L.A. RECORD » reissue

DEVO: GONNA BE A MAN FROM THE MOON

lar_import — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 08:40:55 +0000

Stream: Devo “Planet Earth”

(from Freedom of Choice reissued now on Warner)

The world is now a DEVO song, and so Warner has just reissued two vital early DEVO albums barely containing some of the most annihilating reality ever twined into vinyl. And so L.A. RECORD’s Dan Collins reissues this vintage interview with Mark Mothersbaugh from the archives of the defunct Ostrich Ink. DEVO will perform Freedom Of Choice at the Fonda tonight.

You and the Residents were making videos so early—where do you think the idea came from?
Mark Mothersbaugh (vocals/synthesizers/etc.): A lot of that was owed to the time we grew up. Artists that we were interested in were people like Andy Warhol, who was a multimedia guy. He designed clothes and he silk-screened and he painted and he photographed and he produced bands, and he made movies and put out a magazine—you know, that guy’s so cool. That’s what I want to do. I like it because he’s about ideas rather than just being about an instrument or a technique—rather than an old-time craftsman. We really liked what he was doing. And other people like him that were multimedia artists. Chuck Statler, who Jerry and I had gone to school with at Kent State, had gone to Minneapolis while we were still kinda struggling in Akron. He came back and he had this Popular Science and it said, ‘Laserdiscs: The Wave of the Future.’ It’s 1974. We’re like, ‘Laserdiscs? What are those?’ ‘Well, it looks like a record, but it holds visual and audio information.’ And we thought, ‘Whoa—sound and vision! That’s great! That’s what the future is going to be. And rock ‘n’ roll—we can bury it once and for all!’ We were certain that sound and vision was going to kill rock ‘n’ roll and create a new art form. And the artists that would carry weight in the populace would be artists that thought visually. So he came back and said, ‘Let’s make a film.’ And we said, ‘We don’t have any money—how are we going to handle that?’ ‘I’m working in this company. I’m trying to do commercials now. I can get us free editing time and I can borrow a camera and all we have to do is come up with money for film.’ Our first seven-and-a-half-minute movie took about four months to do because we didn’t have money. But we made it for like three thousand dollars. General Boy was a lucky accident. What happened there was there was this lawyer that was a friend of ours—this young guy that was kind of an asshole yuppie guy.
Is he the one parodied in the in the later videos?
Mark Mothersbaugh: No—that’s other people that we liked much less. But this guy did us a favor because he said, ‘You know, I don’t think it’d be good for my reputation to be in this film you guys are making.’ Oh no—who’s gonna play General Boy? Because we’d written the script. And Jerry goes, ‘Mark, would your dad do it?’ ‘I don’t know. Let’s ask him.’ So we went and asked him, and he was like [in bold announcer voice] ‘WHY YEEES!’ At first he didn’t get the idea. But once he saw himself on screen, he like totally got the acting bug.
He’s a magnetic actor. He really is good.
Mark Mothersbaugh: Yeah—some latent desire to be an artist that was thwarted by World War II and the Depression. He painted a bit and played music a bit, but he never really pursued it because he came from a family of coal miners. The idea of being an artist was like if he would have said, ‘Hey Mom! Dad! I’m gonna be a man from the moon!’ You know—they’d go, ‘Whut? Whut tha fuck yew tawkin’ about?’ He didn’t really pursue that at all. He wasn’t driven enough or obsessed enough to do it and just instead opted for survival. But he did good on his General Boy. Actually I remember on our first tour, we opened at a show in Minneapolis. We were playing at the Walker Arts Center. And one of the roadies—one of the security guards says, ‘There’s an old guy at the back door with an army outfit on and says he’s General Boy, and he wants to talk to you.’ And we’re like—he drove from Akron, Ohio, to Minneapolis? So my dad comes in and he goes, ‘Mark, I’ve got this opening speech I’ve written so I can introduce you boys.’ He was more DEVO than we could ever have been. He had his whole own perception of what DEVO meant—what devolution meant. And it was filtered through the eyes of a guy who’d been in World War II and who was a salesman who sold fire alarms and and vibrating pads and stuff like that. His schooling stopped with the Dale Carnegie book. You know—‘Look ‘em in the eyes! Give ‘em a handshake!’ ‘Make a friend and a sale at the same time.’ He was that kind of guy. So his take on it was kind of interesting. It kind of freaked us out a little bit, but at the same time we kept encouraging him, and he ended up writing lyrics for songs and stuff.
[Mark leaves, and comes back holding a banjo as the interview continues. Imagine the rest of the interview as if it were being accompanied by the strumming of an Appalachian mountain boy.]
Let’s talk about the whole DEVO ethos.
Mark Mothersbaugh: We were living in Ohio. From our vantage point, it was like being on a cultural wasteland. We heard about the Village in Manhattan. And we heard about Carnaby Street in London, or things in England and San Francisco and the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles. We heard about all these places. And there was nothing happening in Ohio. It was the Summer of Hate while everyone else was having the Summer of Love. And we were just watching everything. Also at the time, the economy in Ohio had collapsed. It was one of those areas that got hit really hard during that depression that happened in the seventies and eighties. It was a factory town for the first sixty or seventy years. And then all those factories pulled out and went to Malaysia and South America, so there were these big draconian factories that weren’t employing very many people. Everybody was out of work. Nobody knew what to do. None of them were educated. They made tires, you know? It was a city full of blue-collar tire makers, and it was really a dark time. But yet there was all this promise. I remember going to the Akron Art Institute and I saw laser projected holograms where—for instance—there was a shark that was six feet long in one of the rooms, and you could walk around it. It was like five feet in the air. You could walk around it and look underneath it and look down its mouth and look at it from the back of the tail and look inside the gills. It was totally 3-D, but it was a ghost. You could put your hands through it. And at the time, I said, ‘You know what? I want whatever’s going on in technology. That’s where things are happening.’ And also at the time, there was no voice in music. There wasn’t a Bob Dylan, and there wasn’t a Woody Guthrie or anybody that was a conscience for youth. After they shot kids on different campuses in ’70, it’s like the country went into a big sleep. And all the really politically active people—who were protesting globalization, and America and fucking around with the politics of Southeast Asia, and the Cold War and things—they all stopped. They all just became quiet. And by ’73 or ’74, the, the music that you were hearing was disco and concert rock. The Eagles. Styx. There was nobody talking about the issues. And this was a time when things like the Cuyahoga River, which we lived on—there was all this white foam I remember always floating down. When I was I kid, we’d be swimming around. In the early seventies, the river caught on fire and stayed on fire for days—weeks!