Gavin B.

Felt: The Unsung Brit Band of the Post Punk Era


Felt in the mid-80s

Are there any fans of the band Felt in this god forsaken world? Felt was a British band founded by the enigmatic Lawrence Hayward. Hayward was a talented musician who was madly obsessed with the music of two American bands; Television and the Velvet Underground. Lawrence Hayward wore the Tom Velaine influence on his sleeve and his singing, songwriting and guitar playing bore a striking similarity to Verlaine's.

Felt had a 10 year run from 1979 until 1989 and left a legacy of seven consistently good albums. The eccentric Hayward presided over a revolving door musicians who came and went under his despotic leadership. As legend has it, Hayward dismissed Felt's original drummer Tony Race, for having "bad hair." The best edition of the band included another guitar slinger, Maurice Deeback and his extended solo tradeoffs with Hayword invited favorable comparisons to Tom Verlaine & Richard Lloyd's exquisite dueling guitar leads in Television. My suggestion is to ignore Verlaine/Television comparisons. On the flip side, selecting Tom Verlaine and Television as your musical guru is a far better choice than selecting George Michael and Wham for the task.


A recent photo of Felt founder Lawrence Hayward.

Felt's distinctive guitar band identity got buried beneath the tidal wave of synthesizer dominated new wave bands of the early 80s. Another career obstacle was that Felt's flag ship record label the small but venerable Red Cherry lacked the monetary resources to provide the kind of promotional and touring support needed to launch an aspiring band from the artisitic underground into waters of mainstream success.

The good news is that Felt has a larger American audience in 2010 than it ever did when it was an active band in the Eighties. The renewed American interest in the band is largely because of numerous YouTube video postings by it's small cadre of fans who first became aquainted with Felt's music over two decades ago.

The first embedded song, Fortune comes from Felt's 2nd album release Crumbling the Antiseptic Beauty (1981):



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In 1986 Felt released Forever Breathes the Lonely Word which included the next song Gather Up Your Wings & Fly:



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Lawrence Hayward had resolved to break up Felt after a 10 year run, regardless of the band's success and he made good on his word with the release of Felt's final album, Me and a Monkey on the Moon in 1989. It's unfortunate that Hayword ended Felt at 10 year point because Haywood's songs like New Day Dawning (embedded below) showed him at the peak of his songwriting skills. Felt's untimely breakup was frustrating to the band's followers because with the release Me and a Monkey on the Moon, Hayward had finally made a decisive strides away from his VU/Television influences to develop his own uniquely crafted musical product.

Many credit another punk pioneer Adrian Borland for retooling the sound of Felt for that final album. Borland was one of the most artistically accomplished and unheralded talents of the early punk era. With Borland at the helm as producer, Felt developed bolder and fuller sound that stood apart as the best of Hayward's musical efforts with Felt.



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Bulldog

Legendary photo that.

Unsurprisingly, I've never heard of these guys before but, despite that as far as Television goes I'm only a fan of half of Marquee Moon, they sound really interesting perhaps because, judging by New Day Dawning and Gather Up Your Wings, they don't really sound an awful lot like Television to me. That's probably more to do with the fact that I don't really listen to them these days more than anything else though.

Great shout-out, as per norm. Another name I'll have to take a look around for, which basically means it could be anything from minutes to months before I actually do! I'm still yet to get round to looking for Club 8 as well.

James

Felt are a fantastic band, with 4 of their albums being absolute classics. They are certainly underrated.

Gavin B.

You'd better get kicking on that Club 8 music, mate, I think you'll love them. Their newly released The People's Record is arguably their best ever and one of the best music releases of 2010. Their has been a deluge of great alternative pop coming out of Sweden over the past year or two. Sweden is beginning to rival Great Britian for it's abundance of clever high concept pop bands.

Bulldog

I know next to nothing about Scandinavian music on the whole except for a few Norweigan nu-jazz albums I've been hearing, let alone what the Swedish industry comes up with. I've just got hold of a copy of the Club 8 album an hour or two ago, so I'll be hearing soon(ish).

Anyway, looking forward to the next update.

Gavin B.

THE PSYCHEDELIC CHRONICLES: PART I

Q: What was the first psychedelic record? That all depends on what your definition of psychedelic is. You can make a good argument that the Yardbirds were playing proto-psychedelic music on their earliest single releases like For Your Love, I'm A Man and Heart Full of Soul way back in 1965. The Byrds' first two albums released in 1965 were almost a blend of jangly folk rock & psychedelica on songs like Mr. Tamborine Man, I Feel A Whole Better & It Won't Be Wrong.

