I always loved those long psychedelic jams, the real ones, back when the minds of players and fans were psychedelicized, to quote the Chambers Brothers. We were just on our way up Pacific Coast Highway a bit ago when the hippie station on Sirius (“Deep Tracks”) played “Liberation” by the Chicago Transit Authority. They were a pretty good band then, when they had the long name, doing an updated Electric Flag thing, I guess, less blues and more charts. Certainly sold a of records, too. I was 12 and listening to AM radio then and I remember them well. Switched over to FM a bit later and there was more of them, lots more. That’s where I would have heard “Liberation”. I had no idea that a fifteen minute song back then meant the deejay was out back getting stoned, or maybe in the john, or getting laid. All I knew was long tracks were cool. Heavy. Art. Significant. We were all impressed by long tunes, or suites, or movements, whatever, back then. It gave rock music that classical music cachet. Though let’s be honest, what no doubt happened was the Chicago Transit Authority had recorded enough usable tracks for three sides of a double LP. They needed another 15 minutes of music. Today you’d sit down and write another three or four tunes. But in 1969 every intelligent rock musician spent a lot of time out of his mind high listening to some totally gone John Coltrane. Trane doing a whole LP side of “My Favorite Things”. Trane and Pharoah Sanders doing that utterly mad 12 minutes of “The Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost” that open Meditations. Trane just blowing free form, idea after idea after idea. His quartet doing the same. A lot of raucous soloing. Elvin Jones, baby. Elvin Jones. You’d get way high, you’d listen, maybe ohm a little. Ohm. Trane screaming, Pharoah screeching, Elvin pounding, you om aum ohming. Made sense at the time. So if the producer said we need 15 more minutes for that fourth side you just looked at the band, say yeah baby, fire up a jay and make free form rock’n’roll. Everybody was doing it. The Sons of Champlain, the San Francisco scene’s own horn band at the time, called their fifteen minute fourth side “Freedom”. Freedom, Liberation, what’s the difference? (The difference was that Chicago Transit Authority sold a million copies and the Sons’ Loosen Up Naturally sold a couple thousand). Both tunes are one of those demented aimless freak out jams that work only if the band never stops to think about it. They could do that back then, not think about something. You could get really really into something but not worry about it.. Just let it flow, man. Music–hell, creativity itself–was just a thing that happened. Not like accidentally happened, but just happened. That whole Jackson Pollack thing. Get the right mind vibe going down and let yourself go and man, look what happens. Free love happens. Free music. Free concerts. Free drugs. Freedom from barbers. Freedom from baths. From reality. That was 1969. The year opened up with Liberation and Freedom. Something in the air. Summer was Woodstock. By December bikers are beating up hippies at Altamont. Oh fuck. It all goes to hell eventually, of course. They should have known that. Pollack led to an army of wanna be pollacks, throwing paint around, making a mess. Free form played by amateurs usually completely fails. Free drugs leads to heroin. Free love to the clap. Free verse to words in heaps. But for that magic window when it does work, it’s beautiful. And even though it’s that rarely listened to fourth side of a double album, “Liberation” sure sounded beautiful that sunny wind-blown day driving up PCH. Terry Kath does this insane guitar solo for I dunno how long, forever, it’s hysterical but hey it was 1969, they were some real musicians in that band, used to playing to midwestern dance halls full of kids absolutely out of their minds on some psychedelic or another and what the fuck, go for it Terry, just go for it. It’s not loaded, baby.
Category Archives: Psychedelic
Sky Saxon
(2009)
I see Sky Saxon died.
I remember my pal Ron E’s birthday party, a long time ago. I was playing drums behind my brother Jon (on sax) and a bassist. I remember Sky storming the stage and singing along to some tune we were doing. Later I was playing in a trio with Ron E. (on his big giant loud fast guitar). Sky, stoned, beyond stoned even and out of his mind high, suddenly rushing out from backstage and storming the stage again. He kinda shouted-screamed bellowed-wailed. Which means I actually had the (mis)fortune of playing with Sky Saxon in two different bands on the same night.
When he wasn’t sucking on pipes and joints, he was trying to talk chicks into getting it on with him. Young chicks and big chicks mostly. He liked ’em young and/or big around. Rock stars, ya know. Old hippies. Lost visionaries. Fruitarians. God spelled backward is dog. Really.
Part of me is slightly envious. I mean I was never really a fan, never got the whole Sky cult thing, but what a lifestyle. No one keeps you from getting on somebody else’s stage. No one keeps you from rolling somebody else’s weed. No one stops you from hitting on somebody else’s wife.
