US 1960s MARCH-APRIL 2009

ALL AND EVERYTHING
LENNY HELSING salivates over the deluxe 10 CD box set and luxurious 72-page hardback book which gathers together virtually every note recorded by pioneering Texan psychedelic outlaws THE 13TH FLOOR ELEVATORS.

THE 13TH FLOOR ELEVATORS
Sign Of The 3 Eyed Men
Charly 10 CD box set/book
www.internationalartists.com
Wow. This must surely be the very last word on The 13th Floor Elevators. Sign Of The 3 Eyed Men – named by the Elevators’ electric jug playing lyricist and self-proclaimed psychedelic poet/guru, Tommy Hall – is an inexhaustible package aimed mostly at those already in the know, and love the timeless music made by this seriously unhinged group of wide-eyed Texan trippers.
But for those who are just turning onto the music of the Elevators, what crazed bounty awaits. Aside from their three studio albums, The Psychedelic Sounds Of The Thirteenth Floor Elevators (1966), Easter Everywhere (’67) and Bull Of The Woods (’69), you also get material that’s appeared on numerous bootlegs down the years. This means the unsurpassable Avalon ’66 set – contained here on disc five, Live In California – now has real clarity, with space to hear what’s all happening. It’s a head-swimmingly feverish mix, with the thunderous roar of ‘You Don’t Know (How Young You Are)’ and their freak-scene re-write of The Kinks’ signature tune ‘You Really Got Me’ summing it up perfectly. A true contender for the most intense and exciting live album ever.
The earliest studio recordings – dubbed Headstone: The Contact Sessions – show the pure raw silk of the group, as they power through such gloriously deranged future classics as ‘Roller Coaster’, ‘Where Am I? (Thru The Rhythm)’ and the DMT-trip inspired ‘Fire Engine’: “close your eyes and you erase / your image you no longer chase / while icy flames engulf your brain / and drown your thoughts in scarlet rain”. The countrified ease of ‘Take That Girl’, and ‘You Can’t Hurt Me Anymore’ can now be enjoyed without any of the baseball crowd cheering that mar the versions on the “official” third LP, Live, which was anything but – an assortment of old and new studio songs with studio-doctored applause tacked on. Hearing Roky’s vocal go down on tape for the perennial acid-punk stomper ‘You’re Gonna Miss Me’ is also one of the set’s absolute highs. It’s strange that they’ve included The Bad Seeds’ re-written version of ‘Tried To Hide’ (‘All Night Long’) yet left off the recordings Roky made with The Spades - the original ‘You’re Gonna Miss Me’ and ‘We Sell Soul’ (the blueprint for ‘Don’t Fall Down’) - which are surely more relevant to this aural treatise.
Psychedelic Sounds… and Easter Everywhere appear twice, in superb mono and an alternative stereo mix, the former housing beatific ballads ‘Splash 1’ and ‘Kingdom Of Heaven’, plus the best batch of “Buddy Holly on acid” rock ’n’ roll you’re ever likely to hear. The compilers have unearthed a totally different acetate version of ‘Reverberation’ that’s a real diamond find, including some different lyrics: “on your trip you start to slip caught up by your fears”. A few surprises turn up on the stereo version, including false starts, backing tracks and a change in the running order.
Easter Everywhere rang many changes, with original drummer John Ike Walton and bassist Bennie Thurman departing, replaced by the sure hands of Danny Thomas and Danny Galindo. Shifting musical styles were in evidence too; where the debut ascends on waves of white-hot intensity, they’ve now reached that next level where a sense of calm reigns; the optimistic comedown. Easter contains an amalgam of hypnotic rhythmic patterns, set against more mind-blowing, complex, sometimes quasi-religious word puzzles, not least of which is the eternal theme of ‘Slip Inside This House’. Roky duets with Clementine Hall on the wonderfully fragile ‘Dust’, a blissful rendering of Dylan’s ‘Baby Blue’, and the dark and awesome ‘Nobody To Love’, where Stacy Sutherland really comes into his own, both on liquid LSD-infused lead guitar, and his first showing as lead vocalist, are works of astonishing beauty. More hectic and scarifying trip-blasts round off this astounding venture: ‘Earthquake’, ‘(I’ve Got) Levitation’ and the blinding ‘She Lives (In A Time Of Her Own)’.
Elsewhere, all is not as it would appear, much like Alice found when she ate the cake and drank the drink, for A Love That’s Sound – the lost third album – is mostly demo tracks that wound up on the Elevators’ final LP, Bull Of The Woods. There are still some selections that dazzle, like unheard versions of ‘Livin’ On’ and a horn-free ‘Never Another’; softer, but no less compelling than the finished takes. Two or three titles are essentially instrumental backing track ideas – fairly uninspiring if truth be told – but the hitherto unknown ‘Sweet Surprise’ is breathtaking. Stacy cutting loose, on fire like a psych-fried bluesman.
With the complete Elevators quotient hardly around anymore, Stacy was the main pilot, so it’s his shadowy song sketches, brilliantly coloured by Echoplex twang, that shape the contours of the formidable Bull Of The Woods. Witness the illuminating charms of ‘Scarlet And Gold’, ‘Street Song’ and ‘Rose And The Thorn’. Roky and Tommy still leave their indelible stamp, however. Just witness ‘Never Another’, ‘Dr Doom’ and Roky’s spook-filled ‘May The Circle Remain Unbroken’.
Scattered throughout the box are also the many single sides the group issued, including a wired take of Buddy Holly’s ‘I’m Gonna Love You Too’ and a strange, shortened edit of ‘Slip Inside This House’. The dream over, they did try again to capture what they had on stage in ’73, heard on the final disc Death In Texas.
I’ve not seen the accompanying 72-page hardback book but it promises copious mini-reproductions of rare posters and other ephemera, plus more of the Elevators story, courtesy of compiler and group biographer, Paul Drummond. If you’ve not done so yet, you owe it to yourself to read his fascinating book about the group, Eye Mind and then buy this.

