Updated 11/10/13      This is a work in progress!

The roots of the West Coast Branch started growing in Inglewood, California, a medium-sized suburb in the South Bay just a few miles inland from the beach. Chuck Marchese played a little music at Inglewood High School with a couple of his friends when he first met Jon Hill. “Jon (Hill) and I didn’t really run with the same crowd in school but when he ran for student body president, he asked my trio (two guitarists—Scott Williams and Bob Sheppard and Marchese on drums) who were doing mostly Chuck Berry and Jimmy Reed covers to play a concert during lunch period to promote his candidacy, and we became friends.

When Marchese graduated in 1964 he faced the typical teenage dilemma. “When I got out of high school at seventeen, I was just a kid with no plan except going to the beach. Dad said I either had to go to college or get a job, those were the choices. Well, I already knew school wasn’t my thing but it would take a few weeks of bagging groceries at Von’s Market on La Tijera and Centinela for me to know for sure that work wasn’t for me either. I was really going to have to grow up here or something and I wasn’t into that either! I was just about out of options. Then, a minor miracle happened.”

The miracle came in the form of a rock band. What kid didn’t want to be a rock star? The Beach Boys from neighboring Hawthorne were already making hit records and the Beatles had just done their thing on Ed Sullivan. The Byrds and Turtles were starting to become known locally too.

“Craig Long, a guitar player and school buddy of mine, saved my life,” Marchese recalls. “He offered me a full time ‘job’ playing drums with some guys at a club in Inglewood called The Preview. The Seeds had been the house band there but their record ‘Pushin’ Too Hard’ had propelled them into stardom and out of the Preview.”[1]

“Craig took me to the lead singer, Joe Luster’s, house to meet the rest of the guys and, as I remember it, I brought along another school friend, Jon Hill (the same guy who’d run for class president), who played a multitude of instruments and was into the same funk, blues, soul and R&B music I was into. So we all went to Joe’s, met the other band members, and played together and I guess we all liked the way it was sounding and Jon and I were hired.”

The lineup was Luster on vocals, Marchese on drums, Rick Jamison on bass, Gene Fontaine on guitar and vocals, Craig Long on lead guitar, and Jon Hill on rhythm guitar. That day the guys jammed on some contemporary tunes by Them and the Animals, but Marchese had some ideas of his own about how he wanted the new group to sound. “Later on I brought some of my favorite records over to play for the guys like, ‘Your ‘Ol Lady’ by the Isley Brothers and ‘It’s All Over Now’ by the Valentinos to try and inject a bit more funk into the band.”

Next up was to create an identity. Animals and plants were big in L.A.—as they had been in England—what with the Leaves and Byrds and Turtles around. “We named the band the Twigs, to play off of the Seeds thing a little, and badda bing, we were working at a club! Whew, Saved from growing up!”

The Preview Club in Inglewood featured bands on weekends playing alternating sets. The place was run by a fellow named Red, and while the guys had fun playing the club, it wasn’t that great of a money making venture. “Now, ‘Red,’ the owner of the Preview, was a likable fireplug of a guy but he wasn’t big on parting with money,” Marchese remembers, “He ‘gave’ us food and booze nightly (but ran a tab), and sometimes let us and a few friends hang out, drinking and playing pool after the club closed, but when it came time for cash to exchange hands there was usually a problem. Every now and then he’d say, ‘Hey, here’s a couple hundred on what I owe you, slow week, sorry.’” The upside was that the Twigs really got their act together and were able to work out their sound, which by this point was leaning towards gritty R&B. Remembers Marchese, “We had a lot of fun anyway, and over most of that year we spent most days rehearsing and nights playing the club and got pretty tight, as a band and as friends.”

Besides getting tight, the other big benefit of playing the Preview didn’t pay the bills but it sure made life a lot more interesting and fun, especially for some kids right out of high school. Recalls Marchese, “Aside from growing as a player, the one big perk I got from that job was dating, for a few wonderful months, my first girlfriend. A waitress there named Toni French who was thirty-something and liked to dress me funny. (Hmmm, so did my parents…) But it was a lot more fun with her, and a lot more educational than high school.”

In the summer of ’66 Marchese was still living at home but was gravitating more and more westward on the weekends to the beach towns. “That summer, the band guys were hanging out a lot at our bass player, Rick’s, house on The Strand at 2nd St. in Hermosa Beach or at our singer, Gene Fontaine and Lee Aaker’s house, also on the Strand.”  Aaker was a fellow Inglewood High alum who’d become an actor,  playing Rusty on the Rin Tin Tin TV series.

For those of you unfamiliar with “the Strand,” it’s a ribbon of concrete at the edge of the sand that stretches from El Porto to the north to the Redondo Beach breakwall in the South. For decades it’s been the place to hang out, skateboard, watch girls etc. Black Flag’s Keith Morris would reference those days in the song “Wasted” a few years later in 1978 (“I was so heavy man I lived on the Strand”). Living on the Strand was even better than just hanging out there. There were constantlty parties and plenty of pretty stewardesses because of the nearby LAX airport. Marchese and Hill decided they’d like to spend more time down there in the sun and they looked to get a gig down in that area. Remembers Chuck, “We found a local club called the Flying Jib in Redondo Beach and decided to audition.” The Twigs went in and played a few numbers and got the job. They could literally walk up there from their pads on the Strand.

Located at 610 N. Pacific Ave., just a few blocks up from the King Harbor Marina, the Flying Jib occupied a small Polynesian-looking building. Nowadays it’s part of the offices for the Dive ‘n Surf complex there, selling wetsuits and diving gear. The club had been called Crispin’s Hut in the early ‘60s and featured a low-key place for beach types to hang out. There was folk music and comedy too, much like the other Southern California spots like the Icehouse in Pasadena and the Insomniac in Hermosa Beach. Comedian Pat Paulson did a stint there. The Beach Cities were pretty happening at that time, there was the Smothers Brother’s club Cisco’s in Manhattan, the Revelaire Club in Redondo, Linda Ronstatd even lived in Hermosa for a while right when she moved to California from Arizona. The Jib’s new owners were Don McGee and his wife Mary who was a motocross racer! The two were part of a biker crowd that rode with Steve Mcqueen. Their plan for the Jib was to get the club a little more lively with full bands and dancing.

Remembers Jib regular Will Schaff (Wich Stand) on Facebook, “McGee received a temporary dance license in December 20, 1965, then the actual dance license…The city council approved it in December so the Jib could be open for a New Years Eve party.” McGee began booking rock groups like the Rick and the Ravens (featuring a pre-Doors Ray Manzarek).

“The Jib was a small place but it had big ambiance,” Marchese recalls. “It was all rough-hewn timber inside—dark and nautical. A long bar ran down one side of the room and across from it, a small kitchen with an open grill. Along one wall were removable panels (storm windows) that opened out into a fenced in patio, giving the small room a wide open, outdoorsy feel. In one corner (under the stairway that led to a smaller upstairs barroom with two pool tables and a guy named Benji serving drinks), was a tiny (I mean tiny) stage with two guys playing guitars and singing. Those two guys, I later learned, were ‘No Pants’ Lance Carson, a well known local surfer/beach kid, and (the late, lamented) Steve Aaberg, a blues guitar man thru and thru. The sound of those two guys really filled the room and there was a young, appreciative crowd that hung there. Laid back beach people, mostly—in shorts, t-shirts, tank tops, sandals—a bunch of local, happy drunks. We liked the atmosphere and the crowd. Next thing I knew, we were working there. After a few changes, that is.”

These changes had to do, unsurprisingly, with illicit substances. Remembers Chuck, “First of all, our name. The Twigs needed to go. Twigs, seeds, stems—these were all things you threw away. We needed a more substantial name but we wanted to maintain some continuity with our brand and the following we had thus far developed as the Twigs. So we chose one that perfectly reflected our move from Inglewood to Hermosa Beach, ‘the West Coast Branch.’ We were branching out!”

In reality the name change coincided with a lineup change so the West Coast Branch was kind of a new group altogether. “Around the same time Rick, our bassist, (who was also in law school) and Gene who was a singer songwriter in his own right (and didn’t need a job, he had a trust fund), decided to leave the band. We were left in a quandary for a minute until a guy named Barry Gott, whom I presume Jon Hill knew from his high school track days, suggested a friend named Mike Costanza for the spot. Mike was a perfect fit for us, sure and solid, and we had a band again.”

Costanza was not from Inglewood but West L.A. where he attended Hamilton High School and played varsity football. Remembers Mike Costanza, “I knew ‘trackist’ Barry Gott through a mutual ‘trackist’ friend. I graduated in ‘64 but was supposed to have graduated in ‘65. I had skipped ahead a grade in elementary school—too smart for my own good—as evidenced by dropping out of UCLA for a couple of years (‘66/’67) to play with the WCB! I guess I was the youngest, ‘outsider’ (not from Inglewood) member of the WCB.”

Costanza was originally a guitar player who first started learning to play after graduating at 17 from Hamilton. By the time he’d dropped out of UCLA in his sophomore year in early ’66 he’d managed to play some music (rhythm guitar and lead vocals) with a West L.A. R&B/surfer band called the Legends, whose biggest paid gig had been a weekend stint at Disneyland. But the Branch needed a bass player so that’s what he was brought in to do. “I’d never played bass for more than two minutes or so before the WCB,” Costanza admits, “I auditioned with my old green Gretsch guitar. I didn’t even have a bass at the time.” Apparently Costanza kept this little secret to himself as Marchese recently admitted, “I don’t remember ever knowing Mike had never played bass before until now!” Still, that was his duty, as certainly no one else was going to switch over. “I always attributed that to being the least musically accomplished/knowledgeable of the three guitar players in the band at the time,” Costanza admits.

Costanza borrowed and learned to play bass on-the-job at the Jib with Jon Hill’s Fender Jazz Bass, which he played until late ’67. One night he lost it by absent-mindedly leaving it in its case in the middle of a street in Inglewood while changing cars as the Branch was rushing to a second late night gig at the Hullabaloo Club in Hollywood after playing at the Jib earlier that evening. He borrowed a Vox bass back stage from one of the other bands and made due with that for the rest of the evening. Soon after he bought a red Gibson hollow body bass and played that until the Branch split up in ’68, by which time he’d managed to pay Jon back for the lost Fender bass — ouch!)

The vibe at the Jib was a much better one than the original group had experienced at the Preview. Remembers Marchese, “The owners, Don and Mary McGee, were a big change for us. Very early on, I think all of us in the band felt more like family or friends than employees. Don and Mary were nice people, open-minded and wanted this place to work for the musicians as well as the patrons and they welcomed our input, however crazy it would eventually become. Working within the confines of the tiny club, the West Coast Branch came up with a master plan. “First thing we needed was a stage big enough for five guys plus our equipment and in about a week, we had one. Next, a P.A. system bad enough to compete with said equipment—done. With the ‘Age of Aquarius’ dawning all around us, we soon wanted a strobe light over the dance floor—done. Our favorite records on the jukebox—done. They were usually open to whatever we came up with.”

Things got even wilder as time went on. Like the Third Eye club down the street (The one with the Buffalo Springfield standing in front of the painted wall) that had been the surf stomp spot the Revelaire, the Jib soon became psychedelicized.

