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However, it's the songs that really promote the
proto-psychedelic posture. This entire album sounds like it was
recorded around the same time as the first Moby Grape and Buffalo
Springfield albums. You can hear echoes of both bands so clearly
throughout that it's easy to imagine Jerry Miller or Steven Stills
popping in from the studio next door to scrounge a replacement for
a broken guitar string.
At this stage the whole hippie thing has not yet
quite coalesced, but in a nearby rehearsal room John Phillips is
handing his old former Journeymen bandmate Scott McKenzie a copy
of a song called "San Francisco (Wear Some Flowers In Your
Hair)" that his new band the Mommas And The Pappas has not
gotten around to recording. Sometimes erroneously referred to as
"Are You Going to San Francisco?" by lazy journos who
only know the song from the radio, but have never actually held
a copy of the single in their hands or let a little bit of research
get in the way of a long lunch, the subsequent recording soon will
be radiating out of radios everywhere, attracting the first widespread
media attention to hippies outside the music press.
Then the "summer of love" will spark a
media feeding frenzy of gargantuan proportions, at the same time
helping to crystallize in the public mind the perception of all
such "psychedelic" music as the "San Francisco sound",
a new style based on a combination of radical protest and extended,
improvised instrumentals, often with the aid of exotic instruments,
both newly electronic and arcanely acoustic. Plus plenty of those
tantalizing drugs everybody is talking about and gimme some of that
free love too while you're at it! Oh, and let's not forget the flowers
and beads which are suddenly such a prominent feature of every magazine
article and newspaper weekend supplement. Even the staid accountancy
students that you occasionally bump into at the bus stop on weekday
mornings are burning a bit of incense when they get home and stepping
out on weekends in paisley, beads and headbands. Peace and love
man!
In the meantime, less ambitious (and less sophisticated)
garage rockers from the east and the mid west are rubbing shoulders
with local blues and jug band refugees, star struck singers and
would be entertainers working their passage to the west coast and
folkies drifting around all over. Grouping and rearranging themselves
in endless temporary permutations, many of them are creating concise
pop songs that mix raw three-chord rock with fuzzed guitar, straightforward
lyrics and harmonies that owe more to the polished popular folk
of the Kingston Trio than the increasingly complex multi-part vocals
of commercial pop (remembering that everything on the radio was
"pop" in those days - the emergence of "progressive
heavy blues" hadn't yet turned "pop" into a pejorative
on FM, nor had AM begun its laborious retreat into "easy listening").
During this period, while everybody was waiting
for Sgt Pepper to march "the band" into public view, the
Beatles' "Revolver" was a major signpost and perceived
roadmap to the future, but so were the Yardbirds' singles with Jeff
Beck, the pre-prog orchestral excess Moody Blues, the Pretty Things
and the Zombies (who remained popular in the US, long after the
glow of their one British hit had faded to grey in England). So
too were the forerunners of power pop like the Kinks and the Who
(whose "Sell Out" album would reveal before the end of
the year Mr Townshend's strong interest in going well beyond three
minute songs for the radio). The recordings they inspired by local
bands around the globe were kept simple through a combination of
limited studio budget (and technical facilities), lack of musical
proficiency and the desire/aim of the bands to record what they
were actually playing on stage. Shortly they would all fall by the
psychedelic wayside, squeezed out of that category by the likes
of the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver Messenger
Service and Country Joe & The Fish (and to a lesser extent,
Eric Burdon and the first of his many reconstituted Animals).
Nor would they manage to infiltrate their way into
the other musical categories which subsequently proliferated among
the "underground" cognoscenti, like folk rock, country
rock, art rock, prog rock, acid rock and heavy metal, instead finding
themselves cast adrift in a "pop" category increasingly
seen as something totally manufactured and artificial, before ultimately
being dismissed as merely the less sugary forerunner of bubblegum,
that ultimate commercial insult to modern music. Ironically these
other new cool categories so popular with the counter-culture eventually
were turned into handy marketing tools themselves, while it took
the formulation of a new category to reintegrate the resulting sixties
proto-psychedelic pop diaspora back together into "garage punk".
Opening with the heavily Byrds-ish "Save My
Life", the Grip Weeds appear to whisk us back to those last
short lived halcyon days when "pop" still meant simply
"neither jazz nor classical", enthusiasm was every bit
as important as ability and album packaging had not yet reached
the point where the increasingly elaborate fold out covers were
so extensive that it took longer to read the cover notes and absorb
the visual imagery than it did to play the records they contained;
when it was still permissible to write bright and bouncy songs that
could be catchy "pop" without having to fit readily into
whatever particular sub-category was finding favour with the critics
that week.
