bulk of material on the Electric Prunes' first LP was from outside sources, there were a few exceptions. One of the more notable ones was Train For Tomorrow, an innovative piece credited to the entire band that shows what this group could have done if allowed more artistic freedom.
Artist: Rolling Stones
Title: No Expectations
Source: LP: Beggar's Banquet
Writer(s): Jagger/Richards
Label: London
Year: 1968
After the heavy dose of studio effects on Their Satanic Majesties Request, the Rolling Stones took a back-to-basics approach for their next album, Beggar's Banquet, the first to be produced by Jimmy Miller (who had previously worked with Steve Winwood in Traffic and the Spencer Davis Group). No Expectations, the second track on the album, uses minimal instrumentation and places a greater emphasis on Mick Jagger's vocals and Brian Jones's slide guitar work. Sadly, it was to be Jones's last album as a member of the Rolling Stones, as heavy drug use was already taking its toll (and would soon take his life as well).
Artist: Czar
Title: Ritual Fire Dance
Source: Mono British import CD: Love, Poetry And Revolution
Writer(s): de Falla/arr. Hodges
Label: Grapefruit
Year: 1970
After a series of unsuccessful singles for various labels from 1965-1969, Tuesday's Children decided to abandon light pop for a more progressive sound, changing their name to Czar in the process. Czar's debut LP came out in May of 1970, but it was missing one track due to difficulties over publishing rights: an adaptation of Spanish composer Manuel de Falla's Ritual Fire Dance that the group had recorded in February of that year, about a month after their first gig using their new name.
Artist: Jethro Tull
Title: For Michael Collins, Jeffrey And Me
Source: CD: Benefit
Writer(s): Ian Anderson
Label: Chrysalis/Capitol (original label: Reprise)
Year: 1970
All three of Jethro Tull's early albums contained one track with the name Jeffrey in the song title. The reference was to Jeffrey Hammond, who was not yet a member of the band, but was closely associated with them. The Benefit track, For Michael Collins, Jeffrey And Me, is probably the darkest of the three, reflecting the sound of the album itself. Hammond would soon replace Glenn Cornick on bass, while Michael Collins would remain an American Astronaut for a few more years.
Artist: Guess Who
Title: Humpty's Blues/American Woman (Epilogue)
Source: CD: American Woman
Writer(s): Bachman/Cummings/Peterson/Kale
Label: Buddha/BMG (original label: RCA Victor)
Year: 1970
Guitarist Randy Bachman of the Guess Who was, in the words of lead vocalist Burton Cummings, "chomping at the bit" to use some new guitar effects equipment he had acquired (fuzz boxes and Herzog sustain pedals, mostly). So the rest of the band obliged him by coming up with a Led Zeppelin style blues number called Humpty's Blues. Cummings's lyrics for the song were about the band's drummer, Garry Peterson, who had somehow acquired the nickname "Humpty Mix". The finished song ended up being the longest track on the album, which, combined with a short reprise of the opening section of American Woman, closes out the Guess Who's most popular album.
Artist: Eric Burdon And The Animals
Title: Good Times
Source: LP: Winds Of Change
Writer(s): Burdon/Briggs/Weider/Jenkins/McCulloch
Label: M-G-M
Year: 1967
By the end of the original Animals' run they were having greater chart success with their singles in the US than in their native UK. That trend continued with the formation of the "new" Animals in 1967 and their first single, When I Was Young. Shortly after the first LP by the band now known as Eric Burdon And The Animals came out, M-G-M decided to release the song San Franciscan Nights as a single to take advantage of the massive youth migration to the city that summer. Meanwhile the band's British label decided to instead issue Good Times, (an autobiographical song which was released in the US as the B side to San Franciscan Nights) as a single, and the band ended up with one of their biggest UK hits ever. Riding the wave of success of Good Times, San Franciscan Nights eventually did get released in the UK and was a hit there as well.
Artist: The Mickey Finn
Title: Garden Of My Mind
Source: Mono CD: Nuggets II-Original Artyfacts From The British Empire And Beyond 1964-1969 (originally released in UK as 45 RPM single)
Writer(s): Waller/Marks
Label: Rhino (original label: Direction)
Year: 1967
Not every band in the world makes a living performing their own original material. In fact, the majority of working musicians are members of cover bands, playing a variety of venues all over the world. Most of these bands will never see the inside of a recording studio. There have been times and places, however, when even cover bands could get recording contracts, especially if they had a sizable local following. One such time and place was London in the mid-1960s, where bands like Mickey Finn And The Blue Men found steady work playing ska and R&B covers for the Mod crowd. They recorded a series of singles for several different local labels, one of which was Garden Of My Mind, a freakbeat tune written by guitarist Mickey Waller and vocalist Alan Marks and released on the Direction label. As the decade wore on and the Mod fad began to die out, the Mickey Finn (as they were then known) found itself playing more and more on the European continent, eventually calling it a day (or night) in 1971.
Artist: Jimi Hendrix Experience
Title: Manic Depression
Source: Dutch import LP: The Singles (originally released on LP: Are You Experienced)
Writer(s): Jimi Hendrix
Label: Polydor (original label: Reprise)
Year: 1967
My dad bought an Akai X-355 reel to reel tape recorder when we moved to Ramstein, Germany in early 1968. It was pretty much the state of the art in home audio technology at the time. The problem was that we did not have a stereo system to hook it into, so he bought a set of Koss headphones to go with it. One of my first purchases was a pre-recorded reel to reel tape of Are You Experienced. The Akai had an auto-reverse system and I would lie on the couch with the headphones on to go to sleep every night listening to songs like Manic Depression. Is it any wonder I turned out like I did?
Artist: Grateful Dead
Title: Cream Puff War
Source: CD: The Grateful Dead
Writer(s): Jerry Garcia
Label: Warner Brothers
Year: 1967
The first Grateful Dead album was recorded in a matter of days, and was mostly made up of cover tunes that the band was currently performing. The two exceptions were The Golden Road (To Unlimited Devotion), which was credited to the entire band, and Cream Puff War, a song written by guitarist Jerry Garcia. The two tracks were paired up on the band's first single as well. Cream Puff War, as recorded, ran nearly three and a half minutes, but was edited down to 2:28 at the insistence of the corporate shirts at Warner Brothers Records.
Artist: West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band
Title: If You Want This Love
Source: Mono CD: Where The Action Is: L.A. Nuggets 1965-68 (originally released on LP: Part One)
Writer: Baker Knight
Label: Rhino (original label: Reprise)
Year: 1967
The first West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band album, Volume One, had a limited print run on, Fifa, a small independent label in L.A. After landing a contract with Reprise, the band recut many of the songs (most of which were cover tunes) from Volume One and called the new album Part One. If You Want This Love, a song written and originally recorded by L.A. local legend Baker Knight, is one of those recut tracks.
Artist: Cream
Title: Sleepy Time Time
Source: LP: Fresh Cream
Writer(s): Bruce/Godfrey
Label: Atco
Year: 1966
When Cream was first formed, both Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker worked with co-writers on original material for the band. Baker's partner was Pete Brown, while Bruce worked with his wife, Janet Godfrey. Eventually Bruce and Brown began collaborating, creating some of Cream's most memorable songs, but not before Bruce and Godfrey wrote Sleepy Time Time, one of the high points of the Fresh Cream album.
Artist: Hollies
Title: King Midas In Reverse
Source: British import CD: Psychedelia At Abbey Road (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Writer(s): Clarke/Hicks/Nash
Label: EMI (original label: Parlophone)
Year: 1967
One of the last Hollies singles to include original member Graham Nash, King Midas In Reverse combines pop and psychedelia in a purely British way. The problem was that, with the exception of Nash, the Hollies had no desire to embrace psychedelia, and Nash soon found himself banding with David Crosby and Stephen Stills instead.
Artist: Fairport Convention
Title: The Lobster
Source: British import CD: Fairport Convention
Writer(s): Painter/Hutchings/Thompson
Label: Polydor
Year: 1968
The recording history of the premier English folk-rock band, Fairport Convention, can be more than a little confusing. A large part of the problem was caused by A&M Records, who had the rights to release the band's material in the US, starting with the band's second LP. Rather than go with the original album title, What We Did On Our Holidays, A&M retitled the album Fairport Convention, releasing it in 1970. The problem is that the band's first album, released in the UK on Polydor in 1968, was also titled Fairport Convention. Adding to the confusion is the fact that the lineup on the 1968 Polydor LP differs from that of every other Fairport album, most notably in the absence of the band's most visible member, vocalist Sandy Denny. Fairport Convention (the band) was formed in 1967, and was consciously following in the footsteps of Jefferson Airplane, albeit from a British perspective. Like the Airplane, the original Fairport lineup had a wealth of talent, including Martin Lamble on violin, Simon Nicol on guitars, Judy Dibble on autoharp, recorder and piano, Richard Thompson on guitar and mandolin, Ashley Hutchings (then known as Tyger Hutchings) on bass and Ian MacDonald, who shared lead vocals with Dyble. Musically the band was far more rock-oriented than on later LPs, even dabbling with a progressive rock sound on tracks like The Lobster. This can be attributed, at least in part, to a general disdain among the youth of Britain for the traditional English folk music that was taught to every schoolchild in the country (whether they wanted it or not). Later albums would find Fairport Convention doing more and more traditional folk, eventually becoming the most world's popular practicioners of the art, although they never entirely abandoned their rock roots.
Artist: Beatles
Title: Help!
Source: Mono LP: Rarities (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Writer(s): Lennon/McCartney
Label: Capitol
Year: 1965
It's a little-known fact that the mono single version of the 1965 Beatles hit Help! uses a different lead vocal take than the stereo album version heard on the soundtrack album and most Beatles collections. Which one was recorded first? Good question.
Artist: Creedence Clearwater Revival
Title: Run Through The Jungle
Source: LP: More Creedence Gold (originally released on LP: Cosmos Factory and as 45 RPM single)
Writer(s): John Fogerty
Label: Fantasy
Year: 1970
One of the most popular songs on the 1970 Creedence Clearwater Revival album Cosmos Factory was a tune by John Fogerty called Run Through The Jungle. At the time of the album's release, many people assumed the song was about the Viet-Nam war. However, Fogerty, in a 1993 interview with the Los Angeles Times, said,“ I think a lot of people thought that because of the times, but I was talking about America and the proliferation of guns, registered and otherwise. I'm a hunter and I'm not antigun, but I just thought that people were so gun-happy -- and there were so many guns uncontrolled that it really was dangerous, and it's even worse now." As one half of a double-sided single (paired with Up Around The Bend), the song became the sixth single to break into the top 10, and has been covered by several artists over the years. In the late 1980s the song was at the center of a lawsuit brought by the owner of Fantasy Records, Saul Zaentz, claiming that a 1984 Fogerty song, The Old Man Down The Road, was actually Run Through The Jungle with different lyrics. Zaentz had basically screwed Fogerty out of publishing rights for all of CCR's material, resulting in Fogerty being unable to perform any of the band's tunes, and was now suing Fogerty for plagiarizing himself. In a rare victory for common sense Fogerty eventually won the lawsuit (although the judge did grant Zaentz some concessions), but Fogerty had to countersue Zaentz in order to recover the money he had spent on attorneys. Eventually Fogerty won that lawsuit as well, and is happily performing old Creedence songs as well as new material.
Artist: Peacepipe
Title: The Sun Won't Shine Forever
Source: CD: A Deadly Dose Of Wild Psych (originally released as stereo 45 RPM single)
Writer(s): Jon Uzonyi
Label: Arf! Arf! (original label: Accent)
Year: 1969
Peacepipe was a Southern California band led by guitarist John Uzonyi, who wrote both sides of the band's only single, The Sun Won't Shine Forever b/w Lazy River Blues, released in 1969. The following year Peacepipe recorded an entier album's worth of material that went unreleased until 1995. The 1995 CD Rockadelic, which collects all that unreleased material, does not include either side of the single.
Artist: Steppenwolf
Title: The Ostrich
Source: Canadian CD: Steppenwolf
Writer(s): John Kay
Label: MCA (original label: Dunhill)
Year: 1968
Although John Kay's songwriting skills were still a work in progress on the first Steppenwolf album, there were some outstanding Kay songs on that LP, such as The Ostrich, a song that helped define Steppenwolf as one of the most politically savvy rock bands in history.
Artist: Turtles
Title: Me About You
Source: CD: 20 Greatest Hits (originally released on LP: Happy Together)
Writer(s): Bonner/Gordon
Label: Rhino (original label: White Whale)
Year: 1967
Despite being, in the words of the Turtles' co-leader Mark Volman, one of the band's best recordings, Me About You was not chosen to be released as a single in 1967. Instead, two other bands, the Mojo Men and the Lovin' Spoonful, took a shot at the song, but neither version charted. Eventually, after the Turtles had split up, White Whale Records did release the song as the group's last single, but by then nobody was interested in hearing the Turtles on the radio and the song stalled out in the 105 spot. Described by Volman as "progressive pop with a pulse beat", Me About You features strings and horns by Jerry Yester, a member of the Modern Folk Quintet who would eventually join the Lovin' Spoonful.
Artist: Donovan
Title: Sunny South Kensington
Source: Mono LP: Mellow Yellow (originally released as 45 RPM single B side)
Writer(s): Donovan Leitch
Label: Epic
Year: 1966
Donovan followed up his 1966 hit single Sunshine Superman with an album of the same name. He then repeated himself with the song and album Mellow Yellow. The B side of the Mellow Yellow single was Sunny South Kensington, a tune done in much the same style as Superman. The song was also included on the Mellow Yellow album.
Artist: Crescent Six
Title: And Then
Source: Mono CD: A Heavy Dose Of Lite Psych (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Writer(s): Gregory Ferrera
Label: Arf! Arf! (original label: Rust)
Year: 1965
One of the earliest psychedelic tracks was a single called And Then by New Jersey's Crescent Six. Virtually nothing else is known about the record, which was released on New York's Rust Records label.
Artist: Gurus
Title: Shelly In Camp
Source: LP: Wild In The Streets soundtrack
Writer: Les Baxter
Label: Tower
Year: 1968
Les Baxter is one of those names that sounds vaguely familiar to anyone who was alive in the 50s and 60s, but doesn't seem to be associated with anything in particular. That might be because Baxter was the guy that movie producers went to when they needed something done at the last minute. Such is the case with the short instrumental Shelly In Camp (referring the actress Shelly Winters, whose character ends up in an internment camp in the movie Wild In The Streets), a strange little piece with lots of sitar that closes out side one of the film's soundtrack LP. I seem to recall seeing some Les Baxter albums at a small town radio station I worked at in the early 70s that alternated between country, soft pop and lounge lizard records; Baxter's were in the third pile. "The Gurus", of course, was an entirely fictional name made up by the producers of the Wild In The Streets soundtrack album. I guess it was cheaper than hiring a real band.
Artist: Yardbirds
Title: Evil Hearted You
Source: Simulated stereo Canadian LP: Shapes Of Things (originally released in UK as 45 RPM single and in US on LP: Having A Rave UP)
Writer(s): Graham Gouldman
Label: Bomb (original US label: Epic)
Year: 1965
Perhaps more than that of any other British invasion band, the Yardbirds' US and UK catalogs differ wildly. One of their biggest UK hits was Evil Hearted You, a Graham Gouldman song that made it all the way to the # 3 spot in their native land, but was not even released as a single in the US. Instead, the song appeared on the group's most popular US album, Having A Rave Up, which was not released in the UK at all. Confusing stuff, that.
Artist: Birds
Title: Say Those Magic Words
Source: Mono CD: Nuggets II-Original Artyfacts From The British Empire And Beyond 1964-1969 (originally released in UK as 45 RPM single)
Writer(s): Feldman/Gettehrer/Goldstein/Shuman/Pomus
Label: Rhino (original label: Reaction)
Year: 1966
The Birds are best known for two things. First, they were future Rolling Stone Ron Wood's first band. They also gained notoriety when they took legal action against the Byrds for stealing their name. Originally formed in 1963 as the R&B Bohemians, the band soon changed its name to the Thunderbirds, later shortening it to the Birds to avoid confusion with Chris Farlowe's backup band. The Birds released only four singles between 1964 and 1966, the last of which was an amped up cover of a McCoys tune, Say Those Magic Words. When the single (their first for the Reaction label) failed to chart the group began to disentegrate and officially disbanded in early 1967.
Artist: Who
Title: Sunrise
Source: LP: The Who Sell Out
Writer(s): Pete Townshend
Label: Decca
Year: 1967
One of the nicest tunes on The Who Sell Out is Sunrise, which is actually a Pete Townshend solo tune featuring Townshend's vocals and acoustic guitar. One of my favorites.
Artist: Bob Seger System
Title: 2+2=?
Source: 45 RPM single
Writer(s): Bob Seger
Label: Capitol
Year: 1968
Bob Seger had a series of regional hits in his native Detroit in the mid-1960s, leading to a deal with Capitol Records in 1968. The first single for Capitol was 2+2=?, a powerful anti-Vietnam War tune that was later included on his first LP for the label. The mono single version of the song heard here has a guitar chord near the end of the track that was not on the original recording (on which the song simply stops cold for a few seconds). It was inserted because, according to Seger, radio stations were "afraid of dead air".
