Genre

Going deep, deep in the psychedelic vault

Posted on by brucehhackett

When rock and roll was barely ten years old, some of the more adventurous musicians in England and the U.S. were eager to explore newer sounds and newer techniques that were decidedly not in the popular mainstream. These bands were all about expanding the horizons of what rock music could be, and while much of it was admittedly not very good, some of it was compelling, even catchy, and certainly influential.

There’s no denying that psychedelic drugs played a big part in motivating many bands to test the waters with musical forms that were completely unfamiliar to even the most forward-thinking listeners. Blues-based British groups like The Yardbirds, Fleetwood Mac and Cream enhanced their repertoire with innovative musical experiments, while American bands like Moby Grape, Love and Spirit took folk and rock roots and branched off into uncharted territories.

The “psychedelic rock” era didn’t last too long, roughly 1966 through 1972, but it produced some lasting music that, while not everyone’s cup of tea by a long shot, still captured the “anything goes” freedom that permeated the recording studios, especially in London, San Francisco and Los Angeles. In concert, most psychedelic music was expanded into jams with multiple solos, accompanied by mind-blowing light shows, but many of the studio recordings were held to more conventional lengths.

Instead of trotting out the same handful of spacey songs that are familiar because they made the Top 40 — “I Had Too Much to Dream Last Night” by The Electric Prunes, “Pictures of Matchstick Men” by The Status Quo, “Magic Carpet Ride” by Steppenwolf — I’ve selected a dozen very deep tracks from the late ’60s that are probably too obscure to qualify as “lost classics.” But I’m guessing there’s a segment of this blog’s audience that will get off on hearing them.

Rock on!

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“Fresh Garbage,” Spirit, 1968

Influenced by jazz, rock and folk, L.A-based Spirit emerged in late 1967 under the tutelage of famed producer Lou Adler, who encouraged their psychedelic leanings even as he found ways to make their music more accessible to the masses (at least in California). Their albums fared reasonably well, but their singles fell flat, largely because Spirit’s audience always preferred albums. Still, songs like “I Got a Line on You,” “Mr. Skin” and “Nature’s Way” found their way onto radio eventually. From their eponymous debut LP came the inaccurately titled “Fresh Garbage,” a marvelous, jazz-inflected tune that set the stage for Spirit’s reputation as a premier underground band.

“Happenings Ten Years Time Ago,” The Yardbirds, 1966

The Yardbirds, a trailblazing blues group and proving ground for several of England’s most iconic electric guitarists, bridged the gap between blues and pop enough to land in the Top 20 of the US pop charts five times in 1965-1966: ”For Your Love,” “Heart Full of Soul,” “I’m a Man,” “Shapes of Things” and “Over Under Sideways Down.” In late 1966, their experimental (yet influential) track “Happenings Ten Years Time Ago” failed to chart here, perhaps because of its unorthodox psychedelic arrangement, lyrics about reincarnation and deja vu, and innovative guitar work by Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page, who overlapped as Yardbirds for three months. 

“8:05,” Moby Grape, 1967

According to pop culture writer Jeff Tamarkin, “Moby Grape’s saga is one of squandered potential, absurdly misguided decisions, bad luck, blunders and excruciating heartbreak, all set to the tune of some of the greatest rock and roll ever to emerge from San Francisco.” Their first two albums somehow reached the Top 20 in the US in 1967 and 1968, but you’d be hard pressed to find a copy these days. The group’s three-guitarist lineup featured three singer-songwriters who merged rock, blues, folk and country in a tempting psychedelic stew. One of the better tracks is the brief, folky “8:05” by guitarist Jerry Miller.

“Stop Messin’ Round,” Fleetwood Mac, 1968

In its original incarnation (1967-1970), the band was known as Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac, emphasizing the leadership roll of virtuoso blues guitarist Green, who also handled harmonica and most vocals. On their second LP (titled “Mr. Wonderful” in England but reconfigured as “English Rose” in the US), they added saxophones to several tracks, as well as piano provided by future member Christine Perfect McVie. A highlight is the original Green blues track “Stop Messin’ Round,” which opens the album. These early blues-oriented Fleetwood Mac LPs were all Top Ten successes in England but wallowed in the lower rungs of the US charts.