—before they got it put out. Because there were so many chemicals that companies all along the Cuyahoga River had been dumping into the river that were going into Lake Erie. And that’s when all the early alarmists were saying, ‘Wait a minute, you know—our ozone’s been fucked up, there’s global warming, you know? We’re drinking and eating chemicals that are poisonous, and nobody’s paying attention to all that.’ There were a few scientists and people that were trying to speak and they were getting shouted down by the same people that are right now building roads through pristine timberland and drilling for oil. We were mesmerized by the choices that humans were making at the time. By what people thought was important or precious. And it was before having a conscience was made almost embarrassing by people like Sting—jumping in a Lear Jet and flying down to the Amazon to tell pygmies that he was there to protect them or something, you know? They’re like, ‘Who the fuck are you?’ So that’s part of this whole thing about where DEVO came from—it came from a lot of different sources. We were just looking for a way to describe what we saw going on. We saw this incredible technology fucking everything up. But we saw this stuff that looked and seemed amazing. And it should be doing great things. But the quality of life was deteriorating. So there was like a bunch of things that came together at once. The movie Island of Lost Souls, with the House of Pain—‘What is the Law? Not to walk on all fours, not to spill blood!’ And this Superwoman comic book, where this mad scientist had an evolution-devolution machine. He’d push the lever forward, and there was like this vacuum capsule. And there’d be a guy that was in there. When he pushed it forward, the guy’s head would blow up like a light bulb, and his hair would fall out, and he’d look like a progeria kid. And he’d pull it backwards, and then his brow would drop, and he’d get covered with hair, and he’d be like a caveman.
[Mark gets up out of his seat and grabs a black guitar amplifier nearby. He swings it around to reveal in white letters: ‘DEVOLUTIONARY ARMY.’]
Mark Mothersbaugh: This is an old amp from way back when. We called ourselves ‘The De-evolution Band’ for a while. And then we were the Devolutionary Army, and then we trimmed it down to DEVO. It was just easier to say and it was kind of like ‘Smart Patrol’—the song was originally ‘Smart Proletariats,’ but it just didn’t roll off your tongue. ‘Smart proletariats, nowhere to go!’
You also have a lot of sex imagery—it’s kind of novel in the Hardcore DEVO collections how many of the songs are devoted to really making sex look silly or gooey or messy, and it seems quite the opposite of what was going on in the seventies.
Mark Mothersbaugh: We just felt sex in America was still so Victorian, you know? A Planet of the Apes funky show-your-butt-party is much more interesting than the porno that was around at the time where two people meet on the tennis court. I think porno is like a weathervane for a culture, you know? The more interesting the porno, the more interesting the culture.
What about the covers of the Hardcore DEVO albums? You have some woman with fake breasts over her real breasts, and then they’ve got a picture of you guys.
Mark Mothersbaugh: And we all had fake breasts on, too. We couldn’t afford the real surgery at the time. There was this one photographer out here named Moshe Brakha who really played devil’s advocate—we got some of the best photos of DEVO ever during this photo session. There’s some shots from those photo shoots that nobody’s ever seen. Somewhere near the end of the photo shoot he pulled out this gigantic Nazi flag—I don’t even know where he got it—and he’s got us holding this Nazi flag for a few photos, and we’re like, ‘Whoa, what’s that about?’
How did you meet Brian Eno?
Mark Mothersbaugh: We were playing in New York that summer, and started to get kind of a following and we never got paid. But the shows would be crammed. They’d be totally filled with people. Our guest list would be like sixty or seventy people and they’d have everybody; there’d be like Jack Nicholson and all the Rolling Stones and Frank Zappa’s band. ‘It’s alright with you if Frank Zappa listens to you play?’ ‘Sure!’ ‘Alright with you if Candy Clark is on your guest list?’ So Bowie came and saw us one night. We’d done some interviews and people said, ‘Who’d you like to have produce you guys?’ Of all the people I could think of, I thought it would either be David Bowie or Brian Eno. I liked their music, and I thought maybe they would understand what we were trying to do. David Bowie showed up one night and on the second set before we came out, he introduced us,and he goes [in a canned carny voice] ‘This is the band of the future! I am producing them in Tokyo this winter!’ And we’re like, ‘Okay, we’re sleeping in a car tonight—that sounds good to us!’ Then afterwards, he said, ‘Yeah, I really want to produce you guys. The only thing is, I’m up for this movie called Just a Gigolo. If I get it, I have to go to Berlin for a couple months. So that would push it off.’ And we go, ‘Well, we don’t even have anywhere to go when we leave here.’ We’re homeless, you know—we don’t know what we’re gonna be doing for those two months. The next week, we played again, and Robert Fripp and Brian Eno came. And they invited us over to Robert Fripp’s house. And he fed us. And they both said, ‘We would want to produce you guys if you were up for it.’ And we said, ‘Well, Brian, David Bowie last week said he was producing us in Tokyo!’ And Brian Eno starts going, ‘He’s full of shit.’ At the time I didn’t know that Brian Eno was kinda pissed at Bowie because he felt he didn’t get credited properly on Heroes. And Low. Brian Eno said, ‘Let’s just go right now. Don’t even worry about a record company. I’ll loan you the money. We’ll go over to Germany, at this studio I work at all the time—Conny Plank Studio.’ It’s the place where bands like Birth Control and Guru Guru and Kraftwerk and you know—Can, Moebius, Roedelius, they all recorded at that studio. ‘Sure, that’s great—you’re gonna pay for us to go to this?’ So he flew us over to Germany. David Bowie of course still wanted to be involved and showed up every day on the weekends and hung out with us, and then bickered with Eno.
What did all the German bands think of you?
Mark Mothersbaugh: While we were in Germany, I got a call from the band Kraftwerk and they said, ‘We’re gonna go on our first tour, and we would like to play your film.’ We only had one film at the time. The Truth About Deevolution. So in the spring of ’78, they took the DEVO movie as their opening act.
When did DEVO officially start?
Mark Mothersbaugh: Jerry and I first started writing music together in 1970. There wasn’t another band we were ever in together. We were only ever in DEVO. And in 1970 we were both Students for a Democratic Society. And my brother Bob, he used to come up to Kenton. At the time Bob and I were in this kind of acid-blues band and Jerry was in kind of a more of a straight-ahead blues band. They shot students at Kent State—we were protestors then—and they shot people. They closed down the school that spring. We were there. Jerry was standing right about ten feet away from one of the girls that got her—got blasted.
Did that change your perspective on what you should do with music?
Mark Mothersbaugh: Yeah, quite a bit.

