Artist: Bob Dylan
Title: Like A Rolling Stone
Source: CD: Highway 61 Revisited
Writer: Bob Dylan
Label: Columbia
Year: 1965
Bob Dylan incurred the wrath of folk purists when he decided to use electric instruments for his 1965 LP Highway 61 Revisited. The opening track on the album is the six-minute Like A Rolling Stone, a song that was also selected to be the first single released from the new album. After the single was pressed, the shirts at Columbia Records decided to cancel the release due to its length. An acetate copy of the record, however, made it to a local New York club, where, by audience request, the record was played over and over until it was worn out (acetate copies not being as durable as their vinyl counterparts). When Columbia started getting calls from local radio stations demanding copies of the song the next morning they decided to release the single after all. Like A Rolling Stone ended up going all the way to the number two spot on the US charts, doing quite well in several other countries as well. Personnel on this historic recording included guitarist Michael Bloomfield, pianist Paul Griffin, drummer Bobby Gregg, bassist Joe Madho, guitarist Charlie McCoy and tambourinist Bruce Langhorne. In addition, guitarist Al Kooper, who was on the scene as a guest of producer Tom Wilson, sat in on organ, ad-libbing a part that so impressed Dylan that he insisted it be given a prominent place in the final mixdown. This in turn led to Kooper permanently switching over to keyboards for the remainder of his career.
Artist: Lovin' Spoonful
Title: You Didn't Have To Be So Nice
Source: LP: The John Sebastian Songbook
Writer: John Sebastian
Label: Kama Sutra
Year: 1965
The second single released by the Lovin' Spoonful proved to be just as popular as their first one and helped establish the band as one of the premier acts of the folk-rock movement. Unlike the West Coast folk rock artists such as the Byrds and Barry McGuire, who focused on the socio-political issues of the day, John Sebastian tended to write happy songs with catchy melodies such as You Didn't Have To Be So Nice. As a result, the Lovin' Spoonful for a while rivaled the Beatles in popularity while still managing to maintain some street credit due mainly to their Greenwich Village roots.
Artist: Jimi Hendrix
Title: Hear My Train A Comin'
Source: CD: Blues
Writer: Jimi Hendrix
Label: Legacy
Year: 1967
Sometime in 1967 somebody gave Jimi Hendrix an acoustic 12-string guitar to play around with. As Hendrix generally had a tape recorder running when he was in the studio (just in case he came up with something on the spur of the moment he might want to return to later), he managed to capture this performance of a tune he was working on that wouldn't become an official song until a few years later. The presence of numerous tape dropouts suggests that this recording was simply a practice tape that luckily never got erased and reused.
Artist: John Fahey
Title: Dance Of Death
Source: LP: Zabriskie Point soundtrack
Writer: John Fahey
Label: 4 Men With Beards (original label: M-G-M)
Year: 1970
Although the movie Zabriskie Point has a reputation for being one of the worst films ever made, the soundtrack is another story altogether. Most of the attention has been paid to the Pink Floyd tracks on the album, however there are other gems as well, such as this instrumental piece by acoustic guitarist John Fahey. As far as I can tell Dance Of Death does not appear on any of Fahey's own LPs.
Artist: Kinks
Title: See My Friends
Source: LP: Kinkdom
Writer: Ray Davies
Label: Reprise
Year: 1965
Possibly the most psychedelic recording ever made by the Kinks, See My Friends was originally released as a single in the UK in 1965, making the top 10. Ray Davies has been heard to say the song is about the death of his older sister Rene, who had given him his first guitar for his 13th birthday shortly before her death from an undiagnosed hole in her heart. Like many of the Kinks' UK singles, See My Friends was not released as a single in the US, appearing instead on the US-only LP Kinkdom.
Artist: Eric Burdon And The Animals
Title: Anything
Source: CD: Best of Eric Burdon and the Animals (originally released on LP: Winds Of Change)
Writer: Burdon/Briggs/Weider/McCulloch/Jenkins
Label: Polydor (original label: M-G-M)
Year: 1967
The first album by the "new" Eric Burdon And The Animals, Winds Of Change, included three songs that were released as singles, however only one of the three got airplay in both the US and the UK. The US-only single was a song that Eric Burdon has since said was the one he was most proud of writing, a love generation song called Anything. In fact Burdon liked the song well enough to re-record it for a solo album in 1995.
Artist: Procol Harum
Title: A Christmas Camel
Source: CD: Procol Harum (US album title: A Whiter Shade Of Pale)
Writer: Brooker/Reid
Label: Salvo (original label: Deram)
Year: 1967
In 1966 Gary Brooker, former member of British cover band the Paramounts, formed a songwriting partnership with lyricist Keith Reid. By spring of 1967 the two had at least an album's worth of songs written but no band to play them. They solved the dilemma by placing an ad in Melody Maker and soon formed a group called the Pinewoods. Their very first record was A Whiter Shade Of Pale, which soon became the number one song on the British charts (after the Pinewoods changed their name to Procol Harum). The problem was that the group didn't know any other songs, a problem that was solved by firing the drummer and guitarist and replacing them with two of Brooker's former bandmates, B.J. Wilson and Robin Trower. This second version of the group soon recorded an LP, which included several strong tracks such as A Christmas Camel, making its Stuck in the Psychedelic Era debut this week.
Artist: Grateful Dead
Title: St. Stephen/The Eleven
Source: LP: Live Dead
Writer: Hunter/Garcia/Lesh
Label: Warner Brothers
Year: 1969
In 1969, after going way over budget on the LP Aoxomoxoa, the Grateful Dead decided to release a double-LP live album, essentially giving Warner Brothers three albums for the price of one. Unlike the studio LP, which attempted to combine live material with studio overdubs, Live Dead was a documentation of two nights' worth of recent performances at the Fillmore West. At the time the band pretty much stuck to the same setlist for each performance and the songs were generally played as one continuous piece in concert. For the album, the best performance of each song was chosen and then arranged in the same order that they had been performed. Side two picks up the first nights' performance of St. Stephen (which had also appeared on Aoxomoxoa) and continues into the second night's version of The Eleven, a performance that rock critic Robert Christian called at the time "the finest rock improvisation ever recorded." Within a couple years St. Stephen would be dropped from the band's setlist and a performance of the piece in the band's later decades was considered by fans to be a special treat.
Artist: Beatles
Title: Birthday/Yer Blues
Source: CD: The Beatles
Writer: Lennon/McCartney
Label: Parlophone (original label: Apple)
Year: 1968
One of the great ironies of rock history was that the album entitled simply The Beatles was the one that had the fewest songs with all four of the band members playing on them. By 1968 the Beatles were experiencing internal conflicts, and nearly all of John Lennon and Paul McCartney's songs were played by just the two of them, while George Harrison's songs (and Ringo Starr's single contribution as a songwriter) featured an array of some of the UK's top musicians (including guitarist Eric Clapton). The opening tracks of side three of the album are typical of this approach, as Birthday is essentially a McCartney solo piece. Yer Blues, on the other hand, has Lennon singing and playing guitar, with probably McCartney on bass and drums. The first performance of Yer Blues in front of a live audience was in December of 1968 as part of the Rolling Stones Rock And Roll Circus. It was not the Beatles however, that performed the tune. Instead, Yer Blues was played by the Dirty Mac, a jam band consisting of Lennon, Clapton, drummer Mitch Mitchell (of the Jimi Hendrix Experience), and the Stones' Keith Richards on bass. That performance was never seen, other than by the studio audience, until the entire Circus was released on DVD a few years ago (Mick Jagger reportedly had the entire project shelved due to his dissatisfaction with the Stones' performance).
Artist: Cream
Title: Sitting On Top Of The World
Source: LP: Wheels Of Fire
Writer: Chester Burnett
Label: Atco
Year: 1968
Throughout their existence British blues supergroup Cream recorded covers of blues classics. One of the best of these is Sitting On Top Of The World from the album Wheels Of Fire, which in its earliest form was written by Walter Vinson and Lonnie Chatmon and recorded by the Mississippi Shieks in 1930. Cream's cover uses the lyrics from the 1957 rewrite of the song by Chester Burnett, better know as Howlin' Wolf.
Artist: Monks
Title: Complication
Source: CD: Nuggets-Original Artyfacts from the Psychedelic Era (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Writer: Burger/Spangler/Havlicek/Johnston/Shaw
Label: Rhino (original label: Polydor)
Year: 1966
In 1964 a group of American GIs stationed in Germany decided to get together and form a rock band. After their respective tours of duty ended they decided to stay in the country and in 1966 recorded this single for Polydor. Knowing that a large segment of their audience had a rudimentary grasp of English at best, they deliberately crafted a tune that would be easy to comprehend with clear, almost chanted lyrics. To take the chanting concept a step further they all had square patches shaved off the top of their heads and dressed in brown robes. After thinking about it for a couple days I think I've finally figured out who these guys remind me of: early AC/DC, especially Von Scott's vocals. Compare this to Jailbreak. You'll hear what I mean.
Artist: Music Machine
Title: Discrepancy
Source: CD: Beyond The Garage (originally released on LP: Bonniwell Music Machine)
Writer: Sean Bonniwell
Label: Sundazed (original label: Warner Brothers)
Year: 1967
Last week I did a tribute to Sean Bonniwell of the Music Machine, who died from lung cancer on December 20th, 2011. I inadvertantly left out one song I really wanted to play, however. That song is Discrepancy, one of Bonniwell's most sophisticated efforts. The song actually features two simultaneous vocal lines. The main one, sung by Bonniwell (in the left channel) as a single melody line, tells the story of a deteriorating relationship. In the opposite channel we hear a breathy multi-part vocal line that tells the same story from the perspective of the subconscious. The two come together lyrically from time to time to express key concepts such as the line "now I know I'm losing you", only to once again diverge onto their separate tracks. The bridge serves to further unite the two divergent lines with the repeating plea to "tell me what to do". Discrepancy is one of the few tracks recorded by the original Music Machine lineup that was never released on Original Sound Records, either as an LP track or on a 45 RPM single. Instead, the song was included on the LP Bonniwell Music Machine, released by Warner Brothers in 1967.
Artist: Strawberry Alarm Clock
Title: Incense And Peppermints
Source: CD: Nuggets-Original Artyfacts from the Psychedelic Era (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Writer: Carter/Gilbert/Weitz/King
Label: Rhino (original label: Uni)
Year: 1967
Incense and Peppermints is one of the iconic songs of the psychedelic era, yet when it was originally released to Los Angeles area radio stations it was intended to be the B side of The Birdman of Alkatrash. Somewhere along the line a DJ flipped the record over and started playing Incense And Peppermints instead. The song caught on and Uni Records (short for Universal, which is now the world's largest record company) picked up the Strawberry Alarm Clock's contract and reissued the record nationally with Incense And Peppermints as the A side.
Artist: Jefferson Airplane
Title: Comin' Back To Me
Source: LP: Surrealistic Pillow
Writer: Marty Balin
Label: RCA Victor
Year: 1967
Uncredited guest guitarist Jerry Garcia adds a simple, but memorable recurring fill riff to this Marty Balin tune. Balin, in his 2003 liner notes to the remastered release of Surrealistic Pillow, claims that Comin' Back To Me was written in one sitting under the influence of some primo stuff given to him by Paul Butterfield. Other players on the recording include Balin and Paul Kantner on guitars, Jack Casady on bass and Grace Slick on recorder.
Artist: Yardbirds
Title: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor
Source: CD: Over, Under, Sideways, Down (originally released in US only as 45 RPM single B side)
Writer: Jim McCarty
Label: Raven (original label: Epic)
Year: 1967
By 1967 the Yardbirds had moved far away from the blues roots and were on their fourth lead guitarist, studio whiz Jimmy Page. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor shows signs of Page's innovative guitar style (such as using a violin bow) that would help define 70s rock with his next band, Led Zeppelin.
Artist: Tommy Boyce And Bobby Hart
Title: Words
Source: CD: Where The Action Is: L.A. Nuggets 1965-68
Writer: Boyce/Hart
Label: Rhino
Year: 1965
Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart were really hoping to be selected for the new band that Screen Gems/Columbia Pictures was putting together to star in a new weekly TV series. It didn't work out for them, but several of the songs they wrote appeared on the Monkees albums, including Words, heard here in its previously unreleased 1965 demo form.
Artist: Seeds
Title: Mr. Farmer
Source: LP: A Web Of Sound
Writer: Sky Saxon
Label: GNP Crescendo
Year: 1966
With two tracks (Can't Seem To Make You Mine and Pushin' Too Hard) from their first album getting decent airplay on L.A. radio stations in 1966 the Seeds headed back to the studio to record a second LP, A Web Of Sound. The first single released from the album was Mr. Farmer, a song that once again did well locally. The only national hit for the Seeds came when Pushin' Too Hard was re-released in December of 1966, hitting its national peak the following spring. Wait a sec...didn't I just say this last week?
Artist: Byrds
Title: It Happens Every Day
Source: CD: Younger Than Yesterday (bonus track)
Writer: David Crosby
Label: Columbia/Legacy
Year: 1967
The Byrds had a unique problem in early 1967: they were writing and recording more quality material than they could fit on an album. As a result some truly worthy songs like It Happens Every Day got left off Younger Than Yesterday. It's possible that the song would have been included on the next Byrds album, but with David Crosby no longer a member of the band by the time The Notorious Byrd Brothers came out, it was probably deemed inappropriate to include it there. Ironically, it was revealed years later that an uncredited Crosby did play on several tracks on the Notorious Byrd Brothers, despite having left the band before its release.
Artist: King Crimson
Title: The Court Of The Crimson King
Source: LP: In The Court Of The Crimson King
Writer: MacDonald/Sinfield
Label: Atlantic
Year: 1969
Perhaps the most influential progressive rock album of all time was King Crimson's debut LP, In The Court Of The Crimson King. The band, in its original incarnation, included Robert Fripp on guitar, Ian MacDonald on keyboards and woodwinds, Greg Lake on vocals and bass, David Giles on drums and Peter Sinfield as a dedicated lyricist. The title track, which takes up the second half of side two of the LP, features music composed by MacDonald, who would leave the group after their second album, later resurfacing as a founding member of Foreigner. The album's distinctive cover art (posted on the Stuck in the Psychedelic Era Facebook page) came from a painting by computer programmer Barry Godber, who died of a heart attack less than a year after the album was released. According to Fripp, the artwork on the inside is a portrait of the Crimson King, whose manic smile is in direct contrast to his sad eyes. The album, song and artwork were the inspiration for Stephen King's own Crimson King, the insane antagonist of his Dark Tower saga who is out to destroy all of reality, including our own.
Artist: Spirit
Title: Nature's Way
Source: CD: Best Of Spirit (originally released on LP: Twelve Dreams Of Dr. Sardonicus)
Writer: Randy California
Label: Epic
Year: 1970
Nature's Way is one of the best-known and best-loved songs in the Spirit catalog. Originally released on the 1970 LP The Twelve Dreams Of Dr. Sardonicus, the song was finally issued as a single in 1973, long after lead vocalist Jay Ferguson and bassist Mark Andes had left the band. The single mix is a bit different from the album version, particularly at the end of the song, which originally ended with a tympani roll by drummer Ed Cassidy. The single version ends with the chord immediately preceding that roll.
Artist: Spirit
Title: Elijah
Source: CD: Spirit
Writer: John Locke
Label: Ode/Epic/Legacy
Year: 1968
Since the mid-1960s many bands have had one long piece that they play in concert that is specifically designed to allow individual band members to strut their stuff. In a few cases, such as Iron Butterfly's In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida or Lynnard Skynnard's Freebird, it becomes their best-known song. In most cases, though, a studio version of the piece gets put on an early album and never gets heard on the radio. Such is the case with Spirit's show-stopper Elijah, which was reportedly never played the same way twice. Elijah, written by keyboardist John Locke, starts with a hard-rockin' main theme that is followed by a jazzier second theme that showcases one of the lead instruments (guitar, keyboards). The piece then comes to a dead stop while one of the members has a solo section of their own devising. This is followed by the main theme, repeating several times until every member has had their own solo section. The piece ends with a return to the main theme followed by a classic power rock ending.
Artist: Spirit
Title: Animal Zoo
Source: CD: Best Of Spirit
Writer: Jay Ferguson
Label: Epic
Year: 1970
The last album by the original lineup of Spirit was The Twelve Dreams Of Dr. Sardonicus, released in 1970. The album was originally going to be produced by Neil Young, but due to other commitments Young had to bow out, recommending David Briggs, who had already produced Young's first album with Crazy Horse, as a replacement. The first song to be released as a single was Animal Zoo, but the tune barely cracked the top 100 charts. The album itself did better on progressive FM stations and has since come to be regarded as a classic. Shortly after the release of Twelve Dreams, Jay Ferguson and Mark Andes left Spirit to form Jo Jo Gunne.
Wednesday, January 18, 2012
Thursday, January 12, 2012
Stuck in the Psychedelic Era # 1202 (starts 1/12/12)
This week's edition of Stuck in the Psychedelic Era is dedicated to Sean Bonniwell, who passed away on Dec. 20th 2011 of lung cancer. I thought about doing a tribute set in the second hour, but then hit upon an idea that I think Bonniwell himself would have appreciated: a Music Machine track in every song set. The result is a show with no less than eleven tracks from Bonniwell's Music Machine, one of the most underrated garage-psych bands of the late 1960s. Bonniwell was one of the first rock musicians to take a holistic approach to his musical presentation. The name of the band itself reflected Bonniwell's idea to segue directly from song to song for an entire set, never pausing long enough to let members of the audience call out requests that Bonniwell had no desire to play. Visually, the Music Machine had a look all their own, with all the members dressing entirely in black (including dying their hair) and wearing one glove on stage, years before Michael Jackson did his first moonwalk. The songs themselves showed a sophistication seldom, if ever, heard among their contemporaries. Elements of Bonniwell's music can be heard in later bands such as the Doors (Ray Manzarek's keyboard work has much in common with that of organist Doug Rhodes) and Iron Butterfly (in particular Doug Ingle's vocal style). In addition to the Music Machine tracks we have nearly two dozen more tunes by the usual variety of artists, including one or two you probably never heard of as well as some old favorites like Jimi Hendrix, the Standells and even the Grateful Dead. See the songlist below for details.
Artist: Music Machine
Title: Some Other Drum
Source: CD: Turn On
Writer: Sean Bonniwell
Label: Collectables
Year: 1966
The Music Machine is best known for its high energy arrangements and snarling vocals, as typified by their greatest hit Talk Talk. Some Other Drum, from the Music Machine's debut LP, shows a different side of Sean Bonniwell's songwriting. Sounding a bit like the Lovin' Spoonful, Some Other Drum emphasizes the more traditional elements of pop songwriting such as a catchy melody and layered harmonies and shows that Bonniwell, if he wanted to, could probably have been quite successful if he had chosen to go that route.
Artist: Beatles
Title: Words Of Love
Source: CD: Beatles For Sale (released in US on LP: Beatles VI)
Writer: Buddy Holly
Label: Parlophone (US label: Capitol)
Year: 1964 (US release: 1965)
By 1964 John Lennon and Paul McCartney were already well on their way to becoming one of the most successful songwriting teams in history. Despite this, the Beatles continued to record cover tunes such as Words Of Love, which had been one of Buddy Holly's biggest hits (and one of the few without a co-writing credit for producer Norm Petty). It wasn't until 1965, with the release of Rubber Soul, that the Beatles would write 100% of the material that they recorded.
Artist: Love
Title: My Little Red Book
Source: Nuggets Vol. 2-Punk (originally released as 45 RPM single and on LP: Love)
Writer: Bacharach/David
Label: Rhino
Year: 1966
My Little Red Book was a song originally composed by Burt Bacharach and Hal David for the soundtrack of the movie What's New Pussycat and performed by Manfred Mann. I think it's safe to say that Bacharach and David did not intend the song to sound anything like this recording by Love, the first rock record ever released on the Elektra label.