“Baby’s Calling Me Home,” Steve Miller Band, 1968

Before he settled into a lucrative gig as a mainstream pop/rock star of the late ’70s and early ’80s, Miller was the leader of one of San Francisco’s most promising psychedelic blues bands, cranking out five albums in less than three years, including lost classic tracks like “Space Cowboy” and “Living in the U.S.A.” One of the Steve Miller Band’s founding members was guitarist/singer Boz Scaggs, who split in 1969 for a solo career specializing in R&B and “blue-eyed soul.” On the group’s 1968 debut LP “Children of the Future,” Scaggs wrote and sang lead vocals on the bluesy “Baby’s Calling Me Home,” probably the best track on the record.

“Tin Soldier,” Small Faces, 1967

Emerging as one of the premiere psychedelic bands of London’s mod subculture in the mid-’60s, The Small Faces enjoyed eight hit singles on UK charts but only one in the US, “Itchycoo Park,” which peaked at #16 in 1967. The follow-up, “Tin Soldier,” stalled at #73 in the US but prompted the release of “There Are But Four Small Faces,” their first US album which reconfigured the UK version by dropping some tracks and adding the two singles, both written by guitarist Steve Marriott. When Marriott left in 1969 to form Humble Pie, the others (including Ronnie Lane and Kenney Jones) continued as The Faces with Ron Wood on guitar and Rod Stewart on vocals.

“A House is Not a Motel,” Love, 1967

Arthur Lee, the frontman of the L.A. band Love, wrote unusual songs that deftly amalgamated garage rock, folk rock and psychedelia. He and guitarist Bryan MacLean steered the group from L.A. clubs to a national record contract, even scoring one minor hit, “7 and 7 Is,” which peaked at #33 in 1966. But Love was without question an album band, and their 1967 LP “Forever Changes” is considered a defining work of underground California rock, even as it investigated darker themes and questioned the sunny optimism of the so-called “Summer of Love” that year. In particular, “A House is Not a Motel” uses a folky foundation and then soars off into psychedelic realms.

“Hear Me Calling,” Ten Years After, 1969

British blues-rock band Ten Years After formed in 1966, named because they were born “ten years after” the explosive success of Elvis Presley, guitarist Alvin Lee’s idol. The group had four Top Ten LPs in the UK in 1969 and 1970, and generated a decent following in the US as well, thanks to a game-changing performance of Lee’s “I’m Going Home” at Woodstock, which was featured in the film and soundtrack album. From their third LP “Stonedhenge” comes the driving blues-boogie “Hear Me Calling,” written and sung by Lee, who wrote most of the band’s catalog, including their one US Top 40 entry, “I’d Love to Change the World” in 1971.

“Help Me,” Canned Heat, 1967

Bob “The Bear” Hite was a blues aficionado living in the Topanga Canyon area of L.A. when he formed Canned Heat as a makeshift jug band playing folk blues music, immortalized in the “Woodstock” soundtrack with its single “Going Up the Country.” Their self-titled debut LP consisted mostly of covers of tunes by the people Hite considered the best of the Delta bluesmen — Robert Johnson, Elmore James, Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon. Although Hite was Canned Heat’s gruff lead singer, the track “Help Me” by Sonny Boy Williamson II features guitarist Alan Wilson on vocals. The group was lauded as “one of America’s best boogie bands who also delve into psychedelic funk.”

“N.S.U.,” Cream, 1967

Eric Clapton had already made his mark with The Yardbirds and John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers when he joined forces with bassist/vocalist Jack Bruce and drummer Ginger Baker to form the blues power trio Cream, known for unparalleled live improvisational forays and creative original songs featuring the virtuoso trio in the studio. BBC writer Sid Smith said Cream’s music “is when blues, pop and rock magically starts to coalesce to create something brand new.” Their debut LP “Fresh Cream,” released in late 1966 in England, included the hit “I Feel Free” and the cryptically titled “N.S.U.,” which Bruce later revealed meant “non-specific urethritis,” a joking reference to Clapton’s bout with VD at the time. 