DEVO PERFORMING FREEDOM OF CHOICE ON WED., NOV. 4, AT THE HENRY FONDA THEATER, 6126 HOLLYWOOD BLVD., HOLLYWOOD. 8 PM / $43-$103 / ALL AGES. HENRYFONDATHEATER.COM. DELUXE REISSUES OF Q: ARE WE NOT MEN? AND FREEDOM OF CHOICE ARE AVAILABLE NOW ON RHINO. VISIT DEVO AT CLUBDEVO.COM OR MYSPACE.COM/DEVO.

NORTON TO ISSUE DOUBLE KIM FOWLEY RETROSPECTIVES THIS OCTOBER!

lar_import — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 22:10:39 +0000

Stream: Kim Fowley “Underground Lady”

(from One Man’s Garbage available this October on Norton)

We here at L.A. RECORD are diligent students of L.A.’s Animal God of the Streets and so we are happy to learn that Kim Fowley’s classic ’60s output (as producer, musician and fearsome inspiration) will be corraled on two separate LPs for the unstoppable Norton this October—One Man’s Garbage and Another Man’s Gold! Huge news for all reality seekers, and if you’re reading this and you didn’t get that Black Randy reissue, you best … get right. Details below:

ONE MAN’S GARBAGE IS ANOTHER MAN’S GOLD!

Norton presents a Golden Decade (1959-69) of Kim Fowley’s elusive, previously properly unheralded mega genius escapades that reinforce the fact that Kim is… GODHEAD! Posh gatefold LPs feature extensive liner notes from Mr. Fowley, presented in his own inimitable MEGA GENIUS steeltrap-memory way. Stand now and salute the man, and each of these great records which blast right today as they did back when the chicken was the egg!

KIM FOWLEY – ONE MAN’S GARBAGE (Norton 355)
BRUCE AND JERRY – I Saw Her First/PATTERNS – Late Late Show/U.S. ROCKETS – Bodacious/RITUALS – This Is Paradise/DONNIE AND THE OUTCASTS – Big Fat Alaskan/RENEGADES – Charge/PLAYERS – The Rebel/KIM AND THE SKIPPERS – Daybreaker/MO AND JO – The Yo Yo Song/JOHNNY C AND THE BLAZES – Inferno/KIM FOWLEY – Music Is The Magic/BLUE BELLS – Moccasin/ALTHEA AND THE MEMORIES – Dedication Time/KIM FOWLEY – Underground Lady/KIM FOWLEY AND MARS BONFIRE – Surf Pigs*/ALTHEA AND THE MEMORIES – Worst Record Ever Made (* = previously unissued)

KIM FOWLEY – ANOTHER MAN’S GOLD (Norton 356)
RENEGADES – Geronimo/KIM FOWLEY – Big Sur, Bear Mountain, Ciro’s, Flip Side Protest Song/GAMBLERS – Teen Machine/VAQUEROS – Vaquero Beat/PLAYERS – Memories Of A High School Bride/ASTON MARTIN AND THE MOON DISCS – Fallout/COVER GIRLS – Gone But Not Forgotten/DAYWINS – Heartbeat/RITUALS – Surfers Rule/BONNIE AND THE TREASURES – Eleventh Commandment Of Love*/RENEGADES – Ghost Train*/ HOLLYWOOD ARGYLES – Long Hair, Unsquare Dude Called Jack/DONNIE AND THE OUTCASTS – Bounty Hunter/ALTHEA AND THE MEMORIES – Daddy Said/U.S. ROCKETS – March Of The Siamese Children/RITUALS – Gone (* = previously unissued)

THE MONKS PART 1: WE ALL WANNA DIE IN A HAIL OF BULLETS

lar_import — Wed, 20 May 2009 18:18:39 +0000

shea M gauer

Download: The Monks “Love Came Tumblin’ Down” (demo)

(from The Early Years 1964-1965 out now on Light In The Attic)

The Monks were one of the greatest rock ‘n’ roll bands ever. They came from nowhere—five G.I.s stationed in Germany about to muster out of the U.S. Army when Vietnam and the Beatles were both heating up—and they sounded like nobody else on their single album Black Monk Time and they faded away after only a few years, so shell-shocked that they had to struggle to remember how to be Americans again. Light In The Attic has just reissued Black Monk Time (with vital outtakes like “Pretty Suzanne”) and the pre-Monk Time demos. Founders Eddie Shaw and Gary Burger (who reveals the location of the lost last Monks session!) speak now about the Monk times. These interviews by Chris Ziegler. Read Part Two of the interview (with Monks singer Gary Burger) here.