I have a few more Sky Saxon stories, know of many more…who knows how many there are? I’ve had the hippest jazz critic I know regale me with Sky Saxon stories. I told him mine. He nodded, impressed. What to me was just a weird night was to him a bit of history.
Well, Sky’s dead now. Writers gushed in all the magazines, on the websites, even in the newspapers. Not because of “Pushin’ Too Hard”. But because he was Sky. Or is Sky, the myth. Musicians shake their heads and wonder. Dope dealers hide their stashes. Ladies tingle and blush.
I didn’t mention that I hung backstage with him that night between the stage stormings, smoking out with Sky, experiencing Sky, wondering how the fuck Sky ever got there. He’d smoke, talk batshit crazy, then leap up and chase down some poor chick. She’d say no and turn red, not sure if it was a compliment or not. Most of them said no. Most of them. He was Sky after all.
Wisconsin Death Trip
(Liner notes from the various artists compilation album Gimme The Keys, the band is Lexington (aka Lexington Devils), the tune “Wisconsin Death Trip”, 1987)
I can remember the first time I heard “Wisconsin Death Trip”. The band was playing in a biker\bar in an industrial stretch of Anaheim—you know, all parking lots and dumpsters and broken glass. The club was an immense pool hall, really, row after row of billiards tables surrounded by bikers and their women, punks trying to look like junkies and junkies like punks, old hippies with beads and bellies, barmaids with them perfect asses. Typical rock’n’roll environment. Lexington was playing to an indifferent crowd, the crowd being those who stuck around the stage long enough for them to do a song. They had a bunch of loyal, even fanatical fans who squealed and yelled to everything they did, especially the tight little Replacements-like numbers: verse, chorus, verse, lead, chorus, Thank you, “Singapore Sling”, “Mama Wants Her Baby Back”—good songs, don’t get me wrong, damn good songs. But the band looked so weird. I dunno. Not so much the way they were dressed—Frank in that James Dean / Monterey Pop Jimi outfit and that trashed little Les Paul in his giant Mexican hands; Derek like Keith Moon might have looked like if he had played for Gene Vincent, with those giant sticks he launch off his ride, actually hitting and hurting people; Eric, beautiful, serene, stoned, even if he weren’t, fingers snaking across the frets bloozin’, jazzin’, rockin’ it—and Lex, that crazed rasping voice belied by the almost pretty face El Greco’d in the shitty bar lighting, body twisting, rolling, writhing, staggering—drunk off his ass, pounding his head on the mike stand, laughing laughing laughing, the pretty pink scarf draped besodden round his neck billowing in the breeze blown by Derek’s giant floor fan. Frank is in the middle of some bloozy rock shuffle (“Lord of the Highway”) and it is an audience favorite, they’re digging it at the pool tables, shaking their cues to the beat, when he starts strangling his guitar, I mean choking it, trying to kill it, you can hear its feedback screams over everything, and he doesn’t stop and it just screams and screams and Eric just digs it and nods to Derek who brings it down, way down, all closed high hat and rim shot, and Lex struggles to his feet, kicks one of the toms laying around across the stage, and just stares at Frank, watching, studying, waiting, catching a breath. Frank’s playing with the guitar now, moving it around in front of the amp, making funny feedback noises. Eric stops, Derek taps out a quiet blooz on his shut high hat, its jagged shattered edges sticking out in all directions. It goes on like that for a while, seconds, minutes, this electric squeal and garbage can tapping. The audience doesn’t get it, a few applaud, some hoot, a big drunk biker yells something unintelligible. The band stands there. The breeze from the fan blows Lex’s scarf. It quivers a little, barely alive. Frank pulls his fingers off the guitar’s neck. The feedback expires. The stick taps arhythmically, slowly, even more slowly. The bar is hushed. Billiard balls clack. That biker mumbles. A lady with beautiful legs is walking round by the bar, looking antsy. People hit furtively from the joint being passed around. What a weird way to end a set.
