https://exchange.prx.org/p/536149
They say that opposites attract. That may be so, but as illustrated in a battle of the bands on this week's edition of Stuck in the Psychedelic Era, they don't attract the same audience. These two groups actually tried touring together (at the request of the headliners), but after just three gigs went their separate ways. When you hear who they are in our second hour, you'll understand why. There's lots of other good stuff this week as well, including a seldom heard Bob Dylan non-album single release from 1965 and a tune from the original 1967 Off-Broadway production of the musical Hair.
Artist: Rolling Stones
Title: Midnight Rambler
Source: LP: Let It Bleed
Writer(s): Jagger/Richards
Label: London
Year: 1969
1969 was, with a couple of rather significant exceptions, a good year for the Rolling Stones. Their Beggar's Banquet album, released late in 1968, had reestablished them as one of the world's premier rock bands, and their first single of 1969, Honky Tonk Women, was nothing short of a masterpiece. The song had introduced Stones fans to the band's newest member, Mick Taylor, who had replaced Brian Jones, who had left the band he founded just a few weeks before he was found dead in his swimming pool (the first of those exceptions) on the very night that Honky Tonk Women was recorded. The timing of it all gave fuel to all kinds of conspiracy theories, of course, but the band itself was already hard at work on what would be their final album for the British Decca label (and it's US counterpart, London) before starting their own label. One of the most enduring tracks on Let It Bleed was Midnight Rambler, which would become a staple of the band's live performances for years to come. That other previously mentioned huge exception, incidentally, was the infamous Altamont Speedway Free Festival, which Rolling Stone magazine later called "rock and roll's all-time worst day, December 6th, a day when everything went perfectly wrong."
Artist: Jefferson Airplane
Title: Meadowlands
Source: CD: Volunteers
Writer(s): Lev Knipper
Label: BMG/RCA
Year: 1969
One of the most unexpected tracks on the fifth Jefferson Airplane album, Volunteers, was a one-minute instrumental version of a Russian tune written in 1933 played entirely on keyboards by guitarist Jorma Kaukonen with very faint sounds of what sounds like street vendors off in the right channel. I still haven't figured out exactly why it was included on the album.
Artist: Peter Howell & John Ferdinando
Title: Jabberwocky
Source: Mono British import CD: Love, Poetry And Revolution (originally released on LP: Alice Through The Looking Glass)
Writer(s): Carroll/Howell
Label: Grapefruit (original label: Sound News Productions)
Year: 1969
Once upon a time, somewhere south of London, there was (and still is) a village called Ditchling. This village was home to a theatre group known as the Ditchling Players. In 1968 the Ditchling Players decided to put on an ambitious adaptation of Lewis Carroll's Through The Looking Glass. In addition to elaborate costumes and stage props, the production used original music provided by two local teenagers, Peter Howell and John Ferdinando. The two had played together in various amateur bands since the pre-Beatle days and Howell, in particular, had taken an interest in the recording process. Using a primitive version of track bouncing, the two composed complex musical pieces that were soon collected for a soundtrack album. Only 50 copies of the album were made, most of which were sold to members of the Ditchling Players themselves, along with interested audience members. In addition to the music from the stage production, the album included four "bonus" tracks based on the same concept. One of those was Jabberwocky, which combines music by Howell with Carroll's words. Howell would eventually become known for his work on Doctor Who as a member of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop from 1974-1997.
Artist: Bob Dylan
Title: Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?
Source: 45 RPM single
Writer(s): Bob Dylan
Label: Columbia
Year: 1965
Unlike Positively 4th Street, which used the same musicians that played on Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited album, Bob Dylan's December 1965 single Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window features a backing track by the Hawks, who would go on to be Dylan's tour band and later become famous in their own right as...The Band. The mono non-album track was not made available in any other form until 1978, when it appeared on a compilation called Masterpieces. An extended stereo mix of Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window was finally released in 2015, on the limited Collector's Edition of The Bootleg Series Vol. 12: The Cutting Edge 1965–1966. Although most sources say the song was recorded on November 30, 1965, there is a problem with that date, since a Long Island band called the Vacels had released their own version of the song on the Kama Sutra label in October of that year; hardly possible with a song that Dylan had not yet recorded himself, unless they had somehow laid hands on a demo of the song that has never surfaced.
