Monthly Archives: July 2007

It’s possible, as Joseph Lanza did in his Vanilla Pop: Sweet Sounds From Frankie Avalon to ABBA, to trace an unbroken lineage of effervescent vocals from the Four Lads all the way to ABBA, counting groups like the Chordettes, the Lettermen, the Fleetwoods, Chad & Jeremy, the Sandpipers and the Carpenters along the way. Lanza argued, convincingly so, for such artists’ place along a vanilla continuum of smooth, ethereal studio pop.

It’s pretty easy to dismiss unapologetically clean-cut harmoneers like the Lettermen. Uptempo choral fare like 1971’s “Everything Is Good About You” seems as square now as it did at the time. More than just their soothing qualities and easy palatability, such groups understood the potency of vocal harmonies, though.  The same crew, for instance, might deliver something at a slower tempo, and there the effect of the Lettermen was entirely different. A ballad like 1966’s “Our Winter Love” (hear excerpt here) is hypnotic and transcendent. With a sympathetic engineer and a narcotic cascade of studio echo, groups from the Flamingos (“I Only Have Eyes For You,” excerpt here) and the Association (“Never My Love,” excerpt here) to the Anita Kerr Singers (“Forever,” excerpt here) could transform dog-eared ballads.

This is one of the unappreciated beauties of harmony-pop: it can be pure Valium. Harmony-pop summoned twilight reverie and wistful romantic fantasia for the hi-fi escapist.  The fact is that this week’s artistes didn’t have to strive to sound like drugs. They already sounded like drugs.

1. The Ultra Mates, Pitter Patter (CRC Charter)
A dirge tempo, eerie female harmonies and cavernous echo evoke dark nights of serious teen melodrama. The cold rain never felt so warm and inviting.

What can be said of Ultra Mates?   They were in reality a group comprised of for-hire female session singers – Darlene Love, Jean King and Fanita James – singers who’d also record together occasionally as the Blossoms.  (Jean King would enjoy a solo career in the ’60s as well.)  Recorded at Gold Star Studios in 1963, where Phil Spector realized his finest work, it’s King providing the lead voice on this atmospheric and pre-psychedelic relic.   The songwriter here is likely the same Debbie Stanley responsible for another obscure girl-pop confection, 1964’s “Gary’s My Love” (with “It’s Him I Wanna Go With Mama” on the flipside).

CRC Charter Records was around for a few blips in the early ‘60s. A West Coast subsidiary of MGM Records, the label existed long enough for one hit, Johnny Beecher’s nocturnal instrumental “Sax Fifth Avenue.”

2. Mercy, Love (Can Make You Happy) (Sundi)
The Mercy saga began with a group assembled by Jack Sigler, Jr., who wrote this selection as a high school student in Tampa Bay, Florida.

The group’s biggest hit, “Love (Can Make You Happy)” was ultimately released in two different versions. The first version – this version – was recorded and released in 1968 on Sundi Records, a label run by Florida impresario Gil Cabot. At some point in their story, however, Mercy would attract the notice of the powerhouse label Warner Brothers, who signed Sigler and company on for a full-length album (1969’s Forever) while simultaneously releasing a remastered “Love (Can Make You Happy)” for 45 release. A somewhat ill-advised move on Warner Brothers’ behalf, perhaps, but both versions of the song proved popular, their cumulative sales landing Mercy the number two slot for a week on 1969’s pop charts.

Vying record labels meant that the band that toured as Mercy in the late ‘60s was not necessarily the same crew who recorded as Mercy, however. Furthermore, Gil Cabot, eager to seize upon the fame of his recently departed charges, rushed out a competing album attributed to Mercy (The Mercy and Love Can Make You Happy) that was comprised of cover versions, Jack Sigler demos and various odds and ends.

Mercy’s story, though complicated, was certainly not atypical in the exploitative tumult of the ’60s entertainment business. Nor was “Love (Can Make You Happy)” atypical of harmony-pop in general, and it’s impossible here to resist comparing it to another sunrise meditation, the Velvet Underground’s “Sunday Morning.”. Both songs bubble with sensuality and hypnotic instrumentation.