I remember the next few seconds in slow motion. Frank bolts upright and turns on us, some freaked out “Foxy Lady” triplet riff distorted beyond belief explodes out of his amp and then the whole band follows, punctuated by Derek’s tom tom blasts and it’s a freakin’ Motorhead/Hendrix/Zeppelin hurricane, Lex is screaming and it goes on like that for a minute or two, the audience rockin” out or just staring frozen wondering what the fuck has just happened when it stops just–like–that except for Derek’s out of time descending roll skin-crackingly loud and it hangs there, just for a minute, then BOOMP BOOMP BOOMP BAM and what’s this? Weird guitar, soaring, building on an incredible bass line that just goes on higher with an almost intolerable suspense, drums one two three four five six one two three four five six and Lex on the floor writhing and hurting, first almost in a whisper “Saw your face in the paper…” oblivious to us, to everything but the band, “You know you looked so fine” the vocal melody alien, fragile as a child’s noodling on the piano, or a fragment of a birdsong, recorded and slowed down a hundred times. Frank is chording now, big guitar chunks smashed together, following the bass line, then leading it, then staggering away crazily into feedback then back into he melody again, Derek’s drums grow louder, Lex is walking across the stage, bumping into Frank, away from Eric, tripping on chords, kicking aside pieces of drums and empty cans, yelling into the microphone, yelling at someone in the song, , then screaming this curdling blues howl into the cacophony of drums, guitar and bass blasting this twisted “Dazed and Confused” riff till the remains lay scattered about the stage and the band asks for a beer for Lex. “He looks thirsty. Come on.” The crowd stood silent for a moment, and then screamed.
The Lexington DevilsPaul Kantner
(from an email to Greg Burk)
Yeah, After Bathing at Baxter’s has wound up my favorite rock album, at the top of the pile for years, as others have come and gone. In fact, only the Sex Pistols rate with the Airplane in being a transformative band in my adult life. I heard the Pistols when I was twenty, in ’77, and it was ’77 that I picked up Baxter’s, the oddly obscure (by then) Airplane album, the one you never heard on the radio. I had most of the others. Baxter’s blew my mind like Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica blew my mind, it was overwhelming, a mind fuck. Somehow it overtook Trout Mask in importance–helped along no doubt by Spencer Dryden‘s drumming–and I still listen to it with varying degrees of awe, depending on how stoned I am. I listen to it dozens of time annually, always have. It’s the only record I have that I listened to dozens of times annually since I bought it in some hippie used record store in Isla Vista. And over all these decades of being a rock fan, the only two essential–as in needing them to breathe essential–rock albums left for me are After Bathing at Baxter’s and Never Mind the Bullocks, bought both that same year, 1977, when I was twenty years old. And when I heard Paul Kantner died, my favorite Airplane, the genius of the bunch, with his amazing sense of harmony and rhythm, I felt the briefest twinge and got on with life, which is the way it should be, because otherwise you don’t get it, you don’t get it at all. Paul got down, not the first time, you know. Paul got down and got up to go. And he’s gone.
Monterey Pop Festival, 1967
Jack Bruce
So Jack Bruce died. A whole age group of music fans felt a pang reading that for the first time. He was part of our young hipness process. One of those serious jazz loving bass players you’d find in rock bands back then, like they lowered themselves a notch to play loud blues and love songs. Which wasn’t true, really, but that was the thinking. Jack Bruce was the quintessential one of those. Kids would mention their favorite bass players and you could say Jack Bruce and be hipper than all of them. Ginger Baker too, though that didn’t last for me. He was just a pounder. Make him an astronaut. But Jack did stay with me. I remember watching that Cream reunion a few years ago on a hundred television sets in Circuit City, and aside from Eric Clapton’s solos, which were good, even fired up, the band was limp and weak and not the Cream I remembered from all my albums. Jack on a fretless bass didn’t help any. He couldn’t dumb it down just a little to slam through a Sunshine of Your Love or Tales of Brave Ulysses even though he managed the yelp in precious ears WERE tortured. But Deserted Cities of the Heart took on something new with his jazzier playing, and We’re Going Wrong (a favorite of mine off Disraeli Gears I’d forgotten all about) was gorgeous and spooky and perfect for him. His bass carried it. It was a couple levels above all the Cream classics, it seemed to me now, like a different band altogether. It knocked me out. I think Crossroads followed. His bass line had carried that one, too, on Wheels of Fire, Clapton soaring overhead, Jack keeping it together. Not at Royal Albert Hall, though, not in 2005. They’d rocked the place on their last show there back in 1969 (you can see for yourself in Farewell to the Cream, a standard in the hippie art house theaters back in the day). But not this time. Jack’s heart wasn’t in it. This Cream thing wasn’t what Jack Bruce was three decades on. He was beyond all this. I watched a hundred televisions thinking all those cheering people were seeing what I was seeing but they were hearing Disraeli Gears. That wasn’t the real Jack Bruce up there, the Jack Bruce who’d been growing in stops and starts ever since Cream said farewell. He was never a superstar again, but he was a musician, and kept doing interesting things, despite bouts of melancholy. Alas, I never saw him play, not even once. I intended to some day, but never will now. I no longer have any Jack Bruce records, either, and haven’t even heard his Tony Williams Lifetime project Spectrum Road from 2012. Or his very last, Silver Rails, from earlier this year. Everyone told me how good that one was. And you have to see him live, they said, he’s a legend, he’s Jack Bruce. I said I would, one of these days. Oh well. Sometimes you miss things, and then it’s too late. And my Cream albums are long gone, all of them. Even Live Cream Volume II, with its incredible take on Deserted Cities of the Heart, which would seem appropriate right now.
