engineer make me a reference acetate of it, and I took it to the station. The DJ was in a little shack, and you could go up and ring a doorbell, and the DJ would see a little light flash in the studio and he would come open the door if he wanted to. So the DJ came out and I told him I’ve got this fresh recording of a great song a hot local band just cut. I convinced him to listen to it while he had another record going. After he hear it he said, ‘Can I keep this?’ An hour later, I was home and somebody called me and said, ‘Do you know they’re playing The Litter on the radio right now?’ He was playing the acetate! That’s the kind of impact that song had on people.”


‘Action Woman’ is dominated by some pounding guitar work, yet the guy who played those chops was out of the act by the time the band recorded most of the tracks for the album that was built around it. Despite his effectively aggressive playing on that song, it seems Bill Strandlof was becoming more and more taken by vocal harmonies, and wanted the band to veer in a direction that would have them sounding more Byrds than Yardbirds. The rest of the act felt differently, and soon Strandlof was replaced by Tom “Zippy” Caplan.


Y


OU DON’T HEAR MUCH about the Minneapolis/St. Paul area of Minnesota as being a hotbed of memorable mid-to-


late ’60s music. But any place that can claim to be the geographical origin of the singles ‘Liar Liar’ (The Castaways), ‘Surfin’ Bird’ (The Trashmen) and ‘Action Woman’ (The Litter) obviously had something interesting in its water at the time.


‘Action Woman’ has come to be the signature song of The Litter, who formed in 1966 out of the ashes of two Twin Cities’ acts, The Victors and The Tabs. But at the time they recorded the song, it didn’t make much of a dent in either the local or national charts, and was soon dropped from the band’s live set list. The song didn’t receive its due recognition until it was immortalised by being the first track that jumped off the needle on the first volume of the influential Pebbles series, in ’78. As if it needed any further affirmation for being a psych garage standout, it was also included on the Nuggets box set in ’98.


It’s a wonder the song went by without a trace back in the late ’60s. Written by The Litter’s producer Warren Kendrick, in response to a girl he liked who held herself aloof, it has all the elements of a classic of its kind. Pissed-off lyrics, scorching guitar, a blistering instrumental break, snotty vocal delivery – a perfect two and a half minutes of garage-rock that could easily be The Pretty Things, Q65 or early Who.


Kendrick gives the back story behind the song’s creation and tells an interesting anecdote about a time it got some early air


30


play: “I wrote ‘Action Woman’ for The Litter specifically. Up to that point, when writing a tune, I had always looked for a cycle of how to put together four chords in some kind of unusual progression. For that one, I came up with this idea to use a cycle of three chords – what is called a flatted third, then a flatted seventh, then the one the song is actually written in. It was a different cycle of chords that no one had used before. Then the musicians built on what I had written when we were in the studio – you have to credit them with that.


“We’d been to the local radio stations, asking what worked as a single for them, and we got two valuable pieces of information. One is, make your song two minutes and 30 seconds – do your two and a half minutes and get out. The other is, we are only interested in playing hard rock. No mushy stuff, no ballads. Enough of the nice guy stuff.


“Lyrically, the song was written for this girl I had some romantic interest in. I was trying to act like I wasn’t interested in her, but of course I really was. And sometimes she would act like she was interested in me, and other times she was cool. And finally I got tired of it and decided I don’t need to screw around with this anymore. And that’s where I got the idea for the lyrics like, ‘Hey, Miss high and mighty,’ and ‘I need an action woman.’ Then the rest of the song wrote itself. We did it in just a very few takes in the studio, it only took a couple hours to record.


“Our closest ally amongst the local radio stations was KDWB in Minneapolis. The night we finished the track, I had our


Caplan tells of the developments that led to his entry into The Litter’s fold: “It was ’66 when I was approached by a pair of singer- songwriters to play guitar and bass on their demo recordings, eventually leading them to LA where they were looking for a record deal. After spending a year in LA they weren’t having a lot of luck and I was hearing from people I knew back in Minneapolis about several groups that were becoming very popular – one of these groups was The Litter.


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