Drivin' me wild

Three recent 45 scores remind me of the beauty of sonic randomness

A month or so into the lockdown, as we were all reeling and vibing as if we’d been plunked down into a sci-fi flick, my friend Michael Newman invited me to appear on his Hinky Dinky Time with Uncle Michael podcast via WFMU’s Give the Drummer Radio as a “Music From Shut-Ins” guest. I played and rapped about the last dozen or so 45 singles I’d bought via crate-digging before the brick-and-mortar stores all (temporarily, thankfully) shuttered.

The show was a blast. (You can listen to it here.) I thought about that conversation recently, and it inspired me to do the same thing here at No Such Thing As Was, writ small. There are fews things I love more than spending time in record stores, open to the discoveries and surprises that lurk there. (I’ve grown increasingly impatient with record store owners who care little for even the smallest gestures toward organizing their stock. A few days ago, I nearly fled from a shall-remain-nameless Chicagoland store because of its haphazard, claustrophobic, borderline code-breaking stacks of 45 singles, genre- or artists-labeling be damned; I could barely get through the aisles, so cramped and stuffed were they with box upon tattered box. Rant over.)

I picked up the following singles recently, two from “virtual” stores. There’s nothing linking them, really, but for the decade each was released and the fate that gave each of them to me. Let’s stack ‘em and play ‘em, open our eyes at the end and see where we are.

Q65 named themselves by conjoining the beloved “Suzie Q” and “Route 66,” amending the latter to signify the year that the band formed, in The Hague, Netherlands. This 1966 b-side, the flip of “The Life I Live,” grooves rawly, Joop Roelofs and Frank Nuyens’s angry, snarling guitar riffs perfectly evoking singer Willem Bieler’s blues:

I know you run around
Every time I see you smile
Then I’m happy for awhile

But Bieler sounds pretty pissed off, and I love how the band responds to his tension: a bar of screeching, ear-slitting squall from Roelofs while drummer Jay Baar pounds a manic fill on his snare. (Bass player Peter Vink drops out completely; I think he’s plugging his ears against the din.) It’s the very sound of aggravation and anxiety, one of those passages in a rock and roll song that renders lyrics superfluous. Yet things get complicated in the next verse:

I cry till you come back
Or else I’ll kill myself
I put a rope around my neck

“Or else….” Is that simply one of two choices? Or is that a threat? Or both? The singer seems to indulge the darker possibility, imagining—and then hollering—that in his coffin he’ll no longer have to worry about her: “There’s a time I feel alright / I will never cry in the night.” This is some anthem for a dark night of the soul.

I confess to finding the next two verses a bit obscure. (I had to hit up an unofficial lyric site to help me decipher Bieler’s lyrics; he’s singing in English, but he swallows a lot of his words.) The singer walks into his room, and he has no choice, but he “cannot feel you good.” He sits with his thoughts and “all the sadness that you brought, but he refuses to get lost in the fog—of depression? Self-pity? Weed? The coffin in the chorus returns, and with it the promise of eternal surcease, so maybe that’s the road he takes. One thing’s clear, and that the band’s Pretty Things/Kinks-stomp, which makes graphically clear the singer’s lament and its source in anguish and anger.

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Phoenix, Arizona’s finest, 20th Century Zoo metamorphosed from the Bittersweets, and then proceeded to enact a late 20th century story that’s as old as dirt: enjoy regional successes; open for national touring acts; sign to a label with robust distribution; record a debut album; miss the Billboard charts by a country mile; lose a band member to the draft; disband.

Beyond that lone album (Thunder On A Clear Day, 1968), 20th Century Zoo released four singles, the last of which, 1969’s “Rainbow” (backed with “Bullfrog”), is a blissy, amped-up paean to the multi-hued optical phenomenon. In 2013, lead guitarist Paul “Skip” Ladd related the origins of “Rainbow” in an interview in It’s Psychedelic Baby Magazine: the song “was inspired by one our Southwest tours. Randy Wells, our drummer at the time, was just goofing around with my guitar in the Morrison Hotel, Silver City, New Mexico.”

He played the first riff and I went wow, let me see that. I picked out the same rhythm with a chord pattern to match. The tree outside had branches that scraped the window when the wind blew. Bob Sutko added the lyrics and a song was born.

I love how Lass assumes that we’ll all understand the virtual co-writing credit he gives to the tree branches outside the window.

“Rainbow” bursts forth with a raucous four chord riff that sounds as if it’s chasing its own tail in delight. A frenetic, Amboy Dukes/Blue Cheer-styled rave-up, “Rainbows” offers a point of view that is…well, hard to clearly determine. I’ve listened to the track countless times (even slowed down a step or three, which is it’s own trip) and still can’t decipher the words; it feels as if I’m translating a foreign language. Stray words and phrases from singer/lyricist Bob Sutko come through the buzz: where the wind blows; follow with your mind; rainbow out of time; thunder; seas; look to see inside your mind; treasure chest of beauty, keep it ‘till the end of time. Right now I can’t find the correct drugs make out the rest, which anyway seems to evoke some interior trip toward enlightenment vouchsafed by hallucinogenics, exhaustion, trees branches scraping at a window.