Artist: Music Machine
Title: Absolutely Positively
Source: CD: Beyond The Garage (originally released as 45 RPM single B side and included on LP: Bonniwell Music Machine)
Writer: Sean Bonniwell
Label: Sundazed (original label: Original Sound)
Year: 1967
I'm going to use Sean Bonniwell's own words to describe Absolutely Positively: "Demanding that you get what you don't have without knowing what you want is the same as wanting what you haven't got, then not wanting it after you get it." Heady stuff that describes a very American attitude that has only become even more prevalent in the years since the song was written.
Artist: Byrds
Title: Mind Gardens
Source: CD: Younger Than Yesterday
Writer: David Crosby
Label: Columbia
Year: 1967
Mind Gardens is a perfect example of what songwriter David Crosby refers to as "one of those weird David Crosby songs". The song is a deliberate attempt at abandoning Western concepts such as chord progressions in favor of a more modal approach favored in Eastern composing. Roger McGuinn's guitar perfectly compliments Crosby's esoteric lyrics and melody on this track from the Younger Than Yesterday album, the last LP to be completed with Crosby as a full member of the Byrds.
Artist: Jimi Hendrix Experience
Title: Castles Made Of Sand
Source: CD: Axis: Bold As Love
Writer: Jimi Hendrix
Label: MCA (original label: Reprise)
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 album 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: Music Machine
Title: Double Yellow Line
Source: Beyond The Garage
Writer: Sean Bonniwell
Label: Sundazed
Year: 1967
After the success of Talk Talk, the Music Machine issued a series of unsuccessful singles on the Original Sound label. Band leader Sean Bonniwell attributed this lack of success to mismanagement by record company people and the band's own manager. Eventually those singles would be re-issued on Warner Brothers on an album called Bonniwell Music Machine, along with a handful of new songs. One of the best of these singles was Double Yellow Line, which Bonniwell said he wrote while driving to a gig. This seems to be a good place to mention the rest of the original Music Machine lineup, which consisted of Mark Landon on lead guitar. Ron Edgar on drums, Doug Rhodes on organ and Keith Olsen on bass. This lineup would dissolve before the release of the Bonniwell Music Machine album but was featured on the majority of tracks on the LP nonetheless.
Artist: Procol Harum
Title: Bringing Home The Bacon
Source: 45 RPM single
Writer: Brooker/Reid
Label: Chrysalis
Year: 1973
After the departure of original lead guitarist Robin Trower, the remaining members of Procol Harum continued to record quality albums such as Grand Hotel, although their airplay was limited to sporadic plays on progressive FM stations. One song that probably should have gotten more attention than it did was Bringing Home The Bacon, from the aforementioned Grand Hotel album. The group would experience a brief return to top 40 radio the following year with the release of their live version of Conquistador, a track that originally appeared on the band's 1967 debut LP.
Artist: Leslie West
Title: Blood Of The Sun
Source: 45 RPM single B side (single taken from LP: Mountain)
Writer: West/Pappaliardi/Collins
Label: Windfall
Year: 1969
After the Vagrants disbanded guitarist Leslie Weinstein changed his last name to West and recorded a solo album called Mountain. Helping him with the project was producer Felix Pappaliardi, who had previously worked with Cream on their Disraeli Gears and Wheels Of Fire albums. The two meshed so well that they decided to form a band with drummer Corky Laing, using the name Mountain. One of the first gigs by the new band was the Woodstock festival, where they played Blood Of The Sun to an enthusiastic crowd. This week, making its Stuck in the Psychedelic Era debut, we have the original studio version of the tune.
Artist: Music Machine
Title: The People In Me
Source: CD: Turn On
Writer: Sean Bonniwell
Label: Collectables (original label: Original Sound)
Year: 1966
After Talk Talk soared into the upper reaches of the US charts the Music Machine's management made a tactical error. Instead of promoting the follow-up single, The People In Me, to the largest possible audience, the band's manager gave exclusive air rights to a new station at the far end of the Los Angeles AM radio dial. As local bands like the Music Machine depended on airplay in L.A. as a necessary step to getting national exposure, the move proved disastrous. Without any airplay on influential stations such as KFI, The People In Me was unable to get any higher than the # 66 spot on the national charts. Even worse for the band, the big stations remembered the slight when subsequent singles by the Music Machine were released, and by mid-1967 the original lineup had disbanded.
Artist: Doors
Title: Unhappy Girl
Source: LP: Strange Days
Writer: The Doors
Label: Elektra
Year: 1967
After the success of their first album and the single Light My Fire in early 1967, the Doors quickly returned to the studio, releasing a second LP, Strange Days, later the same year. The first single released from the new album was People Are Strange. The B side of that single was Unhappy Girl, from the same album. Both sides got played on the jukebox at a place called the Woog in the village of Meisenbach near Ramstein Air Force Base (which is where I was spending most of my evenings that autumn).
Artist: Steve Miller Band
Title: Overdrive
Source: LP: Sailor
Writer: Boz Scaggs
Label: Capitol
Year: 1968
The Steve Miller Band, in its early years, was in a sense an American version of John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, serving as a launching pad for the careers of Ben Sidran and Boz Scaggs, among others. This early Scaggs tune shows a harder-edged side to the Boz than most of his later solo hits.
Artist: Grateful Dead
Title: Doin' That Rag
Source: CD: Aoxomoxoa
Writer: Hunter/Garcia/Lesh
Label: Warner Brothers
Year: 1969
After spending six months on their second LP, Anthem Of The Sun (and going way overbudget in the process), the Grateful Dead reeled things in a bit (but not all that much) for their third effort, Aoxomoxoa. Like Anthem Of The Sun, Aoxomoxoa still combined live recordings with studio overdubs, but the individual songs were shorter and more distinct than on the previous effort. One good example is Doin' That Rag, a song that inexplicably disappeared from the band's live repertoire relatively quickly.
Artist: Standells
Title: Riot On Sunset Strip
Source: CD: Best Of The Standells (originally released as 45 RPM single and included on movie soundtrack LP: Riot On Sunset Strip)
Writer: Valentino/Fleck
Label: Rhino (original label: Tower)
Year: 1967
Anyone who doubts just how much influence bands like the Standells had on the punk-rock movement of the late 1970s need only listen to this 1967 track from the movie Riot On Sunset Strip. The track sounds like it could have been an early Ramones recording. The song itself (and the movie) were based on a real life event. Local L.A. business owners had been complaining about the unruliness and rampant drug usage among the teens hanging out in front of the various underage clubs that had been springing up on Sunset Strip in the wake of the success of the Whisky-A-Go-Go, and in late 1966 the Los Angeles Police Department was called in to do something about the problem. What followed was a full-blown riot which ultimately led to local laws being passed that put many of the clubs out of business and severely curtailed the ability of the rest to make a profit. By 1968 the entire scene was a thing of the past, with the few remaining clubs converting to a more traditional over-21 approach.
Artist: Music Machine
Title: Astrologically Incompatible
Source: CD: Beyond The Garage (originally released as 45 RPM single B side)
Writer: Sean Bonniwell
Label: Sundazed
Year: 1967
Astrologically Incompatible, in addition to being one of the first known rock songs to make references to the signs of the zodiac (which would become fashionable in the following decade), marks a transition point in the history of the Music Machine. One of the last tracks recorded by the original lineup, it was also the B side of the first single released under the name Bonniwell Music Machine on Warner Brothers. The horn overdubs were played by Bonniwell himself and organist Doug Rhodes, using then state-of-the-art 8-track technology.
Artist: Strawberry Alarm Clock
Title: Incense And Peppermints
Source: LP: Nuggets Vol. 9-Acid Rock (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Writer: Carter/Gilbert/Weitz/King
Label: Rhino (original label: Uni)
Year: 1967
Starting off this week's show is one of the iconic songs of the summer of love. Interestingly enough, this was supposed to be the B side of The Birdman of Alkatrash, but somehow ended up getting all the airplay. I haven't bothered to actually count, but I wouldn't be surprised to find I have more copies of this particular song than any other. It appears on just about every collection of psychedelic music ever assembled, it seems. I do have a copy of the original 45, but when I bring that in I generally play...you guessed it, The Birdman of Alkatrash.
Artist: Music Machine
Title: Trouble
Source: LP: Turn On
Writer: Sean Bonniwell
Label: Collectables (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 Billy Roberts' 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. 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, the album becomes an 8-song EP and this track becomes the second song on the disc, following the classic Talk Talk.
Artist: Leaves
Title: Hey Joe
Source: LP: Nuggets Vol. 1-The Hits (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Writer: Billy Roberts
Label: Rhino (original label: Mira)
Year: 1966
In 1966 there were certain songs you had to know how to play if you had any aspirations of being in a band. Among those were Louie Louie, Gloria and Hey Joe. David Crosby claims to have discovered Hey Joe, but was not able to convince his bandmates to record it before their third album. In the meantime, several other bands had recorded the song, including Love (on their first album) and the Leaves. The version of Hey Joe heard here is actually the third recording the Leaves made of the tune. After the first two versions tanked, guitarist Bobby Arlin came up with the idea of adding fuzz guitar to the song. It was the missing element that transformed a rather bland song into a hit record (the only national hit the Leaves would have). As a side note, the Leaves credited Chet Powers (aka Dino Valenti) as the writer of Hey Joe, but California-based folk singer Billy Roberts had copyrighted the song in 1962 and had reportedly been heard playing the tune as early as 1958.
Artist: Shadows of Knight
Title: Oh Yeah
Source: CD: Nuggets-Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Writer: Elias McDaniel
Label: Rhino (original label: Dunwich)
Year: 1966
The original British blues bands like the Yardbirds made no secret of the fact that they had created their own version of a music that had come from Chicago. The Shadows Of Knight, on the other hand, were a Chicago band that created their own version of the British blues, bringing the whole thing full circle. After taking their version of Van Morrison's Gloria into the top 10 early in 1966, the Shadows (which had added "of Knight" to their name just prior to releasing Gloria) decided to follow it up with an updated version of Bo Diddley's Oh Yeah. Although the song did not have a lot of national top 40 success, it did help establish the Shadows' reputation as one of the premier garage-punk bands.
Artist: Music Machine
Title: The Day Today
Source: CD: Beyond The Garage (originally released
Writer: Bonniwell/Olsen
Label: Sundazed
Year: 1967
For some unknown reason, every person who wrote a song in the late 1960s wrote a song like The Day Today; a slow, somewhat sappy tune with a kind of hokey spoken section in place of an instrumental break. (I even wrote one myself called Leaves. I cringe every time I think of it.) The odd thing about The Day Today is that it is a rare instance of Sean Bonniwell collaborating with another songwriter (in this case Music Machine bassist Keith Olsen, who himself was about to embark on a career as a record producer). What possessed people to write things like this is beyond me, but just in case you are one of the few that can appreciate this sort of song, here it is. The rest of us can take comfort in the fact that the track is less than three minutes long.
Artist: Turtles
Title: To See The Sun
Source: The Turtles-1968
Writer: The Turtles
Label: Rhino
Year: 1968
In 1968 the Turtles, feeling restricted by the dictates of producers and record company people, decided to rent studio time to produce some tracks of their own. The result was four songs, three of which were rejected outright by their label, White Whale. (The fourth track, Surfer Joe, made it onto their Battle of the Bands album). Several years later a new local L.A. record label, Rhino Records, was looking to move beyond the niche it had carved out for itself as a novelty label. The chance to make previously unreleased material such as To See The Sun from a band as well-known as the Turtles was just what the label was looking for, and, along with re-releasing long out-of-print Turtles albums, got the label moving in a whole new direction that they continue to excel at.
Artist: Crosby, Stills and Nash
Title: Suite: Judy Blue Eyes
Source: Crosby, Stills and Nash
Writer: Stephen Stills
Label: Atlantic
Year: 1969
After the demise of Buffalo Springfield, Stephen Stills headed for New York, where he worked with Al Kooper on the Super Session album and recorded several demo tapes of his own, including a new song called Suite: Judy Blue Eyes (reportedly written for his then-girlfriend Judy Collins). After his stint in New York he returned to California, where he started hanging out in the Laurel Canyon home of David Crosby, who had been fired from the Byrds in 1967. Crosby's house at that time was generally filled with a variety of people coming and going, and Crosby and Stills soon found themselves doing improvised harmonies on each other's material in front of a friendly, if somewhat stoned, audience. It was not long before they invited Graham Nash, whom they heard had been having problems of his own with his bandmates in the Hollies, to come join them in Laurel Canyon. The three soon began recording together, and in 1969 released the album Crosby, Stills and Nash. Suite: Judy Blue Eyes was chosen as the opening track for the new album and was later released (in edited form) as a single.
Artist: Front Line
Title: Got Love
Source: Love Is The Song We Sing: San Francisco Nuggets 1965-70 (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Writer: Lanigan/Philipet
Label: Rhino (original label: York)
Year: 1965
The Front Line was a band from San Rafael, California whose story in many ways was typical of their time. Marin County, being a fairly upscale place, had its share of clubs catering to the sons and daughters of its affluent residents. Of course, these teens wanted to hear live performances of their favorite top 40 tunes and bands like the Front Line made a decent enough living catering to their preferences. Like most bands of the time, the Front Line had one song that was of their own creation, albeit one that was somewhat derivative of the kinds of tunes they usually performed so as not to scare off their audience. That song was Got Love, which was released on the York label in 1965.
Artist: Music Machine
Title: Talk Talk
Source: CD: Turn On (also released as 45 RPM single)
Writer: Sean Bonniwell
Label: Collectables (original label: Original Sound)
Year: 1966
The Music Machine's big hit.
Artist: Music Machine
Title: Come On In
Source: CD: Turn On (also released as 45 RPM single B side)
Writer: Sean Bonniwell
Label: Collectables (original label: Original Sound)
Year: 1966
The B side of the Music Machine's big hit.
Artist: Seeds
Title: Mr. Farmer
Source: CD: More Nuggets (originally released as 45 RPM single and on LP: A Web Of Sound)
Writer: Sky Saxon
Label: Rhino
Year: 1966
With two tracks (Can't Seem To Make You Mine and Pushin' Too Hard) from their first album getting decent airplay on L.A. radio stations in 1966 the Seeds headed back to the studio to record a second LP, A Web Of Sound. The first single released from the album was Mr. Farmer, a song that once again did well locally. The only national hit for the Seeds came when Pushin' Too Hard was re-released in December of 1966, hitting its national peak the following spring.
Artist: Eric Burdon and the Animals
Title: San Franciscan Nights
Source: Best of Eric Burdon and the Animals (originally released on LP: Winds of Change and as 45 RPM single)
Writer: Burdon/Briggs/Weider/Jenkins/McCulloch
Label: Polydor (original label: M-G-M)
Year: 1967
In late 1966, after losing several original members over a period of about a year, the original Animals disbanded. Eric Burdon, after releasing one single as a solo artist (but using the Animals name), decided to form a "new" Animals. After releasing a moderately successful single, When I Was Young, the new band appeared at the Monterey International Pop Festival in June of 1967. While in the area, the band fell in love with the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, during what came to be called the Summer Of Love. The first single to be released from their debut album, Winds Of Change, was a tribute to the city by the bay called San Franciscan Nights. Because of the topicality of the song's subject matter, San Franciscan Nights was not released in the UK as a single. Instead, the song Good Times (which was the US B side of the record), became the new group's biggest UK hit to date (and one of the Animals' biggest UK hits overall). Eventually San Franciscan Nights was released as a single in the UK as well (with a different B side) and ended up doing quite well.
Artist: Music Machine
Title: Me, Myself And I
Source: Beyond The Garage
Writer: Sean Bonniwell
Label: Sundazed
Year: 1968
With the members of the original Music Machine gone their separate ways, Sean Bonniwell recruited a whole new lineup to record and perform as the Bonniwell Music Machine. The new lineup included Guile Wisdom on lead guitar, Jerry Harris on drums, Harry Garfield on organ and Eddie Jones on bass. The new lineup provided a handful of tracks for the LP Bonniwell Music Machine in 1967 and released three singles on Warner Brothers, none of which made any headway on the charts, despite being among Bonniwell's best songs. The first of the singles was Me, Myself And I, a song that Bonniwell himself described as "punk pop" and one that presaged the "me first" attitude that would characterize the disco era in the late 70s.
Artist: Creedence Clearwater Revival
Title: Bad Moon Rising
Source: CD: Woodstock: 40 Years On: Back To Yasgur's Farm
Writer: John Fogerty
Label: Rhino
Year: 1969
It's a mystery to me why the Woodstock movie completely ignores the presence of Creedence Clearwater Revival, especially considering that they were at their commercial peak at the time of the performance. Bad Moon Rising was one of a series of consecutive hits for the band that each made it just short of the top of the charts, stalling out at # 2.
Artist: Johnny Winter
Title: Rollin' And Tumblin'
Source: LP: Progressive Heavies (originally released on LP: The Progressive Blues Experiment)
Writer: McKinley Morganfield
Label: United Artists (original label: Sonobeat)
Year: 1968
Johnny Winter's first album, The Progressive Blues Experiment, was originally released in 1968 on the Texas-based Sonobeat label. The album featured a mix of Winter originals and blues cover tunes such as the Muddy Waters classic Rollin' And Tumblin'. A ctitical success, the album was picked up and reissued on the Imperial label a year later.
Artist: Big Brother And The Holding Company
Title: I Need A Man To Love
Source: LP:Cheap Thrills
Writer: Joplin/Andrew
Label: Columbia
Year: 1968
Big Brother and the Holding Company recorded their first album at the Chicago studios of Mainstream records in 1967. Mainstream, however, was a jazz label and their engineers had no idea how to make a band like Big Brother sound good. When the band signed to Columbia the following year it was decided that the best way to record the band was onstage at the Fillmore West. As a result, when Cheap Thrills was released, four of the seven tracks were live recordings, including the Janis Joplin/Peter Albin collaboration I Need A Man To Love.
Artist: Music Machine
Title: Soul Love
Source: CD: Beyond The Garage
Writer: Sean Bonniwell
Label: Sundazed
Year: 1968
The B side of the first single released by the second version of the Bonniwell Music Machine was a wild R&B/punk piece called Soul Love, which features an instrumental section that seemingly goes on forever but in fact lasts barely more than a minute. Compared to the usual Bonniwell song, which generally managed to pack in as much substance in less than two and a half minutes than most modern songs have in twice that amount of time, Soul Love is practically a jam session.
Artist: Music Machine
Title: Some Other Drum
Source: CD: Turn On
Writer: Sean Bonniwell
Label: Collectables
Year: 1966
The Music Machine is best known for its high energy arrangements and snarling vocals, as typified by their greatest hit Talk Talk. Some Other Drum, from the Music Machine's debut LP, shows a different side of Sean Bonniwell's songwriting. Sounding a bit like the Lovin' Spoonful, Some Other Drum emphasizes the more traditional elements of pop songwriting such as a catchy melody and layered harmonies and shows that Bonniwell, if he wanted to, could probably have been quite successful if he had chosen to go that route.
Artist: Beatles
Title: Words Of Love
Source: CD: Beatles For Sale (released in US on LP: Beatles VI)
Writer: Buddy Holly
Label: Parlophone (US label: Capitol)
Year: 1964 (US release: 1965)
By 1964 John Lennon and Paul McCartney were already well on their way to becoming one of the most successful songwriting teams in history. Despite this, the Beatles continued to record cover tunes such as Words Of Love, which had been one of Buddy Holly's biggest hits (and one of the few without a co-writing credit for producer Norm Petty). It wasn't until 1965, with the release of Rubber Soul, that the Beatles would write 100% of the material that they recorded.
Artist: Love
Title: My Little Red Book
Source: Nuggets Vol. 2-Punk (originally released as 45 RPM single and on LP: Love)
Writer: Bacharach/David
Label: Rhino
Year: 1966
My Little Red Book was a song originally composed by Burt Bacharach and Hal David for the soundtrack of the movie What's New Pussycat and performed by Manfred Mann. I think it's safe to say that Bacharach and David did not intend the song to sound anything like this recording by Love, the first rock record ever released on the Elektra label.
