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| Syd Barrett in the mid-70's |
My previous post on country rock, and specifically the part
about Gram Parsons, made me think about how hard the 60’s were on rock
people. Many leading lights of the 60’s
died young, most of them not outliving the decade by too many years. Janis
Joplin, Mama Cass Elliot, Jimi Hendrix, Brian Jones, Jim Morrison, all of
them died way too young. There’s even an
internet meme called “The 27 Club”, which focuses on how most of these
musicians, as well as musicians from other eras (including blues great Robert Johnson and grunge icons Kurt Cobain and Mia Zapata and even a more recent loss, Amy Winehouse) all died at the age of 27.
But the 60’s had another group of casualties; these didn’t
die, but basically went insane, either as a direct result of over-consumption
of hallucinogenic drugs like LSD or through other mechanisms. I’ve long been a little obsessed with these
damaged geniuses and their Van Gogh-like
descents through creativity into madness.
The general public often conflates genius with madness (or at least
eccentricity); the idea of the mad scientist or the creative-yet-disturbed
artist (like the aforementioned Van Gogh) are clichés widely accepted by the
masses. But I’ve never felt that genius
and madness were necessarily connected; there are plenty of talented folks that
could arguably be considered geniuses who are perfectly sane and well-adjusted,
and conversely there are tons of crazy folks who are no more talented or
creative than average. In fact, I often
wonder if my attraction to these people has more to do with them being the
exception to this rule: I want to know
what happened and why they were unable to avoid such a terrible fate.
One of the most legendary of these 60’s icons is Alexander “Skip” Spence. Spence was born in Canada but move to the Bay
Area in California as a child. In the
mid 60’s he was in the thick of the whole San Francisco scene, playing guitar
in an early incarnation of Quicksilver
Messenger Service before being asked to play drums for the Jefferson Airplane. Spence
played drums on their debut album The
Jefferson Airplane Takes Off, co-writing the song “Blues from an Airplane”
with Marty Balin. This pre-Grace Slick version of the Jefferson
Airplane was actually a fantastic band, splitting the difference between folk-twinged
Beatles-influenced pop, 60’s garage
rock, and nascent psychedelia. “Blues
from an Airplane” has an ominous bass-tinged beginning and crashing,
cymbal-heavy drums from Spence. The backing
vocals remind me of something the Godz
might have recorded around the exact same time.
“Bringing Me Down” has a twangy country/garage guitar lead-in, a sleazy,
strutting drum line from Spence and Balin’s shrill vocals simply scream 60’s
garage rock. This would have fit
perfectly onto Lenny Kaye’s Nuggets compilation of 60’s garage
punks. “Let’s Get Together” is more mellow, a hazy slice of pre-psychedelia
written by Chet Powers; this song
would achieve greater recognition when the
Youngbloods remade it as “Get Together” and had their biggest hit with
it. It features Grace Slick’s predecessor on vocals, Signe Anderson.
Skip Spence (and Anderson) left the Airplane prior to their
recording of what would be their magnum opus, Surrealistic Pillow, in 1967.
This might be as good a place as any to mention that I consider
“Somebody To Love” to be one of the greatest songs the 60’s ever produced, it’s
clanging, chiming guitar and jangly, edgy, driving tempo are just to me the
perfect distillation of that heavy psychedelia period and the sonic template
for everything from the Velvets to the Stooges. I just love this song. The band included another Spence composition,
the sweet, jaunty “My Best Friend”, which sounds like a precursor to the
electric folk pop of the Mamas and the
Papas.