Eddie Shaw (bass): I was a musician when I was 15 years old and I played in a casino in Carson City, Nevada, and Wayne Newton was 12 years old—he was on the front stage, and I was 15 and I was on the back stage. So, you know, I come from a musical family. My aunt Sue almost married Will Wills, who’s Bob Wills’ brother. I was a musician all my life and actually I was assigned to the 6th Army band when I went in the Army. They were gonna station me in San Francisco. I had a plush job and I went and screwed it up and said, ‘Well, I’m gonna be so close to home—can I see some place else?’ and they said sure and sent me to Germany. When I got to Germany all of a sudden I was in an artillery outfit.
Do you feel like you’ve always chosen the path of most resistance?
Well, yeah—I did. My new book is about birds hitting windows and this trumpet player keeps hitting windows and I’ve spent my life hitting windows but that’s the thing. I don’t like playing or doing the conventional sort of stuff. Usually its about discovery for me, and that’s what the Monks was. It was about discovery.
What did you discover through the Monks?
The minimalist thing. The idea of tension.
Do you still feel what you wrote in your book Black Monk Time—that all Monks songs are love songs?
They are in a sense. If you listen to ‘I Hate You, But Call Me,’ how many of us hate the person that we love at any given minute because we’re so frustrated and so in love? The very heart of love in some ways, right?
Did you ever feel that you were turning into your own songs?
We got tired at the end. I don’t know if you saw that Monks documentary Transatlantic Feedback—the documentary was about a list and really there was no list. In the documentary it sounded like we broke up or we didn’t make it because we didn’t follow the list. It’s a myth—just like the Lunachicks in New York City were the first to play Monk music in the states. They had an interview in People magazine and they said, ‘Where’d you get those songs?’ and they said, ‘Well, we discovered this old obscure recording.’ They said it was a bunch of GIs in Germany who went AWOL and the police were looking for them and they showed up on German TV singing ‘I Hate You, But Call Me’ and the police closed in on them and they disappeared and nobody’s seen them since. I’ve always liked that story the best—I wish that one was true. But getting back to whether we were that thing—when you wear that image everyday, people treat you differently and you get used to it and you get the feeling of how it must feel to be a monk. Or a figure of religious authority, so to speak. Until you say, ‘fuck you’ and you have a shot of whiskey and ogle the girls standing over there and they figure it out—‘Wait a minute!’
In the book, you say everybody’s personality was defined by the instrument they play. So who were the Monks?
Gary was a country-western player. I think his roots were probably in folk music. [Banjo player] Dave [Day] played three chords. [Organist] Larry [Clark] took piano lessons and he played Chopin and he also got a $90 organ and could play ‘Green Onions.’ [Drummer] Roger [Johnston] was from Texas and he played Texas swing. He might have been influenced by the Bob Wills swing group. I never discussed my musical past with them. We were all from different environments—for the most part, that’s what made the Monks. The music is a hybrid of sort of a conversation between all of us to get rid of what all of us had that the other ones couldn’t work with. I come from Miles Davis and Chet Baker and all that. My music culture has nothing to do with the Monk music culture and I know that Gary’s music culture has nothing to do with the Monk music culture. Neither do any of them. Basically what the Monk music culture became was what we could do that would work together that nobody else had ever done.
You guys said in the book how you wanted to be truthful as a band and just communicate the simple truth. Is that why people thought Monk music was so ugly?
I don’t think people like to be hit in the head with the straight-on idea that everybody lies. I tell everybody that I lie three times a day and I try to do them as early in the morning as possible so I get them out of the way. So you know—‘Shut up, be a liar.’ We still have that today. Just look at politicians. I’m not a political person. I didn’t really like the political content that we were doing because I don’t really like that. To me it dates the songs. ‘Monk Time’ is dated because of the reference to Vietnam. If it wouldn’t have been the reference to Vietnam, it could have been like ‘Shut up, don’t cry!’—it could be good now. But there is a way to talk about politics in a song that doesn’t date it and we had a big argument about that one. I was against it. But I compromised. If it’s our kid then I’ll do it. But when you use a song to attack the headlines, you are basically dating yourself. It’s not that you shouldn’t have the honor or the courage to say, ‘I’ll speak my mind.’ Because I will. But if you’re going to make a piece of art you want the message to last. I don’t want it to die as soon as the problem died.
I read about someone who’d seen you play in Germany and said, ‘What the hell were you guys doing? I didn’t understand what it was but I got pissed off as soon as I heard it.’ Does that count as success?
Yes, it does. I was in a bar five years ago and I was sitting there drinking a beer and this guy about my age was sitting there we were talking and he said, ‘I was in Vietnam.’ I told him I was in Germany and he said, ‘Yeah, I went to Germany from Vietnam and I had a girlfriend and went to Hamburg and saw this group playing and I hated them—I wanted to kill ‘em.’ I drank my beer and I didn’t say anything but after a while I said, ‘I was in that group.’ He says, ‘I absolutely hate you.’ He said it, but we were drinking a beer real friendly and I say, ‘What did you hate about it?’ He said, ‘That whole bullshit about Vietnam and crap—I just got back from Vietnam.’ I said, ‘Yeah I didn’t like that myself. But as you turn around and look at it thirty years later when Robert McNamara came on TV and apologized about it—I felt then at least maybe we weren’t wrong. Not that that’s the important thing—the sad thing is that 58,000 American kids died along with all the Vietnamese kids.’ And he says, ‘I know that and I thought about it and you’re absolutely right.’ ‘After all these years,’ he says, ‘you’re right. But I still hate you.’ So I said, ‘OK.’
You seemed so shell-shocked coming out of the Monks experience. What did the Monks do to you?
You get conditioned to knowing that you’re going to piss people off. When I went home—my mother is a hell of a piano player, and when I played the Monks stuff for her, she didn’t say anything against it but she just ignored it and went on to something else. But normally before, when I played drums and trumpet, all the jazz stuff—she’d say, ‘Great! Do that again!’ My uncle who also played just turned it off—‘God, you used to be a better musician than that! Why are you doing that?’ So you just lock it away and say, ‘Well, that didn’t work.’ After I wrote the book, these two guys showed up at my house and asked if I was Eddie the Monk and I about fell over. I called Gary Burger in Minnesota just because he would like to know that and I said, ‘You wouldn’t believe this but two guys showed up at my door and wanted to do an article because they’d read the book and they loved our music—the Monks have people who like them.’ And Gary said, ‘fuck you,’ and he hung up.
Was that an affectionate fuck you?
No—it was a pissed-off fuck you. He thought I was fucking with his head. It’s the idea that if you go out and you’re going to be an artist and if you’re just up there to please everybody and you want everybody to love you, you’re really wasting your time. Dave always sought love—I’m not using that against him but people want to be loved and Dave was one of those. You never test the limits of anybody—you just want to please them. If you want to be an artist you need to feel the ripples of tension throughout the audience. I want to see if something is causing a little pushback, because if I get a little pushback then I know that there might lie a key to some hidden truth right there.
The path of most resistance?
You get the pushback and it says you’re raising a reaction. If you’re getting a reaction, then you’re doing something.
Isn’t this basic chemistry? A reaction producing results?
Yeah—that’s it right there! Holy Christ, we are gonna talk about the universe here shortly. Holy Christ, this telephone is getting hot!
So what discoveries do you have that you need to share?
I don’t have any discoveries. I think the idea is the idea of living to discover or learn something. I can’t imagine the idea of retiring and then sitting in my RV in an RV park to watch the sun go down and say, ‘Oh, this is a great life—I don’t have to go to work.’ I enjoy my work, so I live for my work because my work is the process of discovery.
What are the biggest revelations you’ve had in your life?
The idea of being in love is a revelation because you become more than just yourself. The idea of one person standing alone against the world is totally non-existent.
Isn’t that supposed to be the whole romantic rock n’ roll rebel thing?
Well, that’s the outlaw. We all want the outlaws. We all wanna die in a hail of bullets.
But that’s not a realistic expectation.
I don’t think so. If it is, go join the Army.
So the Monks really were all about love then?
In a sense, don’t we all strive for love? If you discover something, isn’t that illumination sort of freeing? It’s like—yeah, this feels good.
Why do you guys think you got so many letters from East Germany? What were they responding to?
One of the things I think was the idea that we would speak our mind—to say, ‘I’m an American, I have free speech, I can say what I wanna say whether you like it or not.’ They go, ‘You can’t say that—you can tell me that in private but don’t say it out loud like that!’ That is what the East Germans picked up on. These Americans are saying this stuff and it doesn’t even sound like they’re supporting their country but the thing is we are. We’re proving that in our country we’re free.
Who were the Monks fans?
What kind of people? I would say people who are more free-thinking. That could be anybody from a stripteaser to a painter or a jazz musician who doesn’t like rock. One of my friends used to hang out and he liked Monk music because he said it doesn’t sound like all that other crap. And it was always amazing that this Monk music was being played by guys who, much of the time, didn’t know more than three or four chords.
Do you feel like that laid the groundwork for punk?
I don’t think it laid the ground but I think that there’s an evolution going on all the time and we’re just part of it. We were the first ones that got the little fins that we crawled out of the water two inches.
Do you still feel like you failed?
No, I don’t. It takes a while to see that the idea of failure is good—if you have no failures then you’ve never tried anything. My grandmother wanted me to be a preacher. I didn’t dare tell her what kind of Monk I was. She said, ‘Are you with the Lord, Eddie?’ I said, ‘I think so.’