Artist: Music Machine
Title: Absolutely Positively
Source: CD: Beyond The Garage (originally released as 45 RPM single B side and included on LP: Bonniwell Music Machine)
Writer: Sean Bonniwell
Label: Sundazed (original label: Original Sound)
Year: 1967
I'm going to use Sean Bonniwell's own words to describe Absolutely Positively: "Demanding that you get what you don't have without knowing what you want is the same as wanting what you haven't got, then not wanting it after you get it." Heady stuff that describes a very American attitude that has only become even more prevalent in the years since the song was written.
Artist: Byrds
Title: Mind Gardens
Source: CD: Younger Than Yesterday
Writer: David Crosby
Label: Columbia
Year: 1967
Mind Gardens is a perfect example of what songwriter David Crosby refers to as "one of those weird David Crosby songs". The song is a deliberate attempt at abandoning Western concepts such as chord progressions in favor of a more modal approach favored in Eastern composing. Roger McGuinn's guitar perfectly compliments Crosby's esoteric lyrics and melody on this track from the Younger Than Yesterday album, the last LP to be completed with Crosby as a full member of the Byrds.
Artist: Jimi Hendrix Experience
Title: Castles Made Of Sand
Source: CD: Axis: Bold As Love
Writer: Jimi Hendrix
Label: MCA (original label: Reprise)
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 album 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: Music Machine
Title: Double Yellow Line
Source: Beyond The Garage
Writer: Sean Bonniwell
Label: Sundazed
Year: 1967
After the success of Talk Talk, the Music Machine issued a series of unsuccessful singles on the Original Sound label. Band leader Sean Bonniwell attributed this lack of success to mismanagement by record company people and the band's own manager. Eventually those singles would be re-issued on Warner Brothers on an album called Bonniwell Music Machine, along with a handful of new songs. One of the best of these singles was Double Yellow Line, which Bonniwell said he wrote while driving to a gig. This seems to be a good place to mention the rest of the original Music Machine lineup, which consisted of Mark Landon on lead guitar. Ron Edgar on drums, Doug Rhodes on organ and Keith Olsen on bass. This lineup would dissolve before the release of the Bonniwell Music Machine album but was featured on the majority of tracks on the LP nonetheless.
Artist: Procol Harum
Title: Bringing Home The Bacon
Source: 45 RPM single
Writer: Brooker/Reid
Label: Chrysalis
Year: 1973
After the departure of original lead guitarist Robin Trower, the remaining members of Procol Harum continued to record quality albums such as Grand Hotel, although their airplay was limited to sporadic plays on progressive FM stations. One song that probably should have gotten more attention than it did was Bringing Home The Bacon, from the aforementioned Grand Hotel album. The group would experience a brief return to top 40 radio the following year with the release of their live version of Conquistador, a track that originally appeared on the band's 1967 debut LP.
Artist: Leslie West
Title: Blood Of The Sun
Source: 45 RPM single B side (single taken from LP: Mountain)
Writer: West/Pappaliardi/Collins
Label: Windfall
Year: 1969
After the Vagrants disbanded guitarist Leslie Weinstein changed his last name to West and recorded a solo album called Mountain. Helping him with the project was producer Felix Pappaliardi, who had previously worked with Cream on their Disraeli Gears and Wheels Of Fire albums. The two meshed so well that they decided to form a band with drummer Corky Laing, using the name Mountain. One of the first gigs by the new band was the Woodstock festival, where they played Blood Of The Sun to an enthusiastic crowd. This week, making its Stuck in the Psychedelic Era debut, we have the original studio version of the tune.
Artist: Music Machine
Title: The People In Me
Source: CD: Turn On
Writer: Sean Bonniwell
Label: Collectables (original label: Original Sound)
Year: 1966
After Talk Talk soared into the upper reaches of the US charts the Music Machine's management made a tactical error. Instead of promoting the follow-up single, The People In Me, to the largest possible audience, the band's manager gave exclusive air rights to a new station at the far end of the Los Angeles AM radio dial. As local bands like the Music Machine depended on airplay in L.A. as a necessary step to getting national exposure, the move proved disastrous. Without any airplay on influential stations such as KFI, The People In Me was unable to get any higher than the # 66 spot on the national charts. Even worse for the band, the big stations remembered the slight when subsequent singles by the Music Machine were released, and by mid-1967 the original lineup had disbanded.
Artist: Doors
Title: Unhappy Girl
Source: LP: Strange Days
Writer: The Doors
Label: Elektra
Year: 1967
After the success of their first album and the single Light My Fire in early 1967, the Doors quickly returned to the studio, releasing a second LP, Strange Days, later the same year. The first single released from the new album was People Are Strange. The B side of that single was Unhappy Girl, from the same album. Both sides got played on the jukebox at a place called the Woog in the village of Meisenbach near Ramstein Air Force Base (which is where I was spending most of my evenings that autumn).
Artist: Steve Miller Band
Title: Overdrive
Source: LP: Sailor
Writer: Boz Scaggs
Label: Capitol
Year: 1968
The Steve Miller Band, in its early years, was in a sense an American version of John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, serving as a launching pad for the careers of Ben Sidran and Boz Scaggs, among others. This early Scaggs tune shows a harder-edged side to the Boz than most of his later solo hits.
Artist: Grateful Dead
Title: Doin' That Rag
Source: CD: Aoxomoxoa
Writer: Hunter/Garcia/Lesh
Label: Warner Brothers
Year: 1969
After spending six months on their second LP, Anthem Of The Sun (and going way overbudget in the process), the Grateful Dead reeled things in a bit (but not all that much) for their third effort, Aoxomoxoa. Like Anthem Of The Sun, Aoxomoxoa still combined live recordings with studio overdubs, but the individual songs were shorter and more distinct than on the previous effort. One good example is Doin' That Rag, a song that inexplicably disappeared from the band's live repertoire relatively quickly.
Artist: Standells
Title: Riot On Sunset Strip
Source: CD: Best Of The Standells (originally released as 45 RPM single and included on movie soundtrack LP: Riot On Sunset Strip)
Writer: Valentino/Fleck
Label: Rhino (original label: Tower)
Year: 1967
Anyone who doubts just how much influence bands like the Standells had on the punk-rock movement of the late 1970s need only listen to this 1967 track from the movie Riot On Sunset Strip. The track sounds like it could have been an early Ramones recording. The song itself (and the movie) were based on a real life event. Local L.A. business owners had been complaining about the unruliness and rampant drug usage among the teens hanging out in front of the various underage clubs that had been springing up on Sunset Strip in the wake of the success of the Whisky-A-Go-Go, and in late 1966 the Los Angeles Police Department was called in to do something about the problem. What followed was a full-blown riot which ultimately led to local laws being passed that put many of the clubs out of business and severely curtailed the ability of the rest to make a profit. By 1968 the entire scene was a thing of the past, with the few remaining clubs converting to a more traditional over-21 approach.
Artist: Music Machine
Title: Astrologically Incompatible
Source: CD: Beyond The Garage (originally released as 45 RPM single B side)
Writer: Sean Bonniwell
Label: Sundazed
Year: 1967
Astrologically Incompatible, in addition to being one of the first known rock songs to make references to the signs of the zodiac (which would become fashionable in the following decade), marks a transition point in the history of the Music Machine. One of the last tracks recorded by the original lineup, it was also the B side of the first single released under the name Bonniwell Music Machine on Warner Brothers. The horn overdubs were played by Bonniwell himself and organist Doug Rhodes, using then state-of-the-art 8-track technology.
Artist: Strawberry Alarm Clock
Title: Incense And Peppermints
Source: LP: Nuggets Vol. 9-Acid Rock (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Writer: Carter/Gilbert/Weitz/King
Label: Rhino (original label: Uni)
Year: 1967
Starting off this week's show is one of the iconic songs of the summer of love. Interestingly enough, this was supposed to be the B side of The Birdman of Alkatrash, but somehow ended up getting all the airplay. I haven't bothered to actually count, but I wouldn't be surprised to find I have more copies of this particular song than any other. It appears on just about every collection of psychedelic music ever assembled, it seems. I do have a copy of the original 45, but when I bring that in I generally play...you guessed it, The Birdman of Alkatrash.
Artist: Music Machine
Title: Trouble
Source: LP: Turn On
Writer: Sean Bonniwell
Label: Collectables (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 Billy Roberts' 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. 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, the album becomes an 8-song EP and this track becomes the second song on the disc, following the classic Talk Talk.
Artist: Leaves
Title: Hey Joe
Source: LP: Nuggets Vol. 1-The Hits (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Writer: Billy Roberts
Label: Rhino (original label: Mira)
Year: 1966
In 1966 there were certain songs you had to know how to play if you had any aspirations of being in a band. Among those were Louie Louie, Gloria and Hey Joe. David Crosby claims to have discovered Hey Joe, but was not able to convince his bandmates to record it before their third album. In the meantime, several other bands had recorded the song, including Love (on their first album) and the Leaves. The version of Hey Joe heard here is actually the third recording the Leaves made of the tune. After the first two versions tanked, guitarist Bobby Arlin came up with the idea of adding fuzz guitar to the song. It was the missing element that transformed a rather bland song into a hit record (the only national hit the Leaves would have). As a side note, the Leaves credited Chet Powers (aka Dino Valenti) as the writer of Hey Joe, but California-based folk singer Billy Roberts had copyrighted the song in 1962 and had reportedly been heard playing the tune as early as 1958.
Artist: Shadows of Knight
Title: Oh Yeah
Source: CD: Nuggets-Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Writer: Elias McDaniel
Label: Rhino (original label: Dunwich)
Year: 1966
The original British blues bands like the Yardbirds made no secret of the fact that they had created their own version of a music that had come from Chicago. The Shadows Of Knight, on the other hand, were a Chicago band that created their own version of the British blues, bringing the whole thing full circle. After taking their version of Van Morrison's Gloria into the top 10 early in 1966, the Shadows (which had added "of Knight" to their name just prior to releasing Gloria) decided to follow it up with an updated version of Bo Diddley's Oh Yeah. Although the song did not have a lot of national top 40 success, it did help establish the Shadows' reputation as one of the premier garage-punk bands.
Artist: Music Machine
Title: The Day Today
Source: CD: Beyond The Garage (originally released
Writer: Bonniwell/Olsen
Label: Sundazed
Year: 1967
For some unknown reason, every person who wrote a song in the late 1960s wrote a song like The Day Today; a slow, somewhat sappy tune with a kind of hokey spoken section in place of an instrumental break. (I even wrote one myself called Leaves. I cringe every time I think of it.) The odd thing about The Day Today is that it is a rare instance of Sean Bonniwell collaborating with another songwriter (in this case Music Machine bassist Keith Olsen, who himself was about to embark on a career as a record producer). What possessed people to write things like this is beyond me, but just in case you are one of the few that can appreciate this sort of song, here it is. The rest of us can take comfort in the fact that the track is less than three minutes long.
Artist: Turtles
Title: To See The Sun
Source: The Turtles-1968
Writer: The Turtles
Label: Rhino
Year: 1968
In 1968 the Turtles, feeling restricted by the dictates of producers and record company people, decided to rent studio time to produce some tracks of their own. The result was four songs, three of which were rejected outright by their label, White Whale. (The fourth track, Surfer Joe, made it onto their Battle of the Bands album). Several years later a new local L.A. record label, Rhino Records, was looking to move beyond the niche it had carved out for itself as a novelty label. The chance to make previously unreleased material such as To See The Sun from a band as well-known as the Turtles was just what the label was looking for, and, along with re-releasing long out-of-print Turtles albums, got the label moving in a whole new direction that they continue to excel at.
Artist: Crosby, Stills and Nash
Title: Suite: Judy Blue Eyes
Source: Crosby, Stills and Nash
Writer: Stephen Stills
Label: Atlantic
Year: 1969
After the demise of Buffalo Springfield, Stephen Stills headed for New York, where he worked with Al Kooper on the Super Session album and recorded several demo tapes of his own, including a new song called Suite: Judy Blue Eyes (reportedly written for his then-girlfriend Judy Collins). After his stint in New York he returned to California, where he started hanging out in the Laurel Canyon home of David Crosby, who had been fired from the Byrds in 1967. Crosby's house at that time was generally filled with a variety of people coming and going, and Crosby and Stills soon found themselves doing improvised harmonies on each other's material in front of a friendly, if somewhat stoned, audience. It was not long before they invited Graham Nash, whom they heard had been having problems of his own with his bandmates in the Hollies, to come join them in Laurel Canyon. The three soon began recording together, and in 1969 released the album Crosby, Stills and Nash. Suite: Judy Blue Eyes was chosen as the opening track for the new album and was later released (in edited form) as a single.
Artist: Front Line
Title: Got Love
Source: Love Is The Song We Sing: San Francisco Nuggets 1965-70 (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Writer: Lanigan/Philipet
Label: Rhino (original label: York)
Year: 1965
The Front Line was a band from San Rafael, California whose story in many ways was typical of their time. Marin County, being a fairly upscale place, had its share of clubs catering to the sons and daughters of its affluent residents. Of course, these teens wanted to hear live performances of their favorite top 40 tunes and bands like the Front Line made a decent enough living catering to their preferences. Like most bands of the time, the Front Line had one song that was of their own creation, albeit one that was somewhat derivative of the kinds of tunes they usually performed so as not to scare off their audience. That song was Got Love, which was released on the York label in 1965.
Artist: Music Machine
Title: Talk Talk
Source: CD: Turn On (also released as 45 RPM single)
Writer: Sean Bonniwell
Label: Collectables (original label: Original Sound)
Year: 1966
The Music Machine's big hit.
Artist: Music Machine
Title: Come On In
Source: CD: Turn On (also released as 45 RPM single B side)
Writer: Sean Bonniwell
Label: Collectables (original label: Original Sound)
Year: 1966
The B side of the Music Machine's big hit.
Artist: Seeds
Title: Mr. Farmer
Source: CD: More Nuggets (originally released as 45 RPM single and on LP: A Web Of Sound)
Writer: Sky Saxon
Label: Rhino
Year: 1966
With two tracks (Can't Seem To Make You Mine and Pushin' Too Hard) from their first album getting decent airplay on L.A. radio stations in 1966 the Seeds headed back to the studio to record a second LP, A Web Of Sound. The first single released from the album was Mr. Farmer, a song that once again did well locally. The only national hit for the Seeds came when Pushin' Too Hard was re-released in December of 1966, hitting its national peak the following spring.
Artist: Eric Burdon and the Animals
Title: San Franciscan Nights
Source: Best of Eric Burdon and the Animals (originally released on LP: Winds of Change and as 45 RPM single)
Writer: Burdon/Briggs/Weider/Jenkins/McCulloch
Label: Polydor (original label: M-G-M)
Year: 1967
In late 1966, after losing several original members over a period of about a year, the original Animals disbanded. Eric Burdon, after releasing one single as a solo artist (but using the Animals name), decided to form a "new" Animals. After releasing a moderately successful single, When I Was Young, the new band appeared at the Monterey International Pop Festival in June of 1967. While in the area, the band fell in love with the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, during what came to be called the Summer Of Love. The first single to be released from their debut album, Winds Of Change, was a tribute to the city by the bay called San Franciscan Nights. Because of the topicality of the song's subject matter, San Franciscan Nights was not released in the UK as a single. Instead, the song Good Times (which was the US B side of the record), became the new group's biggest UK hit to date (and one of the Animals' biggest UK hits overall). Eventually San Franciscan Nights was released as a single in the UK as well (with a different B side) and ended up doing quite well.
Artist: Music Machine
Title: Me, Myself And I
Source: Beyond The Garage
Writer: Sean Bonniwell
Label: Sundazed
Year: 1968
With the members of the original Music Machine gone their separate ways, Sean Bonniwell recruited a whole new lineup to record and perform as the Bonniwell Music Machine. The new lineup included Guile Wisdom on lead guitar, Jerry Harris on drums, Harry Garfield on organ and Eddie Jones on bass. The new lineup provided a handful of tracks for the LP Bonniwell Music Machine in 1967 and released three singles on Warner Brothers, none of which made any headway on the charts, despite being among Bonniwell's best songs. The first of the singles was Me, Myself And I, a song that Bonniwell himself described as "punk pop" and one that presaged the "me first" attitude that would characterize the disco era in the late 70s.
Artist: Creedence Clearwater Revival
Title: Bad Moon Rising
Source: CD: Woodstock: 40 Years On: Back To Yasgur's Farm
Writer: John Fogerty
Label: Rhino
Year: 1969
It's a mystery to me why the Woodstock movie completely ignores the presence of Creedence Clearwater Revival, especially considering that they were at their commercial peak at the time of the performance. Bad Moon Rising was one of a series of consecutive hits for the band that each made it just short of the top of the charts, stalling out at # 2.
Artist: Johnny Winter
Title: Rollin' And Tumblin'
Source: LP: Progressive Heavies (originally released on LP: The Progressive Blues Experiment)
Writer: McKinley Morganfield
Label: United Artists (original label: Sonobeat)
Year: 1968
Johnny Winter's first album, The Progressive Blues Experiment, was originally released in 1968 on the Texas-based Sonobeat label. The album featured a mix of Winter originals and blues cover tunes such as the Muddy Waters classic Rollin' And Tumblin'. A ctitical success, the album was picked up and reissued on the Imperial label a year later.
Artist: Big Brother And The Holding Company
Title: I Need A Man To Love
Source: LP:Cheap Thrills
Writer: Joplin/Andrew
Label: Columbia
Year: 1968
Big Brother and the Holding Company recorded their first album at the Chicago studios of Mainstream records in 1967. Mainstream, however, was a jazz label and their engineers had no idea how to make a band like Big Brother sound good. When the band signed to Columbia the following year it was decided that the best way to record the band was onstage at the Fillmore West. As a result, when Cheap Thrills was released, four of the seven tracks were live recordings, including the Janis Joplin/Peter Albin collaboration I Need A Man To Love.
Artist: Music Machine
Title: Soul Love
Source: CD: Beyond The Garage
Writer: Sean Bonniwell
Label: Sundazed
Year: 1968
The B side of the first single released by the second version of the Bonniwell Music Machine was a wild R&B/punk piece called Soul Love, which features an instrumental section that seemingly goes on forever but in fact lasts barely more than a minute. Compared to the usual Bonniwell song, which generally managed to pack in as much substance in less than two and a half minutes than most modern songs have in twice that amount of time, Soul Love is practically a jam session.
Thursday, January 5, 2012
Stuck in the Psychedelic Era # 1201 (starts 1/5/11)
Artist: Bob Dylan
Title: Like A Rolling Stone
Source: 45 RPM single (stereo reissue)
Writer: Bob Dylan
Label: Columbia
Year: 1965
Bob Dylan incurred the wrath of folk purists when he decided to use electric instruments for his 1965 LP Highway 61 Revisited. The opening track on the album is the six-minute Like A Rolling Stone, a song that was also selected to be the first single released from the new album. After the single was pressed, the shirts at Columbia Records decided to cancel the release due to its length. An acetate copy of the record, however, made it to a local New York club, where, by audience request, the record was played over and over until it was worn out (acetate copies not being as durable as their vinyl counterparts). When Columbia started getting calls from local radio stations demanding copies of the song the next morning they decided to release the single after all. Like A Rolling Stone ended up going all the way to the number two spot on the US charts, doing quite well in several other countries as well.
Artist: Byrds
Title: She Don't Care About Time
Source: CD: Turn! Turn! Turn! (bonus track originally released as 45 RPM single B side)
Writer: Gene Clark
Label: Columbia/Legacy
Year: 1965
The Byrds scored two # 1 hits in 1965, Mr. Tambourine Man and Turn! Turn! Turn!. Both songs came from outside sources (Bob Dylan and Pete Seeger), despite the fact that they Byrds had a wealth of songwriting talent of their own. Gene Clark in particular was writing quality originals such as She Don't Care About Time, which was issued as the B side to Turn! Turn! Turn! but was inexplicably left off the LP. More recently the song has been included as a bonus track on the remastered CD version of the album.