However the Grip Weeds' intention is not mere artistic
appropriation/retro-revivalism, nor is "Save My Life"
just a Byrds pastiche. For a start, it sounds like Keith Moon is
playing the drums and most of the very early Jefferson Airplane
are crammed into the studio helping out on the harmonies, which
also serve to emphasise how psychedelia's "folk" roots
relate more to the Kingston Trio than the likes of Woodie Guthrie
or Pete Seeger.
Amongst these thirteen originals, rounded out by
a cover of Pete Townshend's relatively obscure "Melancholia"
(apparently done originally for a Who tribute album), the legacy
of the sixties is held up to the light, finely sifted, sorted, selected
and used as the basis for synthesizing a musical continuation -
as if most of the period from 1968 to 2000 never happened and 1967
was followed directly by 2001. Make no mistake though; the Grip
Weeds are looking forwards from 1967, not backwards from 2001.
The Byrds do recur from time to time, with a touch
of "Eight Miles High" guitar work on "Don't Look
Over Your Shoulder" (which otherwise sounds like Moby Grape
jamming with Led Zeppelin on a lost demo for "Physical Graffiti"),
while "Love That Never Ends" is positively drenched in
the Byrds' signature Richenbacker jingle jangle. Meanwhile "Is
It Showing?" sounds like it could be a cover of a previously
unknown outtake from "Who Sell Out" and "Changed"
is quite a comprehensive compendium of Jefferson Airplane from "Surrealistic
Pillow" through "After Bathing At Baxter's" to "Volunteers",
but listen closely and it sounds like a whole host of other sixties
greats are jostling for attention from the back of the studio as
well.
Not surprisingly traces of the Beatles turn up continually.
For example the harmonica on "Rainy Day #3" is more Beatles'
"Love Me Do" than anything ever attempted by Bob Dylan,
while "Window" has a strong under taste of "All Things
Must Pass" beneath a soundscape that seems to be an assortment
of middle-to-late period Beatles influences as interpreted by Jan
Akkerman and Focus, circa "Hamburger Concerto", and "Moving
Circle" sounds like a reworking of something originally intended
for "Rubber Soul". On the other hand "She Surrounds
Me" sounds more like classic Buffalo Springfield, only with
John Entwistle on bass, "Love's Lost On You" sounds like
an escapee from sessions for the Litter's breakthrough "Emerge"
album, "Life And Love, Times To Come" sounds like one
of Jimmy Page's early tabla and sitar experiments and the title
track sounds a lot like early King Crimson - and not just in its
similar use of mellotron.
In the last few years, Sweden's Soundtrack of Our
Lives have made considerable progress toward expanding the legacy
of the sixties by creating an extensive range of new "sixties
classics" of their own. Their approach has been far more broad
brush, while the Grip Weeds keep their focus far narrower, at least
on this album (which is apparently their third). However the point
is not what specific influences you can pick (and I continually
find myself scratching my head over snippets which, if they aren't
direct musical quotations from obscure sixties classics, certainly
sound like they should be), but the fresh musical ideas with which
the Grip Weeds elaborate on those sixties sounds, managing to combine
an historian's detailed scholarly interest with an apparent naive
innocence, as if all this was only discovered in the studio during
the recording process.
Did I say earlier that enthusiasm was every bit
as important as ability? Well, while that is true, having buckets
of both isn't necessarily any drawback either. Of course having
their own studio does give them the luxury of redoing things until
they get them right, unlike the "nuggets generation" for
whom it was usually: take one, maybe take two, then take it or leave
it... Mercifully the Grip Weeds manage to avoid the excesses of
many of the later psychedelic bands, for whom an indulgent six months
spent ensconced in a studio "getting their heads together"
sometimes left them out of touch with reality (though the coda on
"Window" does go on a little longer than seems truly necessary).
So ultimately is there any point to this album when
the sixties decade produced so much great, authentic "'60s
music" of its own - aside from giving younger generations the
chance to discover for themselves an early psychedelic classic that
they haven't already heard their aging parents playing to death
for most of their formative years? Well there were plenty of great
songs back then, but in truth not nearly as many albums as consistent
all the way through as this one. Anyway, when world doesn't have
enough room for a few extra '60s classics, then the place won't
be worth living in any more.
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