Artist: Blues Magoos
Title: (We Ain't Got) Nothin' Yet
Source: LP: Psychedelic Lollipop
Writer(s): Esposito/Gilbert/Scala
Label: Mercury
Year: 1966
The Blues Magoos (original spelling: Bloos) were either the first or second band to use the word psychedelic in an album title. Both they and the 13th Floor Elevators released their debut albums in 1966 and it is unclear which one actually came out first. What's not in dispute is the fact that Psychedelic Lollipop far outsold The Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators. One major reason for this was the fact that (We Ain't Got) Nothin' Yet was a huge national hit in early 1967, which helped album sales considerably. Despite having a unique sound and a look to match (including electric suits), the Magoos were unable to duplicate the success of Nothin' Yet on subsequent releases, partially due to Mercury's pairing of two equally marketable songs on the band's next single without indicating to stations which one they were supposed to be playing.
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: Count Five
Title: Psychotic Reaction
Source: Mono CD: The Best Of 60s Psychedelic Rock (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Writer(s): Ellner/Chaney/Atkinson/Byrne/Michalski
Label: Priority (original label: Double Shot)
Year: 1966
In late 1966 five guys from San Jose California managed to sound more like the Jeff Beck-era Yardbirds that the Yardbirds themselves (a task probably made easier by the fact that Jeff Beck was no longer a Yardbird in late 1966). One interesting note about this record is that as late as the mid-1980s the 45 RPM single on the original label was still available in record stores, complete with the original B side. Normally songs more than a year or two old were only available on anthology LPs or on reissue singles with "back-to-back hits" on them. The complete takeover of the record racks by CDs in the late 1980s changed all that, as all 45s (except for indy releases) soon went the way of the 78 RPM record.
Artist: Standells
Title: Sometimes Good Guys Don't Wear White
Source: Mono LP: Nuggets Vol. 2-Punk (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Writer(s): Ed Cobb
Label: Rhino (original label: Tower)
Year: 1966
If ever a song could be considered a garage-punk anthem, it's Sometimes Good Guys Don't Wear White, the follow-up single to the classic Dirty Water. Both songs were written by Standells' manager/producer Ed Cobb, the record industry's answer to Ed Wood.
Artist: Music Machine
Title: Trouble
Source: British import CD: The Ultimate Turn On (originally released on LP: Turn On The Music Machine)
Writer(s): Sean Bonniwell
Label: Big Beat (original label: Original Sound)
Year: 1966
Sean Bonniwell had definite plans for the Music Machine's first album. His primary goal was to have all original material (with the exception of a slowed-down version of Hey Joe that he and fellow songwriter Tim Rose had been working on; (before you ask, both Rose and the Music Machine recorded it before Jimi Hendrix did). Unfortunately, the shirts at Original Sound Records did not take their own company name seriously and inserted four cover songs that the band had recorded for a local TV show. (This was just the first in a series of bad decisions by the aforementioned shirts that led to a great band not getting the success it deserved.) The best way to listen to Turn On The Music Machine, then, is to program your CD player to skip all the extra cover songs. Listened to that way, this track becomes the second song on the disc, following the classic Talk Talk.
Artist: Neil Young
Title: The Needle And The Damage Done
Source: CD: Harvest
Writer(s): Neil Young
Label: Reprise
Year: 1972
One of Neil Young's best-known songs, The Needle And The Damage Done was written as Young watched his friend and bandmate Danny Whitten (of Crazy Horse) sink deeper and deeper into heroin addiction. It was not too long after the song appeared on Young's 1972 album Harvest that Whitten died of an overdose. Sad stuff.
Tuesday, November 25, 2014
Tuesday, November 18, 2014
Stuck in the Psychedelic Era # 1447 (starts 11/19/14)
Artist: Jefferson Airplane
Title: White Rabbit
Source: 45 RPM single (stereo reissue)
Writer(s): Grace Slick
Label: RCA
Year: 1967
For many the definitive song of the psychedelic era, White Rabbit, released as a single after getting extensive airplay on "underground" FM stations, was the second (and final) top 10 hit for the Airplane in the summer of '67.
Artist: Beatles
Title: Getting Better
Source: CD: Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
Writer(s): Lennon/McCartney
Label: Parlophone (original US label: Capitol)
Year: 1967
Following their 1966 North American tour, the Beatles announced that they were giving up touring to concentrate on their songwriting and studio work. Freed of the responsibilities of the road (and under the influence of mind-expanding substances), the band members found themselves discovering new sonic possibilities as never before (or since), hitting a creative peak with their 1967 album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, often cited as the greatest album ever recorded. The individual Beatles were about to move in separate musical directions, but as of Sgt. Pepper's were still functioning mostly as a single unit, as is heard on the chorus of Getting Better, in which Paul McCartney's opening line, "I have to admit it's getting better", is immediately answered by John Lennon's playfully cynical "can't get no worse". The members continued to experiment with new instrumental styles as well, such as George Harrison's use of sitar on the song's bridge, accompanied by Ringo Starr's bongos.
Artist: Penny Peeps
Title: Model Village
Source: Mono British import CD: Insane Times (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Writer(s): Alexander
Label: Zonophone (original label: Liberty)
Year: 1967
Although the British psychedelic era was considerably shorter (only about two years long) than its American counterpart, there are a surprisingly large number of British psych-pop singles that were never issued in the US. Among those was a somewhat forgettable song called Little Man With A Stick, released in 1967 by a band called the Penny Peeps. The band took its name from the risque coin-fed viewers at Brighton Beach (apparently London's version of Coney Island). Emulating his American counterparts, producer Les Reed (who wrote Little Man), allowed the band itself to come up with its own B side. The result was Model Village, a track that manages to convey a classic garage-rock energy while remaining uniquely British.
Artist: Simon and Garfunkel
Title: America
Source: 45 RPM single B side (song originally released on LP: Bookends)
Writer(s): Paul Simon
Year: 1968/1972
Four years after the release of the album Bookends (and two years after the breakup of Simon and Garfunkel), Columbia decided to release the song For Emily, Wherever I May Find Her, from their final album Bridge Over Troubled Water, as a single, to coincide with the release of their Greatest Hits album. For the B side, they went even further back, pulling out the original tapes for the song America. The tracks on the Bookends album were deliberately overlapped to form a continuous audio montage, making this the first standalone version of America to be released.
Artist: Second Helping
Title: On Friday
Source: Mono LP: Ain't It Hard (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Writer(s): Kenny Loggins
Label: Sundazed (original label: Viva)
Year: 1968
Although the band Second Helping did not get much airplay with either of their singles for Snuff Garrett's Viva, the songs themselves, such as On Friday, are notable as being early songwriting efforts from a teenaged Kenny Loggins, who would go on to greater fame as half of Loggins and Messina and later as a highly successful solo artist.
Artist: Nazz
Title: Open My Eyes
Source: CD: Nuggets-Classics From The Psychedelic 60s (originally released as 45 RPM single and on LP: The Nazz)
Writer(s): Todd Rundgren
Label: Rhino (original label: SGC)
Year: 1968
The Nazz was a band from Philadelphia who were basically the victims of their own bad timing. 1968 was the year that progressive FM radio began to get recognition as a viable format while top 40 radio was being dominated by bubble gum pop bands such as the 1910 Fruitgum Company and the Ohio Express. The Nazz, on the other hand, sounded more like British bands such as the Move and Brian Augur's Trinity that were performing well on the UK charts but were unable to buy a hit in the US. The band had plenty of talent, most notably guitarist/vocalist/songwriter Todd Rundgren, who would go on to establish a successful career, both as an artist (he played all the instruments on his Something/Anything LP and led the band Utopia) and a producer (Grand Funk's We're An American Band, among others). Open My Eyes was originally issued as the A side of a single, but ended up being eclipsed in popularity by its flip side, a song called Hello It's Me, that ended up getting airplay in Boston and other cities, eventually hitting the Canadian charts (a new solo version would become Rundgren's first major hit five years later).
Artist: Who
Title: Leaving Here
Source: LP: Who's Missing
Writer(s): Holland/Dozier/Holland
Label: MCA
Year: 1965
In 1960s London, white youth began to take an interest in black music; not the music of the local black population, however, which was Caribbean in origin, but the R&B hits being imported from the US. The Mods, in particular, were big fans of the Motown sound, and by the middle of the decade there were several local bands playing their own brand of R&B. Among the most popular of those were the Who, who recorded several R&B cover songs in their early days, including Leaving Here, one of the earliest Holland/Dozier/Holland collaborations that had been released as a single by Eddie Holland in 1963. The Who's version of the tune, recorded in 1965, remained unreleased until 1985, when it was included on a compilation album called Who's Missing.
Artist: Misunderstood
Title: I Cried My Eyes Out
Source: Simulated stereo British import CD: Before The Dream Faded
Writer(s): Greg Treadway
Label: Cherry Red
Year: 1965
The Misunderstood was originally formed in Riverside, California as an instrumental surf band called the Blue Notes in 1963 . Two years later they added a vocalist and a full-time bass player and changed their name to the Misunderstood. By this time surf music was on the way out, and like many US garage bands of the time, the Misunderstood emulated the sound of British bands like the Yardbirds, Animals and Rolling Stones. The group found their way into a local recording studio and recorded a six-song acetate of original tunes, including I Cried My Eyes Out, written by guitarist and co-founder Greg Treadway. After another key personnel change the band came to the attention of local DJ John Ravencroft, himself an expatriot Brit. Ravencroft convinced the band to relocate to the UK, but before they could get into a recording studio Treadway was forced to the return to the US by his draft board, and ended up joining the navy. Meanwhile the Misunderstood, with a new guitarist, managed to record another half dozen or so tracks, including a single released on the Fontana label before visa problems led to the band's breakup.
Artist: Santana
Title: Treat
Source: LP: Santana
Writer(s): Santana (band)
Label: Columbia
Year: 1969
Guitarist Carlos Santana's original band was known to the San Francisco area as a jam band with a decidedly Latino flavor. Promoter Bill Graham convinced the band to write more structured material for their first LP, which was released in 1969. Although not an instant success, the album, buoyed by the group's appearance at Woodstock, eventually reached the # 4 spot on the Billboard Top 200 Albums chart. Treat, a fairly representative example of the group's early style, is indeed structured, yet maintains much of the band's free-flowing energy through several style and tempo changes.
Artist: Canned Heat
Title: Refried Boogie (part 1)
Source: British import CD: Living The Blues
Writer(s): Canned Heat
Label: BGO (original label: Liberty)
Year: 1968
Canned Heat's third album was a double LP released in 1968 under the title Living The Blues. The first disc was a collection of studio recordings that included their hit single Going Up The Country and an experimental audio collage called Parthenogenesis. It was the second disc, however, that made rock history, as it consisted of a 41 minute live performance of their trademark jam, Refried Boogie, spread out over both sides of the LP. This week we are presenting the first half of that performance (which was side three of the original LP).
Artist: West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band
Title: Tracy Had A Hard Day Sunday
Source: LP: Volume II
Writer(s): Markley/Harris
Label: Reprise
Year: 1967
Once upon a time record producer Kim Fowley hired the Yardbirds to play a private Hollywood party. The Harris brothers, a pair of local art school students who had sent their homemade tapes to Fowley were impressed by the band's musical abilities. Bob Markley, an almost-30-year-old hipster with a law degree and an inheritance was impressed with the band's ability to attract teenage girls. Fowley introduced the Harris brothers to Markley, who expressed a willingness to finance them in return for letting him be their new lead vocalist, and the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band was formed. Before it was all over the group had recorded five or six albums for at least three labels, churning out an eclectic mix of psychedelic tunes such as Tracy Had A Hard Day Sunday, which appeared on the second album for Reprise Records (their third LP overall), appropriately titled Volume II.
Artist: Picadilly Line
Title: Rosemary's Bluebelle Day
Source: Mono British import CD: Love, Poetry And Revolution
Writer(s): Edwards/Hand
Label: Grapefruit
Year: 1967
Rod Edwards and Roger Hand were a British folk-rock duo who appeared (occassionally with a backup band) at various underground London clubs like the UFO and Middle Earth under the name Picadilly Line. The duo released several singles and one LP (The Huge World Of Emily Small), before dropping the pretense of being a band and going on to greater success as Edwards Hand with producer George Martin. While still using the name Picadilly Line they recorded Rosemary's Bluebelle Day with a full band, but did not release the track.
Artist: Jimi Hendrix Experience
Title: Purple Haze
Source: 45 RPM single (reissue)
Writer(s): Jimi Hendrix
Label: Reprise
Year: 1967
Purple Haze has one of the most convoluted release histories of any song ever recorded. Originally issued in the UK as a single, it scored high on the British charts. When Reprise got the rights to release the first Hendrix album, Are You Experienced?, they chose to replace the first track on the album with Purple Haze, moving the original opening track, Foxy Lady, to side two of the LP. The song next appeared on the Smash Hits album, which in Europe was on the Polydor label. This was the way things stayed until the early 1990s, when MCA acquired the rights to the Hendrix catalog and re-issued Are You Experienced? with the tracks restored to the UK ordering, but preceded by the six non-album sides (including Purple Haze) that had originally been released prior to the album. Most recently, the Hendrix Family Trust has again changed labels and the US version of Are You Experienced? is once again in print, this time on Sony's Legacy label. This means that Purple Haze (heard here in its original mono mix) has now been released by all three of the world's major record companies. That's right. There are only three major record companies left in the entire world, Sony (which owns Columbia and RCA, among others), Warner Brothers (which owns Elektra, Atlantic, Reprise and others) and Universal (which started off as MCA and now, as the world's largest record company, owns far too many current and former labels to list here). Don't you just love out of control corporate consolidation?
Artist: Jimi Hendrix Experience
Title: Gypsy Eyes
Source: CD: Electric Ladyland
Writer(s): Jimi Hendrix
Label: Legacy (original label: Reprise)
Year: 1968
Electric Ladyland, the last album by the Jimi Hendrix Experience, was a double LP mixture of studio recordings and live jams in the studio with an array of guest musicians. Gypsy Eyes is a good example of Hendrix's prowess at the mixing board as well as on guitar.
Artist: Jimi Hendrix Experience
Title: Foxy Lady
Source: 45 RPM single (reissue)
Writer: Jimi Hendrix
Label: Reprise
Year: 1967
The US and UK versions of the Are You Experienced differed considerably. For one thing, three songs that had been previously released as singles in the UK (where single tracks and albums were mutually exclusive) were added to the US version of the album, replacing UK album tracks. Another rather significant difference is that the UK version of the album was issued only in mono. When the 4-track master tapes arrived in the US, engineers at Reprise Records created new stereo mixes of all the songs, including Foxy Lady, which had led off the UK version of Are You Experience but had been moved to a spot near the end of side two on the US album. The original mono single mix of Foxy Lady, meanwhile, was issued as a single in the US, despite the song being only available as an album track in the UK.
Artist: Blues Project
Title: Caress Me Baby
Source: LP: Projections
Writer: Jimmy Reed
Label: Verve Forecast
Year: 1966
After deliberately truncating their extended jams for their first LP, Live At The Cafe Au-Go-Go, the Blues Project recorded a second album that was a much more accurate representation of what the band was all about. Mixed in with the group's original material was this outstanding cover of an old Jimmy Reed tune, sung by lead guitarist and Blues Project founder Danny Kalb, running over seven minutes long. Andy Kuhlberg's memorable walking bass line would be lifted a few year later by Blood, Sweat and Tears bassist Jim Fielder for the track Blues, Part II.
Artist: Los Bravos
Title: Black Is Black
Source: 45 RPM single (stereo reissue)
Writer(s): Grainger/Hayes/Wadey
Label: London
Year: 1966
The first band from Spain to have a major pop hit was Los Bravos, who took Black Is Black to the top 10 in several countries, including the US, in late 1966. Interestingly, the band's lead vocalist, Michael Kogel, was actually a German national.
Artist: Rolling Stones
Title: Out Of Time
Source: LP: Aftermath (British version)
Writer(s): Jagger/Richards
Label: Abkco (original UK label: Decca)
Year: 1966
The history of the Rolling Stones' Out Of Time is actually somewhat convoluted. Originally released only in the UK as a five and a half minute track on the Aftermath LP (the US version of the album having a different song lineup), the tune was soon covered by British singer Chris Farlowe, whose Mick Jagger-produced single went to the top of the UK charts in July of 1966. A shorter alternative mix of the Stones version was then released on the Flowers album, a US-only compilation of singles, B sides and unreleased tracks compiled by London Records. Finally, in 1975 a third version of the song, using the backing tracks from the Farlowe version and Mick Jagger's vocals, appeared on an album called Metamorphosis, which was a compilation of unreleased tracks that were owned by record mogul Allen Klein.