3. The Shannons, Mister Sunshine Man (L&M)
Little is known about the Shannons, who released this confection around 1968. From its warm ripples of harmonies and tremolo guitars down to its dazzlingly naïve lyrics and vaguely Baroque touch of the harpsichord, “Mister Sunshine Man” is pure California sunshine pop.

Undoubtedly from Los Angeles, the Shannons’ “Mister Sunshine Man” was written by Johnny Cole, an obscure studio songwriter who also penned songs for the Sound Sandwich, a California psychedelic group (who also covered “Mister Sunshine Man” in 1968, incidentally)

(Ed. note: This is the second installment of, God willing, an ongoing series on sitar 45s. The saga began here. – Little Danny)

Starting with its early and perhaps most famous pop appearance on the Beatles’ “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown),” the sitar was the right instrument at the right moment. Its drones, its flurries of exotic scales – the sitar inherently sounded psychedelic while simultaneously evoking India, that composite Western fantasy of all things mystical and heightened-consciousness. The sitar captured a counterculture’s imagination to such an extent that to hear the instrument today, even in the hands of classically trained musicians, is to evoke hazy visions of beads and flower child gullibility.

It’s always the ‘60s bands we hold dearest which we believe to have played their own instruments. Everybody knows the Monkees were a prop, we can accept that. We still want the Byrds to have played their own instruments on “Mr. Tambourine Man,” however, and Love to have done the same on their Forever Changes album. But they didn’t. With so much ‘60s pop, it’s not always easy to discern the genuine article from the handiwork of studio surrogates.

No such confusion with sitars in play however. By 1967 any hip record producer would have been keenly aware of this new subcontinent fetish and would have coveted the sitar. Of course, being unwieldy instruments, fragile and complicated to tune, sitars were – when procured at all – played by trained studio musicians like Bill Plummer, Vinnie Bell or Mike Deasy. Many American ’60s garage bands probably coveted sitars, too, but they were many times likelier to have guitars that they played like sitars.

Heard in a ’60s pop song the sitar usually means only one thing: played by professionals. Sitars would remain almost categorically an instrument of the big studios. This week on Office Naps, we again examine the sitar, a celebration of pop music masquerade.

1. The Ceyleib People, Changes (Tygstl) (Vault)
“Changes (Tygstl),” from 1968, comes to us from a loose-knit group of Los Angeles session musicians that, when not maintaining a hectic schedule in the studio world, was indulging in some seriously unencumbered grooviness.

The young whiz Ry Cooder, for one, played guitar on this selection. So too did stalwart session guitarist Mike Deasy, who, along with the sitar duties here, co-wrote this under the pseudonym of “Lybuk Hyd”. Deasy and Cooder would be joined by Joe Osborne (bass), Larry Knechtel (bass and keyboards, later in Bread), Jim Gordon (drums, later in Derek & the Dominos), and jazz keyboardist Mike Melvoin. Even in 1968 these were names unlikely to evoke more than blank stares. Reading charts for a Mancini film soundtrack one week, interpreting Brian Wilson’s instructions the next, these guys loomed large, however, as core members of the “Wrecking Crew,” the studio group who, amongst their thousands of sessions, played on some of the classic Phil Spector and Beach Boys productions.

“Changes (Tygstl)” is the highlight of the Ceyleib People’s Tanyet LP, an entire album of Eastern-inspired meanderings from 1968. Was their Tanyet a purely creative response, an experiment and a means to exorcise urges long stifled by too many Jan & Dean sessions? Or was Vault Records (which served mostly as a West Coast subsidiary for R&B and jazz giant Atlantic Records) simply attempting to cash in on the vogue for all things Aquarian? Like so much in ‘60s Los Angeles pop music, the answer isn’t straightforward. The answer lies somewhere in those cracks between opportunism, dissolution and creativity.

This would be the sole 45 culled for release from the Ceyleib People’s Tanyet album.

