Franklin Bach

Two records which have reached the top spot in the charts recently are the Beachboys’ GOOD VIBRATIONS and the Monkeys’ I’M A BELIEVER.

GOOD VIBRATIONS is a very interesting single due to an excellent and intricate arrangement of music and vocal parts; and the Monkeys come across with a rather nice, early Beatleish simple, clean sound. Both songs are listenable, but on both 45s, featured performers do not play most of the instruments.

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It was a Thursday night, December 8, at Wayne State’s Community Arts Auditorium. I was about to hear Lyman Woodward play for the first time...Mustachioed John Sinclair came out of the wings and quietly told us Lyman was going to play and with who and all that. Then Woodward and Charles Miles padded out mumbling to each other. Lyman sat at the piano and Miles stood with his saxophone and they began to play some of the cleanest music I’ve ever heard. Woodward and friends play a kind of free jazz and their concert was hard to describe in ordinary terms at all. The improvisations on the first number lulled one into tranquility and then slid into raucous excitement and then back down again and up and down and when it was all over the audience was too astonished to applaud. Miles stayed, Woodward switched to electric organ, and was later joined by Charles Moore on cornet and Melvin Davis on drums.

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In 1964, when almost everyone in Greenwich Village was playing an acoustic guitar and singing “folk, there was a red-haired ex-Marine named Tim Hardin who was using an electric guitar and sang a sort of jazz flavored blues. Before Hardin had left New York for Los Angeles he had already made a great impression on people who were later to become The Mommas and the Poppas and the Lovin’ Spoonful. Since then Hardin has developed a unique sound which is something like motown rock, jazz, folk, and blues and is different from all those things at the same time. Tim has sung at the Newport Folk Festival; and one of his songs, “If I were a Carpenter,” has been made a hit by Bobby Darin.

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In the last issue of the FIFTH ESTATE John Sinclair put down “acid rock” in favor of new-thing jazz, implying that Coltrane is really where it’s at and that rock is nowhere. His opinion revolves around the term “psychedelic”. Sinclair feels that jazz is truly psychedelic while rock merely exploits the term. I asked Robin Tyner, lead singer of the MC-5, now appearing at the Grande Ballroom, what he considers to be the true psychedelic music.

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I remember that there was a time not too long ago when yours truly sat in one of Detroit’s few coffee houses wanting so badly to have a good time and hear some good music that I actually applauded the second-rate “musicians” folking off onstage. These performers were the product of a very small and very sick music scene in the city. There was very little of anything exciting attracting customers to hear live music. Consequently, there was very little money for the musicians playing in this city. There was, as a result, very little competition, creativity, or excitement going on in the coffee houses. A vicious circle.

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