Artist: Corporation
Title: India
Source: German import CD: The Corporation
Writer: John Coltrane
Label: Repertoire (original label: Capitol)
Year: 1969
A few years back I received an e-mail from a listener who works at WITT-FM near Indianapolis, which has been broadcasting Stuck In The Psychedelic Era since 2010. He mentioned a band he had heard in Chicago in the late 60s called the Corporation, adding that he had recently found a copy of their only album for Capitol on CD. He offered to make me a copy, but, as I am somewhat of a stickler for using legitimate sources for everything I play (i.e. no MP3s or burned copies), I decided to head over to my local music store (Area Records in Geneva, NY) to order my own copy of the CD instead. The track he mentioned in particular was called India, notable for taking up an entire side of the album. I've since learned that they track was also quite popular in discoteques, particularly those in Germany. The song itself was written by jazz legend John Coltrane, and as far as I know has never been attempted by any other rock band.
Artist: Jethro Tull
Title: Serenade To A Cuckoo
Source: LP: This Was
Writer(s): Roland Kirk
Label: Chrysalis (original label: Reprise)
Year: 1968
Jethro Tull did not, as a general rule, record cover tunes. The most notable exception is Roland Kirk's classic jazz piece Serenade To A Cuckoo, which was included on their first LP, This Was.
Title: White Rabbit
Source: 45 RPM single (stereo reissue)
Writer(s): Grace Slick
Label: RCA
Year: 1967
For many the definitive song of the psychedelic era, White Rabbit, released as a single after getting extensive airplay on "underground" FM stations, was the second (and final) top 10 hit for the Airplane in the summer of '67.
Artist: Beatles
Title: Getting Better
Source: CD: Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
Writer(s): Lennon/McCartney
Label: Parlophone (original US label: Capitol)
Year: 1967
Following their 1966 North American tour, the Beatles announced that they were giving up touring to concentrate on their songwriting and studio work. Freed of the responsibilities of the road (and under the influence of mind-expanding substances), the band members found themselves discovering new sonic possibilities as never before (or since), hitting a creative peak with their 1967 album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, often cited as the greatest album ever recorded. The individual Beatles were about to move in separate musical directions, but as of Sgt. Pepper's were still functioning mostly as a single unit, as is heard on the chorus of Getting Better, in which Paul McCartney's opening line, "I have to admit it's getting better", is immediately answered by John Lennon's playfully cynical "can't get no worse". The members continued to experiment with new instrumental styles as well, such as George Harrison's use of sitar on the song's bridge, accompanied by Ringo Starr's bongos.
Artist: Penny Peeps
Title: Model Village
Source: Mono British import CD: Insane Times (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Writer(s): Alexander
Label: Zonophone (original label: Liberty)
Year: 1967
Although the British psychedelic era was considerably shorter (only about two years long) than its American counterpart, there are a surprisingly large number of British psych-pop singles that were never issued in the US. Among those was a somewhat forgettable song called Little Man With A Stick, released in 1967 by a band called the Penny Peeps. The band took its name from the risque coin-fed viewers at Brighton Beach (apparently London's version of Coney Island). Emulating his American counterparts, producer Les Reed (who wrote Little Man), allowed the band itself to come up with its own B side. The result was Model Village, a track that manages to convey a classic garage-rock energy while remaining uniquely British.
Artist: Simon and Garfunkel
Title: America
Source: 45 RPM single B side (song originally released on LP: Bookends)
Writer(s): Paul Simon
Year: 1968/1972
Four years after the release of the album Bookends (and two years after the breakup of Simon and Garfunkel), Columbia decided to release the song For Emily, Wherever I May Find Her, from their final album Bridge Over Troubled Water, as a single, to coincide with the release of their Greatest Hits album. For the B side, they went even further back, pulling out the original tapes for the song America. The tracks on the Bookends album were deliberately overlapped to form a continuous audio montage, making this the first standalone version of America to be released.
Artist: Second Helping
Title: On Friday
Source: Mono LP: Ain't It Hard (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Writer(s): Kenny Loggins
Label: Sundazed (original label: Viva)
Year: 1968
Although the band Second Helping did not get much airplay with either of their singles for Snuff Garrett's Viva, the songs themselves, such as On Friday, are notable as being early songwriting efforts from a teenaged Kenny Loggins, who would go on to greater fame as half of Loggins and Messina and later as a highly successful solo artist.
Artist: Nazz
Title: Open My Eyes
Source: CD: Nuggets-Classics From The Psychedelic 60s (originally released as 45 RPM single and on LP: The Nazz)
Writer(s): Todd Rundgren
Label: Rhino (original label: SGC)
Year: 1968
The Nazz was a band from Philadelphia who were basically the victims of their own bad timing. 1968 was the year that progressive FM radio began to get recognition as a viable format while top 40 radio was being dominated by bubble gum pop bands such as the 1910 Fruitgum Company and the Ohio Express. The Nazz, on the other hand, sounded more like British bands such as the Move and Brian Augur's Trinity that were performing well on the UK charts but were unable to buy a hit in the US. The band had plenty of talent, most notably guitarist/vocalist/songwriter Todd Rundgren, who would go on to establish a successful career, both as an artist (he played all the instruments on his Something/Anything LP and led the band Utopia) and a producer (Grand Funk's We're An American Band, among others). Open My Eyes was originally issued as the A side of a single, but ended up being eclipsed in popularity by its flip side, a song called Hello It's Me, that ended up getting airplay in Boston and other cities, eventually hitting the Canadian charts (a new solo version would become Rundgren's first major hit five years later).
Artist: Who
Title: Leaving Here
Source: LP: Who's Missing
Writer(s): Holland/Dozier/Holland
Label: MCA
Year: 1965
In 1960s London, white youth began to take an interest in black music; not the music of the local black population, however, which was Caribbean in origin, but the R&B hits being imported from the US. The Mods, in particular, were big fans of the Motown sound, and by the middle of the decade there were several local bands playing their own brand of R&B. Among the most popular of those were the Who, who recorded several R&B cover songs in their early days, including Leaving Here, one of the earliest Holland/Dozier/Holland collaborations that had been released as a single by Eddie Holland in 1963. The Who's version of the tune, recorded in 1965, remained unreleased until 1985, when it was included on a compilation album called Who's Missing.
Artist: Misunderstood
Title: I Cried My Eyes Out
Source: Simulated stereo British import CD: Before The Dream Faded
Writer(s): Greg Treadway
Label: Cherry Red
Year: 1965
The Misunderstood was originally formed in Riverside, California as an instrumental surf band called the Blue Notes in 1963 . Two years later they added a vocalist and a full-time bass player and changed their name to the Misunderstood. By this time surf music was on the way out, and like many US garage bands of the time, the Misunderstood emulated the sound of British bands like the Yardbirds, Animals and Rolling Stones. The group found their way into a local recording studio and recorded a six-song acetate of original tunes, including I Cried My Eyes Out, written by guitarist and co-founder Greg Treadway. After another key personnel change the band came to the attention of local DJ John Ravencroft, himself an expatriot Brit. Ravencroft convinced the band to relocate to the UK, but before they could get into a recording studio Treadway was forced to the return to the US by his draft board, and ended up joining the navy. Meanwhile the Misunderstood, with a new guitarist, managed to record another half dozen or so tracks, including a single released on the Fontana label before visa problems led to the band's breakup.
Artist: Santana
Title: Treat
Source: LP: Santana
Writer(s): Santana (band)
Label: Columbia
Year: 1969
Guitarist Carlos Santana's original band was known to the San Francisco area as a jam band with a decidedly Latino flavor. Promoter Bill Graham convinced the band to write more structured material for their first LP, which was released in 1969. Although not an instant success, the album, buoyed by the group's appearance at Woodstock, eventually reached the # 4 spot on the Billboard Top 200 Albums chart. Treat, a fairly representative example of the group's early style, is indeed structured, yet maintains much of the band's free-flowing energy through several style and tempo changes.
Artist: Canned Heat
Title: Refried Boogie (part 1)
Source: British import CD: Living The Blues
Writer(s): Canned Heat
Label: BGO (original label: Liberty)
Year: 1968
Canned Heat's third album was a double LP released in 1968 under the title Living The Blues. The first disc was a collection of studio recordings that included their hit single Going Up The Country and an experimental audio collage called Parthenogenesis. It was the second disc, however, that made rock history, as it consisted of a 41 minute live performance of their trademark jam, Refried Boogie, spread out over both sides of the LP. This week we are presenting the first half of that performance (which was side three of the original LP).
Artist: West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band
Title: Tracy Had A Hard Day Sunday
Source: LP: Volume II
Writer(s): Markley/Harris
Label: Reprise
Year: 1967
Once upon a time record producer Kim Fowley hired the Yardbirds to play a private Hollywood party. The Harris brothers, a pair of local art school students who had sent their homemade tapes to Fowley were impressed by the band's musical abilities. Bob Markley, an almost-30-year-old hipster with a law degree and an inheritance was impressed with the band's ability to attract teenage girls. Fowley introduced the Harris brothers to Markley, who expressed a willingness to finance them in return for letting him be their new lead vocalist, and the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band was formed. Before it was all over the group had recorded five or six albums for at least three labels, churning out an eclectic mix of psychedelic tunes such as Tracy Had A Hard Day Sunday, which appeared on the second album for Reprise Records (their third LP overall), appropriately titled Volume II.
Artist: Picadilly Line
Title: Rosemary's Bluebelle Day
Source: Mono British import CD: Love, Poetry And Revolution
Writer(s): Edwards/Hand
Label: Grapefruit
Year: 1967
Rod Edwards and Roger Hand were a British folk-rock duo who appeared (occassionally with a backup band) at various underground London clubs like the UFO and Middle Earth under the name Picadilly Line. The duo released several singles and one LP (The Huge World Of Emily Small), before dropping the pretense of being a band and going on to greater success as Edwards Hand with producer George Martin. While still using the name Picadilly Line they recorded Rosemary's Bluebelle Day with a full band, but did not release the track.
Artist: Jimi Hendrix Experience
Title: Purple Haze
Source: 45 RPM single (reissue)
Writer(s): Jimi Hendrix
Label: Reprise
Year: 1967
Purple Haze has one of the most convoluted release histories of any song ever recorded. Originally issued in the UK as a single, it scored high on the British charts. When Reprise got the rights to release the first Hendrix album, Are You Experienced?, they chose to replace the first track on the album with Purple Haze, moving the original opening track, Foxy Lady, to side two of the LP. The song next appeared on the Smash Hits album, which in Europe was on the Polydor label. This was the way things stayed until the early 1990s, when MCA acquired the rights to the Hendrix catalog and re-issued Are You Experienced? with the tracks restored to the UK ordering, but preceded by the six non-album sides (including Purple Haze) that had originally been released prior to the album. Most recently, the Hendrix Family Trust has again changed labels and the US version of Are You Experienced? is once again in print, this time on Sony's Legacy label. This means that Purple Haze (heard here in its original mono mix) has now been released by all three of the world's major record companies. That's right. There are only three major record companies left in the entire world, Sony (which owns Columbia and RCA, among others), Warner Brothers (which owns Elektra, Atlantic, Reprise and others) and Universal (which started off as MCA and now, as the world's largest record company, owns far too many current and former labels to list here). Don't you just love out of control corporate consolidation?
Artist: Jimi Hendrix Experience
Title: Gypsy Eyes
Source: CD: Electric Ladyland
Writer(s): Jimi Hendrix
Label: Legacy (original label: Reprise)
Year: 1968
Electric Ladyland, the last album by the Jimi Hendrix Experience, was a double LP mixture of studio recordings and live jams in the studio with an array of guest musicians. Gypsy Eyes is a good example of Hendrix's prowess at the mixing board as well as on guitar.
Artist: Jimi Hendrix Experience
Title: Foxy Lady
Source: 45 RPM single (reissue)
Writer: Jimi Hendrix
Label: Reprise
Year: 1967
The US and UK versions of the Are You Experienced differed considerably. For one thing, three songs that had been previously released as singles in the UK (where single tracks and albums were mutually exclusive) were added to the US version of the album, replacing UK album tracks. Another rather significant difference is that the UK version of the album was issued only in mono. When the 4-track master tapes arrived in the US, engineers at Reprise Records created new stereo mixes of all the songs, including Foxy Lady, which had led off the UK version of Are You Experience but had been moved to a spot near the end of side two on the US album. The original mono single mix of Foxy Lady, meanwhile, was issued as a single in the US, despite the song being only available as an album track in the UK.
Artist: Blues Project
Title: Caress Me Baby
Source: LP: Projections
Writer: Jimmy Reed
Label: Verve Forecast
Year: 1966
After deliberately truncating their extended jams for their first LP, Live At The Cafe Au-Go-Go, the Blues Project recorded a second album that was a much more accurate representation of what the band was all about. Mixed in with the group's original material was this outstanding cover of an old Jimmy Reed tune, sung by lead guitarist and Blues Project founder Danny Kalb, running over seven minutes long. Andy Kuhlberg's memorable walking bass line would be lifted a few year later by Blood, Sweat and Tears bassist Jim Fielder for the track Blues, Part II.
Artist: Los Bravos
Title: Black Is Black
Source: 45 RPM single (stereo reissue)
Writer(s): Grainger/Hayes/Wadey
Label: London
Year: 1966
The first band from Spain to have a major pop hit was Los Bravos, who took Black Is Black to the top 10 in several countries, including the US, in late 1966. Interestingly, the band's lead vocalist, Michael Kogel, was actually a German national.
Artist: Rolling Stones
Title: Out Of Time
Source: LP: Aftermath (British version)
Writer(s): Jagger/Richards
Label: Abkco (original UK label: Decca)
Year: 1966
The history of the Rolling Stones' Out Of Time is actually somewhat convoluted. Originally released only in the UK as a five and a half minute track on the Aftermath LP (the US version of the album having a different song lineup), the tune was soon covered by British singer Chris Farlowe, whose Mick Jagger-produced single went to the top of the UK charts in July of 1966. A shorter alternative mix of the Stones version was then released on the Flowers album, a US-only compilation of singles, B sides and unreleased tracks compiled by London Records. Finally, in 1975 a third version of the song, using the backing tracks from the Farlowe version and Mick Jagger's vocals, appeared on an album called Metamorphosis, which was a compilation of unreleased tracks that were owned by record mogul Allen Klein.
Artist: Corporation
Title: India
Source: German import CD: The Corporation
Writer: John Coltrane
Label: Repertoire (original label: Capitol)
Year: 1969
A few years back I received an e-mail from a listener who works at WITT-FM near Indianapolis, which has been broadcasting Stuck In The Psychedelic Era since 2010. He mentioned a band he had heard in Chicago in the late 60s called the Corporation, adding that he had recently found a copy of their only album for Capitol on CD. He offered to make me a copy, but, as I am somewhat of a stickler for using legitimate sources for everything I play (i.e. no MP3s or burned copies), I decided to head over to my local music store (Area Records in Geneva, NY) to order my own copy of the CD instead. The track he mentioned in particular was called India, notable for taking up an entire side of the album. I've since learned that they track was also quite popular in discoteques, particularly those in Germany. The song itself was written by jazz legend John Coltrane, and as far as I know has never been attempted by any other rock band.
Artist: Jethro Tull
Title: Serenade To A Cuckoo
Source: LP: This Was
Writer(s): Roland Kirk
Label: Chrysalis (original label: Reprise)
Year: 1968
Jethro Tull did not, as a general rule, record cover tunes. The most notable exception is Roland Kirk's classic jazz piece Serenade To A Cuckoo, which was included on their first LP, This Was.
Tuesday, November 11, 2014
Stuck in the Psychedelic Era # 1446 (starts 11/12/14)
Artist: Seeds
Title: The Wind Blows Her Hair
Source: Mono LP: Nuggets Vol. 9-Acid Rock (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Writer(s): Saxon/Bigelow
Label: Rhino (original label: GNP Crescendo)
Year: 1967
The Wind Blows Her Hair is actually one of the Seeds' better tracks. Unfortunately, by the time it was released the whole concept of Flower Power (which the Seeds were intimately tied to) had become yesterday's news and the single went nowhere.
Artist: Canned Heat
Title: Henry's Shuffle
Source: CD: The Very Best Of Canned Heat
Writer(s): Henry Vestine
Label: Capitol
Year: Recorded 1968, released 2005
Henry "Sunflower" Vestine was a guitarist who had been a member of one of Frank Zappa's early bands. In 1966 he introduced fellow guitarist and music historian Al "Blind Owl" Wilson to record store employee Bob "the Bear" Hite, the three of them sharing a passion for old blues records. Wilson and Hite soon formed a band of their own, Canned Heat, with Vestine joining them following their first public performance. The band, one of the only electric blues outfits in Los Angeles, began getting gigs, picking up bassist Larry "the Mole" Taylor and drummer Frank Cook in the process. The soon got a contract with Liberty Records and released their self-titled debut LP in 1967. In June the band made an appearance at the Monterey International Pop Festival, playing mostly blues covers. Later in the year, Cook, who favored a traditional jazz style of drumming, left the group to be replaced by Mexican immigrant Adolpho "Fito" De La Parra, whose hard-driving rock style was more in tune with the direction the band wanted to go. By early 1968 the members of Canned Heat could usually be found hanging out at Hite's house in Laurel Canyon (referred to in the John Mayall song The Bear), listening to old blues records, working up new material of their own and, in Fito's words, smoking a lot of grass. The end product of this was the album Boogie With Canned Heat, which sold a lot of copies and received a significant amount of airplay on progressive FM radio. The band recorded more material than they could fit on the LP, however, and the track Henry's Shuffle, written by Vestine, remained unreleased until Capitol issued a greatest hits CD in 2005.