Anyway, Spence proceeded to form one of the great lost bands
of the 60’s, Moby Grape. The Grape was formed by former Airplane
manager Matthew Katz around Spence
but bad decisions and bad breaks derailed the band before they could truly make
their mark. Moby Grape sounded much
less overtly psychedelic than the Airplane, often bouncing between whimsical
psychdelia-tinged folk pop and Grateful
Dead style jams. “Hey Grandma” off
their first album sounds like vintage Dead; galloping rhythms, noodling guitar,
crisp harmonies. “Mr. Blues” is a more
formal electric blues workout. “8:05” is
sweetly affecting guitar pop with folk harmonies. Two of Spence’s compositions
are present on this first album, the surging, urgent “Omaha” (it reminds me of
“American Ruse” by the MC5), and
“Indifference”, which has a sultry strut and vocal harmonies that sound like Crosby, Stills and Nash.
It was between the release of their debut album and the
recording of their second album, Wow, that Spence began to deteriorate
mentally. According to bandmates, Spence
was hanging around with a lot of shady characters who were plying him with
hard, heavy drugs almost constantly.
While recording the album in New York, Spence apparently had an almost
complete psychotic break, and legendarily attacked bandmate Jerry Miller with an axe before being
hauled off to famous NYC prison the Tombs and eventually to the insane asylum
Bellevue, where he was diagnosed with schizophrenia.
It was while in Bellevue that Spence supposedly wrote what
would become his one and only solo record, Oar. Upon his release from Bellevue in 1968,
Spence supposedly drove directly to Nashville on his motorcycle and recorded
it, and it has been widely debated ever since.
The debate, in essence, can be summarized as follows: genius or madman? Gold or crap?
While some of the songs are interesting, many are pretty spare, even
skeletal. At times they sound like the
mutterings of a lunatic (which in a sense they are). And it is fiercely debated whether anyone
would have actually cared about this independent of Spence’s prior history and
his legendary breakdown. “Little
Hands” comes the closest to the bluesy jam-band-meets-the-Byrds creations of Moby
Grape. On songs like “Cripple Creek”, “Dixie Peach Promenade”, and “Broken
Heart”, Spence’s stentorian baritone and spare picking evoke Johnny Cash but you can also hear the
future echo of southern gothic bands like the
Birthday Party here. “Diana” is a
sweet acoustic number and almost sounds like some of Robert Plant’s post-Zeppelin work.
“Margaret-Tiger Rug” throbs on a heavy bass and spare drum taps and
Spence’s muttering vocals. “Weighted
Down (the Prison Song)” is melancholy and spare. “War In Peace” has a shimmery late 60’s
guitar sheen and lurching tempo that again evokes Zeppelin at their less overtly metallic. “Book of Moses” is pure folk blues, with the
rainstorm sound effects adding an eerie vibe along with Spence’s higher
pitched, almost straining vocals. “Lawrence
of Euphoria” is as odd as its title, another off-kilter slice of skewed
acoustic folk. “Grey/Afro” is a subdued,
droning song in which Spence mutters almost unintelligibly below the sonic moan
and martial drumming. The original Oar ended with “Grey Afro”, but in
subsequent releases other songs have been appended to Oar, most of which continue on in the same vein. One of the strangest is the subdued folk
sketch “Furry Heroine”, which was covered by Beck as “Halo of Gold”.
Alas, Spence never really recovered, and the rest of his
life was more or less a downward spiral of drug and alcohol addiction and
mental illness. His former bandmates
tried to support him for awhile but given Spence’s several and debilitating
mental disabilities he was eventually re-institutionalized, and spent much of
the rest of his life cycling between institutions, homelessness, and stays with
friends or in his trailer in San Jose.
He died at age 57 in 1999 of lung cancer. Spence never worked effectively as a musician
post-Oar with one possible exception, a scratchy recording of a Spence song,
“All My Life (I Love You)” was recorded around 1972 and has since found release
on iTunes. This is actually one of his
best songs, a hard rocking but soulful meditation on love that serves as a
fitting coda to his strange, remarkable career.
But the influence of Oar has been huge. In 1999, the cover compilation More Oar: a Tribute to the Skip Spence Album
was released, and contained covers of the songs on Oar by artists as
diverse as Robert Plant, Beck, Mudhoney,
Robyn Hitchcock, Flying Saucer Attack, and Tom Waits. What was perhaps
most interesting about this collection is how right these varied artists sound
covering these songs.
