Rockin' in the Days of Confusion # 2512 (starts 3/17/25)

https://exchange.prx.org/p/565496

    This week the emphasis is on live tracks, including the uninterrupted version of the Allman Brothers Band's Mountain Jam from the deluxe edition of the classic Eat A Peach album. But first, a couple studio recordings to warm up with.

Artist:    Cream
Title:    Politician
Source:    CD: Wheels Of Fire
Writer(s):    Bruce/Brown
Label:    Polydor (original label: Atco)
Year:    1968
    Despite its title, Cream's Politician, from the Wheels Of fire album, is really not the kind of scathing indictment you might expect from a track from 1968. Indeed, the song's lyrics are actually gentle satire rather than overt criticism. Eric Clapton's guitar work, however, is always a treat, and on Politician he knocks out not one, but two overdubbed solos at the same time, along with his basic guitar track. Controlled chaos at its best!

Artist:    Led Zeppelin
Title:    The Lemon Song
Source:    German import LP: Led Zeppelin II
Writer(s):    Page/Plant/Bonham/Jones/Burnett
Label:    Atlantic
Year:    1969
    If I had to choose just one Led Zeppelin song as representative of the band's early work it would have to be The Lemon Song, from their second album. The track has all the elements that made the Zep's reputation: Jimmy Page's distinctive guitar work, John Bonham's stuttered (but always timely) drum fills, John Paul Jones's funky bass line and Robert Plant's gutsy vocals (with lyrics famously derived from classic blues tunes). Squeeze my lemon, baby indeed!

Artist:    Doors
Title:    Roadhouse Blues (live)
Source:    45 RPM single
Writer(s):    Jim Morrison
Label:    Elektra
Year:    Recorded 1970, released 1978
    Roadhouse Blues is one of the most instantly recognizable songs in the entire Doors catalog. Indeed, most people can identify it from the first guitar riff, long before Jim Morrison's vocals come in. The original studio version of the song was released on the album Morrison Hotel in 1970, and was also issued as the B side of one of the band's lesser-known singles. That same year the Doors undertook what became known as their Roadhouse Blues tour; many of the performances from that tour were recorded, but not released at the time. In 1978 the three remaining members of the band, Robby Krieger, Ray Manzarek and John Densmore, decided to put music to some recordings of Morrison reciting his own poetry made before his death in 1971. The resulting album, An American Prayer, also included a live version of Roadhouse Blues made from two separate concert tapes from their 1970 tour. An edited version of the album track was released as a 1978 single as well.

Artist:    Free
Title:    Ride On Pony
Source:    CD: All Right Now-The Collection (originally released on LP: Free Live!)
Writer(s):    Fraser/Rodgers
Label:    Spectrum/UMC
Year:    1971
    Formed in 1968 by guitarist Paul Kossoff, drummer Simon Kirke, vocalist Paul Rodgers and bassist Andy Fraser, Free hit the big time in 1970 with the release of their third album, Fire And Water, which included the hit single All Right Now. This led to them headlining the first Isle Of Wight Festival in August of that year. But their success was to be short-lived. Kossoff, in particular, found the band's sudden fame hard to deal with, and became increasingly dependent on drugs as the year went on. He was also deeply affected by the death of his idol Jimi Hendrix in September of 1970, and felt that songs like All Right Now were too shallow, and wanted to concentrate on more serious material. Their late 1970 album HIghway was a commercial disappointment, and the band split up not long after its release. After the breakup, their label released Free Live!, a collection of tunes recorded over the past year, including Ride On Pony, a song that their label had wanted to release as a single from the Highway album, but that the band had voted down in favor of another tune. Free reformed in 1972, but a series of personnel changes led to a final breakup in 1973, with Rodgers and Kirke going on to form Bad Company. Kossoff died from a pulmonary embolism in 1976 at the age of 25.

Artist:    Allman Brother Band
Title:    Mountain Jam
Source:    CD: Eat A Peach Deluxe Edition
Writer(s):    Lietch/Allman/Allman/Betts/Oakley/Johanson/Trucks
Label:    Mercury (original label: Capricorn)
Year:    1972
    Due to the limitations of vinyl records, the first released version of Mountain Jam was split over two of the four sides of the Allman Brothers Band's 1972 album Eat A Peach. CD technology, however, has made it possible to present the entire 33 minute long jam uninterrupted. The piece was recorded live at the Fillmore East in March of 1971.

Artist:    Firesign Theatre
Title:    Excerpt from Part One: London; Chapter 2: An Outrageously Disgusting Disguise
Source:    LP: The Tale Of The Giant Rat Of Sumatra
Writer(s):    Procter/Bergman/Austin/Ossman
Label:    Columbia
Year:    1974
    The Firesign Theatre never passed up an opportunity to make a good (or bad) pun, and on this short excerpt from The Tale Of The Giant Rat Of Sumatra they make a whole series of them, all of which are dog related. The entire piece is a parody of Sherlock Holmes, taking place during England's Victorian Era.

Artist:    Uriah Heep
Title:    Easy Livin'
Source:    CD: Electric Seventies (originally released on LP: Demons And Wizards and as 45 RPM single)
Writer(s):    Ken Hensley
Label:    JCI/Warner Special Products
Year:    1972
    Uriah Heep's biggest hit. 'nuff said.
 

Stuck in the Psychedelic Era # 2511 (starts 3/10/25)

https://exchange.prx.org/p/564659

    This week we have a set of Beatles recordings that remained unreleased until 1996, including an expanded stereo mix of one of the group's most endearing B sides. Also, a set of electric Dylan tunes, and to get things started, a set of extra long album tracks.

Artist:    Doors
Title:    When The Music's Over
Source:    LP: Strange Days
Writer(s):    The Doors
Label:    Elektra
Year:    1967
    I remember the first time I heard When The Music's Over. My girlfriend's older brother had a copy of the Strange Days album on the stereo in his room and told us to get real close to the speakers so we could hear the sound of a butterfly while he turned the volume way up. What we got, of course, was a blast of "...we want the world and we want it now." Good times.

Artist:    Country Joe and the Fish
Title:    Section 43
Source:    CD: Electric Music For The Mind And Body
Writer:    Joe McDonald
Label:    Vanguard
Year:    1967
    In 1966 Country Joe and the Fish released their original mono version of an instrumental called Section 43. The song was included on a 7" EP inserted in Joe McDonald's underground arts newspaper called Rag Baby. In 1967 the group recorded an expanded stereo version of Section 43 and included it on their debut LP for Vanguard Records, Electric Music For The Mind And Body. It was this arrangement of the piece (and quite possibly this recording) that was used in D. A. Pennebacker's film chronicle of the Monterey International Pop Festival that June.  

Artist:    13th Floor Elevators
Title:    Postures (Leave Your Body Behind)
Source:    CD: Easter Everywhere
Writer(s):    Hall/Erickson
Label:    Charly (original label: International Artists)
Year:    1967
    There was so much going on with the 13th Floor Elevators in the months leading up to the release of their second LP, Easter Everywhere, that a book could easily be written about it all. The group returned to Texas following a successful California tour in late 1966 and were hailed as returning heroes, largely thanks to the success of their first single, You're Gonna Miss Me. Soon, however, things started to go wrong. The band was under considerable pressure to begin sessions for a new album, but the band members themselves were divided on whether to stay in Texas and work on studio projects or return to California, where the population was much more receptive to the psychedelic sounds the Elevators themselves had helped pioneer. The issue was finally decided when lead guitarist Stacy Sutherland, the one undecided member, got his probation revoked and was not allowed to leave the state. The band's rhythm section, Ronnie Leatherman and John Walton, went to California anyway, leaving Sutherland, guitarist/vocalist Roky Erickson and electric jug player Tommy Hall looking for replacements. Easter Anywhere was conceived as a major spiritual statement, meant to tie together elements of eastern and western religion with mind-expansion elements of LSD; an ambitious project, to be sure. Unfortunately, by the time the new bassist and drummer, Danny Galindo and Danny Thomas, arrived at the rural hunting cabin the rest of the band was hiding out in, Hall and Erickson were so deeply into the project (and LSD), that they were unable to effectively communicate their ideas to the new guys. As a result the group spent an excessive amount of time in the studio with little to show for it. Eventually, when time and money ran out the album was declared finished and Easter Anywhere was released in November of 1967.

Artist:    Peanut Butter Conspiracy
Title:    Ecstacy
Source:    CD: Is Spreading/The Great Conspiracy (originally released on LP: The Great Conspiracy)
Writer(s):    John Merrill
Label:    Collectables (original label: Columbia)
Year:    1967
    The members of the Peanut Butter Conspiracy were not able to play the way they really wanted to on their two LPs for Columbia Records. Much of the reason for this was because of Columbia itself, which had a history of being against just about everything that made psychedelic rock what it was. Immediately after signing the band, the label assigned Gary Usher, whose background was mainly in vocal surf music, to produce the group. Usher urged the band, who had already built up a sizable following playing Los Angeles clubs, to soften their sound and become more hit oriented. To do this he brought in several studio musicians he had previously worked with, including members of the Wrecking Crew, to fill out the band's sound. At first, it seemed to be a successful strategy, as the band's first single, It's A Happening Thing, sold fairly well in local record stores, but when the next two singles failed to generate any interest the band began to assert its right to play on their own records. As a result, all the instruments on the band's second LP, The Great Conspiracy, were played by members of the Peanut Butter Conspiracy itself, including new member Bill Wolff, who had previously played guitar with the Sound Machine. For the most part however, they were still not able to fully recreate the extended jams that they were known for in their live performances, although a couple of tracks, such as Ecstacy, come pretty close. Written by lead guitarist John Merrill, the piece is a classic psychedelic jam, running over six minutes in length. Around the same time as the album was released, Merrill began losing interest in the group, and did not contribute any songs to the band's final album, For Children Of All Ages, released on the Challenge label in 1969.

Artist:    Bob Dylan
Title:    Just Like A Woman
Source:    CD: Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits (originally released on LP: Blonde On Blonde)
Writer(s):    Bob Dylan
Label:    Columbia
Year:    1966
    By late 1966 the shock of Bob Dylan's going electric had long since worn off and Dylan was enjoying a string of top 40 hits in the wake of the success of Like A Rolling Stone. One of the last hits of the streak was Just Like A Woman, a track taken from his Blonde On Blonde album. This was actually the first Bob Dylan song I heard on top 40 radio.

Artist:    Bob Dylan
Title:    Positively 4th Street
Source:    Mono CD: The Best Of The Original Mono Recordings (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Writer(s):    Bob Dylan
Label:    Columbia/Legacy
Year:    1965
    Recorded during the same 1965 sessions that produced the classic Highway 61 Revisited album, Positively 4th Street was deliberately held back for release as a single later that year. It would not appear on an LP until Dylan's first Greatest Hits album.

Artist:    Bob Dylan
Title:    I Want You
Source:    CD: Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits (originally released as 45 RPM single and on LP: Blonde On Blonde)
Writer(s):    Bob Dylan
Label:    Columbia
Year:    1966
    I Want You, Bob Dylan's first single of 1966, was released in advance of his Blonde On Blonde album and was immediately picked by the rock press to be a hit. It was.

Artist:    Standells
Title:    Dirty Water
Source:    Simulated stereo LP: Nuggets (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Writer:    Ed Cobb
Label:    Elektra (original label: Tower)
Year:    1965
    Dirty Water has long since been adopted by the city of Boston (and especially its sports teams), yet the band that originally recorded this Ed Cobb tune was purely an L.A. band, having started off playing cover tunes at frat parties in the early 60s. Drummer Dickie Dodd, who sings lead on Dirty Water, was a former Mouseketeer who had played on the surf-rock hit Mr. Moto as a member of the Bel-Airs.

