Читать книгу The Mojo Collection - Various Mojo Magazine - Страница 148

Record label: Tower

Produced: Michael Lloyd

Recorded: Hollywood Boulevard Studios, LA; summer 1968

Released: November 1968

Chart peaks: None (UK) None (US)

Personnel: Michael Lloyd (v, k, g, b, horn and string ar), Stan Ayeroff (g), Steve Baim (d)

Track listing: Cowboys And Indians; Looking Thru The Mirror; Self-Analysis, Gold Is The Colour Of Thought, Hobbit Symphony; Daisy-Intermission; Fogbound; Song Thru Perception; Philosophy; Umbrella; Ritual Gypsy Music Opus 1; October Country; Odyssey

Current CD: Currently unavailable

Further listening: Castle’s High In A Room (2002), a 2-disc retrospective of the band’s output

Further reading: The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band Story by Tim Forster, published in Ptolomeic Terrascope magazine, 1999; www.marmalade-skies.co.uk/ smoke.htm

Download: Not currently legally available

Michael Lloyd was a precocious 12-year-old when he first decided to be in a band. It was 1962 and he was swimming with a friend. ‘We were far out from the shore and we heard music coming from the beach. It sounded great. So we paddled in and there were these local guys playing Ventures songs – they were very good – and that started us thinking. We’ve got to have a band!’

A couple of bands later, Lloyd started at the Hollywood Professional School, where he met Shaun and Danny Harris. Together they formed The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band and made an album in Michael’s bedroom. (He left before they signed to Reprise.) Still only 17, he was next handed a number of projects by young executive Mike Curb, under names such as The Laughing Wind and The Rubber Band, and for Epic Records he produced a group of fresh-faced teenagers called October Country. Although it flopped, that album gave him a taste of what he could achieve with good studio facilities at his disposal and he persuaded Curb to give him some studio time. Thus was born The Smoke.

Michael poured all he had learnt into the album, he produced, arranged, sang lead vocals and played bass and keyboards while Stan Ayeroff, who co-wrote three of the songs, handled guitar and Steve Baim played drums. The record opens with the organ-driven Cowboys And Indians, echoing Brian Wilson’s Heroes And Villains. There are overt Beatles references throughout, too. The chorus of Lucy In the Sky With Diamonds is quoted in the fade to Fogbound and its influence is clear in Gold Is The Colour Of Thought.

‘I didn’t really think of what I was doing as psychedelic,’ says the undoubtedly clean-cut Lloyd. ‘There may have been drug references in Beatles songs, but in my naïve way it just seemed to be some brilliant creative thing they were doing.’

Despite a wide release, nothing ever happened with the album. Curb subsequently appointed Lloyd Vice-President of MGM, where he finally achieved commercial success as a producer and composer with The Osmonds, Lou Rawls and Debbie Boone (he produced You Light Up My Life) and the multi-million-selling soundtrack to Dirty Dancing. But this non-moneyspinning nugget from his psych-pop roots is still one of his favourites.