Probably the next most celebrated 60’s burnout is Syd Barrett. Barrett was a founding member of Pink Floyd in the mid-60’s, helping to
record and release their first album, Piper
at the Gates of Dawn. Piper was an
impressive debut, one of the first and most comprehensive psychedelic albums of
the 60’s that built effectively on the Beatles’
Sgt. Pepper album and extended
it, and which was written almost
entirely by Barrett. Among the standout
tracks are “Astronomy Domine”, with its odd, flat vocal harmonies and rambling
guitar and eerie keyboards; “Lucifer Sam”, which sounds like a psychedelicized
version of the “Peter Gunn” theme; the epic, clanging “Interstellar Overdrive”;
and the spritely “The Gnome”. Barrett
and Floyd’s take on psychedelia was playful, almost whimsical, with almost
intentionally child-like or silly lyrics, jaunty melodies, and strange musical
accompaniments.
But like Spence
(and at almost exactly the same time), Barrett was rapidly falling apart. Heavy drug use (particularly of LSD) and
growing mental instability were causing Barrett to behave increasingly
erratically and antisocially. In the
months prior his performances with the band and interviews had deteriorated
badly, and he often just stood on stage strumming a single chord or even not
playing at all. Initially, the members
hoped to keep him on as a non-performing songwriter but even this proved to be
too much for all parties to handle, and in spring of 1968 the band announced
they were parting ways with him. Unlike
Spence, Barrett had no final break with reality requiring incarceration or
institutionalization, but he drifted farther away from the public eye.
Also like Spence, he did embark on a solo career, in
Barrett’s case one that lasted for two albums instead of just one. Both were released in 1970 and feature hazy,
introspective songs centered on Barrett’s off-kilter lyrics. “Terrapin” (co-written with Jerry Garcia),
off the Madcap Laughs, is slowly
strummed bluesy folk with Barrett’s sing-song voice and strange time stops
interspersed. “No Good Trying” and “No
Man’s Land” are electric and feature some acidulous guitar; they come close to
capturing Barrett’s psychedelic rock with Floyd and are two of my personal
favorites. “Love You” is jaunty and
silly, as is “Dark Globe” (the latter was later covered by R.E.M.). “ “Here I Go” is
another standout, as is “Octopus”, twee acoustic romps. “Golden Hair” is much more somber and
solemn. “Long Gone” and “She Took a Long
Cold Look” and the rest of the songs on the album hew to the same fractured
take on acoustic folk as most of the other songs here.
Barrett’s other 1970 album, Barrett, boasts far better production that greatly improves the
material. Humble Pie drummer Jerry
Shirley and Floyd members Rick
Wright and David Gilmour play
here (wright and Gilmour produced the album, often without Barrett’s input
since he was incapable of assisting) and better flesh out the arrangements more
than was done on the Madcap Laughs. As a result the album is a huge improvement
over the sketchy Laughs. Album opener “Baby Lemonade” clearly benefits
from this additional production; Wright’s keyboards and Shirley’s drumming pump
this song up and give it much greater depth than anything on Laughs; it’s one of Syd’s best
post-Floyd songs. “Love Song” and its
quirky, tinkling piano and droning organ is another terrific track. “Dominoes” sounds like a more subdued
rendition of “Happy Together” by the
Turtles. “It Is Obvious” sounds like
John Lennon leading the Doug Yule era Velvet Underground through
a folk standard. “Rats” is much louder
and more strident and Shirley’s peppy drum beat keep things moving along nicely
while Gilmour’s noodling guitar provides embellishments to Barrett’s random
ramblings. It is followed by the slower,
lurching, almost threatening “Maisie”, a warped blues workout. “Gigolo Aunt” returns to Syd’s usual quirky,
perky vibe, but is saved from being another tossaway acoustic sketch by the
organ flourishes and some nice guitar licks from Gilmour. “Waving My Arms in the Air” and “I Never
Lied To You” are typical Barrett musings.