“We decided it would be cool, in a purple haze I’m sure, to do some collages here and there on the walls and ceiling beams, maybe add some black lights and fluorescent paint. They handed us the keys to the joint and turned us loose and in no time the Jib became a ‘psychedelic shack.’ They trusted our instincts and gave us kids a pretty free hand in creating, what we felt was a cutting edge, comfortable and ‘trippy’ environment. And judging by the lines outside the door most nights, it worked. All those people certainly weren’t coming there just to hear the band, it was the total ‘Jib vibe’ that brought people in. The little club soon became a South Bay attraction.” The pay was much better at the Jib as well. The McGees paid the group off the books so more went into the guys’ pockets. “I recall making $84 cash-money a week!” recalls Costanza. To top it all off the group was now playing with Fender-sponsored dual cabinet amps.

In mid-’66 the group was approached by a scout named Steve Fazio who represented Al Kavelin Productions and Valiant Records.  “Al Kavelin told us his claim to fame was having produced the hit ‘Alley Oop,’ remembers Marchese. “He had street cred,”  Seems Valiant was keen on getting into “the singles selling bag,” as label president Budd Dolinger told Billboard magazine on Oct. 2^nd of ’65 in an article about new 45 releases from the Lords (doing Dylan’s “On the Road Again” and “She Belongs to Me”), Denny Provisor, and the Motleys; several of which, he believed to be “in the same selling category as disks now making the charts.”

The West Coast Branch went into the studio and recorded three numbers, the first being a fuzzed-out version of Willie Dixon’s “Spoonful” which they learned from the Howlin’ Wolf version. The Blues Project recorded it around this time as well, and both versions predated Cream’s version which didn’t come out in the US until ‘67. The Branch’s take is slow and heavy with atmospheric buzztone guitar.[2] The second song recorded was an original folk punker called “Linda’s Gone,” written by Hill and Luster, also with fuzz and some very Stones-influenced guitar playing with churchy pre-psych background vocals and a Leaves/Monkees kind of verse—sorta like what the Turtles were doing on tuff stuff like “Outside Chance,” but much grittier!

These two songs were released as “Spoonful/Linda’s Gone” (Valiant 753) towards the end of 1966. That day the group also recorded an as-of-yet unreleased song called “And Others.” “I actually played guitar and not just bass on ‘And Others’ as I recall.” says Costanza. “It had an odd drum beat that I was rather proud of and the engineers name was John Haeny”[3], adds Marchese. The group had to join the Musician’s Union to enter the studio, they recall. “It was a total waste of time having to become a paying member of the L.A. Musician’s Union because of the record contracts,” Costanza recalls. The record didn’t do all that well on the radio but it did create some buzz citywide. At some point the group was approached by a couple guys who wanted to manage the group and convert them to Scientology!

Sometime around this time the group landed a gig at Bido Lito’s  in Hollywood where Love had gotten their start. Fellow musician Len Fagan recalls, “That’s where I first saw them, and they immediately became one of my ‘new’ fave bands. They reminded me the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, and when I first approached Jon at Bido’s after a set to tell him how much I dug them, he told me I could get their 45, ‘Linda’s Gone,’ at Wallich’s Music City and I rushed over there and purchased it. The record was on my turntable quite frequently. They were better than some of the so-called blues bands from Hollywood. Unlike too many of the Hollywood bands, the WCB were actually good musicians, and seemed more interested in playing their music, rather than gigging because they hoped to pick up some groupies/chicks—though I’m sure they also did THAT !!”

Marchese remembers the gig at Bido Lito’s being an important milestone for the group. “We met two girls there, Candace Jacobs whom we all called “Candy,” and Linda Quilicot, known as “Quily. They were good friends with Arthur and the guys in Love and regulars at Bido Lito’s and we either met them when we went to the club to see Love perform; when we auditioned; or when we actually did the gig, I don’t remember. But they were a pair you can’t forget. They taught us a lot about the people of, and the scene in Hollywood; introduced us to some very interesting people; and guided us on many daytime and after hours excursions to old Hollywood haunts like Bronson caves, the Hollywood sign, the geodesic dome house, etc., and eventually to Canters Deli on Fairfax for breakfast, or whatever it was at that hour. We met their families and friends and they became close friends of ours, and Flying Jib regulars too. Candy later married our singer, Joe, and Quily married Craig. I still consider them among the close friends I can count on a hand or two.” Often after Bido Lito’s the band would end up at Ben Frank’s on Sunset Blvd. There they were introduced to Rodney Bingenheimer, who Marchese describes as “a famous ‘Groupie come celebrity’ that actor Sal Mineo supposedly nicknamed ‘the Mayor of Sunset Strip.’”

In October of ’66 the group drove up to San Francisco to play at the California Hall with Moby Grape, Lee Michaels, and a group called the American Dream on October 28th. According to Ross Hannan in an interview with Moby Grape’s Peter Lewis, the show was sparsely attended. Moby Grape was still in its embryonic stage and this was apparently the band’s first show in the City. Up until then they had been practicing during the day and performing in the evenings at the Ark, a nightclub on a paddlewheel steam ship called the SS Charles Van Damme in Sausalito. It seems the Branch may have played at the Ark that week as well. “(Branch manager) Don McGee arranged the week long tour for us,” Marchese remembers. “We did do some other gigs in the area that week, one in Sausalito. It was like playing the French Riviera to me.” How the Branch got booked in the Bay Area is unknown though its possible that either McGee had some sort of relation with the Grape’s manager Matthew Katz or that the connection was through Mike “The Bull” Bolan, a Flying Jib hanger-outer who would later serve as guitarist for Mount Rushmore, a San Francisco-based heavy blues act that played the Ark as well. Anyway, after the Bay Area gigs some of the guys decided to stick around and check out the scene. “Craig and I rented a couple of rooms in a large hippie house on Haight St. and stayed there for a few weeks after the tour,’” adds Marchese. “I think the rent was twenty bucks a week. There was no electricity in the house but the brothers and sisters living there taught us how to make an oil lamp out of a couple of jar lids with a piece of cotton cord from a mop as a wick to fight back the night while Craig played his electric guitar acoustically and we’d sit up singing and talking till daylight. We’d walk a couple of blocks to Panhandle Park to catch the free concerts that happened there rather spontaneously. All the local ‘Frisco’ bands played for free in the park (and Vito’s dancers freaked us) but the Steve Miller Band with ‘Curly’ Cook and Boz Scaggs really killed me. Frisco was magic back then.”

Meanwhile the scene at the Flying Jib was really happening. People flocked in from all over to the tiny club with the pool table upstairs. The age limit for guys was 21 but for girls it was only 18 (“Oops for some of the group!” adds Costanza.). All sorts of substances were imbibed, from “Red Mountain” wine coolers to marijuana and psychedelics. Jib-regular Jolene Firgens remembers there was something for everyone, “The place was filled with barbo freaks to the left and beer drinkers to the right!” “Thank god for the 4×4 posts in the middle of the dance floor that kept me from falling over while trying to dance,” remembers another female attendee.

If you look around in online forums and chatrooms you’ll quickly see that people still love to talk about how much fun they had at the Flying Jib. A guy named Lonnie Argabright remembers, “In 1967 I was home on leave from the Navy for 30 days and spent almost every night at the Jib. Most of the Torrance Beach crowd hung out there and alot of my friends were there. I can’t remember the bands name but they were great, they played ‘Friday on My Mind’ for me every night and it was hot! Costanza remembers the Easybeats record being in the jukebox so maybe Argabright remembers it from that. The Good Guys from Manhattan Beach played there a few times. Drummer Don Boomer recalls that the crowd was so gleeful “you’d get a standing ovation just for showing up!” though it could be hard to keep it together in the crammed space. “I remember the ceiling being so low over the stage that I accidentally stick drumsticks into the acoustic tiles of the ceiling.” Even Hollywood bands like the Sons of Adam came down to play. But through it all it seems the West Coast Branch were the local faves.

Inglewood-born Ed Wedemeyer remembers catching the Branch there often. “Used to see them once or twice a week. I went to high school with Jon Hill, the rhythm guitar player and I thought they were one of the best acid rock and blues bands around. Their version of ‘Smokestack Lightnin’ was the best I ever heard. I think they could have hit it big.” Costanza thinks Wedemeyer must have confused “Smokestack Lightnin,” which they didn’t cover, with “Spoonful,” which they did. Then again Marchese does remember it being part of the set list, along with versions of “Born in Chicago,”  ”Little Red Rooster,” “Johnny B Goode,” “I’m a Man,” Traffic’s “Pearly Queen” and “Down the Road Apiece” (“a medium shuffle we would often open with, a warm up number we borrowed from the Stones.”). “I remember we used to play What a Shame & Talkin’ ‘Bout You (Stones) adds Costanza.” Towards the end of their set they’d play a few originals, like “And Others,” “Colors of My Life,” “Linda’s Gone,” and a Joe Luster-penned number that Marchese remembers being called “Thoroughly Modern Millie” though “maybe my memory of it was inspired by the movie of that name.” The finale was often “Caravan,” with an extended drum solo by Marchese. “Everyone used to leave the stage for 15 or 20 minutes,” he recalls.

Interestingly another band that often played the Jib was called Smokestack Lightnin’, the same group who’d go on to record a heavy blues LP for Bell in ’69 and even get a billboard on the Sunset Strip. Back in the Jib days they were a more groovy thing, as evidenced by their White Whale 45s, which even charted locally. Remembers Marchese, “Back when I knew and loved them Ron Darling (whom I’ve tried to track down) sang lead, Howard Newhouse was on rhythm, and Kelly Green on bass, and I think they had another guitar player, too.” Steve Michaelson (who later played drums with Joe and Craig in a group called Sneaker Jones after the Branch break up) may have been the drummer early on, to be replaced by Art Guy, who had been a member of the Minutemen and had even recorded a couple of amazing 45s on his own, one for Original Sound with the Guys in ‘65 —“Walkin’ by the School/Funny Feelin’” (Original Sound 56) and one for Valiant in ‘67—“Where You Gonna Go?/Teenage Millionare” (Valiant 762).

“The Flying Jib also had some great guest bands,” recalls Wedemyer. “One, in particular, was called the Sot Weed Factor. They played often at the Topanga Corral also which was near the top of Topanga Canyon and the crowd was mostly shit kickers and bikers. Interesting venue, to say the least.” The Sot Weed Factor were originally from Tuscon, Arizona and did one record for Original Sound in ’67—a cover of the Who’s “Bald Headed Woman” backed with “Say It It is Not So” (Original Sound 76). “Say It is Not So” is a great punk folker with an intro that’s awfully close to Love’s “The Red Telephone,” especially interesting as the SWF’s record came out in September and Love’s didn’t appear until a couple month’s later in November.

