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Rating: Strength of Music. Weakness of Life.
Tribute to Sky Saxon on the 50th anniversary of “Raw and Alive: The Seeds in Concert at Merlin’s Music Box”.
Sky Saxon, born Richard Elvern Marsh (20/08/1937, Salt Lake City, Utah - 25/06/2009 Austin, Texas), was a hippie, a bard, a more or less reliable rebel. He wrote and composed garage rock or flower punk pieces, played bass, harmonica, and tambourine, and sang in an ostentatious manner with a thorny, aggressive, and monotonous voice.
After a handful of marginal teenage pop singles in collaboration with singer Darla Hood (Richie Marsh & The Hood) and r’n’b (Sky Saxon & The Electra Fires and Sky Saxon & The Soul Rockers), in 1965 in Los Angeles, he formed Seeds with Daryl Hooper (keyboards), Jan Savage (guitar), and Rick Andridge (drums).
Besides performing at Los Angeles's Club Bido Lito, their launch was fundamentally supported by two songs:
- “Can’t Seem to Make You Mine”, a sentimental ballad with a harsh and gritty style, featuring Saxon wailing, struggling between sucked-in sobs and moans;
- “You’re Pushin’ Too Hard”, a scorching hit, a manifesto of the underground era. A track with an essential, hypnotic, and repetitive sound, with a dirty and winning organ and guitar riff, a frenzied and raucous song, establishing a canon and their definitive artistic imprint.
The track was revisited and retitled “Pushin’ Too Hard” for the excellent debut LP edition (self-titled, GNP Crescendo, 1966). That same year, they released “A Web of Sound”, still blues rock with an emphasis on psychedelic traits. The following year, abandoning the Stone-esque poses for the rampant flower music, they released “Future”, an intriguing psychedelic concept, more pop than rock, followed by the lackluster “A Full Spoon of Seedy Blues”, temporarily changing their social name to “Sky Saxon Blues Band”. In May 1968, exactly fifty years ago, they released “Raw and Alive”, again for GNP Crescendo Records, an album that brings the band back to its fiery garage rock roots.
The Seeds express a raw, hard, sparse sound, a “garage punk” influenced by the garagistic attitude of the English beat (paying attention to Rolling Stones, Kinks, and Pretty Things) and their compatriots 13th Floor Elevators. The style is rough, disjointed, with the predominance of the organ setting the rhythm, intertwining with the guitar's outbursts and Saxon's raw, chaotic tones; the obsessive repetition of chords reveals an immediate and primitive psychedelia. The floral iconography and trash taste refine this prototypical garage rock, made by musicians of limited ability but with admirable spontaneity.
It’s 1968, and the band is uncertain about both the artistic directions to take and their own survival. They opted, with the support of producer Marcus Tybalt, for a live recording. But how to best capture the bewildering energy of their performances? How to adequately make the performance's audio appealing? By recording the live set in a studio, a practice already established at the time. Thus was born “Raw and Alive: The Seeds in Concert at Merlin’s Music Box”, even though the event wasn't recorded at that Coffee House, but rather at the Western Recorders studios in Hollywood. If the idiosyncrasy wasn't enough, the audience is fake, mechanical, screaming and getting excited at the most random moments, not to mention they’re annoyingly raving almost throughout the entire track duration. Here’s a Fake Live Album, but it knows how to be a little jewel in its genre (too bad the explosive ride “Excuse, Excuse” is missing from the setlist).
The songs were truly recorded live, without manipulations. Saxon's voice achieves a wild prominence; organ, bass, and drums do their part, see the hallucinatory "Satisfy You", the expansive "Night Time Girl", with its truly powerful pulsing percussive carpet, and "900 Million People Daily All Making Love" so raw and instinctive. Jan Savage's guitar boasts a deeper timbre compared to the self-titled and previous recordings. The intriguing subversive force of “Up in Her Room” is the insane apotheosis: it is a primal and driving erotic-psychedelic drive that refers to “Going Home” from the Stones' “Aftermath.” In addition to the splendid and lascivious “Can’t Seem to Make You Mine” and “Pushin’ Too Hard,” a “Mr. Farmar” with sulfur, a couple of unreleased songs appear (“Humble and Bumble” and “The Gypsy Plays His Drums”). Nothing, however, is retrieved from “Future," the lysergic pop invective, which Saxon would show affection for in the following years.
