Saturday, June 27, 2009

Sky Saxon RIP

Lost in the hysteria surrounding the deaths of Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson was the passing of Sky Saxon, 71, former lead singer and bass player for the Seeds, the LA-based proto-typical '60's garage punk band. His death should not go unnoticed.
The Seeds were one of my early rock and roll infatuations (after Love and before Cream). I bought their first album mainly because they looked incredibly cool on the cover, but then discovered the power of their buzz saw guitars and Saxon's eternally petulant voice. The second album, Web of Sound, expanded on the nastiness of the first album, and, particularly in the writing, demonstrated that they were more than one-hit wonders. (Unfortunately, the band never lived up to the potential of those two albums, releasing first a bad blues album then a "flower power" album, before disintegrating.) Saxon later became a member of a West Coast spiritual cult. He would sporadically perform and release albums either under his own name or as the Seeds right up to the time of his death.
All these years later, listening to those early Seeds albums, it's easy to reconnect to the anger and exultation of adolescence.
The Seeds - Mr. Farmer
The Seeds - Can't Seem to Make You Mine
The Seeds - Up In Her Room

1 comment:

Anthony F. Hall said...

I knew 'Can't Seem to Make you Mine' only as an Alex Chilton song. A great song, a good cover choice.