Also performing at the Jib in ’67 were the Spontaneous Combustion, a group that featured Lance Fent who’d been a member of the Crossing Guards and had recently left the Peanut Butter Conspiracy. The group consisted of Fent on guitar, Duff (?) on bass, Len Fagan on drums, and Ronald Bonk on piano. “During the days the Monterey Pop Festival was happening up north, we played at the Jib all that week, and I’m almost certain we were the only band on the bill that week, because we played 4-5 sets per night,” recalls Fagan. “We might have even been there for two weeks straight, or maybe we were invited back at some other date, to do another week-long gig there. I was only 19 years old during my time in SC (while the other guys were at least five years older than me) and I felt I was more in tune with what was currently happening in the clubs and on the streets, musically. The PBC began as a folk rock band, a genre that was fading fast, and no matter how hard I tried to encourage the rest of the band to player harder, louder, and to write some real contemporary rock songs, both Lance, and Duff were longtime folkies, and couldn’t (or simply didn’t) come around to my way of thinking. Then Lance’s wife Caroline was christened the new lead singer of the band. I was very upset because this monumental addition to the band was done while I was out of town; the prospect had never been discussed before; and I made it clear that I wasn’t happy with their decision as soon as I was told about it. We played two to three nights at Bido Lito’s with the latest lineup, and I was almost ashamed to be playing drums with Caroline fronting the band. I made my feelings clear, and was kicked out soon after. Truth is, if I hadn’t been booted out of the band, I almost certainly would have quit within a month of my dismissal anyway. I had always wanted to be in a band with muscle, a dark, foreboding, appearance, and an old fashioned R n’ R rebellious nature, and SC didn’t turn out to be what I’d hoped it would be. I would have felt more at home in the West Coast Branch, in fact.” Fagan was replaced by John Maggi who’d go on to record with Turnquist Remedy when SC finally broke up.

Peanut Butter Conspiracy in Griffith Park. Lance Fent is the guy in the hat.
from http://www.officialclearlight.com/

But back to the West Coast Branch! Sometime in the spring of ’67 the group signed a contract with A&M Records to record another record. A&M decided to “augment” the Branch with some professional musicians at the recording session in West Hollywood. As a result the sound is much more of a polished, sunshiney one than the group’s previous release. “I do remember A&M management brought in some studio guys on one occasion and wanted Joe to leave the group and go solo,” recalls Marchese. “I must have been a bit out of it by then,” Costanza adds, “I remember recording “Colors of My Life,” but I don’t remember much of anything about “Where is the Door?”, except of course, that Joe sang on it, but I never knew what anyone else in the WCB did on it. I think I just missed that day!”

“Where is the Door?” was the featured side and written not by the group, but by the professional songwriting team of Stan Rhodes and George Goehring.  The fancy production was handled by A&M staffer Larry Marks and arranged by Leon Russell, the same pairing responsible for Gene Clark’s “Echoes” just a couple months prior. The flip, “Colors of My Life,” was another Luster-Hill original composition with great lyrics and a psychy Association-like sound. “’Colors of My Life’ was the one we tried to sell even though we couldn’t even play it very well since it wasn’t really us who recorded most of it!” admits Marchese. “We performed/promoted  it (or tried to, anyway) in Bakersfield,” adds Costanza.

COLORS OF MY LIFE

If I had my way I think I’d leave
Thoughts before eyes I can unseen
Stand inside myself and then the walls come tumbling down
I must find a way to get my feet back on the ground

Colors of my life go flashing by
I can’t even stop to peace unwind [and quiet?]
There are things that can’t be changed they just go on and on
Though these things aren’t a rearranged it doesn’t mean they’re wrong

Everything I do is part of me
All these things are planned consistently
There are grooves which you must follow they are [going wrong?]
If you stand outside the line your kingdom has to fall

Colors of my life go flashing by
I can’t even stop to peace unwind [and quiet?]
Stand inside myself and then the walls come tumbling down
I must find a way to get my feet back on the ground

Around this time Jon Hill got drafted but claimed “conscientious objector” status and was able to remain stateside. “He was working days at the main Salvation Army store in downtown L.A. for free, sleeping four hours; going to play at the Jib; sleeping four hours; and returning to work every day for the term of his enlistment,” Marchese recalls. “I don’t know how he did it.”

During the summer of ’67 the group’s reputation kept expanding beyond the South Bay and they were asked to do a free show at the Easter Love-In in Griffith Park by the merry-go-round along with dozens of other groups. Beginning as impromptu Human Be-Ins over by the Greek Theater and Fern Dell, these pretty-much word-of-mouth gatherings were getting larger and larger and were moved to bigger areas like Elysian Park and the other side of Griffith Park by the merry-go-round. This one was the biggest one yet and even featured out of town groups like the Grateful Dead and the Steve Miller Band. It’s a little unclear as to who all played that day but local bands like Clear Light played sets, as did Alice Cooper in his first L.A. appearance with his group the Nazz. “I remember that playing at the Griffith Park Love-In was a great experience,” Costanza adds. “I recall we got a really nice and unexpectedly good reception—didn’t we fare even better than Iron Butterfly?” MArchese thinks they did. “Mostly I remember sitting in front of the stage watching the Steve Miller Band in rapt awe. Maybe it was the acid, but they always blew me away. I also remember the L.A. Police Dept. sending swarms of new recruits from the nearby police academy down to the park, swinging clubs at all us ‘Peaceniks,’” he recalls.

Later that summer the West Coast Branch was offered a run at the Cheetah Club in Venice Beach at 1 Navy St., opening for the Seeds and the Boston Tea Party. There are pictures of the outside of the club with the West Coast Branch and The Seeds on the marquee. Master info-digger-upper Corry Arnold surmises online, “I am pretty certain that it is the week of August 15-20, 1967. West Coast Branch is playing during the day (at the time of the photo), The Boston Tea Party at night (it says ‘Tonight’) and the Seeds are headlining later in the afternoon (3pm). This would cause me to think it was Sunday, August 20, 1967. Of course that was a big night for Seeds-singer Sky Saxon—he was turning thirty!

Next up for the Branch was a residency at a new club called the Happening at 2905 Sunset Blvd. at Silver Lake. The Happening was a short-lived nightclub/head shop/boutique for the acid set. It seems to have been open briefly during the spring/summer of ’67. There are a couple ads in the L.A. Free Press that give us a little info. The first is from the club’s “grand opening” May 19th with musical guests the Nomads and the Zoo. Also advertised (I would imagine figuratively!) was “liquid sunshine direct from the Avalon in San Francisco” and “Animal Huxley of Cheetah fame.” Of course Huxley deserves an entry to herself—she was the grandaughter of Aldous, one of Vito’s dancers, a Zappa associate, etc. Also part of the Happening was something called The Zap Palace, “a total electro-audio-visual environmental experience on ceiling, walls and you!” I would imagine there was some Zappa involvement or crossover (“ZAP PAlace”) or at least someone hoped it’d be construed as such. There was at least one “Free Concert and Get-Together” in Glendale’s Scholl Canyon Park a year or so later presented by “the Zap People” which may or may not be related to this. The second ad we’ve dug up is for June-2-4 with Smokestack Lightning, Zone 26, and Outlaw Blues Band. Here we can see how word-of-mouth got bands gigs as these are all bands the Branch had or would share stages with. The ad mentions “dancing every weekend” so we’re guessing it lasted at least another month and that the Branch’s tenure there was sometime early that summer. Interestingly this room formerly housed an establishment called Club Zarape (and at some point the Havana Club). It also has some Black Dahlia murder connections you can find by poking around online m. The building is actually still there, though it has been seriously altered and is now called the Silversun Plaza. For those of you who live in the neighborhood, the club was upstairs and is now a dentist office.

Mike Costanza also mentions that someone in the band “remembers playing a gig on a revolving stage somewhere and our lead guitar player (Craig Long) chasing the outlet to plug his amp into. That makes me think he’s thinking of the Aquarius Theater which I do remember playing at even though we were all on acid that night.” This was probably October 7th, 1967 at the Hullabaloo Club for something called the 118th Annual Edgar Allen Poe Electric Memorial and Breakfast, a benefit for the Student Mobilization Committee Conference at East Los Angeles Junior College. According to an ad read on KFWB by DJ B. Mitchell Reed, the performers were to be the Steve Miller Blues Band, the Kaleidoscope, the W.C. Fields Memorial String Band, the West Coast Branch, Taj Majal, Bluesberry Jam, and the Outlaw Blues Band, with lights by the Thomas Edison Memorial Flash. Tickets were just $1.50 and including breakfast which would be served at 2AM. This was probably the night Costanza lost his bass in Inglewood on the way to Hollywood after playing the Jib earlier that night. Oddly, Phil Lesh lost his Guild bass at the Hullabaloo as well when the Grateful Dead played there four months earlier. The Hullabaloo of course became the Aquarius Theater sometime in ’68.

Another big gig for the Branch was a return to the Cheetah to open for Big Brother and the Holding Company on what was advertised as their first L.A. appearance on Saturday December 2^nd, 1967.

Mesnwhile the A&M record didn’t really go anywhere for the guys and the group began to implode. At the Flying Jib things were changing too. Says Costanza, “I remember Don and Mary becoming more and more involved with a ski resort somewhere, and then things just sort of fizzled out for me after that.” “The ski resort was in Sun Valley, Idaho,” remembers Marchese, “Don and Mary were big skiers too.” Another reason for the group’s downfall was Craig Long getting drafted. “That really ended the Branch,” admits Marchese. “We could have gotten another guitar player but it wouldn’t have been the Branch. By that time, I felt like playing with some other people too, trying new ideas out with players I had met in the ensuing years.” “My dad died in ’68,” remembers Costanza. “And the last thing I recall was playing at a fairly big gig on a Malibu Beach.”

I have a suspicion that this large gig on the beach in Malibu was actually documented in the intro to Hal Jepsen’s surf flick the Cosmic Children. There are bands shown playing in the footage, and though they are clearly not the West Coast Branch, it could fit the description of the scene. Furthermore, there are stories of the Steve Aaberg Band playing outside in Malibu around then, and he too was a Jib performer. We’ll see.

In the end the Flying Jib outlasted the West Coast Branch, well, sorta anyway. The group split in late ’67 and  Marchese and Craig Long started a new group called Streamlined Baby with Chris Pritchard and Floyd Fletcher. “When we played at the Jib Don and Mary said our music made people wanna fight!” recalls Marchese, “I’m all peace and love, man!” When that group dissolved Marchese and John Hill briefly played with Alexanders Timeless Bloozband. By ’68 Marchese, Pritchard, and ATB’s Charles Lamont joined up  with Jimmy Carl Black in the post-Mothers group Geronimo Black. Tragically, the Jib burned down a few years later but it was rebuilt to almost exactly how it had been before. Bands like the Berries (who later changed their name to the Band of Angels), Jumbo (with some members formerly St. John’s Green), and Sage kept playing there up until at least 1973. Even after the Branch Marchese continued to frequent the Jib. “Two other bands that were my favorites there were, Joe Mama, with Danny (Kootch) Kortchmar on guitar, Ralph Schuckett on keyboards, Charlie Larkey on bass, and Abigail Haness swapping lead vocal duty with Kootch and another Inglewood High alumni, Mike Ney, on drums. The other was the Mann Beavill Blues Band, the only member of which I knew was guitarist, Steve Aaberg, who was one of the two guys playing onstage that first time I walked into the Jib. Mann Beavill was one of the grittiest, funkiest, drivingest blues bands I have ever heard. The lead singer had a ZZ Top-style beard and wore coveralls. I’m pretty sure one of the members was later killed in a bank holdup attempt. No bullshit guys, were these.”

