Sky Saxon RIP
by Jim Washburn
If there’s ever a day you don’t want to die on, publicity-wise, it would be the day Michael Jackson dies. That kind of sucks up all the ink in the room, and if there’s a drop left, it goes to Farrah Fawcett.
So pity poor Sky Saxon, who left this life on June 25th much the way that he had lived it, forgotten. There was a brief period in the ’60s when he was spoken of as a West Coast Mick Jagger, a sexy, provocative frontman who drove girls crazy when his band, the Seeds, played the Hollywood Bowl.
They had a couple of local hits in 1966, the petulant, whiny “Can’t Seem to Make You Mine” and “Mr. Farmer,” and a national one with the garage/proto-punk classic “Pushin’ Too Hard.”
I later knew a guy who had managed the Seeds back then: Jimmy Madden, a minor Hollywood legend for reasons best left to an FBI file. He told me that, concerned about his investment in the band, he took Sky for a spin in his convertible MG one day and impressed upon him the necessity of coming up with a hit song. “Hey man,” Sky supposedly responded, “You’re pushin’ too hard. You’re pushin’ too hard on me!”
“Sky, I think you have a song there!”
The rest is history, or it would be if anybody noticed. “Pushin’ Too Hard” went to No. 36 on the charts; their followup went to No. 72 and that’s all she wrote. In 1967 they were one of the first bands to jump into the electric blues revival, changing their name to the Sky Saxon Blues Band. Their awful album, A Spoonful of Seedy Blues, is best remembered today for its liner notes by Muddy Waters—“These boys have the true blues feeling”—which have left generations of blues fans wondering how many bottles of inducement that took.
After that, Sky pretty well sank from notice. One afternoon in the late 1970s I got a call at the record store I ran-a friend asking if I’d like to play with the New Seeds in Hollywood that night. Why not? After work, I drove home from Anaheim to Costa Mesa, spent five minutes learning the guitar solo to “Pushin’ Too Hard,” loaded the Quilter and and Super Beatle amps into the car and headed with my friend Jon to Hollywood. I think we made it to Carson before the drive shaft fell out of the car.
Instead of being early, by the time we’d dealt with AAA and had a friend come cram us and our looming amps into her far smaller car, we were about 90 minutes late to the gig. They’d held the show for us because it turned out we pretty much were the New Seeds. There was an anorexic bearded hippie named Rainbow on rhythm guitar, a potato-headed drummer they’d checked out of a mental institution, and Sky, who was calling himself Sky Sunlight in those days and looking like an underfed Charles Manson.
We spent a couple of minutes setting up and were off. No tuning, no mention of chord changes or even what key we were in-that wasn’t Rainbow’s bag-he just started in and the rest of us did our best to sort it out. I think I was wearing a shiny green smoking jacket.
We were playing in a grimy former strip club called the Orpheum, across from Tower Records on the Strip. There might have been 12 people in the audience, five of them friends of ours. Sky was the most famous person I’d ever played with.
He was into some sort of religious thing that put a lot of weight on what god spelled backwards. There were rumors of Sky being sighted scampering on all fours around the hills, following a pack of dogs, rooting through the trash. A lot of his lyrics that night dealt with dogs. One line I recall went something like, “Dylan says let your dogs run free, c’mon everybody, be like me.”
It was a hippie nightmare onstage, out of tune and insensate. We finally did one recognizable song, a reworked “Pushin’ Too Hard.” When Sky started singing in the middle of my memorized fuzztone solo, the idol worship had pretty well worn off. I thought, “Screw you, buddy, my drive shaft died for this,” and turned up.
A couple of songs later, the club owner decided to cut his losses and told us to stop. “Oh well, back into the tunnel” Sky said cryptically as he loped offstage. Behind the club a short time later, I saw the owner pay Sky for the gig with a pack of cigarettes. The rest of us got secondhand smoke.
We got a call the next day. Sky had really dug what we’d brought to his music--Did we have that “true blues feeling”?-and wanted us to come up again that night. I could only think of something Scotty had said on Star Trek: “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”
I read he pulled it together somewhat in later years, hitting the retro circuit with a newer Seeds. According to an obit I read, he was sick last week, but insisted on doing a gig on Saturday. By Monday he was in an Austin, Texas hospital with a raging kidney infection, and passed away on Thursday. No word yet on where he’ll be planted.
He smoked?
2009-06-26 by Jay Schiavone