Artist: Johnny Winter
Title: I Love Everybody
Source: LP: Second Winter
Writer(s): Johnny Winter
Label: Columbia
Year: 1969
Following the success of Johnny Winter's self-titled Columbia debut LP, the guitarist went to work on a followup LP with a slightly expanded lineup. In addition to future Double Trouble member Tommy Shannon on bass and Uncle John Turner on drums, the group featured Winter's brother Edgar on keyboards. When it came time to set the final track lineup, however, they realized they had recorded more material than they could fit on a standard LP, but not enough for a double album. Not wanting to leave any of the material they had recorded off the album, they decided to release Second Winter as a three-sided LP (the fourth side being left totally blank). Although not a conventional solution, a listen to tracks like I Love Everybody (which opens side three of the LP) shows that it was totally justified.
Artist: Steppenwolf
Title: Sookie Sookie
Source: CD: Born To Be Wild-A Retrospective (originally released on LP: Steppenwolf and as 45 RPM single)
Writer: Covay/Cropper
Label: MCA (original label: Dunhill)
Year: 1968
For years I was under the impression that the follow-up single to Steppenwolf's Born To Be Wild was Magic Carpet Ride, from the album Steppenwolf The Second. I was wrong. In fact, Born To Be Wild was not even the first single released from the band's first LP. That honor goes to A Girl I Knew, which was released in 1967, several months before the first Steppenwolf album hit the record racks. The third single from that debut LP was Sookie Sookie, the opening track of the album. The song, co-written by Steve Cropper, had been a minor R&B hit for Don Covay before coming to the attention of Steppenwolf, who cranked up the volume for their version of the tune.
Artist: Beatles
Title: Baby, You're A Rich Man
Source: LP: Magical Mystery Tour
Writer(s): Lennon/McCartney
Label: Capitol
Year: 1967
Baby, You're A Rich Man was one of the last collaborations between John Lennon and Paul McCartney and addresses the Beatles' longtime manager Brian Epstein, although not by name. Lennon came up with the basic question "how does it feel to be one of the beautiful people?" (a popular term for the young and hip in late 60s London), which became the basis for the song's verses, which were combined with an existing, but unfinished, Paul McCartney chorus (Baby, You're A Rich Man, too). The finished piece was issued as the B side of the Beatles' second single of 1967, All You Need Is Love, and later remixed in stereo and included on the US-only LP version of Magical Mystery Tour.
Artist: Herman's Hermits
Title: Listen People
Source: Mono CD: Their Greatest Hits (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Writer(s): Graham Gouldman
Label: Abkco (original label: M-G-M)
Year: 1966
Herman's Hermits were unique among British Invasion groups in that they were far more popular in the US than they were in their native land. Several of their best-known songs, such as Listen People, were not even released as singles in the UK. The song itself was written by Graham Gouldman, who was also responsible for hits for the Yardbirds (For Your Love/Heart Full Of Soul) and the Hollies (Look Through Any Window/ Bus Stop), despite the fact that he was unable to get any records by his own band, the Mockingbirds, on the charts.
Artist: Buffalo Springfield
Title: Rock And Roll Woman
Source: LP: Homer (soundtrack) (originally released on LP: Buffalo Springfield Again and as 45 RPM single)
Writer(s): Stephen Stills
Label: Cotillion (original label: Atco)
Year: 1967
Buffalo Springfield did not sell huge numbers of records (except for the single For What It's Worth). Nor did they pack in the crowds. As a matter of fact, when they played the club across the street from where Love was playing, they barely had any audience at all. Artistically, though, it's a whole 'nother story. During their brief existence Buffalo Springfield launched the careers of no less than four major artists: Neil Young, Richie Furay, Jim Messina and Stephen Stills. They also recorded more than their share of tracks that have held up better than most of what else was being recorded at the time. Case in point: Rock and Roll Woman, a Stephen Stills tune that still sounds fresh well over 40 years after it was recorded.
Artist: Action
Title: Only Dreaming
Source: German import CD: Mighty Baby
Writer(s): Ian Whiteman
Label: Big Beat
Year: Recorded 1968, released 1993
Formed in 1965, the Action was a North London band best known for their dead-on covers of then-current US R&B crossover hits. Producer George Martin signed the band to his own Air Productions, and the band issued five singles on the Parlophone label from 1965-67. The band, which by late 1966 was starting to sound more like a California band, was dropped by the label before releasing a sixth single, and went into hibernation for several months, adding a new member, keyboardist/flautist Ian Whiteman, and developing a more jazz-influenced improvisational style. The group, which at that point also included guitarists Bam King and Martin Stone, bassist Michael Evans and drummer Roger Powell, eventually resurfaced under a new name, Mighty Baby, releasing their first LP in 1969. The band had not been completely inactive in the intervening years, however. Shortly after Whiteman joined, the Action made several studio recordings that acquired legendary status over the years before finally being released on a mini-LP in 1985 with no documentation whatsoever. The recordings, including the track Only Dreaming, were finally reissued in the EU in 1993 as bonus tracks on the CD version of the Mighty Baby album.
Artist: Fat Water
Title: Mistress De Charmaign
Source: Promo LP: Fat Water
Writer(s): Boris
Label: M-G-M
Year: 1969
Virtually nothing is known about the band called Fat Water, other than a) they were probably from somewhere outside the Chicago area, b) they only used their first names, even on songwriting credits, and c) they released one self-titled LP on the M-G-M label in 1969. Mistress De Charmaign, written by Boris the bassist, is one of the more listenable tracks on the LP.
Artist: Grateful Dead
Title: Dupree's Diamond Blues
Source: CD: Aoxomoxoa
Writer(s): Hunter/Garcia/Lesh
Label: Warner Brothers
Year: 1969
The third Grateful Dead LP, Aoxomoxoa, was one of the first albums to be recorded using state-of-the-art sixteen track equipment, and the band, in the words of guitarist Jerry Garcia, "tended to put too much on everything...A lot of the music was just lost in the mix, a lot of what was really there." Garcia and bassist Phil Lesh would return to the master tapes in 1971, remixing the entire album for the version that has appeared on vinyl and CD ever since then. All of the music on the LP, including Dupree's Diamon Blues (which was also released as a single) is credited to guitarist Jerry Garcia and bassist Phil Lesh, with lyrics by poet Robert Hunter.
Artist: Deep Purple
Title: April
Source: LP: Deep Purple
Writer(s): Blackmore/Lord
Label: Tetragrammaton
Year: 1969
The most ambitious track on the third Deep Purple album was a piece called April. The track, which runs over twelve minutes in length, is divided into three sections. The first is an instrumental featuring keyboardist Jon Lord and guitarist Richie Blackmore, the writers of the piece. This leads into an orchestral section featuring strings and woodwinds. The final section of April features the entire band, including vocalist Rod Evans, who would be leaving Deep Purple shortly after the album was released.
Artist: Who
Title: Magic Bus
Source: 45 RPM single
Writer(s): Pete Townshend
Label: Decca
Year: 1968
While working on their landmark Tommy album, the Who continued to crank out singles throughout 1968. One of the most popular was Magic Bus, a song that remained in the band's live repertoire for many years. Like most of the Who's pre-Tommy singles, the song was never mixed in true stereo, although a fake stereo mix was created for the US-only LP Magic Bus-The Who On Tour. The original mono version of the song heard here is also shorter than the LP version, clocking in at slightly over three minutes.
Artist: Eric Burdon And The Animals
Title: Winds Of Change
Source: British import CD: Winds Of Change
Writer(s): Burdon/Briggs/Weider/Jenkins/McCulloch
Label: BGO (original label: M-G-M)
Year: 1967
In late 1966 the original Animals disbanded, and Eric Burdon began working on a new solo album called Eric Is Here. Unsatisfied with the results of the pratject, Burdon set about creating a new version of the Animals, which was at first known as the New Animals but would soon come to be called Eric Burdon And The Animals. The new band's first LP was Winds of Change, an ambitious album that gave writing credit to all five band members for all the tracks on the album (with the exception of a cover version of the Rolling Stones' Paint It Black). The album's title track, which opens the LP, is basically Eric Burdon paying tribute to all his musical heroes, and it's quite an impressive list, including jazz and blues greats as well as some of the most important names in the annals of rock and roll.
Artist: Mystery Trend
Title: Johnny Was A Good Boy
Source: Mono CD: Love Is The Song We Sing: San Francisco Nuggets 1965-70 (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Writer(s): Nagle/Cuff
Label: Rhino (original label: Verve)
Year: 1967
The Mystery Trend was a bit of an anomaly. Contemporaries of bands such as the Great! Society and the Charlatans, the Trend always stood a bit apart from the rest of the crowd, playing to an audience that was both a bit more affluent and a bit more "adult" (they were reportedly the house band at a Sausalito strip club). Although they played in the city itself as early as 1965, they did not release their first record until early 1967. The song, Johnny Was A Good Boy, tells the story of a seemingly normal middle-class kid who turns out to be a monster (without actually specifying what he did), surprising friends, family and neighbors. The same theme would be used by XTC in the early 1980s in the song No Thugs In Our House, one of the standout tracks from their landmark English Settlement album.
Artist: Simon and Garfunkel
Title: I Am A Rock
Source: CD: Collected Works (originally released on LP: Sounds of Silence)
Writer(s): Paul Simon
Label: Columbia
Year: 1966
The success of I Am A Rock, when released as a single in 1966, showed that the first Simon And Garfunkel hit, The Sound Of Silence, was no fluke. The two songs served as bookends to a very successful LP, Sounds Of Silence, and would lead to several more hit records before the two singers went their separate ways in 1970. This was actually the second time I Am A Rock had been issued as a single. An earlier version, from the Paul Simon Songbook, had been released in 1965. Both the single and the LP were only available for a short time and only in the UK, and were deleted at Simon's request.
Artist: Jefferson Airplane
Title: Plastic Fantastic Lover
Source: Mono LP: Surrealistic Pillow
Writer(s): Marty Balin
Label: Sundazed (original label: RCA Victor)
Year: 1967
Following the success of Somebody To Love, Jefferson Airplane quickly followed up with their third single from the Surrealistic Pillow album, White Rabbit. Although it didn't get the same amount of top 40 airplay, Marty Balin's Plastic Fantastic Lover, issued as the B side of White Rabbit, has proved just as enduring as the A side. So much so that, when the Airplane reunited in 1989 and issued their two-disc retrospective, 2400 Fulton Street, they issued a special pressing of both songs on white vinyl as a way of promoting the collection. More recently, Sundazed has reissued the entire Surrealistic Pillow album in its original mono mix, which differs considerably from the more familiar stereo version.
Artist: Del Shannon
Title: Magical Musical Box
Source: British import CD: The Further Adventures Of Charles Westover
Writer(s): Shannon/Perkins
Label: BGO (original label: Liberty)
Year: 1968
Unlike many of his contemporaries, Del Shannon managed to keep active in the recording studio for many years after hitting the top of the charts in the early 1960s with songs like Runaway and Hats Off To Larry. One of the ways he did this was by adapting to the times rather than try to coast on his early fame. His 1968 LP, The Further Adventures Of Charles Westover (his birth name), can be described as psychedelia with strings, as typified by songs like Magical Musical Box, which was also issued as a B side that year.
Artist: Procol Harum
Title: Long Gone Geek
Source: LP: The Best Of Procol Harum (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Writer(s): Brooker/Reid/Fisher
Label: A&M
Year: 1969
The last Procol Harum record with Matthew Fisher on organ was a single called Long Gone Geek. The tune, released in 1969, was co-written by Fisher, along with the band's regular writers Gary Brooker and Keith Reid.
Artist: Led Zeppelin
Title: Hey, Hey, What Can I Do
Source: Stereo 45 RPM single B side
Writer(s): Page/Plant/Bonham/Jones
Label: Atlantic
Year: 1970
In their entire existence Led Zeppelin only issued one non-album track. Hey, Hey, What Can I Do was originally released as the B side of the Immigrant Song in 1970, and was not available in any other form until 1990, when it was included in the first Led Zeppelin box set. It has since been made available as a bonus track on the Led Zeppelin III CD.
Artist: Jimi Hendrix Experience
Title: Crosstown Traffic
Source: 45 RPM single
Writer(s): Jimi Hendrix
Label: Reprise
Year: 1968
By 1968 it didn't matter one bit whether the Jimi Hendrix Experience had any hit singles; their albums were guaranteed to be successful. Nonetheless the Electric Ladyland album had no less that three singles on it (although one was a new stereo mix of a 1967 single). The first single to be released concurrently with Electric Ladyland was Crosstown Traffic, a song that has been included on several anthologies over the years.
Artist: Oracle
Title: Don't Say No
Source: Mono CD: Where The Action Is: L.A. Nuggets 1965-68 (originally released as 45 RPM single).
Writer(s): Ruthann Friedmann
Label: Rhino
Year: 1968
Before the days of arena rock, with two or three bands touring together and putting on virtually the same show night after night, headliner bands often looked to local talent for their opening act, making each stop on the tour a unique event. Sometimes the local opening band made enough of an impression to create a path to stardom for themselves as well, or at least to get a record contract. Take the case of a Lake Charles, Lousiana band known locally as the Great Society. Although they had not made any records, they had developed enough of a reputation to be able to score gigs across the state line in East Texas. One of those gigs was opening for the Music Machine in mid 1967. The Music Machine, at this point, was experiencing the frustration of being unable to score a successful follow up to their 1966 hit Talk Talk and was on the verge of dissolving, with the various individual members starting to explore other options. Among those members was bassist Keith Olsen, who liked Great Society enough to convince them to come out to Los Angeles and let Olsen produce them. Things did not go exactly as planned, however, as a bad acid trip left the band in no shape to cut a record. Olsen, however, working with co-producer Curt Boettcher, did get the group to provide vocals for a studio project the two of them were working on, a Ruthann Friedmann song called Don't Say No. As there had already been a band in California called Great! Society as recently as 1966, it was decided to rename the group the Oracle for the release of Don't Say No on the Verve Forecast label in 1968. Although the record was not a hit, it did help open doors for Olsen, who would go on to discover and produce the duo known as Buckingham Nicks, along with their breakthrough album as members of Fleetwood Mac. Since then Olsen has become one of the top producers in the history of rock music, working with such well known artists as the Grateful Dead, Bob Weir, Eddie Money, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Rick Springfield, REO Speedwagon, Pat Benatar, Heart, Joe Walsh, Starship, Santana, Kim Carnes, Jethro Tull, The Babys, Ozzy Osbourne, the Scorpions, .38 Special, Bad Company, Sammy Hagar, Russ Ballard, Whitesnake, Foreigner, Sheena Easton, Journey, Loverboy, and Lou Gramm. Not bad for a bass player.
Artist: Vanilla Fudge
Title: The Look Of Love
Source: Mono CD: The Complete Atco Singles (originally released as 45 RPM single B side)
Writer(s): Bacharach/David
Label: Rhino (original label: Atco)
Year: 1968
For a group known as one of the original album-rock bands, Vanilla Fudge had an inordinately high number of tracks that were only released on 45 RPM vinyl. Among these was a Fudged up version of Bert Bacharach and Hal David's The Look Of Love. Dusty Springfield had already made the song famous, and the group decided to put it on the B side of a song they wrote themselves called Where Is My Mind as their second single, released in early 1968.
Artist: Les Fleur De Lys
Title: Circles
Source: CD: Nuggets II-Original Artyfacts From The British Empire And Beyond 1964-1969 (originally released in UK as 45 RPM single)
Writer(s): Pete Townshend
Label: Rhino (original label: Immediate)
Year: 1966
Circles was a song by the Who that was originally slated to be released in the UK on the Brunswick label as a follow-up to the highly successful My Generation. A dispute between the band and the label and their producer, Shel Talmy, led to the Who switching labels and releasing another song, Substitute, in its place, with Circles (retitled Instant Party) on the B side of the record. When Talmy slapped the band with a legal injunction, the single was withdrawn, and another band, Les Fleur De Lys, took advantage of the situation, recording their own version of Circles and releasing it on the Immediate label. Just to make things more confusing Brunswick issued the Who's version of Circles as the B side of A Legal Matter later the same month.
