Table of contents for Mojo '60s No.3 in Mojo '60s #3

They were a bunch of R&B-fixated teenagers from north London, smoking the fag-ends of Mod-dom to the filter, and playing soul covers of Garnet Mimms, Eddie Floyd and Lee Dorsey in any club that would have them. Known as The Soul Survivors, they rehearsed hard and dreamt of the big time. And then, in what is an archetypal ’60s yarn of exploitation and industry machinations, their dream came true – but with disastrous consequences. For a start, vocalist Steve Ellis, keyboard player Morgan Fischer, guitarist Ian Miller, drummer Mo Bacon and bassist Warwick Rose were renamed The Love Affair. “Apparently there was a band with the same name in America, so we had to change it,” recalls Ellis. “But I hated it because it just didn’t suit us.” Ellis also…

In the hands of Brian Auger, Julie Driscoll & The Trinity, Bob Dylan’s This Wheel’s On Fire got psychedelicised. Driscoll’s bewitching vocal was pinned to Auger’s Hammond organ swirls, distortion and phasing, and the resulting phantasmogoria landed the group their only UK hit, peaking at Number 5 in 1968. The Trinity had formed from the ashes of Julie and Brian’s previous group, Steampacket, an R&B Revue which also featured Long John Baldry and Rod Stewart. “We recorded but didn’t release anything at the time, but it helped me get together my ideas for The Trinity. I wanted a rhythm section like Tamla, with Bernard Purdie on drums and James Jamerson on bass, and over that I wanted to overlay jazz harmony. When Steampacket disintegrated, Julie said she wanted in with…

AUGUST 1965.HERMAN’S HERMITS’ I’M Henry VIII, I Am is the biggest-selling single in the USA after similar successes for Freddie And The Dreamers and Wayne Fontana And The Mindbenders. The British Invasion, supported by endless US package tours, gives no sign of abating. The Pretty Things, arguably the most convincing – and most thrilling – of the home-grown R&B combos, are nowhere to be seen. Instead, as their management holds out for “the right deal” to make that Atlantic crossing, London’s latest pop controversialists are 12,000 miles from home in New Zealand. And, not for the first time in their comically chequered career, matters are getting a little out of hand. “Pretty Things’ Shock Exhibition” screamed one headline. “Frenzy!” “Stupid!” “Banned!” “Absolutely Disgusting!” and best of all, “‘Thing’ Nearly Missed…

IT WAS AN INAUSPICIOUS START. Years before he became known as rock’s greatest guitar player, Jimi Hendrix was the unconfirmed greatest air guitarist in Seattle. “Jimi used to play air guitar on the broom,” laughs his brother Leon Hendrix. “He’d run around the house and pretend he was Elvis. He’d play the broom, and there would be a trail of straw stretching from room to room.” Hendrix began to ‘play’ the broom around 1953, aged 11, the year that he began to take notice of popular music. Though he would eventually find an appreciation for blues and R&B, his initial musical tastes were more mainstream. “We’d always listen to The Hit Parade Top 10,” recalls Jimmy Williams, his best friend from those early days. Inspired by what they heard, Williams…

“THEIR FATHER WAS UPSET WHEN HE HEARD THE SONG. HE DIDN’T THINK IT WAS THE WAY TO MAKE THEM STARS.” Buck Ormsby IT’S A LATE AFTERNOON in July 1964, and John ‘Buck’ Ormsby, the boss of Etiquette Records, a small independent label in Seattle, Washington, has just left his office for home. As he gets to the parking lot, he hears a shout. “Hey you! Ormsby!” He looks up to see Larry and Andy Parypa, the guitarist and bassist in garage rockers The Sonics, accompanied by their father, who’s waving his fists in readiness to punch him. The night before, Ormsby had recorded the young Tacoma group’s first single, The Witch, a raw, screaming horror show of thumping drums, crashing guitars, raucous sax and fiendish hollers that sounded like nothing…

YOU RARELY HEAR IT ON THE RADIO now but Excerpt From A Teenage Opera was the perfect single for the summer of 1967. The song’s central refrain – a children’s choir singing “Grocer Jack, Grocer Jack, get off your back, go into town, don’t let them down” – was everywhere, hooking the nation into one of the most ambitious British pop records ever. It was a song of lilting fairground melodies, strings, harpsichords, banjos, balalaikas, one that perfectly encapsulated the search for child-like innocence at the core of British psych. Like Sgt. Pepper, it was a psychedelic moment that appealed to everyone, hippy or straight, young or old. Although sung by Keith West, the vocalist and songwriter behind London psych band Tomorrow, Excerpt’s true mastermind was Mark Wirtz, an Alsace-born…

