Rogue Transmissions - Demons, Fairies & Wailing Guitars: The Best 100 Obscured Rock Acts 1968-1976 by Ra'anan Chelled (book review)

Book reviews aren't the kind of thing normally done on music blogs, but one book deserves special mention due to its thoroughly researched excellence and its relevance.

Demons, Fairies & Wailing Guitars is a guide to 100 of the best underground bands from around the world whose first recordings fell between the years 1968-76.  More than a simple list, author Ra'anan Chelled provides insight, opinion and detailed biographies on each entry and outdoes himself by scoring multiple interviews with many of the featured artists.  Some of my personal favorite bands profiled in the book are C.A. Quintet, Leaf Hound and Blue Cheer, all of whom I've written about on this blog.  So of course, the first thing I did when this book came in the mail was to flip to those entries to compare notes.  Mr. Chelled has a wonderful power to turn an unexpected phrase and his literary powers are made all the more exceptional when you realize that English is not his native language.  It's a wonderful thing when non-English speaking writers have a fresh take on the language and discover many uncovered nuances of the language, normally hidden from native speakers due to lazy thinking and taking their own verbal heritage for granted, it's just human nature.

Some of the more familiar bands to PH readers covered in the book include Captain Beyond, Hawkwind, Budgie, Pentagram, Cactus and Sir Lord Baltimore.  But really, the beauty of a book like this isn't necessarily in reading about the bands you already know and love, although it's certainly interesting to do so and learn a bit more about those bands, it's about discovery.  Every band in this book is worth checking out.  The second thing I did when the book came in was I flipped to the back index and looked up the references to Black Sabbath and without half trying discovered a new favorite band of the period, one by the unambiguous name of Bang.  They play a garage thrashy seventies style of hard rock, bordering on proto-metal and even proto-doom, they are well worth checking out.  Other of my favorite bands with their own entries are Arzachel, The Churchills, Gandalf, The Open Mind, The Plastic Cloud and Tomorrow.

Each entry is between two and nine pages long with discography and lineup information and Chelled goes out of his way to include other references in "If You Dig:" and "Loved It? Try Also:" sections at the front and back of each profile featuring a whole host of other bands not covered in the book, but these lists are also essential in one's trolling through the backbins of time.

The book is illustrated throughout with band photos, fliers and album covers and of course, for lovers of lists there is a section of lists in the back section.  This book is altogether essential reading for anybody interested in underground psychedelic rock and hard rock from the original psychedelic era for the worlds that it opens and makes a beautiful companion piece to any music lover's collection.

Demons, Fairies & Wailing Guitars may be the best book on the subject of underground psychedelic rock since the trio of books compiled by Vernon Joynson (Fuzz, Acid & Flowers [U.S.], The Tapestry of Delights [U.K.] and Dreams, Fantasies & Nightmares [CA, AUS & NZ and S.A.]) in the late nineties, and those were really more encyclopedias but were really comprehensive.  Chelled gives prominent credit to those publications in his Foreword.  I often wonder how future generations will view this underground world of stoner rock / doom metal twenty or forty years down the road and I suspect it will be with the same reverence some of us music nerds view that wonderful period of psychedelic / hard rock from the period 1968-1976.  I can hardly wait for the re-issues, the bonus tracks, the unearthed treasures and compilations and the books like Demons, Fairies & Wailing Guitars.

The print run of this book is limited to a hundred copies and each one is signed and numbered by the author himself.

Rating: 5/5

Page Count: 501 pgs

From: Tel Aviv, Israel

Genre: Non-fiction, Music, Psychedelic, Hard Rock, Prog, Krautrock

Reminds me of: Tapestry of Delights, Lysergia.com

Release Date: January 23, 2013

Suggested reading activity for fellow non-stoners: Sit in a tree and freak out the squares, man!

GET IT HERE FOR KINDLE

OR HERE AS ePUB FOR ADOBE READER

FOR HARD COPY:

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Blue Cheer - Vincebus Eruptum (classic album review)

RETROTATION #4 - BLUE CHEER

Taking their cue from their Hell's Angels' buddies machines, Blue Cheer were explosive, heavy and loud.  In fact, they called themselves the loudest band in the world and who knows, with 24 speakers in six amps at time when, they just might have been.  Jim Morrison called them "The single most powerful band I've ever seen".