Artist: Yardbirds
Title: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor
Source: 45 RPM single B side
Writer(s): Page/McCarty
Label: Epic
Year: 1967
By 1967 the Yardbirds had moved far away from their blues roots and were on their fourth lead guitarist, studio whiz Jimmy Page. The band had recently picked up a new producer, Mickey Most, known mostly for his work with Herman's Hermits and the original Animals. Most had a tendency to concentrate solely on the band's single A sides, leaving Page an opportunity to develop his own songwriting and production skills on songs such as Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor, a track that also shows signs of Page's innovative guitar style (including an instrumental break played with a violin bow) that would help define 70s rock.
Artist: Traffic
Title: (Roamin' Thro' The Gloamin' With) 40,000 Headmen
Source: LP: Progressive Heavies (originally released as 45 RPM B side and on LP: Traffic)
Writer(s): Capaldi/Winwood
Label: United Artists
Year: 1968
The second Traffic album saw the band taking in a broader set of influences, including traditional English folk music. (Roamin' Through The Gloamin' With) 40,000 Headmen, originally released as the B side to the Dave Mason tune No Face, No Name, No Number, combines those influences with the Steve Winwood brand of British R&B to create a timeless classic.
Artist: Amboy Dukes
Title: Journey To The Center Of The Mind
Source: LP: Nuggets Vol. 1-The Hits (originally released on LP: Journey To The Center Of The Mind and as 45 RPM single)
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: Rolling Stones
Title: We Love You
Source: Mono CD: Singles Collection-The London Years (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Writer(s): Jagger/Richards
Label: Abkco (original label: London)
Year: 1967
After the less than stellar chart performance of the LP Their Satanic Majesties Request, the Stones decided to pull out all the stops with a double 'A' sided single. We Love You was their most expensive production ever, and included a promotional film that is considered a forerunner of the modern music video. Oddly enough, the other side of the record, Dandelion, ended up getting more airplay, at least in the US.
Artist: Love
Title: My Little Red Book
Source: LP: Nuggets Vol. 2-Punk (originally released on LP: Love)
Writer(s): Bacharach/David
Label: Rhino (original label: Elektra)
Year: 1966
The first rock record ever released by Elektra Records was a single by Love called My Little Red Book. The track itself (which also opens Love's debut LP), is a punked out version of a tune originally recorded by Manfred Mann for the What's New Pussycat movie soundtrack. Needless to say, Love's version was not exactly what Burt Bacharach and Hal David had in mind.
Artist: Bob Seger System
Title: Tales Of Lucy Blue (originally released as 45 RPM single B side)
Source: LP: Ramblin' Gamblin' Man
Writer: Bob Seger
Label: Capitol
Year: 1969
For many years the only Bob Seger record I owned was the single Ramblin' Gamblin' Man that I bought new in 1969 at the Base Exchange at Ramstein Air Force Base Germany for about 50 cents. The B side was the song Tales of Lucy Blue. After that single disappeared from my collection I never bought another Bob Seger record (although I did score a promo copy of Turn The Page from a radio station I was working at in the mid 90s). More recently I was allowed to pillage the WEOS vinyl archives (found on the Hobart and William Smith campus in a storage area in one of the dorms) and found this copy of the Ramblin' Gamblin' Man album. The cover features a young blond woman dressed in blue satin against a blue background. It turns out that the album (Seger's first) was originally going to be titled Tales of Lucy Blue but was changed at the last minute by the shirts at Capitol in order to capitalize on the popularity of the single that I had bought a copy of. Luckily they didn't change the cover art as well, as a picture of Seger in blue satin probably wouldn't have worked.
Artist: Odyssey
Title: Little Girl, Little Boy
Source: Mono CD: Where The Action Is: L.A. Nuggets 1965-68 (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Writer(s): Jerry Berke
Label: Rhino
Year: 1968
As far as I can tell, the Odyssey, a band of L.A. garage-rockers, only cut one record before disbanding, a tune called Little Girl, Little Boy that appeared on White Whale Records. The record was produced by Howard Kaylan, lead vocalist of White Whale's biggest act, the Turtles.
Title: The Wind Blows Her Hair
Source: Mono LP: Nuggets Vol. 9-Acid Rock (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Writer(s): Saxon/Bigelow
Label: Rhino (original label: GNP Crescendo)
Year: 1967
The Wind Blows Her Hair is actually one of the Seeds' better tracks. Unfortunately, by the time it was released the whole concept of Flower Power (which the Seeds were intimately tied to) had become yesterday's news and the single went nowhere.
Artist: Canned Heat
Title: Henry's Shuffle
Source: CD: The Very Best Of Canned Heat
Writer(s): Henry Vestine
Label: Capitol
Year: Recorded 1968, released 2005
Henry "Sunflower" Vestine was a guitarist who had been a member of one of Frank Zappa's early bands. In 1966 he introduced fellow guitarist and music historian Al "Blind Owl" Wilson to record store employee Bob "the Bear" Hite, the three of them sharing a passion for old blues records. Wilson and Hite soon formed a band of their own, Canned Heat, with Vestine joining them following their first public performance. The band, one of the only electric blues outfits in Los Angeles, began getting gigs, picking up bassist Larry "the Mole" Taylor and drummer Frank Cook in the process. The soon got a contract with Liberty Records and released their self-titled debut LP in 1967. In June the band made an appearance at the Monterey International Pop Festival, playing mostly blues covers. Later in the year, Cook, who favored a traditional jazz style of drumming, left the group to be replaced by Mexican immigrant Adolpho "Fito" De La Parra, whose hard-driving rock style was more in tune with the direction the band wanted to go. By early 1968 the members of Canned Heat could usually be found hanging out at Hite's house in Laurel Canyon (referred to in the John Mayall song The Bear), listening to old blues records, working up new material of their own and, in Fito's words, smoking a lot of grass. The end product of this was the album Boogie With Canned Heat, which sold a lot of copies and received a significant amount of airplay on progressive FM radio. The band recorded more material than they could fit on the LP, however, and the track Henry's Shuffle, written by Vestine, remained unreleased until Capitol issued a greatest hits CD in 2005.
Artist: Johnny Winter
Title: I Love Everybody
Source: LP: Second Winter
Writer(s): Johnny Winter
Label: Columbia
Year: 1969
Following the success of Johnny Winter's self-titled Columbia debut LP, the guitarist went to work on a followup LP with a slightly expanded lineup. In addition to future Double Trouble member Tommy Shannon on bass and Uncle John Turner on drums, the group featured Winter's brother Edgar on keyboards. When it came time to set the final track lineup, however, they realized they had recorded more material than they could fit on a standard LP, but not enough for a double album. Not wanting to leave any of the material they had recorded off the album, they decided to release Second Winter as a three-sided LP (the fourth side being left totally blank). Although not a conventional solution, a listen to tracks like I Love Everybody (which opens side three of the LP) shows that it was totally justified.
Artist: Steppenwolf
Title: Sookie Sookie
Source: CD: Born To Be Wild-A Retrospective (originally released on LP: Steppenwolf and as 45 RPM single)
Writer: Covay/Cropper
Label: MCA (original label: Dunhill)
Year: 1968
For years I was under the impression that the follow-up single to Steppenwolf's Born To Be Wild was Magic Carpet Ride, from the album Steppenwolf The Second. I was wrong. In fact, Born To Be Wild was not even the first single released from the band's first LP. That honor goes to A Girl I Knew, which was released in 1967, several months before the first Steppenwolf album hit the record racks. The third single from that debut LP was Sookie Sookie, the opening track of the album. The song, co-written by Steve Cropper, had been a minor R&B hit for Don Covay before coming to the attention of Steppenwolf, who cranked up the volume for their version of the tune.
Artist: Beatles
Title: Baby, You're A Rich Man
Source: LP: Magical Mystery Tour
Writer(s): Lennon/McCartney
Label: Capitol
Year: 1967
Baby, You're A Rich Man was one of the last collaborations between John Lennon and Paul McCartney and addresses the Beatles' longtime manager Brian Epstein, although not by name. Lennon came up with the basic question "how does it feel to be one of the beautiful people?" (a popular term for the young and hip in late 60s London), which became the basis for the song's verses, which were combined with an existing, but unfinished, Paul McCartney chorus (Baby, You're A Rich Man, too). The finished piece was issued as the B side of the Beatles' second single of 1967, All You Need Is Love, and later remixed in stereo and included on the US-only LP version of Magical Mystery Tour.
Artist: Herman's Hermits
Title: Listen People
Source: Mono CD: Their Greatest Hits (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Writer(s): Graham Gouldman
Label: Abkco (original label: M-G-M)
Year: 1966
Herman's Hermits were unique among British Invasion groups in that they were far more popular in the US than they were in their native land. Several of their best-known songs, such as Listen People, were not even released as singles in the UK. The song itself was written by Graham Gouldman, who was also responsible for hits for the Yardbirds (For Your Love/Heart Full Of Soul) and the Hollies (Look Through Any Window/ Bus Stop), despite the fact that he was unable to get any records by his own band, the Mockingbirds, on the charts.
Artist: Buffalo Springfield
Title: Rock And Roll Woman
Source: LP: Homer (soundtrack) (originally released on LP: Buffalo Springfield Again and as 45 RPM single)
Writer(s): Stephen Stills
Label: Cotillion (original label: Atco)
Year: 1967
Buffalo Springfield did not sell huge numbers of records (except for the single For What It's Worth). Nor did they pack in the crowds. As a matter of fact, when they played the club across the street from where Love was playing, they barely had any audience at all. Artistically, though, it's a whole 'nother story. During their brief existence Buffalo Springfield launched the careers of no less than four major artists: Neil Young, Richie Furay, Jim Messina and Stephen Stills. They also recorded more than their share of tracks that have held up better than most of what else was being recorded at the time. Case in point: Rock and Roll Woman, a Stephen Stills tune that still sounds fresh well over 40 years after it was recorded.
Artist: Action
Title: Only Dreaming
Source: German import CD: Mighty Baby
Writer(s): Ian Whiteman
Label: Big Beat
Year: Recorded 1968, released 1993
Formed in 1965, the Action was a North London band best known for their dead-on covers of then-current US R&B crossover hits. Producer George Martin signed the band to his own Air Productions, and the band issued five singles on the Parlophone label from 1965-67. The band, which by late 1966 was starting to sound more like a California band, was dropped by the label before releasing a sixth single, and went into hibernation for several months, adding a new member, keyboardist/flautist Ian Whiteman, and developing a more jazz-influenced improvisational style. The group, which at that point also included guitarists Bam King and Martin Stone, bassist Michael Evans and drummer Roger Powell, eventually resurfaced under a new name, Mighty Baby, releasing their first LP in 1969. The band had not been completely inactive in the intervening years, however. Shortly after Whiteman joined, the Action made several studio recordings that acquired legendary status over the years before finally being released on a mini-LP in 1985 with no documentation whatsoever. The recordings, including the track Only Dreaming, were finally reissued in the EU in 1993 as bonus tracks on the CD version of the Mighty Baby album.
Artist: Fat Water
Title: Mistress De Charmaign
Source: Promo LP: Fat Water
Writer(s): Boris
Label: M-G-M
Year: 1969
Virtually nothing is known about the band called Fat Water, other than a) they were probably from somewhere outside the Chicago area, b) they only used their first names, even on songwriting credits, and c) they released one self-titled LP on the M-G-M label in 1969. Mistress De Charmaign, written by Boris the bassist, is one of the more listenable tracks on the LP.
Artist: Grateful Dead
Title: Dupree's Diamond Blues
Source: CD: Aoxomoxoa
Writer(s): Hunter/Garcia/Lesh
Label: Warner Brothers
Year: 1969
The third Grateful Dead LP, Aoxomoxoa, was one of the first albums to be recorded using state-of-the-art sixteen track equipment, and the band, in the words of guitarist Jerry Garcia, "tended to put too much on everything...A lot of the music was just lost in the mix, a lot of what was really there." Garcia and bassist Phil Lesh would return to the master tapes in 1971, remixing the entire album for the version that has appeared on vinyl and CD ever since then. All of the music on the LP, including Dupree's Diamon Blues (which was also released as a single) is credited to guitarist Jerry Garcia and bassist Phil Lesh, with lyrics by poet Robert Hunter.
Artist: Deep Purple
Title: April
Source: LP: Deep Purple
Writer(s): Blackmore/Lord
Label: Tetragrammaton
Year: 1969
The most ambitious track on the third Deep Purple album was a piece called April. The track, which runs over twelve minutes in length, is divided into three sections. The first is an instrumental featuring keyboardist Jon Lord and guitarist Richie Blackmore, the writers of the piece. This leads into an orchestral section featuring strings and woodwinds. The final section of April features the entire band, including vocalist Rod Evans, who would be leaving Deep Purple shortly after the album was released.
Artist: Who
Title: Magic Bus
Source: 45 RPM single
Writer(s): Pete Townshend
Label: Decca
Year: 1968
While working on their landmark Tommy album, the Who continued to crank out singles throughout 1968. One of the most popular was Magic Bus, a song that remained in the band's live repertoire for many years. Like most of the Who's pre-Tommy singles, the song was never mixed in true stereo, although a fake stereo mix was created for the US-only LP Magic Bus-The Who On Tour. The original mono version of the song heard here is also shorter than the LP version, clocking in at slightly over three minutes.
Artist: Eric Burdon And The Animals
Title: Winds Of Change
Source: British import CD: Winds Of Change
Writer(s): Burdon/Briggs/Weider/Jenkins/McCulloch
Label: BGO (original label: M-G-M)
Year: 1967
In late 1966 the original Animals disbanded, and Eric Burdon began working on a new solo album called Eric Is Here. Unsatisfied with the results of the pratject, Burdon set about creating a new version of the Animals, which was at first known as the New Animals but would soon come to be called Eric Burdon And The Animals. The new band's first LP was Winds of Change, an ambitious album that gave writing credit to all five band members for all the tracks on the album (with the exception of a cover version of the Rolling Stones' Paint It Black). The album's title track, which opens the LP, is basically Eric Burdon paying tribute to all his musical heroes, and it's quite an impressive list, including jazz and blues greats as well as some of the most important names in the annals of rock and roll.
Artist: Mystery Trend
Title: Johnny Was A Good Boy
Source: Mono CD: Love Is The Song We Sing: San Francisco Nuggets 1965-70 (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Writer(s): Nagle/Cuff
Label: Rhino (original label: Verve)
Year: 1967
The Mystery Trend was a bit of an anomaly. Contemporaries of bands such as the Great! Society and the Charlatans, the Trend always stood a bit apart from the rest of the crowd, playing to an audience that was both a bit more affluent and a bit more "adult" (they were reportedly the house band at a Sausalito strip club). Although they played in the city itself as early as 1965, they did not release their first record until early 1967. The song, Johnny Was A Good Boy, tells the story of a seemingly normal middle-class kid who turns out to be a monster (without actually specifying what he did), surprising friends, family and neighbors. The same theme would be used by XTC in the early 1980s in the song No Thugs In Our House, one of the standout tracks from their landmark English Settlement album.
Artist: Simon and Garfunkel
Title: I Am A Rock
Source: CD: Collected Works (originally released on LP: Sounds of Silence)
Writer(s): Paul Simon
Label: Columbia
Year: 1966
The success of I Am A Rock, when released as a single in 1966, showed that the first Simon And Garfunkel hit, The Sound Of Silence, was no fluke. The two songs served as bookends to a very successful LP, Sounds Of Silence, and would lead to several more hit records before the two singers went their separate ways in 1970. This was actually the second time I Am A Rock had been issued as a single. An earlier version, from the Paul Simon Songbook, had been released in 1965. Both the single and the LP were only available for a short time and only in the UK, and were deleted at Simon's request.
Artist: Jefferson Airplane
Title: Plastic Fantastic Lover
Source: Mono LP: Surrealistic Pillow
Writer(s): Marty Balin
Label: Sundazed (original label: RCA Victor)
Year: 1967
Following the success of Somebody To Love, Jefferson Airplane quickly followed up with their third single from the Surrealistic Pillow album, White Rabbit. Although it didn't get the same amount of top 40 airplay, Marty Balin's Plastic Fantastic Lover, issued as the B side of White Rabbit, has proved just as enduring as the A side. So much so that, when the Airplane reunited in 1989 and issued their two-disc retrospective, 2400 Fulton Street, they issued a special pressing of both songs on white vinyl as a way of promoting the collection. More recently, Sundazed has reissued the entire Surrealistic Pillow album in its original mono mix, which differs considerably from the more familiar stereo version.
Artist: Del Shannon
Title: Magical Musical Box
Source: British import CD: The Further Adventures Of Charles Westover
Writer(s): Shannon/Perkins
Label: BGO (original label: Liberty)
Year: 1968
Unlike many of his contemporaries, Del Shannon managed to keep active in the recording studio for many years after hitting the top of the charts in the early 1960s with songs like Runaway and Hats Off To Larry. One of the ways he did this was by adapting to the times rather than try to coast on his early fame. His 1968 LP, The Further Adventures Of Charles Westover (his birth name), can be described as psychedelia with strings, as typified by songs like Magical Musical Box, which was also issued as a B side that year.