Artist: Jefferson Airplane
Title: Thunk
Source: LP: Bark
Writer: Joey Covington
Label: Grunt
Year: 1971
The classic Jefferson Airplane lineup of Marty Balin, Grace Slick, Paul Kantner, Jorma Kaukonen, Jack Casidy and Spencer Dryden made their debut on the second Airplane LP, Surrealistic Pillow, and remained intact for the next three albums. In 1970, however, the oldest band member, drummer Dryden, left the Airplane and Joey Covington was brought in as his replacement. Covington's contribution as a songwriter was the offbeat a cappela tune Thunk, a song that is up there with some of Slick's more avant garde material on the weirdness scale.
Artist: Crawling Walls
Title: Inner Limits
Source: LP: Inner Limits
Writer: Bob Fountain
Label: Voxx
Year: 1985
The Crawling Walls have the distinction of being the only band from the 1980s to get played on Stuck in the Psychedelic Era (besides the various theme music used on the show). I promised to reveal the story behind that on this blog, so here it is: The Crawling Walls were one of the first neo-psychedelic bands, and to my knowledge the only one in New Mexico. Led by keyboardist/vocalist/songwriter Bob Fountain (who used a vintage Vox organ exclusively) the band also featured guitarist Larry Otis, who had previously recorded with the Philisteens, an early 80s alternative band (think R.E.M. or the Police). I had known Larry in high school in Germany (I hung out with his younger brother Jeff), and even then he had a reputation as a talented guitarist. The Crawling Walls recorded at Bottom Line Studios, a homemade studio in the basement of a rented house on San Rafael Avenue, just a few blocks south of Albuquerque International Airport and directly under the path of the backup runway. Generally this was not a problem unless the wind was coming from the south, in which case all studio activity would have to stop as a 737 or something flew over. Engineer Mark Shipman (whom I knew as a fellow volunteer at radio station KUNM) did a remarkable job on both the Philisteens and Crawling Walls albums, considering the conditions he was working under. Other artists recording at Bottom Line included guitarists Steve LaRue and Kenny Hume and experimental rocker Craig Ellis, along with a variety of bands including Civilian Joe, the Pheremones, the Soft Corps and the Mumphries. Bottom Line was dismantled in 1989 when the house was sold and the tenants (including most of the members of the Mumphries) were evicted. At that time I had only recently gained controlling interesting in Bottom Line Studios and ended up selling all the equipment to Kenny Hume and leaving Albuquerque in disgust. All of the music beds heard on Stuck in the Psychedelic Era were recorded at Bottom Line in the late 1980s.
Artist: Blues Image
Title: Fugue U/Parchman Farm/Wrath Of Daisey
Source: LP: Open
Writer: Allison/Blues Image
Label: Atco
Year: 1970
Despite drawing crowds in south Florida and getting rave reviews from the rock press, Blues Image was never able to sell a lot of albums. This is a shame, as almost all of their material was as good or better than anything else being recorded in 1969-70. A classic example is the medley of Fugue U (emulating J.S. Bach), a jazz-rock arrangement of Mose Allison's Parchman Farm and the latin-rock instrumental Wrath Of Daisey). Guitarist Mike Pinera went on to replace Eric Brann in Iron Butterfly the following year.
Artist: Ultimate Spinach
Title: Your Head Is Reeling
Source: LP: Ultimate Spinach
Writer: Ian Bruce-Douglas
Label: M-G-M
Year: 1967
Ultimate Spinach was one of a group of bands signed by M-G-M in 1967 and marketed as being representative of the "Boss-town sound". Unfortunately for all involved, there really was no such thing as a "Boss-town sound" (for that matter there was no such thing as a "San Francisco sound" either, but that's another story). All the hype aside, Ultimate Spinach itself was the brainchild of multi-instrumentalist Ian Bruce-Palmer, who wrote and arranged all the band's material. The opening track of side two of the band's debut album is a piece called Your Head Is Reeling, which is as good or better than any other raga styled song of the time.
Artist: Music Machine
Title: You'll Love Me Again
Source: CD: Beyond The Garage (originally released as 45 RPM single B side)
Writer: Sean Bonniwell
Label: Sundazed
Year: 1967
The day after recording this week's show I got word of the passing of Sean Bonniwell, leader of the Music Machine, on December 29th from cancer. Next week's show will feature an extended tribute to the musical genius whose influence went far beyond his commercial success. For now we have a song by the second incarnation of the Machine, recorded in 1967 and issued as a B side on Warner Brothers that year.
Artist: Jimi Hendrix Experience
Title: I Don't Live Today
Source: LP: Are You Experienced?
Writer: Jimi Hendrix
Label: Reprise
Year: 1967
I remember a black light poster that choked me up the first time I saw it. It was a shot of Jimi Hendrix playing his guitar with the caption I Don't Live Today. I don't believe Hendrix was being deliberately prophetic when he wrote and recorded this classic track for the Are You Experienced album, but it still spooks me a bit to hear it, even now.
Artist: Merrell And The Exiles
Title: Tomorrow's Girl
Source: CD: Where The Action Is: L.A. Nuggets 1965-68 (originally released as 45 RPM single and included on LP: Fapadokly)
Writer: Merrell Fankhauser
Label: Rhino (original label: Glenn)
Year: 1967
Merrell Fankhauser was a fixture on the L.A. music scene, fronting several bands throughout the 60s ranging in styles from surf to psychedelic, depending on what was in vogue at the time. For most of 1966 and 67 he led a group called Merrell and the Exiles (or Xiles), while holding down a somewhat more mundane day job between gigs. The last single by the Exiles was Tomorrow's Girl, originally released in 1967 on the tiny Glenn label and included on Fankhauser's Fapadokly album on UIP records later that same year.
Artist: Big Brother And The Holding Company
Title: Ball And Chain
Source: CD: Cheap Thrills
Writer: Willie Mae Thornton
Label: Columbia
Year: 1968
In June of 1967 Big Brother And The Holding Company, fronted by Janis Joplin, electrified the crowd at the Monterey International Pop Festival with their rendition of Willie Mae "Big Mama" Thornton's Ball And Chain. Over the years Joplin, both with and without Big Brother continued to perform the song. One of the finest performances of Ball And Chain was recorded live at the Fillmore in 1968 and included on the band's major label debut, Cheap Thrills. In retrospect the recording marks the peak of both Big Brother and of Joplin, who went their separate ways after the album was released.
Artist: Steve Miller Band
Title: Your Saving Grace
Source: LP: Anthology (originally released on LP: Your Saving Grace)
Writer: Tim Davis
Label: Capitol
Year: 1969
One of the most highly regarded of the Steve Miller Band's early albums was 1969's Your Saving Grace. A listen to the title track of the album shows why. As often as not, spoken sections in the middle of a song come off as silly or pretentious, but here Miller manages to make it work, enhancing what is already a fine recording.
Artist: Doors
Title: Roadhouse Blues
Source: CD: Best Of The Doors (originally released on LP: Morrison Hotel)
Writer: The Doors
Label: Elektra
Year: 1970
Yet another classic rock radio standard makes its Stuck in the Psychedelic Era debut this week. This difference, of course, is that classic rock radio generally uses the live version of this track from the 1970 LP Morrison Hotel.
Artist: Cream
Title: Tales Of Brave Ulysses
Source: LP: Disraeli Gears
Writer: Clapton/Sharp
Label: Atco
Year: 1967
Cream was one of the first bands to break British tradition and release singles that were also available as album cuts. This tradition likely came about because 45 RPM records (both singles and extended play 45s) tended to stay in print indefinitely in the UK, unlike in the US, where a hit single usually had a shelf life of around 2-3 months then disappeared forever. When the Disraeli Gears album was released, however, the song Strange Brew, which leads off the LP, was released in Europe as a single. The B side of that single was Tales Of Brave Ulysses, which opens side two of the album.
Artist: Pink Floyd
Title: Interstellar Overdrive/The Gnome
Source: CD: The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn
Writer: Barrett/Waters/Wright/Mason
Label: Capitol
Year: 1967
Syd Barrett was still very much at the helm for Pink Floyd's first LP, Piper At The Gates Of Dawn, released in 1967. The group had already released a pair of Barrett-penned singles, Arnold Layne (which was banned by the BBC) and See Emily Play. Piper, though, was the first full album for the group, and some tracks, notably the nine-minute psychedelic masterpiece Interstellar Overdrive, were entirely group efforts. On the original UK version of the LP Overdrive tracks directly into a Barrett piece, the Gnome. The US version, issued on Tower records, truncated Overdrive and re-arranged the song order. The only CD version of Piper currently available, heard here, follows the original UK ordering of the tracks.
Artist: Blues Magoos
Title: There's A Chance We Can Make It
Source: LP: Electric Comic Book
Writer: Gilbert/Scala
Label: Mercury
Year: 1967
Following up on their biggest hit, (We Ain't Got) Nothin' Yet, the Blues Magoos released There's A Chance We Can Make It, backed with Pipe Dream for their next single. Unfortunately for both songs, some stations elected to play There's A Chance We Can Make It while others preferred Pipe Dream. The result was that neither song charted as high as it could have had it been released with a weaker B side. This had the ripple effect of causing Electric Comic Book (the album both songs appeared on) to not chart as well as its predecessor Psychedelic Lollipop had. This in turn caused Mercury Records to lose faith in the Blues Magoos and not give them the kind of promotion that could have kept the band in the public eye beyond its 15 minutes of fame. The ultimate result was that for many years, there were an excessive number of busboys and cab drivers claiming to have once been members of the Blues Magoos and not many ways to disprove their claims, at least until the internet made information about the group's actual membership more accessible.
Artist: Buffalo Springfield
Title: Rock And Roll Woman
Source: LP: Buffalo Springfield Again
Writer: Stephen Stills
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: Richie Furay, Jim Messina, Stephen Stills and Neil Young. 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: Wishbone Ash
Title: Leaf And Stream
Source: LP: Argus
Writer: Wishbone Ash
Label: Decca
Year: 1972
One of the first bands ever to feature two lead guitarists was Wishbone Ash. The story goes that following the departure of their original guitarist bassist Martin Turner and drummer Steve Upton auditioned several lead guitarists and got it down to two finalists, Andy Powell and Ted Turner (no relation to Martin), but could not decide between the two. At that point they decided just to keep both of them, and a heavy metal tradition was born. Whether the story is true or not, the two definitely traded off leads for the next three years and five albums, even on relatively quiet songs such as Leaf And Stream from their third LP, Argus.
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: Kinks
Title: Tired Of Waiting For You
Source: CD: Best Of 60s Supergroups (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Writer: Ray Davies
Label: Priority (original label: Reprise)
Year: 1965
After a series of hard-rocking hits such as You Really Got Me and All Day And All Of The Night, the Kinks surprised everyone with the highly melodic Tired Of Waiting For You in 1965. As it turns out the song was just one of many steps in the continually maturing songwriting of Ray Davies.
Artist: Leaves
Title: Too Many People
Source: LP: Nuggets Vol. 2-Punk (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Writer: Pons/Rinehart
Label: Rhino (original label: Mira)
Year: 1965
The Leaves are a bit unusual in that the members were all native L.A.ins. Founded by bassist Jim Pons and some of his fraternity brothers at Cal State Northridge, the Leaves had their greatest success when they took over as house band at Ciro's after the Byrds vacated the slot to go on tour. Like many bands of the time, they were given a song to record as a single by their producer (Love Minus Zero) and allowed to write their own B side. In this case that B side was Too Many People, written by Pons and guitarist Bill Rinehart. The song ended up getting more airplay on local radio stations than Love Minus Zero, making it their first regional hit. The Leaves had their only national hit the following year with their third attempt at recording the fast version of Hey Joe. Eventually Pons would leave the Leaves, hooking up first with the Turtles, then Frank Zappa's Mothers of Invention.
Artist: Standells
Title: Dirty Water
Source: LP: Nuggets Vol. 1-The Hits (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Writer: Ed Cobb
Label: Rhino (original label: Tower)
This song has long since been adopted by the city of Boston, yet the band that originally recorded this Ed Cobb tune was purely an L.A. band, having started off playing cover tunes in the early 60s. Lead vocalist/drummer Dickie Dodd, incidently, was a former Mouseketeer who had played on the surf-rock hit Mr. Moto as a member of the Bel-Airs.
Artist: Monkees
Title: Daily Nightly
Source: Where The Action Is: L.A. Nuggets 1965-68 (originally released on LP: Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn and Jones, LTD.)
Writer: Michael Nesmith
Label: Rhino (original label: Colgems)
Year: 1967
One of the first rock songs to feature a Moog synthesizer was the Monkees' Daily Nightly from the album Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn and Jones LTD. Micky Dolenz, who had a reputation for nailing it on the first take but being unable to duplicate his success in subsequent attempts, was at the controls of the new technology for this recording of Michael Nesmith's most psychedelic song (he also sang lead on it). Here we have a slightly different mono mix of the tune, with the synthesizer a bit more prominent than on the stereo LP.
Artist: Rolling Stones
Title: Dear Doctor
Source: LP: Beggar's Banquet
Writer: Jagger/Richards
Label: London
Year: 1968
The term Anglophile is usually used to describe Americans with a fascination for all things British. Just what is the term for the opposite situation? Whatever it might be, the Stones have always been an example, from their open idolization of Chuck Berry and other Chess Records artists to songs like this one, which sounds more like Appalachian folk music than anything British.
Artist: Jethro Tull
Title: Jeffrey Goes To Leicester Square
Source: CD: Stand Up
Writer: Ian Anderson
Label: Chrysalis/Capitol (original label: Reprise)
Year: 1969
Another rock band influenced by folk music, Jethro Tull incorporated traditional Indian instruments on Jeffrey Goes To Leicester Square, one of a pair of tunes named for future bassist Jeffery Hammond.
Artist: Jan And Dean
Title: The Little Old Lady From Pasadena
Source: LP: The Little Old Lady From Pasadena
Writer: Atfeld/Christian
Label: Liberty
Year: 1964
Just for something completely different we have this famous Jan And Dean hit from 1964. The song was inspired by a popular TV ad campaign for Southern California Dodge dealers that was a parody of the cliche about the used car that was only driven by a "little old lady from Pasadena to go to church on Sundays". Kathryn "Put a Dodge in your garage, honey" Minner, the chracter actress who had starred in the commercials, appeared with Jan And Dean on the album cover.
Artist: Who
Title: Someone's Coming
Source: CD: Magic Bus-The Who On Tour
Writer: John Entwhistle
Label: MCA
Year: 1968
Some songs just get no respect. First released in 1967 in the UK as the B side of I Can See For Miles, John Alec Entwistle's Someone's Coming got left off the US release entirely. It wasn't until the release of the Magic Bus single (and subsequent LP) in 1968 that the tune appeared on US vinyl, and then, once again as a B side. The Magic Bus album, however, was never issued on CD in the US, although it has been available as a Canadian import (heard here) for several years. Finally, in 1995 the song found a home on a US CD as a bonus track on The Who Sell Out.
Artist: Them
Title: Baby Please Don't Go
Source: LP: Backtrackin' (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Writer: Joe Williams
Label: London (original label: Parrot)
Year: 1965
Belfast, Northern Ireland was home to one of the first bands that could be legitimately described as punk rock. Led by Van Morrison, the band quickly got a reputation for being rude and obnoxious, particularly to members of the English press (although it was actually a fellow Irishman who labeled them as "boorish"). Their first single was what has come to be considered the definitive version of the 1923 Joe Williams tune Baby, Please Don't Go. Despite its UK success, the single was a flop in the US. Oddly enough, the song's B side ended up being the song most people associate with Them: the classic Gloria, which was released as Them's US debut single in 1965 but promptly found itself banned on most US radio stations (except in Southern Florida) due to suggestive lyrics.
Title: Like A Rolling Stone
Source: 45 RPM single (stereo reissue)
Writer: Bob Dylan
Label: Columbia
Year: 1965
Bob Dylan incurred the wrath of folk purists when he decided to use electric instruments for his 1965 LP Highway 61 Revisited. The opening track on the album is the six-minute Like A Rolling Stone, a song that was also selected to be the first single released from the new album. After the single was pressed, the shirts at Columbia Records decided to cancel the release due to its length. An acetate copy of the record, however, made it to a local New York club, where, by audience request, the record was played over and over until it was worn out (acetate copies not being as durable as their vinyl counterparts). When Columbia started getting calls from local radio stations demanding copies of the song the next morning they decided to release the single after all. Like A Rolling Stone ended up going all the way to the number two spot on the US charts, doing quite well in several other countries as well.
Artist: Byrds
Title: She Don't Care About Time
Source: CD: Turn! Turn! Turn! (bonus track originally released as 45 RPM single B side)
Writer: Gene Clark
Label: Columbia/Legacy
Year: 1965
The Byrds scored two # 1 hits in 1965, Mr. Tambourine Man and Turn! Turn! Turn!. Both songs came from outside sources (Bob Dylan and Pete Seeger), despite the fact that they Byrds had a wealth of songwriting talent of their own. Gene Clark in particular was writing quality originals such as She Don't Care About Time, which was issued as the B side to Turn! Turn! Turn! but was inexplicably left off the LP. More recently the song has been included as a bonus track on the remastered CD version of the album.
Artist: Jefferson Airplane
Title: Thunk
Source: LP: Bark
Writer: Joey Covington
Label: Grunt
Year: 1971
The classic Jefferson Airplane lineup of Marty Balin, Grace Slick, Paul Kantner, Jorma Kaukonen, Jack Casidy and Spencer Dryden made their debut on the second Airplane LP, Surrealistic Pillow, and remained intact for the next three albums. In 1970, however, the oldest band member, drummer Dryden, left the Airplane and Joey Covington was brought in as his replacement. Covington's contribution as a songwriter was the offbeat a cappela tune Thunk, a song that is up there with some of Slick's more avant garde material on the weirdness scale.
Artist: Crawling Walls
Title: Inner Limits
Source: LP: Inner Limits
Writer: Bob Fountain
Label: Voxx
Year: 1985
The Crawling Walls have the distinction of being the only band from the 1980s to get played on Stuck in the Psychedelic Era (besides the various theme music used on the show). I promised to reveal the story behind that on this blog, so here it is: The Crawling Walls were one of the first neo-psychedelic bands, and to my knowledge the only one in New Mexico. Led by keyboardist/vocalist/songwriter Bob Fountain (who used a vintage Vox organ exclusively) the band also featured guitarist Larry Otis, who had previously recorded with the Philisteens, an early 80s alternative band (think R.E.M. or the Police). I had known Larry in high school in Germany (I hung out with his younger brother Jeff), and even then he had a reputation as a talented guitarist. The Crawling Walls recorded at Bottom Line Studios, a homemade studio in the basement of a rented house on San Rafael Avenue, just a few blocks south of Albuquerque International Airport and directly under the path of the backup runway. Generally this was not a problem unless the wind was coming from the south, in which case all studio activity would have to stop as a 737 or something flew over. Engineer Mark Shipman (whom I knew as a fellow volunteer at radio station KUNM) did a remarkable job on both the Philisteens and Crawling Walls albums, considering the conditions he was working under. Other artists recording at Bottom Line included guitarists Steve LaRue and Kenny Hume and experimental rocker Craig Ellis, along with a variety of bands including Civilian Joe, the Pheremones, the Soft Corps and the Mumphries. Bottom Line was dismantled in 1989 when the house was sold and the tenants (including most of the members of the Mumphries) were evicted. At that time I had only recently gained controlling interesting in Bottom Line Studios and ended up selling all the equipment to Kenny Hume and leaving Albuquerque in disgust. All of the music beds heard on Stuck in the Psychedelic Era were recorded at Bottom Line in the late 1980s.