The opening track of 'Vincebus Eruptum', "Summertime Blues" is considered by many to be the very first heavy metal song, it predated Steppenwolf's "Born To Be Wild" by a matter of months, but followed in the wake of Vanilla Fudge, Cream & The Jimi Hendrix Experience by a matter of many more months, let alone heavy contributions from The Rolling Stones, The Pretty Things and The Yardbirds.  But the point is a moot one because everybody knows that Black Sabbath was the first heavy metal band.  Were Blue Cheer heavier than Black Sabbath?  Nope.  Thing is Blue Cheer came first and were right up there among the heaviest of their era and are deserving of the respect they receive as pioneers.  But these days their classic output would be better recognized as belonging to the stoner rock genre than heavy metal and that will be our starting point.

Blue Cheer started out life as a sextet in the burgeoning heavy rock scene of San Francisco in early 1967, just in time to be a part of the Summer of Love and to witness Jimi Hendrix's inflammable set at the Monterrey Pop Festival, after which they divided their forces by two to end up as a very Experience-like power trio (Dickie Peterson - vocals / bass, Leigh Stephens - guitar / vocals & Paul Whaley - drums).  The band was managed by a guy named Gut who was mentioned in Hunter S. Thompson's Hell's Angels, Tom Wolfe's Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and On The Road by Jack Kerouac, which must only have served to increase their loud and heavy profile.  Some reports claim he was a full patch member of the Hells Angels, others that he was a hang-around and it's none of my business, except to give the reader an idea of the heavy and intense company this band kept.  This motley mix of band and management moved to Boston (an excellent destination for fuzzy rockers, even back then) and scored a top 20 hit single with their aforementioned high octane version of Eddie Cochran's classic "Summertime Blues" (Billboard #14 May 4 1968).

The classic lineup l-r: Peterson, Stephens & Whaley

It was quickly followed up by the release of "Just A Little Bit" a song off their next record 'Outsideinside', which was yet to be released.  Bands were more prolific in those days, or so it seemed.  More accurately, record companies wanted them to be and tried not to give the record buying public a chance to forget a hit making group, which is why bands like The Beatles, The Stones, Manfred Mann and The Hollies et al, released as many as six singles and two long players a year for much of the sixties.  Many bands were under tremendous pressure to deliver the hits on a ridiculously frequent basis and many sober minded witnesses believe that this is what drove Syd Barret to the brink of self-destruction and eventual exile from The Pink Floyd.  The tactic didn't quite pay off for Blue Cheer as "Just A Little Bit" peeked into the Billboard charts at number 92 and was quickly forgotten by mass audiences.  The subsequent full-length record didn't fare much better hitting number 90 on the album charts, a flop by pop standards, especially when compared to 'Vincebus Eruptum's number 11 placing.  Ironically, 'Outsideinside' was a much more streamlined affair, better suited to popular tastes than 'Vincebus Eruptum's sprawling free-flowing and swampy jams.

The title of the first record is deserving of some attention as the question of a perfect translation to the phrase has largely been a mystery.  Some translation sites on the web will pull up the result "conquering attack" or "conquering explosion".  But the true story behind the title is that Vincebus Eruptum (pronounced win-kay-bus ee-rupped-um) was coined by friend of the band Charlie Osborne and was intended to sound like a Latin phrase meaning "control of chaos".  Dickie Peterson confirmed this on the Steve Allen show in 1968.  When asked what the title of the LP meant, he said "controlled chaos".  When asked where they got their songs from guitarist Leigh Stephens replied, "arsenals".