Artist: Beatles
Title: Nowhere Man
Source: CD: Rubber Soul (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Writer(s): Lennon/McCartney
Label: Parlophone (original label: Capitol)
Year: 1965
The original UK version of Rubber Soul, released in December 1965, had several songs that were left off the shorter US version. In the case of Nowhere Man, it was because Capitol Records decided to hold back the song for release as a single in early 1966. Although Nowhere Man was one of the most popular songs of the year in the US, the song was never released as a single in the UK.
Artist: Standells
Title: Dirty Water
Source: Simulated stereo LP: Nuggets (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Writer: Ed Cobb
Label: Elektra (original label: Tower)
Year: 1965
Dirty Water has long since been adopted by the city of Boston (and especially its sports teams), yet the band that originally recorded this Ed Cobb tune was purely an L.A. band, having started off playing cover tunes for frat parties in the early 60s. Drummer Dickie Dodd, who sings lead on Dirty Water, was a former Mouseketeer who had played on the surf-rock hit Mr. Moto as a member of the Bel-Airs.
Artist: Country Joe And The Fish
Title: Not So Sweet Martha Lorraine
Source: LP: Electric Music For The Mind And Body
Writer(s): Joe McDonald
Label: Vanguard
Year: 1967
While not as commercially successful as the Jefferson Airplane or as long-lived as the Grateful Dead (there's an oxymoron for ya), Country Joe and the Fish may well be the most accurate musical representation of what the whole Haight-Ashbury scene was about, which is itself ironic, since the band operated out of Berkeley on the other side of the bay. Of all the tracks on their first album, Not So Sweet Martha Lorraine probably got the most airplay on various underground radio stations that were popping up on the FM dial at the time (some of them even legally).
Artist: "Hair" Original Off-Broadway Cast
Title: Aquarius
Source: LP: New York Shakespeare Festival Public Theater Presents Hair - An American Tribal Love-Rock Musical
Writer(s): Ragni/Rado/MacDermott
Label: RCA Victor
Year: 1967
Two years before Hair became a national phenomena, RCA Victor released the original Off-Broadway version of The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical, with a significantly different cast than the more popular Broadway version. The songs were a bit different as well, with several of the later additions, such as Let The Sunshine In, not yet part of the Off-Broadway production. The song Aquarius, which opens the show in the Broadway version, comes much later on the original 1967 Off-Broadway soundtrack album, and is sung by the entire company rather than vocalist Ronnie Dyson, who joined the cast in 1968.
Artist: Flock
Title: Tired Of Waiting For You
Source: German import LP: Underground '70 (originally released on LP: The Flock)
Writer: Ray Davies
Label: CBS (original label: Columbia)
Year: 1969
The Flock was one of those bands that made an impression on those who heard them perform but somehow were never able to turn that into massive record sales. Still, they left a pair of excellent LPs for posterity. The most notable track from the first album was their cover of the 1965 Kinks hit Tired Of Waiting For You, featuring solos at the beginning and end of the song from violinist Jerry Goodwin, who would go on to become a charter member of John McLaughlin's Mahavishnu Orchestra a couple years later.
Artist: Blue Cheer
Title: Summertime Blues
Source: CD: Love Is The Song We Sing: San Francisco Nuggets 1965-70 (originally released on LP: Vincebus Eruptum)
Writer: Cochrane/Capehart
Label: Rhino (original label: Philips)
Year: 1968
If 1967 was the summer of love, then 1968 was the summer it all went straight to hell. Framed by the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, both major anti-establishment movements of the time (civil rights and anti-war) became increasing radicalized and more violent. The hippies gave way to the Yippies, LSD gave way to crystal meth, and there were riots in the streets of several US cities. Against this backdrop Blue Cheer released one of the loudest and angriest recordings ever to grace the top 40: the proto-metal arrangement of Eddie Cochrane's 1958 classic Summertime Blues. It was the perfect soundtrack of its time.
