The Pretty Things announce their retirement

By Mark St John

As I write this, the snow is banked up across roads all over the country, the military are air-dropping supplies to rural areas and power is off across half the country. Right now, the weather in England is the coldest on record since 1963—the coldest winter on British record, and, coincidentally, the year that the Pretty Things were formed and set out on the long journey that has kept them on the road right up to this year—and into this freezing winter, 55 years on, it’s like nothing has changed…

Except—it has.

Fifty-five years after their first live performance, 50 years after the milestone that was SF Sorrow, and 30 years after I formally began to manage them, the Pretty Things are retiring from live performances as an electric band. Phil’s health, the gruelling tour schedules, the long, long travel days, the disappearing venues, the toll of time, and the disappearing landscape of the old school rock n roll industry have finally hit deep into the heartland of the greatest real rock band in the world, and our long-standing heroes. And, after a lot of soul-searching, they have called “Time” on a phenomenal roller coaster of a career and a mythological life of music, mayhem and magnificence…

I can’t say too much about this, apart from fulfilling the job of messenger. Most of you reading this will have your own point of view, your own memories and your own feeling about our war-worn heroes… most of you are believers. I’ll leave you to take this news in and, maybe, write to Mike with your feeling and let the guys know what this means to you, I know what it means to me. You guys are the first “real people” to be told, but, for the record, this is the press release, that will be going out to all the agents, promoters, venues, clubs, festivals and long-time working partners that we have, in our live performance world. This is the party line…..

Goodbye The Pretty Things – Press Release, 2018.

After 55 years of performing, the Pretty Things—the iconic, first wave, R&B cult heroes, formed by ex Rolling Stone Dick Taylor, and singer Phil May—will retire from electric performances at the end of this year.
Serial under-achievers, and the greatest band you never heard of, the Pretty Things have been a massive critical success and a huge influence on artists as diverse as David Bowie, Aerosmith, the Ramones, Bob Dylan, the Sex Pistols, the White Stripes, Kasabian and many, many more—who cite their outrageous behaviour, incandescent stage performances and astonishing catalogue of remarkable recordings as fundamental in the creation of their own work.
With a huge catalogue of musical and cultural “firsts” at their core—longest hair in the world, first ever rock & roll drugs bust, most arrests of any band, first ever ‘garage’ single, first ever rock opera, first UK band to win Rolling Stone Record of the Year, arrested for discharging a sawn off shotgun, first band to gain control of its entire recorded catalogue and on and on…—they are an indelible part of the fabric of popular music and the social influence that it has created.
Still making significant front-line records and with such influential work as their ground-breaking masterpiece and world’s first rock opera SF Sorrow, which celebrates its 50th Anniversary this year, in their catalogue, they remain a hugely significant artistic and creative force; with no artists save the Rolling Stones, from the first wave, outselling their frontline recordings and probably no artist at all out-performing them.
It should be compulsory for anyone with the slightest interest in popular music and the social revolution of the 1960s to see the Pretty Things before they hang up their guns at the end of this year. They will be back in the groove until then, hitting every working room on the circuit and finishing up with a huge farewell show in London at the end of the year, with guest appearances from some significant old friends and old school gunslingers to make sure they go out like they came in—with all guns blazing and taking no prisoners.
The Pretty Things are waving goodbye. Be there to wave back…

26th February, 2018.

So there it is—The King is Dead, but there’s no Long Live the King… This is an end to that monarchy and we’ll be the last generation to live within it, and the old nemesis the Rolling Stones are out this year too, also very possibly for the last time. And then the grass will grow over the hill and only those of us who were there will know…

OK—enough, we’ll all think about this in our own way, and I’ll get on with the business of the day.

So… The 55^th Anniversary, what is that going to bring? Well a great new album (probably the last…), a phenomenal vinyl box of SF Sorrow, a “yet to be decided” digital Sorrow release, and a LOT of shows… In our favorite countries, in our favorite rooms, in our favorite places and with our ever-lovin’ favorite audiences. Some big deal stuff by our standards, too. We’re performing a stripped down, totally psych, live version of Sorrow in The Big Top Stage on the funky late afternoon slot at the Isle of Wight Festival. It’s the 50^th Anniversary of the IOW, and (predictably) the only guys still standing who graced the first Festival, back in ’68 are… the Pretty Things. It’ll be a great show and, a quick hop down the road for Dick, a long-time resident of that little island.