“Waiting,” Santana, 1969

Carlos Santana had emigrated from Mexico to California in his early 20s, bringing his Latin music influences to the psychedelic milieu of the San Francisco counterculture. His first project, The Santana Blues Band, fell by the wayside when some members didn’t take their gigs seriously, but once Fillmore West impresario Bill Graham got involved, along with keyboardist/vocalist Gregg Rolie, the new lineup called themselves simply Santana and finagled their way onto the bill at Woodstock, almost stealing the show with a breakout performance. “Waiting,” a percussion-driven instrumental track, opens their debut LP, released two months after the festival.  

“Glow Girl,” The Who, 1968

Pete Townshend was a prolific songwriter, especially in the group’s early Mod days when The Who released multiple hit singles and B-sides and left numerous outtakes from their album sessions in the studio vault. By the mid-’70s, they decided they had enough worthwhile archival tracks to compile “Odds & Sods,” a collection of a dozen great unreleased Who tunes like “Pure and Easy,” “Postcard,” “Little Billy” and the anthem-like “Long Live Rock.” Another fine track, “Glow Girl,” was written and recorded during the 1968 sessions for “Tommy.” The lyric “It’s a girl, Mrs. Walker, it’s a girl” makes it a sort of companion piece to the brief introductory song “It’s a Boy” from the 1969 rock opera.

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Smoke and lightning, heavy metal thunder

Posted on by brucehhackett

(When a friend recently asked me if I’d ever written a blog entry about heavy metal, I recalled having written this piece back in 2015, the first year of “Hack’s Back Pages.” I dug it up and found that it still holds together pretty well. I don’t think I can I improve on it much, and since most of my readers today probably weren’t reading the blog back then, I’m running it again this week. I hope you get something from it.)

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I was 15 in the fall of 1970 when I met this strange, edgy girl in my suburban Cleveland neighborhood, a girl who would later be among those labeled as Goth — dark eye makeup, dark clothes, a creepy, nihilistic attitude.  She invited me to her house to listen to albums, which was one of my favorite activities, so I accepted…except her albums were nothing like my albums, and her room was lit with about a dozen candles and creepy wall hangings.

As I looked through her collection, I asked her to play me her latest favorite, and she lowered the needle on a song called “Black Sabbath,” the leadoff track from the album Black Sabbath by the band Black Sabbath.  The cover showed a sinister-looking woman lurking in the woods, with an old building behind her.  And the “music” — well, it was the sound of a thunderstorm, with a church bell tolling ominously in the distance.  What the hell is this?  I thought.  And then the band came crashing in with these weighty, frightening chords, evoking a sense of doom and death.  I got chills up my spine.

“What is this that stands before me??”  The vocals seemed to grab me by the throat and demand my attention.  I found it unnerving, but mesmerizing, and it went on for more than six minutes.  “Oh no no, please God help me,” the vocalist implored, followed by more sledgehammer chords, first slow and plodding, then eventually triple-time with bass and guitar in unison, drums wailing, before it all came to a cataclysmic, sudden conclusion.

Holy shit.

I’d heard and enjoyed plenty of heavy blues and psychedelic rock — Cream, Hendrix, early Zeppelin — but this was something else entirely.  It kind of scared me, like it was evil, possessed.  I thanked the girl for her hospitality and scurried home, where I put on something comforting like “Sweet Baby James” to make the dark vibes go away.

I didn’t really know it at the time, but I was hearing one of the earliest examples of a new genre of rock music:  Heavy metal.

Full confession:  This is not for me.  I like to think I’m willing to keep my ears open to all kinds of music, but it was readily apparent to me early on that this was not my cup of tea, even when I was a 15-year-old awkward teen, supposedly the prime demographic for it.