If you knew the West Coast Branch or the Flying Jib or any of the bands mentioned here and can fill in more details on any of this, please drop Erik a line at westcoastfog@gmail.com
Thanks to Chuck Marchese, Mike Costanza, Jonathan Hill, Paul Gammage, Gary Schneider, Chuck Kelley, Gray Newell, Colin Mason, Ross Hannan, Corry Arnold, Domenic Priore, Richard Morton Jack, and anyone else I forgot!

Updated 7/27/13  As always this is a work in progress…

Another favorite 45 that’s been getting spin-time at the WCF headquarters is Samy Phillip’s “I Wonder Freely/Magic Fly (for Jordana” (Infinite 2002) from 1964, with its swinging garage-soul groove, gruff, snotty vocals, and blaring Dylanish harmonica. I managed to track down Phillip last year and sat down to lunch with him at his favorite Boyle Heights Mexican restaurant. I brought along my good friend, artist Jan Steward, who’d known the musician back in the mid-60s but hadn’t seen him since.

 I Wonder Freely

Turns out Samy Phillip is not Samy Phillip at all. His real name is Hirth Martinez and some of you may recognize his name from a couple of Robbie Robertson-produced LPs from the mid-70s. But the story starts about a decade earlier in East Los Angeles where young Martinez honed his chops by playing jazz and RnB piano and guitar with guys that’d go on to form successful groups like Thee Midniters, the Blendells, and the Premiers (you can listen to an informative podcast about Martinez’s legacy on Mark Guerrero’s Chicano Music Chronicles here).

Martinez put together his own combo sometime in ’63 and throughout 1964-65 the group played the Classic Cat in Hollywood. Though he was already an accomplished musician and had performed at lots of East L.A. dances, he hadn’t been old enough to really play in real show-biz clubs before that. The Classic Cat was a topless club with live entertainment located at 8844 Sunset Boulevard at Larrabee, right in the heart of the Sunset Strip. The Cat drew all sorts of celebrities from movie stars like Bob Crane and Robert Conrad to musicians like Dino Valenti and Jim Morrison, who apparently liked to hang out at the pool table.[1] Around this time Martinez’s group also played at the Chez, which was next door to P.J.’s in West Hollywood at Santa Monica and Crescent Heights Blvd.

Sometime during this period Martinez decided to record and release his own songs so he started his own imprint. “Infinite was just a label I started myself to put out my own songs,” Martinez explained. “I think the first Infinity labels were black and then they turned to a green color.” The label on the first release was minus the definitive “infinity” symbol of its successors.

Infinite’s first release was Samy Phillip himself doing “When I Say I Love You, I Mean It, and I Don’t Change My Mind” (Infinite 2001). Some of you might remember this ‘un from its inclusion on Boulders #2. A great snotty frat punker with harmonica, its twangy guitar really grooves but its Martinez’s strong vocals that really make this a classic with memorable lines like “It’s a fact that nuts like that are cheaper by the bunch.” The flip, “Baby, I Love You Today,” is somewhat tamer but also worthy.

Infinity’s second release was another Phillip release, the amazing and aforementioned “I Wonder Freely” backed by “Magic Fly (for Jordana)” (Infinite 2002). While we’ve already discussed the geen’ qualities of the topside, the Donovan-esque flip is pretty interesting as well.

“’Magic Fly’ was a song I wrote for my baby cousin, Jordana,” Martinez explained. “She was staying at my house and was having trouble going to sleep so I was telling her a story about a magic fly that could talk and I made up a little song about it for her. Later her parents would tell her, ‘It’s okay you can go to sleep now, there’s the magic fly!’”

This one was apparently the only Infinity release to come in a black and white picture sleeve. Martinez drew the cover art for the record himself. “I did the little drawing of myself for the sleeve. I always had my hair combed down in the front and wore these round dark glasses. That was my look. And boots, we all wore boots back then.”

It’s a little unclear exactly who is playing what on these releases. Martinez leaves it vague. “I had a group that backed me on those records. Sometimes Richie Frost from the Crickets and sometimes Jim Troxell on drums.” Troxell of course would go on to be Curt Boettcher and Steve Clark’s main drummer, showing his stuff on Tommy Roe’s It’s Now Winter’s Day, the Friar Tuck and His Psychedelic Guitar album, Bobby Jameson’s Color Him In, etc. Martinez sometimes apparently had some of Thee Midniters themselves behind him as well and when I asked Midniters’ leader Jimmy Espinoza about Martinez he had nothing but compliments for his friend. On “I Wonder Freely” it was George Domaine on drums, Benny Lopez on bass, Martinez on piano, and Danny Diaz guitar. “Those records were recorded in a real primitive studio on Rollins Dr. in East L.A. I think Del Casher was the engineer,” Martinez recalled. While Casher is most known for inventing the wah-wah pedal that Vox marketed he also played guitar for Frank Zappa in an early Mothers of Invention incarnation in ’66 and was the brains behind the notorious pre-psych “Space Boy” recording from ’64. Casher explained it all in a Vintage Guitar magazine interview in ’97. “Frank Zappa came by one day, said he’d heard about me, and said he wanted to record something for a singer who had a song about a Russian cosmonaut who was lost in space (chuckles). In those days he wasn’t a guitar player, so he asked me to play guitar and bass, laying down tracks using the Ecco-Fonic to get the spacey sounds, while he played on a snare drum I had in the studio. I think this was one of the first recordings Frank did when he arrived in L.A. He was very pleasant, and he looked as weird as the sounds we created, but boy, was he talented! When he played the drum, I knew something great was going on, and we enjoyed that session so much he asked me to join his new group. I politely declined because my studio schedule was beginning to happen. Later, he formed the Mothers of Invention, and he asked me to play at several of his concerts while he and his manager were getting a record deal together; it was an interesting experience. Frank employed me to perform with him on the David Susskind TV show featuring a ‘Freak Out’ concert.”

It was no accident that the Samy Phillip records sound a lot like Dylan. “Hanging around other musicians it was the same everywhere,” Martinez told me. “Everyday was all Dylan all the time in Hollywood and New York.” To most of the musicians it was a great relief, Martinez figured. “He freed the songwriter to write longer songs and the lyrics didn’t have to make sense.” Interestingly “ I Wonder Freely” was written for a Dylan-type character for a Las Vegas show. “I wrote 45-minute lounge shows for a friend’s dance company. There were three girl dancers and a trio of musicians, Johnny Larkin AKA ‘Scatman’ on piano, and then keyboard and drums.”

Martinez’s first big break in the music biz however came when was his friends Thee Midniters chose his song “Evil Love” as the follow up to their hit “Land of 1000 Dances.” Credited to Samy Phillip, “Evil Love” originally graced the A-side of Chattahoochee 684 when it was released in mid-1965 but DJs began flipping the record over and playing the other side, an instrumental (loosely based on the Rolling Stones’ “2120 South Michigan Avenue”) called “Whittier Boulevard.” Locally “Whittier Boulevard” was huge—ping-ponging around the top ten at KRLA for a few months. Nationally it rose up on the Billboards to #127. Chattahoochee eventually repressed the record with the titles flipped.

The tune’s a great one, and somewhat atypical of the East L.A. sound. “Jazzy chord changes and odd (for pop) structure without easily demarcated verses and bridges”[2] are counterbalanced by staccato guitar, Farfisa organ, and an impressive break and hook. Apparently Martinez hid behind the name Samy Phillip (his dad’s first name) to avoid paying some of his old agents that were coming after him to collect their cut!

Infinite kept on going for a little while. The third Infinite release was Phillip doing “What is This Feeling?/It’s Showtime” (Infinite 2003). The top is a rockin’ gospel kinda number while the flip is a freaky, almost Kim Fowley-style downer, beat-jazz recital. The fourth was Jo and Jim’s “They Day We Both Knew/A Fairly Tale” (Infinity 2004). “She was a singer and her husband Jim Richardson was a sax player who played flute on this.”

Eventually Martinez got drafted and was sent away for a few years. Upon returning to civilian life he jumped right back on the music biz bandwagon, He toured the country and kept on performing with big names like John Lee Hooker and was even there when Gabor Szabo got busted in Boston. This was when Martinez and my friend Jan Steward’s paths crossed. Steward’s home in Los Feliz was ground central for the East-West collaborations that were happening at the time with jazz and rock players and visiting Indian musicians. Steward entertained everyone from Mike Seeger and John Cage to Karlheinz Stockhausen, Ravi Shankar, and Aashish Khan at her home and even played sarod with bassist Bill Plummer in the Cosmic Brotherhood. Martinez mixed freely in this ethno-jazz scene and became especially tight with vibe player Lynn Blessing.

In 1969 Martinez played on Lynn Blessing’s solo LP Sunset Painter. Fresh out of the Cosmic Brotherhood and the Advancement, Blessing had just hooked a deal with Epic Records. “The group had Wolfgang Meltz (on bass) who was in the Cosmic Brotherhood too,” Martinez remembers. “Jim Gordon was the drummer and Jim Keltner too, he was playing jazz stuff more before he started doing rock.” Sneaky Pete Kleinow is also featured on the record which features several creatively arranged covers such as the Byrds’ “Child of the Universe.” Martinez penned one of the tunes on the LP, though not my fave, “Where There is Grass,” an incredible arrangement that sounds like something off the Byrds’ Notorious Byrd Brothers. Again Martinez had to hide his identity so as not to have to cough up agent fees. “On Lynn’s LP I go by the name Robert Hirth because there was another agent after me,” he explained matter-of-factly, though one begins to wonder if there was something more to this story. Like the Cosmic Brotherhood, Blessing’s was a working band, at least temporarily. “I think we played some shows with that group at Shelley’s (Manne Hole) on Cahuenga.” From there Martinez began working on movie scores for David Carradine. “I got $1500 maybe $2000 to make a score,” he figured. The process was not entirely satisfying however as “everybody was so stoned all the time.”

Martinez’s real big break however came about through a chance encounter at a music store. “I was at Norm’s Guitar one day and Dylan came in to buy a guitar. I was like, Norm, give him a tape of my songs! But I was too nervous so I hid in the back room. When I got home Bob had already called me and said lets make a record.” The rest is history and outside the scope of this forum, but let’s just say Martinez has enjoyed a fulfilling musical career since then. For the intrepid music buyer, all the Infinity sides are available on an out-of-print CD called Teenage Hirth issued by Japan’s Coconut Grove in 2010. If you want to know more about Martinez please visit hirthmartinez.com.

Thanks to Hirth Martinez, Jan Steward, Jimmy Espinoza, and all the other bloggers I gathered info and images from!

Updated 11/15/13  This is a work in progress

Attila’s “When/Come Out” is one of my fave West Coast private 45s. The top side, “When,” is the one that gets all the attention with its two-note, Count Fivey fuzz intro, close-to-acid punk organ, and bee buzz-soloing. When the adenoidal vocals kick in, it gets a kind of a primitive, garagey Strawberry Alarm Clock sound, before going into a marching beat break with an improvised distorto-guitar lead, followed by a sped-up Ray Manzarek organ solo and then back into the two-note intro fer the outro. Totally incredible. The flip, “Come Out,” is even better. Again kicking it off with two notes (this time on organ), it’s a moody teenage attempt at being heavy with poetry class rhymes like “Give me one more try before I die.” Then they guys rip into the riff from the Four Seasons “C’mon Marianne” (which the Doors would also rip off for “Touch Me”) with another great Manzarek organ solo over it. Then it’s back to the verse and adieu with a fuzzy rave-up outro.