The end of the year will bring a very special “Farewell” Concert. It will be held at the Roundhouse or the Royal Albert Hall and our good friends, dear David Gilmour and Bill Nighy have agreed to join us (Bill’s shooting schedule permitting). And we’ll be looking to add to that tally. Serge from Kasabian is on our list, with a few others—I’ll keep you in the loop. A lot of other old friends have agreed to attend (if not perform), so expect to spot a few famous and significant faces sharing the air with us all, It will be a celebration of the whole life of the band, so more than just a Sorrow show—much, much more. It will, I’m sure, be a fit tribute and it will be recorded and filmed and available for all, sometime next year.

The year will be very, very busy and between recording the new album, rehearsing the psych Sorrow outing, routining our guests for the Farewell show and rehearsing a full scale, “history of” performance for the big show, and fulfilling the busiest touring schedule for years (as we show respect to our fave venues, everywhere) there will be no time left for any of us for much else than the Pretty Things. I hope Phil holds up…

So, that’s pretty much all I have to say right now, really. I know it’s not my longest Gospel and there is a lot more news n stuff, but the scale of this announcement and the way it affects all of us, and many of you, you’re all family, makes saying anything more, redundant.

Phil May, my greatest friend, Frank Holland, my oldest friend, Dick Taylor, my most informed and informing friend. George Woosey and Jack Greenwood—I’ve managed them since they started and George was about 13, my youngest, true friends. That’s a life, right there.

And so, the end of a life, the end of an era. Be sure to dig down deep into 2018, it’s going to be a year to remember. Don’t let it pass you by…

Enough now, I’ll sign off while my eyes are still dry. I’m going to miss them so much…. Please God they find some way back, in any way possible… Where there’s life…

God bless you guys, keep the faith.

Mark St John

In the snow, the Dartford Delta, where it all began.

Jack Good 1937-2017

By Harvey Kubernik 

Jack Good, producer of the landmark Shindig! television series passed away on September 24, 2017.  I learned the news from deejay Rodney Bingenheimer. Good also produced a very early TV special Around the Beatles in 1964.

Shindig! was a seminal pop and rock music series that changed the music and frame game. It debuted September 1964 and ran through 1965 and was shot in L.A. at ABC Prospect Avenue Hollywood studios Initially it was a weekly half-hour spot that was extended to two weekly half hour episodes. No Jack Good, no MTV.

I went to live tapings as a teenager. I cited the program in my 2004 book Hollywood Shack Job: Rock Music in Film and On Your Screen. Rodney saw the Animals and the Stones. I have a fond memory of the Four Tops. Live vocal track from Levi and the group over a pre-recorded track by the Shindig! house band. The show might have aired nationally in black and white but what I saw was in living color. The Four Tops were clad in matching iridescent green suits, moving to “I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie Honey Bunch).”

Andrew Loog Oldham was the manager/record producer of the Rolling Stones 1963-1967 who booked the Stones on Shindig! in 1965. It’s an episode that also featured Howlin’ Wolf. In  Hollywood Shack Job, Oldham told me, “The British fashion business was the first pop business. At the same time poor British pop music had its moments, grand magical moments like Jack Good’s TV shows, Oh, Boy! and Boy Meets Girl, but the music we had was hardly exportable. All that ever got out and onto the Ed Sullivan TV show and the American airwaves was the one-offs and the freaks—Acker Bilk, Jackie Dennis and Laurie London.

“How vaudeville and World War II begot a middle class trad-jazz which begot skiffle and imitative well-meaning pop and eventually this little cluster of about 300 white kids with a passion for rhythm ‘n’ blues. How before the Beatles there was a Jack Good, Eddie Cochran, Little Richard, Buddy Holly, Billy Fury, Marty Wilde and Cliff Richard and the Shadows that ran that first all-important mile.”