Artist: Blues Image
Title: Fugue U/Parchman Farm/Wrath Of Daisey
Source: LP: Open
Writer: Allison/Blues Image
Label: Atco
Year: 1970
Despite drawing crowds in south Florida and getting rave reviews from the rock press, Blues Image was never able to sell a lot of albums. This is a shame, as almost all of their material was as good or better than anything else being recorded in 1969-70. A classic example is the medley of Fugue U (emulating J.S. Bach), a jazz-rock arrangement of Mose Allison's Parchman Farm and the latin-rock instrumental Wrath Of Daisey). Guitarist Mike Pinera went on to replace Eric Brann in Iron Butterfly the following year.
Artist: Ultimate Spinach
Title: Your Head Is Reeling
Source: LP: Ultimate Spinach
Writer: Ian Bruce-Douglas
Label: M-G-M
Year: 1967
Ultimate Spinach was one of a group of bands signed by M-G-M in 1967 and marketed as being representative of the "Boss-town sound". Unfortunately for all involved, there really was no such thing as a "Boss-town sound" (for that matter there was no such thing as a "San Francisco sound" either, but that's another story). All the hype aside, Ultimate Spinach itself was the brainchild of multi-instrumentalist Ian Bruce-Palmer, who wrote and arranged all the band's material. The opening track of side two of the band's debut album is a piece called Your Head Is Reeling, which is as good or better than any other raga styled song of the time.
Artist: Music Machine
Title: You'll Love Me Again
Source: CD: Beyond The Garage (originally released as 45 RPM single B side)
Writer: Sean Bonniwell
Label: Sundazed
Year: 1967
The day after recording this week's show I got word of the passing of Sean Bonniwell, leader of the Music Machine, on December 29th from cancer. Next week's show will feature an extended tribute to the musical genius whose influence went far beyond his commercial success. For now we have a song by the second incarnation of the Machine, recorded in 1967 and issued as a B side on Warner Brothers that year.
Artist: Jimi Hendrix Experience
Title: I Don't Live Today
Source: LP: Are You Experienced?
Writer: Jimi Hendrix
Label: Reprise
Year: 1967
I remember a black light poster that choked me up the first time I saw it. It was a shot of Jimi Hendrix playing his guitar with the caption I Don't Live Today. I don't believe Hendrix was being deliberately prophetic when he wrote and recorded this classic track for the Are You Experienced album, but it still spooks me a bit to hear it, even now.
Artist: Merrell And The Exiles
Title: Tomorrow's Girl
Source: CD: Where The Action Is: L.A. Nuggets 1965-68 (originally released as 45 RPM single and included on LP: Fapadokly)
Writer: Merrell Fankhauser
Label: Rhino (original label: Glenn)
Year: 1967
Merrell Fankhauser was a fixture on the L.A. music scene, fronting several bands throughout the 60s ranging in styles from surf to psychedelic, depending on what was in vogue at the time. For most of 1966 and 67 he led a group called Merrell and the Exiles (or Xiles), while holding down a somewhat more mundane day job between gigs. The last single by the Exiles was Tomorrow's Girl, originally released in 1967 on the tiny Glenn label and included on Fankhauser's Fapadokly album on UIP records later that same year.
Artist: Big Brother And The Holding Company
Title: Ball And Chain
Source: CD: Cheap Thrills
Writer: Willie Mae Thornton
Label: Columbia
Year: 1968
In June of 1967 Big Brother And The Holding Company, fronted by Janis Joplin, electrified the crowd at the Monterey International Pop Festival with their rendition of Willie Mae "Big Mama" Thornton's Ball And Chain. Over the years Joplin, both with and without Big Brother continued to perform the song. One of the finest performances of Ball And Chain was recorded live at the Fillmore in 1968 and included on the band's major label debut, Cheap Thrills. In retrospect the recording marks the peak of both Big Brother and of Joplin, who went their separate ways after the album was released.
Artist: Steve Miller Band
Title: Your Saving Grace
Source: LP: Anthology (originally released on LP: Your Saving Grace)
Writer: Tim Davis
Label: Capitol
Year: 1969
One of the most highly regarded of the Steve Miller Band's early albums was 1969's Your Saving Grace. A listen to the title track of the album shows why. As often as not, spoken sections in the middle of a song come off as silly or pretentious, but here Miller manages to make it work, enhancing what is already a fine recording.
Artist: Doors
Title: Roadhouse Blues
Source: CD: Best Of The Doors (originally released on LP: Morrison Hotel)
Writer: The Doors
Label: Elektra
Year: 1970
Yet another classic rock radio standard makes its Stuck in the Psychedelic Era debut this week. This difference, of course, is that classic rock radio generally uses the live version of this track from the 1970 LP Morrison Hotel.
Artist: Cream
Title: Tales Of Brave Ulysses
Source: LP: Disraeli Gears
Writer: Clapton/Sharp
Label: Atco
Year: 1967
Cream was one of the first bands to break British tradition and release singles that were also available as album cuts. This tradition likely came about because 45 RPM records (both singles and extended play 45s) tended to stay in print indefinitely in the UK, unlike in the US, where a hit single usually had a shelf life of around 2-3 months then disappeared forever. When the Disraeli Gears album was released, however, the song Strange Brew, which leads off the LP, was released in Europe as a single. The B side of that single was Tales Of Brave Ulysses, which opens side two of the album.
Artist: Pink Floyd
Title: Interstellar Overdrive/The Gnome
Source: CD: The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn
Writer: Barrett/Waters/Wright/Mason
Label: Capitol
Year: 1967
Syd Barrett was still very much at the helm for Pink Floyd's first LP, Piper At The Gates Of Dawn, released in 1967. The group had already released a pair of Barrett-penned singles, Arnold Layne (which was banned by the BBC) and See Emily Play. Piper, though, was the first full album for the group, and some tracks, notably the nine-minute psychedelic masterpiece Interstellar Overdrive, were entirely group efforts. On the original UK version of the LP Overdrive tracks directly into a Barrett piece, the Gnome. The US version, issued on Tower records, truncated Overdrive and re-arranged the song order. The only CD version of Piper currently available, heard here, follows the original UK ordering of the tracks.
Artist: Blues Magoos
Title: There's A Chance We Can Make It
Source: LP: Electric Comic Book
Writer: Gilbert/Scala
Label: Mercury
Year: 1967
Following up on their biggest hit, (We Ain't Got) Nothin' Yet, the Blues Magoos released There's A Chance We Can Make It, backed with Pipe Dream for their next single. Unfortunately for both songs, some stations elected to play There's A Chance We Can Make It while others preferred Pipe Dream. The result was that neither song charted as high as it could have had it been released with a weaker B side. This had the ripple effect of causing Electric Comic Book (the album both songs appeared on) to not chart as well as its predecessor Psychedelic Lollipop had. This in turn caused Mercury Records to lose faith in the Blues Magoos and not give them the kind of promotion that could have kept the band in the public eye beyond its 15 minutes of fame. The ultimate result was that for many years, there were an excessive number of busboys and cab drivers claiming to have once been members of the Blues Magoos and not many ways to disprove their claims, at least until the internet made information about the group's actual membership more accessible.
Artist: Buffalo Springfield
Title: Rock And Roll Woman
Source: LP: Buffalo Springfield Again
Writer: Stephen Stills
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: Richie Furay, Jim Messina, Stephen Stills and Neil Young. 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: Wishbone Ash
Title: Leaf And Stream
Source: LP: Argus
Writer: Wishbone Ash
Label: Decca
Year: 1972
One of the first bands ever to feature two lead guitarists was Wishbone Ash. The story goes that following the departure of their original guitarist bassist Martin Turner and drummer Steve Upton auditioned several lead guitarists and got it down to two finalists, Andy Powell and Ted Turner (no relation to Martin), but could not decide between the two. At that point they decided just to keep both of them, and a heavy metal tradition was born. Whether the story is true or not, the two definitely traded off leads for the next three years and five albums, even on relatively quiet songs such as Leaf And Stream from their third LP, Argus.
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: Kinks
Title: Tired Of Waiting For You
Source: CD: Best Of 60s Supergroups (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Writer: Ray Davies
Label: Priority (original label: Reprise)
Year: 1965
After a series of hard-rocking hits such as You Really Got Me and All Day And All Of The Night, the Kinks surprised everyone with the highly melodic Tired Of Waiting For You in 1965. As it turns out the song was just one of many steps in the continually maturing songwriting of Ray Davies.
Artist: Leaves
Title: Too Many People
Source: LP: Nuggets Vol. 2-Punk (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Writer: Pons/Rinehart
Label: Rhino (original label: Mira)
Year: 1965
The Leaves are a bit unusual in that the members were all native L.A.ins. Founded by bassist Jim Pons and some of his fraternity brothers at Cal State Northridge, the Leaves had their greatest success when they took over as house band at Ciro's after the Byrds vacated the slot to go on tour. Like many bands of the time, they were given a song to record as a single by their producer (Love Minus Zero) and allowed to write their own B side. In this case that B side was Too Many People, written by Pons and guitarist Bill Rinehart. The song ended up getting more airplay on local radio stations than Love Minus Zero, making it their first regional hit. The Leaves had their only national hit the following year with their third attempt at recording the fast version of Hey Joe. Eventually Pons would leave the Leaves, hooking up first with the Turtles, then Frank Zappa's Mothers of Invention.
Artist: Standells
Title: Dirty Water
Source: LP: Nuggets Vol. 1-The Hits (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Writer: Ed Cobb
Label: Rhino (original label: Tower)
This song has long since been adopted by the city of Boston, yet the band that originally recorded this Ed Cobb tune was purely an L.A. band, having started off playing cover tunes in the early 60s. Lead vocalist/drummer Dickie Dodd, incidently, was a former Mouseketeer who had played on the surf-rock hit Mr. Moto as a member of the Bel-Airs.
Artist: Monkees
Title: Daily Nightly
Source: Where The Action Is: L.A. Nuggets 1965-68 (originally released on LP: Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn and Jones, LTD.)
Writer: Michael Nesmith
Label: Rhino (original label: Colgems)
Year: 1967
One of the first rock songs to feature a Moog synthesizer was the Monkees' Daily Nightly from the album Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn and Jones LTD. Micky Dolenz, who had a reputation for nailing it on the first take but being unable to duplicate his success in subsequent attempts, was at the controls of the new technology for this recording of Michael Nesmith's most psychedelic song (he also sang lead on it). Here we have a slightly different mono mix of the tune, with the synthesizer a bit more prominent than on the stereo LP.
Artist: Rolling Stones
Title: Dear Doctor
Source: LP: Beggar's Banquet
Writer: Jagger/Richards
Label: London
Year: 1968
The term Anglophile is usually used to describe Americans with a fascination for all things British. Just what is the term for the opposite situation? Whatever it might be, the Stones have always been an example, from their open idolization of Chuck Berry and other Chess Records artists to songs like this one, which sounds more like Appalachian folk music than anything British.
Artist: Jethro Tull
Title: Jeffrey Goes To Leicester Square
Source: CD: Stand Up
Writer: Ian Anderson
Label: Chrysalis/Capitol (original label: Reprise)
Year: 1969
Another rock band influenced by folk music, Jethro Tull incorporated traditional Indian instruments on Jeffrey Goes To Leicester Square, one of a pair of tunes named for future bassist Jeffery Hammond.
Artist: Jan And Dean
Title: The Little Old Lady From Pasadena
Source: LP: The Little Old Lady From Pasadena
Writer: Atfeld/Christian
Label: Liberty
Year: 1964
Just for something completely different we have this famous Jan And Dean hit from 1964. The song was inspired by a popular TV ad campaign for Southern California Dodge dealers that was a parody of the cliche about the used car that was only driven by a "little old lady from Pasadena to go to church on Sundays". Kathryn "Put a Dodge in your garage, honey" Minner, the chracter actress who had starred in the commercials, appeared with Jan And Dean on the album cover.
Artist: Who
Title: Someone's Coming
Source: CD: Magic Bus-The Who On Tour
Writer: John Entwhistle
Label: MCA
Year: 1968
Some songs just get no respect. First released in 1967 in the UK as the B side of I Can See For Miles, John Alec Entwistle's Someone's Coming got left off the US release entirely. It wasn't until the release of the Magic Bus single (and subsequent LP) in 1968 that the tune appeared on US vinyl, and then, once again as a B side. The Magic Bus album, however, was never issued on CD in the US, although it has been available as a Canadian import (heard here) for several years. Finally, in 1995 the song found a home on a US CD as a bonus track on The Who Sell Out.
Artist: Them
Title: Baby Please Don't Go
Source: LP: Backtrackin' (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Writer: Joe Williams
Label: London (original label: Parrot)
Year: 1965
Belfast, Northern Ireland was home to one of the first bands that could be legitimately described as punk rock. Led by Van Morrison, the band quickly got a reputation for being rude and obnoxious, particularly to members of the English press (although it was actually a fellow Irishman who labeled them as "boorish"). Their first single was what has come to be considered the definitive version of the 1923 Joe Williams tune Baby, Please Don't Go. Despite its UK success, the single was a flop in the US. Oddly enough, the song's B side ended up being the song most people associate with Them: the classic Gloria, which was released as Them's US debut single in 1965 but promptly found itself banned on most US radio stations (except in Southern Florida) due to suggestive lyrics.
Monday, January 2, 2012
Stuck in the Psychedelic Era # 1152 (starts 12/29/11)
Once again it's the end of the year, and this week we honor an old radio tradition in substance, although not in form. That tradition is the countdown of the year's top songs. But, you say, all the songs you play are 40 years old or more. How can you do a countdown of top songs for the year? Glad you asked. What we have here are the top 25 songs ranked by how much they got played on Stuck in the Psychedelic Era, and how many times they were commented on or requested by you listener types. Additionally we have tracks from the four artists that got played the most on the show the past year. Why four? Well, there was a tie for fifth, actually, so I cut it off at four. Besides, that works out to one top artist per segment, starting with number four on the list: the Beatles.
Artist: Beatles
Title: If I Needed Someone
Source: CD: Rubber Soul
Writer: George Harrison
Label: Parlophone (original label: Capitol)
Year: 1965
So how exactly does the most commercially successful rock group of all time end up at only the number four slot this year? Because they are the most commercially successful rock group in history, of course. The fact is, like all but one of this year's tops Stuck in the Psychedelic Era artists, the Beatles recorded so many playable songs that no one track got played more than once or twice all year. Also, since several Beatles songs are still in rotation on all kinds of commercial radio stations, I felt it was important to give more exposure to other artists, including the three that finished higher than the Beatles this year. As to why I chose this particular song, a look through past playlists will show that If I Needed Someone is one of the many Beatle tunes that have yet to be heard on Stuck In the Psychedelic Era (at least since the show went into syndication a couple of year back). I figured the appearance was overdue. Now, on to the top 25!
Artist: West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band
Title: I Won't Hurt You
Source: LP: Nuggets Vol. 9-Acid Rock (originally released on LP: Part One)
Writer: Harris/Lloyd/Markley
Label: Rhino (original label: Reprise)
Year: 1967
In the # 25 spot we have a band with one of the most bizarre stories in the history of rock. The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band was formed when aging hipster Bob Markley hosted a party at his home in the Hollywood hills. Markley had left a moderately successful career as a TV personality in his native Oklahoma to try his luck in the city of Angels in the early 60s. Although he did not have a lot of success in either movies or TV on the coast, he did manage to make the acquaintance of Kim Fowley, the embodiment of the classic 60s Hollywood hustler. It was Fowley that managed to book the Yardbirds at Markley's 1965 party, a party that was also attended by Shaun and Danny Harris, sons of composer Roy Harris, and guitarist Michael Lloyd, who had just formed a new band called the Laughing Wind. Markley was impressed with the crowds of young girls flocking around the Yardbirds, and after being introduced to Lloyd and the Harris brothers offered to finance the new band if he could join up with them. As Markley was the adopted heir to an oil fortune and getting a monthly stipend, the rest of the guys readily agreed to the deal and the
West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band (a name Markley came up with) was born. The group recorded an album of mostly cover songs called Volume 1 in a studio they built themselves before signing a deal with Reprise records. The first album for Reprise was called Part One and, unlike their earlier effort, featured mostly songs written by band members. Among the tracks on Part One was I Won't Hurt You, a tune that is written around a simulated heartbeat.
Artist: Seeds
Title: Can't Seem To Make You Mine
Source: CD: Nuggets-Classics From the Psychedelic 60s (originally released as 45 RPM single and included on LP: The Seeds)
Writer: Sky Saxon
Label: Rhino (original label: GNP Crescendo)
Year: 1965
Our # 24 song comes from the Seeds, a Los Angeles band made up of members that had migrated westward to California from nearby states (although some critics believed they actually came from another planet) and are generally credited with creating the term "flower power". Their first single was Can't Seem To Make You Mine, which got considerable airplay on area radio stations in 1965.
Artist: Chocolate Watchband
Title: Are You Gonna Be There (At The Love-In)
Source: CD: More Nuggets (originally released as 45 RPM single and on LP: No Way Out)
Writer: McElroy/Bennett
Label: Rhino (original label: Tower)
Year: 1967
In the # 23 spot we have the Chocolate Watchband, a band formed in 1965 by students at Foothills Junior College in Los Altos Hills, California. These days Los Altos Hills is in the heart of silicon valley, but in 1966 it was a sleepy town a few miles northwest of San Jose, which was itself a medium-sized US city at the time (today it's one of the top 10 US cities in population). After going through a series of personnel changes, the Watchband solidified around vocalist Dave Aguilar. Aguilar's vocals, like those of many other garage bands of the time, were heavily influenced by the Rolling Stones' Mick Jagger. The Watchband became the top band on the San Jose scene, with a repertoire consisting mostly of covers of songs by British invasion bands such as the Kinks and of course the Rolling Stones, interspersed with songs from popular soul artists such as Wilson Pickett. It wasn't long before they came to the attention of Ed Cobb, who has been called the Ed Wood of 60s garage-rock. Wood was already getting known for managing and producing the Standells out of L.A., and he soon had signed the Watchband to a contract with Tower records, the low-budget Capitol records subsidiary. For reasons of his own, Wood did not play the the strengths of the Watchband (their raw energetic performances). Instead, he attempted to fit them into a psychedelic mold of his own design. Many of the tracks on the group's debut LP for Tower, No Way Out, were actually recorded by studio musicians with no input whatsoever from the Watchband itself. These tracks were by and large instrumentals, mostly written by professional songwriters Richie Podolor and Jerry Ragovich. Additionally, a couple of songs that were played by the Watchband appeared on the album with vocals by studio singer Don Bennett. Ironically, one of the few songs that did feature Aguilar on vocals, Are You Gonna Be There (At The Love-In), was co-written by Bennett. The song was eventually released as a single after being used on the soundtrack for the cheapie teensploitation flick The Love-In.
Artist: Traffic
Title: Dear Mr. Fantasy
Source: CD: Heaven Is In Your Mind
Writer: Winwood/Capaldi/Wood
Label: Island (original label: United Artists)
Year: 1967
Our # 22 song is a true classic that has become somewhat of a signature song for vocalist/guitarist/keyboardist Steve Winwood. By 1967 18-year-old Winwood had already established a reputation with the Spencer Davis Group when he left that band to form Traffic with guitarist Dave Mason, flautist/saxophonist Chris Wood and drummer Jim Capaldi. Dear Mr. Fantasy, written by Winwood, Wood and Capaldi, was originally released on Traffic's debut LP. The album was released in the UK as Mr. Fantasy, while in the US it was called Heaven Is In Your Mind. In addition to a slightly different track lineup the US version had entirely different cover art than the UK album. After the first printing the name of the US album was changed to Mr. Fantasy, although the cover art remained. Most recently, both versions of the album have been released on CD in the US. Mr. Fantasy is entirely in mono and uses the UK track lineup and cover art and includes singles and B sides that were not included on the original UK version. Heaven Is In Your Mind is a stereo CD that uses the US track lineup and cover art and includes (as bonus tracks) stereo mixes of the songs that were previously only available on the original UK album.