Read Chris Ziegler’s interview with Monks singer Gary Burger here.

THE MONKS PART 2: I LOVED YOU BEFORE AND I HATE YOU NOW

lar_import — Wed, 20 May 2009 18:18:27 +0000

shea M gauer

Download: The Monks “Love Came Tumblin’ Down” (demo)

(from The Early Years 1964-1965 out now on Light In The Attic)

The Monks were one of the greatest rock ‘n’ roll bands ever. They came from nowhere—five G.I.s stationed in Germany about to muster out of the U.S. Army when Vietnam and the Beatles were both heating up—and they sounded like nobody else on their single album Black Monk Time and they faded away after only a few years, so shell-shocked that they had to struggle to remember how to be Americans again. Light In The Attic has just reissued Black Monk Time (with vital outtakes like “Pretty Suzanne”) and the pre-Monk Time demos. Founders Eddie Shaw and Gary Burger (who reveals the location of the lost last Monks session!) speak now about the Monk times. These interviews by Chris Ziegler. Read Part One of the interview (with Monks bassist Eddie Shaw) here.

Are you still the mayor of your town?
Gary Burger (vocals/guitar): I’m the mayor. I’ve been the mayor fifteen years in this fine little city of Turtle River and I originally ran on the ‘no progress’ platform and that’s still sucking ‘em in. No change at all. We don’t want new people moving in—we don’t want progress.
Do people call you up? ‘Gary, come over and fix my pipes!’
No, the mayor don’t do that kind of work. I’ve got a recording studio. I’m about to bring some boys in—I got a great drummer Len Curio from L.A. I got a terrific bassist from Minneapolis and a local keyboard player and myself and we’re gonna produce a Gary Burger album. Some of them are protest songs. Some are damn near a love song. It’s sort of eclectic and it worries me because I’m going to be yelling at money mongers and bankers. I wrote that damn song ten years ago!
Are you still yelling like you used to? Do you still have the voice?
Oh, man, that’s all I can do. I’ve always thought, ‘Hey, I should be a crooner,’ but no—that’s a mistake. I need to yell, I guess, before people will listen to me. And sometimes they turn me off even then. It’s a good way to get your frustrations out. Just go yell in a recording studio where nobody is hearing you but yourself—at least that day. And later on they can listen if they want. But I’m pretty excited about this new recording I’ve got 18 songs that are all original. I’m playing guitar on it too. 18 wont make the cut but we’ll see what happens. I’ve got my players here for five days. We don’t believe in taking two years or six months to do an album. It’s basically set the band up, get good sound and let ‘er rip.
Your German managers wanted you to be the hardest band in the world—do you think that actually came true?
At that time? Yeah. The audiences didn’t appreciate it very much and the bar owners hated it. They used to say, ‘What happened to my nice little band the Torquays? Now you guys are playing this crap and you’re running my customers out of the place. I loved you before and I hate you now.’ Pretty strong stuff for a band that’s counting on these businesses to make our living. We managed it for quite a while and it eventually petered out.
What kind of people were really connecting with you guys?
We had some people who would actually shave their heads and wear black. There were a few of those. They were dedicated and became our friends—they just saw something in the music and in us that struck a chord with them. We were probably the only band on the continent at the time that would shout, ‘Why’d you kill all those kids over there in Vietnam?’ I don’t think the English groups were doing that and the German groups certainly were not and there were people in the States that were doing it with the anti-war movement growing in the states. Dylan had some pretty damn pointed songs about it all. And Barry McGuire.
How much did your Army training influence the Monks?
The band was a pretty loose show. The Army didn’t have much to do with that, and as far as the look, it was the manager’s creation. It was still a rock ‘n roll band. People say what kind of music is it—punk? Naw, hell—I thought it was rock ‘n roll. Punk? What was that in ’66? If you called somebody punk that meant they were a shithead or a young dummy or something.
Do you feel like you laid the groundwork for the punk music that would happen later?
I don’t want to go that far, my friend. There’s a lot of people out there in the history of music who have made little steps in this direction or that direction and the Monks were just another step. I think what we did with our anti-war songs—we were one of the first ones, in Europe for sure, to do that. I’m very proud of that. When we went out to play or when we regrouped for these reunion concerts in the last few years, I couldn’t bring myself to sing or yell, ‘Why’d you kill all those kids over there in Vietnam?’ That’s ancient history. So I put in words like, ‘Why’d you kill all those kids in Iraq?’ Or Afghanistan? That makes sense. There’s always going to be a war—it just pisses me off that there’s always going to be a war. If there’s not one going on, just wait a week.
I know there’s a little tension about those lyrics.
Who said that? I don’t think I was ever uncomfortable with it—I think Eddie was. I always felt good about it. Even though I was an Army guy and I had connections with friends who were in the Army after we became the Monks, they didn’t want to go to Vietnam. They heard the stories. The Army is one big rumor pipeline inside it. You hear the stories of people who have been there and they didn’t want to go. But on the other hand I can relate to Eddie’s spookiness about doing those songs—he never did want to do that sort of thing. But I was pleased about it. I think it’s what the Monks had to do. If the Monks were truly going to have any impact in 1966, we better be saying something about the Vietnam War. When we go out now, we don’t do that. I’m talking about new wars and that still makes Eddie uncomfortable. Eddie is just not comfortable with any of this protest stuff. I guess I’m not afraid of repercussions. I’m not spooked by what the world might say about me. I’m an individual. I’m a leader, not a follower.
Eddie said in the book all the Monks songs were love songs—what do you think? Were the protest songs love songs?
Not the protest songs. But we get asked about ‘I Hate You’ which happens to be one of my favorites—I love to sing that song today. That’s a love song—‘I hate you but call me?’ Come on. How many relationships have we had in our lives where we’re like, ‘I don’t know if I like this person but I’d sure like to hear from them’?
What was the most romantic Monks moment?
That’s almost X-rated! Eddie said something that I always liked, and I don’t like too much of what he says, but I liked this—he said that when we were the Torquays we got the nice girls and after we became the Monks we got the bad girls.