Artist: Electric Prunes
Title: Are You Lovin' Me More (But Enjoying It Less)
Source: 45 RPM single B side
Writer: Tucker/Mantz
Label: Reprise
Year: 1967
For a follow-up to the hit single I Had Too Much To Dream (Last Night), producer Dave Hassinger chose another Annette Tucker song (co-written by Jill Jones) called Get Me To The World On Time. This was probably the best choice from the album tracks available, but Hassinger may have made a mistake by choosing Are You Lovin' Me More (But Enjoying It Less) as the B side. That song, written by the same Tucker/Mantz team that wrote I Had Too Much To Dream (Last Night) could quite possibly been a hit single in its own right if it had been issued as an A side. I guess we'll never know for sure.
Artist: Yardbirds
Title: Over Under Sideways Down
Source: 45 RPM single
Writer: Dreja/Relf/Samwell-Smith/McCarty/Beck
Label: Epic
Year: 1966
The only Yardbirds album to feature primarily original material was released under different titles in different parts of the world. The original UK version was called simply The Yardbirds, while the US album bore the Over Under Sideways Down title. In addition, the UK album was unofficially known as Roger the Engineer because of band member Chris Dreja's drawing of the band's recording engineer on the cover. The title cut was the last single to feature Jeff Beck as the band's sole lead guitarist (the follow-up single, Happenings Ten Years Time Ago, featured both Beck and new member Jimmy Page).
Artist: Seeds
Title: Tripmaker
Source: Mono CD: Where The Action Is: L.A. Nuggets 1965-68 (originally released on LP: A Web Of Sound)
Writer(s): Tybalt/Hooper
Label: Rhino (original label: GNP Crescendo)
Year: 1966
Although the second Seeds album, A Web Of Sound, came out in both stereo and mono versions, there are very few copies of the mono version in existence, let alone in playable condition. Apparently Rhino Records has access to one of them, allowing them to use this mono mix of Tripmaker, showing the advantages of being a record label that started off as a record store.
Artist: Eric Burdon and the Animals
Title: Monterey
Source: CD: Psychedelic Pop (originally released as 45 RPM single and on LP: The Twain Shall Meet)
Writer: Burdon/Briggs/Weider/Jenkins/McCulloch
Label: BMG/RCA/Buddah (original label: M-G-M)
Year: 1968
One of the first appearances of the New Animals on stage was at the Monterey International Pop Festival. The experience so impressed the group that they wrote a song about it. The song was issued both as a single and on the LP The Twain Shall Meet. The single used a mono mix; the LP version, while in stereo, was overlapped at both the beginning and end by adjoining tracks, and was missing the first few seconds of the single version. The version used here was created by splicing the mono intro onto the stereo main portion of the song, fading out at the end a bit early to avoid the overlap from the LP. This process (called making a "cut down") was first done by a company called Drake-Chenault, which supplied tapes to radio stations using the most pristine stereo versions of songs available. Whether M-G-M, which included Monterey on The Best Of Eric Burdon And The Animals Volume 2, used the Drake-Chenault version or did the cut down itself, the result is the same.
Artist: Beacon Street Union
Title: The Clown Died In Marvin Gardens
Source: LP: The Clown Died In Marvin Gardens
Writer(s): Ulaky/Wright
Label: M-G-M
Year: 1968
While the first Beacon Street Union album is considered a psychedelic masterpiece, the followup LP, The Clown Died In Marvin Gardens, has a decidedly different feel to it. Some of this is attributable to a change in producer from Tom Wilson, whose work with Bob Dylan, the Mothers of Invention and others is legendary, to Wes Farrell, whose greatest success would come producing the Partridge Family in the early 1970s. Farrell used strings extensively to create a noticably more mainstream pop sound, as can be heard on the album's title track.
Artist: Byrds
Title: Turn! Turn! Turn!
Source: Simulated stereo LP: Homer (soundtrack) (originally released as 45 RPM single and included on LP: Turn! Turn! Turn!)
