Yeah Yeah Yeah

by Bob Stanley

  Canadian Steve Miller had a clearer head. He noted that the city’s flower-power scene was largely a social trip; the Airplane weren’t playing that much music and spent as much time handing out flowers as they did rehearsing. If these lightweights can get a deal, figured Miller, so can I. Capitol signed the hastily assembled Steve Miller Band for $50,000.

  The most enduring psychedelia has a tightness, even if it remains structurally weird. Donovan’s ‘Sunshine Superman’ (US no. 1, UK no. 2 ’66) still sounds gently, warmly lysergic; late-in-the-day cash-in ‘Green Tambourine’ by the Lemon Pipers (US no. 1, UK no. 8 ’68) has enough vim (and sitar, and wild percussion) to keep it on the radio in the twenty-first century. This is not true of the vast majority of San Francisco-scene recordings. Much San Francisco psychedelia failed to communicate the highs it was meant to soundtrack. It could sound self-indulgent, strung-out, little more than a twenty-minute variation on a Bo Diddley line. Yet the SF bubble was secure in the knowledge of its own superiority – the drugs also enabled musicians to say, ‘We know something you don’t.’

  As it turned out, the best psychedelic group on the west coast were down the road, in a city that hip San Franciscans regarded as the capital of everything manufactured – Los Angeles. They were called Love, and they had two leaders: a mixed-race hardnut R&B guitarist called Arthur Lee and a blond boy-toy with an unfashionable love of Broadway and flamenco called Bryan MacLean. They began as a fierce six-piece garage band who dropped acid and lived together in a house called the Castle, previously the home of Bela Lugosi.

  Their name was ironic. Lee was rumoured to have killed a roadie, and two other members – Ken Forssi and Johnny Echols – paid for their drug habits by robbing donut stands. Recording their first album in January ’66, engineer Bruce Botnick remembers that Lee was ‘so high all the time that he wasn’t high. He had achieved what they call clear light.’ Yet once they’d cemented their place as the toughest, punkest folk-rockers in LA with the insanely intense hit ‘7 and 7 Is’ (US no. 33 ’66), their music transformed into a unique, incredibly delicate form of psychedelia. For their second album, Da Capo in early ’67, they were reinforced with a flautist called Tjay Cantrelli, and their drummer Alban ‘Snoopy’ Pfisterer switched to harpsichord. Arthur Lee, possibly as a non-generic side effect of taking hallucinogenic drugs, stopped roaring like an ursine Jagger and instead modelled his vocals on crooner Johnny Mathis. Essentially they sounded like off-kilter easy listening, a Herb Alpert, Tijuana Latin sound with flecks of feedback and lyrics like ‘Oh the snot has caked against my pants.’ Love’s song titles were a way into their elliptical, gently apocalyptic netherworld: ‘Alone Again Or’, ‘Orange Skies’, ‘Stephanie Knows Who’, ‘Andmoreagain’. When Lee and MacLean combined with arranger David Angel on Forever Changes at the end of 1967, they created something no one in San Francisco had managed – a melodic, concise, hypnotic album.

  Though acid may seem revelatory for the first two or three trips, it starts to become a hall of mirrors thereafter. Love’s Forever Changes has an inexact beauty: someone randomly shouts ‘Face!’ in one song; the needle jumps deliberately, repeatedly, on the fade of ‘The Good Humor Man He Sees Everything Like This’; the guitar wig-out of ‘A House Is Not a Motel’ ends in mid-air; ‘Andmoreagain’ climbs to a lyric of ‘And you don’t know how much I love you’, and its sudden conventionality is shocking, genuinely moving. Forever Changes is exquisitely arranged, but everything is slightly out of place. When the Manson gang wanted to unsettle Beach Boy Dennis Wilson, they broke into his house, moved three or four things around in the living room, then left. Forever Changes is similarly intimidating. It is certainly mind-altering. On the back of the album cover the band stand around, laughing at an off-camera gag, looking like they could be posing for a men’s clothing catalogue. Arthur Lee, though, is looking straight at the camera, holding two parts of a broken vase. What’s wrong with this picture?

  Love’s masterpiece peaked at 152 on the Billboard album chart.3 ‘We all thought we were on a rocket ship that was going to continue to go straight up,’ said Bryan MacLean. ‘I thought this was always going to be my life.’ The band disintegrated in 1968; Lee’s subsequent career was rarely more than disappointing, while MacLean never made another record.

