my path to heavy music (part 1)
Spirit in the Sky
I’m going to get to the song Spirit in the Sky in a minute, but let me just say up front that the single most important record on my path to heavy music was Led Zeppelin II. It’s the end of the 1960’s and I’m becoming a teenager, just barely. I’ll spare you the hormone related specifics, but the cliché of “the soundtrack of our lives” meant for me being outside in the Arizona heat meeting up with friends and having fun. I don’t remember the exact order that these songs entered my life, but they were all released around 1969/70. Most would come and go fairly quickly and Spirit in the Sky was one of those. But Led Zeppelin II would get the bulk of the playing time on my turntable, and I eventually forgot about Spirit in the Sky.
I never gave much thought to the development of heavy music, especially the details of heavy rock throughout the 1960’s, but my recent research on the Yardbirds for my project on the Gomelsky Recordings (see earlier blog posts) opened my eyes to many of these details that I was too young to appreciate at the time. As a kid, the Yardbirds were never on my radar. To me, Led Zeppelin was Jimmy Page’s first band. I mean, I knew he must have been in other bands prior, but they were insignificant. At 13 I wasn’t too interested in music history. The future was exploding before my ears and I was diving headlong into it.
As everyone knows today, the Yardbirds launched the careers of three of the greatest rock guitar players in all of rock history. Some consider the band the third most important in shaping the direction of rock music into the late 1960’s, after the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Of course it was Gomelsky that gave the Rolling Stones their first break as the house band at his new Crawdaddy Club in London, and when they left he replaced them with the Yardbirds. The man had vision. And with the Yardbirds he also had a tremendous amount of creative input. He pushed them to think beyond the blues which eventually lead to the exit of Eric Clapton. Gomelsky already knew Jimmy Page well and recruited him to join the Yardbirds, but Page said why don’t you check out my good friend Jeff Beck instead? They did and Beck was perfect. He embraced the experimentation Gomelsky was looking for and they went on to record a few hit singles in spite of never really capturing their awesome live sound. The grueling touring started taking its toll on the band and after a disastrous drunken performance by their lead singer, the bass player quit. Jimmy was at that gig and thought the show was fantastic. They asked him to join on the spot and he did, playing bass for awhile before joining Beck as co-lead guitarist.
Around this time the band was expecting to be paid better, and not seeing that forthcoming they fired Gomelsky and the creative spark that had taken them this far was now gone. The relentless touring remained however, and Jimmy, being the new guy in the band, had plenty of energy to pull the shows along. The Beck/Page stage duels on some nights would be the talk of rock legend. But one by one the original Yardbird members burned out, leaving Page with the band name and a few gigs still contracted to perform. Thus were the New Yardbirds born, soon to be called Led Zeppelin.
Five decades later, my path to heavy music is more clear than ever. I owe it all to the Yardbirds. Well, not exactly. That would be too simplistic. The evolution of the music created by the Yardbirds is without doubt a microcosm of the developments in rock music in general at the time. They start out as a rhythm and blues band and end up pioneering psychedelic rock. Each of the three greatest rock guitarists of the band become a stepping stone for slightly different flavors of heavy rock. It’s all about the electric guitar, the amplification, …….. and the fuzz tone.
Which brings me back to Spirit in the Sky.
A couple of weeks ago I was flipping around tv channels late at night not watching anything in particular when I stopped for a few seconds on an Adam Sandler comedy movie. I was about to hit the remote button again when THAT SOUND jumped out at me from the tv movie: those first gorgeous fuzz tone notes from Spirit in the Sky. I was immediately catapulted back in time to an Arizona night riding my bicycle meeting up with friends and going to an amusement park with that song playing in the background all night. That didn’t happen of course, but that’s how I remember it. After the tv movie scene and the song were over, I had to start looking up the history of the song. I really knew nothing about it. I assumed it had been written and performed by one of the many famous bands of the time, that for some reason I never got any of their albums. It didn’t occur to me that this was a one hit wonder song. It is. And that made the story even more interesting to me. This song was not just a one hit wonder. It was a one hit phenomenon. The movie that I stumbled onto is one of over 50 movies that have used it. Add to that a huge number of commercials and cover versions. Now I had to know how this song, this sound, was originally recorded. Surely there was some genius producer responsible for it.