Why didn’t I like it?  Well, I’m into melody and harmony, and the subtle nuances of great singing, contagious rhythm and impressive instrumental passages.  Heavy metal isn’t interested in any of that, and the most ardent fans will tell you so.  “F–k melody, just give me volume,” was the bold appraisal of AC/DC’s lead vocalist Bon Scott before he died in 1980 of alcohol poisoning, known in British parlance as “death by misadventure.”

Even heavy metal artists and fans will concede that, for them, it’s all about high volume and heavy distortion, less syncopation, more showmanship, long guitar solos, tons of brute force.  It’s what one critic called “the sensory equivalent of war.”  It’s a duel between the lead vocalist and lead guitarist as to who can get the most attention.  The tone of voice as an instrument in the mix is far more important than what the lyrics are about, which is probably a good thing, because the lyrics are overwhelmingly dark and depressing — “personal trauma, alienation, isolation from society, nasty side effects of drugs, the occult, horny sex, a party without limits.”  And this isn’t me talking; it’s a summary from Ozzy Osbourne, sometimes referred to as the Godfather of Heavy Metal.

The 31-year-old son of a good friend is a devoted metalhead, and he offered this opinion: “After jazz, it was the genre that got me into playing drums and opened my mind to other forms of ‘not so mainstream’ music.  Slipknot, Underoath, Slayer…  Their live shows were unlike any other…just a sea of throbbing heads, aggressive, sweaty, loud, not giving a f–k about what people thought about you.  Deep down I will always be a hardcore metal kid.”

Another friend, now in his 50s, was more pragmatic about it:  “There can be something very cathartic and powerful about heavy metal.  It appeals to lost or outsider kids, mostly, I think.  Sometimes it just fits the bill.  It got me through lots of cold, lonely walks across campus.  You have to be of the right age and mindset… One thing about metal I never got into, though, was the cartoonish ‘evil’ imagery and stupid vibe of the lyrics, which were really kind of laughable.”

It’s not clear exactly when and how the term “heavy metal” came to describe this genre. Scientists refer to various elements like zinc, mercury and lead as heavy metals, which can be toxic but can be nonetheless important to our health in small quantities.  The iconoclastic author William Burroughs used the term in his early ’60s novels “Naked Lunch” and “The Soft Machine.”  The ’60s band Steppenwolf used it in their biker anthem “Born to Be Wild” in 1968 to describe the thrill of riding a noisy chopper down the highway at breakneck speed.

Metal was born in the late ’60s, when bands like Deep Purple, Blue Cheer, The Stooges and even Led Zeppelin were pushing the boundaries of blues and hard rock to become even more thunderous, more caocophonous, more chaotic.  It could be rugged or mysterious, but rarely both at the same time, and hardly ever frightening.  Then Black Sabbath arrived to change the game.  Ozzy Osbourne and Company, originally known as Earth, went over to the dark side with a foundation built on thick, simplistic power chords, tempos that shifted from dirge-like to frenetic, desperate vocals spewing despairing words, and a relentless, basic bass/drums underpinning.

Geezer Butler, bass player for Black Sabbath, recalls, “In some review of our first album, someone called us ‘heavy metal’ as an insult.  It said, ‘This isn’t music.  It sounds like a load of heavy metal crashing to the floor.'”  Lemmy Kilmister, the leader of the British metal band Motorhead, said:  “For me, it needs to be big and it needs to be loud.  In a club, you can have conversations over bands that are playing jazz or pop, or even hard rock.  Nobody can ever have a conversation over my kind of music.  Once we start, you listen or you leave.”

Osbourne, who named his band after a Boris Karloff movie, is remarkably matter-of-fact about the darkness of it at this point in his life.  He said in 2010:  “In the beginning, we decided to write scary music because we really didn’t think life was all roses.  So we decided to write horror music.  We never dealt with the occult ourselves, but all these nutters started sending us letters, and it kind of freaked us out.  If you play with the dark stuff long enough, bad shit happens.”