THE AGGREGATION
Mind Odyssey
Erebus CD
www.erebusrecords.com
The Aggregation was a classically trained rock band that held a residency at Disneyland in ’68, performing classics of the day. A visiting Lee Hazlewood saw their potential and signed them to his own label to record a LP, which they based around the concept of a psychedelic theme park.
The result is a rich, highly atmospheric listening experience as somnambulant riffs caress the ear and multi-instrumental passages snuggle up to your pineal gland. Horn sections may alienate some but they’re all tasteful and contribute perfectly to the whole trip. A strong Moody Blues influence is evident on several of the dreamier tracks and overall the concept hangs together well.
There is some crackle and hiss on the quieter sections of the CD but the sound quality is generally clean and bright. Several listens reveal a record as multi-dimensional as the theme park that inspired it, but with none of the superficiality. Recommended.
Austin Matthews

CAPTAIN BEEFHEART AND HIS MAGIC BAND
Safe As Milk
Rev-Ola CD
www.revola.co.uk
I first bought Safe as Milk, the good Captain’s ’67 debut album, in the Arnotts department store in Greenock in ’77, where I found it nestling surreally among decanters and soft furnishings. I regarded it as a masterpiece back then, but somehow it’s even better than that now.
To call it ‘blues rock’ is reductive and insulting. It’s almost as if the Magic Band were carrying a huge picture of Howlin’ Wolf across Sunset Strip and a truck hit it; and when they pieced the fragments back together again, everything was in a different place, some pieces were upside down, some missing altogether. Over the years, those fragments would come unglued to devastating effect, but Safe As Milk clings to just enough residual logic to make it the ideal starting point for novitiates.
The glassy mesh of Ry Cooder and Alex St Clair’s guitars, the sideways lope of John French’s drums, the Captain’s “Mars Delta” vocals and a running order including ‘Zig Zag Wanderer’, ‘Electricity’ and ‘Drop Out Boogie’…life gets no better than this.
Marco Rossi

GENE CLARK
Echoes
SPV Yellow Label CD
www.spv.de
For first generation Byrds fans Gene Clark was the name you looked for on the song-writing credits. In 1965, covering Dylan propelled the group into the charts but in Clark, The Byrds harboured its own creative genius. Shock then when just two albums in, he quit. Sadness turned to joy however in ’67 when, just ahead of the first Clark-free Byrds album, Younger Than Yesterday, he resurfaced with his solo debut, Gene Clark With The Gosdin Brothers. It felt like we’d been gifted two new Byrds records at once. Inexplicably it marked the beginning of Clark’s commercial decline.
Resurfacing once more at the core of the newly re-issued ‘91 compilation, on Echoes, a little re-sequencing allows those debut tracks to sound once more and reveal Clark’s innovative genius as he invents country-rock (‘Tried So Hard’, ‘Keep On Pushin’’) whilst forging the sonic template for The Notorious Byrd Brothers. Few may have been listening at the time but clearly Gram Parsons and Clark’s former band mates were…
Colin Hall