Effervescing Elephant” sounds like a goofy kid’s song, particularly with
the tuba accompaniment. In all Barrett was a vast improvement over Madcap Laughs, for which Barrett could
thank his former Floyd mates.
Barrett never recorded another proper album, but rumors
about additional studio outtakes from his first two albums floated around for
almost two decades before a compilation was released in 1989 called Opel.
Opel contains alternate versions of songs from his first two albums as
well as a few previously unreleased songs, including the title track and “Word
Song”, which continue on in the vein of Madcap Laughs. Many of the alternate takes have subsequently
been appended to the original releases and are available elsewhere.
Barrett did become involved briefly in a musical project in
the early 70’s involving Twink of the Pink Fairies and Henry Cow guitarist Henry Firth called Stars but after a couple of gigs (one of which supported the MC5) Barrett quit. He also supposedly played with Steve Peregrin Took of Tyrannosaurus Rex and Shagrat, and was famously asked by both
the Sex Pistols and the Damned to produce their albums (the
Pistols’ first, the Damned’s second).
Barrett drifted further and further from public contact throughout the
70’s; eventually in the early 80’s he returned to live with his mother in Cambridge,
focusing his talents on another artistic love, painting. He died in 2006 at age 60 from pancreatic
cancer. In 1987 a covers tribute album
was released that featured the Shamen,
Opal, and the Soup Dragons,
among others, and artists as diverse as John
Lennon, David Bowie (who covered “See Emily Play” for Pinups) and Robyn Hitchcock
have said to have been influenced by him.
Less well known than either Spence or Barrett but
nevertheless regarded as another burned out 60’s visionary is Roky Erickson. Erickson was a founding member of the seminal
Texas psychedelic group the 13th
Floor Elevators, who along with Moving
Sidewalks (which contained future ZZ
Top guitarist Billy Gibbons)
were two of America’s first psychedelic groups.
The Elevators’ single “You’re Gonna Miss Me” is a wild slab of galloping
60’s garage rock, punctuated by Erickson’s fierce, punky vocals and wild primal
screams. The Elevators developed a
significant following but in 1968 (which was apparently a bad year for
acid-damaged musicians), Erickson started acting erratically and was admitted
to a psychiatric hospital in Houston where he received electroshock
treatment. A year later he was busted
for possession of marijuana and was essentially given the choice of going to
jail for 10 years or pleading insanity and chose the latter. He was sent to a home for the criminally
insane, where he received more electroshock treatments and Thorazine. Erickson continued to write and perform
however, even in this psychiatric prison; over the years a few homemade tapes
of performances while still incarcerated have surfaced, including the songs
“Devotional Number One” and “God Is Everywhere”, odd, affectingly warped
acoustic numbers. “Gone and Number” is
more high fidelity and features rambling vocals but is a sweet love song. “You’re an Unidentified Flying Object” is
similarly pleasant, a nice acoustic jaunt.
But my favorite of these old recordings is “Save Me”; here Erickson’s
beautiful voice peeks from under the low fi nature of the recording and is
simply magnificent. This is strong
evidence that he was an extremely talented if disturbed man. These songs are particularly poignant because
most of Erickson’s other solo offerings were obsessed with aliens, demons and
other forms of disturbing imagery.
Upon his release in 1973, Erickson put together a band known
as the Aliens which released some interesting music. One of their best songs is “Two Headed Dog”,
which sounds like a cross between twangy 70’s Tom Petty rock and crunchy Ted
Nugent hard rock; this song was later covered by punk guitarist Jeff Dahl, and “Mine Mine Mind”, a
garage punk ditty that again has Tom
Petty-esque overtones, mostly in Erickson’s twangy Midwestern vocals. “The Wind And More” is another phenomenal
track, another Nugent-y number showing that if his legal and mental troubles
hadn’t sidetracked him he might have achieved as much success as fellow Texan Billy Gibbons did with ZZ Top.