The audience for heavy metal has typically been white teenage boys struggling to make their way in a world that they think doesn’t want them.  Critic Jon Pareles said this:  “As long as ordinary teen white boys fear girls, pity themselves, and are permitted to rage against a world they’ll never beat, heavy metal will have a captive audience.”  Ronnie James Dio, vocalist for Sabbath after Osborne’s departure, had this to say:  “Heavy metal is an underdog form of music because of the way you dress, how you act, what you listen to.  So you’re always being put down.  It’s this edgy, angry music, and because it pigeonholes the bands and their fans, together we feel strength with each other.”

It was also, let’s not kid ourselves, about sex and drugs.  Bad boy Ted Nugent, now a poster boy for the far right, had disparaging things to say about those who liked his brand of music:  “I toured more for the girls and the sexual adventure than for the music. If all I had was looking at those unclean heathens in the front row with their lack of personal hygiene and stenchy clothes, I’d take up crocheting.”

The reason heavy metal fans became known as “headbangers” is the tendency among fans (and band members too) to aggressively bang their heads in the air to the beat as they absorbed the music.  Think “Wayne’s World” at its most crazed.

Heavy metal remained pretty much a fringe genre for nearly a decade, as punk, disco and New Wave dominated, with the occasional exception like Kiss’s “Rock and Roll All Nite” and “Beth,” both top ten singles in 1975 and 1976.  But then, beginning in the ’80s, bands such as AC/DC, Def Leppard and Quiet Riot not only packed stadiums but went to the very top of the album charts with “Metal Health,” “Pyromania” and “For Those About to Rock We Salute You.”  Between 1983 and 1984, heavy metal albums grew from 8% to 20% of the albums sold in the US market. At the three-day US Festival that year, the Heavy Metal lineup of Ozzy, Van Halen, Scorpions, Motley Crue and Judas Priest drew by far the largest crowds.

The rise of MTV beginning in 1981 helped the heavy metal snowball continue to grow, with outrageous music videos of sex and drugs and rock and roll at its most decadent and hedonistic.  Iron Maiden, Saxon, Guns ‘n Roses, Metallica, Poison, Ratt, Megadeth, Anthrax and others sold millions of albums and concert tickets, thanks in large part to the constant exposure of their videos.  And their audience widened; astute observers recognized that metal fans were no longer exclusively male teens but also college grads, pre-teens and, curiously, females (despite the often mysogynistic lyrics).

Eventually, the monolithic heavy metal audience became fractionalized.  Hard core fans dismissed some bands as “light metal” and fed the desire for more extreme versions.  If you Google “heavy metal,” you’ll see more than a dozen subgenres of metal that claim a share of this audience:  Thrash metal, death metal, power metal, doom metal, gothic metal, sludge metal, rap metal. Even folk metal and Christian metal (really?).  Each emphasizes one facet of the sound or lyrics more than the next.

Heavy metal in all its permutations remains a powerful force in the new millenium among the same audience it has always attracted — teenaged, disenfranchised, mostly male, alienated, pissed off.  There’s a whole slew of newer bands (Bullet for My Valentine, Korn, System of a Down, Linkin Park, Mastodon) to keep the genre alive, but some of the veterans are still cranking out new material.  Even Black Sabbath (the original lineup, including Ozzy) had a #1 album in 2013 with their reunion album, “13.”

For those who are curious, I highly recommend “Louder Than Hell:  The Definitive Oral History of Metal” by Jon Wiederhorn and Katherine Turman.  Many of the quotes included here were gleaned from their comprehensive book.

Clearly, many rock music fans will never like heavy metal.  One music-loving friend summed it up by saying, “I love my rock and roll loud, but I would rather stick a hot poker in my ear than have to listen to metal.  And I don’t want to leave a concert covered with bruises.”

Illegal drugs and violent images aside, it’s a mostly harmless escape, a way to isolate in a sonic bubble with like-minded outcasts for a little while.  In that way, it’s not all that different from other niche genres like opera, or progressive rock, or Australian folk music: It’s definitely not mainstream…but maybe that’s the whole point.

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