California Revue: Through

California Revue: Through


Posted on Tuesday August 18, 2009 at 09:01 AM 1 |
The Seeds with Sky Saxon were expected to venture out on a package tour including the Electric Prunes and Love this summer, but that has reportedly fizzled. And, by that, the Washington Post means fizzled.


The Post recently published an exposé on the tour by pop music critic J. Freedom DuLac – a story about an attorney with a dream to be a concert tour promoter. But much like the dreams of attorneys who want to become restaurateurs, and like so many other first-time promoters, the dream became a financial nightmare.
Washington lawyer Patrick Hand wanted the country to take another look at the Electric Prunes – a band some consider the forefathers of psychedelic rock. In a press release announcing the tour, Hand said the Prunes are “the best rock band in the world right now. The Electric Prunes are the only band from the 1960s who are putting out better music now than then.”
He also landed Love, which is synonymous with leader Arthur Lee, who died in 2006. Hand also got Sky Saxon and The Seeds to come along for the California ’66 Revue tour.
But the Prunes backed out because of logistical and financial agreements a week before the tour started, according to the Post. That was followed by the death of Saxon. Former Moby Grape guitarist Jerry Miller was to take Saxon’s place, but that fell apart at the last second.
Hand wanted to revise Miller’s contract, he told the Post, but “he didn’t want to do that, so I bought him out. In essence, I paid him not to play because it saves me money.”
Which means the August tour was Love, minus Lee. A visit to Chicago had 55 people in a 473-capacity room. The tour finale at the 500-capacity Birchmere in Alexandria, Va., was canceled. Plenty of venues dropped out along the way. DuLac attended the Milwaukee, Wisc., show, which had “fewer than 50 people in the room, including bartenders, waitresses, the sound guy, the door guy and the musicians.”
It got to the point where nobody got comps, with even Hand’s wife, Katie Griffin Hand, paying the $12 cost to get in. Although Hand said he has not lost money that he can’t afford to lose, it went away at a pretty good clip. Wife Katie chuckled at the situation.
“Every 10 days, I’d say: ‘Listen, honey: I’m so glad the tour’s going well,’” she told the Post. “‘Can we have the money talk now?’”

Ghost tour comes to Lee's Palace

http://www.nowtoronto.com/daily/story.cfm?content=170782

MUSIC
Ghost tour comes to Lee's Palace
A CONCERT BILL THAT INCLUDES MANY DEAD MUSICIANS
BY JASON KELLER
The grim spectre of death will be at Lee Palace’s this Friday in the form of a 60s nostalgia psychedelic rock tour called the California 66 Revue.

When the revival tour was announced in mid-June it boasted three of the best Cali psych rock combos from back in the day – Electric Prunes, Love and Sky “Sunlight” Saxon of proto-punk LA garage rockers the Seeds.

Tragically, Saxon died about a week later – June 25 – in an Austin, Texas hospital from an undetermined internal infection but the news was greatly overshadowed by the untimely death of another, far more famous musician hours later.

Best known for a couple Top 40 hits, Can’t Seem to Make You Mine and Pushin' Too Hard, the Seeds, with their inclusion on the legendary Nuggets compilation, eventually became a cult band garage rockers will always namecheck because the Stones are too obvious.

The California 66 was already on shaky ground before Saxon’s death by trumpeting a modern configuration of another cultish psych pop band from the LA scene – Love – which debatably has no business existing without deceased frontman Arthur Lee, the voice, main songwriter and face of the group in all its various incarnations over the last 30-plus years.

Lee passed away in 2006 and now original guitarist John Echols and some players going by the very hippy-dippy name of Baby Lemonade (Lee’s backing group for about a decade before his death) are touring as Love.

Echols did play in the original Love lineup up until their near breakthrough Forever Changes, which is cited as one of the most overlooked records of the late 60s, but was given the boot along with the rest of the band by Lee soon after Changes’ release.

To see Love without Lee is difficult to wrap your head around. It’s like going to see ELO without Jeff Lynne.

To make matters worse for the troubled tour is the recent cancellation of the band originally responsible for putting the tour together - obscure psych combo the Electric Prunes. The influential feedback rockers, now fronted by Mike Tulin and James Lowe, pulled out at the last minute due to irreconcilable differences with promoter Patrick Hand.

The Prunes biggest success came from what many describe as a religious concept album called Mass in F Minor. The head trip album contained psychedelic versions of prayers, and a tune called Kyrie Eleison which made it onto the Easy Rider soundtrack.

Yet this show somehow still goes on.

Filling in the deep vacant hole left by Saxon and the Prunes is Jerry Miller, one of three guitarists from San Francisco psych crackpots Moby Grape, a group better known for wild Canuck frontman Skip Spence, also deceased, then any other their unheard records.

Despite all the problems, fatalities, cancellations, the California 66 Revue, unlike many of the unsung musicians associated with it, lives on.

Check the Lee’s Palace website for more ticket information on the California 66 Revue.


Aug 11, 2009 at 12:06 AM
Copyright 2009 NOW Communications

HAPPY BIRTHDAY ARTHUR

MARCH 7 sunrise


i miss you so much. love always,...noon Forest Lawn & a good Merlot


Sunset 5:55

HE BIDS HIS BELOVED BE AT PEACE

HE BIDS HIS BELOVED BE AT PEACE

by: William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

HEAR the Shadowy Horses, their long manes a-shake,
Their hoofs heavy with tumult, their eyes glimmering white;
The North unfolds above them clinging, creeping night,
The East her hidden joy before the morning break,
The West weeps in pale dew and sighs passing away,
The South is pouring down roses of crimson fire:
O vanity of Sleep, Hope, Dream, endless Desire,
The Horses of Disaster plunge in the heavy clay:
Beloved, let your eyes half close, and your heart beat
Over my heart, and your hair fall over my breast,
Drowning love's lonely hour in deep twilight of rest,
And hiding their tossing manes and their tumultuous feet.
"He Bids His Beloved Be at Peace" is reprinted from The Wind Among the Reeds. W.B. Yeats. London: Elkin Mathews, 1899.

SOMEBODYS WATCHING YOU

January 1989 Summer Of LOve show Universal Amphitheatre