The Seeds - The Seeds 1966

Of the great garage punk bands of the 1960s, some were louder (the Sonics), some were angrier (the Music Machine), and some were trippier (the 13th Floor Elevators), but few seemed like a bad influence on so many levels as the Seeds. The Seeds had long hair, a gloriously lamentable fashion sense, an attitude that was at once petulant and lackadaisical, and music that sounded aimless, horny, agitated, and stoned all at once. Is it any wonder America's delinquent youth loved them? The Seeds' aural signature was as distinctive as any band of their era, and they got a bit fancier with their formula as they went along, but they never captured their essential seediness with more impressive concision than they did on their self-titled debut album from 1966. Dominated by the fierce, drawling yelp of Sky Saxon's vocals and Daryl Hooper's hypnotically repetitive keyboard patterns, and supported by the snarling report of Jan Savage's guitar and Rick Andridge's implacable drumming, the Seeds had a limited bag of melodic tricks, but they hardly seemed to care that roughly half their songs sounded identical, as Saxon bellowed about people who had done him wrong in some way or another (usually women) and the band locked into cyclical grooves that picked up impressive momentum when they gained enough traction (especially "Evil Hoodoo," "You Can't Be Trusted," and the Seeds' signature tune "Pushin' Too Hard"). On their second album, A Web of Sound, the Seeds would become more blatant in their celebrations of sex and drugs, but the glorious primitivism and narrower focus of their debut ultimately works to their advantage; there are few albums of the era that mirror the delicious arrogance of a beer-sodden teenage misfit with the effortless simplicity of the Seeds, and it's justly celebrated as a classic of first-wave garage punk. Amg.

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The Seeds - Future 1967

Though the Seeds' third album, 1967's Future, was pegged by critics as the band's attempt to ride the wave of baroque/psychedelic/orchestral magic the Beatles defined with Sgt. Pepper's, the recording was actually complete before the release of the Beatles' far more popular breakthrough album, making it impossible for the influence to touch the uncannily similarly minded flower power tones of Future.  The Seeds had their own relatively huge smash with the raw high-pressure garage thumper "Pushin' Too Hard" the year before, and saw nothing wrong with recycling that tune's melody on more than a few songs on their first two albums. The melody and feel of that track is revisited on Future in the form of "Out of the Question" and the spooky organ of "A Thousand Shadows," but a deliberate attempt to move away from the band's by-the-numbers caveman garage rock toward something more experimental, spectral, and musical can be felt all over the rest of the album. While Sgt. Pepper's set a standard for this type of conceptual, genre-bending rock, other heavyweight contemporaries of the Seeds were already experimenting with injecting their straightforward rock & roll with mind-expanding psychedelia and uncommon orchestration. Love, the Zombies, Blues Magoos, and the Left Banke were all getting into flutes, Mellotrons, and harps by 1967, and the Seeds themselves had hinted at a classical influence with the haunting piano solo of their earlier classic "Can't Seem to Make You Mine." Though Future sought to expand on the raw approach of earlier albums with heightened musicality, there's no real concept to tie the various pieces together. Instead, listeners were treated to a pleasant if confusing mishmash of attempted statements. There are stabs at mind-expanding psychedelic mantras like the spare raga-esque guitars and muddy bongos of "Travel with Your Mind," indulgent string sections and random-sounding harpsichords on "Painted Doll" and the waltzy, tuba-heavy "Two Fingers Pointing On You," the aforementioned garage vamps, and all of the above on the obligatory seven-minute album-closing jam "Fallin'." While it's clear vocalist Sky Saxon and company were tuned into the electricity and open-mindedness of the burgeoning hippie movement, the various experiments on Future fail to ever congeal. Even in the most orchestrated, quiet, or overwrought moments, the Seeds can't quite shake their core personalities, sounding less like they're changing directions and more like they're donning a new costume with each song, never really settling on one look before just leaving in the clothes they were wearing, to begin with. While the sidesteps into Technicolor psychedelia and overly serious orchestration are interesting and sometimes good, nothing has quite the same power as Saxon's feral howls or the burning fuzz guitar that escapes in the least calculated (and most exciting) moments of Future. AMG.