Artist: Procol Harum
Title: Long Gone Geek
Source: LP: The Best Of Procol Harum (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Writer(s): Brooker/Reid/Fisher
Label: A&M
Year: 1969
The last Procol Harum record with Matthew Fisher on organ was a single called Long Gone Geek. The tune, released in 1969, was co-written by Fisher, along with the band's regular writers Gary Brooker and Keith Reid.
Artist: Led Zeppelin
Title: Hey, Hey, What Can I Do
Source: Stereo 45 RPM single B side
Writer(s): Page/Plant/Bonham/Jones
Label: Atlantic
Year: 1970
In their entire existence Led Zeppelin only issued one non-album track. Hey, Hey, What Can I Do was originally released as the B side of the Immigrant Song in 1970, and was not available in any other form until 1990, when it was included in the first Led Zeppelin box set. It has since been made available as a bonus track on the Led Zeppelin III CD.
Artist: Jimi Hendrix Experience
Title: Crosstown Traffic
Source: 45 RPM single
Writer(s): Jimi Hendrix
Label: Reprise
Year: 1968
By 1968 it didn't matter one bit whether the Jimi Hendrix Experience had any hit singles; their albums were guaranteed to be successful. Nonetheless the Electric Ladyland album had no less that three singles on it (although one was a new stereo mix of a 1967 single). The first single to be released concurrently with Electric Ladyland was Crosstown Traffic, a song that has been included on several anthologies over the years.
Artist: Oracle
Title: Don't Say No
Source: Mono CD: Where The Action Is: L.A. Nuggets 1965-68 (originally released as 45 RPM single).
Writer(s): Ruthann Friedmann
Label: Rhino
Year: 1968
Before the days of arena rock, with two or three bands touring together and putting on virtually the same show night after night, headliner bands often looked to local talent for their opening act, making each stop on the tour a unique event. Sometimes the local opening band made enough of an impression to create a path to stardom for themselves as well, or at least to get a record contract. Take the case of a Lake Charles, Lousiana band known locally as the Great Society. Although they had not made any records, they had developed enough of a reputation to be able to score gigs across the state line in East Texas. One of those gigs was opening for the Music Machine in mid 1967. The Music Machine, at this point, was experiencing the frustration of being unable to score a successful follow up to their 1966 hit Talk Talk and was on the verge of dissolving, with the various individual members starting to explore other options. Among those members was bassist Keith Olsen, who liked Great Society enough to convince them to come out to Los Angeles and let Olsen produce them. Things did not go exactly as planned, however, as a bad acid trip left the band in no shape to cut a record. Olsen, however, working with co-producer Curt Boettcher, did get the group to provide vocals for a studio project the two of them were working on, a Ruthann Friedmann song called Don't Say No. As there had already been a band in California called Great! Society as recently as 1966, it was decided to rename the group the Oracle for the release of Don't Say No on the Verve Forecast label in 1968. Although the record was not a hit, it did help open doors for Olsen, who would go on to discover and produce the duo known as Buckingham Nicks, along with their breakthrough album as members of Fleetwood Mac. Since then Olsen has become one of the top producers in the history of rock music, working with such well known artists as the Grateful Dead, Bob Weir, Eddie Money, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Rick Springfield, REO Speedwagon, Pat Benatar, Heart, Joe Walsh, Starship, Santana, Kim Carnes, Jethro Tull, The Babys, Ozzy Osbourne, the Scorpions, .38 Special, Bad Company, Sammy Hagar, Russ Ballard, Whitesnake, Foreigner, Sheena Easton, Journey, Loverboy, and Lou Gramm. Not bad for a bass player.
Artist: Vanilla Fudge
Title: The Look Of Love
Source: Mono CD: The Complete Atco Singles (originally released as 45 RPM single B side)
Writer(s): Bacharach/David
Label: Rhino (original label: Atco)
Year: 1968
For a group known as one of the original album-rock bands, Vanilla Fudge had an inordinately high number of tracks that were only released on 45 RPM vinyl. Among these was a Fudged up version of Bert Bacharach and Hal David's The Look Of Love. Dusty Springfield had already made the song famous, and the group decided to put it on the B side of a song they wrote themselves called Where Is My Mind as their second single, released in early 1968.
Artist: Les Fleur De Lys
Title: Circles
Source: CD: Nuggets II-Original Artyfacts From The British Empire And Beyond 1964-1969 (originally released in UK as 45 RPM single)
Writer(s): Pete Townshend
Label: Rhino (original label: Immediate)
Year: 1966
Circles was a song by the Who that was originally slated to be released in the UK on the Brunswick label as a follow-up to the highly successful My Generation. A dispute between the band and the label and their producer, Shel Talmy, led to the Who switching labels and releasing another song, Substitute, in its place, with Circles (retitled Instant Party) on the B side of the record. When Talmy slapped the band with a legal injunction, the single was withdrawn, and another band, Les Fleur De Lys, took advantage of the situation, recording their own version of Circles and releasing it on the Immediate label. Just to make things more confusing Brunswick issued the Who's version of Circles as the B side of A Legal Matter later the same month.
Artist: Yardbirds
Title: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor
Source: 45 RPM single B side
Writer(s): Page/McCarty
Label: Epic
Year: 1967
By 1967 the Yardbirds had moved far away from their blues roots and were on their fourth lead guitarist, studio whiz Jimmy Page. The band had recently picked up a new producer, Mickey Most, known mostly for his work with Herman's Hermits and the original Animals. Most had a tendency to concentrate solely on the band's single A sides, leaving Page an opportunity to develop his own songwriting and production skills on songs such as Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor, a track that also shows signs of Page's innovative guitar style (including an instrumental break played with a violin bow) that would help define 70s rock.
Artist: Traffic
Title: (Roamin' Thro' The Gloamin' With) 40,000 Headmen
Source: LP: Progressive Heavies (originally released as 45 RPM B side and on LP: Traffic)
Writer(s): Capaldi/Winwood
Label: United Artists
Year: 1968
The second Traffic album saw the band taking in a broader set of influences, including traditional English folk music. (Roamin' Through The Gloamin' With) 40,000 Headmen, originally released as the B side to the Dave Mason tune No Face, No Name, No Number, combines those influences with the Steve Winwood brand of British R&B to create a timeless classic.
Artist: Amboy Dukes
Title: Journey To The Center Of The Mind
Source: LP: Nuggets Vol. 1-The Hits (originally released on LP: Journey To The Center Of The Mind and as 45 RPM single)
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: Rolling Stones
Title: We Love You
Source: Mono CD: Singles Collection-The London Years (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Writer(s): Jagger/Richards
Label: Abkco (original label: London)
Year: 1967
After the less than stellar chart performance of the LP Their Satanic Majesties Request, the Stones decided to pull out all the stops with a double 'A' sided single. We Love You was their most expensive production ever, and included a promotional film that is considered a forerunner of the modern music video. Oddly enough, the other side of the record, Dandelion, ended up getting more airplay, at least in the US.
Artist: Love
Title: My Little Red Book
Source: LP: Nuggets Vol. 2-Punk (originally released on LP: Love)
Writer(s): Bacharach/David
Label: Rhino (original label: Elektra)
Year: 1966
The first rock record ever released by Elektra Records was a single by Love called My Little Red Book. The track itself (which also opens Love's debut LP), is a punked out version of a tune originally recorded by Manfred Mann for the What's New Pussycat movie soundtrack. Needless to say, Love's version was not exactly what Burt Bacharach and Hal David had in mind.
Artist: Bob Seger System
Title: Tales Of Lucy Blue (originally released as 45 RPM single B side)
Source: LP: Ramblin' Gamblin' Man
Writer: Bob Seger
Label: Capitol
Year: 1969
For many years the only Bob Seger record I owned was the single Ramblin' Gamblin' Man that I bought new in 1969 at the Base Exchange at Ramstein Air Force Base Germany for about 50 cents. The B side was the song Tales of Lucy Blue. After that single disappeared from my collection I never bought another Bob Seger record (although I did score a promo copy of Turn The Page from a radio station I was working at in the mid 90s). More recently I was allowed to pillage the WEOS vinyl archives (found on the Hobart and William Smith campus in a storage area in one of the dorms) and found this copy of the Ramblin' Gamblin' Man album. The cover features a young blond woman dressed in blue satin against a blue background. It turns out that the album (Seger's first) was originally going to be titled Tales of Lucy Blue but was changed at the last minute by the shirts at Capitol in order to capitalize on the popularity of the single that I had bought a copy of. Luckily they didn't change the cover art as well, as a picture of Seger in blue satin probably wouldn't have worked.
Artist: Odyssey
Title: Little Girl, Little Boy
Source: Mono CD: Where The Action Is: L.A. Nuggets 1965-68 (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Writer(s): Jerry Berke
Label: Rhino
Year: 1968
As far as I can tell, the Odyssey, a band of L.A. garage-rockers, only cut one record before disbanding, a tune called Little Girl, Little Boy that appeared on White Whale Records. The record was produced by Howard Kaylan, lead vocalist of White Whale's biggest act, the Turtles.
Tuesday, November 4, 2014
Stuck in the Psychedelic Era # 1445 (starts 11/5/14)
Artist: Max Frost And The Troopers
Title: Shape Of Things To Come
Source: Mono CD: Nuggets-Original Artyfacts From The First Psychedelic Era (originally released as 45 RPM single and on LP: Wild In The Streets (soundtrack))
Writer(s): Mann/Weill
Label: Rhino (original label: Tower)
Year: 1968
Max Frost was a politically savvy rock star who rode the youth movement all the way to the White House, first through getting the support of a hip young Senator, then getting the age requirements for holding high political office lowered to 21, and finally lowering the voting age to 14. Everyone over 30 was locked away in internment camps, similar to those used during WWII by various governments to hold those of questionable loyalty to the current regime. What? You don't remember any of that? You say it sounds like the plot of a cheapie late 60s teen exploitation flick? Right on all counts. "Wild in the Streets" starred Christopher Jones as the rock star, Hal Holbrook as the hip young senator, and a Poseidon Adventure-sized Shelly Winter as the rock star's interred mom. Richard Pryor, in his film debut, played the band's drummer/political activist Stanley X. Imagine that.
Artist: B.B. King
Title: Dance With Me
Source: British import CD: Blues On Top Of Blues
Writer(s): B.B. King
Label: BGO (original US label: Bluesway)
Year: 1968
My first exposure to the music of B.B. King was an album called Blues On Top Of Blues. I had already heard of the legendary blues artist but had not actually been exposed to any of his recordings before buying the LP. Needless to say, I was impressed. Unlike the rock guitarists I was into at the time (Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, Leigh Stephens, etc.), who were experimenting with all kinds of electronic effects, King had a clean, uncluttered sound that was completely at odds with current trends. The instrumentation on the album (King's 14th studio effort) was somewhat unusual for the time as well, with organ and horn section featured prominently on tracks like Dance With Me, which was, like all the songs on the LP, written by King himself. At the time the album was released, B.B. King was still not well-known outside of blues circles, a situation that would soon change, first with the release of the Lucille album and later with the hit single The Thrill Is Gone.
Artist: Fever Tree
Title: San Francisco Girls (Return Of The Native) (originally released on LP: Fever Tree)
Source: CD: Psychedelic Pop
Writer(s): Scott and Vivian Holtzman
Label: BMG/RCA/Buddah (original label: Uni)
Year: 1968
A minor trend in 1968 was for producer/songwriters to find a band to record their material exclusively. A prime example is Houston's Fever Tree, which featured the music of husband and wife team Scott and Vivian Holtzman. San Francisco Girls (Return of the Native) was the single from that album, peaking in the lower reaches of the Hot 100 charts.
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: Electric Prunes
Title: The Great Banana Hoax
Source: CD: Underground
Writer(s): Lowe/Tulin
Label: Collector's Choice/Rhino (original label: Reprise)
Year: 1967
The second Electric Prunes LP, Underground, saw the band gaining greater creative control over the recording process than at any other time in their career (until their reformation in the 1990s). The album's opening track, The Great Banana Hoax, is notable for two reasons: first, it was composed by band members and second, it has nothing to do with bananas. The title probably refers to the rumor circulating at the time that Donovan's Mellow Yellow was really about smoking banana peels to get high. The song itself is an indication of the musical direction the band itself wanted to go in before it got sidetracked (some would say derailed) by producer David Hassinger, who would assert control to the point of eventually replacing all the original members of the band by their fourth album (yes, some producers had that kind of power in those days).
Artist: Ten Years After
Title: A Sad Song
Source: CD: Stonedhenge
Writer: Alvin Lee
Label: Deram
Year: 1969
The Base Exchange (BX) at Ramstein Air Force Base had, in 1969, a fairly sizable record and tape section, comparable to those of the large discount stores like K-Mart and Woolco that were starting to pop up in many US cities. Most LPs ran $2.50 (compared to $3.98 stateside), and included a mixture of domestic and import pressings of the most popular albums of the time. Each month the BX would feature one new LP for $1.50, and as a general rule it was something I would have bought anyway (like the European version of the Rolling Stones' Through The Past, Darkly album). Sometimes I would even take a chance on a band I had never heard of, if the cover looked interesting enough. One such case was an album from an obscure British blues band called Ten Years After. The album was called Stonedhenge, and the cover, featuring the famous monolithic stones against a maroon background, immediately grabbed me. It was probably the best purchase of its type I have ever made, as the album soon became one of my favorites. The LP has a unique structure, with each side starting and ending with tracks featuring the full band, alternating with short solo pieces from each of the band's four members (and including a full band track in the middle of each side). Side two of the album opens with A Sad Song, a quiet blues piece that was likely inspired by British blues guru John Mayall.
Artist: Procol Harum
Title: Quite Rightly So
Source: LP: Shine On Brightly
Writer(s): Brooker/Reid
Label: A&M
Year: 1968
In 1969, while living on Ramstein AFB in Germany, my dad managed to get use of one of the basement storage rooms in building 913, the 18-unit apartment building we resided in. For a few months (until getting in trouble for having overnight guests and making too much noise...hey I was 16, whaddaya expect?) I got to use that room as a bedroom. I had a small record player that shut itself off when it got to the end of the record, which meant I got to go to sleep every night to the album of my choice. As often as not that album was Shine On Brightly, a copy of which I had gotten in trade for another album (the Best of the Beach Boys I think) from a guy who was expecting A Whiter Shade of Pale and was disappointed to discover it was not on this album. I always thought I got the better end of that deal, despite the fact that there was a skip during the fade of Quite Rightly So, causing the words "one was me" to repeat over and over until I scooted the needle over a bit. Luckily Quite Rightly So is the first song on the album, so I was usually still awake to do that.
Artist: Jimi Hendrix Experience
Title: Castles Made Of Sand
Source: CD: Axis: Bold As Love
Writer(s): Jimi Hendrix
Label: MCA
Year: 1967
When I was a junior in high school I used to fall asleep on the living room couch with the headphones on, usually listening to pre-recorded tapes of either the Beatles' Revolver album or one of the first two albums by the Jimi Hendrix Experience. One song in particular from the second Hendrix album, Axis: Bold As Love, always gave me a chill when I heard it: Castles Made Of Sand. The song serves as a warning not to put too much faith in your dreams, and stands in direct contrast to the usual goal-oriented American attitude.
Artist: Shadows Of Knight
Title: Gloria
Source: CD: Even More Nuggets (originally released as 45 RPM single and included on LP: Gloria)
Writer(s): Van Morrison
Label: Rhino (original label: Dunwich)
Year: 1966
For some reason I don't quite understand, I never paid much attention to current trends in popular entertainment other than as an outside observer. For example, when everyone else in my generation was tuned into the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan show, I was happily watching Car 54 Where Are You on a rival network. The same applies to the radio stations I listened to. KIMN was, by far, Denver's most popular top 40 station, yet I always managed to find myself listening to their rivals: first KDAB (until a flood took them off the air permanently), and then KBTR. For a short time in late 1966, however, KIMN had no rivals (KBTR had switched to an all-news format and KLZ-FM was still spending most of its broadcast day simulcasting the programming of its middle-of-the-road AM station). As a result, I found myself following KIMN's New Year's countdown of the year's top songs, which included a handful of tunes that I had never heard before. The highest ranked of these unfamiliar songs was one that immediately grabbed me: Gloria, as recorded by a Chicago area band called the Shadows Of Knight. It would be years before I even knew that this was actually a cover version of a song that had been released by Van Morrison's band, Them, but that had been banned in most US markets the previous year. All I knew is that it was a cool tune that would be one of the first songs I learned to play when I switched from violin to guitar the follwing summer.
Artist: Kinks
Title: Got My Feet On The Ground
Source: Mono LP: Kinda Kinks
Writer(s): Ray Davies
Label: Reprise
Year: 1965
For most people, the name Kinks brings to mind songs like You Really Got Me and Lola and not much else. Those a bit more in the known can easily identify several more Kinks tunes such as Sunny Afternoon, Come Dancing and A Well Respected Man. It takes a true Kinks fan, however, to fully appreciate the wealth of great material the Muswell Hillbillies have recorded over the past fifty years. Such a fan is my distant cousin Frank Van Norstrand, who until around 2012 managed to hang onto original vinyl copies of every Kinks LP released in the US from 1964-66. The only reason he does not still have those LPs is that I convinced him that songs like Got My Feet On The Ground from the album Kinda Kinks deserved to be heard on the radio and that the best way to make sure that happened was for those albums to be in my possession. Of course the real winner here is you, the listener, so enjoy!