  Psychedelia, meanwhile, was absorbed and processed, with ruminants like the Doors chewing it over and spitting it out in a radio-friendly format. Psychedelic bands were singing about a world that the majority of listeners had never experienced – tuning in without either turning on or dropping out. In London, the 14 Hour Technicolor Dream festival at Alexandra Palace was peopled not only by flower children and a hungry media, but by confused mods who had turned up to see what the fuss was all about.4 Those who didn’t buy into it went home, dug out their Tamla 45s, began to scour junk shops and market stalls for more mid-sixties thrills, and helped to lay the roots of the northern-soul scene.

  In the States, mysticism was used as a cloak. The Doors dropped a few quotes from Lorca and teen-rebel fodder into their interviews: ‘The most loving parents and relatives commit murder with smiles on their faces,’ said singer Jim Morrison. ‘They force us to destroy the person we really are.’ Morrison dared you to point and laugh at such pronouncements, and wrote the primary rule for all of pop’s future satyrs and self-taught poets, from Lou Reed to Patti Smith to Nick Cave: stare down your detractors, and don’t blink.

  On stage Morrison was saturnine and wore tight leather pants. Cold and aloof, he would pout and sneer at the audience; he never smiled. The Doors, said Australian writer Lilian Roxon, had ‘poetry, violence, mystery, suspense and terror’. That they moved swiftly from the underground to pop crossover was a major shock to their loyal LA fans, many of whom rapidly disowned them, but it was no surprise to anyone else because – amid the oedipal tracts and suggestions of the satanic – they wrote some prime whistleable pop. Two of their best singles – ‘Light My Fire’ (US no. 1 ’67) and ‘Touch Me’ (US no. 3 ’69) – came from guitarist Robby Krieger, and were covered to great effect by José Feliciano and French yé-yé girl Katty Line respectively. It wouldn’t have happened to the Grateful Dead. On top of this, Morrison could roar or whisper, his voice was deep, chocolate brown, he was a new kind of crooner. ‘Riders on the Storm’ (US no. 14, UK no. 22 ’71) could have been Mel Tormé singing a Frankie Laine cowboy song if it wasn’t for the rain-sodden backing track, the neon blur of electric piano and lines like ‘There’s a killer on the road, his brain is squirming like a toad.’ Some felt betrayed by rock’s first poet – even their producer Paul Rothchild quit midway through sessions for the final album, LA Woman, allegedly calling it ‘cocktail music’. But what had people expected of the Doors? That their unsmiling demeanour and loud, organ-heavy rock could bring deliverance, that it was ‘real’ unlike the studio-bound Lemon Pipers? There’s no such thing as a discourse that delivers only truth. So ‘Riders on the Storm’ sounded like Frankie Laine – so what? No one was betrayed.

  Anyway, the Doors never cracked jokes, became the first major rock act with a logo, usually included an epic closing track on each of their albums (‘The End’, ‘When the Music’s Over’, ‘The Soft Parade’), and were hugely successful. In these respects, they created a new American rock template. In their wake came San Diego’s Iron Butterfly, whose portentous album In-a-Gadda-Da-Vida sold twenty-five million copies solely on the strength of its seventeen-minute-long title track. Yet, in the heavy stakes, both the Doors and the ’Fly were trumped by a Long Island act called Vanilla Fudge, whose shtick was to re-cut hit records – the Supremes’ ‘You Keep Me Hangin’ On’ (US no. 6, UK no. 17), Cher’s ‘Bang Bang’, the Beatles’ ‘Ticket to Ride’ – at half speed, adding wounded-lion vocals and overloaded church organ to increase the angst. They also recorded a soulfully strained 1967 Coke jingle – an unorthodox way to stick it to the Man. Quite possibly they were the most hilarious group of all time. Their second album, The Beat Goes On, attempted to condense the entire histo
ry of music, from Mozart to Elvis via Stephen Foster, inside half an hour. You had to admire their ambition, but such a grave undertaking needed gentle hands to guide it, maybe a George Martin at the helm; the Fudge had George ‘Shadow’ Morton, the man who had discovered the Shangri-Las and written ‘Leader of the Pack’. Morton was a great producer, but subtlety really wasn’t his strong point. Tracks on The Beat Goes On were interspersed with quotes from Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt – an early example of sampling – as well as the four members of Vanilla Fudge. Kids were wide open to this stuff; those who had taken acid had their critical faculties impeded, while non-trippers believed their turned-on friends. Vanilla Fudge’s weight and density found plenty of takers and created stoner rock, loud music to pass out to; they are god fathers to Black Sabbath and, in turn, Monster Magnet and Soundgarden.