We tracked down Attila Galamb (who was listed as the writer of “Come Out”) a couple years ago and he was happy to fill me in a little on the story of that record and his musical career. When this record came out, Galamb was only fourteen and living with his parents in North Hollywood. He’d already had a full career in the music biz. A child prodigy, he came to Canada from his native Hungary after the 1956 revolution. His father, a bandleader back in Europe, began teaching him music and the younger Galamb picked it up quickly. By age eight he was the sole source of income for his family, playing about eleven different instruments, including sax, clarinet, piano, harmonica, and accordion, including an electric one. At ten he’d performed at the Hollywood Bowl, Radio City Music Hall and was sponsored by the Hohner company. He’d even appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show playing his saxophone in 1964 just a few months after the Beatles.

Now this is still unconfirmed, but we have a sneaking suspicion that Galamb played briefly in a surf-style group with guitarist Peter Klimes who also grew up in North Hollywood. Remembered Klimes in an interview before his death, “I went to Milican Junior High School and we used to play for the dances. There was an electronic version of an accordion called a Cord-a-Vox (and) we had a Cord-a-Vox player in the band. I can’t remember his name. One of my highlights was stepping backwards off the platform, falling off the stage onto my back. Boom, flat on my back.” Klimes was a lifelong musician and is credited as appearing on the Mr. Gasser and the Weirdos LP and later played with Tom Waits.

Anyway, in late ’66 Galamb’s father decided that his son should be releasing some music. “I recorded my first couple of records in 1967,” Galamb recalls. “I couldn’t get a record deal so my dad and I just started our own label, I joined ASCAP, recorded our own masters at Gold Star and pressed up a few thousand 45s and sold them at my personal appearances and concerts through out the country.” The first release on Attila Records is “Sax-O-Phun/Bonanza” (A-1000). We haven’t heard this one but the a-side is a cover of an old Rudy Weidoeft jazz song, while the flip is a Galamb original and not the theme song from the tv show. The artist is listed as Attila Galamb playing alto sax on one side and accordion on the other. Next was “A Lonely Day/Banana Split” (A-1001). The A-side is a moody easy-listening instrumental with Galamb on clarinet while the flip is more of a groovy instro with tenor saxophone. Again the artist is Attila Galamb. Neither of these records are very “rock.”

At some point in ’67 however, Galamb fell in with a new crowd. Like most kids in the mid-’60, the teenager was inspired by the new sounds coming through the radio. Already a more-than-proficient musician, Galamb knew he could do it too and looked to get in on that scene. “I met 14-year old drummer Randy Ezratty who introduced me to his 13-year-old buddy, guitarist Art Laboe Jr. (son of Art Laboe of Original Sound fame). The three of us started a rock group.” They decided to call the group Attila.

The three teens went to work immediately, rehearsing and working out song arrangements. “I co-wrote six original tunes that we recorded in Hal Mooney’s home studio in Glendale somewhere,[1] Galamb told me. “We pressed them up and I continued trying to sell them.” The best of the lot is the aforementioned “When/Come Out” 45 (A-003). “I recorded that in a home studio with Art Laboe Jr. on guitar in the summer of 1967 when I was 14 and he was 15.” Of course the senior Laboe had released the Music Machine on his Original Sound label and it’s feasible that Galamb and Art Jr. witnessed some of the magic happening at the Original Sound studios on Sunset with Paul Buff at the board and Keith Olsen’s fuzz box in full effect. Clearly the guys were influenced by the Doors, especially Galamb who was already a wiz on keyed instruments thanks in part to his sponsorship by Hohner. Galamb explained a slight twist in the story however. “You mention organ on the records but what is interesting is that the instrument is a Hohner Electravox. It was an accordion shaped electronic organ instrument that was invented by the Hohner company. In fact I had an endorsement deal with the Hohner company for quite a few years and they gave me one to use, as well as many harmonicas, melodicas, guitars, and amps. I was one of the first to play the ElectraVox, a precursor of the Accorgan and other electronic keyboards.” Galamb’s tune “Come Out” (Laboe wrote “When”) particularly shows a Doors influence and is especially reminiscent of “Touch Me” which didn’t come out until late ’68. Of course the Doors stole the riff from “C’mon Marianne” which was released in June of ’67. Unless Galamb is wrong about when he recorded “Come Out,” he and and the Doors both had the same idea, Galamb just beat them to it by a year!

It seems to me that at least two 45s on the Attila imprint came from these sessions. We know “When/Come Out” did, and its follow-up “Sound of Love/Rock Rhapsody” (A-004) sounds like the same group. “Rock Rhapsody” is just arranged by Galamb so it may be based on a classical composition. It’s an instrumental with heavy ElectraVox, sax, and what sounds like some of that same distorted guitar from “When.” “Sound of Love” features Galamb singing over some prominent more electric accordian. It’s a slow number with some fuzzy guitar bursts, sort of a “Come Out” part two. This had to have been released at least by mid-‘68 as by February of ‘69 (as we shall see) Galamb was out on tour. We’ve never seen (A-002) but possibly it contains the other two songs Galamb remembers co-writing in ’67. Details of the group are few (hopefully Galamb can fill in a few more) but it seems they were in existence from the summer of ’67 to the end of ’68 when they split. Remembers Galamb, “After the records did not do particularly well, we just broke up the band. We never had a chance to perform live but once or twice that I can remember around town.”

When the band broke up it seems that Galamb went back to his old ways and went out on tour for a few months to make some money playing more “traditional” music. A newspaper article from a Florida paper dated Feb. 23^rd ’69 shows the 17-year old looking pretty straight-laced, in a suit with parted hair. There is no mention of any acid rock recordings, instead he’s just “a teen-age boy who has been thrilling school children, their teachers and parents throughout America with his musical genius.” “I performed in front
of hundreds of thousands of school students in 43 states around the country,” he remembered,” adding “It would be interesting to hear from anyone who remembers my
performances.” Galamb left us with this intriguing teaser about that era, “Next time I’ll tell you about my experience at Woodstock.”

When he returned from the ’69 U.S. tour, Galamb told us he settled down in Highland Park, a neighborhood along the Arroyo Grande, halfway between downtown Los Angeles and Pasadena, and most famous for being home to Jackson Browne before he made the big time. There Galamb settled down for a while. “My first studio was on Raphael Avenue in Highland Park. I lived there from 1969 to 1973 and built an 8-track garage studio where I recorded a lot of singers, artists, and produced a lot of cheap B-movie soundtracks up until about 1970 when I relocated it to Hollywood and opened a better, larger 8-track facility on Western Ave, just south of Santa Monica, that was also shared by a well known vocal coach at the time Roger Wolff. He had a lot of vocal students and pro singers for whom I recorded demos at that studio. That is where I recorded tons of stuff for records, for other people and for some of the world’s worst movies such as the 4-D Witch. That was a funny experience.”

An occult softcore doozey, Psyched by the 4-D Witch (A Tale of Demonology) was released in 1973. Galamb laughingly calls it an “abomination.” The film appears to have been shot on 16mm on and around what looks like the USC campus. It’s pretty umm, “psychedelic” and seems to have been shot earlier than ’73, what with all the liquid light show effects. Galamb’s theme song “Beware of the 4-D Witch” features driving guitar, effecty keyboards and some schmaltzy singing credited to someone named Johnny by the Way. The words and melody are not Galamb’s either, they were written by one Joe Bisko, an aspiring blue movie producer whose sole release, Dingle Dangle (1966) was advertised as a XXX tale “from the land of the Golden Gate.” It featured a couple of “actresses” from Behind the Green Door and guest appearances by our man Johnny by the Way and one Ed Sanders, who may or may not be the poet/Fugs founder. Interestingly, Sanders was in San Francisco in November of ’65 as the Fugs played the first benefit for Bill Graham’s Mime Troupe with the Jefferson Airplane and Sandy Bull, so who knows what he got up to!

The theme song was released on a promotional two-sided 45 with an instrumental version on the flipside. Galamb’s name is nowhere to be seen and the only info listed is a Hollywood Blvd. address and phone number for Coastline Music Publication. Possibly this was Galamb’s new studio. We’re still looking into what else Galamb recorded in his studio(s) and whether or not anything else was released, as he told us, “I actually wrote some great material that never saw the light of day, but also some crap that got some pretty wide release.”

By the time he was of legal age, Galamb was done with Hollywood business. “I worked nonstop in music until I was about 21,” he told us, “When I finally got burned out of it, got married, moved to Reno, Nevada with my wife and got into the business of running a productions studio producing radio and TV commercials and eventually owned and operated a full service advertising agency.” Drummer Randy Ezratty would later become Vice President of Sirius Satellite Radio. Laboe Jr. may have been one of KRLA’s “Hitmen” who in the ‘70s who were sent out hand out cash to people who displayed a KRLA sticker on their car. Rumor has it he died of a drug overdose.

It seems like there are at least four Attila 45s on the Attila label.
Bonanza/Sax-O-Phun (A-1000)
A Lonely Day/Banana Split (A-1001)
? (002)
When/Come Out (A-003)
Sound of Love/Rock Rhapsody (A-004)

[1] Hal Mooney was the staff arranger at Mercury up until about this time when he moved to Universal Studios to work on tv shows.

Thanks to Westex for posting the audio!

Paul and I have been digging around lately trying to get the scoop on a guy named Tony Harris. I’d been noticing his involvement on some interesting records over the years and thought maybe it’s time to put together what we know and cast it out there to see what comes back.

This is a work in progress…

The Tony Harris were talking about here recorded a pair of fantastic 45s for a Los Angeles-based imprint called Dee Gee Records in the mid-‘60s. Harris’s Dee Gee output is a little hard to pin down stylistically. His first two-sider is “Honey/Scorpio,” with “Honey” being a solid sort of leftover teener kind of sound and “Scorpio” a completely different animal. Beginning with a cryptic spoken word intro, Harris kicks in with some hard protest-style acoustic guitar strumming, and begins piling on some freaky downer Dylan-influenced lyrics (“Just remember watchers are all waiting and blue lemmings pick apiece my brain”). It’s a pretty heavy trip. The second Tony Harris record on Dee Gee is “Super Man/How Much Do I Love You.” “Super Man” is a raw and snotty folk rock ode to the superhero in the vein of the Turtles best work. The flip is even better, moody and introspective—a great piece of baroque-Sunset Strip songwriting, very Mystic Males.

Then I remembered I had another Dee Gee 45 and dug it out. It’s by a guy named Darrius. I’d had it for a few years but somehow never noticed that its “How Much Do I Love You” was the same song. Doy. The production and writing credits belong to Tony Harris too. The final straw was placed in the Luxuria Music studios. I was just finishing up my show and Howie Pyro was getting ready for his show, Intoxica! He handed me a 45 and said, “You should have this. It took me years to find my copy and I just found a second. It’s amazing.” I quickly recognized that familiar Dee Gee silver and black, and yep, there it was, Deborah Walley’s “Sometimes in the Darkest Hour,” written and produced by Tony Harris. As soon as I got home I emailed Paul and told him it was time to start sleuthing.

