When did the promise and innocence of the Sixties end? This is the stuff that dissertations are made of. The Manson murders on August 9-10, 1969, are a common answer. (Side note: It has become common wisdom that the Manson murders never would have happened if the powers that be just would have let Charlie become a folk-rock star. He could have been the leader of the Family, but Sly Stone already had that on lockdown. Manson and the Master Race has a nice ring to it. Their debut album: Charlie Don’t Serf! Get your copy at the local head shop.) The mayhem and murder of Meredith Hunter at Altamont is another. Some would end the Sixties with the shootings at Kent State and Jackson State in 1970. Arthur Marwick, who wrote an epic analysis of the Sixties, posited the Sixties as a long decade that did not end until the mid-1970s with the resignation of Nixon and the end of the Vietnam War.
Maybe, just maybe, there was something rotten In a Gadda da Vida almost from the beginning. Something smelled as early as Monterey Pop in the Summer of Love of 1967. It wasn’t pot or pachouli. It was the smell of money, and the sharks, like Lou Adler, were starting to circle. Monterey Pop established the fact that there was big money to be made in the counterculture and those with a sensitive disposition, like Joan Didion in her essay “Slouching Towards Bethlehem”, detected something sinister in the Summer of Love at its inception. The Diggers proclaimed the Death of the Hippie in October 1967 after the hordes streamed into the Haight with flowers in their hair.
But was there a golden era of the Sixties? There is something appealing about 1964-1966 when the Merry Pranksters roamed the earth, The Charlatans played the Red Dog Saloon in Virginia City, Nevada, when acid was legal and the Grateful Dead played the Acid Tests with Neal Cassady as MC. Or do you have to go back earlier to the Beatles in 1963 which Philip Larkin remembered wistfully in “Annus Mirabilis”? Before JFK was taken for a one-way ride in Dealey Plaza in that space of time before the Beatles on Ed Sullivan and after Elvis went into the Army and Buddy Holly went down in Clear Lake, Iowa. Is that gap the sweet spot? That brief time when California seemedlike the center of what was happening in art and music. With the Cool School and Duchamp and Warhol in LA and surf music, which is like jazz, a purely American art form? Or does Dick Dale’s “Miserlou” with its Middle Eastern influences, blow that theory too out of the water?
Well shit, did the Sixties ever exist? Or were they just a myth? Didn’t Thomas Pynchon write about all this in The Crying of Lot 49? Well, fuck, which was published in April 1966.
The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band’s Part One, which is weirdly their second album, came out in February 1967, months before Monterey Pop made counterculture music a corporate commodity, when rock and roll became rock. Is there something pure here? Or is this just another band out of the Pynchon universe? Is this a lost classic of the Sixties that captures something of its promise and innocence? Is this album mythic like The Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators?
The short answer is no. But the back story is interesting and instructive. Part One, in fact, highlights the darkness that lurks (always lurked I would argue) behind the Summer of Love and the Sixties. The musical talent behind TWCPAEB were Michael Lloyd and brothers Danny and Shaun Harris. This trio had a convoluted history of revolving bands and regional minor success before they joined up to form a group together, The Laughing Wind. So far so good. Such a background was typical of California music in the early 1960s.
Enter Bob Markley. Markley was the adopted son of an Oklahoma oil tycoon who moved to LA to be part of the scene. He had a lavish home in Beverly Hills where he threw parties and dabbled in the music industry. Markley liked the new musicfine, but what he really loved were the young girls drawn like moths to a flame at LA rock shows and clubs. This proclivity would eventually get Markley in trouble with the law but not before post-TWCPAEB he released the batshit insane Where’s My Daddy?, which should have been an exhibit at his later court appearances if it wasn’t. At a party at Markley’s home, the Yardbirds performed with local rock stars in attendance and, of course, all those young girls. Markley realized that he had to form a rock band if he wanted to get pieces of the action. At the party, Kim Fowley (another notorious scenester and manipulator) introduced Markley to Lloyd and the Harris Brothers. TWCPAEB was formed.
Markley produced the convoluted name, which he owned as well as all the music rights. The name is just what it sounds like. A mash-up of buzzwords of the time that suggested hipness. In 1965, the West Coast was still the place to be. A contender to New York, Paris and London as a cultural hot spot. Pop Art was the thing in the art world, and it could be arguedthat LA was the birthplace of Pop with the Ferus Gallery artists and the landmark Andy Warhol show of soup cans. An experimental was the in-word for the avant garde as in experimental film, which was exploding eyes and minds in select cinemas around the world. The question is whether all this buzz actually got you high. Markley through his LA industry connections quickly got the band a record deal with Reprise, Frank Sinatra’s label. This led to the release of TWCPAEB second album, Part One, as the first was Volume One, on Markley’s own FiFo label. The history of TWCPAEB is nothing if not confusing and mysterious.
Part One is the best album TWCPAEB ever recorded but is it any good? “Shifting Sands”, “I Won’t Hurt You”, “Leiyla” are a few of the songs and you get the distinct feeling that you have heard them somewhere before. That is because you have. The TWCPAEB sound like its name is a mixtape of all the sounds of early LA, British rock, and garage as well as psych. Love, Dylan, The Byrds, early Zappa, the Kinks, early The Who and whoever else seemed hip are in the Part One sound. Markley envisioned the band as a West Coast version of The Velvet Underground. Unfortunately, they did not have the songwriting talent of Lou Reed, not the truly experimental concepts of the Velvets. The Velvets would change rock and roll, TWCPAEB would be a footnote in psych rock.
“Help, I am a Rock” is a cover of a Mother of Invention freak out. “Here’s Where You Belong” was a P.F. Sloan tune. “Scuse Me, Miss Rose” was written by Bob Johnston and “High Coin” was written by Van Dyke Parks. 1906” is a genuine original and shows that Markley was full of ideas that if they were not pure psych were plenty weird. Did I mention Where’s My Daddy?
I would describe the sound of TWCPAEB as one of multiple personalities and schizophrenia. Their live light show was supposed to be mind-blowing, and again suggested mental agitation. It seems to be a product of the peace and love generation, but this stuff has elements of Manson and Altamont that ended the Sixties’ pipe dreams. The sound is dark and sinister. A wolf in sheep’s clothing. Markley’s disturbing history is a case study in the history of the Sixties itself.
For years Part One was something of a grail for hardcore psych collectors as it was a tough find on the rare vinyl market. A reissue made this less of an issue so to speak, but for psych collectors and those interested in the nooks and crannies (and all the trolls and devils living there) of the Sixties, Part One is a must have in the original vinyl.
Suggested sites and sounds:
Manson rocks: Look At WhenYour Game Girl
The End of the Sixties?: Altamont Free Concert - Death of Meredith Hunter
When Rock and Rock became Rock: Wild Thing (1967) (Monterey Pop Festival)
The Sunset Strip: Hollywood, Sunset Strip, 1967 - YouTube
The TWCPAEB Were Not This: The Velvet Underground - Sister Ray (Live At The Matrix, San Francisco / Audio)
— Lou Waxman