Artist: Music Machine
Title: The Eagle Never Hunts The Fly
Source: LP: Nuggets Vol. 2-Punk (originally released as 45 RPM single and included on LP: Bonniwell Music Machine)
Writer: Sean Bonniwell
Label: Rhino (original label: Original Sound)
Year: 1967
The song occupying this year's # 21 spot is from one of the most influential bands to come out of the Los Angeles under-21 club scene. The Music Machine was the brainchild of Sean Bonniwell, who had previously recorded several albums for RCA as a member of the light-folk group the Limelighters. By 1966 Bonniwell was looking to do something with more of an edge to it, and formed the Music Machine as an outlet for his musical creativity. Unusual for bands of the time, the Music Machine had a tight stage show and a unique visual image. Band members dressed entirely in black, including dyed hair, and wore one black glove each. After a performance, Bonniwell was heard to say, one glove came off and the other one went on. Each set was a virtually continuous series of well-rehearsed Bonniwell originals, with no time between songs for the audience to yell out requests. The group got its big break with the release of the single Talk Talk, which made the national top 40 charts and led to an album, Turn On The Music Machine. With that album, however, problems with the band's management and record label began to manifest. The Music Machine had recorded a set of cover songs to lip synch to on a local TV show. Without the band's knowledge or approval, Original Sound records included those songs on the LP, weakening the creative impact of the album. The problems got worse when the band's manager gave the newest (and lowest-rated) local top 40 station exclusive rights to the Music Machine's second single, The People In Me. The move killed any momentum the band may have still had and a series of successive singles failed to chart as well. Among those were some truly outstanding songs such as The Eagle Never Hunts The Fly. By mid-1967 most of the original members had left the group for other projects. Undaunted, Bonniwell signed a deal with Warner Brothers, releasing one album (Bonniwell Music Machine) that included all of the Original Sound singles and B sides that were not on the debut album, as well as several new tracks featuring a new Music Machine lineup.
Artist: Country Joe and the Fish
Title: Bass Strings
Source: LP: Electric Music For The Mind And Body
Writer: Joe McDonald
Label: Vanguard
Year: 1967
The # 20 spot this year is held by Bass Strings, an album track that was originally recorded for an EP (extended play) record included in an early arts-oriented underground newspaper published by Joe McDonald, leader and primary songwriter for Country Joe and the Fish. The paper was called Rag Baby and it was meant to be a kind of Berkeley version of New York's Village Voice. The issue of Rag Baby that included Bass Strings was actually McDonald's second issue of the paper to include an EP in it (the first Rag Baby EP included the original version of McDonald's I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-To-Die Rag). Bass Strings, a literal example of acid-rock, was re-recorded in stereo for the group's first LP for Vanguard, Electric Music For The Mind And Body, released in 1967.
Artist: Bob Dylan
Title: Rainy Day Women # 12 & 35
Source: CD: Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits (originally released on LP: Blonde On Blonde)
Writer: Bob Dylan
Label: Columbia
Year: 1966
Sometimes things just work out the way they should. Such is the case with Bob Dylan's Rainy Day Women # 12 & 35 coming in at the # 19 spot, immediately following Bass Strings on this week's show (listen closely to the lyrics to hear what I mean). By 1966 even Dylan's most hardcore fans had resigned themselves to his using rock instrumentation, after booing him profoundly at the Newport Jazz Festival the previous year. It was hard to argue with the success, both artistically and commercially, of his Highway 61 Revisited album, and so when Blonde On Blonde came out it was no surprise to hear a song like Rainy Day Women opening the LP. The album was, in its own way, just as daring as Highway 61; after all, no rock or folk artist had released a double LP before. Blonde On Blonde was reportedly recorded under the influence of pot and alcohol, with most of the musicians, including Dylan himself, partaking between the takes. It's pretty obvious, listening to Rainy Day Women # 12 & 35, that Dylan was having the time of his life making the album.
Artist: Rolling Stones
Title: 2,000 Light Years From Home
Source: LP: Their Satanic Majesties Request
Writer: Jagger/Richards
Label: London
Year: 1967
We take a break from the song countdown to hear from our third most heard artist of 2011. The Rolling Stones have been called the world's greatest rock band, and they certainly have outlasted most of their contemporaries. There was a time, however, when the band's relevance was in serious doubt. There had always been a friendly rivalry between the Stones and the Beatles (even more so among the fans of the two groups), but in 1967 the Beatles took a clear lead. The Fab Four had retired from live performing after their 1966 US tour, and shifted their focus to the recording studio. The result was a double-sided single, Penny Lane/Strawberry Fields Forever, followed by the iconic Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album. The Stones, meanwhile, released an album that by comparison sounded very 1966: Between The Buttons. Finding themselves trying to play catch up, the Stones worked furiously on a new LP that was by far the most psychedelic album they would ever record: Their Satanic Majesties Request. Unfortunately by the time Majesties was released their brand of psychedelia was already sounding dated, and the album was savaged by the critics, despite hitting the top 5 in the LP charts. In retrospect, Their Satanic Majesties Request was a much better album than it was perceived to be at the time it was released. For this week's show I have chosen 2,000 Light Years From Home, a song that was also released in the US as the B side of She's A Rainbow. The song had its greatest popularity in Germany, where it was released as a single, making the top 10 there.
Artist: Seeds
Title: The Wind Blows Her Hair
Source: LP: Nuggets Vol. 9-Acid Rock (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Writer: Saxon/Bigelow
Label: Rhino (original label: GNP Crescendo)
Year: 1967
We resume our countdown with our first repeat artist of the week holding down the # 18 spot. The Seeds hit their peak of popularity in early 1967, when Pushin' Too Hard, which had already been a hit in the Los Angeles area, was re-released nationally, making the top 20 in several markets. 1967 was a year of constant change, however, and by the time Pushin' Too Hard had run its course the Seeds themselves were starting to sound like an anachronism. The corporate pop song machine that had lost control of top 40 radio with the arrival of the Beatles in 1964 was beginning to reassert itself, squeezing out indy bands like the Seeds, who were still too singles-oriented for the new progressive FM stations that were beginning to pop up across the nation. Against this backdrop the Seeds released what was possibly their finest single: The Wind Blows Her Hair.
Artist: First Edition
Title: Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In)
Source: CD: Even More Nuggets (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Writer: Mickey Newbury
Label: Rhino (original label: Reprise)
Year: 1968
Our # 17 song is from a group that was formed by members of another group. The New Christy Minstrels were one of the many homogenized folk groups that had sprung up in the sixties, getting most of their exposure through play on what was then called MOR (middle of the road) radio, mostly older stations that had gradually converted to a music format as TV took over the comedy, drama and variety shows that had established radio as the medium of choice in the 30s and 40s. These stations targeted a much older demographic than top 40 radio, and were more in line with TV variety shows such as those hosted by Perry Como, Dinah Shore, and Dean Martin (in fact the New Christy Minstrels were frequent guests on these types of shows). In late 1967 some of the members decided to do something a bit more hip and broke away from the Minstrels to form the First Edition. Led by songwriter Mickey Newbury and vocalist Kenny Rogers, the group hit a home run on their first attempt with Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In), released in 1968. Rogers, however, was not comfortable with the psychedelic sound of Just Dropped In, and the First Edition soon shifted to a more country sound, establishing Rogers as an artist who would come to dominate the country charts by the early 1980s.
Artist: Buffalo Springfield
Title: Rock And Roll Woman
Source: CD: Retrospective (originally released on LP: Buffalo Springfield Again)
Writer: Stephen Stills
Label: Atco
Year: 1967
The Buffalo Springfield was formed when Stephen Stills, who had been unsuccessfully trying to form a new band after having been rejected as an applicant for the Monkees, was stuck in traffic in L.A and suddenly saw a hearse driven by his friend Neil Young, whom he had not seen since leaving Toronto several months earlier. Stills had already assembled a group of talented musicians, including Richie Furay, Bruce Palmer and Dewey Martin, but Young was the missing element that made the new group come together. Taking the name Buffalo Springfield, the new group managed to get a gig replacing the Byrds as the house band at Ciro's, but were not able to attract a large audience (possibly due to the popularity of Love, who were the house band at the Whiskey-A-Go-Go, across the street from Ciro's). Undaunted, the group pressed on and got a contract with Atco records. At first it looked their first album, released in 1966, would flop, but then Stills wrote a new tune, For What It's Worth, that Atco released as a single in early 1967. The song became a major national hit and the album was re-cut with For What It's Worth added as the opening track. The group soon recorded a second LP, Buffalo Springfield Again. The album had several songs that were worthy of being released as singles. Possibly the best of these was Rock And Roll Woman, another Stills tune. Although it didn't get much beyond the lower reaches of the charts when it was released, it comes in at the # 16 slot on the Stuck in the Psychedelic Era top 25 list for 2011. That's gotta be worth something, right?
Artist: Chambers Brothers
Title: Time Has Come Today
Source: CD: Even More Nuggets (originally released on LP: The Time Has Come; edited for single release)
Writer: Joe and Willie Chambers
Label: Rhino (originally label: Columbia)
Year: 1967 (single edit released in 1968)
In the # 15 slot this year we have a song that has actually been released in four different versions. Time Has Come Today was first recorded in 1966 in a form that is vastly different from the version heard here. That version was released as a single, but did not go anywhere and was soon deleted from the Columbia catalog. The following year the Chambers Brothers cut a new version for their album The Time Has Come. This new version ran over 10 minutes, and featured a long extended psychedelic section that featured several innovative studio effects. The track started getting extensive airplay on progressive FM radio stations, prompting Columbia to create and release a single version in 1968. Columbia, being still a somewhat conservative label, edited the track down to about three and a quarter minutes (the rule of thumb was that top 40 radio would not play anything over three and a half minutes). The problem was that the edited version completely exorcised the track of everything that got it played on FM in the first place: the extended psychedelic section with all the innovative studio effects. When even top 40 stations started demanding a version of the song that was more like what FM was playing, Columbia engineers went back and created a fourth version of Time Has Come Today, which, although edited, kept a portion of the middle section of the track. It is this version that finally got played on AM radio and has become the version usually heard on classic rock radio as well. Personally I prefer the album version, but due to time considerations I'm going with that four and three-quarter minute edit instead.
Artist: Country Joe and the Fish
Title: Section 43
Source: CD: Love Is The Song We Sing: San Francisco Nuggets 1965-70 (originally released as an underground newspaper supplement EP flexi-disc)
Writer: Joe McDonald
Label: Rhino (original label: Rag Baby)
Year: 1966
Our # 14 song of the year is the second of two tracks originally released in 1966 as an EP that was included with Joe McDonald's Rag Baby arts-oriented underground newspaper. After Section 43 started getting airplay on local San Francisco radio stations, Vanguard records took notice and signed Country Joe And The Fish to a contract. Both Section 43 and Bass Strings (see entry for the # 20 slot) were re-recorded in stereo for the band's Vanguard debut, but for tonight's show I am using the original mono version from the EP, which is about a minute shorter than the LP version. At six and three-quarter minutes, however, this version of Section 43 is still the longest track on tonight's show.
Artist: Music Machine
Title: Talk Talk
Source: CD: More Nuggets (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Writer: Sean Bonniwell
Label: Rhino (original label: Original Sound)
Year: 1966
Starting off the second hour we have the second song tonight from the Music Machine. Talk Talk is possibly the most intense two minute song ever to get played on top 40 radio, and it comes in this year in the lucky 13 spot. For more on the Music Machine see the # 21 song above.
Artist: Traffic
Title: Feelin' Alright
Source: LP: Progressive Heavies (originally released on LP: Traffic)
Writer: Dave Mason
Label: United Artists
Year: 1968
Our # 12 song, Feelin' Alright, has the distinction of being one of only two songs played on Stuck In The Psychedelic Era this past year by three different artists. In addition to the original Traffic version heard here, we've heard Joe Cocker performing the song live at Woodstock and Grand Funk Railroad re-working the song for their Survival LP. If Dear Mr. Fantasy (# 22 this year) is Steve Winwood's signature song, then Feelin' Alright certainly has to be considered bandmate Dave Mason's, perhaps even more so. Mason had already left Traffic by the time their first LP, Mr. Fantasy, was released, but had rejoined the group in time to record their second album, entitled simply Traffic. Mason would soon leave the group again, joining up with the others one final time for the Welcome To The Canteen live album before permanently parting ways with Traffic in 1971.
Artist: Standells
Title: Sometimes Good Guys Don't Wear White (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Source: CD: More Nuggets
Writer: Ed Cobb
Label: Rhino (original label: Tower)
Year: 1966
The Standells are a bit of an enigma. Although they come across as the quintessential garage-punk band, the members of the group all had squeaky clean backgrounds (lead vocalist Dickie Dodd, in fact, was one of the original Mousketeers). The band was first spotted by Cobb while playing cover songs in an upscale L.A. club. He was impressed enough with their musical proficiency that he got them a contract with Tower records and had them record Dirty Water. When the song did decently on the charts, an album followed, and then a second single, Sometimes Good Guys Don't Wear White, which barely misses this year's top 10 list, coming in at # 11.
Artist: Shadows of Knight
Title: Gloria
Source: CD: Even More Nuggets (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Writer: Van Morrison
Label: Rhino (original label: Dunwich)
Year: 1966
While the Standells have the reputation for being the quintessential garage-punk band, it's the Shadows of Knight that were, by all accounts, the real deal. Formed in the Chicago suburbs, the band originally known as the Shadows tore up the local teen scene, often to the chagrin of the adults in the area. In fact, lead vocalist Jim Sohns was actually banned from at least one school campus in order to protect the virtue of the female students. Such was the band's popularity that they easily landed a deal with local Chicago label Dunwich, which had a national distribution deal with Atlantic records. The first record that the band recorded was a cover of Van Morrison's Gloria, which had stalled out in the lower reaches of the charts the previous year when most US radio stations banned the song due to suggestive lyrics. The Shadows, who had added "of Knight" to their name just in case there were other Shadows making records somewhere, got around the ban by changing "up to her room" to "around here". The record immediately made the playlist of the local Chicago radio stations, including 50,000 watt WLS, which could be heard nearly from coast to coast at night. With listeners hearing the song at night and demanding to hear it on their local station the next day, Gloria, # 10 on this year's Stuck in the Psychedelic Era most played list, became a hit overnight for the Shadows, who of course followed it up with an album named (what else?) Gloria. After some personnel adjustments, the band recorded a second album, Back Door Men, which included a handful of blues cover songs in addition to garage-rock standards such as Hey Joe. Both LPs were released in 1966, which proved to be the only truly successful year for the Shadows of Knight, who continued to make personnel changes until by the end of 1967 the only original member left was Sohns.
Artist: Seeds
Title: Pushin' Too Hard
Source: CD: Nuggets-Classics From the Psychedelic 60s (originally released on LP: The Seeds and as 45 RPM single)
Writer: Sky Saxon
Label: Rhino (original label: GNP Crescendo)
Year: 1966
The only band to get three slots in the top 25 is the Seeds, whose top song is the # 9 Pushin' Too Hard. The song was included on the first Seeds album, released in early 1966, and was soon made available as a single to local L.A. radio stations. The continued popularity of Pushin' Too Hard led to two significant developments. First, the band recorded a second LP and released it before the end of the year. Second, and perhaps more significant, Pushin' Too Hard was re-released nationally and became the Seeds' only top 20 hit.
Artist: Jimi Hendrix Experience
Title: Hey Joe
Source: CD: Are You Experienced?
Writer: Billy Roberts
Label: MCA (original label: Reprise)
Year: 1966
One year ago I made all of you a promise that I would play more Hendrix in 2011. Unlike most New Year's resolutions, I actually managed to keep this one, resulting in Hendrix being the artist with the second most airplay on Stuck in the Psychedelic Era this year. Most of the Hendrix that was heard on the show was from the three Jimi Hendrix Experience albums. Oddly enough, One well-known Hendrix track did not get played at all in 2011. The song Hey Joe, however, did get played. In fact, it got played by three different artists: Love, the Leaves and Tim Rose, who with the Music Machine's Sean Bonniwell came up with the idea of slowing the tempo down. This week we finally get around to hearing the best known version of the venerable song, which was the first record ever released by the Jimi Hendrix Experience.
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
Returning to our countdown we have the eighth most played track on Stuck in the Psychedelic Era this year (at least in part because it was played on three consecutive shows this summer). By 1968 Eddie Cochrane's Summertime Blues had become a rock standard. San Francisco's Blue Cheer turned up the feedback with this arrangement that has often been cited as the first heavy metal hit. Bassist Dick Peterson provides the vocals, while guitarist Leigh Stephens cranks up his amp to 11.
Artist: Blues Magoos
Title: (We Ain't Got) Nothin' Yet
Source: CD: More Nuggets (originally released on LP: Psychedelic Lollipop)
Writer: Gilbert/Scala/Esposito/Theilhelm
Label: Rhino
Year: 1966
In 1966 the Blues Magoos were THE east coast psychedelic band. Based in New York, the Magoos got as much attention for their visual presentation, including smoke bombs and electric suits, as for their music, which was nonetheless some of the best of the psychedelic era. Their first single, Tobacco Road, with it's extended psychedelic jam in the middle of the song, was one of the first tracks to get more airplay on college radio than on top 40 stations (although the song did make the charts). This year's # 7 song, (We Ain't Got) Nothin' Yet, did much better on AM radio, peaking at in February of 1967 and becoming the tune the Blues Magoos are best remembered for.
Artist: Jefferson Airplane
Title: White Rabbit
Source: CD: The Worst of Jefferson Airplane (originally released on LP: Surrealistic Pillow)
Writer: Grace Slick
Label: RCA
Year: 1967
White Rabbit was not originally intended for single release. It was not until progressive FM radio stations began playing White Rabbit as an alternative to Somebody To Love (which was being played to death on top 40 radio) in early 1967 that RCA Victor decided to release the song as a follow-up to Somebody To Love. White Rabbit ended up being the Jefferson Airplane's second consecutive (and final) top 10 single, and is the # 6 song on the Stuck in the Psychedelic Era most-played list of 2011.
Artist: Amboy Dukes
Title: Journey To The Center Of The Mind
Source: CD: Nuggets-Classics From the Psychedelic 60s (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Writer: Nugent/Farmer
Label: Rhino (original label: Mainstream)
Year: 1968
Taking a break from the top 25 list we have last year's # 1 song, the Amboy Dukes classic Journey To The Center Of The Mind. The song introduced the world to guitarist Ted Nugent, whose career continues to careen out of control even to this day.
Artist: Canned Heat
Title: Boogie Music (originally released on LP: Living The Blues)
Source: LP: Progressive Heavies
Writer: L.T. Tatman III
Label: United Artists (original label: Liberty)
Year: 1968
Canned Heat was by far the most successful blues-rock band to come from the San Francisco Bay area. The band was formed when a group of blues record collectors decided to start making their own records. After a successful appearance at the Monterey International Pop Festival the group signed a contract with Liberty and recorded an album of blues cover tunes. They followed it up in 1968 with an album of mostly original material called Boogie With Canned Heat. A second album that same year, Living The Blues, was a double-LP that included a long jam that took up two of the album sides, as well as a suite called Parthenogenesis that took up a third side. The rest of the album was made up of standard-length tracks such as Going Up The Country, which was released as a single and became the group's biggest hit. The B side of Going Up The Country was an edited version of Boogie Music, another track from Living The Blues and our # 5 song of the year.