Artist:    Electric Prunes
Title:    I Had Too Much To Dream (Last Night)
Source:    CD: Psychedelic Pop (originally released as 45 RPM single and on LP: The Electric Prunes)
Writer(s):    Tucker/Mantz
Label:    BMG/RCA/Buddah (original label: Reprise)
Year:    1966
    The Electric Prunes biggest hit was I Had Too Much To Dream (Last Night), released in late 1966 and hitting the charts in early 1967. The record, initially released without much promotion from the record label, was championed by Seattle DJ Pat O'Day of KJR radio, and was already popular in that area when it hit the national charts (thus explaining why so many people assumed the band was from Seattle). I Had Too Much To Dream (Last Night) has come to be one of the defining songs of the psychedelic era and was the opening track on both the original Lenny Kaye Nuggets compilation and Rhino's first Nuggets LP.

Artist:     Big Brother And The Holding Company
Title:     Down On Me
Source:     45 RPM single
Writer:     Trad. Arr. Joplin
Label:     Mainstream
Year:     1967
     Big Brother And The Holding Company's first album, featuring the single Down On Me, was recorded in 1967 at the studios of Mainstream Records, a medium-sized Chicago label known for its jazz recordings. At the time, Mainstream's engineers had no experience with a rock band, particularly a loud one like Big Brother, and vainly attempted to clean up the band's sound as best they could. The result was an album full of relatively sterile recordings sucked dry of the energy that made Big Brother and the Holding Company one of the top live attractions of the San Francisco Bay Area. Probably the stongest track on the album was lead vocalist Janis Joplin's arrangement of Down On Me, a "freedom song" dating back at least to the 1920s that Mainstream issued as a single during the Summer of Love. A hit in San Francisco, the song almost made the national top 40 charts, peaking at #42.

Artist:    Gods
Title:    Toward The Skies
Source:    British import CD: Insane Times (originally released in UK on LP: Genesis)
Writer(s):    Joe Konas
Label:    Zonophone (original label: Columbia)
Year:    1968
    It was probably pretty pretentious for a band to call themselves the Gods, but when you consider that, at various times, the band's lineup included Greg Lake and  Mick Taylor (both future rock gods), as well as two future members of Uriah Heep, the claim somehow doesn't seem quite so outrageous. By the time their first album, Genesis, came out in 1968 both Taylor and Lake had moved on, but between guitarist/keyboardist Ken Hensley, drummer Lee Kerslake (the two aforementioned Heepsters), bassist John Glascock (who would eventually serve as Jethro Tull's bassist until his untimely death in 1979) and guitarist Joe Konas, who wrote the album's opening track, Toward The Skies, the Gods had talent to spare.

Artist:    Box Tops
Title:    Cry Like A Baby
Source:    CD: The Best Of 60s Supergroups (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Writer(s):    Penn/Oldham
Label:    Priority (original label: Mala)
Year:    1968
    The Box Tops' second top 5 single, Cry Like A Baby, was the result of an all-night songwriting session. The band's producer, Dan Penn, was under pressure from the record company to come up with a follow up hit to The Letter, and asked his friend Spooner Oldham for help writing a song. The session, though long, was unproductive, and the two decided to call it a night and have breakfast at a cafe across the street. During the course of the conversation, Oldham expressed his frustration, saying "I could just cry like a baby." Penn decided then and there that Cry Like A Baby would be the title of the song and by the time the left the restaurant they had the first verse written. When Box Tops vocalist Alex Chilton showed up later that morning the two songwriters played him a demo of the new tune that they had come up with and the rest is history.

Artist:    Beatles
Title:    You Know My Name (Look Up The Number)
Source:    CD: Anthology 2 (mon version originally released as 45 RPM single B side)
Writer(s):    Lennon/McCartney
Label:    Apple/Parlophone
Year:    1970
    Basically a studio concoction assembled by John Lennon and Paul McCartney, You Know My Name (Look Up The Number) was originally intended to be released as a 1969 single by the Plastic Ono Band. The track was the result of four separate recording sessions dating back to 1967 and originally ran over six minutes long. The instrumental tracks were recorded around the same time the album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was released in Spring of 1967. Brian Jones added a saxophone part on June 8th of that year. In April of 1969 Lennon and McCartney added vocals, while Lennon edited the entire track down from a monoraul mixdown to slightly over four minutes. The single was readied for a November release, but at the last minute was withdrawn. The recording was instead released as the B side of the Beatles' Let It Be single the following year. In 1996 the original tapes were re-edited to create a new stereo mix that runs a little over five and a half minutes in length. The new mix was included on the Anthology 2 CD.

Artist:    Beatles
Title:    12-Bar Original
Source:    Anthology 2
Writer(s):    Lennon/McCartney/Harrison/Starkey
Label:    Capitol/Apple
Year:    Recorded 1965, released 1996
    Apparently nobody at EMI studios was familiar with the term "blues jam", so they called this Rubber Soul outtake 12-Bar Original. The Beatles actually recorded two takes of this; the second of these ran about six and a half minutes in length. That second take was edited down to about three minutes for inclusion on the second Anthology album in 1996.

Artist:    Beatles
Title:    Not Guilty
Source:    CD: Anthology 3
Writer(s):    George Harrison
Label:    Capitol/Apple
Year:    Recorded 1968, released 1996
    One of the most legendary unreleased Beatles recordings, Not Guilty was written by George Harrison after returning from the band members' spiritual retreat in Rishikesh, India, where they studied Transcendental Meditation under Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. The song addresses his growing dissatisfaction with his role in the band, while defending himself against accusations that he led the group "astray on the road to Mandalay". The recording process was a difficult one, taking over 100 takes to get right, and even then Harrison was unsatisfied with the final recording, which may explain why the song, originally slated for inclusion on the White Album, remained unreleased for nearly 30 years.

Artist:     Turtles
Title:     The Last Thing I Remember, The First Thing I Knew
Source:     CD: The Turtles Present The Battle Of The Bands (bonus track originally released on 12" 45 RPM Picture Disc: Turtles 1968)
Writer:     The Turtles
Label:     FloEdCo (original label: Rhino)
Year:     Recorded 1968, released 1978
     In 1968 the Turtles rebelled against their record company. They did not attempt to break the contract or go on strike, though. Instead, they simply went into the studio and produced four songs that they themselves wrote and chose to record. The record company, in turn, chose not to issue any of the self-produced recordings (although one, Surfer Dan, did end up on their Battle of the Bands album a few months later). Finally, in the late 1970s a small independent label known for issuing oddball recordings by the likes of Barnes and Barnes (Fish Heads) and professional wrestler Fred Blassie (Pencil-Neck Geek) put out a 12-inch picture disc featuring the four tunes. That label also began reissuing old Turtles albums, starting it on a path that has since become the stock in trade for Rhino Records. More recently, Turtles front men Howard Kaylan and Mark Volman (aka Flo & Eddie) have reissued all four songs as bonus tracks on the expanded CD version of The Turtles Present The Battle Of The Bands on their own FloEdCo label.

Artist:    Monkees
Title:    Dandruff/Daddy's Song
Source:    LP: Head soundtrack
Writer:    Harry Nilsson
Label:    Colgems
Year:    1968
    After their TV show was cancelled in the spring of 1968, the Monkees set out to make a feature-length film. The movie, written by a young Jack Nicholson, was called Head, and was nothing like the TV show. The soundtrack album was nothing like any previous Monkees album either. For one thing, there were no songs written by Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart. More importantly, there were clips from the movie itself, including Dandruff, which leads into the Harry Nillson tune Daddy's Song.

Artist:    Pretty Things
Title:    Walking Through My Dreams
Source:    Mono British import CD: Psychedelia At Abbey Road (originally released as 45 RPM single B side)
Writer(s):    May/Taylor/Waller
Label:    EMI (original label: Columbia)
Year:    1968
    Like the Rolling Stones, the Pretty Things were a product of London's somewhat rough and tumble blue collar neighborhoods, and in their early years played a similar mix of early rock 'n' roll and R&B cover tunes. By 1967, however, the band had embraced psychedelia far more than the Stones, even to the point of rivalling Pink Floyd for the unofficial title of Britain's leading psychedelic band. A case in point is Walking Though My Dreams, released in 1967 as the B side to the equally psychedelic Talkin' About The Good Times. For some reason, however, the Pretty Things never had the success in the US that the Stones (or even Pink Floyd) enjoyed.

Artist:    J.K. & Co.
Title:    Fly
Source:    CD: A Heavy Dose Of Lyte Psych (originally released on LP: Suddenly One Summer)
Writer(s):    Jay Kaye
Label:    Arf! Arf! (original label: White Whale)
Year:    1969
            By 1969, some of the glamor had worn off the drug scene, with Pot and LSD giving way to amphetamines and cocaine as the drug of choice among many users. Jay Kaye, an expatriate Canadian fronting his own band in Los Angeles, recorded the album Suddenly One Summer, including the song Fly, as a way of documenting the horrors of hard drug use. Although Suddenly One Summer was not a commercial success, J.K. & Co. deserve props for daring to go against the grain long before it became fashionable to eschew drug use.

Artist:    Fifty Foot Hose
Title:    Fantasy
Source:    LP: Cauldron
Writer(s):    David Blossom
Label:    Limelight
Year:    1968
    Although Fifty Foot Hose was not a commercial success in 1968, they are now highly regarded as pioneers of electronic music. The group's core members were the husband and wife team of David and Nancy Blossom (on guitar and vocals respectively) and Cork Marcheschi, who provided various electronic effects. Marcheschi actually created the devices he used with the group, being as much an inventor/engineer as a musician (perhaps even more). David Blossom, on the other hand, was the band's primary songwriter, creating pieces such as Fantasy, which at over ten minutes was the longest track on the group's only album, Cauldron.

Artist:    Deep Purple
Title:    Help!
Source:    LP: Shades Of Deep Purple
Writer(s):    Lennon/McCartney
Label:    Tetragrammaton
Year:    1968
    It takes brass for a band to include a Beatles cover on their debut LP, especially if they have chosen to completely rearrange the song, a la Vanilla Fudge. Nonetheless, that is exactly what happened on the album Shades Of Deep Purple, which hit the stands in 1968. The Beatles cover song in question is the classic Help! Deep Purple gives it a kind of slow, soft treatment that is both light years away from the original, and, in my opinion, quite an enjoyable listen.

Artist:    Max Frost And The Troopers
Title:    Shape Of Things To Come
Source:    Mono CD: Nuggets-Original Artyfacts From The First Psychedelic Era (originally released as 45 RPM single and on LP: Wild In The Streets (soundtrack))
Writer(s):    Mann/Weill
Label:    Rhino (original label: Tower)
Year:    1968
    Max Frost was a politically savvy rock star who rode the youth movement all the way to the White House, first through getting the support of a hip young Senator, then getting the age requirements for holding high political office lowered to 21, and finally lowering the voting age to 14. Everyone over 30 was locked away in internment camps, similar to those used during WWII by various governments to hold those of questionable loyalty to the current regime. What? You don't remember any of that? You say it sounds like the plot of a cheapie late 60s teen exploitation flick? Right on all counts. "Wild in the Streets" starred Christopher Jones as the rock star, Hal Holbrook as the hip young senator, and a Poseidon Adventure-sized Shelly Winter as the rock star's interred mom. Richard Pryor, in his film debut, played the band's hook-handed drummer/political activist Stanley X. The band itself, Max Frost And The Troopers, was actually a group called the 13th Power (and was credited as such on the soundtrack album, but not the single).

