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The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band Part One Drug-free psych made to satisfy the lusts of an eccentric millionaire.

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Record label: Reprise

Produced: Bob Markley and Jimmy Bowen

Recorded: United Western Recording Studios, Los Angeles; late 1966

Released: July 1967

Chart peaks: None (UK) None (US)

Personnel: Bob Markley (v, p); Shaun Harris (v, b); Danny Harris (v, g); Michael Lloyd (v, g); Ron Morgan (g); Hal Blaine or Jim Gordon (d)

Track listing: Shifting Sands (S); I Won’t Hurt You; 1906 (S); Help I’m A Rock; Will You Walk With Me; Transparent Day; Leiyla; Here’s Where You Belong; If You Want This Love; ’Scuse Me Miss Rose; High Coin

Running time: 30.36

Current CD: Sundazed SC6173 adds: Help I’m A Rock (Single Mix); Transparent Day (Single Mix)

Further listening: A Child’s Guide To Good And Evil (1968); A Group (1970) Bob Markley ‘solo’ LP which reunited the original members

Further reading: http://members.chello.nl/cvanderlely/wcpaeb.html

Download: iTunes

If ever an album demonstrated the haphazard way in which much psychedelic music of the late ’60s was recorded, Part One must surely be it. After going to see their heroes, The Yardbirds, play at a hip Hollywood party, teenage hopefuls Michael Lloyd and the Harris brothers found themselves locked into a Faustian pact with the host, eccentric millionaire Bob Markley. The deal? He would promote their band and buy expensive equipment if they let him bang a tambourine on stage. According to Lloyd, music was the last thing on Markley’s mind: ‘He had seen the incredible amount of girls and that was his only motivation.’

Coining the ludicrously cumbersome name, Markley used his society contacts to secure the group a three-LP deal with Reprise, but once in the studio his younger bandmates soon began to tire of their patron’s increasing dominance. As Shaun recalls: ‘The part that was frustrating was that he had no musical aptitude of any kind and so what he was trying to do to be different and innovative ended up sounding contrived. It was an embarrassment.’

Well, time can tell a different story. Recorded without the influence of drink or drugs, it is precisely the palpable tensions within the band – and the unexpected juxtapositions within the music – which make Part One so extraordinary. Alongside passionate, harmonic pop songs like Transparent Day and the cover of PF Sloan’s Here’s Where You Belong lurk the hard-edged, distorted weirdness of Leiyla, Zappa’s Help I’m A Rock and 1906. The latter, with Markley eerily reciting his lyrics, attempts to convey a dog’s premonition of the San Francisco earthquake: ‘See the frightened foxes/See the hunchback in the park/He’s blind and can’t run for cover/I don’t feel well.’

Another of Bob’s Tinseltown friends, Baker Knight (who had written for Elvis and Ricky Nelson), composed two of the album’s highlights: a beautifully sparse arrangement of Shifting Sands and If You Want This Love. As Danny recalls, the latter was transformed by a driving time signature: ‘When Baker Knight first heard the playback he didn’t know what to make of it and said: “Hey! I thought this was a country song!”’ These were balanced in turn by the delicate dreamy songs I Won’t Hurt You (backed with a heartbeat) and the acoustic, post-apocalyptic Will You Walk With Me, complete with string quartet and celeste; the album closed with an energetic reading of Van Dyke Parks’s High Coin. The group would go on to record another four albums, each as individual as the last, but none would quite capture the sound of their first Reprise LP – the sound of teenage dreams diverted.

The Mojo Collection

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