A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs - Episode 86: “LSD-25” by the Gamblers

Episode Date: June 10, 2020

Episode eighty-six of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “LSD-25” by the Gamblers, the first rock song ever to namecheck acid, and a song by a band so obscure no photos exist of them. (The photo here is of the touring lineup of the Hollywood Argyles. Derry Weaver, the Gamblers’ lead guitarist, is top left). Patreon backers also have a fifteen-minute bonus episode, on “Papa Oom Mow Mow” by the Rivingtons. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ (more…)

A History of rock music in 500 songs by Andrew Hick Episode 86 LSD 25 By the Gamblers On the 16th of April 1943 Albert Hoffman, a research scientist in Zurich,

had a curious experience after accidentally touching a tiny speck of the chemical he was experimenting with at the pharmaceutical lab in which he worked, and felt funny afterwards. Three days later, he decided to experiment on himself, and took a tiny dose of the chemical to see if anything happened. He felt fine at first, but asked a colleague to escort him as he rode home on his bicycle. By the time he got home, he was convinced that his neighbour was a witch, and that he had been poisoned.

But a few hours later, he felt a little better, though still unusual. as he would later report little by little i could begin to enjoy the unprecedented colours and plays of shapes that persisted behind my closed eyes kaleidoscopic fantastic images surged in on me alternating variegated opening and then closing themselves in circles and spirals exploding in coloured fountains rearranging and hybridising themselves in constant flux The chemical he had taken was a derivative of ergotamine that had been discovered about five years earlier and mostly ignored up until that time, a chemical called de-lisurgic acid diethylamide tartrate. Sandoz, the company he worked for, were delighted with this unusual chemical and its effects. They came up with some variants of the molecule without those effects, but which still affected the brain, and marketed those as migraine treatments.

The chemical itself they decided to make available as an experimental drug for psychiatrists and psychologists who wanted to investigate unusual states of consciousness. It found some uptake among experimenters who wished to experience psychotic symptoms in a controlled environment in order to get a better understanding of their patients, or who wanted to investigate neurochemistry, and it had some promise as a treatment for alcoholism and various other psychiatric illnesses, and throughout the 1950s it was the subject of much medical research under the trade name Sandoz came up with for it, Delicid. But in the 60s, it became better known as LSD 25. There are some records that one can look back at retrospectively and see that while they seemed unimportant at the time,

they signalled a huge change in the musical culture. The single Moondog, backed by LSD 25, by The Gamblers is one of those records. Unfortunately, everything about the Gamblers is shrouded in mystery. The story I am going to tell here is the one that I've been able to piece together from stray fragments of recollection from the main participants over the years, but it could very well be wrong. Put it this way, on the record, there are two guitarists, bass, drums and keyboards. I have seen 15 people credited as how many.

having been members of the group that recorded the track. Obviously, those credits can't all be true, so I'm going to go here with the stories of the people who are most commonly credited, but with the caveat that the people I'm talking about could very easily not have been the people on the record. I have also made mistakes about this single before. There are a couple of errors in the piece on it

in my book California Dreaming. Part of the problem is that almost everyone who has A. Claim to being involved in the record is, or was, as many of them have died, a well-known credit thief. Someone who will happily place themselves at the centre of the story, happily put their name on copyright forms for music with which they had no involvement, and then bitterly complain that they were the real unsung geniuses behind other records, but that some evil credit thief stole all their work. The other people involved. Those who haven't said that everything was them, and they did everything, were for the most part jobbing musicians who, when asked about the record,

would not even be sure if they'd played on it, because they played on so many records, and weren't asked about them for decades later. Just as one example, Nick René, who is generally credited as the producer of this record, said for years that Derry Weaver, the credited co-composer of the song, and the person who is generally considered to have played lead guitar on it, was a pseudonym for himself. Later, when confronted with evidence that Derry Weaver was a real person, he admitted that Weaver had been a real person, but claimed that it was still a pseudonym for himself. Vennay claimed that Weaver had died in a car crash years earlier, and that as a result,

he had been able to use his social security number on forms to claim himself extra money he wasn't entitled to as a staff producer. The only problem with that story is that Vennay died in 1990. while the Real Dairy Weaver died in 2013. But Weaver only ever did one interview have been able to track down in 2001, so Veney's lives went unchallenged, and many books still claim that Weaver never existed. So today, I'm going to tell the story of a music scene

and use a few people as a focus, with the understanding that they may not be the people on the record we're talking about. I'm going to look at the birth of the Surf and Hot Rod studio, scene in L.A., and at Bruce Johnston, Kim Fowley, Derry Weaver, Nick Renée, Sandy Nelson, Elliot Ingber, Larry Taylor, Howard Hirsch and Rod Schaefer, some or all of whom may or may not have been the gamblers. Possibly the best place to start the story is at University High School, Los Angeles, in the late 1950s. University High had always had more than its fair share of star students

over the years. Judy Garland, Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor had all attended in previous years, and over the succeeding decades, members of Sonic Youth, The Doors, Black Flag, the Foo Fighters, and the Partridge family would all attend the school, among many others. But during the period in the late 50s, it had a huge number of students who would go on to define the California lifestyle in the pop culture of the next few years. There was Sandra D. who starred in Gidgett, the first beach party film. Annette Funnichello, who starred in most of the other beach party films. Randy Newman, who would document another side of California life a few years later,

and Nancy Sinatra, who was then just her famous father's daughter, but who would go on to make a series of magnificent records in the 60s with Lee Hazelwood. and there was a vocal group at the school called the Barons, one of the few interracial vocal groups around at the time. They had a black lead singer, Chuck Steele, a Japanese tenor, Wally Yagi, two Jewish boys, Arnie Ginsburg and John Saligman, and two white kids,