Artist:    Ten Years After
Title:    Love Until I Die (Top Gear version)
Source:    Mono CD: Ten Years After (bonus track)
Writer(s):    Alvin Lee
Label:    Deram
Year:    1967
    When the British government pulled the plug on Radio London in 1967, DJ John Peel, who had hosted a popular and influential underground radio show on the popular pirate station, immediately found work on the new BBC Radio 1, which was launched specifically to capture Radio London's former audience. He soon found himself involved with the revival of a program called Top Gear, that featured a mixture of records and live performances by Britain's most popular bands. Under Peel's guidance, the show became an important part of the emerging blues and progressive rock scenes. One of the first bands to be featured on the show was Ten Years After, performing songs from their first album, such as Love Until I Die, an Alvin Lee original that builds on the same riff that Eric Clapton And The Powerhouse had used for their version of Crossroads on the 1966 LP What's Shakin' (and Cream would use on their 1968 Wheels Of Fire album), but soon takes off in an entirely different musical direction.

Artist:    Executives
Title:    The Ginza Strip
Source:    Mono British import CD: Acid Daze (originally released in UK as 45 RPM single)
Writer(s):    Roy and Tony Carr
Label:    Uncut (original label: Columbia)
Year:    1967
    The Executives were one of the many British beat bands that decided to try their hand at psychedelia in 1967. They had previously been tied closely to the Mod movement however (in fact producer/bandleader Tony Carr had written the 1964 hit March Of The Mods) and, despite the fact that The Ginza Strip is a fine slice of psychedelia, were unable to shed their Mod image enough to gain credibility with the psychedelic crowd.
 

Rockin' in the Days of Confusion # 2511 (starts 3/10/25)

https://exchange.prx.org/p/564657 

Artist:    
Title:    
Source:    
Writer(s):    
Label:    
Year:    

    This week we pull out a whole bunch of tunes that haven't been played on Rockin' in the Days of Confusion before, along with a couple that were last played over five years ago. And yeah, there are two or three that have been heard more recently as well.

Artist:    Paul McCartney & Wings
Title:    Nineteen Hundred And Eighty-Five
Source:    45 RPM single B side
Writer(s):    Paul McCartney
Label:    Apple
Year:    1973
    Band On The Run is often cited as Paul McCartney's best post-Beatles album. The third single from the album paired the first and last tracks from the album itself, with the song Nineteen Hundred And Eighty-Five ending with a coda reprising the chorus of the album's title track.

Artist:    Gun
Title:    Race With The Devil
Source:    European import CD: Pure...Psychedelic Rock (originally released on LP: Gun)
Writer(s):    Adrian Gurvitz
Label:    Repertoire (original UK label: Columbia)
Year:    1968
    One of the most popular songs on the jukebox at the teen club on Ramstein Air Force Base, Germany in 1969 was a song called Race With The Devil by a band called Gun. The song was so popular, in fact, that at least two local bands covered it (including the one I was in). Nobody seemed to know much about Gun at the time, but it turns out that the group was fronted by the Gurvitz brothers, Adrian and Paul (who at the time were using the last name Curtis); the two would later be members of the Baker-Gurvitz Army with drummer Ginger Baker. I've also learned recently that Gun spent much of its time touring in Europe, particularly in Germany, where Race With The Devil hit its peak in January of 1969 (it had made the top 10 in the UK in 1968, the year it was released).

Artist:    Who
Title:    Amazing Journey/Sparks
Source:    LP: Tommy
Writer(s):    Pete Townshend
Label:    Decca
Year:    1969
    After achieving major success in their native England with a series of hit singles in 1965-67, the Who began to concentrate more on their albums from 1968 on. The first of these concept albums was The Who Sell Out, released in December of 1967. The Who Sell Out was a collection of songs connected by faux radio spots and actual jingles from England's last remaining pirate radio station, Radio London. After releasing a few more singles in 1968, the Who began work on their most ambitious project yet: the world's first rock opera. Tommy, released in 1969, was a double LP telling the story of a boy who, after being tramautized into becoming a blind deaf-mute, eventually emerges as a kind of messiah, only to have his followers ultimately abandon him. One of the early tracks on the album is Amazing Journey, describing Tommy's voyage into the recesses of his own mind in response to the traumatic event that results in his blind, deaf and dumb condition. This leads into the instrumental Sparks, featuring a bass solo by John Entwhistle and some intricate guitar work from Pete Townshend.

Artist:    Chicago
Title:    Poem For The People
Source:    CD: Chicago
Writer(s):    Robert Lamm
Label:    Rhino (original label: Columbia)
Year:    1970
    Bassist Peter Cetera and keyboardist Robert Lamm share the lead vocals on Poem For The People from the second Chicago album. The song is an invitation to expand one's mind, without being particularly specific about what method to use.

Artist:    Grand Funk Railroad
Title:    All You've Got Is Money
Source:    CD: Survival
Writer(s):    Mark Farner
Label:    Capitol
Year:    1971
    By 1971, Grand Funk Railroad was commanding upwards of $50,000 per show, which probably explains how they were able to get away with including a song called All You've Got Is Money on their fourth studio LP, Survival. The song actually complements the old standard Nobody Knows You When You're Down And Out.

Artist:    Genesis
Title:    Watcher Of The Skies
Source:    CD: Foxtrot
Writer(s):    Banks/Collins/Gabriel/Hackett/Rutherford
Label:    Rhino/Atlantic (original label: Charisma)
Year:    1972
    The opening song for most of Genesis's live performances throughout the mid-1970s was also the opening track of their 1972 album Foxtrot. Watcher Of The Skies was inspired by the works of science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke (Childhood's End) and legendary comic book writer Stan Lee (the Tales Of The Watcher series), although the title itself reportedly was taken from an 1817 poem by John Keats. The two alternating chords at the beginning of the piece were actually the result of the limitations of a Mellotron MKII (a keyboard instrument that utilized tape loops of string orchestras) that keyboardist Tony Banks had just bought from King Crimson. According to Banks "There were these two chords that sounded really good on that instrument. There are some chords you can't play on that instrument because they'd be so out of tune. These chords created an incredible atmosphere. That's why it's just an incredible intro number. It never sounded so good on the later Mellotron."

Artist:    Dr. John
Title:    Cold Cold Cold
Source:     45 RPM single
Writer(s):    Johnson/Hill/Rebennack
Label:    Atco
Year:    1973
    Mac Rebennack was a fixture on the New Orleans music scene for over 50 years. He first started performing publicly in his teens, lying about his age to able to play in some of the city's more infamous clubs. At age 13 he was expelled from Jesuit school and soon found work as a staff songwriter and guitarist for the legendary Aladdin label. In 1957, at age 16, he joined the musicians' union, officially beginning his professional career. In the early 1960s he got into trouble with the law and spent two years in federal prison. Upon his release he relocated to Los Angeles, due to an ongoing cleanup campaign in New Orleans that had resulted in most of the clubs he had previously played in being permanently shut down. While in L.A., Rebennack developed his Dr. John, the Night Tripper personna, based on a real-life New Orleans voodoo priest with psychedelic elements thrown in (it was 1968 after all). By the early 1970s Dr. John had developed a cult following, but was getting tired of the self-imposed limitations of his Night Tripper image. In 1972 he recorded an album of New Orleans cover songs, following it up with his most successful album, In The Right Place, in 1973. Produced by the legendary Allen Toussaint, In The Right Place provided Dr. John his most successful hit single, Right Place Wrong Time, as well as a followup single, Such A Night, that peaked just outside the top 40. Although most of Dr. John's tunes were solo compositions, he did, on occasion, collaborate with other New Orleans songwriters such as Alvin "Shine" Robinson and Jessie Hill on songs like Cold Cold Cold, which closes out In The Right Place and appeared as the B side of Such A Night. Dr. John continued to perform on a regular basis until shortly before his death on June 6, 2019.

Artist:    Doobie Brothers
Title:    Black Water
Source:    CD: What Were Once Vices Are Now Habits
Writer(s):    Patrick Simmons
Label:    Warner Brothers
Year:    1974
    Doobie Brothers co-founder Patrick Simmons' contribution had been for the most part overshadowed by those of Tom Johnston on the band's first three albums, but with the song Black Water from the LP What Were Once Vices Are Now Habits, that changed in a big way. The song, inspired by a visit to New Orleans, was released as the B side of the album's first single, Johnston's Another Park, Another Sunday. That single, however, stalled out in the #32 spot, and a subsequent single, Eyes Of Silver, did even worse, peaking at #52. This worried the record label enough to re-release yet another Johnston song, Nobody, which had appeared on the band's first album and had been released as a single in 1971. But then something unexpected happened. A radio station in Roanoke, Virginia began playing Black Water as an album track, prompting overwhelming listener response that led to other stations in Virginia airing the song as well. Five weeks after the Roanoke station began playing Black Water, Warner Brothers reissued the song, this time as an A side. It became the Doobie Brothers' first #1 hit and revived the band's career.

Artist:    Crack The Sky
Title:    Hold On/Surf City
Source:    LP: Crack The Sky
Writer(s):    John Palumbo
Label:    Lifesong
Year:    1975
    The first LP released on Terry Cashman and Joe West's Lifesong label was a group that is still active in the Baltimore area called Crack The Sky. Originally called Words, the band had been formed in Weirton, West Virginia by members of two local bands, Sugar and Uncle Louie. The 10-member band successfully auditioned for CashWest Productions, the company that also produced singer/songwriter Jim Croce, and, after paring down to five members, released their self-titled debut LP in 1975. Although never a major national success (due mostly to distribution problems on the part of Lifesong), the group did manage to place three albums on the Billboard charts, the two of which have since been reissued as a single CD. The band itself is hard to classify, incorporating elements of progressive rock, jazz and even soft-rock, with unexpected twists and turns, as can be heard on the first LP's opening track, Hold On, which segues directly into the innovative Surf City.

Artist:    Cheech And Chong
Title:    Trippin' In Court
Source:    CD: Cheech & Chong
Writer(s):    Marin/Chong
Label:    Warner Brothers (original label: Ode)
Year:    1971
    Cheech Marin and Thomas Chong take on a variety of voices for Trippin' In Court, from their 1971 debut album, including a judge, a bailiff, a nervous public defender, a drunken pervert and, in a starring role, Anthony "Man" Stoner, who would be featured in several films, starting with 1978's Up In Smoke.

Artist:    Mothers Of Invention
Title:    Electric Aunt Jemima
Source:    LP: The 1969 Warner/Reprise Record Show (originally released on LP: Uncle Meat)
Writer(s):    Frank Zappa
Label:    Warner Brothers (original labels: Bizarre/Reprise)
Year:    1969
    Following the release of Absolutely Free in 1967, Frank Zappa began work on a project he called No Commercial Potential, which consisted of four albums with a common theme. The first of these was We're Only In It For The Money, released as a Mothers Of Invention album in March of 1968, followed by Zappa's first official solo album, Lumpy Gravy two months later. The third album, Cruising with Ruben & the Jets, was credited to the Mothers Of Invention and appeared on the racks in December of 1968. Not long after the release of Ruben, Zappa parted company with M-G-M's Verve label, prompting the company to release an unauthorized (yet compiled by Zappa himself) retrospective album called Mothermania. In 1969 Zappa's Bizarre Productions became an actual record label distributed by Warner Brothers as a partner to Reprise Records. One of the earliest releases on Bizarre was Uncle Meat, the fourth and final portion of No Commercial Potential. The double LP, including several short pieces such as Electric Aunt Jemima, would eventually become the basis for the 1987 film Uncle Meat.