Artist: Beatles
Title: Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds
Source: LP: Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
Writer(s): Lennon/McCartney
Label: Parlophone/EMI (original US label: Capitol)
Year: 1967
The top album of 1967 was the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. It was also the first US Beatle album to have a song lineup that was identical to the original UK LP. As such, it was also the first Beatle album released in the US to not include any songs that were also released as singles. Nonetheless, several tracks from the LP found their way onto the playlists of both top 40 AM and "underground" FM stations from coast to coast. Among the most popular of these tracks was John Lennon's Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds, which shows up on just about everyone's list of classic psychedelic tunes.
Artist: Traffic
Title: Coloured Rain
Source: Mono CD: Mr. Fantasy (originally released on LP: Heaven Is In Your Mind)
Writer(s): Winwood/Capaldi/Wood
Label: Island (original label: United Artists)
Year: 1967
Traffic, in its early days, was a band with an almost schizophrenic identity. On the one hand there was Steve Winwood, who was equally adept at guitar, keyboards and vocals and was generally seen as the band's leader, despite being its youngest member. His opposite number in the band was Dave Mason, an early example of the type of singer/songwriter that would be a major force in popular music in the mid-1970s. The remaining members of the band, drummer/vocalist Jim Capaldi and flautist/saxophonist Chris Wood, tended to fall somewhere between the two, although they more often sided with Winwood in his frequent creative disputes with Mason. One of these disputes involved the choice of the band's second single. Mason wanted to follow up the successful Paper Sun with his own composition, Hole In My Shoe, while the rest of the band preferred the group composition, Coloured Rain. Mason won that battle, but would end up leaving the band before the release on the group's first LP, Mr. Fantasy. This in turn led to the album being revised considerably for its US release, which was issued under a completely different title, Heaven Is In Your Mind, with most of Mason's contributions being excised from the album (although, oddly enough, Hole In My Shoe, which was not on the original LP, was included on the US album). One final example of the band's schizophrenic nature was in the way the group was marketed. In the US, Traffic was, from the beginning, perceived as a serious rock band along the lines of Cream and the Jimi Hendrix Experience. In their native land, however, they were, thanks in part to the top 40 success of both Paper Sun and Hole In My Shoe as well as Winwood's fame as lead vocalist for the Spencer Davis Group, dismissed as a mere pop group. Mason would rejoin and leave the group a couple more times before achieving solo success in the mid-70s with the hit We Just Disagree, while Traffic would go on to become a staple of progressive FM rock radio in the US.
Artist: Flash
Title: Small Beginnings
Source: 45 RPM single
Writer: Peter Banks
Label: Capitol
Year: 1972
Before Steve Howe joined Yes, the group featured Peter Banks on lead guitar. After the first Yes album, Banks left the group to form a new band, Flash. Despite having a similar sound to Yes at a time when such bands were in vogue, Flash failed to achieve more than a small fraction of the original band's success.
Artist: Donovan
Title: Preachin' Love
Source: Mono British import CD: Mellow Yellow (bonus track originally released as 45 RPM B side)
Writer: Donovan Leitch
Label: EMI (original US label: Epic)
Year: 1967
Due to a contract dispute with his UK record label, Pye Records, Mellow Yellow (the song), did not get released in Donovan's native country until early 1967, well after the song had already run its course on the US charts. Preachin' Love, a swing jazz tune recorded in late 1966, was chosen as the record's B side. Around the same time Donovan's next US single, Epistle To Dippy, was released, also with Preachin' Love as the B side. The song was not included on any albums, however, until re-issued in the UK on the Mellow Yellow CD.
Artist: Wailers
Title: Out Of Our Tree
Source: Mono CD: Nuggets-Original Artyfacts from the Psychedelic Era (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Writer: Gardner/Morrill/Ormsby
Label: Rhino (original label: Etiquette)
Year: 1965
The Pacific Northwest was, and is, home to a louder, harder-rocking and generally raunchier style of rock and roll than most other regions of the country. It's never been explained exactly why this is, but Kurt Cobain may have touched on it when he said that because the weather is such that it discourages outdoor activities (i.e, it rains a lot), there really isn't much else to do but go to places where live music is played. Another reason for the scene developing the way it did might be these guys, who practically invented raunch and roll. The Wailers were formed in 1958, doing mostly instrumental versions of songs by Chuck Berry, Little Richard and other early rock and roll/R&B artists. One of the hallmarks of the Wailers was that they played hard and loud, influencing later bands such as the Sonics to do the same. This meant that in order to be heard over the instruments, a vocalist had to basically scream out the lyrics. Etiquette Records, which was started by the Wailers themselves, was one of the first labels to release records with a healthy amount of distortion built in. This may have been due to budget limitations or it could have been a deliberate aesthetical choice. The result was garage-rock classics such as Out Of Our Tree, the echoes of which can be heard in the Grunge movement of the early 1990s.
Artist: Palace Guard
Title: Falling Sugar
Source: Mono CD: Nuggets-Original Artyfacts From The First Psychedelic Era (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Writer(s): Rush/Leka
Label: Rhino (original label: Orange-Empire and Verve)
Year: 1966
Whereas most garage bands favored a Rolling Stones approach to rock 'n' roll, the Palace Guard tried hard to emulate the Beatles. Unfortunately, they didn't have the talent to really pull it off, despite the presence of drummer Emmet Rhodes, who would soon leave the Guard to front his own band, the Merry-Go-Round, then embark on a moderately successful solo career.
Artist: Quiet Jungle
Title: Everything
Source: Mono CD: An Overdose Of Heavy Psych (originally released in Canada as 45 RPM single)
Writer(s): Mark Taylor
Label: Arf! Arf! (original label: Yorkshire)
Year: 1967
Musically speaking, 1967 was a busy year in the US, with the Summer of Love in San Francisco, the aftermath of the Sunset Strip crackdowns on teenagers in Los Angeles, Andy Warhol's unveiling of the Velvet Underground in New York, and of course, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band casting its shadow over everything. It's easy to see, then, how happenings in neighboring Canada pretty much went under the radar, with bands like the Guess Who cranking out hit after hit without getting any attention whatsoever south of the border. That all changed in 1969 for that band, but other groups, such as Toronto's Quiet Jungle, were never successful outside of Canada itself. That did not stop Yorkshire Records from putting out plenty of singles, however, including Everything, a 1967 tune from the aforementioned Quiet Jungle.
Artist: Beacon Street Union
Title: Beautiful Delilah
Source: LP: The Eyes Of The Beacon Street Union
Writer(s): Chuck Berry
Label: M-G-M
Year: 1968
Although Beautiful Delilah was not Chuck Berry's most serious song by any means, the Beacon Street Union took it almost into Spike Jones territory on their 1968 debut LP, The Eyes Of The Beacon Street Union. All it needs is a police whistle.
Artist: Bubble Puppy
Title: Lonely
Source: British import CD: A Gathering Of Promises
Writer(s): Prince/Cox
Label: Charly (original label: International Artists)
Year: 1969
The Bubble Puppy came into existence in 1967, when two former members of the legendary Corpus Christie,Texas garage band the Bad Seeds, guitarist Rod Prince and keyboardist/bassist Roy Cox, relocated to San Antonio, recruiting guitarist Todd Potter and drummer Craig Root to form the new band. Success came quickly in the form of the band's very first gig, opening for the Who at the San Antonio Colosseum. After David Fore replaced Root in the band, the group relocated to Austin, where they got a steady gig at the Vulcan Gas Company. By 1968 the Bubble Puppy was traveling all over Texas for gigs, and late in the year got a contract with Houston-based International Artists, a label that had already gained notoriety by signing the 13th Floor Elevators and Red Crayola. After releasing a surprise top 40 hit, Hot Smoke And Sassafras in December of 1968, the band got to work on a full album, A Gathering Of Promises. International Artists failed to get the album, which was full of fine tunes like Lonely, out quickly enough to capitilize of the popularity of Hot Smoke And Sassafras, and further hurt the band's chance of success by refusing to grant licensing rights on the single to Apple Records for European release. By 1970 the band and the label had parted company, with the Bubble Puppy relocating to Los Angeles and changing their name to Demian.
Artist: Chambers Brothers
Title: CD: Time Has Come Today
Source: The Time Has Come
Writer(s): Joe and 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. Their best-known recording was Time Has Come Today, considered to be one of the defining tracks of the psychedelic era. The song, written by brothers Joe and Willie Chambers, was originally recorded in 1966 and released as a single, but went largely unnoticed by radio and the record-buying public. In 1967 the band recorded a new, eleven-minute version of Time Has Come Today for their album The Time Has Come. This version got considerable airplay on the handful of so-called "underground" FM stations that were starting to pop up across the US in college towns and major metropolitan areas, but was considered too long for most commercial stations. The following year an edited version of the track was released, getting enough airplay to make the top 40; as a result the full-length version has become somewhat of a rarity on the radio since the shorter version was made available in stereo. This week Stuck in the Psychedelic Era presents the full-length version of Time Has Come Today. Enjoy!
Artist: Blues Project
Title: The Flute Thing
Source: CD: Anthology (originally released on LP: Projections)
Writer(s): Al Kooper
Label: Polydor (original label: Verve Forecast)
Year: 1966
Keyboardist/vocalist/songwriter Al Kooper started his professional career as a guitarist, touring with the Royal Teens long after they had faded from the public view following their only hit single, a novelty song called Short Shorts. By the mid-1960s Kooper had gotten to know several people in the New York music industry, including producer Tom Wilson, who invited Kooper to a fateful Bob Dylan recording session in 1965. Dylan was working on a new song, Like A Rolling Stone, but was having trouble getting the sound he wanted. Kooper, noticing an unused organ in the corner of the studio, began to play riffs on the instrument that Dylan took an immediately liking to. Kooper soon found his services to be in demand on the New York studio scene and was present when a new band called the Blues Project auditioned for Columbia Records. Although Columbia did not sign the band, Kooper ended up joining the group as a way to hone his organ skills onstage. Kooper was also interested in developing his songwriting skills, providing several songs for the group's second LP, Projections. Among the Kooper compositions on the album was an instrumental called The Flute Thing, a piece inspired by Roland Kirk that gave the band's bassist, Andy Kuhlberg, an opportunity to show off his skills as a flautist.
Title: Somethin' Goin' On
Source: LP: Child Is Father To The Man
Writer(s): Al Kooper
Label: Columbia
Year: 1968
After leaving the Blues Project just prior to the band's appearance at the Monterey International Pop Festival, Al Kooper volunteered his services to the festival promoters as part of the stage crew and hastily put together a band of his own to make a one-off appearance at the festival itself. Following that, Kooper returned to New York to do studio work, becoming a staff producer at Columbia Records. While there, he conceived the idea of combining rock and jazz in a new band to be called Blood, Sweat & Tears. The group's first LP, Child Is Father To The Man, featured Kooper on both keyboards and vocals on several new tunes, most of which were written by Kooper himself. Among these new tunes was Somethin' Goin' On, a powerful blues-based piece that helped establish the new group's distinct sound. Kooper would leave BS&T following the release of Child Is Father To The Man. The band itself would go on to even greater success with the addition of vocalist David Clayton Thomas, while Kooper would soon embark on what is considered by many to be the greatest jam album of them all: Super Session.
Artist: Al Kooper/Mike Bloomfield/Harvey Brooks/Eddie Hoh
Title: His Holy Modal Majesty
Source: LP: Super Session
Writer(s): Bloomfield/Kooper
Label: Sundazed/Columbia
Year: 1968
One of the earliest electronic keyboard instruments was a device that came to be known as the Kooperphone, thanks to its use by Al Kooper as early as 1966, when he was a member of the Blues Project. The instrument could not play chords, only single notes, and Kooper used it extensively on tracks like His Holy Modal Majesty on the 1968 album Super Session. If that were all there was to the track it might be remembered as little more than a curiosity piece. Thanks to the outstanding improvisational abilities of Kooper, guitarist Michael Bloomfield, bassist Harvey Brooks and drummer Eddie Hoh however, the piece soars, changing style and tempo with a fluidity rarely found outside of jazz circles.
Artist: Manfred Mann
Title: Mighty Quinn (Quinn The Eskimo)
Source: 45 RPM single
Writer: Bob Dylan
Label: Mercury
Year: 1968
In 1965 there were a rash of bands doing cover versions of Bob Dylan songs. Almost all of these were protest songs of one sort or another. By 1968, however, things had changed, and the most popular Dylan cover of the year was the relatively harmless Mighty Quinn (Quinn The Eskimo), recorded by Manfred Mann. It turned out to be the third biggest US hit in Manfred Mann's long career, surpassed only by 1965's Do-Wah-Diddy-Diddy and 1974's Blinded By The Light.
Title: Shape Of Things To Come
Source: Mono CD: Nuggets-Original Artyfacts From The First Psychedelic Era (originally released as 45 RPM single and on LP: Wild In The Streets (soundtrack))
Writer(s): Mann/Weill
Label: Rhino (original label: Tower)
Year: 1968
Max Frost was a politically savvy rock star who rode the youth movement all the way to the White House, first through getting the support of a hip young Senator, then getting the age requirements for holding high political office lowered to 21, and finally lowering the voting age to 14. Everyone over 30 was locked away in internment camps, similar to those used during WWII by various governments to hold those of questionable loyalty to the current regime. What? You don't remember any of that? You say it sounds like the plot of a cheapie late 60s teen exploitation flick? Right on all counts. "Wild in the Streets" starred Christopher Jones as the rock star, Hal Holbrook as the hip young senator, and a Poseidon Adventure-sized Shelly Winter as the rock star's interred mom. Richard Pryor, in his film debut, played the band's drummer/political activist Stanley X. Imagine that.
Artist: B.B. King
Title: Dance With Me
Source: British import CD: Blues On Top Of Blues
Writer(s): B.B. King
Label: BGO (original US label: Bluesway)
Year: 1968
My first exposure to the music of B.B. King was an album called Blues On Top Of Blues. I had already heard of the legendary blues artist but had not actually been exposed to any of his recordings before buying the LP. Needless to say, I was impressed. Unlike the rock guitarists I was into at the time (Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, Leigh Stephens, etc.), who were experimenting with all kinds of electronic effects, King had a clean, uncluttered sound that was completely at odds with current trends. The instrumentation on the album (King's 14th studio effort) was somewhat unusual for the time as well, with organ and horn section featured prominently on tracks like Dance With Me, which was, like all the songs on the LP, written by King himself. At the time the album was released, B.B. King was still not well-known outside of blues circles, a situation that would soon change, first with the release of the Lucille album and later with the hit single The Thrill Is Gone.
Artist: Fever Tree
Title: San Francisco Girls (Return Of The Native) (originally released on LP: Fever Tree)
Source: CD: Psychedelic Pop
Writer(s): Scott and Vivian Holtzman
Label: BMG/RCA/Buddah (original label: Uni)
Year: 1968
A minor trend in 1968 was for producer/songwriters to find a band to record their material exclusively. A prime example is Houston's Fever Tree, which featured the music of husband and wife team Scott and Vivian Holtzman. San Francisco Girls (Return of the Native) was the single from that album, peaking in the lower reaches of the Hot 100 charts.
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: Electric Prunes
Title: The Great Banana Hoax
Source: CD: Underground
Writer(s): Lowe/Tulin
Label: Collector's Choice/Rhino (original label: Reprise)
Year: 1967
The second Electric Prunes LP, Underground, saw the band gaining greater creative control over the recording process than at any other time in their career (until their reformation in the 1990s). The album's opening track, The Great Banana Hoax, is notable for two reasons: first, it was composed by band members and second, it has nothing to do with bananas. The title probably refers to the rumor circulating at the time that Donovan's Mellow Yellow was really about smoking banana peels to get high. The song itself is an indication of the musical direction the band itself wanted to go in before it got sidetracked (some would say derailed) by producer David Hassinger, who would assert control to the point of eventually replacing all the original members of the band by their fourth album (yes, some producers had that kind of power in those days).
Artist: Ten Years After
Title: A Sad Song
Source: CD: Stonedhenge
Writer: Alvin Lee
Label: Deram
Year: 1969
The Base Exchange (BX) at Ramstein Air Force Base had, in 1969, a fairly sizable record and tape section, comparable to those of the large discount stores like K-Mart and Woolco that were starting to pop up in many US cities. Most LPs ran $2.50 (compared to $3.98 stateside), and included a mixture of domestic and import pressings of the most popular albums of the time. Each month the BX would feature one new LP for $1.50, and as a general rule it was something I would have bought anyway (like the European version of the Rolling Stones' Through The Past, Darkly album). Sometimes I would even take a chance on a band I had never heard of, if the cover looked interesting enough. One such case was an album from an obscure British blues band called Ten Years After. The album was called Stonedhenge, and the cover, featuring the famous monolithic stones against a maroon background, immediately grabbed me. It was probably the best purchase of its type I have ever made, as the album soon became one of my favorites. The LP has a unique structure, with each side starting and ending with tracks featuring the full band, alternating with short solo pieces from each of the band's four members (and including a full band track in the middle of each side). Side two of the album opens with A Sad Song, a quiet blues piece that was likely inspired by British blues guru John Mayall.