THE CORPORATION
Get On Our Swing/Hassels In My Mind
Big Beat CD
www.acerecords.com
The brief saga of Milwaukee’s ’60s progressive psych-rockers The Corporation was all too typical for the times. All six members (vocalist Danny Peil, multi-instrumentalist and songwriter John Kondos and his drumming brother Nick, B3 organist Pat McCarthy, guitarist Gerry Smith and bassist Kenny Berdoll) had earlier recorded with various regional garage bands and had the talent to be signed to a major label. Sadly however, their debut Capitol album released in ’69 (one side of which is a cover of John Coltrane’s ‘India’) barely charted before a combination of egos and drugs led to their breakup.
This project presents their rare second and third 1970 albums, originally issued on Wisconsin’s aptly titled Age Of Aquarius label. Highlights include the fuzz guitar-rife ‘You Make Me Feel Good,’ an organ strong ‘Heard The News’, the extended hard rock stew of ‘My Child, He Walks Alone’ and the quirky ‘Walking Along’. Vanilla Fudge and Cream fans will particularly enjoy.
Gary von Tersch

THE DOORS
Live At The Matrix
Rhino CD
www.rhino.com
San Francisco’s 100-seat Marina district club called the Matrix opened in August 1965 with the debut of Jefferson Airplane. By March of ’67, the then little-known Doors were second-billed to Country Joe & The Fish at the nearby Avalon Ballroom and used the sparsely attended mid-week Matrix gig to improvise and experiment with their sound.
This two CD set, with cover art by ’60s poster artist Stanley Mouse, features most of the songs from their recently released debut LP including expanded renditions of ‘The End’, ‘Alabama Song’, and ‘Back Door Man’ along with a vibrant cover of Lee Dorsey’s ‘Get Out Of My Life Woman’.
Disc two broadly hints at the future as the quartet works on seminal versions of many songs from their second album (‘Moonlight Drive’ and ‘People Are Strange’ amongst them) as well as subsequent concert staples like ‘Crawling King Snake’ and ’Close To You’. Surprisingly great sound throughout.
Gary von Tersch

THE FLIRTATIONS
Sounds Like The Flirtations
RPM CD
www.cherryred.co.uk
Growing from the ashes of cute R&B girl group The Gypsies, South Carolina’s The Flirtations – Earnestine, Shirley and Viv – relocated to London, where they met songwriting team Wayne Bickerton and Tony Waddington. It was a match made in heaven; floor shaking rhythms and attitude-laden lyrics met soulful voices and an impeccable feel. The Flirtations’ first album and a clutch of bonus tracks, all from this London period, is what we have here.
There can’t be many who haven’t heard ‘Nothing But A Heartache’, the Northern Soul favourite also used to flog KFC; miraculously, the song remains completely untarnished and still sounds as barnstorming brilliant as ever. Sounds Like The Flirtations is so varied and delivers on so many levels – the gritty Dusty-like ‘I Wanna Be There’, the relentless ‘Need Your Loving’, the unusually layered ‘Everybody Needs Somebody’ and the festive splendour of ‘Christmas Time Is Here Again’ – it’s actually quite overwhelming. An essential purchase.
Jeanette Leech

THE KEYES
The Keyes
Gear Fab CD
www.gearfab.swiftsite.com
The Keyes started life in 1964 as a Beach Boys style frat group, and like so many acts of this period progressed rapidly. Janis Ian’s ‘Society’s Child’ and a slew of interesting pop/harmony/folk-rock/soul hybrids, including the unreleased soft-pop delight ‘I Cherish You’, which was recorded in Scotty Moore’s studio in Nashville and benefits from a mid-tempo Northern Soul rhythm, are all good. The ’70-71 era tunes recorded by bandleader Tom Owen are mainly in a cool soulful-rock vain, notably the Steve Marriott sounding vocals on ‘Are You Lonely For Me Baby’.
The Keyes were neither the state’s finest nor the strongest garage band (if a garage band is indeed what they were), but there’s enough on offer here to merit inspection.
Jon ‘Mojo’ Mills