Stuck in the Psychedelic Era # 2510 (starts 3/3/25)

https://exchange.prx.org/p/563838

    This time around we have a battle of the bands between a British group, the Rolling Stones, and a California band, the Association, featuring some of the earliest releases from each group. Also on tap, a Paul Revere and the Raiders rendition of a popular early 60s instrumental, a somewhat controversial song from a New York street band, and a set of tunes from Traffic.

Artist:    Kinks
Title:    A Well Respected Man
Source:    45 RPM single
Writer(s):    Ray Davies
Label:    Reprise
Year:    1965
    The Kinks were one of the original British Invasion bands, scoring huge R&B-influenced hits with You Really Got Me and All Day And All Of The Night in 1964. The hits continued in 1965 with more melodic songs like Set Me Free and Tired Of Waiting For You. 1966 saw Ray Davies's songwriting take a satiric turn, as A Well Respected Man amply illustrates. Over the next few years the Kinks would continue to evolve, generally getting decent critical reviews and moderate record sales for their albums. The title of one of those later albums, Muswell Hillbillies, refers to the Davies brothers hometown of Muswell Hill, North London.

Artist:    Love
Title:    7&7 Is
Source:    Mono LP: Nuggets vol. 2 (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Writer(s):    Arthur Lee
Label:    Elektra
Year:    1966
    The word "seven" does not appear anywhere in the song 7&7 Is. In fact, I have no idea where Arthur Lee got that title from. Nonetheless, the song is among the most intense tracks to ever make the top 40. 7&7 Is starts off with power chords played over a constant drum roll (possibly played by Lee himself), with cymbals crashing over equally manic semi-spoken lyrics. The song builds up to an explosive climax: an atomic bomb blast followed by a slow post-apocalyptic instrumental that quickly fades away.

Artist:    Jimi Hendrix Experience
Title:    If 6 Was 9
Source:    CD: Axis: Bold As Love
Writer(s):    Jimi Hendrix
Label:    Experience Hendrix/Legacy (original label: Reprise)
Year:    1967
    Before 1967 stereo was little more than an excuse to charge a dollar more for an LP. That all changed in a hurry, as artists such as Jimi Hendrix began to explore the possibilities of the technology, in essence treating stereophonic sound as a multi-dimensional sonic palette. The result can be heard on songs such as If 6 Were 9 from the Axis: Bold As Love album, which is best listened to at high volume, preferably with headphones on.

Artist:    King Crimson
Title:    The Court Of The Crimson King
Source:    CD: In The Court Of The Crimson King
Writer:    MacDonald/Sinfield
Label:    Discipline Global Mobile (original 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 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:    West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band
Title:    Until The Poorest People Have Money To Spend
Source:    CD: Volume III-A Child's Guide To Good And Evil
Writer(s):    Markley/Harris
Label:    Sundazed (original label: Reprise)
Year:    1968
            The final West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band album for Reprise, Volume III-A Child's Guide To Good And Evil, is generally considered the group's best album as well, despite the absence of founding member Danny Harris (who would return for their next LP on the Amos label). As always, Bob Markley provided the lyrics for all the band's original songs on the album, including Until The Poorest People Have Money To Spend, which Shaun Harris wrote the music for. Although the sentiment expressed in the song is a good one, the sincerity of Markley's lyrics is somewhat suspect, according to guitarist Ron Morgan, who said that Markley was notoriously miserly with his own money (of which he had inherited quite a lot).
     
Artist:    Mad River
Title:    A Gazelle
Source:    Mono British import CD: The Berkeley EPs (originally released in US on EP: Mad River)
Writer(s):    Lawrence Hammond
Label:    Big Beat (original label: Wee)
Year:    1967
    Mad River was formed in 1965 in Yellow Spings, Ohio, as the Mad River Blues Band. The group (after several personnel changes) relocated to the Berkeley, California in spring of 1967, and soon began appearing at local clubs, often alongside Country Joe And The Fish. Around this time the band came into contact with Lonnie Hewitt, a jazz musician who had started his own R&B-oriented label, Wee. After auditioning for Fantasy Records, the band decided instead to finance their own studio recordings, which were then issued as a three-song EP on Wee. With all their material having been written and arranged before the band left Ohio, and then perfected over a period of months, Mad River's EP was far more musically complex than what was generally being heard in the Bay Area at the time. The opening track, Amphetamine Gazell (the title having been temporarily shortened to A Gazelle for the EP) contains several starts and stops, as well as time changes. Bassist Lawrence Hammond's high pitched, almost operatic, vocal style actually enhances the lyrics, which drummer Greg Dewey described as "a teenager's idea of what it must be like to be hip and cool in California". The song was recut (with its original title restored and even more abrupt starts and stops), for Mad River's Capitol debut LP the following year.

Artist:    Sound Magics
Title:    Don't You Remember
Source:    Mono CD: Nuggets II-Original Artyfacts From The British Empire And Beyond 1964-1969 (originally released in the Netherlands as 45 RPM single)
Writer(s):    van Waegeningh/Mouris
Label:    Rhino (original label: Philips)
Year:    1966
    Who were the Sound Magics? Good question. Here's what's known: they were a Dutch band, either from Doesburgse or Arnhem, that released two singles on the Philips label, the first of which was Don't You Remember, which hit the racks in 1966. The song was co-written by Rob van Waegeningh, who would resurface with a band called Moan (or the Moans) a couple of years later. One other thing: these guys seem to have been pretty well-financed, judging by the huge (for 1966) guitar amps they included on the picture sleeve of their Don't You Remember single.

Artist:    Paul Revere And The Raiders
Title:    Night Train
Source:    Simulated stereo LP: Just Like Us
Writer(s):    Forrest/Simpkins/Washington
Label:    Columbia
Year:    1965
    Like many US West Coast bands, Paul Revere And The Raiders started out as an instrumental group, adding vocals in the wake of the British invasion of 1964. Even after becoming the "house band" for Dick Clark's daily dance show, Where The Action Is, the group continued to play an occasional instrumental such as Night Train, a standard first recorded by Jimmy Forrest in 1951 and popularized for the baby boom generation by James Brown in 1963.

Artist:    Caravan
Title:    Grandma's Lawn
Source:    British import CD: Spirit Of Joy (originally released on LP: Caravan)
Writer(s):    Sinclair/Hastings/Coughlin/Sinclair
Label:    Polydor (original label: MGM-Verve)
Year:    1968
    From a business standpoint, the British and American record industries were worlds apart for the first several decades of their respective existences. In fact, some UK labels had the same names as US labels but were owned by different companies altogether. Columbia, for example, was the flagship label of the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) in the US. In the UK, however, Columbia was one of the major labels making up the EMI group. Even familiar trademarks such as the iconic dog and phonograph were associated with different companies in the two countries (RCA Victor in the US, His Master's Voice in the UK). Toward the end of the 1960s, however, this was beginning to change, with companies such as Polydor starting up their own US label (and signing the godfather of soul himself, James Brown, in the process), or acquiring a majority share of existing labels, as EMI did with Capitol Records. One major US label, M-G-M, decided to open their own British division, MGM/Verve, in 1968. The first band signed to the new label was Caravan, one of the most enduring progressive bands to emerge from the so-called Canterbury scene. A highlight of Caravan's debut LP was Grandma's Lawn. Unfortunately, MGM/Verve ceased operations the following year, leaving Caravan to sign with another British label with the same name as an unrelated US label: Decca.

Artist:    Monkees
Title:    Daily Nightly
Source:    LP: Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn And Jones, LTD.
Writer(s):    Michael Nesmith
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 (Dolenz also sang lead on the tune).
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Artist:    Golden Earrings
Title:    Daddy Buy Me A Girl
Source:    Mono CD: Nuggets II-Original Artyfacts From The British Empire And Beyond 1964-1969 (originally released in Holland as 45 RPM single)
Writer(s):    Gerritson/Kooymans
Label:    Rhino (original label: Polydor)
Year:    1966
    Years before Radar Love made them international stars, Golden Earring had an 's' on the end of their name and was one of Holland's most popular beat bands, thanks to songs like Daddy Buy Me A Girl, which takes the usual "poor boy out to prove he's worthy of the rich girl" theme and turns it on its head, with the singer complaining that everyone just likes him for his money and not for himself. The song, released in 1966, was the group's fourth single for Polydor International.

Artist:    Them
Title:    Bent Over You
Source:    LP: Time Out! Time In! For Them
Writer(s):    Them/Lane/Pulley
Label:    Tower
Year:    1968
    While not an unlistenable track by any means, the most curious aspect of Bent Over You from Them's 1968 Time Out! Time In! For Them album is probably the fact that the entire band (but not the individual members) shares songwriting credit with Thomas Lane and Sharon Pulley, who in fact wrote most of the songs on the album itself. I have to wonder just how the royalties situation would have worked if the album had actually made any money.

Artist:    Cream
Title:    Crossroads
Source:    CD: Best of 60s Psychedelic Rock (originally released on LP: Wheels Of Fire)
Writer:    Robert Johnson
Label:    Priority (original label: Atco)
Year:    1968
    Robert Johnson's Crossroads has come to be regarded as a signature song for Eric Clapton, who's live version (recorded at the Fillmore East) was first released on the Cream album Wheels Of Fire.

Artist:    Small Faces
Title:    Me You And Us Too
Source:    British import 45 RPM single B side (originally released in box set: Here Come The Nice)
Writer(s):    Steve Marriott
Label:    Immediate (original label: Charly)
Year:    Recorded 1968, released 2014
    The Small Faces went into a recording studio together for the final time on September 11, 1968 to record two sides of a projected, but ultimately unreleased single. The A side, a Steve Marriott tune called The Autumn Stone, ended up being the title track of a double LP released a year later, after the group had officially disbanded. The B side, Me You And Us Too, is an early version of Wham Bam, Thank You Mam, remained unreleased until it was included in a British box set called Here Come The Nice. The song itself sounds more like early Humble Pie than late Small Faces to me.

Artist:    Hysterics
Title:    Everything's There
Source:    Mono CD: Where The Action Is: L.A. Nuggets 1965-68 (originally released as 45 RPM single B side)
Writer(s):    David Donaghue
Label:    Rhino (original label: Bing)
Year:    1965
    Much as San Jose, California had its own thriving teen-oriented music scene within the greater San Francisco media market, the San Bernardino/Riverside area of Southern California, sometimes called the Inland Empire, was home to several local bands that were able to score recording contracts with various small labels in the area. Among those were the Hysterics, who recorded four songs for two separate labels in 1965. The best of those was Everything's There, which appeared as the B side of the second single issued by the band. At some point, Everything's There was reissued (along with the A side of the first record, That's All She Wrote) on yet a third label, but this time credited to the Love Ins. Such was the state of the indy record business in 1965.

Artist:     Barry McGuire
Title:     Eve of Destruction
Source:     LP: 93 KHJ Boss Goldies  (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Writer:     P.F. Sloan
Label:     Original Sound (original label: Dunhill)
Year:     1965
     P.F. Sloan had already established a reputation for writing songs that captured the anger of youth by the time he wrote Eve Of Destruction, which Barry McGuire took into the top 10 in 1965. It would be McGuire's only major hit, and represented folk-rock at the peak of its popularity.