Writer(s): Pete Seeger
Label: Cotillion (original label: Columbia)
Year: 1965
After their success covering Bob Dylan's Mr. Tambourine Man, the Byrds turned to an even more revered songwriter: the legendary Pete Seeger. Turn! Turn! Turn!, with lyrics adapted from the book of Ecclesiastes, was first recorded by Seeger in the early 60s, nearly three years after he wrote the song.
Artist: Monkees
Title: Peter Gunn's Gun
Source: CD: Headquarters (bonus track)
Writer(s): Henry Mancini
Label: Rhino
Year: 1967
Sometimes you just gotta cut loose and do something silly. Sometimes you even do something silly in a situation where someone can see or hear you. And if you happen to be in a recording studio, sometimes you do something silly with the tape rolling. Such is the case with the Monkees goofing on Henry Mancini's Peter Gunn theme. I can remember doing the same kind of thing with my first band, except three of us had to share an amplifier and the drummer was using a set of toy drums. And we didn't tape it. I do have a cassette tape of one my 80s bands doing the same thing; in this case however we actually had real instruments, amps and toys to play with. And no, I don't have any intention of playing it on the air, but if you really want to hear it that bad contact me through hermitradio.com and I might be persuaded to send you a link to an MP3 copy.
Artist: Jimi Hendrix Experience (Mk II)
Title: Stepping Stone
Source: CD: First Rays of the New Rising Sun (originally released on LP: War Heroes)
Writer: Jimi Hendrix
Label: MCA (original label: Reprise)
Year: 1970
The last single released by Jimi Hendrix (with bassist Billy Cox and drummer Buddy Miles as Hendrix Band Of Gypsys) during his lifetime was Stepping Stone, recorded in February of 1970 and released two months later. In June, Hendrix and drummer Mitch Mitchell recorded new instrumental parts for inclusion on Hendrix's new double LP, tentatively titled First Rays Of The New Rising Sun. Hendrix's death on Sept 16, 1970 sidetracked the double LP until it was finally finished by Mitchell and engineer Eddie Kramer in 1997 and released on CD. Meanwhile the revised version of Stepping Stone was included on 1972's War Heroes LP, as well as on other collections over the years.
Artist: Monkees
Title: Your Auntie Grizelda
Source: CD: More Of The Monkees
Writer(s): Hilderbrand/Keller
Label: Rhino (original label: Colgems)
Year: 1967
Despite being, in the words of bandmate Michael Nesmith, the best musician in the Monkees, Peter Tork had very little to do on the band's second LP, More of the Monkees. This was mostly because Don Kirschner, the music director for the Monkees project, did pretty much what he wanted with little regard for the wishes of the band members themselves. In fact, when More of the Monkees was released in January of 1967, the band members were unaware of the album's existence. Since Kirschner's policy was to use studio musicians exclusively for the instrumental parts, Tork was left with a few backup vocals and one track, Your Auntie Grizelda, that he sang lead on. The song was played for laughs, as Tork was generally portrayed as the goofy guy in the group on the Monkees TV show. This lack of respect would soon change, however, as a Tork composition would end up being used as the show's closing theme for the second and final season, and Tork himself would be featured playing a variety of instruments on subsequent Monkees records following Kirschner's dismissal.
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 originally 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: Monkees
Title: Mr. Webster
Source: CD: Headquarters
Writer: Boyce/Hart
Label: Rhino (original label: Colgems)
Year: 1967
After scathing criticism from the rock press for not playing their own instruments, the Monkees were determined to show that they could do it themselves with their third LP, Headquarters. One of the better, yet often overlooked tracks is Mr. Webster, a folk-rock song about an underappreciated bank security guard who decides to determine his own retirement bonus. Although their musicianship was nowhere near being on a level with the studio musicians who had played on their first two albums, the Monkees, in the words of Peter Tork, finally felt like a "real band". Unfortunately the damage to their reputations was already past the point of redemption, and subsequent LPs all used studio musicians, albeit under the direct supervision of the Monkees themselves.