THE LEMON PIPERS
Love Beads And Meditation
Rev-Ola CD
www.revola.co.uk
The dreaded ‘one-hit wonder’ tag is like an albatross, causing people to discount everything else the group ever recorded, especially their albums. The Lemon Pipers had a number-one smash with the bubblegum sunshine of ‘Green Tambourine’, but hey, they had a lot of other things going for them, particularly their two albums, Green Tambourine and Jungle Marmalade, which make up Love Beads and Meditation. The liner notes of this collection, written by the estimable Andy Morten, reveal that the band considered producer and co-songwriter Paul Leka to be little more than a pariah, and that they demanded and ultimately received, to some degree, creative control in songwriting. When listening to these albums, particularly Jungle Marmalade one can almost feel the battle ensuing, as you’ll find songs at each end of the rock ’n’ roll spectrum.
Equal credit for the versatility of The Lemon Pipers should be given to the band and Paul Leka (as well as his co-writer Rochelle Pinz). Other tunes in the ‘Green Tambourine’ vein include the wonderful ‘Rice Is Nice’, with its undulating harp and violins, ‘Rainbow Tree’ and ‘Blueberry Blue’, all of which are on the debut album, as well as ‘Jelly Jungle (Of Orange Marmalade)’ and ‘Everything Is You’ from Jungle Marmalade. Right alongside those you’ll find some band-written rockers like ‘Fifty Year Void’, the freak-out ‘Through With You’ (which one can hear the contemporary pop-psych band The Grip Weeds doing), the bluesy ‘Catch Me I’m Falling’, the appropriately named ‘Hard Core’ and the eleven-minute magnum opus, ‘Dead End Street/Halflight’. Although the band may have had a point about being ‘wimped out’ by Leka, it’s difficult to have much sympathy for Lemon Piper Bill Bartlett; anyone who wrote something as limp as ‘Turn Around And Take A Look’ has nothing to complain about!
If there was ever a band that popped jellybeans along with their acid, it was The Lemon Pipers!
David Bash

THE PEANUT BUTTER CONSPIRACY
For Children Of All Ages
Rev-Ola CD
www.revola.com
After a period of uncertainty, line up changes and a new label, leader Alan Brackett reinvented the Conspiracy as a rootsy soulful rock band that echoed the gritty approach of Dunhill acts Three Dog Night and Smith Minus One. The West Coast jangle and Mamas-meets-Airplane sound are gone, and it must be said that psych fans will find few ragas here. Little is lost though, and this scribe wholly supports the shift from acid to whisky. Brackett’s decidedly forceful tone (which on the slower numbers resemble The Music Machine’s Sean Bonniwell) and Robison’s womanly soulful rasp work well amongst the bed of Hammond, fuzz guitar leads and tight as… drums.
The palette of tunes is varied, with the orchestrated Robison vehicles ‘It’s Alright’ and ‘Return Home’ sounding not unlike the band mark one if they had been recorded at Nashville instead of LA.
Jon ‘Mojo’ Mills

GARY USHER
Barefoot Adventure: The 4 Star Sessions 1962-66
Sundazed
www.sundazed.com
This double album takes us back to a more innocent age when Gary Usher, aided and abetted by Dennis Wilson, Mike Borchetta, Roger Christian and ‘the wrecking crew’, ran from studio to studio literally churning out and recording songs about surfing, hot rods and girls on a variety of labels all too keen to cash in on the latest teenage craze.
The excellent sleeve notes by Stephen McParland utilising the many interviews he did with Gary for his five-volume biography explain in detail the genesis and recording of each track. 20 of the 36 tracks are unreleased demos, many up to the standard of the released versions.
Standouts include ‘RPM’ by The Four Speeds with Dennis Wilson on drums, ‘Coney Island Wild Child’ – written for Freddy Cannon – and ‘You Made A Believer Out Of Me’ and ‘Waiting For The Day’, both unissued demos with The Honeys which will delight all girl group fans.
Interspersed with four excerpts from a Gary Usher interview this is a must for lovers of surf and hot rod music.
Pat Curran