If we can overlook that "audience" going wild pompously, we can really enjoy this live testament, which showcases a repertoire of immortal underground classics and all the primitive energy of the "First Psychedelic Era" (transversely immortalized in “Nuggets, 1965-68).
The true farewell concert of the Seeds took place on May 3, 1969, at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium: among the audience, a remembered, very excited 22-year-old named Neil Percival Young. If their keyboard-centric rock would influence the Doors, Saxon's stage flamboyance would be imitated by Johnny Lydon.
If this is the âge d'or, but not all is on the leader Richard Marsh. After a few scattered singles (a couple as Sky Saxon And The Seeds with a revised lineup), Saxon disappeared from the official scene in 1971 to join the sect of the enigmatic guru Ya-Ho-Wha or Faher Yod, known as James Edward Baker from Cincinnati (Ohio). This kind of messiah-yogin had first followed the teachings of Harbhajan Singh Puri called Yogi Bhajan, a Sikh authority and master of Kundalini Yoga and White Tantra, then pitched into Western esotericism (drawing generically from alchemy, Kabbalah, theosophy, and some crass occultism), so much as to "produce" some secret doctrines, which he coupled with a manifesto vegetarianism. Baker held the Source, a large chain of restaurants - conveniently- specialized in vegetarian menus (among the regular customers John Lennon and Julie Christie!); he founded a commune (the Source Family) on the Hollywood hills and became their spiritual guide. Besides having 14 wives, he had his own psychedelic and tribal rock band, the Yahowha 13, in which he was the singer. Saxon, who had gotten into that circle, collaborated in recording their albums, receiving from Ya-Ho-Wha the new name Sunlight, to which he would always remain attached, but also that of Arlick. Thus it happened that Saxon abandoned everything, possessions and author rights included, to dedicate himself wholly (body and soul) to carrying out the two fundamental tasks the guru had assigned him:
1) The practice of esoteric music.
2) Nothing more and nothing less than caring for stray dogs.
Kinikós bios? If it isn't this! Sunlight thus continued, more or less professionally, to make music with other adepts, but in a veiled way (he may have shared something with some of these obscure projects "Spirit of 76," "Savage Sons of Yahowha," "Yodship," and "Breath"). In August 1975, guru Ya-Ho-Wha passed away, Saxon Sunlight with other followers opted to move in exile to Hawaii. He later participated –this time with apodictic certainty– in various projects under multiple names (The Starry Seeds Band, Sky Saxon & Firewall, The Hour, Wolf Pack, Fast Planet, Back to the Garden, King Arthur's Court, Shapes Have Fangs), until as Sky Sunlight with Michael Rainbow Neal, he formed the World Peace Band, dedicating himself to mystical guitarism more freely and creatively. The two then became the Stars New Seeds Band, recording regularly from the mid-80s, with friends and colleagues such as Mars Bonfire, keyboardist of Steppenwolf (the composer of "Born to Be Wild"), and Ron Bushy, drummer of Iron Butterfly.
Many have wanted to collaborate with Saxon: we remember Kim Fowley, Steve Wynn, Rudi Protrudi, up to Billy Corgan. In 2002, there were a few dates for a reunion with the original Seeds. In 2008, a new album was even released under The Seeds ("Back to the Garden", composed together with Mike Oak for their Airplay Records, reissued the following year by Global Recording Artists).
Saxon is an interesting character, an ingenuous but good-natured longhair, a scripted rebel, yet consistently nonchalant (at least in old age), the teenager that extols lust, the adult uncertain in mystical pursuit, a modern Proteus, but also a man who has always dedicated himself with beautiful and disarming immediacy to garage music. His means of expression were limited, but, in his way, he was grandiose. That rough and moving singing of his says something about the vitality of rock music. Something endemic, simple, and necessary: «Just give it a try!», “Choose to Love”.
Sky Saxon passed away on June 25, 2009, from kidney failure related to an infection, and heart failure. He died at 71 in Austin, Texas. Ironically, on the same day as Michael Jackson died.
On July 24, members of Love, Strawberry Alarm Clock, Electric Prunes, and Smashing Pumpkins held a tribute concert at the Echoplex in Los Angeles.
I miss Sky Saxon. I don't need to make him an idol.
I like to see him in the video of “Barbie Doll Looks”, it makes me tender and serene. I like to think of him with that face among the angels. And in his heart the boiling of the 66-68 season, in an intensity-increased fervor.
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