'Vincebus Eruptum' is loaded with moments that would not sound out of place on many current records reviewed on this blog.  "Out of Focus" is a fine example of this.  Sounding equal parts 'And the Circus Left Town' era Kyuss, Kadavar, Heat and Witchcraft, this song speaks to the influence this album has had on the passing generations. Not just anybody stumbles onto this record.  The curious, the knowledge-seeking, those who wish to glean a better understanding of where their music comes from find 'Vincebus Eruptum'.  And those that do find it, find it absolutely mouth watering.  Heavier and fuzzier than CCR, Iron Butterfly and Vanilla Fudge put together, louder and dirtier than Cream, The Jimi Hendrix Experience or Steppenwolf, more immediate and accessible than flower power bands like Country Joe & The Fish, The United States of America or The Crazy World of Arthur Brown, Blue Cheer were a monster band with a monumental sound.

Their influences are immediately obvious.  The spirit and some of the ideas of The Jimi Hendrix Experience and Cream are tangible, especially in the syncopated blasts of "Summertime Blues", but they were no copycats, they had many innovative ideas of their own.  By the time they had appeared on Steve Allen they had six amps with 24 speakers and they were looking to add more.  Steve Allen himself, who had an obvious and well-documented disdain for rock & roll and its progenitors could not help but be impressed with the power of the band, noting their music as an intense visceral experience that had to be experienced live.  This drive to constantly turn the knobs up to 11 and beyond was not lost on the succeeding generation who would go on to create the genre of heavy metal.

Their penchant for stop and turn on a dime dynamics has since spawned an entire industry of imitators.  It was something they had borrowed from 12 bar blues that they did in a unique way.  While in a typical blues song you might get that pause on the last line of the verse before the backing band comes back in with a syncopated and descending riff, Blue Cheer might cut the pause time in half and crash back in with a double time improvisation.  The guitar flourishes on "Doctor Please" and solos in "Out of Focus" sound like they could have been performed by Dave Chandler himself and there's little doubt that a young Chandler played along with this record.

If there were ever a band whose output embodied the sound of the thousand cc engine of a Harley Davidson, it was Blue Cheer.  Leigh Stephens left the band between the release of 'Outsideinside' and the band's third album 'New! Improved!', reportedly because he was going deaf.  'Vincebus Eruptum''s raw performance is a snapshot of a band discovering their own power and exploring it.  Their legacy is secure, far reaching and ever expanding.  It all started with this 'Vincebus Eruptum'.

Blue Cheer were the band that their fans wouldn't let die.  Main man Dickie Peterson left the band numerous times throughout the years but kept returning flying the freak flag high.  They disbanded several times throughout the years undergoing frequent lineup changes.  Their final album was 2007's 'What Doesn't Kill You ...'.  The band finally called it a day in 2009 after the death of Dickie Peterson.

Highlights include: "Out of Focus" and "Summertime Blues"

Rating: 4/5



Tracklist
1. Summertime Blues (3:47)
2. Rock Me, Baby (4:23)
3. Doctor Please (7:53)
4. Out of Focus (3:58)
5. Parchment Farm (5:50)
6. Second Time Around (6:18)
Total Run Time: 32:06

From: San Francisco, California

Genre: Fuzz Rock, Stoner, Psychedelic

Reminds me of: Cream, Iron Butterfly, Jimi Hendrix Experience, Steppenwolf

Release Date: January 1968

Suggested listening activity for fellow non-stoners: Tribal anthems for bikers in Cimmeria.

The Pretty Things - S.F. Sorrow (classic album review)

RetRotation #3 - December 1968

It's splitting hairs trying to decide who did the first what in music.  What does it matter that The Beatles weren't the first band to use the sitar as a lead instrument in rock music when they were certainly the ones to popularize it?  The Pretty Things' 'S.F. Sorrow' is considered by many to be the first true concept album, an opinion which is wrong on many levels.  However, it was one of the first, and just may have been the the first full-length album recorded with a single narrative thrust tying each song together in a single cohesive story, therefore making it, perhaps, the first ever 'rock opera', a claim which may also be wrong, but let's not split hairs.  By the time of the album's release, in late 1968, there had been many concept albums and the psychedelic music thing had largely come and gone, discarded like any other fashion trend once folks sobered up a little and caught a glimpse of themselves passing by a mirror.  The tale of S.F. Sorrow is another of those, 'lost classic' stories you hear so much about from that late great psychedelic epoch of rock music.