Jan Berry, who was leader of the group, and Dean Torrance, his friend who could sing a little falsetto. As they were all singers, they were backed by three instrumentalists who also went to the school, Barry's neighbour Bruce Johnston on piano, Torrance's neighbour Sandy Nelson on drums, and Nelson's friend Dave Shostack on saxophone. This group played several gigs together, but slowly split apart as people's mothers wanted them to concentrate on school, or they got cars that they wanted to fix up.

In Sandy Nelson's case, he was sacked by Barry for playing his drums so loud. As he packed up his kit for the last time, he told Barry, you'll see. I'm going to have a hit record that's only drums. Slowly, they were whittled down to three people, Barry, Torrance, and Ginsberg, with occasional help from Barry's friend Don Altfeld. The Barons caught a demo tape of a song about a prominent local stripper named Jenny Lee, but then Torrance decided to sign up with the army.

He'd discovered that if he did six months basic training and joined the army reserves, he would be able to avoid being drafted a short while later. He thought that six months sounded a lot better than two years, so he signed up, and he was on basic training when he heard a very familiar sounding record on the radio. He was surprised to hear it, and also surprised to hear it credited to Jan and Arnie, rather than the Barron's. He called Barry, who told him that, no, it was a completely new recording, though Torrance was absolutely certain that he could hear his own voice on there as well.

What had happened, according to Jan, was that the... there had been a problem with the tape, and he and Arnie had decided to re-record it. He'd then gone into a professional studio to get the tape cut into an acetate, so he could play it at parties, and someone in the next room had happened to hear it. And that someone happened to be Joe Lubin. Lubin was the vice president of Arwin Records, a label owned by Marty Melcher, Doris Day's husband. He told Barry that he would make Jan and Arne bigger than the Everly brothers, but Jan didn't believe him, though he let him have a copy of the disc. Jan took his copy to play at a friend's party, where it went down well.

That friend was Craig Brudolin, who later changed his name to James Brolin and became a major film star. Presumably Brudeline's best friend Ryan O'Neill, who also went to University High, was there as well. I told you, University High School had a lot of future stars. And Jan and Arnie became two more of those stars. Joe Lubin overdubbed extra instruments on the track and released it. He didn't quite make them bigger than the Everly Brothers, but for a while they were almost as big. At one point, the Everly Brothers were at number one in the charts.

Number two was Sheb Wully with the Purple People Eater, and number three was Jan and Arnie with Jenny Lee. And Dean Torrance was off in the army, regretting his choices. We'll be picking up on what happened with those three in a few months' time. But what of the other barons? The instrumentalists, Bruce Johnston, Dave Shostack, and Sandy Nelson, formed their own band, The Sleepwalkers, with various guitarists sitting in, often a young blues player called Henry Vestine,

who had already started taking LSD at this time, though none of the other band members indulged. They would often play parties organised by another university high student, Kim Fowley. Now, Fowley is the person who spoke most about this time on the record, but he was also possibly the least honest person involved in this episode, and if the accusations made about him since his death are true, also one of the most despicable people in this episode, which is quite a high bar.

So take this with a grain of salt. But Fowley claimed in later years that these parties were his major source of income, that he would hire sex workers to take fellow university high school, students who had big houses off to a motel to have sex with them. While the students were otherwise occupied, Fowley would break into their house and move all the furniture, so people could dance. He'd get the band in, and he'd invite everyone to come to the party. Then dope dealers would sell dope to the partygoers, giving Fowley a cut, and meanwhile, friends of Fowley would be outside breaking into the partygoers' cars and stealing their stuff. But then Fowley got arrested.

according to him, for stealing wine from a liquor store owned by a girlfriend who was twice his age, and selling it to other students at the school. He was given a choice of joining the army or going to prison, and he chose the army, on the same deal as Dean Torrance, who he ended up going through some of his training with. Meanwhile, Johnston, Shostack and Nelson were trying to get signed as a band. They went to see John Dolphin on February 1, 1958. We've talked about Dolphin before in the episodes on Gene and Eunice and the Penguins. Dolphin owned Dolphins of Hollywood, the biggest black-owned record store in the L.A. area

and was responsible for a large part of the success of many of the records we've covered through getting them played on radio shows broadcast from his station. He also owned a series of small labels which would put out one or two singles by an artist before the artist was snapped up by a bigger label. For example, he owned cash records, which had put out Walking Stick Boogie by Jerry Capehart and Eddie and Hank Cochran. He also owned a publishing company, which owned the publishing on Buzz Buzz Buzz by the Hollywood Flames. Johnston, Bus, Bus, Bus, Bus, Boss, Ghost of a Bumble Be, Tweedly, Dee, Darling, and I hope someday you'll be mine.