VARIOUS ARTISTS
You Heard It Here First!
Ace CD
www.acerecords.com
Most of this will be familiar, in one form or another, to those who dig rock ’n’ roll; a bit of beat, some blues and soul, even a little folk. But much still surprises and delights as you spin the contents of this CD.
Take ‘I Fought The Law’, for example, we’ve all heard the Bobby Fuller Four version somewhere I’ll bet, and The Clash’s too, countless times, but it was The Crickets who first waxed it up back in 1960, and very cool it is too. Similarly, ‘Wild Thing’ by The Troggs is regarded as an instant garage band classic, but how many know it by the harmonica-led Wild Ones? Or how about Joe Jones’ fine sax-pumpin’ take of that future staple of both The Rivieras and The Ramones, ‘California Sun’?
This thoroughly enjoyable Ace sampler reveals twenty-odd more tracks in their lesser-known original recordings. Bessie Banks’ ‘Go Now’ – made famous by The Moody Blues, ‘Rock Around The Clock’ by Sunny Dae & The Knights, and ‘Suspicious Minds’ by the hopelessly obscure Mark James are but a few of them.
Lenny Helsing

THE GOLDEN DAWN
Power Plant
BUBBLE PUPPY
A Gathering Of Promises
Both Charly Digibook CDs
www.snappermusic.com
If the promotional wheels at International Artists had been properly oiled back in the middle of ’67, when this set was completed, The Golden Dawn could’ve shared in the original, somewhat limited, glory that The 13th Floor Elevators were afforded with Easter Everywhere. But the label sat on the album for nearly a year and, when it did eventually appear, the numbers fortunate enough to find it were few indeed. Well, what’s done is done. This is the fourth or fifth time that The Golden Dawn’s sole album has been out, and this super fine CD is definitely among the best.
The level of subtlety and conviction within the group is evident from the start, as their message rings out crisp and clear, electrifyingly so on the disc’s wildest cuts, ‘My Time’ and ‘Starvation’ - jaw-droppingly intense creations. For ‘This Way Please’ and ‘Reaching Out To You’ they plead their case in softer tones; wickedly beguiling all the same.
Of course the Elevators were a major source of influence and inspiration for the group; lead singer George Kinney and Roky Erickson were childhood friends and formed their first rock ’n’ roll group, The Fugitives, while still at school. But let it be known that The Golden Dawn could hold their own with their more infamous acid-craving brothers, weaving some truly psychedelic patterns with their joyously clanging sounds and well- constructed lyrical exclamations. They can also just as easily stop you in your tracks with a stripped-down, gorgeously august ballad delivered in such a way as to maximise the emotional connection between player and listener.
It would’ve been tremendous to have heard some unissued material from the time, if such things do exist, but for now this is as intended. The booklet includes an interview with George Kinney, conducted by Marty Ratcliffe of contemporary British garage-psychsters The Higher State. Kinney also offers up a few illuminating words about each song. The Golden Dawn’s Power Plant is an incandescent experience, one that leaves the listener enriched and refreshed time and time again.
Bubble Puppy too are a significant name with many ’60s freaks. They were the most successful of all the IA label bands, in terms of chart recognition, due to their early ’69 hit, ‘Hot Smoke And Sasafrass’. That complex prog-psych smash aside, A Gathering Of Promises has much to commend it.
This time around the set has been enhanced to include all the group’s single sides, of which the feedback-imbued ‘Beginning’ is one of the standouts, and along with ‘Lonely’ (flip of ‘Hot Smoke…’) and the highly regarded ‘Hurry Sundown’, were featured on the original LP. The title track too, scant though it is, has a wonderfully plaintive and simplistic quality, showing a decidedly folkier side to the group.
‘Thinkin’ About Thinkin’ revamps the ‘Sasafrass’ riffery, while ‘Elizabeth’, with its jutting twists and turns, brings to mind later-period Love. Here and there, for example on ‘Road To St. Stephens’, are echoes of the San Francisco ballroom scene. Bubble Puppy’s clever, hard and soft, but always melodic interplay between guitars, drums, and vocals was remarkably prescient, as many successful groups of the following decade utilised similar-sounding approaches. SD scribe Mike Fornatale shares insight into the Bubble Puppy story in the accompanying booklet.
Lenny Helsing