Is that a step in the right direction?
Well, it was for the Monks—at least we were still getting girls!
What do you think the Monks’ message was?
I think if anything, songs like ‘Complication’ and ‘Monk Time’ raise the awareness to stand up and say something about the inequities going on in the world. War is number one. There’s so many areas—it would be about impossible to cover all the bases. Starvation, poverty—it just goes on and on. I think putting that message out with the original Monks was a good thing to do. And I think I’ve said it twice that I’m very proud of the Monks for having those two particular cuts on our albums these days. Without those two cuts, I think the Monks would have been a bubblegum punk band. ‘Shut Up,’ too—that’s another possible anti-war song. ‘The world is worried, the world is always worried’—let’s find a damn world where we’re not so damn worried about everything and we can just live our lives in peace and accomplish our personal goals. Not whether you do or not but at least have the chance to accomplish your personal goals.
Was it true that you guys got bags of fan mail?
Yeah, we would get fan mail. ‘Hey, we love you and we’re coming to see you and my name is Brigitte.’
What do you think the Monks experience did to you as a person?
I went in enthusiastic and came out sobered. I didn’t want to hear any more about the Monks after I came back to the States. I didn’t feel like an American. I missed Europe and I missed my friends and I missed the life. It took me years to really settle down again and become an American again. We weren’t German, we weren’t French, we weren’t Italian, we weren’t Swedish, we were Americans that became something else and we became something else because we lived there, spoke the language, ate that food, heard their newscasts—didn’t hear CNN, didn’t hear NBC, didn’t hear CBS news. We eventually lost a good share of our American identity because we were relating to people who were non-American. I don’t want to say we became German because that isn’t so. We just became more international in attitude. When I got back to the States I didn’t like it here. I got back here in ‘68 and around 1974 I sold everything that I had and I was single again and I did it to finance a trip to Germany and I went over that with the idea that I might stay here—but Germany had marched on without me for four or five years and it was already too late. It was a sobering experience but I came back and eventually ended up where I am now and built a new life, new career, new happiness and what’s kept me interested and excited during these times is to continue writing songs. I haven’t pressed anybody to try to shop them or go that direction but I’m about to change that that. I’m gonna move that next little album around, assuming it comes out good.
I found a quote where you’re talking about how in some ways you feel there is no place for people in the world who wanna be different and so they just get crushed. Do you still feel that way?
Sometimes, yeah. People who want to be different—well, who are different, who speak out or do things that are not part of the normal grain can be penalized. I’m not saying I am—I don’t believe that any more from my point of view. And I do believe that anybody who wants to make a statement through music or however—who are we to penalize anybody? We should be encouraging people to have discussion and have new ideas and be allowed to experiment and try them.
Is there any Monks music you’d like to still see come out? Any unreleased recordings?
There’s a couple more recordings that haven’t been released and probably never will be. We recorded them in the Top Ten Club in Hamburg. They’re sitting here on a shelf about ten feet away from me.
Are you kidding? Everybody is going to come after you for those!
Tell them I’ve got three big dogs and they’re all mean! I think the Monks have mutually agreed that it will just stay where it is—the world doesn’t need it. They’ll stay there.
Do you feel a sense of vindication now with these reissues?
Amazement was the first reaction—the second was that this was okay. The third is some satisfaction that the Monks still leave a wake and that’s pretty damn cool. There’s been thousands of groups that have worked just as hard as the Monks did or harder and haven’t managed to have that wake behind them. And the ship’s still moving. It is still satisfying, I’m just hoping to hell nobody wants to shoot me for being a Monk! The only time that I felt physically at potential risk was once in south Germany, a fella jumped on stage and started to choke the life out of me for being a Monk. But that was kind of a Nazi zone down there at the time and that was the only time.
What pushed him over the edge?
I don’t have a clue. It was just the way we looked, just the way we sounded. I don’t think he even understood what we were singing.
He was just inspired to engage with you?
Yes, he was. I hit him in the side of the face with my guitar neckpiece with all those little strings sticking out and he let go right quick and security got to him right quick. I was glad to be done with that show though—I can remember that!

Read Chris Ziegler’s interview with Monks bassist Eddie Shaw here.

UBIQUITY TO ISSUE LIMITED REPRESS OF ARTHUR VEROCAI LP!

lar_import — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 19:13:31 +0000

Download: Arthur Verocai “Presente Grego”

(from the self-titled LP coming soon on Ubiquity)

Costa Mesa label Ubiquity—and its reissue arm Luv N Haight—have quietly announced a very limited vinyl repress of the long-gone Arthur Verocai LP, a lost masterpiece that surfaced only in 2002 and which provoked such a powerful response (Madlib has said he’d listen to it every single day!) that Verocai was able to perform his first American shows ever in Los Angeles last month. (We even got to interview him—read it here!) This record is an easy lock for any DJs—people always come running up asking what it is—and a satisfying listen start to finish. Folks into Os Mutantes, Azymuth, Jorge Ben, Norman Whitfield, Shuggie Otis, Sly Stone, Charles Stepney (of Rotary Connection) or any of those lone visionary types who made the studio into their own psychedelic instrument will want to get this and will be particularly unhappy if they miss the second chance. The album remains available on CD and iTunes, however.

Pre-order the reissue of the Verocai LP here!

CHRIS DARROW: YOU SAVED MY LIFE!

lar_import — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 04:14:49 +0000

christine hale

Stream: Chris Darrow “Albuquerque Rainbow”

(from Chris Darrow/Under My Own Disguise out now on Everloving)

Chris Darrow was the underheralded sideman of ‘70s L.A as well as one of the founders of the Kaleidoscope, one of the best psych-and-everything-else bands to ever come out of California. He is present on perhaps 15% of the records in your collection. He speaks now on a Friday evening from his hometown of Claremont. This interview by Dan Collins.