One thing’s clear. When that opening riff reverses itself in the song’s middle, it invites Sutko to lay down the song’s reason for being: “You will be there,” he sings. “I will there, they will be there.” Whatever literal and figurative, witnessed or imagined rainbow brings them there, there they, and we, all are, communing with the diffusion of sunlight in water droplets—and noisy guitar solos. Hippie dippie corn? Of the era, for sure. What’s striking, what burns off the time- and date-stamped lyrics like acid, is the sublime guitar dueling between Ladd and rhythm guitarist Greg Farley. They play furiously, frantically, and with palpable joy, Ladd’s noisy, serpentine fuzz solos pushing against Farley’s assertive jabs in a wrestling match. “Rainbow” may be dated, but as one of the truly fantastic fuzz-guitar workouts of the decade, the performance reminds us why folks pick up gear and plug in in the first place. And that’s a need that transcends time.

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I’d known about Steve Miller’s “My Dark Hour” and Paul McCartney’s involvement with the song for years, but never bothered to listen to it closely until I picked up the 45 in a dollar bin a few months ago.

The backstory is something else. On May 9, 1969, the Beatles were in Olympic Studios in London listening to playbacks of the ill-fated Get Back album when a fight broke out among them over Allen Klein. Lennon, Harrison, and Starr split. McCartney was left alone in the studio to fume. Glyn Johns was producing an album for the Steve Miller Band, and Miller wandered in to Olympic, solo. McCartney picks up the story with Barry Miles in Many Years From Now:

[Steve Miller] just breezed in. ‘Hey, what’s happening, man? Can I use the studio?’ ‘Yeah!’ I said. ‘Can I drum for you? I just had a fucking unholy argument with the guys there.’ I explained it to him, took ten minutes to get it off my chest. So I did a track, he and I stayed that night and did a track of his called ‘My Dark Hour.’ I thrashed everything out on the drums. There’s a surfeit of aggressive drum fills, that’s all I can say about that. We stayed up until late.

In a 1992 issue of Club Sandwhich, McCartney revealed a bit more about the events of that icy Friday night session. “Allen Klein showed up [to Olympic] with all the guys,” he recalled, and the evening swiftly fell apart. “They all accused me of stalling; in my mind I was actually trying to save our future, and I was vindicated later, but at the time I was definitely ‘the dark horse, the problem’.” He added, “And that was actually the night we broke the Beatles, that was the big crack in the liberty bell, it never came back together after that one.” For a wounded and anxious McCartney, Miller, arriving by happenstance, was an “up.” After “the big downer,” McCartney needed “an up, so he was my security blanket,” adding, “We just had to do something.”

(On the record sleeve, there’s a note: “With special thanks to Paul Ramon.” McCartney adopted that stage name while in the Silver Beetles when they traveled to Scotland to tour with Johnny Gentle in May 1960. “We thought we were showbiz people,” McCartney said, “and, as it was a Larry Panics tour and all of his people changed their names—Wilde, Eager, Fury, Pride, all of that—we changed ours.” Ramon sounded French to the seventeen year-old McCartney: “My idea of what a French name might be, like Monsieur Ramon!”)

“My Dark Hour,” born of strife, is more of a stomp-and-groove than a song, the riff of which Miller would of course repurpose to enormous success seven or so years later. (I wonder what McCartney thought when he heard that). It is a jam, and I think McCartney really did dig it, not only for its emotionally purging therapy but because it sounds uncannily like something McCartney himself might’ve knocked out a year or so later for McCartney or Ram. Playing drums in what Ian MacDonald once described as his “floppy style,” McCartney lopes along after the riff, his fills enthusiastic and indeed “aggressive,” if a bit stiff. His funky bass playing is, of course, effortlessly superb, and it’s a blast to hear him in the pre-chorus holler his answer lines, indulging his brassy, soulful mode.

He and Miller are both clearly having fun in the moment of creation—their happiness is embedded in the record’s grooves—yet the lyrics are telling. It’s unclear how much work McCartney did on the song, or how much Miller had already, and it’s certainly indulgent to apply retroactive knowledge to what is in truth a minor song made unselfconsciously in a single evening. But that title. And these lines: “Who’s that comin’ down that road / Looks like he’s carryin’ a heavy load.”

So do you think these sinners will fall
Or do you think they’ll survive us all?
Well, well, well, well, down this road
Won’t you help me carry my load?

Sounds as if it’s torn right out of McCartney’s diary. Late ‘69 and 1970 were very tough times for him, dark hours indeed. Nice to spin this 45 for evidence that he still knew how to throw down a hell of a time.