THE STORY OF JAMAICAN MUSIC IS peppered with intriguing and colourful characters – prophets, outlaws, magicians, patricians, nutcases, zealots. By the late ’50s, three such titanic figures dominated the sound system business, which Jamaican culture at that time: Clement ‘Coxsone’ Dodd, Prince Buster and Arthur ‘Duke’ Reid. In their lively and often violent threeway rivalry, it was Buster who invented ska and thus ruled through the ’60s up to 1966. From 1968, Clement Dodd would become the pivotal force in Kingston as the first rumblings of reggae emanated from Studio One. But in the two-year window between those two clear-cut skankin’ dominions, in the crucial, inspirational, transitional months between ska and reggae, there was but one sound that would prevail across the island – the Duke’s. During that period, he…

“SYD BARRETT FOR ME IS AN ICON IN EVERY WAY,” SAYS Roddy Bogawa, director of a forthcoming documentary detailing the extraordinary story of Pink Floyd’s enigmatic first leader, who died in 2006. “His look, his songwriting, his riding the cusp of psychedelia – the fact that, as some people say in the film, he was destined for mythical status.” Have You Got It?, named after the non-existent song that Syd once mischievously tried to ‘teach’ his confused bandmates, was begun under the auspices of Pink Floyd’s storied sleeve designer and Hypgnosis art guru Storm Thorgerson, who grew up with the group in Cambridge. When Thorgerson died in 2013, Bogawa took charge of the film, which promises new insights into Barrett’s mercurial career, breakdown and subsequent retreat from public view via…

ROSALYN (Fontana single, June 1964) If the long hair and scruffiness weren’t enough, the juddering attack of their debut single repelled squares everywhere. CAN’T STAND THE PAIN (Fontana B-side, December 1965) Flip Midnight To Six Man for this moody, fragmented mid-tempo examination of the psyche. COME SEE ME (Fontana single, April 1966) The definitive crunching, riff-driven stomper. This was as polished as their punk R&B got; plus great unhinged guitar solo. DEFECTING GREY (Columbia single, November 1967) A whole psychedelic album in one song. Everything was showcased – sitar, fuzz guitar, weird rhythms, atonal shifts. ALEXANDER (Even More Electric Banana, De Wolfe, 1968) Psych highlight, from the third LP recorded by their alter ego The Electric Banana. THE LONELIEST PERSON (S.F. Sorrow, Columbia album track, December 1968) S.F. Sorrow was…

As BoB Dylan prepareD, in January 1965, to recorD his fifth album for columbia, he had much to ponder. only 12 months had elapsed since the release of The Times They Are A-Changin’ but the landscape was already unrecognisable. 1964 had seen Beatlemania come into full frenzied bloom, and what might have seemed at frst a mere diversion, a human hula hoop, had became a cultural phenomenon. the Beatles had shaken culture to the core, and remade the world. Bob Dylan had changed dramatically too. the 22-yearold Greenwich Village folk singer had cemented his position as the most important fgure on america’s most vibrant music scene. a songbook that included Blowin’ in the Wind, Don’t think twice, a Hard rain’s a-Gonna Fall and With God on our side had brought…

IN FEBRUARY 1965 AN INTERVIEW with the beatles appeared in Playboy magazine, conducted by well-known humourist, raconteur, actor and radio presenter Jean ‘Shep’ Shepherd. “Do you enjoy jazz, any of you?” asked Shepherd, midway through a garbled conversation. “[Stan] Getz,” replied John Lennon. “but only because somebody gave me an album of his… with him and somebody called iguana, or something like that.” It was a fippant answer to what seemed like a facile question buried among a slew of prompts about the royal Family, “the homosexual problem” (“we’re all homosexuals!” said George Harrison) and a discussion centred around the fact that the beatles had been compared to adolf Hitler by members of the conservative press. In fact, the question stemmed from Shepherd's own interest in jazz. Through his wide-ranging…

“I COULDN’T BUY RHYTHM AND BLUES IN AMERICA, SO I HAVE TO MAKE A JAMAICAN SETTING FOR THE MUSIC, AND THAT WAS SKA.” MY FIRST GLIMPSE of Orange Street comes from the back of a battered green Peugeot on a scorching January nearly 20 years ago. The street is a major thoroughfare that heads north from St William Grant Park, once the site of public hangings and the only patch of greenery in downtown Kingston. The park and its surrounding lanes are filled with cacophonous market higglers and their clients, as well as vagrants and groups of young toughs slyly dispensing herb from shack-like speakeasies, but most of Orange Street itself is devoid of human life, like the ghost-town of a spaghetti western film set. There’s a palpable tension that…