Unlike Spence and Barrett, whom I didn’t get into until the
late 90’s when I was able to sample a few of their songs via online means, I
actually was into Erickson in the 80’s when I was in college. At the time I
worked at the campus radio station and Erickson released an album called Don’t Slander Me in 1986 that I listened
to and liked, particularly the title song, which returns more to his shrieking
60’s wild man persona vocally. A few
years later a collection of acoustic recordings was released called the Holiday Inn Tapes, and this is
instead a return to his mid-70’s mellowness.
A particularly stellar song is “The Times I’ve Had”, which sounds like Zeppelin’s “Going to California” but
contains some touchingly autobiographical lyrics, such as “let me tell you
about the times I’ve had; ain’t so good and they ain’t so bad”. Other standouts are an acoustic, almost
rockabilly run through “Don’t Slander Me” and “May the Circle Remain Unbroken”,
a cover of another song of his from his 13th
Floor Elevators days in the mid-60’s.
This is a fabulous album and a perfect entre into the amazing talented
world of Roky.
But Erickson was in slow decline during the 80’s and 90’s,
becoming ever more isolated and mentally ill as his schizophrenia affected him
more deeply. For a time he became obsessed with the mail, and would spend hours
reading junk mail and contacting the senders.
He was eventually arrested for stealing some of his neighbors’
mail. But in 2001 his brother took over
care for him and he started receiving some high quality health care and has
continued to improve psychologically. He
has continued to play around at various festivals. In 1990 a tribute album Where the Pyramid Meets the Eye was released containing covers by
such artists as the Butthole Surfers
(who were both fellow Texans and huge fans; BH drummer King Coffey had put out an Erickson album on his Trance Syndicate
label in the 90’s), R.E.M., the Jesus
and Mary Chain, ZZ Top, Julian Cope, and Richard Lloyd. In 2006 a documentary of Erickson’s life was
aired and some of his best songs from his 13th
Floor Elevators and Aliens days
were assembled for the soundtrack, which is available on iTunes. In 2010 Erickson released another incredible
album, True Love Cast Out All Evil
with the band Okkervil River. On this album Erickson has mellowed and
sounds wise and comfortable with himself.
This is a really terrific album that should have received more attention
and accolades than it did. The title
track is a great slice of country rock, an introspective ballad anchored by
this fantastic backing band. Roky seems
to be in a much better place now and it’s great to see him making music again.
The fourth member of the “60’s burnout club” is Sky Saxon. Saxon didn’t end up in an institution, but he
did spend a considerable chunk of the 70’s affiliated with a strange Hollywood
cult known as the Source Family. Saxon
first achieved renown as the lead singer of the seminal LA 60’s garage band the Seeds, who had a minor hit with
“Pushin’ Too Hard”, a galloping, twangy gem that features Saxon’s yowling
Jagger-esque vocals and was featured in Lenny
Kaye’s Nuggets compilation. Another song, the slower “Can’t Seem To Make
You Mine”, was covered by the Ramones. “Girl I Want You”, with its fuzzy/buzzy
guitar and pulsing organ fills, is another Seeds classic. “The Tripmaster” is ominous and reminds me of
early Doors, while “Mr. Farmer” is
an upbeat splash of sunny psychedelia.
But, like the artists above, Saxon’s story took a turn for
the deeply bizarre as the 60’s ended. In
1969, Saxon became involved with the
Source Family, a bizarre spiritual cult centered around James Edward Baker, aka Father Yod aka YaHoWha. Baker, a decorated
WWII hero, moved to Los Angeles after the war and became a follower of various
beatnik and Eastern philosopies. In the
late 60’s he opened one of the first health food restaurants in Hollywood on
Sunset Strip and eventually started his own spiritual commune which lived in a
mansion in the Hollywood Hills. The
Source Family practiced a random mix of free love (Father Yod reputedly had
thirteen “wives”), vegetarianism, kindness to animals, Eastern spiritual
meditational practices, and so forth.