Jack Bruce’s final release, Silver Rails. The extraordinary painting is Sacha Jafri’s “The Child Within – The New Adventure”. Few musicians have the confidence or humility (or both) to share an album cover with something so extraordinary.
.
Thunderclap Newman
Alas, Andy Thunderclap Newman has passed on. What a strange thing his namesake Thunderclap Newman was, and even stranger what a thing that Hollywood Dream LP was. I remember playing it in the car as I drove down Hollywood Blvd right after moving here in 1980, blasting the title cut out the window and thinking wow, I’ve made it. I wish there was a Hollywood, I sang along, just like there used to be, with long black cars and paper hoods and a film star on my knee. Except that my canary yellow (with grey primer) Buick Opel didn’t have a cassette player when I first moved to Hollywood, it had an AM radio, and unless KHJ was playing Something in the Air, Andy Newman’s unhurried piano never saw the inside of my beat up little car. Now, as I mash together memories, formats, and automobile sound systems I’m listening to an Accidents (long version) that I copped off the internet. Andy takes a wonderfully ancient solo like we’re watching Buster Keaton chasing his hat in a windstorm, so unhip it hurts. “I see Jimmy climbing on the milkman’s van, laughing,” sings Speedy, “on his feet were a pair of granddad’s shoes / Then I looked around / And he was gone / Are we to lose?” Then a melodic solo by Jimmy, a penny whistle, and more of Andy accompanying Buster Keaton. I recall how unpopular a party album this was at our pad. It was an acquired taste, like an aged but weird wine. Andy himself, I always thought, was even better on a b-side of Something In the Air called Wilhelmina that one can safely assume probably did not get as much airplay as the a-side. He sings nothing like Mick Jagger over a barrelhouse piano nothing like Keith Emerson and though Jimmy McCulloch does a very nice psychedelic fill it’s as unrock’n’roll a thing as you can imagine. I love it. Now Andy Thunderclap Newman is gone, following Jimmy McCulloch and Speedy Keen, and the band is gone too. Life is just a game, you fly a paper plane, there is no end.
Speedy, Andy, and Jimmy on the cover of Tiger Beat.
My Dinner With Jimi
I just wanted to say that Royale Watkins does a dead on perfect Jimi Hendrix in Howard Kaylen’s My Dinner With Jimi. A great flick, a Turtles biopic, a true story, with the most eerily perfect Jimi Hendrix I ever saw. On top of all that the movie is really funny. Great screenplay, tightly written I believe by the Turtles lead vocalist Howard Kaylen himself who appears to remember so much from the sixties you’d doubt he was there, except, of course, that he was. Great casting too. All around a terrific film. How it never became a sensation I don’t know. Almost nobody I know has ever seen it. I’d show you a clip but it’s better to watch the entire movie for the full impact of Royale Watkins’ performance. The story builds up to it. It’s a funnier rock’nroll flick than Almost Famous, which I thought was really good too, except this story really happened. It’s also set a couple years before Almost Famous, long before rock’n’roll had become jaded, so there’s all that innocence to mine for material, something not possible in any film set even a few years later, or in any music film since. A generation’s innocence is a rare and fleeting thing, scarcely believable to later audiences. Yet it works here. It works in the great Canter’s scene (dig Jim Morrison, nothing like the Gothic myth). It works in the great draft board scene. And in London where that innocence is shattered by the very purveyors of all that innocence, the Fab Four, after which Howard Kaylen’s dinner with Jimi provides the story’s denouement in that it all comes up again. The film came out it 2003, I think, and I have no idea why it never caught on big. Weird how that works. Some hit, some don’t, ya never know. How is the weather.
Brick's Picks 