While other folks have casually attempted to unravel the Tony Harris mystery by speculating in forums and elsewhere, no one seems to have gotten very far. First off, we’re pretty certain that our Tony Harris is not the same Tony Harris who recorded three 45s for the Los Angeles R&B label Ebb Records in the late ‘50s. That Tony Harris, we have been assured, was Black. Soooo….

•••

The earliest appearance of our Tony Harris seems to be as a co-writer on a song called “Carmen P.” which showed up on the flip of “Do the Philly” by an L.A. group called the Citations (Princess 54). It’s an instrumental number and Harris shares writing credit with John Marascalco and Richard Delvy. Marascalco was a producer and co-wrote some of Little Richard’s hits including “Good Golly Miss Molly” and “Rip it Up.” Delvy was the drummer for surf groups the Bel-Airs (“Mr. Moto”) and the Challengers, as well as an up-and-coming producer for the Vault and (his own) Triumph imprints. Sometime in ’63 Marascalco and Delvy partnered on a label called Princess. The only other releases we can find on Princess are the Surfaris’ “Surfer Joe/Wipe Out” (P 50) and the Travelers’ “Spanish Moon/Everywhere I Go” (P 52) though the catalog numbers suggest there were at least a couple more.[1] A German researcher named Andreas Grabsch posted something interesting on a Harry Nilsson site that Marascalco kept a stable of young writers at hand— including Harry Nilsson and Tommy Boyce—to write numbers for him. Nilsson in fact is one of the writers credited on “Do the Philly,” so Harris’s first release may also actually be one of Nilsson’s earliest as well! Grabsch also claims “there also was a pool of musicians from the surf genre around Princess Records (the Challengers, the Surfaris, Tony Harris, and Richard Delvy himself), who were often used for studio work and also for some [thrown together] instrumentals, which filled the flip sides like ‘Carmen P.’ behind ‘Everybody Philly’.” There are a couple things fishy about this statement. First off, there really was no Princess records scene. The Surfaris were from way inland in Glendora and probably never even met Marascalco and Delvy, who licensed the record from another label. Likewise the Travelers were an Arizona-based band and their record was licensed from a Tucson label. Westside musician/Western actor Ron Heiss, who wrote a couple sides for the Challengers, does recall bringing Travelers guitarist Ron Story up to California a few times. He told artyfactsinwax.blogspot.com last year, “Ron and I spent quite a bit of time in Hollywood as we cut deals with the Vault and Princess Record labels,” and he possibly could’ve been around long enough to lay down some tracks. Mostly though it would have been the Challengers who would have been around and available for studio work. As for Harris, nobody seems to remember him as being part of that South Bay surf group scene at all. It is quite possible however that he was one of the aspiring “writer” types hanging around Marascalco’s studio, especially considering his later achievements and the fact that he appears to have been studying music at USC at the time.

The relative success of “Do the Philly/Carmen P.”—which would eventually be picked up nationally in June of ‘65 by Roulette Records (R 4623)—apparently gained Harris enough clout with Delvy to release his own record on Triumph. “Go Go Little Scrambler/ Poor Boy” (T 60) saw the light in May of ’65, credited to Tony Harris with the Woodies. It’s a great proto-garage/hot rod 45 with the top being a vocal cash-in on the Southern California motorbike craze (i.e. the Sandells “Scrambler!”, the Beach Boys “Little Honda,” and Ronny and the Daytonas “Little Scrambler”), while the flip is an attacking proto-garage teener. Both songs were penned by Harris and engineered by Mike Lietz who’d go on to produce Spirit, Fever Tree, and the International Submarine Band. A double-sided acetate of this single recently popped up on eBay. It featured a generic Richard Delvy Productions/Miraleste Music Co. label. Miraleste, by the way, was the name of a street (and later a school) in Palos Verdes where most of the Challengers grew up. Could Harris have South Bay roots as well?

Wherever Harris was from, he seems to have slipped in and out of the studio without much fanfare as I asked Challengers bassist Randy Nauert (who usually remembers everything!) about the session and it didn’t ring any bells. Delvy unfortunately passed away a couple years ago so we can’t ask him. We do know that we know the Woodies was just another name for the Woods, a group that sang on several folk rock and surfer-style sides—a great one for Triumph in xxx of ‘65 (“Broken Marionette/Can’t Seem to Get Over You”) (T 62), the theme for the television show Ninth Street Beat, and a couple sides for GNP Crescendo after that. The Woods were a Hermosa Beach vocal group consisting of Richard George, Ray Duron, and John Mead. There were close connections between the Challengers and the Woods, specifically “Can’t Seem to Get Over You” was written by Challengers guitarist Ed Fournier and the Woods provided vocals on some Challengers recordings. In fact, the same recording of “Can’t Seem to Get Over You” was released as the flip of a Challengers 45 “Channel Nine” (Vault 918) in the spring of ’65 and San Bernardino/Riverside Top-40 station KXFM even spotlighted the release in its “Tiger Touts” the week of 6/5/65. The song also appears on a Richard Delvy-issued Challengers e.p. that was passed out by the band in soliciting gigs.[2] We recently tracked down Woods member Richard George but he too remembers little of the mysterious Harris, saying, “We met him at Sunset Sound when we recorded the vocals for “Go Go, Little Scrambler” and “Poor Boy.” That was it. I never saw him again.”

Sometime in the summer of ‘65 a Richard Delvy Productions acetate came out credited to Tony Harris. RDP 63 has a Harris composition called “You Know What You You Can Do”—a brooding Stones-style punker with a “Time Is On My Side” bridge—on top. The flip of the acetate is another Harris number, a Beatles-ish jangler titled “I Love the Words.” In September these songs were officially released on Triumph (T 63) as the Lincoln Greens. Interestingly, the exact same recording of “You Know What You Can Do” also showed up on the B-side of a Dylan cover by a group called the Bows And Arrows that same year. “I Don’t Believe You/You Know What You Can Do” (GNP 356) was released by GNP Crescendo on Sept. 4^th, 1965 and produced by Delvy. It seems that the Bows and Arrows and the Lincoln Greens may have been the same group, or more correctly, both studio lineups manufactured by Harris and Delvy, possibly a trick Delvy had gleaned from Marascalco. I would further that it’s a pretty sure bet that Harris singing on these cuts. Oddly, a Sept. 4 issue of KRLA Beat magazine has an article entitled “West Coast Clamors for Dylan Tunes” which mentions that the Lincoln Greens will be releasing a cover of Dylan’s “I Don’t Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met)” backed by “You Know What You Can Do.” As far as we can tell this 45 was never released but instead GNP Crescendo picked it up and released it as the Bows and Arrows, while Delvy put his friend Harris’s  “I Love the Words” on the flip instead. The GNP issue seems to have been released only promotionally though the Triumph release is stock.

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Meanwhile, on July 17^th , 1965, Billboard magazine announced that “Tony Harris has signed a contract with Dee Gee Records as writer-producer for the label’s artists and recording sessions, and for acts under Dee Gee Productions slated for tours and night club engagements.” Not to be confused with Dizzy Gillespie’s Dee Gee imprint outta Chicago, this Dee Gee was L.A.-based and started by a woman named Doris Gilbert. We think she’s the same Doris Gilbert who was a television writer in the ‘50s. If it is her, she had basically retired from the biz by the early ‘60s; married actor Harry Lauter; taken up landscape painting in Ojai; and backed a small record label. There are several Hollywood connections to the label and a couple of releases were musical efforts by actresses. As we shall see Harris too had Hollywood movie connections. Gilbert it seems had some Hollywood pull and for extra insurance brought KRLA Beat columnist Julian Portman on board as an iterant staff producer, perhaps as a reward for plugs like, “Business woman in a field normally reserved for tough-minded men, will be the theme of an article to appear in Vogue magazine. The story is on Doris Gilbert, prexy of Dee Gee records, and should be a model for all our female teen readers.” In its year-plus run, Dee Gee released fifteen or so 7” releases ranging from early folk rock and garage to girl group/soul and more pop vocally kind of stuff. Producers for the label included Jerry Styner and Norm Ratner, who produced the Leaves and would go on to start Penthouse Records. Some folks over at the G45 Central forum put together a complete Dee Gee discography you can check out if you’re curious but here we’re gonna try and deal only with the releases that Harris was directly involved with and/or are relevant to our sesh.

To get things rolling, Dee Gee execs (Harris? Ratner?) began auditioning acts at a club called the Crescendo Tiger’s Tail located in Hollywood next to the Playboy Club. It had been Gene Norman’s club (hence the name of his label GNP Crescendo Records) and would later become the Trip and launch the Byrds career, but in the summer of ’65 the management let local djs have their own night. Dave Diamond’s (KHJ) night showcased the Turtles and Reb Foster (KFWB) had his own night as well. It is not known who all Dee Gee auditioned but we do know that on August 14^th Billboard announced that along with Nat King Cole’s little brother Ike, “new pactees with Dee Gee Records are Jeannie Haywood, the Messengers, Frisby Clemens and Darius.” Actress Deborah Walley put pen to paper a week later and Harris went to work quickly booking the label’s groups into the studio that summer.

Dee Gee’s first release was the aforementioned Darrius record, “How Much Do I Love You/Lonely Boy” (DG 3001). Both sides were produced and the top was written by Harris, while the flip was credited to Harris and Darius (the song’s publishing credit actually reads “Darius, pseudonym of Robert J. Ott, & Tony Harris”). A native Ohian, Ott apparently moved to Los Angles sometime in 1964. How he met up with Harris is unknown—possibly through the audition night at the Tiger’s Tail—but the two soon went into the studio and began writing together and publishing (at least one song) through Harris’s Bolinger publishing company. Darrius’s version of “How Much Do I Love You” has a very similar arrangement to what Harris’s would later have, but with a brisker paced backing track; the main difference being the singer’s higher, dreamier voice and soulful outro. The single warranted a Chart Spotlight in Billboard on Sept. 4^th, the same week the Bows and Arrows’ Dylan cover did as well. Harris was getting face time all over the trade mag charts in L.A. that summer!

Things were still going Harris’s way in September when KRLA Beat magazine announced Dee Gee’s second release, Tony Harris-“Honey/Scorpio” (3002), fawning, “Tony Harris, Dee Gee Records’ young bundle of talent, wrote, arranged, produced and sang the label’s hot-off-the-press release of “Honey.” Dee Gee even pushed this one by taking out an ad that ran concurrently with the plug. By the end of the month they further announced that that “’Honey,’ Dee Gee’s latest release by talented Tony Harris is quickly becoming a d.j. favorite around the country”—hot topic no doubt thrown out there by their pal Portman. Again at the end of October in “Portman’s Platterpoop” column the writer directed music fans to the “Do Yourself a Favor Dept.” and to “Do buy yourself a copy of ‘Honey’ by Tony Harris on Dee Gee records. It’s getting huge airplay in San Francisco, Minneapolis and Chicago. It’s getting big!” On Nov. 6th the record was even being pushed as a Billboard Chart spotlight. Of course few of these deejays ever flipped the disc to discover how gnarly the flip “Scorpio” was.