You sound really young!
I’m 64.
How did you end up in Kaleidoscope?
I started out in folk music. When I was a real small kid, I played ukulele, and then my sister broke my ukulele when I was about five years old. In the fifties, I was about thirteen years old, and the folk boom hit America, and most of my heroes of rock and roll—I saw Richie Valens play about a month before he died—all those guys by the end of the fifties and early sixties were either gone or in jail. Chuck Berry was in jail for a Mann Act violation, Jerry Lee Lewis had just married his cousin, Elvis was in the army… so during the latter part of the fifties I played folk music and had gotten into bluegrass music. I joined the ‘Mad Mountain Ramblers,’ and we started playing at Disneyland and playing at the Icehouse, and we merged two bands together and formed the Dry City Scat Band…
You played the Icehouse in Pasadena? The one that’s now a comedy club? It used to be hip?
Oh, it was totally an epicenter music club! We were sort of a Claremont/Pasadena/Arcadia group of guys. And that summer, Richard Greene, the fiddle player, brought this guy to the gig who was Jim McGuinn, who was the original guy from the Byrds. And I’d heard about the Beatles, but I’d never heard the Beatles. And he had Beatle boots on and bobbed hair and pegged pants, and one of those John Lennon Gibson acoustic electrics. And my friend Chris Hillman, a mandolin player—I ran into him at the Ash Grove one night, and he unabashedly said, ‘Oh, I had to join a rock ‘n’ roll band. I needed the money.’ So my wife and I later on were watching Hullabaloo, and all of a sudden this song starts, and I look and it’s that guy I met in the summer, Jim McGuinn, and Chris Hillman—and I said ‘Oh, cool!’
He changed his name to Roger McGuinn later?
Yeah, it was a Buddhist thing. So the Beatles… I said, ‘I get it: Everly Brothers, Buddy Holly, bluegrass harmony…’ Almost all of us bought ourselves electric guitars and started ourselves bands. I started a band called the Floggs, kind of based on a combination of Animals, Yardbirds, Stones, Them—the rockers as opposed to the mods. More bluesbased. We became kind of the hot band of the area. And I was married, had a kid, going to graduate school…
What were you getting your masters in?
In art. I went to the Claremont graduate school. And I got a call and they said ‘Do you want to join this band,’ a band of a bunch of guys who could all be leaders… that band became the Kaleidoscope. It started out with Dave and I playing bluegrass together and finally getting together as a rock ‘n’ roll band. And so I stayed with the band for a couple years.
And you guys played on Leonard Cohen’s first record.
That’s right. I’d left the band, and the guy who was going to take my place hadn’t joined the band yet, and I’d never been to New York, so when they asked if I’d go on this East Coast tour, I said, ‘Sure.’ And we played at this place called the Scene, and we opened for Nico. So people like Warhol came in. And one night Leonard Cohen came up to me. And he was this guy who was dressed in a black leather jacket, and carrying a briefcase, and short kinda cropped hair, and said ‘I’m making an album.’ And this was the sixties—he didn’t look like a guy that would be making a record album. We were kind of scruffy, long-haired guys from the West Coast. The East Coast wasn’t as hippie-oriented as the West Coast. So the next day we were up in his hotel room working on some of his songs. And he wasn’t a really good guitar player—he was a poet and a novelist—and a lot of people were having a hard time trying to figure out what he was trying to say. And we were all folk musicians, so it was pretty easy for us to read what he was trying to do. We ended up playing on a number of his songs. It happened completely by accident.
The right place at the right time?
I’m finding that in my life I’ve been in the right place at the right time more often than not. Much later, ten or fifteen years ago, he moved to a Buddhist retreat up in Mt. Baldy, north of Claremont here. He had broken up with Rebecca De Mornay, and he was up there for about five years. One day I was in downtown Claremont, and my niece said she’d seen Leonard Cohen at one of the restaurants downtown out front—Yiannis—drinking some coffee. So I went over and said, ‘Remember me?’ And he said ‘Of course! You saved my life.’ It was weird to have it come full circle after all these years. And him—living in my own hometown. And it just so happens this week, Philip Glass is giving a concert that he wrote to a hundred poems of Leonard Cohen—in Claremont!
Back in the Kaleidoscope days—was it weird being in a band called ‘Kaleidoscope’ when there were at least two other bands with that name, one in the UK and one in Mexico?
At the time, we had never heard about the Mexican Kaleidoscope, and no one ever mentioned the one from England. As far as anybody knew, we were the Kaleidoscope—we were from the West Coast and we were playing at the Avalon and the Fillmore. We were part of the California scene, so at that moment in time, the hippie-psychedelic scene was totally West Coast. Right before the Beatles hit, most of the records being made in America by guys my age were being done on the East Coast because most of the guys were playing folk music. People like John Sebastian were playing on Vanguard Records and Folkways records, a lot of the record companies on the East Coast. As soon as the Beatles hit, most of the bands that formed all came from California. A couple came from Texas. Ultimate Spinach came from Boston, but those bands sucked!
As far as L.A. bands, it feels like you were a little bit against type. Unlike the San Francisco bands, a lot of the L.A. bands were more comfortable with three-minute songs. Like the Seeds songs sound very consistently like each other. Whereas you guys—every song was a different style. Do you think you guys were atypical?
I think we were, and we set out to be that way. We were playing Middle Eastern music, and Cajun music, and rock and roll, and country, and bluegrass, and that made us unique. We could open for anybody, and we weren’t in competition with anybody, so people loved playing with us. The problem with that was the people who might like the Middle Eastern stuff wouldn’t like the twenties-style stuff we did. We became known as an eclectic band. We were the first rock ‘n’ roll band to ever be reviewed in Downbeat, for instance. We played the Jazz Workshop in San Francisco, the first band ever allowed to be played there. But because we were so diverse, you know… if you liked one Seeds song, they all sounded like the other ones. Same with the Doors, and same with the Byrds. They were much more stylistically linear with what they did. So it became our signature. That’s why we were called the Kaleidoscope—because we were all over the place. It was an advantage and a disadvantage. The disadvantage is that it didn’t allow us to sell very many records.
Your solo records are pretty eclectic, too—were you at all influenced by Skip Spence’s solo album, Oar?