Artist:    Eric Burdon and the Animals
Title:    When I Was Young
Source:    45 RPM single
Writer:    Burdon/Briggs/Weider/Jenkins/McCulloch
Label:    M-G-M
Year:    1967
    After the Animals disbanded in 1966, Eric Burdon set out to form a new band that would be far more psychedelic than the original group. The first release from these "New Animals" was When I Was Young. The song was credited to the entire band, a practice that would continue throughout the entire existence of the group that came to be called Eric Burdon And The Animals.

Artist:    Association
Title:    Along Comes Mary
Source:    45 RPM single
Writer:    Tandyn Almer
Label:    Valiant
Year:    1966
    The Association are best known for a series of love ballads and light pop songs such as Cherish, Never My Love and Windy. Many of these records were a product of the L.A. studio scene and featured several members of the Wrecking Crew, the studio musicians who played on dozens of records in the late 60s and early 70s. The first major Association hit, however, featured the band members playing all the instruments themselves. Produced, and possibly co-written, by Curt Boettcher, who would soon join Gary Usher's studio project Sagittarius, Along Comes Mary shows that the Association was quite capable of recording a classic without any help from studio musicians.
        
Artist:    Rolling Stones
Title:    Not Fade Away
Source:    Mono CD: Singles Collection-The London Years (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Writer(s):    Hardin/Petty
Label:    Abkco (original label: London)
Year:    1964
    The Rolling Stones' first top 5 hit in the UK was an updated version of Buddy Holly's Not Fade Away. The Stones put a greater emphasis on the Bo Diddley beat than Holly did and ended up with their first charted single in the US as well, establishing the Rolling Stones as the Yang of the British Invasion to the Beatles' Ying. It was a role that fit the top band from the city they call "The Smoke" well.

Artist:    Association
Title:    Your Own Love
Source:    45 RPM single B side
Writer:    Yester/Alexander
Label:    Valiant
Year:    1966
    After signing with the Valiant label, the Association brought in producer Curt Boettcher to help them establish a more mainstream pop sound. He brought with him a song called Along Comes Mary that he later claimed he had co-written by Tandyn Almer. For the B side, they went with an original tune called Your Own Love, which is probably a better indication of how the group sounded at that point in time.

Artist:    Rolling Stones
Title:    I Wanna Be Your Man
Source:    45 RPM single B side
Writer(s):    Lennon/McCartney
Label:    London
Year:    1964
    Mick Jagger and Keith Richards have written so many classic songs together that it's hard to imagine a time when they had yet to pen their first hit. That was precisely the case, however, in the early days of the Rolling Stones, when they were barely scratching the bottom of the British charts with covers of blues songs from the 1950s. A chance meeting with John Lennon and Paul McCartney, however, resulted in the Stones being given a song called I Wanna Be Your Man which became the band's first top 20 hit in the UK. The song was later released as the B side to the Stones' first US charted single, Not Fade Away.

Artist:    Association
Title:    Pandora's Golden Heebie Jeebies
Source:    Mono British import CD: My Mind Goes High (originally released in US as 45 RPM single and included on LP: Renaissance)
Writer(s):    Gary Alexander
Label:    Warner Strategic Marketing (original US label: Valiant)
Year:    1966
    Following up on their monster hit Cherish, the Association released their most overtly psychedelic track, Pandora's Golden Heebie Jeebies, in late 1966, in advance of their second LP, Renaissance. The group had wanted to be more involved in the production process, and provided their own instrumental tracks for the tune, written by band member Gary Alexander. Unfortunately for the band, the single barely made the top 40, peaking at # 35, which ultimately led to the band relying more on outside songwriters and studio musicians for their later recordings such as Never My Love and Windy.

Artist:    Rolling Stones
Title:    I'm All Right
Source:    Mono CD: Out Of Our Heads
Writer(s):    Nanker Phelge
Label:    Abkco (original label: London)
Year:    1965
    Right from the beginning the Rolling Stones seemed to know that the key to their future was success in the US market. Many of their most memorable recordings were made in US studios (including the legendary Chess studios in Chicago). They sometimes even released records that seemed to be geared more toward an American audience. One such album was Out Of Our Heads, which included a pair of hit singles, Satisfaction and The Last Time, as well as songs like The West Coast Under Assistant Promotion Man, a rather topical song that didn't make a whole lot of sense to anyone not living in the United States. One of the songs on the album was I'm All Right, a track that had originally appeared on a British 45 RPM Extended Play record called Got Live If You Want It. I'm All Right is credited to Nanker Phelge, a pseudonym used for songs that were written (often as the result of spontaneous jams) by the entire band.

Artist:     Beatles
Title:     Blackbird
Source:     CD: The Beatles
Writer:     Lennon/McCartney
Label:     Parlophone
Year:     1968
     Blackbird is one of the many songs on the Beatles "White Album" that Charles Manson would interpret as having special meaning for his "family". In this case he saw it as a call for blacks to rise up and overthrow the whites that controlled the bulk of wealth in the US. I guess he forgot that the Beatles at the time were still based in the UK. Then again, he completely misread the tone of Revolution (also from the same album) as well.

Artist:    Merry-Go-Round
Title:    You're A Very Lovely Woman (originally released on Emitt Rhodes LP: The American Dream)
Source:    CD: More Nuggets
Writer:    Emmit Rhodes
Label:    Rhino (original label: A&M)
Year:    Recorded 1967, released 1971
    Emitt Rhodes first got noticed in his mid-teens as the drummer for the Palace Guard, a Beatles-influenced L.A. band that had a minor hit with the song Like Falling Sugar in 1966. Rhodes would soon leave the Guard to front his own band, the Merry-Go-Round, scoring one of the most popular regional hits in L.A. history with the song Live. In 1969 Rhodes decided to try his hand as a solo artist. The problem was that he was, as a member of the Merry-Go-Round, contractually obligated to record one more album for A&M. The album itself, featuring a mixture of Rhodes solo tunes and leftover Merry-Go-Round tracks, sat on the shelf for two years until Rhodes had released a pair of well-received LPs for his new label, at which time A&M finally issued The American Dream as an Emitt Rhodes album. One of the best tracks on The American Dream was You're A Very Lovely Woman, a Merry-Go-Round recording from 1967 that shows influences from fellow L.A band Love's Forever Changes album.

Artist:    Turtles
Title:    You Baby
Source:    CD: Battle Of The Bands Vol. Two (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Writer(s):    Sloan/Barri
Label:    Era (original label: White Whale)
Year:    1966
    After first hitting the charts with their version of Bob Dylan's It Ain't Me Babe, the Turtles released yet another "angry young rebel" song, P.F. Sloan's Let Me Be. Realizing that they needed to vary their subject matter somewhat if they planned on having a career last longer than six months, the band formerly known as the Crossfires went with another Sloan tune, You Baby, for their first single of 1966. Although the music was in a similar style to Let Me Be, the lyrics, written by Steve Barri, were fairly typical of teen-oriented love songs of the era. Almost without exception the Turtles would continue to record songs from professional songwriters for single release for the remainder of their existence, with their original compositions showing up mostly as album tracks and B sides.
 
Artist:    Front Line
Title:    Got Love
Source:    Mono CD: 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 (not to mention unusually short in duration) so as not to scare off their audience. That song was Got Love, which was released on the York label in 1965.

Artist:    David Peel And The Lower East Side
Title:    I Like Marijuana
Source:    LP: Have A Marijuana
Writer(s):    Peel/Goldsmith/Smith/Barnum/Cooper
Label:    Elektra
Year:    1968
    One of the most controversial albums to be released on a major label in 1968 was Elektra's Have A Marijuana by David Peel And The Lower East Side. Described by Elektra publicist Danny Fields as "a collection of drinking songs for pot smokers" and recorded live on the streets of New York, the album features tunes like I Like Marijuana sung off key to slightly out of tune accompaniment. Unlike other late 1960s counter-culture figures who ended up becoming icons of mainstream rock in the 1970s, Peel remained a street musician until his death in 2017 as well as making regular appearances on Howard Stern's radio show.

Artist:    Steppenwolf
Title:    Magic Carpet Ride
Source:    LP: Nuggets Vol. 9-Acid Rock (originally released on LP: Steppenwolf The Second)
Writer(s):    Moreve/Kay
Label:    Rhino (original label: Dunhill)
Year:    1968
    Steppenwolf's second top 10 single was Magic Carpet Ride, a song that combines feedback, prominent organ work by Goldy McJohn and an updated Bo Diddly beat with psychedelic lyrics. Along with Born To Be Wild, Magic Carpet Ride (co-written by vocalist John Kay and bassist Rushton Moreve) has become one of the defining songs of both Steppenwolf and the psychedelic era itself.

Artist:    Donovan
Title:    Get Thy Bearings
Source:    British import CD: The Hurdy Gurdy Man
Writer(s):    Donovan Leitch
Label:    EMI (original US label: Epic)
Year:    1968
    Donovan's 1968 album, The Hurdy Gurdy Man, saw the Scottish singer/songwriter stretching further from his folk roots with tracks like Get Thy Bearings, which uses 50s style jazz instrumentation to create a Beatnik atmosphere.

Artist:     Traffic
Title:     No Face, No Name, No Number
Source:     CD: Smiling Phases (originally released on LP: Mr. Fantasy, aka Heaven Is In Your Mind)
Writer(s): Winwood/Capaldi
Label:     Island (original US label: United Artists)
Year:     1967
     When the first Best of Traffic album was issued in 1969 (after the group first disbanded) it included No Face, No Name, No Number, a single only released in the UK and a couple European countries. Later Traffic anthologies tended to focus on songs recorded after the group reformed in 1970 and No Face, No Name, No Number was out of print for many years until the first Traffic album was reissued on CD. The song itself is a good example of Winwood's softer material.

Artist:    Traffic
Title:    (Roamin' Thru' The Gloamin' With) 40,000 Headmen
Source:    LP: Progressive Heavies (originally released as 45 RPM B side and on LP: Traffic)
Writer(s):    Capaldi/Winwood
Label:    United Artists
Year:    1968
    The second Traffic album saw the band taking in a broader set of influences, including traditional English folk music. (Roamin' Thro' The Gloamin' With) 40,000 Headmen, originally released in the UK as the B side to No Face, No Name, No Number, combines those influences with the Steve Winwood brand of British R&B to create a timeless classic.

Artist:    Traffic
Title:    Heaven Is In Your Mind
Source:    CD: Smiling Phases (originally released on LP: Heaven Is In Your Mind)
Writer(s):    Winwood/Capaldi/Wood
Label:    Island (original label: United Artists)
Year:    1967
    Heaven Is In Your Mind was, for a short time, the title track of the first Traffic album released in the US. Although the album title was soon changed to Mr. Fantasy to match the European version, the song Heaven Is In Your Mind remained one of the band's most popular early tracks, and has been included on virtually every Traffic compilation ever released. The mono and stereo mixes are noticably different from each other, and even feature entirely different guitar breaks.
    