  Acid was not freely available in Britain in 1966. There was no Owsley in Bradford or Bracknell. Instead, the influence of psychedelia was largely third-hand, via the in-the-know (essentially the Beatles) or the drug-inspired music that made it onto the pirate stations (‘Good Vibrations’, the Association’s ‘Along Comes Mary’). An emergent, homegrown strain of psychedelia came from Cambridge. The Pink Floyd were well-spoken, decidedly middle-class boys who played at devastatingly loud volumes, with oil-lamp projections adding another dimension to the off-kilter sound. ‘We’re a very young group, not in age, but in experience,’ they would coyly say. ‘We can’t go on doing clubs and ballrooms. We want a brand-new environment, and we’ve hit on the idea of using a big top. We’ll have a huge screen 120 feet wide and forty feet high and project films and slides.’ Singer Syd Barrett had a mop of curls and an intense look of obtuse ambition. Bassist Roger Waters claimed coolly that they weren’t interested in chart positions, but Barrett wrote songs like ‘Arnold Layne’ (UK no. 20 ’67) and ‘See Emily Play’ (UK no. 6 ’67) to augment their freeform cacophony, and they were gently weird but incredibly catchy. Syd Barrett wanted to be a pop star. But in 1967 he ingested vast amounts of acid, which derailed his plans after just three singles and one magical album. The Piper at the Gates of Dawn defined a thoroughly English take on psychedelia, a mix of dark, driving floor-fillers (‘Lucifer Sam’), space rituals (‘Astronomy Domine’) and twisted nursery rhymes (‘The Gnome’, ‘Bike’, ‘The Scarecrow’) with Lewis Carroll lyrics that suggested spiked cups of Earl Grey. When Barrett stood on stage, unable to sing a note, his bandmates took him to see R. D. Laing and were told there was nothing he could do to help. Barrett had given himself permanent brain damage. Having to cut loose from their stricken songwriter in mid-’68, the remaining band members decided to try and scratch out a living, playing their mumbled, unmelodic jams on the student circuit. As it turned out, this would be their salvation.

  The influence of Floyd and Sgt Pepper was all over the British pop of late ’67 and ’68: the woody sadness of the Mellotron – first heard on ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ – was the defining sound of the year, along with lyrics about wishing wells, steam trains and honey for tea. Birmingham band Traffic had emerged in the spring of ’67 with ‘Paper Sun’ (UK no. 5), a tough mod sound with a sitar hook, but ‘Hole in My Shoe’ (UK no. 2) was the full Alice in Wonderland, English psychedelic flowering: ‘I walked through the sky where an elephant’s eye was looking at me from a bubblegum tree.’ There was a Mellotron, a spoken interlude about a giant albatross narrated by a small child, and a strange, wellington-boots-through-mud rhythm track. It was tremendously over the top. Keith West’s ‘Excerpt from A Teenage Opera’ roped in a whole kiddie chorus, as well as balalaikas and cornets, for an absorbing Toytown Spector sound which reached number two in the autumn – producer Mark Wirtz hinted that the ‘opera’ was complete but it soon became clear he’d been caught out by the excerpt’s success. Still, if you’re looking for a British equivalent to Smile, the fragments that remain of the Teenage Opera make it a good call.

  Beyond this handful of hits were 45s by short-lived groups like Ice (‘Anniversary of Love’, ‘Ice Man’), the Virgin Sleep (‘Secret’) and the Fairytale (who created a creaking-floorboard sense of unease on ‘Guess I Was Dreaming’) – all of them had probably been playing Motown covers in ’66, or had been Swinging Blue Jeans soundalikes in ’64. The main difference between them and their US counterparts was that they were only given deals of one or two singles, and so condensed all their ideas inside three minutes; American bands had a forty-minute album to play with, stretching their initial ideas to breaking point almost as soon as they opened their mouths. While Tintern Abbey’s ‘Vacuum Cleaner’ or the Factory’s droning ‘Path through the Forest’ pick you up, disorient you gloriously for three minutes, then drop you back in your armchair before the kettle’s even boiled, the careers of American bands like Autosalvage, Clear Light and Mad River were stillborn; their albums remain largely unloved, with blues jams and freaky guitar workouts extended to fill the empty inches on the vinyl. While this format created the possibilities of psychedelia, from which an elemental, pan-global music could be created, any band that had just one good idea was always going to sound stronger on a seven-inch single than on an album. Among those who ultimately benefited from a frugal record company were the Beautiful Daze (‘City Jungle’), the Calico Wall (‘Flight Reaction’) and the Caretakers of Deception (‘Cuttin’ Grass’), who were all offered just a solitary single on which to promote their singular psychedelic vision.