Artist: Jimi Hendrix
Title: Belly Button Window
Source: CD: First Rays Of The New Rising Sun (originally released on LP: The Cry Of Love)
Writer(s): Jimi Hendrix
Label: MCA (original label: Reprise)
Year: 1971
Following the death of Jimi Hendrix, Reprise Records got to work compiling tracks for The Cry Of Love, the first of many posthumous Hendrix albums released by the label. The final track on the LP was an unfinished piece called Belly Button Window that featured Hendrix on vocals and electric guitar, with no other musicians appearing on the track. In the late 1990s the Hendrix family released a CD called First Rays Of The New Rising Sun that was based on Hendrix's own plans for a double-length album that he was working on at the time of his death. First Rays Of The New Rising Sun ends with the same bare bones recording of Belly Button Window that was used on The Cry Of Love.
Artist: Them
Title: I'm Your Witch Doctor
Source: British import CD: Now and Them
Writer(s): John Mayall
Label: Rev-Ola (original US label: Tower)
Year: 1968
Them's version of I'm Your Witch Doctor is an oddity: a pyschedelicized version of a John Mayall song by Van Morrison's old band with a new vocalist (Kenny McDowell). Just to make it even odder we have sound effects at the beginning of the song that were obviously added after the fact by the producer (and not done particularly well at that). But then, what else would you expect from the label that put out an LP by a band that didn't even participate in the recording of half the tracks on the album (Chocolate Watchband's No Way Out), a song about a city that none of the band members had even been to (the Standells' Dirty Water), and soundtrack albums to films like Wild In the Streets, Riot On Sunset Strip and The Love In? Let's hear it for Tower, the American International of the record industry!
Artist: Tim Rose
Title: Hey Joe (You Shot Your Woman Down)
Source: 45 RPM single
Writer: Billy Roberts
Label: Columbia
Year: 1966
The folk music revival of the late 50s and early 60s is generally thought of as an East Coast phenomena, centered in the coffee houses of cities such as New York, Boston and Philadelphia. California, though, had its share of folk music artists, especially in the San Francisco area, where the beatniks espoused a Bohemian lifestyle that would pave the way for the Hippy movement centered in the city's Haight-Ashbury district. Among the California folkies were Billy Roberts, who copyrighted the song Hey Joe in 1962, and Tim Rose, who (along with the Music Machine's Sean Bonniwell) came up with a slower version of the song. Rose's version, released as a single in mid-1966, got considerable airplay on San Francisco radio stations and was the inspiration for the more famous Jimi Hendrix version of the song that made the British top 10 toward the end of the year. Rose's version was not widely available until 1967, when his debut LP for Columbia was released. By then, however, the Hendrix version was all over the progressive FM airwaves in the US, and the Rose version (now in stereo) remained for the most part unheard.
Artist: Shadows of Knight
Title: Dark Side
Source: CD: Dark Sides
Writer: Rogers/Sohns
Label: Rhino (original label: Dunwich)
Year: 1966
Dark Side, written by guitarist Warren Rogers and singer Jim Sohns, is probably the quintessential Shadows of Knight song. It has all the classic elements of a garage rock song: three chords, a blues beat and lots of attitude. Oh, and the lyrics "I love you baby more than birds love the sky". What more can you ask for? Backup vocals, barely on key? Yeah, it's got those too.
Artist: Love
Title: My Flash On You
Source: Mono CD: Love Story (originally released on LP: Love)
Writer(s): Arthur Lee
Label: Elektra/Rhino
Year: 1966
Sounding a bit like the fast version of Hey Joe (which was also on Love's debut LP), My Flash On You is essentially Arthur Lee in garage mode. A punk classic.
Artist: Janis Ian
Title: Society's Child (Baby I've Been Thinking)
Source: 45 RPM single
Writer(s): Janis Ian
Label: Verve Folkways
Year: 1966
Janis Ian began writing Society's Child, using the title Baby I've Been Thinking, when she was 13 years old, finishing it shortly after her 14th birthday. She shopped it around to several record labels before finally finding one willing to take a chance on the controversial song about interracial dating. The record was released in September of 1966 by M-G-M subsidiary Verve Folkways, a label whose roster included Dave Van Ronk, Laura Nyro and the Blues Project, among others. Despite being banned on several radio stations the song became a major hit when re-released the following year after being featured on an April 1967 Leonard Bernstein TV special. Ian had problems maintaining a balance between her performing career and being a student which ultimately led to her dropping out of high school. She would eventually get her career back on track in the mid-70s, scoring another major hit with At Seventeen, and becoming somewhat of a heroine to the feminist movement.
