The Mojo Collection. Various Mojo Magazine
balanced in turn by the delicate dreamy songs I Won’t Hurt You (backed with a heartbeat) and the acoustic, post-apocalyptic Will You Walk With Me, complete with string quartet and celeste; the album closed with an energetic reading of Van Dyke Parks’s High Coin. The group would go on to record another four albums, each as individual as the last, but none would quite capture the sound of their first Reprise LP – the sound of teenage dreams diverted.
The Electric Prunes
Underground
Dissolution around the corner, dark psychedelic visionaries – briefly – reach flashover.
Record label: Reprise
Produced: Dave Hassinger
Recorded: The American Recording Company, North Hollywood, California; mid-1967
Released: August 1967
Chart peaks: None (UK) 172 (US)
Personnel: James Lowe (v, autoharp, hm); Mark Tulin (b, o, p); Ken Williams (g, effects); James ‘Weasel’ Spangola, Mike Gannon (v, g); Preston Ritter, Michael ‘Quint’ Weakley (d); Richie Podolor, Bill Cooper (e)
Track listing: The Great Banana Hoax (S); Children Of Rain; Wind-Up Toys (S); Antique Doll; It’s Not Fair; I Happen To Love You; Dr Do-Good (S); I; Hideaway (S); Big City; Capt. Glory; Long Day’s Flight (S)
Running time: 34.43
Current CD: Rhino 8122748822 gathers all their Reprise-era recordings together including I Had Too Much To Dream Last Night album plus outtakes and demos
Further listening: I Had Too Much To Dream Last Night (1967)
Further reading: www.electricprunes.com (fan site); www.electricprunes.net (official)
Download: iTunes
Like many musicians of their time The Electric Prunes were not masters of their own destiny. The three albums they recorded in a mere nine months during 1967 tell a cautionary tale of what happens when a gifted band are subjected to the whims of an equally talented producer and brilliant, but erratic, songwriters. Although their debut album I Had Too Much To Dream Last Night contained material equally as powerful as the classic single from which it spawned its title, it had been marred by ill-judged gimmicks. By the time of the third LP, Mass In F Minor, the band would effectively be reduced to session musicians languishing under the weight of composer David Axelrod’s quasi-religious visions. Between these two extremes, Underground comes closest to expressing the unique spirit of a group who will long be regarded as one of the finest exponents of psychedelic pop.
The stunning sleeve shows the Prunes charging out of the cover, a forlorn face looming above them – an image whose mystery and energy are reflected in opening cut The Great Banana Hoax. With pounding drums and a pulsing rhythm as irresistible as The Byrds’ Eight Miles High, at its centre is one of the group’s defining moments: a plaintive organ note rises from the maelstrom and seamlessly gives way to Williams’s biting guitar solo.
Aided by producer Dave Hassinger, they created a collage of effects without swamping each individual contribution, and conjured an atmosphere of haunting melodrama. Lowe’s vocals wavered between soft innocence and sneering malice while the band shifted between the soft, sparse arrangements of tracks like I and the electrical charge of Hideaway. Antique Doll and Children Of Rain explore dark corners of childhood and themes of emotional isolation. In the hyperactive Dr Do-Good, Lowe’s demented cartoon voice was juxtaposed with a riot of distorted guitar; but the real treat comes at the album’s climax where raw punk and easterntinged psychedelia blend perfectly in Long Day’s Flight.
Sadly, however, the Prunes were running out of juice. The album sold poorly. They produced only one more single before losing control of both their name and their future.
Etta James
Tell Mama
The toughest female soul voice of the ’60s gets the full Muscle Shoals treatment.
Record label: Chess
Produced: Leonard and Philip Chess
Recorded: Fame Studios, Muscle Shoals, Alabama; early 1967
Released: August 1967
Chart peaks: None (UK) 82 (US)
Personnel: Etta James (v); Albert Lowe Jr (g); Jimmy Ray Johnson (g); David Hood (b); Roger Dawkins (d); Dewey Oldham (p); Carl Banks (o); Gene ‘Bowlegs’ Miller (t); Charles Chalmers, Aaron Varnell, Floyd Newman (s); George Davis (p)
Track listing: Tell Mama (S); I’d Rather Go Blind (S); Watch Dog; The Love Of My Man (S); I’m Gonna Take What He’s Got; The Same Rope; Security (S); Steal Away; My Mother In Law; Don’t Lose Your Good Thing; It Hurts Me So Much; Just A Little Bit
Running time: 30.10
Current CD: The Complete Muscle Shoals Sessions: Remastered adds: Do Right Woman, Do Right Man; You Took It; I Worship The Ground You Walk On; I Got You Babe; You Got It; I’ve Gone Too Far (Previously Unreleased); Misty (Previously Unreleased); Almost Persuaded; Fire; Do Right Woman, Do Right Man (Alternate)
Further listening: Live album Etta James Rocks The House (1964); Etta James Sings Funk (1970); Chess Masters (1983)
Further reading: Rage To Survive (Etta James and David Ritz, 1998); www.ettajames.com
Download: Not currently legally available
Etta James began singing at the age of five as little Jamesetta Hawkins, belting out gospel at Los Angeles’ St Paul Baptist Church. Discovered and re-christened by LA band leader Johnny Otis, the 16-year-old Etta James had her first hit in 1955 with Roll With Me Henry. For the next five years James’s life was one of constant touring and full immersion in a rough on-the-road life – sex, drugs and real mean men. A voice of sweet’n’lowdown power, like a born-bad angel, James signed to Leonard Chess’s Chess Records in 1960 and the hits soon followed: At Last, Something Got A Hold Of Me and Stop The Wedding. By 1967 she was a full-time soul star with painted-on cat eyes, tight cup dresses, a pistol in her purse and a full-time heroin habit – ‘Working to get high, stay high, live high and, if the stuff was strong enough, die high.’
James sang the life she lived. Leonard Chess was convinced that the only woman who did it like Etta was Aretha Franklin. So, after Jerry Wexler put Aretha in Rick Hall’s Fame Studios in 1967 to cut the R&B heartache classic I Never Loved a Man The Way I Love You, Chess decided to do the same with Etta. The first track James cut with the Muscle Shoals team was I’d Rather Go Blind, a song ripped from the heart about loving someone so much that you ‘just don’t want to be free.’ James knew all about that. At the time she was seeing a guy called Billy Foster. Sometimes they fought so hard that Etta would end up sticking Billy with a kitchen knife. Etta says she wrote I’d Rather Go Blind. The songwriting credit went to Billy Foster. James sang about Security as she saw it slipping through her fingers. ‘The same rope that pulls you up/sure can hang you,’ she hollers on The Same Rope.
What she ended up with was an album of pure pain and suffering, and drum-tight soul. Just don’t expect Etta to love it in the same way. ‘They rant and rave about Tell Mama,’ says James, ‘how I sang the shit out of it. I wish I could agree. I don’t like being cast in the role of the Great Earth Mother, the gal you come to for comfort and easy sex. Nothing was easy then. My career was building up but my life was falling apart.’
Pink Floyd
The Piper