None of those 1965 releases could really be called fully self-conscious efforts to make music that depicted the LSD experience. The tag word "psychedelic" came into usage in 1966 and it described a very specific genre of popular music related the use of LSD and other hallucinogenic substances.

Most music historians concur that 1966 was the year where psychedelic music came spilling out of the the psychedelic dungeons in L.A. and London. Most of the San Francisco bands remained under the radar because the hub of the music recording industry was Los Angeles and nearly every good, bad and ugly band that gigged in the clubs on Sunset Strip were signed in 1966. The attention turned to the Bay Area, a year later in 1967, when Moby Grape, the Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead finally released their much anticipated released albums.

1967 was the real watershed year for psychedelic music in terms of landmark album releases of first generation psychedelic music. With release of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band by the Beatles in the summer of 1967, and the extensive media coverage of the Monterey Pop Festival, an international audience for psychedelic music was created.

By 1968 many of the early psychedelic groups were in the state of flux. The Yardbirds were broken up. The Byrds moved on to a more countrified sound. Cream was feuding and on the verge of a break-up after the release of the brilliant Disraeli Gears album in 1967. Love was in the state of a drug fueled meltdown following the recording of Forever Changes. By the summer of 1968 Jimi Hendrix had recorded Electric Ladyland, which was his final album with his talented but underrated band mates in the Experience. With the release of Electric Ladyland, the most significant and productive era of Hendrix's musical career was behind him. The Seeds fell under the radar forever. Moby Grape went through a traumatic expulsion of their most beloved and talented member Skip Spence, following an infamous rampage with a fire ax in a recording studio that resulted in Skip's committment to Bellevue Hospital in NYC. The Doors, the Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead and a crop of newly recorded bands all flourished in 1968, but that rarest sense of musical magic that marked the passage of the Summer of Love and Monterey Pop had dissipated by end of 1968.

By the end of the summer of 1969, the first great era of psychedelic music was pretty much over and done with. The Woodstock Music Festival held in August 1969 is generally considered to be the last great event of the psychedelic era.

The chronological list of the earliest psychedelic music releases of 1966 is below. I'll leave it to you to decide for yourself what the first psychedelic song was.

A Chronology of Psychedelic Album and Single Releases:1966:

February: "You're Gonna Miss Me"--The 13th Floor Elevators (The month of the release date in 1966 is disputed)
February: "Shapes Of Things/You're A Better Man Than I"--The Yardbirds (both sides)
February: "Free Advice"--The Great Society (b-side of "Someone To Love")
February: LOVE (Arthur Lee & Love's debut album. The month of the release date in 1966 is disputed)

March: "Eight Miles High/Why"--The Byrds (both sides)

May: "Paint It Black"--The Rolling Stones
May: "Over Under Sideways Down"--The Yardbirds

June: "Rain"--The Beatles
June: "Country Joe And The Fish" EP (key cuts: "Section 43" and "Bass Strings")--Country Joe And The Fish
June: "Tobacco Road"--The Blues Magoos
June: "Making Time"--The Creation
June: "Last Time Around"--The Del-Vetts

July: FREAK OUT! Lp--The Mothers Of Invention (key cuts: "Hungry Freaks Daddy", "Who Are The Brain Police", "Help I'm A Rock", "Return Of The Son Of Monster Magnet")
July: "Seven And Seven Is"--Love
July: "Psychotic Reaction"--The Count Five
July: "Jack Of Diamonds"--The Daily Flash
July: "Sunshine Superman/The Trip"--Donovan (A-side for sure, B-side is borderline)
July: FIFTH DIMENSION Lp--The Byrds (key cuts: "5D", "I See You", "What's Happening?!?", "Eight Miles High")
July: ROGER THE ENGINEER Lp--The Yardbirds (key cuts: "Lost Women", "Over Under...", "Farewell", "Hot House Of Omagararshid", "Turn Into Earth", maybe "I Can't Make Your Way")

August: REVOLVER Lp--The Beatles (key cuts: "I'm Only Sleeping", "Love You To", "She Said She Said" and "Tomorrow Never Knows". "Taxman", "Yellow Submarine" and "Doctor Robert" are all on the borderline)
August: EAST-WEST Lp--Paul Butterfield Blues Band (key cut: title track)
August or September: THE MAMAS AND THE PAPAS Lp--The Mamas And The Papas (key cuts: "Strange Young Girls", "Even If I Could"...some of the studio tricks on this album are as advanced as on "Revolver"...)