Artist: Count Five
Title: Psychotic Reaction
Source: CD: Nuggets-Classics From the Psychedelic 60s (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Writer: Ellner/Chaney/Atkinson/Byrne/Michaelski
Label: Rhino (original label: Double Shot)
Year: 1966
This year we had essentially a four-way tie for most popular song of the year on Stuck in the Psychedelic Era. All four got played the exact same number of times, so we went with a tie-breaker system based on listener feedback. All four songs got comments, but when all was said and done we did end up with a definite ranking for the four songs. At # 4 is Psychotic Reaction from San Jose, California's Count Five. The band had a gimmick that immediately made them stand out from other bands: they all dressed like Bela Lugosi's version of Count Dracula (thus the five-member band's moniker). Psychotic Reaction emulates the 1965 Yardbirds (think I'm A Man), with a fast-paced guitar-driven break midsong that could have come from Jeff Beck himself. A listen to the B side of the record, by the way, reveals a true garage-punk sound that ranks right up there with the Standells and Shadows Of Knight in terms of attitude and raw energy. It is not known what happened to the members of Count Five after Psychotic Reaction had run its course in the autumn of 1966.
Artist: Electric Prunes
Title: I Had Too Much To Dream (Last Night) (originally released as 45 RPM single and on LP: I Had Too Much To Dream (Last Night).
Source: CD: Even More Nuggets
Writer: Tucker/Mantz
Label: Rhino (original label: Reprise)
Year: 1967
At # 3 we have a song that is so intimately tied to the psychedelic era that Lenny Kaye himself chose it as the opening track for his original Nuggets compilation, released in 1972. I Had Too Much To Dream (Last Night) had its brief chart run in early 1967, a year of such volatility that by the end of the year nearly every song from the previous winter sounded hopelessly out of date. Kaye's compilation album, celebrating the wave of rock bands such as the Electric Prunes that had come from the garages of America in the late 60s, created the term psychedelic era, and has been cited as an influence by dozens of musicians in the 40 years since it was first released. The story of the Electric Prunes is in some ways the story of the psychedelic era itself. Coming from California's Encino Valley, the group came to the attention of producer/engineer Dave Hassinger, who proceeded to con the band out of the rights to their own name while getting them a contract with a major record label. After two LPs and a series of singles with diminishing commercial returns, Hassinger took direct control of the Electric Prunes, releasing a rock mass written by David Axelrod called Mass In F Minor. Axelrod's arrangements proved to be too challenging for the band itself, and studio musicians were brought in to finish the project. Within a few months an entirely different group was recording under the name Electric Prunes, with no more commercial success than the original group. Eventually Hassinger abandoned the name, and in recent years many of the original members have begun performing (and recording) together as the Electric Prunes.
Artist: Jefferson Airplane
Title: Triad
Source: CD: Crown Of Creation
Writer: David Crosby
Label: RCA
Year: 1968
Our final aside before revealing the top two songs of the year is to acknowledge the band that got the most airplay on Stuck in the Psychedelic Era this past year. For the second straight year that band is Jefferson Airplane. The reason the Airplane gets heard on the show so much is that a) they put out five albums from 1966-69 b) every track on those five albums is appropriate for a show called Stuck in the Psychedelic Era. Compare this to the Jimi Hendrix Experience or Cream or even the Grateful Dead, each of which released only three albums over the same period. The Beatles also released five albums from 1966-69, but much of what they released was geared toward a more mainstream audience, and thus does not get played on Stuck in the Psychedelic Era as often as tracks from the Airplane do. Tonight we have an Airplane song that was originally recorded, but not released, by the Byrds. In fact, the song Triad was quite possibly the catalyst that led to David Crosby being fired from the Byrds by Roger McGuinn and Chris Hillman. The Jefferson Airplane version of Triad, featuring one of Grace Slick's best vocal performances of her career, appears on Crown Of Creation, the band's fourth album (and the only one released in 1968).
Artist: Turtles
Title: She's My Girl
Source: LP: Nuggets Vol. 9-Acid Rock (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Writer: Bonner/Gordon
Label: Rhino (original label: White Whale)
Year: 1967
The Turtles began as an L.A. surf band known as the Crossfires. When they signed a contract with White Whale, however, the label (rightly) felt that surf music had run its course and encouraged the group to move into the then booming folk-rock arena. The band, now calling itself the Turtles, took a cue from fellow L.A. band the Byrds and released a cover of a Bob Dylan song as their first single. While the Byrds, with their folk background, emphasized soaring harmonies and Jim McGuinn's 12-string guitar, the Turtles, being an L.A. club band, emphasized Howard Kaylan's strong lead vocals and tight rock and roll arrangements. It Ain't Me Babe was a major hit in the L.A. market and did well enough on the national charts to prompt a series of follow-ups in the same vein, mostly written by P.F. Sloan, who had written Eve of Destruction for Barry McGuire. By 1966, however, the hits were getting scarce for the band, and a change of direction was called for. In early 1967 the Turtles released Happy Together, written by Garry Bonner and Alan Gordon, who had recently migrated to the West Coast to try their hand at professional songwriting after having some minor success with their own band, the Magicians, in New York and New England. Happy Together went all the way to the top of the charts. It was no surprise, then, when later that year the Turtles released another Bonner/Gordon song. She's My Girl, a personal favorite of the band members themselves and a masterpiece of 4-track recording, was, for a good portion of 2011, the most played and most positively received song on Stuck in the Psychedelic Era. However, on the last day before I had to compile the final top 25 list, a vote came in for the next song, pushing it ahead of She's My Girl.
Artist: Love
Title: 7&7 Is
Source: CD: Nuggets-Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era (originally released as 45 RPM single and included on LP: De Capo)
Writer: Arthur Lee
Label: Rhino (original label: Elektra)
Year: 1966
In 1966 Elektra Records founder Jac Holzman had just opened a West Coast office headed by his friend Paul Rothchild, and the label was looking for local talent to sign. Up to that point Elektra had been exclusively a folk and blues label, with the Butterfield Blues Band being the closest thing to a rock band on the roster. Rothchild, however, felt it was time for the label to move into new territory, and started checking out the bands playing the clubs on Sunset Strip. The most famous of these clubs was the Whisky-A-Go-Go, which had gotten national attention when Johnny Rivers recorded a highly successful live album there a couple of years before. The house band at the Whisky was a group called Love, and they were, by all accounts, the undisputed kings of the Sunset Strip. Formed in 1965 by multi-instrumentalist singer/songwriter Arthur Lee and singer/songwriter/rhythm guitarist Bryan McLean, Love became the first rock band ever signed to Elektra. The signing of Love was so important to the label, in fact, that a whole new numbering series started with the band's debut LP. The featured track on that first album was a punked-out version of a Burt Bacharach/Hal David song, My Little Red Book, which was also released as a single. The song had been originally recorded by Manfred Mann for the What's New Pussycat soundtrack, but Love's version, with its choppy guitar track, driving bass line and Lee's unique vocals, was a complete makeover of what had started out as a light pop tune. Later in the year Love released their second, and most successful single, 7&7 Is, one of the most intense records ever to get top 40 airplay. The stereo version of 7&7 Is was included on the band's second LP, De Capo, released in early 1967. For this week's show we go back to the original 1966 mono mix of the Stuck in the Psychedelic Era # 1 song of 2011: Love's 7&7 Is.
And that wraps up another show and another year of being Stuck in the Psychedelic Era. Next week it's back to the usual unpredictable mix of familiar favorites, obscure B sides and album tracks from the most creative and heartfelt period in the history of recorded music: the psychedelic era.
Artist: Beatles
Title: If I Needed Someone
Source: CD: Rubber Soul
Writer: George Harrison
Label: Parlophone (original label: Capitol)
Year: 1965
So how exactly does the most commercially successful rock group of all time end up at only the number four slot this year? Because they are the most commercially successful rock group in history, of course. The fact is, like all but one of this year's tops Stuck in the Psychedelic Era artists, the Beatles recorded so many playable songs that no one track got played more than once or twice all year. Also, since several Beatles songs are still in rotation on all kinds of commercial radio stations, I felt it was important to give more exposure to other artists, including the three that finished higher than the Beatles this year. As to why I chose this particular song, a look through past playlists will show that If I Needed Someone is one of the many Beatle tunes that have yet to be heard on Stuck In the Psychedelic Era (at least since the show went into syndication a couple of year back). I figured the appearance was overdue. Now, on to the top 25!
Artist: West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band
Title: I Won't Hurt You
Source: LP: Nuggets Vol. 9-Acid Rock (originally released on LP: Part One)
Writer: Harris/Lloyd/Markley
Label: Rhino (original label: Reprise)
Year: 1967
In the # 25 spot we have a band with one of the most bizarre stories in the history of rock. The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band was formed when aging hipster Bob Markley hosted a party at his home in the Hollywood hills. Markley had left a moderately successful career as a TV personality in his native Oklahoma to try his luck in the city of Angels in the early 60s. Although he did not have a lot of success in either movies or TV on the coast, he did manage to make the acquaintance of Kim Fowley, the embodiment of the classic 60s Hollywood hustler. It was Fowley that managed to book the Yardbirds at Markley's 1965 party, a party that was also attended by Shaun and Danny Harris, sons of composer Roy Harris, and guitarist Michael Lloyd, who had just formed a new band called the Laughing Wind. Markley was impressed with the crowds of young girls flocking around the Yardbirds, and after being introduced to Lloyd and the Harris brothers offered to finance the new band if he could join up with them. As Markley was the adopted heir to an oil fortune and getting a monthly stipend, the rest of the guys readily agreed to the deal and the
West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band (a name Markley came up with) was born. The group recorded an album of mostly cover songs called Volume 1 in a studio they built themselves before signing a deal with Reprise records. The first album for Reprise was called Part One and, unlike their earlier effort, featured mostly songs written by band members. Among the tracks on Part One was I Won't Hurt You, a tune that is written around a simulated heartbeat.
Artist: Seeds
Title: Can't Seem To Make You Mine
Source: CD: Nuggets-Classics From the Psychedelic 60s (originally released as 45 RPM single and included on LP: The Seeds)
Writer: Sky Saxon
Label: Rhino (original label: GNP Crescendo)
Year: 1965
Our # 24 song comes from the Seeds, a Los Angeles band made up of members that had migrated westward to California from nearby states (although some critics believed they actually came from another planet) and are generally credited with creating the term "flower power". Their first single was Can't Seem To Make You Mine, which got considerable airplay on area radio stations in 1965.
Artist: Chocolate Watchband
Title: Are You Gonna Be There (At The Love-In)
Source: CD: More Nuggets (originally released as 45 RPM single and on LP: No Way Out)
Writer: McElroy/Bennett
Label: Rhino (original label: Tower)
Year: 1967
In the # 23 spot we have the Chocolate Watchband, a band formed in 1965 by students at Foothills Junior College in Los Altos Hills, California. These days Los Altos Hills is in the heart of silicon valley, but in 1966 it was a sleepy town a few miles northwest of San Jose, which was itself a medium-sized US city at the time (today it's one of the top 10 US cities in population). After going through a series of personnel changes, the Watchband solidified around vocalist Dave Aguilar. Aguilar's vocals, like those of many other garage bands of the time, were heavily influenced by the Rolling Stones' Mick Jagger. The Watchband became the top band on the San Jose scene, with a repertoire consisting mostly of covers of songs by British invasion bands such as the Kinks and of course the Rolling Stones, interspersed with songs from popular soul artists such as Wilson Pickett. It wasn't long before they came to the attention of Ed Cobb, who has been called the Ed Wood of 60s garage-rock. Wood was already getting known for managing and producing the Standells out of L.A., and he soon had signed the Watchband to a contract with Tower records, the low-budget Capitol records subsidiary. For reasons of his own, Wood did not play the the strengths of the Watchband (their raw energetic performances). Instead, he attempted to fit them into a psychedelic mold of his own design. Many of the tracks on the group's debut LP for Tower, No Way Out, were actually recorded by studio musicians with no input whatsoever from the Watchband itself. These tracks were by and large instrumentals, mostly written by professional songwriters Richie Podolor and Jerry Ragovich. Additionally, a couple of songs that were played by the Watchband appeared on the album with vocals by studio singer Don Bennett. Ironically, one of the few songs that did feature Aguilar on vocals, Are You Gonna Be There (At The Love-In), was co-written by Bennett. The song was eventually released as a single after being used on the soundtrack for the cheapie teensploitation flick The Love-In.
Artist: Traffic
Title: Dear Mr. Fantasy
Source: CD: Heaven Is In Your Mind
Writer: Winwood/Capaldi/Wood
Label: Island (original label: United Artists)
Year: 1967
Our # 22 song is a true classic that has become somewhat of a signature song for vocalist/guitarist/keyboardist Steve Winwood. By 1967 18-year-old Winwood had already established a reputation with the Spencer Davis Group when he left that band to form Traffic with guitarist Dave Mason, flautist/saxophonist Chris Wood and drummer Jim Capaldi. Dear Mr. Fantasy, written by Winwood, Wood and Capaldi, was originally released on Traffic's debut LP. The album was released in the UK as Mr. Fantasy, while in the US it was called Heaven Is In Your Mind. In addition to a slightly different track lineup the US version had entirely different cover art than the UK album. After the first printing the name of the US album was changed to Mr. Fantasy, although the cover art remained. Most recently, both versions of the album have been released on CD in the US. Mr. Fantasy is entirely in mono and uses the UK track lineup and cover art and includes singles and B sides that were not included on the original UK version. Heaven Is In Your Mind is a stereo CD that uses the US track lineup and cover art and includes (as bonus tracks) stereo mixes of the songs that were previously only available on the original UK album.
Artist: Music Machine
Title: The Eagle Never Hunts The Fly
Source: LP: Nuggets Vol. 2-Punk (originally released as 45 RPM single and included on LP: Bonniwell Music Machine)
Writer: Sean Bonniwell
Label: Rhino (original label: Original Sound)
Year: 1967
The song occupying this year's # 21 spot is from one of the most influential bands to come out of the Los Angeles under-21 club scene. The Music Machine was the brainchild of Sean Bonniwell, who had previously recorded several albums for RCA as a member of the light-folk group the Limelighters. By 1966 Bonniwell was looking to do something with more of an edge to it, and formed the Music Machine as an outlet for his musical creativity. Unusual for bands of the time, the Music Machine had a tight stage show and a unique visual image. Band members dressed entirely in black, including dyed hair, and wore one black glove each. After a performance, Bonniwell was heard to say, one glove came off and the other one went on. Each set was a virtually continuous series of well-rehearsed Bonniwell originals, with no time between songs for the audience to yell out requests. The group got its big break with the release of the single Talk Talk, which made the national top 40 charts and led to an album, Turn On The Music Machine. With that album, however, problems with the band's management and record label began to manifest. The Music Machine had recorded a set of cover songs to lip synch to on a local TV show. Without the band's knowledge or approval, Original Sound records included those songs on the LP, weakening the creative impact of the album. The problems got worse when the band's manager gave the newest (and lowest-rated) local top 40 station exclusive rights to the Music Machine's second single, The People In Me. The move killed any momentum the band may have still had and a series of successive singles failed to chart as well. Among those were some truly outstanding songs such as The Eagle Never Hunts The Fly. By mid-1967 most of the original members had left the group for other projects. Undaunted, Bonniwell signed a deal with Warner Brothers, releasing one album (Bonniwell Music Machine) that included all of the Original Sound singles and B sides that were not on the debut album, as well as several new tracks featuring a new Music Machine lineup.
Artist: Country Joe and the Fish
Title: Bass Strings
Source: LP: Electric Music For The Mind And Body
Writer: Joe McDonald
Label: Vanguard
Year: 1967
The # 20 spot this year is held by Bass Strings, an album track that was originally recorded for an EP (extended play) record included in an early arts-oriented underground newspaper published by Joe McDonald, leader and primary songwriter for Country Joe and the Fish. The paper was called Rag Baby and it was meant to be a kind of Berkeley version of New York's Village Voice. The issue of Rag Baby that included Bass Strings was actually McDonald's second issue of the paper to include an EP in it (the first Rag Baby EP included the original version of McDonald's I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-To-Die Rag). Bass Strings, a literal example of acid-rock, was re-recorded in stereo for the group's first LP for Vanguard, Electric Music For The Mind And Body, released in 1967.
Artist: Bob Dylan
Title: Rainy Day Women # 12 & 35
Source: CD: Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits (originally released on LP: Blonde On Blonde)
Writer: Bob Dylan
Label: Columbia
Year: 1966
Sometimes things just work out the way they should. Such is the case with Bob Dylan's Rainy Day Women # 12 & 35 coming in at the # 19 spot, immediately following Bass Strings on this week's show (listen closely to the lyrics to hear what I mean). By 1966 even Dylan's most hardcore fans had resigned themselves to his using rock instrumentation, after booing him profoundly at the Newport Jazz Festival the previous year. It was hard to argue with the success, both artistically and commercially, of his Highway 61 Revisited album, and so when Blonde On Blonde came out it was no surprise to hear a song like Rainy Day Women opening the LP. The album was, in its own way, just as daring as Highway 61; after all, no rock or folk artist had released a double LP before. Blonde On Blonde was reportedly recorded under the influence of pot and alcohol, with most of the musicians, including Dylan himself, partaking between the takes. It's pretty obvious, listening to Rainy Day Women # 12 & 35, that Dylan was having the time of his life making the album.
Artist: Rolling Stones
Title: 2,000 Light Years From Home
Source: LP: Their Satanic Majesties Request
Writer: Jagger/Richards
Label: London
Year: 1967
We take a break from the song countdown to hear from our third most heard artist of 2011. The Rolling Stones have been called the world's greatest rock band, and they certainly have outlasted most of their contemporaries. There was a time, however, when the band's relevance was in serious doubt. There had always been a friendly rivalry between the Stones and the Beatles (even more so among the fans of the two groups), but in 1967 the Beatles took a clear lead. The Fab Four had retired from live performing after their 1966 US tour, and shifted their focus to the recording studio. The result was a double-sided single, Penny Lane/Strawberry Fields Forever, followed by the iconic Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album. The Stones, meanwhile, released an album that by comparison sounded very 1966: Between The Buttons. Finding themselves trying to play catch up, the Stones worked furiously on a new LP that was by far the most psychedelic album they would ever record: Their Satanic Majesties Request. Unfortunately by the time Majesties was released their brand of psychedelia was already sounding dated, and the album was savaged by the critics, despite hitting the top 5 in the LP charts. In retrospect, Their Satanic Majesties Request was a much better album than it was perceived to be at the time it was released. For this week's show I have chosen 2,000 Light Years From Home, a song that was also released in the US as the B side of She's A Rainbow. The song had its greatest popularity in Germany, where it was released as a single, making the top 10 there.
Artist: Seeds
Title: The Wind Blows Her Hair
Source: LP: Nuggets Vol. 9-Acid Rock (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Writer: Saxon/Bigelow
Label: Rhino (original label: GNP Crescendo)
Year: 1967
We resume our countdown with our first repeat artist of the week holding down the # 18 spot. The Seeds hit their peak of popularity in early 1967, when Pushin' Too Hard, which had already been a hit in the Los Angeles area, was re-released nationally, making the top 20 in several markets. 1967 was a year of constant change, however, and by the time Pushin' Too Hard had run its course the Seeds themselves were starting to sound like an anachronism. The corporate pop song machine that had lost control of top 40 radio with the arrival of the Beatles in 1964 was beginning to reassert itself, squeezing out indy bands like the Seeds, who were still too singles-oriented for the new progressive FM stations that were beginning to pop up across the nation. Against this backdrop the Seeds released what was possibly their finest single: The Wind Blows Her Hair.
Artist: First Edition
Title: Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In)
Source: CD: Even More Nuggets (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Writer: Mickey Newbury
Label: Rhino (original label: Reprise)
Year: 1968
Our # 17 song is from a group that was formed by members of another group. The New Christy Minstrels were one of the many homogenized folk groups that had sprung up in the sixties, getting most of their exposure through play on what was then called MOR (middle of the road) radio, mostly older stations that had gradually converted to a music format as TV took over the comedy, drama and variety shows that had established radio as the medium of choice in the 30s and 40s. These stations targeted a much older demographic than top 40 radio, and were more in line with TV variety shows such as those hosted by Perry Como, Dinah Shore, and Dean Martin (in fact the New Christy Minstrels were frequent guests on these types of shows). In late 1967 some of the members decided to do something a bit more hip and broke away from the Minstrels to form the First Edition. Led by songwriter Mickey Newbury and vocalist Kenny Rogers, the group hit a home run on their first attempt with Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In), released in 1968. Rogers, however, was not comfortable with the psychedelic sound of Just Dropped In, and the First Edition soon shifted to a more country sound, establishing Rogers as an artist who would come to dominate the country charts by the early 1980s.