Artist:    Count Five
Title:    Psychotic Reaction
Source:    45 RPM single
Writer(s):    Ellner/Atkinson/Byrne/Chaney/Michalski
Label:    Double Shot
Year:    1966
    In late 1966 five guys from San Jose California managed to sound more like the Jeff Beck-era Yardbirds that the Yardbirds themselves (a task probably made easier by the fact that by late 1966 Jeff Beck was no longer a member of the Yardbirds). One interesting note about this record is that as late as the mid-1980s the 45 RPM single on the original label was still available in record stores, complete with the original B side. Normally (in the US at least) songs more than a year or two old were only available on anthology LPs or on reissue singles with "back-to-back hits" on them. The complete takeover of the record racks by CDs in the late 1980s changed all that, as all 45s (except for indy releases) soon went the way of the 78 RPM record. The resurgence of vinyl in the 2010s has been almost exclusively limited to LP releases, making it look increasingly unlikely that we'll ever see (with the exception of Record Store Day special releases) 45 RPM singles on the racks ever again.
 

Rockin' in the Days of Confusion # 2510 (starts 3/3/10)

https://exchange.prx.org/p/563835

    This week, after a little deja vu from Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, we turn things around and work our way backward through the years, starting in 1975 and going all the way back to 1967 to end with an appropriate Doors song.

Artist:    Crosby, Stills, Nash And Young
Title:    Woodstock
Source:    CD: déjà vu
Writer(s):    Joni Mitchell
Label:    Atlantic
Year:    1970
    It's somewhat ironic that the most famous song about the Woodstock Music and Art Festival was written by someone who was not even at the event. Joni Mitchell had been advised by her manager that she would be better off appearing on the Dick Cavett show that weekend, so she stayed in her New York City hotel room and watched televised reports of what was going on up at Max Yasgur's farm. Further inspiration came from her then-boyfried Graham Nash, who shared his firsthand experiences of the festival with Mitchell. The song was first released on the 1970 album Ladies Of The Canyon, and was made famous the same year when it was chosen to be the first single released from the Crosby, Stills, Nash And Young album déjà vu. The CSNY version peaked just outside of the Billboard top 10 in the US, but did not chart at all in the UK, prompting Fairport Convention co-founder Iain Matthews to release his own version of the song with his band Matthews Southern Comfort later that year that ended up going all the way to the #1 spot on the British charts.

Artist:    Robin Trower
Title:    Shame The Devil
Source:    LP: From Earth Below
Writer(s):    Robin Trower
Label:    Chrysalis
Year:    1975
    For Earth Below was Robin Trower's third studio album, following up on the phenomenally successful Bridge Of Sighs LP. Structured along the same lines, the main difference between the two was the replacement of drummer Reg Isidore with Bill Lordan, a veteran of the Minnesota prog-rock band Gypsy, who would continue to work with Trower for the next half dozen years. Shame The Devil is the first track on For Earth Below.

Artist:    Black Sheep
Title:    Stick Around
Source:    45 RPM single
Writer(s):    Grammatico/Turgon
Label:    Chrysalis
Year:    1974
    Before he shortened his stage name to Lou Gramm and became famous as Foreigner's front man, Louis Grammatico was a member of the Rochester, NY band Black Sheep, which released two LPs on the Capitol label in 1975. What a lot of his fans don't know, however, is that those two albums were not Black Sheep's only major label releases. In 1974, before signing to Capitol, Black Sheep released a single on the Chrysalis label. Stick Around was written by Graham and bassist Bruce Turgon, who would play on Gramm's solo albums in the late 1980s and eventually become a member of Foreigner itself in 1992.

Artist:    National Lampoon featuring John Belushi
Title:    Megadeath
Source:    LP: Lemmings
Writer(s):    Jacobs/Kelly
Label:    ABC/Blue Thumb
Year:    1973
    Lemmings was a stage production put on by National Lampoon magazine. The first act was a series of comedy sketches, similar to what had been heard on the National Lampoon Radio Hour and is considered the template for the later TV show NBC Saturday Night (later Saturday Night Live), while the second half was a musical parody of the Woodstock festival in which the main goal of both the performers and audience was to commit mass suicide. The various musical numbers in Lemmings were performed by a stage band that included Christopher Guest and Paul Jacobs on guitars, Chevy Chase on drums and John Belushi on bass guitar. Belushi also provided the stage announcements and lead vocals for several numbers, including Megadeath, a parody of heavy metal bands introduced by Megagroupie Alice Playten.

Artist:     Yes
Title:     America
Source:     CD: Yesterdays (originally released in UK on LP: The New Age of Atlantic)
Writer:     Paul Simon
Label:     Atlantic
Year:     1972
     Following the success of the Fragile album and the hit single Roundabout, Yes went into the studio to cut a ten and a half minute cover of Paul Simon's America for a UK-only sampler album called The New Age Of Atlantic. The track was then edited down to about four minutes for single release in the US as a followup to Roundabout. The original unedited track was finally released in the US on the 1974 album Yesterdays, which also included several tracks from two earlier Yes albums that featured an earlier lineup of the band that included guitarist Peter Banks and keyboardist Tony Kaye. Paul Simon's America was, in fact, the only track on Yesterdays that featured the most successful Yes lineup of Jon Anderson, Steve Howe, Chris Squires, Bill Bruford and Rick Wakeman.

Artist:    James Gang
Title:    Things I Could Be
Source:    LP: Thirds
Writer(s):    Jim Fox
Label:    ABC
Year:    1971
    Although James Gang is best known as the band that brought fame to guitarist/vocalist Joe Walsh, the band actually existed both before and after Walsh was in the group, with the only member to appear in all incarnations of the band being Jim Fox, who formed the band in 1966 after two stints as drummer for Cleveland's Outsiders (although he was on hiatus from the group when they recorded their big hit Time Won't Let Me). Fox wrote and sang lead on Things I Could Be, from the third James Gang album.

Artist:    Derek And The Dominos
Title:    Anyday
Source:    CD: Layla And Other Assorted Love Songs
Writer(s):    Clapton/Whitlock
Label:    Polydor (original label: Atco)
Year:    1970
    Derek And The Dominos was originally an attempt by Eric Clapton to remove himself from the solo spotlight and work in a larger group setting than he had with his previous bands, Cream and Blind Faith. Such was Clapton's stature, however, that even among talents like Jim Gordon, Carl Radle and Bobby Whitlock, Clapton was still the star. However, there was one unofficial member of the group whose own star was in ascendancy. Duane Allman, who had chosen to stick with his own group the Allman Brothers Band, nonetheless played on eleven of the fourteen tracks on Layla And Other Assorted Love Songs. His slide guitar work is especially noticeable on the title track and on the song Anyday, which remains one of the most popular songs on the album.

Artist:    Spirit
Title:    New Dope In Town
Source:    German import LP: Underground '70 (originally released on LP: Clear)
Writer(s):    Andes/California/Cassidy/Ferguson/Locke
Label:    CBS (original US label: Columbia)
Year:    1969
    The third Spirit album, Clear, is generally considered the weakest of the four albums released by the band's original lineup. The main reason for this is fatigue. The group had released two albums in 1968, along with providing the soundtrack for the film Model Shop in early 1969 and constantly touring throughout the entire period. This left them little time to develop the material that would be included on Clear. There are a few strong tracks on the LP, however, among them New Dope In Town, which closes out the original LP. Like Elijah, from their debut album, New Dope In Town is credited to the entire band, and was included on a CBS Records sampler album called Underground '70 that was released in Germany (on purple vinyl that glows under a black light, even) around Christmastime.

Artist:    Steppenwolf
Title:    Born To Be Wild
Source:    CD: Bron To Be Wild-A Retrospective (originally released on LP: Steppenwolf)
Writer(s):    Mars Bonfire
Label:    MCA (original label: Dunhill)
Year:    1968
    Born To Be Wild's status as a counter-cultural anthem was cemented when it was chosen for the soundtrack of the movie Easy Rider. The popularity of both the song and the movie resulted in Steppenwolf becoming the all-time favorite band of bikers all over the world.

Artist:    Doors
Title:    When The Music's Over
Source:    CD: The Best Of The Doors (originally released on LP: Strange Days)
Writer:    The Doors
Label:    Elektra
Year:    1967
    I remember the first time I heard When The Music's Over. My girlfriend's older brother had the new Doors album on the stereo in his room and told us to get real close to the speakers so we could hear the sound of a butterfly while he turned the volume way up. What we got, of course, was a blast of "...we want the world and we want it now." Good times.

 

 

Stuck in the Psychedelic Era # 2509 (starts 2/24/25)

https://exchange.prx.org/p/562984

    This week we have a pair of artists' sets from time zones that are eight hour apart. From Scotland, we have singer/songwriter Donovan Leitch with three tracks never played on Stuck in the Psychedelic Era before, and then from Tacoma, Washington, the band that practically invented punk rock itself, the Sonics. There are lots of other goodies this week as well, including a rare Ray Charles B side and a nearly seven minite long album track from possibly the last group you ever expected to hear on a show called Stuck in the Psychedelic Era.

Artist:    Creedence Clearwater Revival
Title:    Suzy Q
Source:    CD: Creedence Gold (originally released on LP: Creedence Clearwater Revival)
Writer(s):    Dale Hawkins
Label:    Fantasy
Year:    1968
    Creedence Clearwater Revival is known mostly for their series of hit singles written by vocalist/guitarist John Fogerty; tight, relatively short songs like Green River, Proud Mary and Bad Moon Rising. The most popular track on their 1968 debut LP, however, was an eight and a half minute long rendition of a song that had originally hit the charts over ten years earlier. Suzy Q had been a top 30 single (and top 10 on the R&B charts) for Dale Hawkins in 1957, helping to launch a long career in the music business as an artist, producer and record company executive. CCR took the song to even greater heights, with the track, split over two sides of a 45 RPM single, barely missing the top 10 in 1968.

Artist:    Beacon Street Union
Title:    The Prophet
Source:    British import CD: The Eyes Of The Beacon Street Union/The Clown Died In Marvin Gardens (originally released in US on LP: The Eyes Of The Beacon Street Union)
Writer(s):    Ulaky/Wright
Label:    See For Miles (original US label: M-G-M)
Year:    1968
    The Beacon Street Union had already relocated to New York from their native Boston by the time their first LP, The Eyes Of The Beacon Street Union, appeared in early 1968. Unfortunately, they were grouped together with other Boston bands such as Ultimate Spinach by M-G-M Records as part of a fictional "Boss-Town Sound", which ultimately hurt the band's chances far more than it helped them. The album itself is actually one of the better psychedelic albums of the time, with tracks like The Prophet, which closes out side two of the original LP, combining somewhat esoteric music and lyrics effectively.

Artist:    Ultimate Spinach
Title:    Suite: Genesis Of Beauty (part 3)
Source:    LP: Behold And See
Writer(s):    Ian Bruce-Douglas
Label:    M-G-M
Year:    1968
    In early 1968 M-G-M Records, a major label that had failed to sign any San Francisco bands, attempted to make up for this oversight by hiring a bunch of bands from Boston and promoting them as part of the "boss-town sound", despite there being no one particular sound peculiar to the bean city (except the obvious). Then again, there really was no such thing as a San Francisco sound either, but that didn't stop Matthew Katz from marketing the bands he managed (Jefferson Airplane, Moby Grape and others) as such. Anyway, the one thing all these bands on M-G-M had in common is that their debut albums did better in the charts than their follow-up efforts. This could well be due to the fact that by the time those follow-ups hit the racks, the public was onto the phoniness of the whole promotion, but I think it might also be because the albums themselves didn't measure up to the earlier recordings. A prime example is Behold And See by Ultimate Spinach. The album itself is hard to review, since by the time you've finished listening to side two you've probably forgotten entirely what side one sounded like. Also somewhat confusing is a piece called Suite: Genesis Of Beauty that seems to be divided into four completely unrelated parts, albeit listenable ones.