The Pretty Things started out as the raunchiest rock and roll band in the UK.  They were to the Stones what the Stones were to the Beatles.  Their first two albums are some of the finest blues inspired raw rock and roll one will hope to find from mid to early sixties Britain and the band had enjoyed a string of successful singles including "Midnight to 6" and "Rosalyn" to name a couple.  In fact the band's first seven singles all charted in the UK.  On their third album, 'Emotions', the band tried for a horn infused, poppier sound to less than stellar results.  Before long, it was time to record a follow-up, a return to the hard rock sound they were known for, but it wasn't time to forget all the lessons learned from the 'Emotions' album.

Dateline: Abbey Road studios, London, England, November 1967.  Work is in progress on the follow up to The Beatles  'Sgt. Pepper' album.  There's tension in the formerly Four Fabs camp and the quartet can be seen recording each of their parts separately when not squabbling among each other and no one seems to be impressed with John Lennon's new girlfriend.  Down the hall a newer band called The Pink Floyd, a handful of singles and a single full-length album into their young career, are busy recording tunes for their sophomore full-length effort.  The recklessness of madcap frontman Syd Barrett means the band face an uncertain future.  They've had to pen a clutch of new material without their resident tunesmith and have drafted a new guitarist into their camp in the form of David Gilmour, but their colorful light shows and wild live performances have built quite a reputation for the band.  Further down into the building we come across a group of has beens, former hitmakers who just don't seem to have it anymore, recording the follow up to their disappointing third album 'Emotions'.  It's a record that will see the band part ways with drummer Skip Alan.  Ultimately no one will hear it and it will go on to produce no hit singles.

Three classic albums all recorded at the same studio, at the same time, 'The Beatles (White Album)', 'A Saucerful of Secrets' and 'S.F. Sorrow'.  It's like the division of time, past (Pretty Things), present (The Beatles) and future (Pink Floyd).  The record buying public only had room on their shelves for two of them it seems.  At least that's how the band's label appeared to approach things with little in the way of promotion for S.F. Sorrow.

As for the music itself, The Pretty Things had completely outdone themselves and had proven, albeit too late by the time the album arrived in record shops across the country, that they had outdistanced the competition in terms of breadth, depth, scope, tone (heaviness) and vision.  Let's take a look at each of the tracks of 'S.F. Sorrow'.

"S.F. Sorrow Is Born" has a nice descending riff and though played on acoustic guitar still comes across quite heavy.  As an introduction to the story, they keep the song brief but still full enough to stand on its own as a full song, rather than it being a throw away micro-song.  One of the major criticisms of The Who's 'Tommy' is that the musical ideas seem rather sketchy to some, that the abundance of short songs gives the album the feeling of not being properly fleshed out and having been cobbled together in a roughshod fashion.  The Pretty Things don't do that.  Each song on this album is a part of a whole, but is its own musical statement which conforms to the structural standards of the day.  "S.F. Sorrow Is Born" features many of the production cliches of its time: backwards guitars, high harmonies and wailing horns for the chorus and coda.  The album is full of these little production touches that were so in vogue in late 1967.  By late 1968 however, they were tired, relics of a bygone era.  That's how fast the trends in rock music moved in the 1960s, especially in England, where there's a discernible difference between songs released from year to year, if not season to season.

"Bracelets of Fingers" continues the trend of backwards guitars and psychedelic ambiance.  Throughout the album and on this song in particular, the backwards effects aren't gratuitous but flash and slash by, as do a great deal of unnameable effects and noises, the backwards slashes usually lead the listener to a change in the song as a way of focusing the attention.  It's a technique that's used tastefully and effectively.

"She Says Good Morning" is a perfect example of how the band and producer Norman Smith used stereo to focus the listener's attention.  Guitars, vocals and even drums drift in on purple clouds from out of nowhere.  From the ether, man.  This song however, is one of the more grounded and sober efforts on the album.  The kind of song the band would have had little difficulty in recreating live (although it's said the band couldn't play the album live, there's no way to tell without records whether or not they played any songs from the album live).  The song's charms lie in its terrific bass line, and vocal / guitar melodies and the changes of pace and tempo from the drums.