September: "Happenings 10 Years Time Ago"--The Yardbirds
September: "Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing In The Shadow?"--The Rolling Stones
September: SUNSHINE SUPERMAN Lp--Donovan (key cuts: almost the whole album!)
September: "It's-A-Happening"--The Magic Mushrooms

October: "Good Vibrations"--The Beach Boys
October: "Painter Man"--The Creation (borderline)
October: "Smashed Blocked"--John's Children
October: "Disguises" (from "Ready, Steady, Who!" EP)--The Who
October: "Sunny South Kensington"--Donovan (b-side of "Mellow Yellow")
October: A WEB OF SOUND Lp--The Seeds (key cuts: almost the whole album, but esp "Pictures And Designs", "Tripmaker", and "Up In Her Room")
October: FACE TO FACE Lp--The Kinks (key cuts: "Rainy Day In June", "Fancy". Credit must also go to the cover art!)
October/November: THE PSYCHEDELIC SOUNDS OF THE 13TH FLOOR ELEVATORS (key cuts: almost the whole album, although I consider most of it somewhat transitional. The release date is in dispute; it's either the last week of October or first week of November. My father, however, had a promo copy dated from August, so I give it release date priority over The Deep and The Blues Magoos).

November: PSYCHEDELIC LOLLIPOP Lp--The Blues Magoos (key cuts: "Love Seems Doomed", "Tobacco Road")
November: "Mud In Your Eye"--Les Fleur De Lys
November: PSYCHEDELIC MOODS Lp--The Deep (key cuts: the entire album!)
November: I Had Too Much To Dream (Last Night)--The Electric Prunes
November: DA CAPO Lp--Love (key cuts: "Stephanie Knows Who", "Seven And Seven Is", "The Castle", "She Comes In Colors". Apparently the "Revelation" jam was much better live than it was on the record. Also, although most discographies list its release date as Jan '67, the recent Arthur Lee bio pinpoints it as from this month).

December: "Night Of Fear/Disturbance"--The Move
December: "I Can Take You To The Sun"--The Misunderstood
December: FRESH CREAM Lp--Cream (key cuts: "Sweet Wine" and "Toad", both recorded after the majority of the album just after the group met Hendrix, and clearly showing his influence on the guitar solos. Hendrix didn't release his stunning debut album until early in 1967.)
December: "Machines"--The Herbal Mixture

NumberNineDream

How 'bout The Deep's Psychedelic Moods, who is said to be the first album to include the word "Psychedelic" beating the 13th Floor Elevators' Psychedelic Sounds.
A very good album btw, if you haven't heard it yet.

It's pretty tricky time anyway, the year 66.

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Gavin B.

The release date of the Psychedelic Sounds of 13th Floor Elevators is in dispute as I pointed out on the list, but it's very close (maybe even earlier) to the release date of The Deep's Psychedelic Moods, which I've heard and love. The March release of Eight Miles High by the Byrds is my own choice because it was the first song that attempted to depict the subjective experience of what taking LSD was like.

The word psychedelic was already a part of the medical nomenclature in 1966 and was first coined in 1957 by psychiatrist Humphrey Osmund as a medical descriptor for psychotherapy involving the use of hallucinogenic drugs. Osmond consulted Aldous Huxley. Huxley suggested the term "phanerothyme," from the Greek terms for "to show" and "spirit." In a letter to Osmond, he wrote:

To make this mundane world sublime,
Take half a gram of phanerothyme

To which Osmond responded:

To fathom Hell or soar angelic,
Just take a pinch of psychedelic

By 1965, a Harvard professor, Timothy Leary became a well known evangelist for LSD use and he's credited with bringing term psychedelic into popular usage. I was a kid back in 1965 but my father, who was in the music business, frequently used the term psychedelic describe both a state of mind and a specific kind of music played by the Leaves, the Seeds & Love, three unsigned Los Angeles bands band he first heard at Sunset Strip clubs when he visited Los Angeles late in 1965.

From my perspective, being the band that first used of the word psychedelic in an album or song title doesn't necessarily establish bragging rights to being the band that recorded first psychedelic song. In Part II of my Psychedelic Chronicles, there will be more information on the central role played by Ken Kesey & Owsley Stanley in introducing the word psychedelic into the pop music vocabulary.

NumberNineDream

Well, that was very enlightening.
Looking forward to read the sequels to the Chronicle.

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Bulldog

Great post there Gav (I'd expect no less), particularly as I know next to nothing about that area of music. For instance, I'd thought 'til I checked this thread that Eight Miles High was the first ever psychedelic record, so it shows what I know eh. I think I've only got something like 5-10 of those songs you listed there with my favourite probably being I Had Too Much To Dream Last Night (although Rain and Good Vibrations make it a close call).

Also, I only just noticed your list of notable new releases of 2010 list a few posts back just now, and it's gonna be useful to say the least when I go onm another new music binge, so cheers for that