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The Seeds - A Web of Sound 1966

Recorded in the midst of 1966, naturally after the spring release of their debut but before "Pushin' Too Hard" climbed into the national charts in the spring of 1967, A Web of Sound finds the Seeds pushing their sound into new dimensions, happily keeping pace with their Los Angeles contemporaries Love and the Doors. That the Seeds never received the respect accorded to their peers, either then or now, may be partially due to their lack of lyrical ambition, or it could be due to the Hollywood teenage sleaze that seeped out of this quartet led by garage rock icon Sky Saxon. Whatever the Seeds did, it sounded somewhat dirty, a maxim that applies to A Web of Sound even if it lacks singles as hard and filthy as "Pushin' Too Hard." Instead, this is a proto-psychedelic trip, kicked off by the cheerful, swirling "Mr. Farmer" -- the Kinks transplanted to a Middle American fable as refracted through the prism of the West Coast -- and "Pictures & Designs," which falls into the "Pushin' Too Hard" progression by its chorus. Thing is, A Web of Sound was cut long before that single turned into a hit, so neither "Pictures & Designs" in specific or the album as a whole functions as a cash-in. Rather, it's an expansion, downplaying grit and grunge in favor of expansive organ-fueled pop fantasias, minor-chord stomps, an elastic blues burner ("A Faded Picture"), and veiled odes to drugs and sex, all wrapped up via the monumental live-in-the-studio workout "Up in Her Room," nearly 15 minutes of sneering tension and release. "Up in Her Room" compares favorably to Love, and Saxon and Arthur Lee did run in the same circles, but decades later Saxon's downscale aspirations are blindingly apparent; he wasn't seeking transcendence, he was exploiting the moment. As such, A Web of Sound feels more thoroughly tied to 1966 than most of the Los Angeles rock of that year and that's both its blessing and its curse: it brings the era rushing back but it doesn't suggest any of the future. And yet, that transience is precisely why the album is so enjoyable. All the organs, all the minor-key riffs, all the desperate desire to be a star coalesce into a quintessentially L.A. trip, a harbinger of all the wasted good times that could be found on the Sunset Strip. AMG.

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The Seeds - The Seeds 1966

As mid-'60s L.A. garage bands go, the Seeds were perhaps the most primitive, which isn't necessarily a virtue. Whereas the Standells had good lyrics, the Leaves could write pop, and Love was gifted beyond comparison, Sky Saxon and company had to settle for attitude and an unintended comicalness. Their debut record is just that. It's comprised of snotty boy-girl songs and teeters on the edge of musical ineptness, though it does contain the garage classic "Pushin' Too Hard" (whose arrangement is recycled at least once here). The other significant tune is "Can't Seem to Make You Mine," which features a repetitive, haunted-house guitar riff. The rest of the record, though fairly forgettable, still reinforces the truth that pure punk appeared long before the Sex Pistols. AMG.

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The Seeds - Future 1967

The "A Thousand Shadows" 45 rpm from this album, Future, came in a pink sleeve decorated by gray four-leaf clovers and a negative picture of the Seeds next to a sign that says "Wishing Well - Help Us Grow." "A Thousand Shadows" is the melody as well as the feel of their Top 40 1967 hit "Pushin' Too Hard." Breaking no new ground, the band insisted on revisiting its formula, reinventing new versions of "Pushin' Too Hard" like "Flower Lady & Her Assistant." This is a sophisticated package with a gatefold which includes lyrics over pastel sunflowers as if the band was Joni Mitchell. Three colorful pages come inside the album, including two beautiful photos of the group along with single flowers representing the songs on the disc with instructions: "Cut out paste on whatever" for grade schoolers or those so strung out on LSD they have regressed to that point. "Six Dreams" is Black Sabbath's Ozzie meeting George Harrison in some biker film soundtrack with weird sound effects and a sitar. The harp on "Fallin'" underscores Saxon's passionate garage vocal. Imagine, if you will, Brian Jones during the recording of Satanic Majesties deciding to bare all the excesses of rock stardom. This album is a trip, not because it reflects the ideas captured in the Peter Fonda film of the same name, but because a band had the audacity to experiment with record company money and make something so noncommercial and playful. Droning organ sounds penetrate "Fallin'," the seven minute, 40 second final track. Saxon writes in the inner-sleeve essay "Originations of the Flower Generation" "...The farmer lives by the elements alone, the sun, the rain, and the earth, but the earth needs its seeds to sow the flower generation of the leaf...." It's heady stuff, and the melody and sound of "Pushin' Too Hard" permeates incessantly. Hardly aFuture, as the title proclaims, this is actually the Sgt. Pepper of the flower-power set, a reinvention of past efforts, but no "Strawberry Fields" or "Day in the Life" to bring it out of its cult niche. Very listenable, highly entertaining, and totally not for the mass audience. GNP stands for Gene Norman Presents, and the label should be commended for allowing such creativity which inspired Iggy Pop and the Lyres'Mono Mann. Saxon played his game to the hilt, and that followers like Mono Mann and Jeff Connellywould get stuck in his groove is only testament to how original and enthralling these sounds are. Tunes like "Now a Man" are low-key Ventures riffs with naïve guitar and Saxon being as indulgent as humanly possible. Fans should also seek out a 45 on Expression records, "Beautiful Stars" by Sky Sunlight and Thee New Seeds featuring Rainbow. Despite its musical limitations, Future holds up quite well to repeated plays by sitting firmly in the past. AMG.

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