Bumper Christmas compilation giveaway madness!

As a modest thank you to everyone who has taken an interest in my blog this year, I’ve put together two short compilations of songs from the late 60s / early 70s that I’ve enjoyed in recent months. The first features heavier material, the second gentler sounds. The acts represented come from all over the world, but are all on major labels.

Cosmic Christmas Compilation #1

Cosmic Christmas Compilation #2

To add an unseasonally competitive edge to proceedings, I'll send a free copy of my new Endless Trip book to the first ramblers who can identify all the songs on either compilation. Good luck!

PS sorry, no prize for guessing the identity of the Santa pictured above

PPS Cosmic Christmas was the awful working title of Their Satanic Majesties Request

Endless Trip has begun!

I'm delighted to announce that Endless Trip is now available to order, priced at £40.

You can buy it direct from the publisher here:

http://foxcotebooks.com/Foxcote_Books/Home.html

or on eBay here:

http://cgi.ebay.com/ENDLESS-TRIP-massive-new-US-psych-folk-rock-LP-book-/270679743590?pt=UK_Records&hash=item3f05c51c66

Enjoy!

Great lost pop papers #2: World Countdown

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This enigmatic publication might well have been the first music-focused underground paper to emerge from California in the 1960s, and was aptly described by Rolling Stone (after its demise) as ‘a peculiar collage of photographs, publicity handouts and occasional ads’. Founded by English expat and wheeler-dealer Charles Royal (assisted by his brother Mark, and also Ellinor and Annette Royal), early issues billed it as ‘The First Worldwide Big Beat Newspaper’, then ‘This Earth’s Leading Newspaper’, with a stated circulation of 500,000 a fortnight. Despite such grandiose claims (and some pretty hip contributors), its distribution seems to have been very limited, and copies rarely surface.

Charles Royal

Its name is rather strange, but makes some sort of sense when you know that Royal had promoted a nationwide Battle of the Bands named 'Countdown 65' in 1965, whose finals were televised, and may have been cashing in on whatever renown that had earned. In the late, great Derek Taylor's autobiography he describes World Countdown as 'a cheerfully apolitical underground newspaper owned and edited by a gigantic red-haired Englishman named Charles Royal, who gave away far more copies than he sold.’

Here are a couple of mastheads:

Attempts to establish its publication history are hampered by the fact that most editions are undated, but it seems to have begun in the summer of 1966 with a ‘Beatles Souvenir Issue’ (see top of this post) to coincide with the quartet’s final show at Candlestick Park on August 29th. Printing initially occured in SF, then moved to Hollywood, with sales via street corners, newsstands and head shops such as The Psychedelic Shop on Haight Street. An issue dating from July 1968 claims that ‘we started publishing in May 1965’, but this is almost certainly inaccurate, and August 1966 seems likely to have been its regular starting date (though one-offs might have appeared earlier). Thereafter publication appears to have been frequent, if sporadic, and I’ve seen an issue from July 1969 (with Led Zeppelin on its cover), around the time it seems to have folded. I don't know how many issues there are, or whether its schedule was weekly, fortnightly or plain unpredictable. Anne Moore, one of its longstanding contributors, tells me: "The paper was supposed to appear twice monthly, but the schedule really depended on when they got enough advertising money to print the thing. That was done by some company in Tujunga (out in the east San Fernando Valley), who printed a lot of local, mostly weekly papers. I think they also ran a few as well. I just remember that the printers and the people involved were typically very straight, and it was rather jarring for them to have these 'hippy' nuts coming into the printing plant. But money is money." 

The paper was variously called Royal’s World Countdown, World Countdown News and simply World Countdown, and its contents tended to be a collage of PR-styled puff pieces about bands both well-known and obscure, syndicated articles from the British underground press (notably International Times), ads for records and hippie accoutrements, and full-page psychedelic artwork and photo-montages. Though it gave consistent attention to heroes like The Beatles and the Stones, it also found room for features on acts like The Common People and The Lollipop Shoppe, who were ignored by everyone else (as far as I'm aware).



Seeds collage, February 1967

World Countdown belonged to the Underground Press Syndicate, whose main condition for joining was that members could freely reproduce each other’s material. This meant that counter-cultural news and information was widely disseminated, but also that much of World Countdown’s content was not unique. Original articles and interviews were not its strength, though it included pieces by well-known rock writers (such as Derek Taylor, Danny Fields and Ralph J. Gleason), and there are fascinating odds and ends scattered throughout the handful of copies I own. It is consistently visually striking, however, and conveys a stronger sense of the immediacy of the SF hippie experience than any other publication I’ve seen. As Beat Books puts it: ‘During the summer of 1967, in its loose and playfully psychedelic visual style, Royal's World Countdown embodied the West Coast vibe. Thereafter it inevitably lost some of its impetus, and by its final year it resembled a considerably more conventional music journal.’