Artist: Simon and Garfunkel
Title: A Most Peculiar Man
Source: CD: Collected Works (originally released on LP: Sounds Of Silence)
Writer: Paul Simon
Label: Columbia
Year: 1966
You would think that a high school on a US military facility would be inclined to use the most staunchly traditional teaching methods known to mankind. Surprisingly, though, this was not the case at General H. H. Arnold High School in Weisbaden, Germany, in 1967. In fact, the English department was teaching some sort of new system that dispensed with terms such as verb and noun and replaced them with a more conceptual approach to language. What I best remember about my Freshman English class is the day that my rather Bohemian teacher (he wore sandals to class!), actually brought in a copy of the Sounds Of Silence and had us dissect two songs from the album, Richard Cory and A Most Peculiar Man. We spent several classes discussing the similarities (they both deal with a suicide by someone representing a particular archetype) and differences (the methods used and the archetypes themselves) between the songs. I have forgotten everything else about that class and its so-called revolutionary approach (and even the teacher's name), but those two songs have stayed with me my entire life. I guess that teacher was on to something.
Artist: Traffic
Title: Withering Tree
Source: LP: Last Exit (originally released as 45 RPM single B side)
Writer(s): Winwood/Capaldi
Label: Island (original label: United Artists)
Year: 1968
One of Traffic's best-known songs is Feelin' Alright from their eponymous second LP. When the song was issued as a single in 1968, a brand-new song, Withering Tree, was included as a B side. The stereo version of Withering Tree would not be heard until 1969, when it was included on the post-breakup Traffic LP Last Exit.
Artist: Deep Purple
Title: Exposition/We Can Work It Out
Source: CD: The Book Of Taleisyn
Writer(s): Blackmore/Lord/Simper/Paice/Lennon/McCartney
Label: Eagle (original label: Tetragrammaton)
Year: 1968
The original Deep Purple was sometimes referred to as England's answer to Vanilla Fudge. Tracks like Exposition (a band original based on a piece by Tchaikovsky) and We Can Work It Out, from their second LP, The Book Of Taleisyn, show how they got that reputation.
Artist: Quicksilver Messenger Service
Title: Pride Of Man
Source: CD: Quicksilver Messenger Service
Writer(s): Hamilton Camp
Label: RockBeat (original label: Capitol)
Year: 1968
There are differing opinions on just how serious legendary San Francisco singer/songwriter and all-around iconoclast Dino Valenti was being when, at a jam session with guitarist John Cippolina one night, he suggested that the two of them form a band. Since Valenti was busted for marijuana possession the very next day (and ended up spending the next two years in jail), we'll never know for sure. Cippolina, however, was motivated enough to begin finding members for the new band, including bassist David Freiberg (later to join Starship) and drummer Skip Spence. When Marty Balin stole Spence away to join his own new band (Jefferson Airplane), he tried to make up for it by introducing Cippolina to vocalist/guitarist Gary Duncan and drummer Greg Elmore, whose own band, the Brogues, had recently disbanded. Taking the name Quicksilver Messenger Service (so named for all the member's astrological connections with the planet Mercury), the new band soon became a fixture on the San Francisco scene. Inspired by the Blues Project, Cippolina and Duncan quickly established a reputation for their dual guitar improvisational abilities on songs like Hamilton Camp's Pride Of Man (which a reviewer from Rolling Stone magazine claimed was better than Camp's original). Unlike other San Francisco bands such as the Airplane, Moby Grape and the Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service did not jump at their first offer from a major record label, preferring to hold out for the best deal. This meant their debut album did not come out until 1968, missing out on the initial buzz surrounding the summer of love.
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