It’s the psychedelic event of the century, but already there are warning signs. As a vast international audience prepares to fly in for the Levitation Festival (previously the Austin Psych Fest) in Austin, Texas, to witness the first ever ‘proper’ reunion gig by ’60s psychedelic legends The 13th Floor Elevators, a tornado warning is issued. A raging storm is forecast at the band’s allotted show time. If the extreme weather warnings aren’t terrifying enough, the old band dynamics are adding to the drama. Days before the show, drummer John Ike Walton’s participation was looking shaky and a replacement was already in rehearsal. Given that Walton’s unique style is so integral to the band’s sound, it wouldn’t be the Elevators without him. The band lost their original lead guitarist Stacy Sutherland…

PHOTOS OF RINGO STARR CLIMBING TREES were a rarity in the mid ’60s, and shots of The Beatles larking around in the privacy of their suburban London piles even scarcer. But in June 1966, readers of The Beatles Book, the band’s monthly fan mag, were treated to a combination of both those extraordinary sights as part of an occasional series of ‘at home’ features published at the height of their fame. The Beatles Book had first hit the shelves in August 1963, kicking off a run of 77 editions that would provide a remarkable window into the group’s public and private worlds until December 1969, three months before their split. The magazine – it was called a ‘book’ as a nod to the group’s quirky humour – was the brainchild…

FEBRUARY 2015 SAW THE RELEASE OF A Pretty Things box set, Bouquets From A Cloudy Sky, a vast career survey featuring the group’s 11 albums, beginning with their 1965 self-titled debut and ending at 2007’s Balboa Island, plus rarities, DVDs and a 10-inch replica acetate. The band’s story will be brought right up to date in July with the issue of their 12th album, The Sweet Pretty Things (Are In Bed Now, Of Course…). Named after the first line of Bob Dylan’s Tombstone Blues, it captures the current line-up – founders Phil May and Dick Taylor, plus guitarist Frank Holland, bassist George Woosey and drummer Jack Greenwood – in the studio for the first time. The album was put down live to tape via a Trident Series 80 mixing consol…

FOR FOLK PURISTS, DYLAN GOING ELECTRIC WAS THE BETRAYAL OF A scene dedicated to protest and social change. consider the tone of Izzy Young, owner of Greenwich Village's Folklore Center, writing in the November 1965 issue of Sing Out! magazine: "[Dylan] has given up his companions for the companionship of the charts." The rubric of folk was stylistically diverse, encompassing calypso, Cajun, sea shanties, jug band music, chain gang songs, and much more - but rock'n'roll had been unwel¬come for some time. On April 3, 1959, Carnegie Hall hosted Folksong '59, featuring Pete and Mike Seeger, The Selah Jubilee Singers, Jimmy Driftwood and Memphis Slim. When he introduced The Cadillacs, MC and great folk archivist Alan Lomax asked the audience to "lay down [your] prejudices and listen to rock'n'roll". Amid…

JOAN BAEZ Joan Baez (Vanguard, 1960) Dubbed “the queen of folk”, Baez was – for a while at least – the trailblazer of a new folk song dawn. Her crystalline voice, dusky beauty and principled attitude endeared her instantly to the American college circuit as she rebuffed the overtures of Columbia to release this debut LP on the independent Vanguard label. The traditional songs she performs here, like Silver Dagger, House Of The Rising Sun, Fare Thee Well and the Child Ballads, Mary Hamilton and Henry Martin, swiftly passed into common currency on the scene that her record helped create. JEAN RITCHIE Ballads From Her Appalachian Family Tradition (Folkways, 1961) From the Cumberland mountains of south-east Kentucky, dulcimer-playing Jean Ritchie was – as a precious link to a pristine, unfettered…

BLUE TRAIN (Blue Note, 1957) Coltrane’s one and only album for Blue Note is also the most consistent of his early recordings, possibly because the label in question always insisted on rehearsals prior to recording – something that Coltrane did not always do. Indeed, on Blue Train – his second album, recorded while he was still playing with Thelonious Monk – Trane uses a crew of crack Blue Note musicians: Lee Morgan (trumpet), Philly Joe Jones (drums), Paul Chambers (bass), Kenny Drew (piano) and Curtis Fuller (trombone). The resultant hard bop set is dominated by the blues of the title track and also features the impressive Moment’s Notice, which paves the way for some of his later work. GIANT STEPS (Atlantic, 1960) “Along with Sonny Rollins, John Coltrane has become…