The Mojo Collection. Various Mojo Magazine
words, discovered Marshall amplifiers, and here comes this feather floating through a wall of noise.’ Given distance and hindsight, however, Friends is a uniquely rewarding Beach Boys album that, excepting Pet Sounds, is the group’s most sonically and thematically unified. Its 26 weightless minutes make up possibly the sweetest album ever to be filed under rock.
Significantly, Friends also marked the songwriting debut of drummer Dennis, whose beautifully fragile Be Still and Little Bird are highlights, signalling his development into a songwriter of major emotional reach. Friends has won many admirers since its initial humiliating launch. In his 1991 autobiography, Brian himself called it ‘my favourite Beach Boys album’.
Dr John, The Night Tripper
Gris-Gris
The record that transformed session player Mac Rebennack into post-hippy psychedelic voodoo king Dr John.
Record label: Atlantic
Produced: Harold Battiste
Recorded: Gold Star Studio, Los Angeles, California; autumn 1967
Released: July 1968
Chart peaks: None (UK) None (US)
Personnel: Mac Rebennack, (v, g, o); Steve Mann (g); Alvin ‘Shine’ Robinson (g, v); Ernest McLean (g); Harold Battiste (bs, clarinet); Ron Johnson (b); David West (b); Richard ‘Didimus’ Washington (d, pc); John Boudreaux (d); Dave Dixon (v, pc); Jessie Hill (v); Shirley Goodman (v); Tami Lynn (v); Joanie Jones (v); Sonny Raye (v); Ronnie Barron (v, o); Morris Bachamin (ts); Plas Johnson (s)
Track listing: Gris-Gris Gumbo Ya Ya; Danse Kalinda Ba Boom; Mama Roux (US/S); Danse Fambeaux; Croker Courtbullion; Jump Sturdy (US/S); I Walk On Gilded Splinters
Running time: 33.32
Current CD: Collectors Choice COLC1311
Further listening: Babylon (1969); Gumbo (1972); Dr John Plays Mac Rebennack (1982); Anutha Zone (1998)
Further reading: Under A Hoodoo Moon: The Life of the Night Tripper (Mac Rebennack with Jack Rummel, 1994); www.drjohn.org
Download: iTunes
Mac Rebennack had no intention of singing on this brooding underground classic; New Orleans belter Ronnie Barron had been designated for the job. But with Barron unavailable – ‘his manager thought it was a bad career move’ – the man who had worked as a session keyboardist and guitar player (until a gunshot wound put paid to the picking) on albums by Professor Longhair, Joe Tex and Frankie Ford morphed into his alter ego – mystical, menacing growler Dr John, The Night Tripper, a character he had learned about in the ’50s from voodoo artist Prince LaLa.
‘I figured it would be a one-off thing,’ recalls the Doctor.
Rebennack was familiar with the mystery and magic of Crescent City – his nightmarish 1965 Zu Zu Man borrowed liberally from the voodoo chants and incantations that were as prevalent as incense smoke in the tawdry French Quarter. But Gris-Gris went further, grafting voodoo’s dark, esoteric heart to a hypnotic groove with funky blues, sparse, repetitive minor chord melodies, funereal keyboards and Afro-Cuban syncopation shot through with feral noises, gibberish and metaphysical threats and boasts, creating an unwholesome witchy brew of sorcery and chicanery that fascinates as much as it disturbs.
‘One thing I always did was believe. I used to play for gigs for the Gris-Gris church. I dug the music, and that’s what I was trying to capture.’ Using left-over time at Gold Star from a Sonny and Cher session, Dr John and his fellow refugees did their best to turn the legendary studio into a voodoo church: ‘I remember Hugh Masekela was cutting next door to us and the engineers at Gold Star were nervous. They were used to Phil Spector and Sonny Bono and people like that coming in, and they saw my crew and next door they saw Hugh’s crew and these guys didn’t look like your regulation studio-looking kind of guys, and we were burning candles and incense to get into the mood and everything. But I got a kick out of that.’
Centrepiece I Walk On Gilded Splinters was based on a traditional voodoo church song. ‘It’s supposed to be “Splendors” but I turned it into “Splinters”,’ said the Doctor. ‘I just thought splinters sounded better and I always pictured splinters when I sung it.’ And the ambling, subliminal title cut wormed its way into the nascent waves of American FM radio where it became a late-night staple, catching the cresting wave of psychedelia and hippiedom. More than three decades on, the album retains its extraordinary power to cast a spell.
J.K. & Co.
Suddenly One Summer
Dreamy psychedelia from Canada! Now a cult classic.
Record label: White Whale
Produced: RH Spurgin
Recorded: Vancouver Recording, Canada; dates unknown
Released: July 1968
Chart peaks: None (UK) None (US)
Personnel: Jay Kaye (all instruments, v); RW Buckley (ar)
Track listing: Break Of Dawn; Fly; Little Children; Christine; Speed; Crystal Ball; Nobody; O.D; Land Of Sensations & Delights; The Times; The Magical Fingers Of Minerva; Dead
Running time: 33.03
Current CD: Currently unavailable on legitimate CD, though bootlegs exist
Further listening: Ford Theatre – Trilogy For The Masses (1968)
Further reading: You just read it!
Download: Not currently legally available
One of those treasured items record collectors occasionally stumble across and pick up merely because they find the cover to be interestingly tacky, Suddenly One Summer has proven to be a jewel of a record, albeit a mystifying one. Canadian in origin, and issued in the US on White Whale Records – a label with a bizarrely eclectic artist roster that included The Turtles, Nino Tempo And April Stevens, and British under-achievers John’s Children – the record is a whooshing, floating trip.
As its cover credits only three humans to speak of – and anonymously named ones at that – one is left to ponder whether J.K. & Co. was in fact a band or a psychedelic predecessor of the Alan Parsons Project. In some ways it indeed seems a producer’s record: opening vocal track Fly boasts a drum sound lifted straight off The Beatles’ A Day In The Life; a sitar can be heard on The Magical Fingers Of Minerva; Little Children features the inevitable sound effect of children at play and actually breaks into a few bars of Frère Jacques; and, most appropriately, album closer Dead includes the voice of a clergyman invoking burial rites, and – nice touch, this – the sound of someone shovelling actual dirt.
But what holds Suddenly One Summer together throughout is the voice and song of one Jay Kaye, who has crafted a rather special song cycle. From its whirling beginning – in which Kaye in lazy reverie sings, ‘If you want to fly …’ – through the troubled lyrics of Nobody (‘My happiness is a needle/I will escape for another day’), which recalls Love’s Signed D.C. – to the cheery sound of that gravedigger’s shovel, there’s a story of some sort being told here.
Consider this one of those late ’60s psychedelic concept albums – Ford Theatre’s Trilogy For The Masses and Mandrake Memorial’s Puzzle are two others – that in their ambition to tell some sort of life parable emerge with an oddly open-ended suite that can be interpreted in any manner the listener finds appropriate. In the end, the big question is less the matter of