Artist:    Pretty Things
Title:    Midnight To Six Man
Source:    Mono CD: Nuggets II-Original Artyfacts From The British Empire And Beyond 1964-1969 (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Writer(s):    Taylor/May
Label:    Rhino (original label: Fontana)
Year:    1965
    Once upon a time in London there was a band called Little Boy Blue And The Blue Boys. Well, it wasn't really so much a band as a bunch of schoolkids jamming in guitarist Dick Taylor's parents' garage on a semi-regular basis. In addition to Taylor, the group included classmate Mick Jagger and eventually another guitarist by the name of Keith Richards. When yet another guitarist, Brian Jones, entered the picture, the band, which was still an amateur outfit, began calling itself the Rollin' Stones. Taylor switched from guitar to bass to accomodate Jones, but when the Stones decided to add a "g" and go pro in late 1962, Taylor opted to stay in school. It wasn't long, however, before Taylor, now back on guitar, showed up on the scene with a new band called the Pretty Things. Fronted by vocalist Phil May, the Things were rock and roll bad boys like the Stones, except more so. Their fifth single, Midnight To Six Man, sums up the band's attitude and habits. Unfortunately, the song barely made the British top 50 and was totally ignored by US radio stations.            
        
Artist:    Association
Title:    Along Comes Mary
Source:    LP: And Then...Along Comes The Association
Writer:    Tandyn Almer
Label:    Valiant
Year:    1966
    The Association are best known for a series of love ballads and light pop songs such as Cherish, Never My Love and Windy. Many of these records were a product of the L.A. studio scene and featured several members of the Wrecking Crew, the studio musicians who played on dozens of records in the late 60s and early 70s. The first major Association hit, however, featured the band members playing all the instruments themselves. Produced, and possibly co-written, by Curt Boettcher, who would soon join Gary Usher's studio project Sagittarius, Along Comes Mary shows that the Association was quite capable of recording a classic without any help from studio musicians.

Artist:    West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band
Title:    Help, I'm A Rock (single mix)
Source:    Mono CD: Part One (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Writer(s):    Frank Zappa
Label:    Sundazed (original label: Reprise)
Year:    1967
    Ya gotta hand it to the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band. It takes cojones to record a cover of a Frank Zappa tune, especially within a year of the original Mothers of Invention version coming out. To top it off, the W.C.P.A.E.B. even prepared a single edit of Help, I'm A Rock, although to my knowledge it was never released as such.

Artist:    Beatles
Title:    Everybody's Got Something To Hide Except Me And My Monkey
Source:    CD: The Beatles
Writer(s):    Lennon/McCartney
Label:    Parlophone
Year:    1968
    Sporting the longest title of any Beatles recording, Everybody's Got Something To Hide Except Me And My Monkey is also one of the hardest-rocking late period Beatle tracks. There are two schools of thought concerning the subject matter of the lyrics. According to Lennon, the song is about himself and Yoko Ono, who was his constant companion during recording sessions for what would come to be known as the "White album". The other, more negative view, is that the one expressed by Paul McCartney that the Monkey was heroin, which both Lennon and Ono were getting into at the time. Since Lennon wrote the song, his version of things is the generally accepted one.

Artist:    Donovan
Title:    Trudi
Source:    LP: Barabajagal
Writer(s):    Donovan Leitch
Label:    Epic
Year:    1969
    In May of 1969, Donovan recorded four tracks backed up by the Jeff Beck Group. Two of these, Barabajagal (Love Is Hot) and Trudi were released as a single in the UK of June 1969 and in the US two months later, concurrent with the release of the Barabajagal LP in both countries. The original UK pressings of the single give the title of the B side as Bed With Me, which actually fits the lyrics of the song better, but later pressings, including the LP, list it as Trudi.

Artist:    Donovan
Title:    Superlungs (second version)
Source:    British import CD: Mellow Yellow (bonus track)
Writer(s):    Donovan Leitch
Label:    EMI
Year:    Recorded 1967, released 2005
    Donovan first recorded Superlungs, My Supergirl in 1966 for his Sunshine Superman album, but chose not to include it on the LP. The following year he recorded a second version of Superlungs, but ultimately ended up going back to the original version for inclusion on his 1969 album Barabajagal.

Artist:    Donovan
Title:    Pamela Jo
Source:    LP: Barabajagal
Writer(s):    Donovan Leitch
Label:    Epic
Year:    1969
    Although not the longest song on Donovan's Barabajagal album (Atlantis holds that honor), the LP's final track, Pamela Jo, is unquestionably the one with the most lyrics. Lots and lots of words in that one. Look it up.

Artist:    Jefferson Airplane
Title:    Blues From An Airplane
Source:    LP: Jefferson Airplane Takes Off
Writer(s):    Balin/Spence
Label:    RCA Victor
Year:    1966
    Blues From An Airplane was the opening song on the first Jefferson Airplane album, Jefferson Airplane Takes Off. Although never released as a single, it was picked by the group to open their first anthology album, The Worst Of Jefferson Airplane, as well. The song is one of two tunes on Takes Off co-written by lead vocalist Marty Balin and drummer Skip Spence, who would soon leave the Airplane to co-found Moby Grape.

Artist:    Family Tree
Title:    Live Your Own Life
Source:    Mono CD: Love Is The Song We Sing: San Francisco Nuggets 1965-70 (originally released as 45 RPM single B side)
Writer(s):    Segarini/Dure
Label:    Rhino (original label: Mira)
Year:    1966
    The Family Tree was actually one of the first rock bands to play the Fillmore, but even then were seen as interlopers due to their propensity for dressing and sounding like the Beatles and other Mercybeat bands. Live Your Own Life was intended for release on San Francisco's premier local label, Autumn Records, but for some unknown reason ended up on Mira (the same label that released L.A. band the Leaves' first records). Live Your Own Life is sometimes known as The Airplane Song due to its perceived similarity to some early Jefferson Airplane recordings.

Artist:    Modern Folk Quintet
Title:    Night Time Girl
Source:    Mono CD: Where The Action Is: L.A. Nuggets 1965-68 (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Writer(s):    Kooper/Levine
Label:    Rhino (original label: Dunhill)
Year:    1966
    The Modern Folk Quintet can be seen two ways: either as a group that constantly strived to be on the cutting edge or simply as fad followers. Starting off in the early 60s, the MFQ found themselves working with Phil Spector in the middle of the decade, complete with Spector's trademark "wall of sound" production techniques. When that didn't work out they signed with Lou Adler's Dunhill Records, cutting Night Time Girl, a tune that sounds like a psychedelicized version of the Mamas and the Papas.

Artist:    Procol Harum
Title:    Rambling On
Source:    CD: Shine On Brightly
Writer(s):    Brooker/Reid
Label:    A&M/Rebound
Year:    1968
    Procol Harum is generally considered to be one of the first progressive rock bands, thanks in part to their second LP, Shine On Brightly. In addition to the album's showpiece, the seventeen minute In Held Twas In I, the album has several memorable tracks, including Rambling On, which closes out side one of the original LP. The song's rambling first-person lyrics (none of which actually rhyme) tell the story of a guy who, inspired by a Batman movie, decides to jump off a roof and fly. Oddly enough, he succeeds.

Artist:    Doors
Title:    You're Lost Little Girl
Source:    Mono CD: Strange Days
Writer:    The Doors
Label:    Elektra/Rhino
Year:    1967
    The Doors second LP, Strange Days, was stylistically similar to the first, and served notice to the world that this band was going to be around for awhile. Songwriting credit for You're Lost Little Girl (a haunting number that's always been a personal favorite of mine) was given to the entire band, a practice that would continue until the release of The Soft Parade in 1969.

Artist:    Bob Dylan
Title:    Obviously 5 Believers
Source:    Austrian import CD: Blonde On Blonde
Writer(s):    Bob Dylan
Label:    Sundazed/Columbia
Year:    1966
    The earliest music recordings were made to be played through a single speaker (well, technically a big horn in the early days). Despite various advances in technology, this remained the case for half a century, until, in the 1950s, various engineers came up with a couple of ways to record in stereo (tape and stereo vinyl). Still, for a good ten years after stereo became commercially available, monoraul was still the industry standard for most recordings, with stereo mixes often created as an afterthought. This was literally the case with the 1966 Bob Dylan album Blonde On Blonde. Producer Bob Johnston says that they worked on the mono mix of the album for three or four days. At some point, one of the engineers reminded Johnston that they also needed to do a stereo mix. It took them about four hours. Nonetheless, for many years the only version of Blonde On Blonde available for sale was the stereo version, with the mono mix finally being reissued on vinyl in 2003. The album itself is considered one of Dylan's best, and has historical significance as the first double-LP to be released by a popular contemporary artist. One of the most overlooked songs on the album is Obviously 5 Believers, which closes out side three of the album. Dylan himself did not feel the need to spend much time on it, calling it "very easy", and the entire track was finished in four takes. Personally, I find it to be one of my favorite Dylan tracks. Oddly enough, Dylan does not play his own harmonica on the piece; it's actually the work of Charlie McCoy, with Robbie Robertson on guitar and Ken Buttrey on drums.

Artist:    Kingston Trio
Title:    Where Have All The Flowers Gone
Source:    CD: Songs Of Protest (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Writer(s):    Pete Seeger
Label:    Rhino (original label: Capitol)
Year:    1961
    Protest songs did not start in the 1960s. Indeed, two of the genre's torchbearers, Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, had been around since the 1930s. But McCarthyism in the early 1950s had squelched virtually all non-conformist voices in the US, and it wasn't until late 1961, when the clean-cut Kingston Trio recorded their own version of Seeger's Where Have All The Flowers Gone, that a protest song received enough national exposure to become a genuine hit, going to the #21 spot on the top 40 charts in early 1962. Peter, Paul And Mary included their own version of the song on their chart-topping (five weeks at #1) debut LP later that year.

Artist:    Sonics
Title:    Boss Hoss
Source:    Mono LP: Nuggets Vol. 8-The Northwest (originally released on LP: Here Are The Sonics)
Writer(s):    Gerald Roslie
Label:    Rhino (original label: Etiquette)
Year:    1965
    Surf music hit its peak of popularity in 1963, and by 1964 groups like the Beach Boys and Jan & Dean had shifted their focus from the surfboard to the means of getting that surfboard to the beach in the first place: the hot rod. But by 1965 the hot rod craze itself had run its course, and it took the Sonics, from Tacoma, Washington to put the final nail in the tires with Boss Hoss, a track from their debut LP that was also issued as a B side of a non-LP single called The Hustler. Like everything else they recorded, Boss Hoss was over the (rag) top, thanks to the songwriting talents of vocalist Gerald Roslie.

Artist:    Sonics
Title:    Strychnine
Source:    LP: Nuggets Vol. 2-Punk (originally released on LP: Here Are The Sonics)
Writer:    Gerald Roslie
Label:    Rhino (original label: Etiquette)
Year:    1965
    Like most rock albums from the mid-1960s, Here Are The Sonics was made up mostly of cover versions of popular songs like Good Golly Miss Molly and Roll Over Beethoven. The four original tunes on the album, including Strychnine, were all written by vocalist Gerry Roslie, who had joined the band in 1964.