Next up for Dee Gee was Jean Haywood’s “Flowers Die/Pietro the Prince of Patience,” (3003) both written by Tony Harris and arranged by Gene Paige. “Flowers Die” is doomy Spector-ish girl group stuff and Ms. Haywood sings almost as low as Nico. “Pietro” is very similar to “Scorpio” with odd “beat” poetry spoken dramatically over some Fahey/Takoma-esque guitar.

Apparently not one to rest on his laurels, Harris went right back into the studio for a post-Mersey folk rock record (“Got a Feeling/Tonight’s the Night for Love” [3004]) by a group called the Fenians… or did he? On Sept. 11^th, Billboard announced “We’ve had the English sounds, now be prepared to dig the Irish sounds. Dee Gee Records just recorded The Fenians first stateside release “I’ve Got A Feeling” b/w “Love Our Love.” An ad was placed the same week in KRLA Beat reading “You don’t have to be Irish but it helps! America’s newest imported sound.” Both sides of this record are produced and arranged by Tony Harris. This leaves us with three possible conclusions. 1. Harris licensed the record from an Irish group. We know he’d seen his pal Delvy have some success licensing, though Delvy generally picked up things already making a splash. These Fenians songs were apparently unknown. 2. Harris flew to Ireland to produce the group… highly unlikely. Or 3. The Fenians were Irish but living here in L.A. In the KRLA Beat ad there’s a Westwood fan club address where you can write in for a free shamrock. It seems this was the Dee Gee office (the building had been a machine shop up until the early ’60s). It is close to UCLA. Were the Fenians Irish students studying there? Their names were Dillon and Deeham. Of course right about this time, Delvy was marketing his version of the Travelers as a “British American Rock and Roll Band” with two of its members “arrived in the United States a year ago from England” and now “residing in Lomita and Harbor City.” Students too? An English (or Irish) band member would have been great attribute and draw, case in point Limey and the Yanks. Or was this all a fleece job, a part Harris and the Fenians were playing? Richard George recalls that when his group the Woods met Harris, “We thought of him as possibly being part of the British invasion at the time, as we thought he had a little bit of an English accent.” Whatever it was, the novelty didn’t seem to gather much steam. Even though by the end of October KRLA Beat was reporting that “Dee Gee records is being swamped with requests for the Irish shamrock they offered in last week’s BEAT ad in introducing their imported Irish folk-rock group The Fenians,” not a peep was heard of them after that.

The next Harris appearance on Dee Gee is by none other than actress Deborah Walley, “So Little Time/Sometimes in the Darkest Hour” (3006). This one’s absolutely fantastic. Again we’re sold by KRLA Beat’s description, “Deborah, the pixie of Gidget that went Hawaiian and now of the Bikini-type movies, has a Marianne Faithfull-type voice. She’s readied a socko single for release by Dee Gee records.” Harris produced and wrote just one side, but it’s the good side. Windy storm sounds back this dark ‘n moody beatnik number about being depressed about being depressed in the middle of the day, the end of the world, rain, etc. This is absolutely incredible stuff. Came in a picture sleeve too. Walley of course starred opposite Elvis in Spinout (1966) and appeared as Suzie on the Desi Arnez-produced tv show Mothers-In-Law. You can see her dancing to the Warts (the Seeds) singing “Pushin’ Too Hard” on the episode where her brother becomes the group’s manager. At the time, Walley was married to actor/singer John Ashley, “handsome hero of teen movies” like Dragstrip Girl and Beach Party. Ashley lost out on the lead to I Was a Teenage Werewolf to Michael Landon. Harris may have been looking to sign the heartthrob to Dee Gee as the same KRLA Beat article also mentions that Ashley “has two labels seeking his musical services.” Again, big thanks to Howie Pyro for slipping me his extra copy of this 45!

“It had to happen. The Batman comes to television and Superman goes on Broadway…” wrote KRLA Beat on Nov. 27^th, “Tony Harris, Dee Gee records fair-haired youth, has written and recorded a gassy-tune titled ‘Superman.’ If the b’way producer doesn’t hurry, he may have to change the name of the show.” We already talked about Harris’s “Super Man/How Much Do I Love You” 45 (DG 3014). One other thing I noticed about “How Much Do I Love You” is that on Harris’s version here there seems to be louder tambourine crunching and there’s a really cool tape edit at the very end where everything just sort of drops out except the beat and some kind of flute. There are rumours of a third Tony Harris 45 for Dee Gee (DG 3016) but little evidence to prove it, and in fact much to disprove it—that catalogue number was reserved for Jefferson County’s “Organized Confusion/City Billy” produced by who else… Julian Portman! Harris’s Bolinger publishing company does list a pair of unknown compositions—“Blue Boy” and “You Don’t Love Me Enough” from around this period. Could these make up the mysterious does it/doesn’t it exist third single? Or were these tunes recorded by another artist, or just never released at all. We’ve also seen mention of another 45 credited to “Darius DePaul” but have no info on song titles or label. Were any of these tunes related to that? Darius did go on to record a remarkable LP that was released on the Chartmaker label in ’69 but alas, it seems to have no Tony Harris connection.[3]

In the last weeks of 1965 Harris arranged and produced 45s for Bob Walker and Friends and the Magnificents, whose “On Main Street” is somewhat of a soul collectors fave. Then it seems the Dee Gee empire crumbled. There were a few more releases but Harris’s name was not on them. Press coverage in the Beat stopped and the releases died out. An announcement in Billboard in April ‘66 tells us that Dee Gee (along with Monument, Hanna Barbera, Tower, and Crescendo) is now distributed by Privilege Distributors. Unfortunately by then it seems they had nothing left to distribute.

•••

As Dee Gee’s run ended, it seems Harris was busy immersing himself in a new venture—breaking in to the soundtrack biz. The first cinematic venture he was involved in was an exploitation flick titled The Black Klansman, released in June of ’66. The film was produced by Joe Solomon who would go on to produce classics like Hells Angels on Wheels, Werewolves on Wheels, and the Curious Female—each having fantastic soundtracks by the way, though none Harris-related.[4] There was a one sided promotional 45 released for The Black Klansman, written and sung by Harris. The melody, Paul points out, sounds a lot like Lee and Nancy’s “Sand,” while the lyrics predate the Ramones by more than a decade!

The Ku Klux Klan killed my little girl
Now I’m alone in this hostile world
My plan for vengeance may seem odd
But with the help of God
I will destroy them from within
Disguise myself and be the Black Klansman

And the Klan will ride this night
Living their big lie
Burning cross upon a hill
Guiltless people die

Why can’t they learn to love and understand
What type fool could find it in the Klan
My life will not be complete
‘til the Klan has their defeat

It’s likely that Harris’s connection to the film world was through his father, movie producer Jack H. Harris, who produced The Blob, Astro Zombies, and The Eyes of Laura Mars amongst others. The younger Harris penned the theme to the elder Harris’s The Unkissed Bride (also known Mother Goose a Go Go), which was released on Oct. 12, 1966. Dig the synopsis!

 “Newlyweds Ted and Margie Hastings immediately begin to have marital problems on their honeymoon at the hotel of Margie’s uncle, Jacques Phillipe. Margie, to overcome her nervousness during lovemaking preliminaries, picks up a copy of Mother Goose and begins to read aloud from it, whereupon Ted faints. A secret visit to psychiatrist Dr. Marilyn Richards reveals that Ted has a “Mother Goose” complex. Hotel detective Ernest Sinclair complicates Dr. Richards’ treatment (conducted for convenience’s sake in the hotel) by his overzealousness–he believes that Ted, like his employer, Jacques Phillipe, is being unfaithful to his wife. Dr. Richards solves Ted’s problem by treating him with an LSD spray while he sleeps, causing him to hallucinate and thus incorporate into reality the fairy tale characters from his fantasies.”

The title track, “Mother Goose à Go-Go” has words and music by Tony Harris, sung by Tom Kirk while another number, “Queen of Soul,” has words and music by Tony Harris and is sung by Barbara McNair, an actress and singer whose career took her from the tiny stage of S.F.’s Purple Onion to the pages of Playboy.

Interestingly the summer of ’66 also saw old partners Richard Delvy and Harris’s names still connected. An August 13^th Billboard chart spotlight announces the Great Scots’ new 45 “The Light Hurts My Eyes/You Know What You Can Do” (Triumph 67). Unlike the Bows and Arrows 45, this is a completely new version of Harris’s song, done in a more Animalsy, show-group style. The Great Scots were originally from Halifax, Nova Scotia and were working in Los Angeles when Delvy signed them. After a few 45s on Epic and appearances on Shindig and other television programs in ‘65, the group had grown cold and Delvy apparently thought he could revive them, first issuing “Ball and Chain/Run, Run For Your Life” (T 66) and then “Light Hurts My Eyes.” It’s unclear whether or not Harris had any involvement in this resurrection or if Delvy just suggested the group record the Harris tune as a b-side because he had the rights to it. Interestingly, Challenge Records concurrently released a pair of Delvy-produced Great Scots’ tunes “Blue Monday/Show Me The Way” (Challenge 59339) as the more-hiply named Free-For-All on Challenge that same summer.

•••

Harris’s next job was over at Vance Music Corporation, then aspiring talent agent Steven Vail’s new label. A December 9^th article in Billboard announces that “Vance Music and VMC Records have been formed to develop as a full-line record company. First act signed by 23-year old Vail is the David, a male quartet he formerly managed and had on the 20th (Century) Fox roster. Vail says his financing comes from a wealthy scientist-silent partner.” Aside from the David (incidentally produced by Gene Paige who Harris had worked with before), VMC had some other pretty hip acts as well, and even Electric Prune Jim Lowe landed himself a job there as an artist-producer in ’69. VMC had a pretty good string of garage/psych rock and pop records in the late ‘60s with highlights being the outsider ego trip LP by Dennis Olivieri, the spooky flower power 45 from Redondo Beach’s Paper Fortress, some 7” California toytown madness frwom Morley, and the heavy vibes of John Guess’s “Up From the Sea” 45 split with Magnus Opus. Harris’s participation at VMC began with him arranging and producing Milton Berle’s novelty version of “Yellow Submarine” (V 726). Over some sunshine pop and acidy guitar, Berle does a little comedy routine referencing all sorts of maritime movies and jokes. It’s pretty funny actually. Like several VMC 45s, this one came in a hiply-designed monochromatic picture sleeve.

Next up Harris gave his own music a shot again. His 45 “The Oldest Profession/Love Mantra” (V 727) featured songs from the soundtrack to a 1967 film called The Oldest Profession, a French production directed by six different film directors (Jean-Luc Godard being one of them!) each one doing a segment on prostitution through the ages. It features cameo roles by Anna Karina and Raquel Welch, who graces the 45’s picture sleeve. Harris’s father was a producer on this as well, which is undoubtedly how this ended up on VMC. It seems Harris graduated from USC’s Thornton School of Music in 1968 with BA in Music around this time. The film was released in the U.S. 8/68 dubbed into English. It is doubtful that the original featured Harris’s music.

