http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/music/article3404400.ece
Going for a song
February 24, 2008
A tiny farming town among the cornfields of Nebraska is an unlikely
place to find inspiration in music, but when I was a teenager growing
up in Lyons (population about 800), music was my salvation, and radio
was my connection to it. As I cruised up and down the main street of
my little town on summer nights, hoping to score some beer or a girl
and usually missing out on both counts, the radio was always there,
an exciting soundtrack to otherwise mundane evenings. On Top 40
radio, the old guard were being slowly shown the door by the new. The
"British invasion" psychedelia and the garage rock of America were
storming the charts, bumping up hard against conservative, orchestrated pop.
You could hear Engelbert Humperdinck's mellow pipes right after Jim
Morrison's scream at the end of Light My Fire. The tracks that stood
out to me were the ones that sounded the dirtiest, the grittiest –
the ones branded "garage rock", obviously recorded in one take.
Hearing Pushin' Too Hard by the Seeds for the first time while
drifting under the streetlights of Lyons on a warm night sent me, for
two minutes and 30 seconds, onto another plane of existence. The car
wheels left the bumpy bricks of the road and I was airborne on that
whirl of two chords trading places as fast as they could, like
molecules bouncing off one another as heat is applied. The scorn and
humour in the snarling voice, as it sailed over the beat, seemed to
mutate and change. Other voices bellowed and answered with the words
"Too haaaard". The song was magical and crude, scary and hilarious,
its simplicity belying the genius of its construction. Those two
chords go back and forth while the vocals and guitar paint the
perfect picture of manic energy.
Sky Saxon (right), the troubled brain behind it, had a voice that
sounded like a bratty little kid who just may be dangerous. The Seeds
were part of the flower-power generation, but they brought a darkness
and an edge to it. My band, the British (such was my love for all
things Brit), learnt Pushin' Too Hard and performed it at local
halls, and those two simple chords were just as wondrous to play as
they were to hear. I moved on to other songs, other bands, and Sky
Saxon and the Seeds moved on to where most such musicians eventually
ended up – victims of the music biz, drugs, flighty fans,
unscrupulous managers, or just time. After a couple more singles and
an uneven album or two, they disappeared, becoming just a footnote to
the era. Then, one Saturday afternoon a couple of years ago, one of
my current bands, the Know-It-All Boyfriends, were setting up our
gear at a bar in Madison, Wisconsin, when a phone call from a friend
who runs a local record store announced: "Sky Saxon is here and wants
to come and say hello." He was in town with a group of 1960s bands,
"revived" for a small tour.
Ten minutes later, I almost dropped my guitar at the sight of the man
blowing through the door, with long salt-and-pepper hair, dressed
from head to toe in billowing folds of some purple, silky fabric. He
wore oversized shades that covered much of his face and sported a
beard that hid much of the rest. The next thing I knew, we were on
stage, blazing away on those two chords, with Sky Saxon on lead
vocal, snarling and whining as we readied ourselves to answer him in
the chorus. I felt hypnotised and ecstatic – the same feeling I had
on first hearing it. After 20 minutes of this divine madness, the
song finally disintegrated as those things do. As the five other
people in the bar applauded, or looked a bit dumbstruck, the
bartender continued polishing glasses, and Sky Saxon disappeared
again and went back to wherever those guys go. And I, a little sweaty
and breathing a little fast, felt like I had been visited by a ghost.
---
Duke Erikson is Garbage's guitarist
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