All members, including Saxon, adopted the surname “Aquarian” (his
official name was Arlick Aquarian). The cult was better tolerated than many other
70’s outfits because they didn’t proselytize, had better grooming standards,
and didn’t beg.
Music was another central concept of Baker’s cult, and Saxon
became involved on the musical end after joining the group in 1973. He would eventually assist in the release of
a 13 CD set of their music called God and
Hair (the cult is reputed to have over 65 albums worth of music from the 70’s
alone). The cult’s band, named Ya Ho Wa 13, produced strange extended
neo-psychedelic jams; several of these can be found on YouTube and are worth a
listen—“Time Travel”, “Two”, “Fire in the Sky”, and “Wolf Pack” actually aren’t
bad, in a Spinal Tap blues/jazz, jazz/blues jam kind of way. “I’m Gonna Take You Home” is a driving,
building jam that strangely reminds me of “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” by Bauhaus. Imagine if Charles Manson had guided his Family
toward music and not toward murder, this is what it might have sounded
like. Interestingly, these recordings
have become highly sought-after by collectors for their rarity and oddity. In fact, collector and avid Ya Ho Wa 13
fanatic David Nuss (himself a member
of an odd musical collective called the No-Neck
Blues Band, also known as NNCK),
met with surviving members of the cult in the 2000’s and worked with them to
release another collection of Ya Ho Way 13 songs called Magnificence in the
Memory.
Father Yod died in 1975 in a bizarre hang gliding accident
in Hawaii that authorities felt was better left unsolved (actually, this last
part about the authorities is untrue but sadly the rest of it isn’t). Saxon continued to make music both within and
outside the confines of the Source Family/Ya Ho Wa 13, under a bewildering
array of related hippie-esque monikers, including the Starry Seeds Band, Sky Saxon & Firewall, King Arthur's Court,
and Shapes Have Fangs the Universal Stars Peace Band, Sky Sunlight Saxon, Star's
New Seeds Band, Sunlight and the New Seeds, and even a reconstituted Seeds.
In 1977 he released a bludgeoning EP called Expression, which contains “In Love With Life” b/w “Starry Ride”
(some generous soul has uploaded this to YouTube), which evokes the finest of the MC5 and Stooges; this is actually one of the best things Sky put out in his
life. Supposedly Mars Bonfire of Steppenwolf and
Ron Bushy of Iron Butterfly contribute to this work. In 1986 he put out an album with Steve and Jeff McDonald of Redd Kross
and Brian Corrigan of Chemical People under the name Sky “Sunlight” Saxon and Purple Electricity. None of this is available on iTunes (though a
couple of modern day Saxon albums are)”Starving for Your Love” by Sky Saxon and Firewall from 1986 is
actually a pretty decent recreation of the garage punk of the 60’s Seeds. Prior to his death in 2009, Saxon also played
a number of gigs, including a beautiful, sloppy, feedback-drenched jam with Fuzztones member Rudi Protrudi and members of the
Cheeks.
As mentioned above, Sky never experienced any major
psychiatric problems or had any break with reality that necessitated being
institutionalized. However, to quote All
Music Guide’s description of him and his work, “Much of his post-Seeds work
fit the mold of a curious 1960s relic, a hippie acid casualty with a strong
cult following, in the mold of Roky
Erickson”, and that he released “a series of singles that increasingly
reflected a drug-induced separation from reality”, which is why I felt his work
was best discussed here. All four of these artists experienced some major
dislocations after the dream of the 60’s died, and maybe that’s one reason why
I still cherish their work. They
believed in, and bought into, the 60’s revolution of sex, drugs and rock and
roll, and ended up paying for it with their sanity, at least for a time.
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