2. The Believers, Soul Raga Cookin’ (Capitol)
Capitol Records, though responsible for some top-notch psychedelic LPs, hadn’t quite navigated the straits of late ‘60s pop and rock with the same savvy as West Coast label rivals like Warner Brothers, A&M, Reprise, Dunhill and Uni.  The Beach Boys were becoming increasingly irrelevant by 1969, at least in terms of their chart success, and the Beatles, with their newly founded Apple Records, had negotiated their Capitol contract down to a distribution-only agreement a year earlier.  Pink Floyd wasn’t yet the powerhouse, and Grand Funk Railroad had just made a somewhat forgettable debut album.

But Capitol Records was, by other standards, still a bona fide industry powerhouse. Among other late ‘60s sellers, the label enjoyed the unrivalled popularity of a host of Southern-inspired pop-country artists. Bobbie Gentry (“Ode to Billie Joe”), Glen Campbell (“By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” “Wichita Lineman”), and Joe South (“Games People Play”) belonged to a group of artists that was in some ways a stylistic vestige of Capitol’s pioneering Bakersfield country sound and that, in other ways, engendered a hipper, unclassifiable brand of Southern pop-country.

Joe South wrote and produced this particular selection. Born in Atlanta, South was already a rising phenom in the early ‘60s, a seasoned country and R&B session guitarist in Nashville and Muscle Shoals who would later develop into a talented singer-songwriter. A series of solo records on Capitol commenced for him in 1968, and so, too, did the crossover hits. South compositions like “Games People Play” and “Walk a Mile In My Shoes” defined his idiosyncratic, country-flavored blend of soul, folk, and pop. With their occasionally psychedelic and electronic production, they were improbable hits then, and odd, if highly enjoyable, relics today; South is remembered better for covers of his own compositions. “Hush” (Deep Purple), “Down In the Boondocks” (Billy Joe Royal), “(I Never Promised You a) Rose Garden” – Joe South compositions all.

“Soul Raga Cookin’” came from the sessions that comprised South’s third LP, 1969’s Games People Play. This trippy selection was excised from the same jam that served as the backing track for South’s “Hole In Your Soul,” and attributed to “The Believers.” (Sharing their name with the Joe South opus, “Be a Believer.”)

“Soul Raga Cookin’” is many things: psychsploitation artifact, boogie raga with Bo Diddley beat, cosmic swamp brew. Capitol obviously tossed this single out there in the hopes that at least one of its component parts might stick.

But that isn’t a real sitar we hear. It was an electric sitar, an instrument that looked very much like a guitar, that was played very much like a guitar, and that generally lived up to its name.

Joe South is today semi-retired from the music business. Check out a vintage clip of him – with electric sitar – at his website.

3. The Flower Pot, Wantin’ Ain’t Gettin’ (Vault)
The Flower Pot was, like the Ceyleib People, a Mike Deasy vehicle.

Deasy must have felt very strongly about this composition. Its Dylan-inspired free associations and funky, flower-power aesthetic made just enough loopy sense that Deasy prevailed upon West Coast sunshine popsters the Association to cover it on Insight Out, their third album. The two versions are nearly identical, and it’s not clear whose – the Association’s or the Flower Pot’s – was released first.

It isn’t clear, either, who is singing on “Wantin’ Ain’t Gettin’,” whether they were a “real” group or, more likely, a studio composite. It is undoubtedly Deasy who we again hear on sitar, though, and again he is mashing the hell out of the instrument’s drone strings. He was probably joined here by some of the same session players – like Joe Osborne and Larry Knechtel – who’d played with him on “Changes” (and on the Associations’ version of “Wantin’ Ain’t Gettin’,” as well).

This artifact was released in 1967. Deasy, with California sunshine pop producer/arranger extraordinaire Curt Boettcher, would release yet another full-length album of budget-priced rainbow thrills the same year with his Friar Tuck and His Psychedelic Guitar LP on Mercury Records. Its recent reissue includes Deasy’s two singles from the Flower Pot.