The next two tracks were released as a single in advance of the album's release.  It wasn't too common for a UK record label in the 1960s to release album cuts as a single, as there was a policy not to 're-release' singles on an album and vice versa, presumably this policy was conceived as an attempt to keep the sale of 7" singles high.  "Private Sorrow", the a-side of the single, is a flute driven military march, and a killer song.  The b-side "Balloon Burning" is a very heavy song with progressive rhythms and a very memorable and dreamy high harmony for the chorus.  It's the kind of song that was more in step with the climate and the progressive leanings of the time that would soon take over rock music for the next several years until the birth of punk.  The label might have done well to flip the single but the marketing of this album was an afterthought and is full of potential second guesses.

"Death" is a bass driven slow waltz dirge with a very memorable bassline.  "Baron Saturday" has an almost afro-funk beat, double tracked for a mid-song breakdown / freakout.  The band uses shakers and tambourines with slices of mellotron (nipped from The Beatles while on break) to memorable effect.  "The Journey" begins as an acoustic guitar and bongo driven high harmony showcase but soon breaks down into a wall of sound with samples and snippets from the rest of the record.  The Pretties didn't bother to build songs up slowly, they would stop and turn on a dime, a technique used on their earlier "Defecting Grey" single, which was the first song these recording sessions for 'S.F. Sorrow' had yielded.  The transition to "I See You" is flawless.  A delicately plucked melody is played on acoustic guitar and is cut through by chainsaw strains of electric guitar.  At this point in the record it's clear that The Pretty Things had mastered their craft, each of their choruses are terrific and memorable, the flow of ideas is masterful.  Slowed down and distorted vocals which speed up close out the song on a coda of "taking the steps, the steps to see".  "Well of Destiny" is a short sound painting, the only instrumental on the album and is very reminiscent of some of the more adventurous flights of fancy from Pink Floyd's 'Piper at the Gates of Dawn' album.

"Trust" is a mellotron infused slice of progressive pop with a very memorable monotonous and extended vocal line during the verse.  Jangling piano and harmonies that float in and out of the background with crashing cymbals and shakers make for a very psychedelic atmosphere.  "Old Man Going" is a standout track, the heaviest thing one is likely to hear from the 60s.  I've mentioned the song before in my Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell review.  The album is capped off with a short mournful acoustic track, "The Loneliest Person".

Thus concludes the story of S.F. Sorrow from birth to death.



Eventually, the album found a smallish audience of psychedelic rock enthusiasts in the 90s and is now firmly established as one of the great albums of the original psychedelic era and a true classic, once lost and now found.  I would rank 'S.F. Sorrow' near the top of my favorite albums of all time and I know that I'm not alone.

The Pretty Things are still very much an ongoing concern and they will be appearing at Jus Osborn's Electric Acid Orgy at Roadburn this April.  Doubtlessly, they will be performing some cuts from this album.  There's more than enough classic material to chose from.  Either way, it'll be a great event and I envy those that are attending.  For those of us that aren't going, there's always a great album or two to curl up with and my suggestion for listening material is The Pretty Things' 'S.F. Sorrow'.

Highlights Include: "Old Man Going" and "Balloon Burning"

My Rating: 5/5



Tracklist
1). S.F. Sorrow Is Born (3:08)
2). Bracelets of Fingers (3:39)
3). She Says Good Morning (3:19)
4). Private Sorrow (3:51)
5). Balloon Burning (3:48)
6). Death (3:06)
7). Baron Saturday (3:59)
8). The Journey (2:46)
9). I See You (3:56)
10). Well of Destiny (1:46)
11). Trust (2:46)
12). Old Man Going (3:08)
13). Loneliest Person (1:27)
Total Run Time: 40:32

From: London, England

Genre: Psychedelic Rock, Progressive

Reminds me of: Pink Floyd, Small Faces, Tomorrow

Released: December 1968

Suggested Listening Activity for fellow non-stoners: An electric acid orgy sounds like a good idea.