No, not at all! I’ve never even heard that record. But I actually had a band for a short while with Bob Mosley, the bass player [of Moby Grape] called the Darrow Mosley Band, in the early seventies. It sounded something like a California version of the Faces. There’s no records out—if you give me your email, I can send you an MP3. Moby Grape was probably my favorite California band. But I wasn’t really into most of the San Francisco bands. I liked the Byrds from the word ‘go.’ I was never a Doors fan. The first time I saw them at the Whiskey, before they had a record deal, they were opening for Them, who I was just mad about at the time. And I was so not knocked out by the Doors, I went up to the owner and I said—I was in the Floggs at the time—I said, ‘I have a band better than these guys, you should let us play.’
Was he like, ‘You got spunk, kid!’?
No. I gave him a tape, and he never called me back. I got to know Morrison later on. But most of us guys were trying to be organic guys. I was living in the middle of 40 acres of lemon groves, and driving VW buses, and wearing Levis and flannel shirts and growing our hair long. And those guys—he was wearing leather pants and trying to be the cute, prancing guy, and it just didn’t sit with me at the time. He was an okay guy, but I just wasn’t into their music. The Byrds, I really liked their scene. I especially liked Gene Clark. He was my favorite.
Let’s talk about your solo records for a minute. I got the two albums, Chris Darrow and Under My Own Disguise, and they sound shockingly contemporary—like something that would come out on Manimal. Do you think music is cyclical, and that you might be back at the top of the slot again?
I think you’re right. ‘Cyclical’ might be a good word. I put two different types of cloth with this—flannel and polyester. Polyester would be the boy bands, and Michael Jackson, and all the stuff that happened during the disco period, and Madonna. And then the flannel stuff would be something like the Seattle sound, and the West Coast sound during the sixties and seventies, and just recently, I don’t know if you watched the Grammys… well, the person who got the five Grammys this year was Alison Krauss and Robert Plant. And when they started playing the song that was the winning song, I said, ‘That guitar player sounds like me.’ And when they sang together, it sounds like my singing partner and I singing together. So, okay, there are ears nowadays that are listening to stuff… of all the things out there, to have a bluegrass chick and the guy from Led Zeppelin win five Grammys—they won everything! And a couple years ago, when O Brother, Where Art Thou? won the album of the year, I said, ‘Oh, we’re in a flannel period right now.’ I think when the Seattle scene came in, I think it initiated the second wave… not the second wave of punk necessarily, but took the attitude to the next level. And it had to happen in a place that wasn’t L.A. or New York. A lot of regional things evolve on their own. Like what happened with Elvis in the fifties, and Memphis, Tennessee. It didn’t happen in L.A. or New York. Or the stuff that happened in Detroit—the Stooges and all that kind of stuff. I think Detroit might still be the rock ‘n’ roll city of America. The hardest core stuff comes out of there. I’m a big Bob Seger fan. And Kid Rock, too.
Are there any local acts that you’ve seen in L.A. who bring the ‘flannel’?
To some degree, yeah. You know Mike Stinson? He’s considered to be the Southern California alt-country guy. My son Steven was in the Decadents, which was a great punk band in L.A., and then the Super Heroines, and then in the original Guns & Roses, when it was Hollywood Rose, and he and Mike Stinson had a band called High Horses for a while. I don’t see too many people play. I have not performed on stage in close to ten years, mostly because I just wanted to record. I made most of my money coming as a result of royalties.
You put out Angela Bowie’s record, I heard.
I played on it, but that was a Kim Fowley project. Kim and I have been friends for over forty years now. I was at a party at Tom Marris’s house and Kim came up to me and said [in a deep voice] ‘Chris Darrow?’ and I said yeah. ‘Kim Fowley!’ And he proceeded to run down my entire career in a two and a half minute total. He knew exactly everything: ‘This, this, this, this, this, and this… and if I were you, this is what I would do.’ He was right on the money on everything. He obviously had taken the time to find out who I was, he’d listened to what I did, he had an opinion about it, and he was right on the money. And a lot of people don’t like him—he’s a really tall guy, he’s really smart, and he’s usually right, and it’s so hard to take it from a guy who’s so blunt. And he’s got a reputation that’s not necessarily totally who he is. But he works the reputation part of it too a bit.
You talked a bit about playing with the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. Did Steve Martin open for you?
Sure! I’ve known Steve Martin since way before. When we were playing bluegrass at Disneyland, he and John McEuen who was the banjo played in the Dirt band used to work at Coke Corner, and used to do magic tricks. When I was in the Dirt Band the first time, he opened for us at the Troubadour in ‘67. John McEuen just put out an album of banjo songs by Steve Martin that came out a few weeks ago.
Wild and Crazy Guy is one of the most amazing albums ever.
There was a time when people could not figure him out. They couldn’t figure out why he was funny. I remember Jeff Hanna from the Dirt Band and I used to sit in the audience and be laughing, and there would be nobody else getting it for a long time. When he started writing for the Smothers Brothers, that’s when he really started taking off. He was always a funny guy, but his humor was so off-kilter that it took people a while to figure out what he was trying to do. Once he caught on, he’s a phenomenon.
I wish he wasn’t doing movies with Hilary Duff, but otherwise he’s okay. Did you ever have run-ins with Bobby Beausoleil or the Manson Family?
No, but Kim Fowley and Rodney Bingenheimer actually went out to Spahn Ranch to see if they could hang out with the chicks out there! To me, that’s such an unspeakable thing, I’m glad I never had to touch any of those people. That was really the end of the sixties for us, in Southern California. It created a whole different vibration.
Johnny Legend—of all people—said that if you lived in Los Angeles in the sixties and you had long hair, girls from out of town would hook up with you and then take a photo, like it was a postcard from their trip.
Oh yeah. I remember being in San Francisco, and walking down Haight Street and going through the stores, and everybody had a smile on their face, and everybody was beautiful, and there was no bad vibes. Once the people from out of town—everybody ran away from home, and came to San Francisco, and started sleeping on the streets, and they started doing speed and heroin, and then it changed. And then the edge started building up in the situation, and that was really sad. The Monterey Pop Festival was really the turning point where everything started becoming about money. All of a sudden it became very mercenary. The Manson family finally put the lid on it, and Altamont was another one of those things. Having been there, it’s hard to explain. The music only gives you a piece of it. There was a tonality that was pervasive. It began with ‘Mr. Tambourine Man,’ and ended with ‘Hotel California.’

CHRIS DARROW’S SELF-TITLED SOLO ALBUM AND UNDER MY OWN DISGUISE ARE OUT NOW ON EVERLOVING. VISIT CHRIS DARROW AT CHRISDARROW.COM OR MYSPACE.COM/CHRISDARROW.