  British psych records were generally more red-blooded. This was down to superior studios, a love of angles and musical briskness among musicians, and the 45 factor. And yet the American acts were almost always more out on a limb, with a more radical musical and linguistic vocabulary. Put simply, they sounded more like a revolution than Pink Floyd, or anything Britain – with a child’s kaleidoscope pressed tightly to its eye – had to offer. If a group could blend the two distinct styles, chances were the alchemy would provide a psychotropic journey without equal – and so it proved.

  The golden ticket arrived in the hand of Animals’ bassist Chas Chandler when Keith Richards’s girlfriend Linda Keith told him about a wild but shy guitarist she’d seen at Cafe Wha? in Greenwich Village. Chandler was about to quit his disintegrating group and looking to manage someone: Jimi Hendrix – with the name and the face of a ready-made star – suited him just fine. He brought his charge back to London and harnessed him to bassist Noel Redding and drummer Mitch Mitchell. If the Jefferson Airplane wanted to explore your mind, the Jimi Hendrix Experience sounded like they wanted to tear through it on a silver rocket. Chandler was smart enough to know that his feral boy – who had already been sacked from a few tight, touring R&B groups for being too musically wayward and unreliable – would have the most impact if he was contained by three-minute singles and by his two bandmates, similarly untamed but instilled with a zipped-up British aggression. His plan worked: almost incredibly, they gelled like no trio before or since.

  In no time the Jimi Hendrix Experience scored four UK Top 20 hits – ‘Hey Joe’, ‘Purple Haze’, ‘The Wind Cries Mary’, ‘Burning of the Midnight Lamp’ – that made everything else in 1967 sound as lightweight as balsa wood. The music poured out of Hendrix’s fingers, he made it look so effortless. He also happened to be an A-grade showman; he claimed to be from Mars, dressed outrageously, was both boyishly cute and sexual as hell, and he had a laugh in his voice as infectious as Alma Cogan’s. Jimi Hendrix, the original dandy highwayman. ‘Rock is so much fun,’ he said. ‘That’s what it’s all about – filling up the chest cavities and empty kneecaps and elbows.’ He filled them up with guitar music that recalled the noise of roaring lions, Spitfire dogfights and racing-green Ferraris tearing around Brands Hatch.

  Yet without Chas Chandler maybe none of this would have happened. Hendrix needed to be kept on a tight leash, without which his psychedelic pyrotechnics – which he happily alloyed to anything from Sgt Pepper’s title track to the Troggs’ ‘Wild Thing’ to the Coronation Street theme5 – might have been
dripped randomly, wastefully, over aimless jams. The inevitable split happened in ’68 after three Experience albums and one more single, a roof-lifting take on Bob Dylan’s ‘All along the Watchtower’ (UK no. 5, US no. 20 ’68), which soundtracked the paranoia and viciousness on the streets that year as well as anything.

  Hendrix, though, was utterly outside of and totally uninterested in the disciplines and mechanics of hit singles. ‘I don’t want to be a clown any more. I don’t want to be a “rock & roll star”,’ he told Rolling Stone’s Sheila Weller in late ’69 as he ate a Theragran and drank a shot of tequila in milk for breakfast. By then he was free of Chandler and Redding, keeping Mitchell on as a part-timer, indulging his tastes for the avant, and mixing with jazzers and black militants who he worried didn’t take him seriously. The ensuing Band of Gypsies album was flabby. Adrift without the Experience, he died in 1970.

  If much of the San Francisco scene’s music is forgotten, its myth was hugely influential, redirecting pop’s geographical focus from Britain to the American west coast for a whole decade. Concretely, it gave us the rock concert. Until the late sixties, package tours ruled in the UK, and sock hops in the US: you got to see a lot of star names perform a few songs through a sound system more suited to announcing train delays than psychedelic rock. In San Francisco in 1966 they became ‘concerts’, announced by posters with vivid colours, swirling fonts and wild imagery; bands had their own sound systems built to accommodate the volume of the new music. One promoter, Bill Graham, bought up all the ballrooms, including the Carousel, which had been owned by members of the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane. The early boho fantasy of right-on, acid-inspired socialism buckled and the era began of the rock concert as money-spinner rather than mere promotional tool for recorded matter.