Artist: Buffalo Springfield
Title: Rock And Roll Woman
Source: CD: Retrospective (originally released on LP: Buffalo Springfield Again)
Writer: Stephen Stills
Label: Atco
Year: 1967
The Buffalo Springfield was formed when Stephen Stills, who had been unsuccessfully trying to form a new band after having been rejected as an applicant for the Monkees, was stuck in traffic in L.A and suddenly saw a hearse driven by his friend Neil Young, whom he had not seen since leaving Toronto several months earlier. Stills had already assembled a group of talented musicians, including Richie Furay, Bruce Palmer and Dewey Martin, but Young was the missing element that made the new group come together. Taking the name Buffalo Springfield, the new group managed to get a gig replacing the Byrds as the house band at Ciro's, but were not able to attract a large audience (possibly due to the popularity of Love, who were the house band at the Whiskey-A-Go-Go, across the street from Ciro's). Undaunted, the group pressed on and got a contract with Atco records. At first it looked their first album, released in 1966, would flop, but then Stills wrote a new tune, For What It's Worth, that Atco released as a single in early 1967. The song became a major national hit and the album was re-cut with For What It's Worth added as the opening track. The group soon recorded a second LP, Buffalo Springfield Again. The album had several songs that were worthy of being released as singles. Possibly the best of these was Rock And Roll Woman, another Stills tune. Although it didn't get much beyond the lower reaches of the charts when it was released, it comes in at the # 16 slot on the Stuck in the Psychedelic Era top 25 list for 2011. That's gotta be worth something, right?
Artist: Chambers Brothers
Title: Time Has Come Today
Source: CD: Even More Nuggets (originally released on LP: The Time Has Come; edited for single release)
Writer: Joe and Willie Chambers
Label: Rhino (originally label: Columbia)
Year: 1967 (single edit released in 1968)
In the # 15 slot this year we have a song that has actually been released in four different versions. Time Has Come Today was first recorded in 1966 in a form that is vastly different from the version heard here. That version was released as a single, but did not go anywhere and was soon deleted from the Columbia catalog. The following year the Chambers Brothers cut a new version for their album The Time Has Come. This new version ran over 10 minutes, and featured a long extended psychedelic section that featured several innovative studio effects. The track started getting extensive airplay on progressive FM radio stations, prompting Columbia to create and release a single version in 1968. Columbia, being still a somewhat conservative label, edited the track down to about three and a quarter minutes (the rule of thumb was that top 40 radio would not play anything over three and a half minutes). The problem was that the edited version completely exorcised the track of everything that got it played on FM in the first place: the extended psychedelic section with all the innovative studio effects. When even top 40 stations started demanding a version of the song that was more like what FM was playing, Columbia engineers went back and created a fourth version of Time Has Come Today, which, although edited, kept a portion of the middle section of the track. It is this version that finally got played on AM radio and has become the version usually heard on classic rock radio as well. Personally I prefer the album version, but due to time considerations I'm going with that four and three-quarter minute edit instead.
Artist: Country Joe and the Fish
Title: Section 43
Source: CD: Love Is The Song We Sing: San Francisco Nuggets 1965-70 (originally released as an underground newspaper supplement EP flexi-disc)
Writer: Joe McDonald
Label: Rhino (original label: Rag Baby)
Year: 1966
Our # 14 song of the year is the second of two tracks originally released in 1966 as an EP that was included with Joe McDonald's Rag Baby arts-oriented underground newspaper. After Section 43 started getting airplay on local San Francisco radio stations, Vanguard records took notice and signed Country Joe And The Fish to a contract. Both Section 43 and Bass Strings (see entry for the # 20 slot) were re-recorded in stereo for the band's Vanguard debut, but for tonight's show I am using the original mono version from the EP, which is about a minute shorter than the LP version. At six and three-quarter minutes, however, this version of Section 43 is still the longest track on tonight's show.
Artist: Music Machine
Title: Talk Talk
Source: CD: More Nuggets (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Writer: Sean Bonniwell
Label: Rhino (original label: Original Sound)
Year: 1966
Starting off the second hour we have the second song tonight from the Music Machine. Talk Talk is possibly the most intense two minute song ever to get played on top 40 radio, and it comes in this year in the lucky 13 spot. For more on the Music Machine see the # 21 song above.
Artist: Traffic
Title: Feelin' Alright
Source: LP: Progressive Heavies (originally released on LP: Traffic)
Writer: Dave Mason
Label: United Artists
Year: 1968
Our # 12 song, Feelin' Alright, has the distinction of being one of only two songs played on Stuck In The Psychedelic Era this past year by three different artists. In addition to the original Traffic version heard here, we've heard Joe Cocker performing the song live at Woodstock and Grand Funk Railroad re-working the song for their Survival LP. If Dear Mr. Fantasy (# 22 this year) is Steve Winwood's signature song, then Feelin' Alright certainly has to be considered bandmate Dave Mason's, perhaps even more so. Mason had already left Traffic by the time their first LP, Mr. Fantasy, was released, but had rejoined the group in time to record their second album, entitled simply Traffic. Mason would soon leave the group again, joining up with the others one final time for the Welcome To The Canteen live album before permanently parting ways with Traffic in 1971.
Artist: Standells
Title: Sometimes Good Guys Don't Wear White (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Source: CD: More Nuggets
Writer: Ed Cobb
Label: Rhino (original label: Tower)
Year: 1966
The Standells are a bit of an enigma. Although they come across as the quintessential garage-punk band, the members of the group all had squeaky clean backgrounds (lead vocalist Dickie Dodd, in fact, was one of the original Mousketeers). The band was first spotted by Cobb while playing cover songs in an upscale L.A. club. He was impressed enough with their musical proficiency that he got them a contract with Tower records and had them record Dirty Water. When the song did decently on the charts, an album followed, and then a second single, Sometimes Good Guys Don't Wear White, which barely misses this year's top 10 list, coming in at # 11.
Artist: Shadows of Knight
Title: Gloria
Source: CD: Even More Nuggets (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Writer: Van Morrison
Label: Rhino (original label: Dunwich)
Year: 1966
While the Standells have the reputation for being the quintessential garage-punk band, it's the Shadows of Knight that were, by all accounts, the real deal. Formed in the Chicago suburbs, the band originally known as the Shadows tore up the local teen scene, often to the chagrin of the adults in the area. In fact, lead vocalist Jim Sohns was actually banned from at least one school campus in order to protect the virtue of the female students. Such was the band's popularity that they easily landed a deal with local Chicago label Dunwich, which had a national distribution deal with Atlantic records. The first record that the band recorded was a cover of Van Morrison's Gloria, which had stalled out in the lower reaches of the charts the previous year when most US radio stations banned the song due to suggestive lyrics. The Shadows, who had added "of Knight" to their name just in case there were other Shadows making records somewhere, got around the ban by changing "up to her room" to "around here". The record immediately made the playlist of the local Chicago radio stations, including 50,000 watt WLS, which could be heard nearly from coast to coast at night. With listeners hearing the song at night and demanding to hear it on their local station the next day, Gloria, # 10 on this year's Stuck in the Psychedelic Era most played list, became a hit overnight for the Shadows, who of course followed it up with an album named (what else?) Gloria. After some personnel adjustments, the band recorded a second album, Back Door Men, which included a handful of blues cover songs in addition to garage-rock standards such as Hey Joe. Both LPs were released in 1966, which proved to be the only truly successful year for the Shadows of Knight, who continued to make personnel changes until by the end of 1967 the only original member left was Sohns.
Artist: Seeds
Title: Pushin' Too Hard
Source: CD: Nuggets-Classics From the Psychedelic 60s (originally released on LP: The Seeds and as 45 RPM single)
Writer: Sky Saxon
Label: Rhino (original label: GNP Crescendo)
Year: 1966
The only band to get three slots in the top 25 is the Seeds, whose top song is the # 9 Pushin' Too Hard. The song was included on the first Seeds album, released in early 1966, and was soon made available as a single to local L.A. radio stations. The continued popularity of Pushin' Too Hard led to two significant developments. First, the band recorded a second LP and released it before the end of the year. Second, and perhaps more significant, Pushin' Too Hard was re-released nationally and became the Seeds' only top 20 hit.
Artist: Jimi Hendrix Experience
Title: Hey Joe
Source: CD: Are You Experienced?
Writer: Billy Roberts
Label: MCA (original label: Reprise)
Year: 1966
One year ago I made all of you a promise that I would play more Hendrix in 2011. Unlike most New Year's resolutions, I actually managed to keep this one, resulting in Hendrix being the artist with the second most airplay on Stuck in the Psychedelic Era this year. Most of the Hendrix that was heard on the show was from the three Jimi Hendrix Experience albums. Oddly enough, One well-known Hendrix track did not get played at all in 2011. The song Hey Joe, however, did get played. In fact, it got played by three different artists: Love, the Leaves and Tim Rose, who with the Music Machine's Sean Bonniwell came up with the idea of slowing the tempo down. This week we finally get around to hearing the best known version of the venerable song, which was the first record ever released by the Jimi Hendrix Experience.
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
Returning to our countdown we have the eighth most played track on Stuck in the Psychedelic Era this year (at least in part because it was played on three consecutive shows this summer). By 1968 Eddie Cochrane's Summertime Blues had become a rock standard. San Francisco's Blue Cheer turned up the feedback with this arrangement that has often been cited as the first heavy metal hit. Bassist Dick Peterson provides the vocals, while guitarist Leigh Stephens cranks up his amp to 11.
Artist: Blues Magoos
Title: (We Ain't Got) Nothin' Yet
Source: CD: More Nuggets (originally released on LP: Psychedelic Lollipop)
Writer: Gilbert/Scala/Esposito/Theilhelm
Label: Rhino
Year: 1966
In 1966 the Blues Magoos were THE east coast psychedelic band. Based in New York, the Magoos got as much attention for their visual presentation, including smoke bombs and electric suits, as for their music, which was nonetheless some of the best of the psychedelic era. Their first single, Tobacco Road, with it's extended psychedelic jam in the middle of the song, was one of the first tracks to get more airplay on college radio than on top 40 stations (although the song did make the charts). This year's # 7 song, (We Ain't Got) Nothin' Yet, did much better on AM radio, peaking at in February of 1967 and becoming the tune the Blues Magoos are best remembered for.
Artist: Jefferson Airplane
Title: White Rabbit
Source: CD: The Worst of Jefferson Airplane (originally released on LP: Surrealistic Pillow)
Writer: Grace Slick
Label: RCA
Year: 1967
White Rabbit was not originally intended for single release. It was not until progressive FM radio stations began playing White Rabbit as an alternative to Somebody To Love (which was being played to death on top 40 radio) in early 1967 that RCA Victor decided to release the song as a follow-up to Somebody To Love. White Rabbit ended up being the Jefferson Airplane's second consecutive (and final) top 10 single, and is the # 6 song on the Stuck in the Psychedelic Era most-played list of 2011.
Artist: Amboy Dukes
Title: Journey To The Center Of The Mind
Source: CD: Nuggets-Classics From the Psychedelic 60s (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Writer: Nugent/Farmer
Label: Rhino (original label: Mainstream)
Year: 1968
Taking a break from the top 25 list we have last year's # 1 song, the Amboy Dukes classic Journey To The Center Of The Mind. The song introduced the world to guitarist Ted Nugent, whose career continues to careen out of control even to this day.
Artist: Canned Heat
Title: Boogie Music (originally released on LP: Living The Blues)
Source: LP: Progressive Heavies
Writer: L.T. Tatman III
Label: United Artists (original label: Liberty)
Year: 1968
Canned Heat was by far the most successful blues-rock band to come from the San Francisco Bay area. The band was formed when a group of blues record collectors decided to start making their own records. After a successful appearance at the Monterey International Pop Festival the group signed a contract with Liberty and recorded an album of blues cover tunes. They followed it up in 1968 with an album of mostly original material called Boogie With Canned Heat. A second album that same year, Living The Blues, was a double-LP that included a long jam that took up two of the album sides, as well as a suite called Parthenogenesis that took up a third side. The rest of the album was made up of standard-length tracks such as Going Up The Country, which was released as a single and became the group's biggest hit. The B side of Going Up The Country was an edited version of Boogie Music, another track from Living The Blues and our # 5 song of the year.
Artist: Count Five
Title: Psychotic Reaction
Source: CD: Nuggets-Classics From the Psychedelic 60s (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Writer: Ellner/Chaney/Atkinson/Byrne/Michaelski
Label: Rhino (original label: Double Shot)
Year: 1966
This year we had essentially a four-way tie for most popular song of the year on Stuck in the Psychedelic Era. All four got played the exact same number of times, so we went with a tie-breaker system based on listener feedback. All four songs got comments, but when all was said and done we did end up with a definite ranking for the four songs. At # 4 is Psychotic Reaction from San Jose, California's Count Five. The band had a gimmick that immediately made them stand out from other bands: they all dressed like Bela Lugosi's version of Count Dracula (thus the five-member band's moniker). Psychotic Reaction emulates the 1965 Yardbirds (think I'm A Man), with a fast-paced guitar-driven break midsong that could have come from Jeff Beck himself. A listen to the B side of the record, by the way, reveals a true garage-punk sound that ranks right up there with the Standells and Shadows Of Knight in terms of attitude and raw energy. It is not known what happened to the members of Count Five after Psychotic Reaction had run its course in the autumn of 1966.
Artist: Electric Prunes
Title: I Had Too Much To Dream (Last Night) (originally released as 45 RPM single and on LP: I Had Too Much To Dream (Last Night).
Source: CD: Even More Nuggets
Writer: Tucker/Mantz
Label: Rhino (original label: Reprise)
Year: 1967
At # 3 we have a song that is so intimately tied to the psychedelic era that Lenny Kaye himself chose it as the opening track for his original Nuggets compilation, released in 1972. I Had Too Much To Dream (Last Night) had its brief chart run in early 1967, a year of such volatility that by the end of the year nearly every song from the previous winter sounded hopelessly out of date. Kaye's compilation album, celebrating the wave of rock bands such as the Electric Prunes that had come from the garages of America in the late 60s, created the term psychedelic era, and has been cited as an influence by dozens of musicians in the 40 years since it was first released. The story of the Electric Prunes is in some ways the story of the psychedelic era itself. Coming from California's Encino Valley, the group came to the attention of producer/engineer Dave Hassinger, who proceeded to con the band out of the rights to their own name while getting them a contract with a major record label. After two LPs and a series of singles with diminishing commercial returns, Hassinger took direct control of the Electric Prunes, releasing a rock mass written by David Axelrod called Mass In F Minor. Axelrod's arrangements proved to be too challenging for the band itself, and studio musicians were brought in to finish the project. Within a few months an entirely different group was recording under the name Electric Prunes, with no more commercial success than the original group. Eventually Hassinger abandoned the name, and in recent years many of the original members have begun performing (and recording) together as the Electric Prunes.
Artist: Jefferson Airplane
Title: Triad
Source: CD: Crown Of Creation
Writer: David Crosby
Label: RCA
Year: 1968
Our final aside before revealing the top two songs of the year is to acknowledge the band that got the most airplay on Stuck in the Psychedelic Era this past year. For the second straight year that band is Jefferson Airplane. The reason the Airplane gets heard on the show so much is that a) they put out five albums from 1966-69 b) every track on those five albums is appropriate for a show called Stuck in the Psychedelic Era. Compare this to the Jimi Hendrix Experience or Cream or even the Grateful Dead, each of which released only three albums over the same period. The Beatles also released five albums from 1966-69, but much of what they released was geared toward a more mainstream audience, and thus does not get played on Stuck in the Psychedelic Era as often as tracks from the Airplane do. Tonight we have an Airplane song that was originally recorded, but not released, by the Byrds. In fact, the song Triad was quite possibly the catalyst that led to David Crosby being fired from the Byrds by Roger McGuinn and Chris Hillman. The Jefferson Airplane version of Triad, featuring one of Grace Slick's best vocal performances of her career, appears on Crown Of Creation, the band's fourth album (and the only one released in 1968).
Artist: Turtles
Title: She's My Girl
Source: LP: Nuggets Vol. 9-Acid Rock (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Writer: Bonner/Gordon
Label: Rhino (original label: White Whale)
Year: 1967
The Turtles began as an L.A. surf band known as the Crossfires. When they signed a contract with White Whale, however, the label (rightly) felt that surf music had run its course and encouraged the group to move into the then booming folk-rock arena. The band, now calling itself the Turtles, took a cue from fellow L.A. band the Byrds and released a cover of a Bob Dylan song as their first single. While the Byrds, with their folk background, emphasized soaring harmonies and Jim McGuinn's 12-string guitar, the Turtles, being an L.A. club band, emphasized Howard Kaylan's strong lead vocals and tight rock and roll arrangements. It Ain't Me Babe was a major hit in the L.A. market and did well enough on the national charts to prompt a series of follow-ups in the same vein, mostly written by P.F. Sloan, who had written Eve of Destruction for Barry McGuire. By 1966, however, the hits were getting scarce for the band, and a change of direction was called for. In early 1967 the Turtles released Happy Together, written by Garry Bonner and Alan Gordon, who had recently migrated to the West Coast to try their hand at professional songwriting after having some minor success with their own band, the Magicians, in New York and New England. Happy Together went all the way to the top of the charts. It was no surprise, then, when later that year the Turtles released another Bonner/Gordon song. She's My Girl, a personal favorite of the band members themselves and a masterpiece of 4-track recording, was, for a good portion of 2011, the most played and most positively received song on Stuck in the Psychedelic Era. However, on the last day before I had to compile the final top 25 list, a vote came in for the next song, pushing it ahead of She's My Girl.
Artist: Love
Title: 7&7 Is
Source: CD: Nuggets-Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era (originally released as 45 RPM single and included on LP: De Capo)
Writer: Arthur Lee
Label: Rhino (original label: Elektra)
Year: 1966
In 1966 Elektra Records founder Jac Holzman had just opened a West Coast office headed by his friend Paul Rothchild, and the label was looking for local talent to sign. Up to that point Elektra had been exclusively a folk and blues label, with the Butterfield Blues Band being the closest thing to a rock band on the roster. Rothchild, however, felt it was time for the label to move into new territory, and started checking out the bands playing the clubs on Sunset Strip. The most famous of these clubs was the Whisky-A-Go-Go, which had gotten national attention when Johnny Rivers recorded a highly successful live album there a couple of years before. The house band at the Whisky was a group called Love, and they were, by all accounts, the undisputed kings of the Sunset Strip. Formed in 1965 by multi-instrumentalist singer/songwriter Arthur Lee and singer/songwriter/rhythm guitarist Bryan McLean, Love became the first rock band ever signed to Elektra. The signing of Love was so important to the label, in fact, that a whole new numbering series started with the band's debut LP. The featured track on that first album was a punked-out version of a Burt Bacharach/Hal David song, My Little Red Book, which was also released as a single. The song had been originally recorded by Manfred Mann for the What's New Pussycat soundtrack, but Love's version, with its choppy guitar track, driving bass line and Lee's unique vocals, was a complete makeover of what had started out as a light pop tune. Later in the year Love released their second, and most successful single, 7&7 Is, one of the most intense records ever to get top 40 airplay. The stereo version of 7&7 Is was included on the band's second LP, De Capo, released in early 1967. For this week's show we go back to the original 1966 mono mix of the Stuck in the Psychedelic Era # 1 song of 2011: Love's 7&7 Is.
And that wraps up another show and another year of being Stuck in the Psychedelic Era. Next week it's back to the usual unpredictable mix of familiar favorites, obscure B sides and album tracks from the most creative and heartfelt period in the history of recorded music: the psychedelic era.
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