Artist: Procol Harum
Title: Quite Rightly So
Source: LP: Shine On Brightly
Writer(s): Brooker/Reid
Label: A&M
Year: 1968
In 1969, while living on Ramstein AFB in Germany, my dad managed to get use of one of the basement storage rooms in building 913, the 18-unit apartment building we resided in. For a few months (until getting in trouble for having overnight guests and making too much noise...hey I was 16, whaddaya expect?) I got to use that room as a bedroom. I had a small record player that shut itself off when it got to the end of the record, which meant I got to go to sleep every night to the album of my choice. As often as not that album was Shine On Brightly, a copy of which I had gotten in trade for another album (the Best of the Beach Boys I think) from a guy who was expecting A Whiter Shade of Pale and was disappointed to discover it was not on this album. I always thought I got the better end of that deal, despite the fact that there was a skip during the fade of Quite Rightly So, causing the words "one was me" to repeat over and over until I scooted the needle over a bit. Luckily Quite Rightly So is the first song on the album, so I was usually still awake to do that.
Artist: Jimi Hendrix Experience
Title: Castles Made Of Sand
Source: CD: Axis: Bold As Love
Writer(s): Jimi Hendrix
Label: MCA
Year: 1967
When I was a junior in high school I used to fall asleep on the living room couch with the headphones on, usually listening to pre-recorded tapes of either the Beatles' Revolver album or one of the first two albums by the Jimi Hendrix Experience. One song in particular from the second Hendrix album, Axis: Bold As Love, always gave me a chill when I heard it: Castles Made Of Sand. The song serves as a warning not to put too much faith in your dreams, and stands in direct contrast to the usual goal-oriented American attitude.
Artist: Shadows Of Knight
Title: Gloria
Source: CD: Even More Nuggets (originally released as 45 RPM single and included on LP: Gloria)
Writer(s): Van Morrison
Label: Rhino (original label: Dunwich)
Year: 1966
For some reason I don't quite understand, I never paid much attention to current trends in popular entertainment other than as an outside observer. For example, when everyone else in my generation was tuned into the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan show, I was happily watching Car 54 Where Are You on a rival network. The same applies to the radio stations I listened to. KIMN was, by far, Denver's most popular top 40 station, yet I always managed to find myself listening to their rivals: first KDAB (until a flood took them off the air permanently), and then KBTR. For a short time in late 1966, however, KIMN had no rivals (KBTR had switched to an all-news format and KLZ-FM was still spending most of its broadcast day simulcasting the programming of its middle-of-the-road AM station). As a result, I found myself following KIMN's New Year's countdown of the year's top songs, which included a handful of tunes that I had never heard before. The highest ranked of these unfamiliar songs was one that immediately grabbed me: Gloria, as recorded by a Chicago area band called the Shadows Of Knight. It would be years before I even knew that this was actually a cover version of a song that had been released by Van Morrison's band, Them, but that had been banned in most US markets the previous year. All I knew is that it was a cool tune that would be one of the first songs I learned to play when I switched from violin to guitar the follwing summer.
Artist: Kinks
Title: Got My Feet On The Ground
Source: Mono LP: Kinda Kinks
Writer(s): Ray Davies
Label: Reprise
Year: 1965
For most people, the name Kinks brings to mind songs like You Really Got Me and Lola and not much else. Those a bit more in the known can easily identify several more Kinks tunes such as Sunny Afternoon, Come Dancing and A Well Respected Man. It takes a true Kinks fan, however, to fully appreciate the wealth of great material the Muswell Hillbillies have recorded over the past fifty years. Such a fan is my distant cousin Frank Van Norstrand, who until around 2012 managed to hang onto original vinyl copies of every Kinks LP released in the US from 1964-66. The only reason he does not still have those LPs is that I convinced him that songs like Got My Feet On The Ground from the album Kinda Kinks deserved to be heard on the radio and that the best way to make sure that happened was for those albums to be in my possession. Of course the real winner here is you, the listener, so enjoy!
Artist: Beatles
Title: Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds
Source: LP: Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
Writer(s): Lennon/McCartney
Label: Parlophone/EMI (original US label: Capitol)
Year: 1967
The top album of 1967 was the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. It was also the first US Beatle album to have a song lineup that was identical to the original UK LP. As such, it was also the first Beatle album released in the US to not include any songs that were also released as singles. Nonetheless, several tracks from the LP found their way onto the playlists of both top 40 AM and "underground" FM stations from coast to coast. Among the most popular of these tracks was John Lennon's Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds, which shows up on just about everyone's list of classic psychedelic tunes.
Artist: Traffic
Title: Coloured Rain
Source: Mono CD: Mr. Fantasy (originally released on LP: Heaven Is In Your Mind)
Writer(s): Winwood/Capaldi/Wood
Label: Island (original label: United Artists)
Year: 1967
Traffic, in its early days, was a band with an almost schizophrenic identity. On the one hand there was Steve Winwood, who was equally adept at guitar, keyboards and vocals and was generally seen as the band's leader, despite being its youngest member. His opposite number in the band was Dave Mason, an early example of the type of singer/songwriter that would be a major force in popular music in the mid-1970s. The remaining members of the band, drummer/vocalist Jim Capaldi and flautist/saxophonist Chris Wood, tended to fall somewhere between the two, although they more often sided with Winwood in his frequent creative disputes with Mason. One of these disputes involved the choice of the band's second single. Mason wanted to follow up the successful Paper Sun with his own composition, Hole In My Shoe, while the rest of the band preferred the group composition, Coloured Rain. Mason won that battle, but would end up leaving the band before the release on the group's first LP, Mr. Fantasy. This in turn led to the album being revised considerably for its US release, which was issued under a completely different title, Heaven Is In Your Mind, with most of Mason's contributions being excised from the album (although, oddly enough, Hole In My Shoe, which was not on the original LP, was included on the US album). One final example of the band's schizophrenic nature was in the way the group was marketed. In the US, Traffic was, from the beginning, perceived as a serious rock band along the lines of Cream and the Jimi Hendrix Experience. In their native land, however, they were, thanks in part to the top 40 success of both Paper Sun and Hole In My Shoe as well as Winwood's fame as lead vocalist for the Spencer Davis Group, dismissed as a mere pop group. Mason would rejoin and leave the group a couple more times before achieving solo success in the mid-70s with the hit We Just Disagree, while Traffic would go on to become a staple of progressive FM rock radio in the US.
Artist: Flash
Title: Small Beginnings
Source: 45 RPM single
Writer: Peter Banks
Label: Capitol
Year: 1972
Before Steve Howe joined Yes, the group featured Peter Banks on lead guitar. After the first Yes album, Banks left the group to form a new band, Flash. Despite having a similar sound to Yes at a time when such bands were in vogue, Flash failed to achieve more than a small fraction of the original band's success.
Artist: Donovan
Title: Preachin' Love
Source: Mono British import CD: Mellow Yellow (bonus track originally released as 45 RPM B side)
Writer: Donovan Leitch
Label: EMI (original US label: Epic)
Year: 1967
Due to a contract dispute with his UK record label, Pye Records, Mellow Yellow (the song), did not get released in Donovan's native country until early 1967, well after the song had already run its course on the US charts. Preachin' Love, a swing jazz tune recorded in late 1966, was chosen as the record's B side. Around the same time Donovan's next US single, Epistle To Dippy, was released, also with Preachin' Love as the B side. The song was not included on any albums, however, until re-issued in the UK on the Mellow Yellow CD.
Artist: Wailers
Title: Out Of Our Tree
Source: Mono CD: Nuggets-Original Artyfacts from the Psychedelic Era (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Writer: Gardner/Morrill/Ormsby
Label: Rhino (original label: Etiquette)
Year: 1965
The Pacific Northwest was, and is, home to a louder, harder-rocking and generally raunchier style of rock and roll than most other regions of the country. It's never been explained exactly why this is, but Kurt Cobain may have touched on it when he said that because the weather is such that it discourages outdoor activities (i.e, it rains a lot), there really isn't much else to do but go to places where live music is played. Another reason for the scene developing the way it did might be these guys, who practically invented raunch and roll. The Wailers were formed in 1958, doing mostly instrumental versions of songs by Chuck Berry, Little Richard and other early rock and roll/R&B artists. One of the hallmarks of the Wailers was that they played hard and loud, influencing later bands such as the Sonics to do the same. This meant that in order to be heard over the instruments, a vocalist had to basically scream out the lyrics. Etiquette Records, which was started by the Wailers themselves, was one of the first labels to release records with a healthy amount of distortion built in. This may have been due to budget limitations or it could have been a deliberate aesthetical choice. The result was garage-rock classics such as Out Of Our Tree, the echoes of which can be heard in the Grunge movement of the early 1990s.
Artist: Palace Guard
Title: Falling Sugar
Source: Mono CD: Nuggets-Original Artyfacts From The First Psychedelic Era (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Writer(s): Rush/Leka
Label: Rhino (original label: Orange-Empire and Verve)
Year: 1966
Whereas most garage bands favored a Rolling Stones approach to rock 'n' roll, the Palace Guard tried hard to emulate the Beatles. Unfortunately, they didn't have the talent to really pull it off, despite the presence of drummer Emmet Rhodes, who would soon leave the Guard to front his own band, the Merry-Go-Round, then embark on a moderately successful solo career.
Artist: Quiet Jungle
Title: Everything
Source: Mono CD: An Overdose Of Heavy Psych (originally released in Canada as 45 RPM single)
Writer(s): Mark Taylor
Label: Arf! Arf! (original label: Yorkshire)
Year: 1967
Musically speaking, 1967 was a busy year in the US, with the Summer of Love in San Francisco, the aftermath of the Sunset Strip crackdowns on teenagers in Los Angeles, Andy Warhol's unveiling of the Velvet Underground in New York, and of course, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band casting its shadow over everything. It's easy to see, then, how happenings in neighboring Canada pretty much went under the radar, with bands like the Guess Who cranking out hit after hit without getting any attention whatsoever south of the border. That all changed in 1969 for that band, but other groups, such as Toronto's Quiet Jungle, were never successful outside of Canada itself. That did not stop Yorkshire Records from putting out plenty of singles, however, including Everything, a 1967 tune from the aforementioned Quiet Jungle.
Artist: Beacon Street Union
Title: Beautiful Delilah
Source: LP: The Eyes Of The Beacon Street Union
Writer(s): Chuck Berry
Label: M-G-M
Year: 1968
Although Beautiful Delilah was not Chuck Berry's most serious song by any means, the Beacon Street Union took it almost into Spike Jones territory on their 1968 debut LP, The Eyes Of The Beacon Street Union. All it needs is a police whistle.
Artist: Bubble Puppy
Title: Lonely
Source: British import CD: A Gathering Of Promises
Writer(s): Prince/Cox
Label: Charly (original label: International Artists)
Year: 1969
The Bubble Puppy came into existence in 1967, when two former members of the legendary Corpus Christie,Texas garage band the Bad Seeds, guitarist Rod Prince and keyboardist/bassist Roy Cox, relocated to San Antonio, recruiting guitarist Todd Potter and drummer Craig Root to form the new band. Success came quickly in the form of the band's very first gig, opening for the Who at the San Antonio Colosseum. After David Fore replaced Root in the band, the group relocated to Austin, where they got a steady gig at the Vulcan Gas Company. By 1968 the Bubble Puppy was traveling all over Texas for gigs, and late in the year got a contract with Houston-based International Artists, a label that had already gained notoriety by signing the 13th Floor Elevators and Red Crayola. After releasing a surprise top 40 hit, Hot Smoke And Sassafras in December of 1968, the band got to work on a full album, A Gathering Of Promises. International Artists failed to get the album, which was full of fine tunes like Lonely, out quickly enough to capitilize of the popularity of Hot Smoke And Sassafras, and further hurt the band's chance of success by refusing to grant licensing rights on the single to Apple Records for European release. By 1970 the band and the label had parted company, with the Bubble Puppy relocating to Los Angeles and changing their name to Demian.
Artist: Chambers Brothers
Title: CD: Time Has Come Today
Source: The Time Has Come
Writer(s): Joe and 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. Their best-known recording was Time Has Come Today, considered to be one of the defining tracks of the psychedelic era. The song, written by brothers Joe and Willie Chambers, was originally recorded in 1966 and released as a single, but went largely unnoticed by radio and the record-buying public. In 1967 the band recorded a new, eleven-minute version of Time Has Come Today for their album The Time Has Come. This version got considerable airplay on the handful of so-called "underground" FM stations that were starting to pop up across the US in college towns and major metropolitan areas, but was considered too long for most commercial stations. The following year an edited version of the track was released, getting enough airplay to make the top 40; as a result the full-length version has become somewhat of a rarity on the radio since the shorter version was made available in stereo. This week Stuck in the Psychedelic Era presents the full-length version of Time Has Come Today. Enjoy!
Artist: Blues Project
Title: The Flute Thing
Source: CD: Anthology (originally released on LP: Projections)
Writer(s): Al Kooper
Label: Polydor (original label: Verve Forecast)
Year: 1966
Keyboardist/vocalist/songwriter Al Kooper started his professional career as a guitarist, touring with the Royal Teens long after they had faded from the public view following their only hit single, a novelty song called Short Shorts. By the mid-1960s Kooper had gotten to know several people in the New York music industry, including producer Tom Wilson, who invited Kooper to a fateful Bob Dylan recording session in 1965. Dylan was working on a new song, Like A Rolling Stone, but was having trouble getting the sound he wanted. Kooper, noticing an unused organ in the corner of the studio, began to play riffs on the instrument that Dylan took an immediately liking to. Kooper soon found his services to be in demand on the New York studio scene and was present when a new band called the Blues Project auditioned for Columbia Records. Although Columbia did not sign the band, Kooper ended up joining the group as a way to hone his organ skills onstage. Kooper was also interested in developing his songwriting skills, providing several songs for the group's second LP, Projections. Among the Kooper compositions on the album was an instrumental called The Flute Thing, a piece inspired by Roland Kirk that gave the band's bassist, Andy Kuhlberg, an opportunity to show off his skills as a flautist.
Title: Somethin' Goin' On
Source: LP: Child Is Father To The Man
Writer(s): Al Kooper
Label: Columbia
Year: 1968
After leaving the Blues Project just prior to the band's appearance at the Monterey International Pop Festival, Al Kooper volunteered his services to the festival promoters as part of the stage crew and hastily put together a band of his own to make a one-off appearance at the festival itself. Following that, Kooper returned to New York to do studio work, becoming a staff producer at Columbia Records. While there, he conceived the idea of combining rock and jazz in a new band to be called Blood, Sweat & Tears. The group's first LP, Child Is Father To The Man, featured Kooper on both keyboards and vocals on several new tunes, most of which were written by Kooper himself. Among these new tunes was Somethin' Goin' On, a powerful blues-based piece that helped establish the new group's distinct sound. Kooper would leave BS&T following the release of Child Is Father To The Man. The band itself would go on to even greater success with the addition of vocalist David Clayton Thomas, while Kooper would soon embark on what is considered by many to be the greatest jam album of them all: Super Session.
Artist: Al Kooper/Mike Bloomfield/Harvey Brooks/Eddie Hoh
Title: His Holy Modal Majesty
Source: LP: Super Session
Writer(s): Bloomfield/Kooper
Label: Sundazed/Columbia
Year: 1968
One of the earliest electronic keyboard instruments was a device that came to be known as the Kooperphone, thanks to its use by Al Kooper as early as 1966, when he was a member of the Blues Project. The instrument could not play chords, only single notes, and Kooper used it extensively on tracks like His Holy Modal Majesty on the 1968 album Super Session. If that were all there was to the track it might be remembered as little more than a curiosity piece. Thanks to the outstanding improvisational abilities of Kooper, guitarist Michael Bloomfield, bassist Harvey Brooks and drummer Eddie Hoh however, the piece soars, changing style and tempo with a fluidity rarely found outside of jazz circles.
Artist: Manfred Mann
Title: Mighty Quinn (Quinn The Eskimo)
Source: 45 RPM single
Writer: Bob Dylan
Label: Mercury
Year: 1968
In 1965 there were a rash of bands doing cover versions of Bob Dylan songs. Almost all of these were protest songs of one sort or another. By 1968, however, things had changed, and the most popular Dylan cover of the year was the relatively harmless Mighty Quinn (Quinn The Eskimo), recorded by Manfred Mann. It turned out to be the third biggest US hit in Manfred Mann's long career, surpassed only by 1965's Do-Wah-Diddy-Diddy and 1974's Blinded By The Light.
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