Well …. almost. His name is Erik Jacobsen. Like Gomelsky, Jacobsen is a kind of people genius that has an ear for a certain kind of talent and a knack for bringing those people and that talent together in the right place at the right time. He’s not the type of music producer genius we think of today who knows his or her way around all the tech in a recording studio. In fact, according to Jacobsen himself, on the day they started recording Spirit in the Sky, the main studio engineer called in sick, but Erik wanted to proceed anyway, so he threw up some mics and got the second engineer to run the tape machine. There was no real thought put into what mics were used or what sound reinforcing could be used. From Jacobsen’s description, it sounded like they were barely doing a demo recording (many of Gomelsky’s early recordings with his bands would be done in a similar fashion). But Jacobsen knew one thing. This trio, that he had just thrown together for the first time to record this song, was rocking out to a fuzz tone the likes of which he had never heard before.
That fuzz tone was coming from the guitar of Norman Greenbaum, the songwriter of Spirit in the Sky. Jacobsen had seen Greenbaum perform at a club in LA and liked him so much he invited him to San Francisco to do some recording. Jacobsen had a record deal with a major label and he was hoping to present some of Greenbaum's songs to them. Up till then, Greenbaum was known as a folk songwriter and had a minor hit with a novelty song performed by his previous band Dr. West's Medicine Show and Junk Band. This is not the stuff that heavy rock songs are made from, so what happened? It seems that at some point not too long before coming to San Francisco, Greenbaum had an acquaintance modify his guitar by installing some electric circuitry that was small enough to fit in the body of his guitar. This, along with an on/off switch mounted onto the guitar is what would provide the famous fuzz tone. It’s more than a little baffling to me that Mr. Greenbaum can’t seem to be able to remember the name of the person that installed this marvelous device, but such were the ways of the late 60’s. Shit happened. To this day, according to Mr. Greenbaum and rock folklore, no one has been able to reproduce that sound.
Of course there’s more to that song than the fuzz tone. There’s the excellent gospel backing vocals by the Stovall Sisters from Oakland. One of Jacobsen’s partners brought them in for overdubs. And then there’s the equally excellent lead guitar lines added by Russell DaShiell. Other musicians from Jacobsen’s stable included bass player Doug Killmer from the band Crowfoot and drummer Norman Mayell from the band Sopwith Camel. It seems that all these people knew they had a hit right away, but Jacobsen had a hard time convincing the record label partially because the song was 4 minutes long, well past the length of most hit songs. After its release, the song nearly died as most do, except for the effort of one believer at the record label that pushed an LA radio station to not drop it from the rotation, and soon after the requests started pouring in, along with the singles sales.
And somewhere around that time I started hearing that song on those warm nights pedaling my bicycle around the streets of Phoenix. In the week since I saw that Sandler movie I read a lot about the history of that song. It was only then that it occurred to me …. I might have bought that single. I went to my record collection and it only took me a few minutes to find it (amazingly I still have most of the singles I bought as a pre-teen). I was reunited with my collection of singles less than 10 years ago after my father died and I inherited all the vinyl he had. It seems I never bothered to retrieve my singles when I moved away decades ago. And I never bothered to even look at them when I was reunited, preferring to give my attention to my dad’s records. Well I was looking now, and that flashback rush of my barely teen mind was flooding me with memories. Here are a few of my other singles that fall into a similar category as Spirit:
No Time by The Guess Who 1969
I Hear You Knocking by Dave Edmunds 1970
Venus by The Shocking Blue 1969
All Right Now by Free 1970
Ride Captain Ride by Blues Image 1970
Temptation Eyes by The Grass Roots 1971
Green Eyed Lady by Sugarloaf 1970
House of the Rising Sun by Frijid Pink 1970
No Matter What by Badfinger 1970
Mama Told Me Not To Come by Three Dog Night 1970
They may not all have a unique fuzz tone guitar sound, and they may not all have pointed me down the path of heavy music, but they were all there, on my turntable, for at least a day.