Another VMC group Harris had a hand in was Eastfield Meadows, a decent Buffalo Springfield kind of fusion group without the talent pool of their mentors. The group was signed in October of ’68 and managed to have their debut LP out before the end of the year. The first single pulled, “Silent Night/Love’s Gone,” (V 734) features some tasty guitar leads and Steven Stills-influenced vocals. Our man gets production credit on the A-side and arrangers co-credit on the B-side label. On the self-titled album (VS 133) Harris wrote one of the songs (“Weekend”) and is mentioned on the back cover both as producer and in a column with band members leading some to speculate that Harris was actually in the band. There are six members listed, but only five in the photo. Would it make sense that he could be doing a “fifth Beatle” sort of thing, maybe?

Smooth soul singer Hal Frazier did a version of Harris’s “Flowers Die” on his self-titled LP (VS 136) in 1968. Harris produced this record at TTG Studios in Hollywood at pretty much the same time the Velvet Underground were recording their third LP there (they also recorded/remixed much of the Velvet Underground and Nico here as well). Wonder if Harris ever crossed paths with Lou and crew during these sessions?

On May 3^rd, ’69 Billboard announced that Harris had been named general manager of Vail Publishing and VSAV Publishing. At that time he was working with the group Pacific Ocean, featuring a young Edward James Olmos on vocals. Their 1969 LP Purgatory (V 135) may feature Harris as a band member as well. There are two songs credited to him on it, “The Road To Hell” and “My Shrink.” “My Shrink” was also on a 45 backed with “16 Tons” (V 738). Another 45, “I Can’t Stand It/I Wanna Testify” (V 732) has both sides arranged and produced by Harris as well. I’ve never been very impressed by this record… too late and too souly.

Also in 1969 Harris produced a 45 by a group called Morning Sun—“Together / Little Girl You’re A Woman” (V 739). “Together” was a Harry Nilsson cover. Morning Sun featured some of the members of former Dunhill recording artists, The Thomas Group, specifically lead singer and organist Greg Gilford. “Tony Harris produced three recordings I performed for VMC,” Gilford informs us, ‘Together,’ ‘Little Girl,’ and ‘Someone.’ ‘Someone’ was the best cut—an original by moi, which Tony got the master of from Steve Vail at VMC. Tony sold that master to Epic Records. As luck would have it, a guy named Pete (don’t recall his last name) who was the head of A&R at Epic loved the tune, but then Epic got bought and the single was shelved. After our Epic Records master was shelved, I never saw or heard from/of Tony Harris again.” I think this was recorded in ’68 but when the Thomas Group splintered it took a while for it to come out.

Harris’s biggest success at VMC involved a singer named Duke Baxter. Baxter’s Everybody Knows Matilda LP (V 138) The 45 “Everybody Knows Matilda/ I Ain’t No School Boy” (V 740) peaked at #52 on the Billboard charts in 1969. Harris gets production credit on both sides and Hal Blaine and Larry Knechtel play on it. A couple more singles were pulled from the LP as well, “Superstition/Crosstown Woman” (V 749) and “John Q. Citizen / Don’t Hurt Us” (V 750). The Duke Baxter story deserves an investigation all its own as he was kind of a mysterious character. His real name was Dudley F. Baxter and though Apparently Canadian, he was in L.A. by ’66 and working with the Rob Roys on their great “Do You Girl?/Yes I Do” 45 for Accent (AC 1213) which was featured on Pebbles Vol. 22. He’s also the guy behind the incredible Combine Records 45 by a group called Revelation—“Kiss Your Mind Goodbye/Dorplegank” (Combine 45-12). The A-side is a trippy anti-acid number featured on Sixties Rebellion 11. The flip is just as wild. There’s involvement on it also from one Kerry Hatch, who may be the same guy who later played bass for Oingo Boingo, not at all unlikely as Boingo guitarist Steve Bartek was in the Strawberry Alarm Clock. I know I’ve seen a Hatch credit on something else too, just can’t remember what. Anyone? There’s a second Revelation 45 too, “Cotton Candy Weekend/Wait and See” (Music Factory 412), it’s a more of a pop-psych/bubblegum type thing, again with both sides written by Baxter.

But that’s getting away from the subject of Tony Harris, which I guess it’s time to do anyway, as by late ’69, sounds had changed for the worse and Harris left VMC and went elsewhere. We’re sure there’s more Harris involvement in other later records but it’s pretty much beyond the realm of West Coast Fog. He had a good run of it though! Tony Harris, if you’re out there, drop us a line!

Thanks to Brett Hosier, GM Gilford, Randy Nauert, Richard George, Colin Mason, and Howie Pyro.

In the late ’60s Douglas Adams was a member of the El Paso, Texas psych group Wailing Wall, playing rhythm guitar and singing. When the group split in the early ’70s, Adams made his way out to California in his VW bus. At a folk club called the Holy City Zoo he met his future wife, De Ann, forming a troupe that combined De Ann’s dancing with Middle-Eastern-inspired instrumentals. The two eventually got married and moved to Marin County.
Meanwhile Adams was still concentrating on his own compositions, both on guitar and on the fiddle. In 1977 he booked some time at a recording studio in San Anselmo called the Church (where Country Weather had recorded a couple years earlier). He called the resulting album Light Rain. It’s a pretty fascinating record, full of some rootsy, still-Texas inspired numbers, but also with tinges of exoticism and echoes of English folkies like John Martyn. I’ve been playing the album’s final track “La Vienta” on my show the last couple weeks and getting lots of positive response re its fine writing and Adams’ haunting voice. His next record, Dream Dancer, combined Adams’ interests in folk and Middle-Eastern music and is a fine example of the “ethno-psych” sound that the kids are so crazy for these days, yuck yuck. We love it. Adams didn’t stop there either. He’s continued to record music in that same vein up until this day. If this sounds good to you (and it should!), check these pages here and here for way more detailed stories of Adams’ adventures. Pretty cool stuff.

Check out this footage of Douglas and De Ann down by the Embarcadero in San Francisco in ’73.

There’s a great little piece on the Sopwith Camel over at the Pondering Pig complete with cool news clippings like this ‘un. Our good friend Stephen Ehret of the Wildflower claims them as the best band on the scene. Unfortunately their in-town trajectory was halted for being out in New York for too long recording; for actually having a “hit record;” and for being on the same label as the Spoonful when Zal Yanovsky and Steve Boone ratted out Bill Loughborough for selling them weed. In a Flamin’ Groovies interview for Cream Puff War way back in ’91, Roy Loney claims to have been in jail that night too, also for pot. “I was with the guy they turned in I think,” he says. Was Loney friends with Loughborough? Who knows? Cyril Jordan goes on to claim the guy “had an in with (Bill) Graham” and that’s what got them blacklisted. I remember also reading somewhere Loughborough being cool about the whole thing… kids will be kids, or something to like that. There’s a image of the court report for the case I saw somewhere online a while back but I haven’t been able to find it again. Someone?

Anyhow, this group’s omission from the “head” canon is a crime. The Camel should not be overlooked!

For a listen check out the Fog podcast from June 22 for a bunch ‘o unreleased demos the guys did in ’66.

A film exploration of the work and aesthetic concepts of Yayoi Kusama, painter, sculptor, and environmentalist, conceived in terms of an intense emotional experience with metaphysical overtones, an extension of my ultimate interest in a total fusion of the arts in a spirit of mutual collaboration.

I was introduced to the Citizens for Interplanetary Activity (C.I.A.) through my old friend Ted Berk. Ted was a poet and occultist, and lived in Brooklyn near the Pratt Institute in the early 60s while I was living on St. Marks Place in the Village. I lived down the street from what became the Electric Circus, around the corner from the Fillmore East and across the street from The Five Spot. From 1961 to 1964, I had done several early film projects, in regular 8mm and in 16mm, with Ted before he had gone to Mexico, and then moved to California.

The C.I.A. (I believe they added the “Change” to their name when they went on the road to come to New York) was founded some time in early 1966, Ted and I believe, by Win Hardy*, the lead guitarist and vocalist. He was originally from Lexington, Kentucky, where his father owned a funeral home. Ted first performed his poetry with the band at a gig in Portland, Oregon at the Pythian Hall on Friday, March 3, 1966, on a bill with The Jook Savages and the Multnoman Electric Band, with lights being done by the Retinal Circus. Later, from March 21-26, the band performed at the Rock Garden on Mission Street in San Francisco, on a bill with Big Brother and the Holding Company and Arthur Lee’s Love.

The C.I.A. Change came to New York perhaps around September 1967, just as I was finishing up the editing of the visual for the “Kusama’s Self Obliteration” film, which was scheduled to be premiered at the Fourth International Experimental Film Festival in Knokk-Le-Zoute, Belgium, that December. As we remember, the band came to perform at the Fillmore East with another group, from San Francisco called the Salvation Army. C.I.A. Change stayed on to perform at the Fillmore as an opening act for Procol Harem, and then later for Simon and Garfunkel. (!) After my meeting with the band, they agreed to do a soundtrack for the edited film. I arranged an after-hours session at the Apostolic Studios of Vanguard Records with Matt Hoffman, and old friend and fellow filmmaker, who worked as a sound engineer there.

We screened the film in the studio on a 16mm Bell and Howell and the band improvised as we ran the film a second time. We recorded it on 1/4” tape. On piano, sitting in with the band, was Paul Kilb, an actor / writer / friend, who was the star in “Twice A Man”, a short film by Gregory Markopoulos. One or two others, whose names we cannot recall, who occasionally worked with lighting behind the band as “aurora Glory Alice”, provided “Liquid Sounds” for the mix. What these “liquid sounds” consisted of, we have no idea. We were prepared to record other takes and do remixes, but upon hearing playback, everyone agreed that the track was perfect as it was. That track was what was married to the visual in the release print and it is what you have on this record. The band returned to San Francisco after this, and their spell at the Fillmore “self-obliterated” there, as it were.
-Jud Yalkut
Dayton, Ohio, August 2000

More here on an LP issue of the soundtrack

Fantastic interview with singer Dorris Henderson from a 1968 issue of the British magazine Zigzag.

Eclection page 1 Eclection page 2

Henderson grew up in Los Angeles and decided to pursue a folk singing career after seeing Odetta perform at the Ash Grove. Armed with an autoharp and a copy of Alan Lomax’s The Folk Songs of North America, she began performing wherever she could. At a health food restaurant in Topanga Canyon she caught the attention of Lord Buckley, and she became part of his act in Hollywood. A move East to New York City threw her into the same Greenwich Village melting pot as Fred Neil, Bob Dylan, and Paul Simon, (whose “Leaves That Are Green” she covers on her first single). You can even catch a glimpse of her in Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back. Visiting her brother in England (he was stationed there in the Air Force),  Henderson met up with John Renbourn at the Roundhouse pub in Soho. The pair hit it off and went on to record the albums There You Go (1965) and Watch the Stars (1967). When Renbourn formed the Pentangle with Bert Jansch and Jacqui McShea, Henderson became a free agent and was quickly snatched up by Trevor Lucas’s group Eclection, to replace the Australian singer Kerrilee Male who’d had enough of show biz.