Books


CANYON OF DREAMS Harvey Kubernik Sterling www.sterlingpublishing.com


Having been there myself, I can confirm that short of hopping a jet to Los Angeles and sparking one up at the intersection of Mulholland Drive and Laurel Canyon Boulevard, this


luscious tome offers armchair travellers by far the most enjoyable way to immerse yourself in that old Laurel Canyon hippy vibe. From the first glimpse of the cover, all done out in the same colours and texture as the original Crosby, Stills & Nash album, you know you’re in for a long, leisurely tie-dyed ride. Flowers in your hair are optional, but I’d say go for it. Kubernik, lest you know it not, has long


been a byword for the most glorious kind of been-there, done-that, on-the-spot densely researched music history insights available to the musically-smitten, especially where the California Coastline is involved. He’s run record companies, written for just about every major rock publication you can name, hung out with everyone who was anyone in the West Coast music biz and, best of all, kept notes and can remember it all. You might have trouble actually getting


round to reading the damn thing, though, because Canyon Of Dreams is so captivatingly beautiful that vast tracts of cosmic time can be spent just leafing through the pictures and ephemera contained therein. You want to touch the lovingly reproduced Whisky A Go Go tickets, step right into those pix of Doheny Drive and hitch a ride in Gene Clark’s Ferrari. You can hear those West Coast vocal harmonies in your head, along with McGuinn’s 12-string acoustic jangles intermingled with Jonathan Wilson’s tastefully plucked banjo. Hell, if ever a book was crying out for


scratch ’n’ sniff, this is it. You can almost smell the coffee in Gazzari’s on the Strip, the dope smoke wafting out over the canyon, and the trace of patchouli that no doubt still lingers in Joni Mitchell’s pretty dresses. And, then, of course, there are the words.


Kubernik’s commentary is enriched with evocative eyewitness recollections not just from all the obvious superstars, but from insiders like Van Dyke Parks, Glen Campbell (a session player back then) and photographer Henry Diltz.


To paraphrase the well-known song, this


book doesn’t rain – it pours. Johnny Black


OUTSIDERS BY INSIDERS Jerome Blanes Misty Lane www.mistylane.it


The music of The Outsiders is surely familiar to everyone here. Since the early ’80s, when the pioneering enthusiasm of Lenny Helsing, Mike Stax and Jeff Connolly (all of whom were also


instrumental in seeing this project to fruition, with editing, introductory and foreword duties respectively) helped to bring the band to a new audience of younger ’60s devotees, their blistering spiky blistering R&B proto-punk and ominous eerie psychedelic soundscapes have become much loved, along with their gypsy ballads, plaintive vocals and harmonica solos, and eccentric jangling jarring freak folk-rock. Frontman Wally Tax passed on to realms


unknown back in 2005, though since then the remaining Outsiders have taken to hitting the stage once again, wowing fans at the Rotterdam Primitive festival and still sounding as sharp and free and ferocious as the day CQ was laid onto wax. Given this, it’s timely in the extreme that this


marvelous book is finally seeing an English- language release, a decade after Jerome Blanes’ Dutch-only original. Here in full we get the truth about Wally’s exotic roots, and the untold stories of juvenile aggro and alienation that fed into the band’s anarchic violence and frenzy; we get tales of the strangely innocent early daze of the early Dutch underground and sad stories from the opiate-soaked later years; we get a superb overview of a small country undergoing a youth explosion in the mid to late ’60s and we get the inside schtick of the whole shebang from band members, friends, roadies, producers and other band members. Running chronologically, this labour of love


comes complete with over 250 images (including plenty of full-colour gems), a remarkable list of gigs played, reproductions of old articles and so much more. A fitting tribute to one of the era’s most


singular and idiosyncratic acts, this tome won’t be around forever, so grab your copy whilst it’s still hot to trot. Hugh Dellar


PSYCHEDELIC DAYS 1960-1969 Patrick Campbell-Lyons Global Recording Artists www.psychedelicdays.com


Campbell-Lyons’ songs were recorded by The Everly Brothers, Francoise Hardy, The Alan Bown Set, Herman’s Hermits and Jimmy Cliff (the career- saving and award- winning ‘Waterfall’, detailed in a


wonderful chapter about their performance of the song at the 1968 Rio De Janeiro International Song Festival), and his band, the original Nirvana, were the first to sign and release an album on Island (although A&R man Muff Winwood claims it was only because Procol Harum declined). That album, ’67’s The Story Of Simon Simopath, was arguably the first concept album, predating both SF Sorrow and Tommy. Campbell-Lyons also reminds us that Nirvana “were the first to use the electric cello in a pop-group context” and that their hit single, ‘Rainbow Chaser’ was “the first pop record to use phasing throughout the track”. Throughout the book, you’ll join Campbell- Lyons as he buys his first bass at the Hanwell


music shop where Mitch Mitchell worked, hangs out with the Ealing crowd, witnesses the birth of The Jimi Hendrix Experience and demos his songs for Mickie Most (in front of Donovan, Jeff Beck and Terry Reid). From his beginnings in the band (Second Thoughts) that spawned future producer Chris Thomas (with whom, as Hat & Tie, he recorded the great ‘Finding It Rough’ for President) and members of Thunderclap Newman and July/Jade Warrior, through Nirvana’s unforgettable appearance on French TV with Salvador Dali, Campbell-Lyons is both lucid and honest about how the music game was played and the depths musicians had to go through to sell their product, like that “incredible occasion” on a frosty October ’69 morning in Hyde Park when Island honcho Chris Blackwell assembled his roster for the cover shoot of the very first label sampler, You Can All Join In. I would’ve preferred a few more anecdotes


rather than a roll call of his musical mates, and the outcome of his dispute over the rights to the Nirvana name is never clearly explained, but his chapters on Blackwell, Who manager Pete Meaden and producers Guy Stevens and Mickie Most capture the period so perfectly you can almost taste the patchouli oil jumping off the page. Jeff Penczak


“THE FOLLOWING DECADES PALE INTO INSIGNIFICANCE” Patrick Campbell-Lyons talks to Jeff Penczak


Shindig!: Your book is based on songs about your life in ’60s London. Does your forthcoming album, The 13 Dalis, fill in more details about this period? Patrick Campbell-Lyons: No, not at all. The 13 Dalis is a different place on my “Nirvana island”. The only tangible connection is that three of the songs were co-written and produced by Alex Spyropoulos, my Nirvana partner and friend. The book started with some lyrical lines that went “psychedelic days just like purple haze”. I became obsessed with the words and started to write non-stop for four months.


SD: You still write with Alex. Are there plans for another Nirvana album? PCL: I doubt it very much… but there will be our first ever official album release in the USA in early 2011 compiling our best “psychedelic” tunes with a couple of brand new bonus tracks.


SD: Your book leaves us hanging 40 years ago at the dawn of the ’70s. Will there be a sequel


taking us through the next decade? PCL: There will be no sequel. The following decades pale into insignificance in terms of songwriting, energy and creativity. I did enjoy the writing process of the book and I may attempt something very different. I have an idea about a man who falls in love with a song and where it takes him. I’ve written a short synopsis for copyright purposes, which is why I can share the idea with you here!


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