The edition below was published to coincide with the Monterey Festival in June 1967, and is full of pictures and articles relating to it, while the one beneath it appeared in the spring of 1969, and has a lengthy feature / press release about the UK pop-rock band Cartoone:

In its sixth issue (February 24th 1968), Rolling Stone reported some controversy concerning a proposed follow-up Monterey festival to be held at the same site – Charles Royal had applied for a licence, as had the original organisers, but local officials were only willing to allow one event to go ahead. In the event, neither happened.

A small article about Royal appeared in Rolling Stone on February 21st 1970, explaining that he had got God, and moved to Tahiti with his family. Here it is:

Anne Moore says: "You know more about Charles Royal than I do or did. I think I was introduced to him at a party once. My contact was through different people who acted as editors - 'acting' being the big word, since they mostly gathered copy and let us all know when a deadline might be." One of these editors was Martin Cerf, whom Anne remembers well. "Marty was interested in all of it," she says, "from the writing to the layout and final printing. He would even play delivery man at times, going down to the printers and picking up big stacks of copies to deliver around town - to the writers, shops, radio stations and clubs. I remember it was a long, hot drive out to Tujunga to pick up the papers with Marty! He ended up knowing everyone, which helped him land a great job as Director of Creative Services at UA / Libery Records in 1970. However, he had got so interested in how World Countdown was put together that he eventually decided to do his own paper. And he did. He started Phonograph Record." In conclusion, Anne says "I'm surprised anyone knows about or is even interested in World Countdown today. It only gets mentioned now and again, and has faded into the realms of obscurity and very brittle paper. But it's amazing how receptive people were with it back at the time, and it opened a lot of doors for other writing. No one got paid, not even the so-called editors, but we got into any concert, club or party we wanted to. In those days, that was worth everything."


As for Charles Royal, he was clearly an interesting guy, and it's a shame that he seemingly vanished so soon after his venture into music publishing foundered. If anyone has any idea what became of him – or has any copies of the paper – I’d love to hear from them. Issue #1 contains photos of two blond little boys named Bruce Royal and Vince Royal - perhaps they're out there somewhere? Any leads welcomed!

The Deviants: keeping it lean

Mick Farren

It’s usually a bad sign when a band releases successive LPs on different labels, but in The Deviants’ case, signing to Transatlantic for their third LP resulted in their most economic and punchy work. With new guitarist Paul ‘Blackie’ Rudolph aboard (bringing a distinctively jagged and aggressive guitar style with him from Vancouver, despite having a withered right arm from childhood polio), the band entered its most musically coherent phase. Mick Farren has remarked of the album: “I was convinced in my gut that it sucked. It was the first one created by committee rather than the dictatorship of my personal megalomania,” adding that “I had one idea and the rest of them wanted to be a kind of Led Zeppelin guitar band.” Nonetheless, it’s the concise tracks in the latter style that stand up best today. Produced with admirable crispness by Farren, the album certainly isn’t free of the self-indulgence that marred its predecessors, but it contains some ace proto-punk, most notably the vicious Broken Biscuits, twitchy Billy The Monster and lean First Line (whose new-wave sound is a good decade ahead of its time). As Farren told Melody Maker at the time: “We’re not interested in dexterity, or this big technical thing represented by people like King Crimson. That’s so sterile. The function of rock and roll is to get out and have a good time, not to stand in groups marvelling at the guitarist’s technique.”

For some reason, the tiny booklet that accompanied its UK release (in September 1969) has become intensely desirable, pushing the price of complete copies ever higher. This has been partially fuelled by dealers like Malcolm Galloway, who bagged £432 for a copy on eBay last April, jet-propelled by the claim that it was from a 'VERY FIRST PRESS OF 100 ONLY WITH THE 8 PAGE BOOKLET WHICH WAS WITHDRAWN IMMEDIATELY DUE TO SUBVERSIVE CONTENT (EVEN THEN!)', adding that 'THE BANNED 8 SIDED MINI-BOOKLET WAS CONSIDERED TOO SUBVERSIVE BY THE POWERS THAT BE'. Where he got this information from is hard to say, but I would politely suggest that it might be unfounded. For a start, without the booklet, the artwork contains no information whatsoever about the songs, musicians or production. Secondly, the LP itself contains the word 'fucking', which is more offensive than anything in the booklet. Thirdly, who are 'the powers that be' that would care so much about some mild anti-establishment sentiments? Certainly not Transatlantic (after all, it was a proudly independent label, and was glad to pick up Zappa's Uncle Meat for the UK when Reprise declined to issue it over here). It seems to me pretty clear that, rather than being banned, most copies simply got lost. Anyhow, you can judge just how subversive it is for yourselves here:

No reviews seem to have appeared of the LP, despite gigs in France and Germany and a triumphant performance in Hyde Park on September 20th (alongside Soft Machine, The Edgar Broughton Band, Al Stewart and Quintessence). Deciding they needed a change of scene, they accepted manager / speed dealer Jamie Mandelkau’s proposed tour of Canada and the US, with backing from Seymour Stein of Sire Records. Upon arrival in Vancouver, however, it was discovered that local promoters had stitched them up and there was no money to pay them. It was the final straw, and as Farren binged on mid-altering substances, the other members decided to oust him in mid-October. Stunned and disgusted, he returned to London, where he produced Twink’s Think Pink LP and recorded his solo debut, amongst other activities. His former bandmates, meanwhile, limped to San Francisco and began to morph into The Pink Fairies. But that’s a whole other story…

I spoke to Farren about the album earlier this year, and here's what he told me:

Why did the hippie dream die?

We’d all started with such high hopes, way before 1967 (the roots of the underground went back to 1963 or so). Things had gone from there – a gathering storm, if you like. But the so-called underground was never all that realistic for most people. ‘Psychedelia’ was really a commercial construct – bells, beads and kaftans sold well, and the hippie message was packaged up on hits by The Flowerpot Men, Scott Mackenzie and others. The reality was that the police were frisking you on your doorstep and Mick Jagger went to jail…

What was the atmosphere like in the underground by 1969?

The 1968 student revolt had crashed and burned, leaving little but social secretaries on the make, incompetent wannabe terrorists, and scrag-end psychedelic clubs waiting for the coming of Disco. A lot of the optimism was gone. People had taken LSD and expected some great change to happen, but acid did bad things in the long run – Syd Barrett went mad, for a start! People went back to drinking. 1968 was a bad year in many ways – Vietnam, the Paris riots, Czechoslovakia, the Tet offensive, Chicago, Nixon, you name it – and the violence that had always been beneath the surface (mods versus rockers, etc) became more palpable as time went on. People had begun to realise that society at large didn’t want to change. Also, the flower-power gold rush was over; the hustlers were gone, and it was time for hard digging by the real hippies. Trench warfare, you might call it!

What state were The Deviants in by 1969?

We’d been hard at it for 3 and-a-half years, so we were tired out. We’d had constant hassles and harassment from the police, and had taken a lot of drugs, so there was tension both in the band and between the band and society. Paul Rudolph was a great guitarist, but maybe in hindsight we should have gone on the road with him a bit more before recording. By the time the third album was made there was a major schism developing, as we were pulling in different directions. But there’s nothing like a bit of acrimony for producing energy in a band!

Tell us about the LP.

It was recorded pretty quickly and efficiently at Morgan Sound in Willesden. We were off the methadone by then, so it was quite snappy and businesslike. We’d done all the experimenting on the first two albums, so it was a smooth process. We were stripping things down, trying to keep it lean. We weren’t interested in flanging, reverb, echo, double-tracking or any of that – we’d done it all already and wanted a simpler and more direct sound. I liked the cover, but they released the album with a stupid little booklet containing the credits and a bit of rhetoric.

Was Transatlantic a good home for The Deviants?

They were a folk label who wanted to enter the rock market, but didn’t really know what they were doing. Nat Joseph, who owned it, meant well but was more used to one man and his guitar. He’d made his money from Bert Jansch and Pentangle, and didn’t know what rock and roll was all about. Recording bands was more expensive, and though we were quite organised, I think he found the costs a bit surprising. Then they went and publicised their venture into rock music with a ridiculous slogan about Transatlantic being ‘where the electric children play’. I mean, what sort of bullshit is that? But we weren’t very interested in playing the publicity game anyway.

What do you make of the album today?

I’m keener than I used to be, on some tracks more than others. But there are a couple of things I really don’t like. I’m pleased if people still enjoy the music, but it was all a long time ago!

Are you still in touch with the other members?

I’m still very much in touch with Russell and Sandy, and occasionally in touch with Jamie Mandelkau and Paul. There’s no more resentment.