In my book Turn Up the Radio! Rock, Pop, and Roll in Los Angeles 1956–1972, singer/pianist Ian Whitcomb reflected on Shindig! to me. “I had been a guest several times on producer Jack Good’s TV series, Shindig!, that was filmed in Hollywood at ABC-TV. Jack had a background in drama at Oxford. When he did the earlier Oh Boy! television music series in England, he had everything organized and synchronized. So Jack saw the dramatic potential of rock ’n’ roll. To that point, it hadn’t been exploited or explored in this country. You simply had teenage kids dancing with each other on the Dick Clark shows. Jack had this dramatic view. The Shindig! shows were done live, and the backing tracks of the music were done on Melrose Avenue at Nashville West, next to Nickodell Restaurant near Paramount Studios. It took a week to make a Shindig!”

In a 2000 interview I talked about Shindig! with keyboardist/arranger/composer/and producer Jack Nitzsche. “I spent a day with Howlin’ Wolf on the set of Shindig! I went down there with the Stones, and Sonny & Cher were there, too.  So Sonny introduced me to Howlin’ Wolf and I was speechless.  He was imposing.  There was a sweetness in there you could see.  And anyway, we were sitting there for a long time and he was sitting next to me and he had a friend with him who was a little older, and strange.  He wore a cowboy hat, boots and a bolo tie.  Western attire.  We sat together and I was content just to sit and not even speak.  Just to be in the man’s presence, ya know.

“So, after a while, we got to talking and he became more comfortable.  So did I.  He said, ‘I didn’t introduce you to my friend.  Jack, this is Son House. . .’  I’m sitting with Wolf and Son House.  I saw the Stones sitting around Howlin’ Wolf when he performed.

“You should have seen the take they stopped. They made him stop in the midst of a take.  ‘Cause he was like 300 pounds.  Huge and he had a toy harmonica, a tiny harmonica that he would put in his mouth.  He could hold it between his lips.  Oh man. So, he got up there on stage to do his set and he put that little harmonica in his mouth.  That was the surprise.  The band was playing, and it came time for the instrumental and he was kinda dancin’ around when he came up again for air, he was playing harmonica and holding the microphone.  It was theatrical and funny stuff for the fish fry.  I had to use a Wolf track on Blue Collar.

“I met Leon Russell with Jackie DeShannon; she introduced me. Leon at the time was playing piano in a bar in Covina. He was an innovative piano player. He was good. In those days it was real hard to find rock ‘n’ roll piano players who didn’t play too much. Leon talked the same language. You could really hear Leon play in the Shindig! television band. I put him in the TAMI Show band, and he’s all over the soundtrack. I knew Leon would emerge as a band leader.”

In 1985, I watched a Marvin Hagler and Thomas Hearns boxing match with Jack Nitzsche and Denny Bruce inside Bruce’s Bel-Air home. That night Nitzsche touted and endorsed Good’s telegenic musical vision but also lamented network executives who couldn’t handle race mixed recording artists vocalizing together on camera in their early 1964 Shindig! TV pilot. Our current politically correct climate prohibits me from printing Jack’s specific memory statement and exact racist wording of a cautionary remark he heard at the time uttered from a couple of former  ABC programmers and censors. In addition, brass also didn’t want Jack’s Caucasian wife, Gracia, a studio background singer and a regular member of the Blossoms, Shindig! regulars, to appear on the weekly series with them.

By January ’66 Good had his final argument with ABC executives, splitting from Shindig! He went on to produce the locally shot TV special 33 1/3 Revolutions per Monkee that was broadcast on NBC-TV on April 14, 1969. Fats Domino, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, the Clara Ward Singers, the Buddy Miles Express and Brian Auger, Julie Driscoll and the Trinity were the guests.

Harvey Kubernik is the author of 12 books, including Leonard Cohen, Everybody Knows, and Neil Young, Heart of Gold.  In April 2017, Sterling published Kubernik’s 1967 A Complete Rock Music History of the Summer of Love. Kubernik’s literary anthology Inside Cave Hollywood: The Harvey Kubernik Music InnerViews and InterViews Collection, Vol 1 will be published during November 2017 by Cave Hollywood.    