Artist:    Sonics
Title:    He's Waitin'
Source:    Mono LP: Nuggets Vol. 8-The Northwest (originally released on LP: Boom)
Writer(s):    Gerald Roslie
Label:    Rhino (original label: Etiquette)
Year:    1966
    If you were to ask a punk rock musician about his or her influences, one name that would certainly be near the top of the list is the Sonics. Formed in Tacoma, Washington in 1960 by guitarist Larry Parypa, the group began to take off with the addition of keyboardist Gerry Roslie, who took over lead vocals in 1964. Their first single, The Witch, released in late 1964, became the biggest selling locally produced single in the history of the entire Northwestern US, despite a lack of airplay due to its controversial subject matter. An LP, Here Are The Sonics, soon followed, along with several more singles on the local Etiquette label. Throughout 1965 the band continued to record new material between gigs, releasing a second LP, Boom, in February on 1966. I highlight of the album was He's Waitin' a song written to an unfaithful girlfriend. The final lines of the song make it clear just who "he" is:       
"You think you are happy, I got news for you
Well, Satan found out, little girl, you're through"

Artist:    4 Seasons
Title:    American Crucifixion Resurrection
Source:    LP: Genuine Imitation Life Gazette
Writer(s):    Gaudio/Holmes
Label:    Philips
Year:    1969
    The 4 Seasons had one of the most recognizable sounds on 60s top 40 radio, thanks in large part to the lead vocals of Frankie Valli, who managed to hit impossibly high notes with regularity. They also had one of the most successful runs of any vocal group in history, with hits like Sherry, Big Girls Don't Cry, Rag Doll and Let's Hang On, among many others. In the mid 70s they had a resurgence with a pair of dance hits, Who Loves You and December 1963. In 1969, however, the band was not doing so well, with no major hits since Valli's solo hit Can't Take My Eyes Off You two years earlier. Looking to attract new listeners, the group released their most ambitious album, the Genuine Imitation Life Gazette. The cover was done in the style of an old-style newspaper, with various faux articles about various social goings on interspersed with disguised information about the songs themselves. Musically, the album covered a lot of new ground, including the deep psychedelia of American Crucifixion Resurrection, which at nearly seven minutes is the longest track the 4 Seasons ever released.

Artist:    Canned Heat
Title:    On The Road Again
Source:    45 RPM single
Writer(s):    Jones/Wilson
Label:    Liberty
Year:    1968
    Canned Heat was formed by a group of blues record collectors in San Francisco. Although their first album consisted entirely of cover songs, by their 1968 album Boogie With Canned Heat they were starting to compose their own material, albeit in a style that remained consistent with their blues roots. On The Road Again, the band's second and most successful single (peaking at # 16) from that album, is actually an updated version of a 1953 recording by Chicago bluesman Floyd Jones (which was in turn adapted from delta bluesman Tommy Johnson's 1928 recording of a song called Big Road Blues) that guitarist/vocalist Al "Blind Owl" Wilson reworked, adding a tambura drone to give the track a more psychedelic feel. Wilson actually had to retune the sixth hole of his harmonica for his solo on the track. I didn't even know a harmonica could BE retuned!

Artist:    Strawberry Alarm Clock
Title:    Incense And Peppermints
Source:    45 RPM single
Writer:    Carter/Gilbert/Weitz/King
Label:    Uni (original label: All-American)
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 on the local All-American label 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:    Zipps
Title:    Kicks And Chicks
Source:    Mono CD: Nuggets II-Original Artyfacts From The British Empire And Beyond 1964-1969 (originally released in the Netherlands as 45 RPM single)
Writer(s):    Nuyten/Katerberg
Label:    Rhino (original label: Relax)
Year:    1966
    In 1966 various people in the US music industry were obsessed with what they called "drug songs" such as the Byrds' classic Eight Miles High. In reality, the real drug song action was in the Netherlands, where the Zipps (from a place called Dordrecht) were handing out publicity stickers that read "Be Stoned: Dig Zipps: Psychedelic Sound" and performing a song called LSD-25 on national television. The group was formed in 1965 by members of the Beattown Skifflers and the Moving Strings and quickly caught on with the local Beat crowd and early hippies. Their second single, Kicks And Chicks, was a documentation of the band's own way of life, with lines like "I read only books of Jack Kerouac, he's the only priest in my life" cementing the group's beat credentials. Although the Zipps never recorded a full-length LP, they remained a popular band on the local underground scene until they disbanded in 1971.
        
Artist:    Byrds
Title:    Turn! Turn! Turn!
Source:    45 RPM single
Writer(s):    Pete Seeger
Label:    Columbia
Year:    1965
    After their success covering Bob Dylan's Mr. Tambourine Man, the Byrds turned to an even more revered songwriter: the legendary Pete Seeger. Turn! Turn! Turn!, with lyrics adapted from the book of Ecclesiastes, was first recorded by Seeger in the early 60s, nearly three years after he wrote the song.
    
Artist:    Cream
Title:    Spoonful
Source:    LP: Homer (soundtrack) (originally released in UK on LP: Fresh Cream)
Writer(s):    Willie Dixon
Label:    Cotillion (original label: Reaction)
Year:    1966
    When the album Fresh Cream was released by Atco in the US it was missing one track that was on the original UK version of the album: the band's original studio version of Willie Dixon's Spoonful. A live version of Spoonful was included on the LP Wheels of Fire, but it wasn't until the 1970 soundtrack album for the movie Homer that the studio version was finally released in the US. Unfortunately the compilers of that album left out the last 15 seconds or so from the original recording.

Artist:    Things To Come (Illinois band)
Title:    I'm Not Talkin'
Source:    Mono CD: If You're Ready! The Best Of Dunwich Records...Volume 2 (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Writer(s):    Mose Allison
Label:    Sundazed/Here 'Tis (original label: Dunwich)
Year:    1966
    Not to be confused with the California band Things To Come, this Illinois group released one single on the Dunwich label in 1966, a cover of the Yardbirds cover version of an old Mose Allison tune called I'm Not Talkin'. Other than that, absolutely nothing is known about this band, so if you have some info you'd like to pass along, you know where to send it, right?

Artist:    Ray Charles
Title:    The Train
Source:    45 RPM single B side
Writer(s):    Ray Charles
Label:    ABC
Year:    1966
    Irony: the first single released by Ray Charles after getting out of rehab following a 16-year-long bout with heroin addiction was a song called Let's Go Get Stoned. But that's not what I'm playing this week. Instead, we have the pretty much forgotten B side of that 1966 single, a Charles composition called The Train. On the surface it seems to be a fairly typical call to try out a new dance called the Train, but then again "a train" was known in some circles as a euphemism for gang bang, and it's entirely possible Charles heard the phrase while in rehab.

Artist:    Simon and Garfunkel
Title:    At The Zoo
Source:    CD: Collected Works (originally released as 45 RPM single and included on LP: Bookends)
Writer(s):    Paul Simon
Label:    Columbia
Year:    1967
    Simon and Garfunkel did not release any new albums in 1967, instead concentrating on their live performances. They did, however, issue several singles over the course of the year, most of which ended up being included on 1968's Bookends LP. At The Zoo was one of the first of those 1967 singles. It's B side ended up being a hit as well, but by Harper's Bizarre, which took The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin' Groovy) to the top 10 early in the year.

Artist:    Luke & The Apostles
Title:    Been Burnt
Source:    Mono LP: Also Dug-Its (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Writer(s):    Ray Bennett
Label:    Elektra (original label: Bounty)
Year:    1967
    Just as New York had its Greenwich Village music scene, with groups like the Blues Project, Lovin' Spoonful and Paul Butterfield Blues Band playing small clubs like the Cafe au Go Go, so did Toronto have Yorkville Village, home of artists like Buffy Sainte Marie, Gordon Lightfoot and the Paupers, and a coffee house known as the Purple Onion. Elektra Records had opened a Canadian division in 1965 and Paul Rothchild, who was serving as a talent scout for the label, caught a local blues band called Luke & The Apostles at the Purple Onion one evening in late 1965. He was so taken with the group that he had their lead vocalist, Dave "Luke" Gibson, audition for label head Jac Holzman...over the phone. The band flew down to New York to record a pair of songs, including Been Burnt, but then Rothchild got busted for marijuana possession and did a year at Sing Sing (or some other NY state facility). The band continued to build a following in the Toronto area, going through a series of personnel changes in the process. In April of 1967, still waiting for their single to be released, the band returned to New York for a week-long engagement at the Cafe au Go Go, which led to a return engagement at the same club in May. While in New York the band spent an entire day at the Elektra studios, recording an album's worth of material. During their May gig, the band was offered a management contract by Albert Grossman (Bob Dylan's manager) and Bill Graham, with Graham offering a slot at the Fillmore West that summer. In between the two Cafe au Go Go gigs, Elektra released Been Burnt/Don't Know Why as a single, which ended up putting a strain on relations within the band itself, with some members wanting to go with Grossman and Graham while others wanted to stay with Rothchild and Holzman. Three months later, Gibson left the band to join another Canadian group, Kensington Market, and the rest of the band quickly fragmented, only to reunite briefly in 1970, releasing their second and final single on Canada's True North label. Since then the band has occasionally gotten back together and finally released their first (and only) LP, Luke & The Apostles, in 2017, 50 years after the first appearance of Been Burnt on vinyl.

Artist:    Yardbirds
Title:    Rack My Mind
Source:    Mono CD: Roger The Engineer (original US title: Over Under Sideways Down)
Writer(s):    Dreja/McCarty/Beck/Relf/Samwell-Smith
Label:    Great American (original label: Epic)
Year:    1966
            It may come as a surprise to some, but, despite their status as one of the most influential bands in rock history, the Yardbirds actually only recorded one studio album. The album, released in 1966, was originally titled The Yardbirds, but has since come to be known as Roger The Engineer, thanks to the distinctive cover drawn by band member Chris Dreja. In the US, the album was released under a different title (Over Under Sideways Down) and had an entirely different cover as well. To add to the confusion, a compilation of British singles and EP tracks had been released in the US under the title Having A Rave Up the previous year. Roger The Engineer was co-produced by Simon Napier-Bell and Yardbirds bassist Paul Samwell-Smith, and was made up entirely of original songs such as Rack My Mind. Samwell-Smith would leave the band to become a full-time producer not long after the album's release; his replacement would be a guitarist named Jimmy Page.
        
Artist:    Rolling Stones
Title:    Dandelion
Source:    Mono CD: Singles Collection-The London Years (originally released as 45 RPM single)
Writer(s):    Jagger/Richards
Label:    Abkco
Year:    1967
    When the Rolling Stones' most expensive single to date, We Love You, got only a lukewarm response from American radio listeners stations began to flip the record over and play the B side, Dandelion, instead. The song ended up being one of the band's biggest US hits of 1967.

Artist:    Monkees
Title:    Salesman
Source:    CD: Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn and Jones, LTD.
Writer(s):    Craig Vincent Smith
Label:    Rhino (original label: Colgems)
Year:    1967
    The first song on the Monkees' fourth LP, Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn And Jones, LTD. was also the most controversial. Michael Nesmith, as a side project, had been producing songs for a group led by Craig Vincent Smith called the Penny Arkade. One song in particular, Salesman, impressed Nesmith so much that he decided to produce a Monkees version of the song as well. The track was then used in a Monkees TV episode called The Devil And Peter Tork. NBC-TV at first refused to air the episode, claiming that the line "Salesman with your secret goods that you push while you talk" was a veiled drug reference (although producer Bert Schnieder was convinced the real reason was the liberal use of the word "hell" in the show's script).