Col. Bruce Hampton (1947-2017)

By Alan Bisbort

The first time I saw Bruce Hampton, he was standing on the tiny stage at a suburban Atlanta “teen scene” venue reading the contents off the side of can of spray paint. This was in 1968. A sweaty, short-haired guy in a button-down-collared shirt with the build of a middle linebacker, Hampton looked out of place accompanied by two guitarists, a bassist and drummer all with hair so long you could not see their faces and all of whom were playing as loud as fire engine sirens. Needless to add, I had never seen anything like it in my 15 years on this planet. Nor had the handful of other brave teens whose parents had dropped them off at the alcohol-free club in the shopping mall. A much larger crowd of teenyboppers were milling about in the parking lot outside, having been driven from the room by the psychedelic noise created by the Hampton Grease Band. Years later I learned this was just one of the many ill-advised gigs the band’s manager had secured for them prior to their signing a record deal with Columbia, which released their one and only album, the epic double-LP package Music to Eat.  (On which was a cut called “Spray Paint”).

Not too long after that, the band—Hampton on vocals and dada vibes, guitarists Harold Kelling and Glenn Phillips, bassist Mike Holbrook and drummer Jerry Fields—began appearing at free shows in Piedmont Park, the downtown Atlanta hangout for hippies, druggies, bikers and most of the runaways in the southeastern US. Soon enough, on the strength of these monumental free gigs, the Hampton Grease Band would wow hundreds of thousands of “freaks” at the two Atlanta Pop Festivals and regularly share bills with Jimi Hendrix, the Allman Brothers Band, Grateful Dead and even Captain Beefheart & his Magic Band. Bruce was, in fact, a Southern-fried version of Don Van Vliet, with a warming touch of Sun Ra. To my fragile eggshell mind, Hampton, and his band, provided an epiphany of sorts—showing me that music could go beyond mere recitation of clichéd boogie lyrics and shoddy playing and take you to places you never expected to go.

The Hampton Grease Band carried on for a few years, then members drifted off to pursue their own musical muses. Phillips and Kelling went on to form their own bands (a live recording by Phillips’ band was favorably reviewed in UT #44). Over the next four decades, Hampton added the honorific “Colonel” to his name and recorded a few solo albums (including the unsurpassably strange One Ruined Life of a Bronze Tourist) and became a major force in the jam band subculture that flourished under the banner of H.O.R.D.E. He fronted several bands of his own, including the Aquarium Rescue Unit, Fiji Mariners and Codetalkers, and served as a mentor to many young, gifted players who’ve since gone on to productive musical careers.

In the 1990s, during one of his passes through Washington DC, where I then lived, Hampton contacted me through a mutual friend and I spent a day museum-hopping with Bruce and members of his band, one of the highlights of my 17 years in the nation’s capital. He was generous, funny, kind and subject to conversational turns on a dime. No wonder Billy Bob Thornton called Hampton (who appeared in his film Sling Blade) “the eighth wonder of the world.” Listening to Hampton on album (other than the indispensable Music to Eat) was not quite the same as seeing him live. I once saw him play a gig with a golf club in his hands, practicing his swing while his band jammed, and every so often going to the microphone to pronounce the word “hose.” Every concert was different, unpredictable, strange and beautiful.

Early in May, a veritable who’s who of Southern rock gathered for a sold-out 70th birthday celebration for Col. Bruce Hampton at Atlanta’s historic Fox Theater. At the end of the show, during the final encore (of “Turn on Your Lovelight”), Hampton collapsed on stage and died minutes later at a nearby hospital. The mourning could be heard all the way to New England, where I live now. Both of my sisters, who live in Atlanta, called to bring me the news, then high school friends I hadn’t heard from in years began contacting me. Eventually, the strangeness of Col. Hampton’s demise gave the story “legs” in print and on the Internet, propelling it even into the staid pages of the Wall Street Journal—providing Hampton more notoriety in death than he ever had in life. The consensus seems to be that he could not have had a more fitting exit, dying on stage like that.

For me, though, it’s just sad. Part of it is, no doubt, tied up with losing that personal connection to my youth, but so many musicians I admired have died before this and the sadness didn’t linger like this. With Hampton’s death, it’s as if a musical force were shut off, like a faucet or a hose. I had no delusions that he still had some musical masterpieces locked inside his fertile cranium. No, it’s clear now that HE was the masterpiece.