Johnston, Johnston, hoped that maybe they could get signed to one of Dolphins' labels, but they chose the worst possible day to do it. While they were waiting to see Dolphin, they got talking to an older man, Percy Ivy, who started to tell them that Dolphin couldn't be trusted, and that he owed Ivy a lot of money. They were used to hearing this kind of thing about people in the music business

and decided they'd go in to see Dolphin anyway. When they did, Ivy came in with them. What happened next is told differently by different people. What's definitely the case is that Ivy and Dolphin got into a heated row. Ivy claimed that Dolphin pulled a knife on him. Witness statements seem confused on the matter, but most say that all Dolphin had in his hand was a cigar. Ivy pulled out a gun and shot Dolphin. One shot also hit Shostack in the leg. Sandy Nelson ran

out of the room to get help. Johnston comforted the dying Dolphin, but by the time Nelson got back, he was busily negotiating with Ivy, talking about how they were going to make a record together when Ivy got out of jail. One presumes he was trying to humour Ivy to make sure nobody else got shot. Obviously, with John Dolphin having died, he wasn't going to be running a record company anymore. The shop part of his business was, from then on, managed by his assistant. A failed singer called Rudy Ray Moore, who later went on to become famous playing the comedy character, Dolomite. Then the sleepwalkers got a call from another acquaintance.

Kip Tyler had a band called The Flips, who had had some moderate success with rockabilly records produced by Milt Gables. And this is one of the points where the conflicting narratives become the most confusing. According to every one of the few articles I can find about Tyler, before forming the flips, he was the lead singer of the Sleepwalkers, the toughest rock and roll band in the school, when he was at Union High School. According to those same articles, he was born in 1929. So either, there were two bands at Union High School, a decade apart,

called the Sleepwalkers, one of which was a rock and roll band before the term had been coined, or Tyler was still at high school age 28, or someone is deeply mistaken somewhere. Kipp and the Flips didn't have much recording success and kept moving to smaller and smaller labels, but they were considered a hot band in L.A.

In particular, they were the house band at Art Le Bow's regular shows at El Monte Stadium, the shows which would later be immortalized by the penguins in memories of El Monte. And the medallions with the letter end. Sweet words of his mortality. But then the group's piano player, Larry Nectal, saxophone player, Steve Douglas, and drummer Mike Bermarni,

all left to join Dwayanetti's group. Kim Fowley was, by this point, a rody and general hanger on for the flips. And he happened to know a piano player, a saxophone player and a drummer, who were looking for a gig, and so the Sleepwalkers joined Kip Taylor and guitarist Mike Deasy in the flips,

and took over that role performing at El Monte, performing themselves but also backing other musicians, like Richie Valens, who played at these shows. Sandy Nelson didn't stay long in the flips, though. He was replaced by another drummer, Jim Troxel, and it was this lineup with extra sax from Dwayneeddy's sax player Jim Horn that recorded Rumble Rock. Nelson's departure from the group coincided with him starting to get a great deal of session work

from people who had seen him play live. One of those people was a young man named Harvey Philip Spectre, who went by his middle name. Spector went to Fairfax High, a school which had a strong rivalry with University High, and produced a similarly ludicrous list of famous people, and he'd got his own little clique of people around him with whom he was making music.

These included his best friend Marshall Leib and sometimes also Leib's girlfriend's younger brother, Ross Titleman. Spector and Lebe had formed a vocal group, the Teddy Bears, with a girl in you who then went by a different name but is now called Carol Connors.

Their first single was called To Know Him is to Love Him, inspired by the epitaph on Spector's father's grave. Sandy Nelson played the drums on that, and the track went to number one. I've also seen some credits say that Bruce Johnston played the bass on it, but at the time Johnston wasn't a bass player, so this seems unlikely. Even though Nelson's playing on the track is absolutely rudimentary,

it gave him the cachet to get other gigs, for example playing on Gene Vincent's Crazy Times LP. down and brown Another record Reunited him with Bruce Johnston Kim Fowley was by this point doing some work for American international pictures and was asked to come up with an instrumental

for a film called Ghost of Drag Strip Hollow a film about a drag racing club that have a Halloween party inside a deserted mansion but then discover a real monster has shown up. It's not as fun as it sounds. A songwriter friend of Fowley is named Nick Reney is credited with writing Geronimo,

although Richie Pollardor, the guitarist and bass player on the session, says he came up with it. Polidore said, There are three guys in the business who really have no scruples whatsoever. They are Bruce Johnston, Kim Fowley and Sandy Nelson, and I was Mr. Scruples. I wrote both Geronimo and Charge, but they were taken away from me.

It was all my stuff, but between Nick Renée, Kim Fowley and Bruce Johnston, I had no chance. It was cut in my studio, I did all the guitars, I wrote it, and Nick René walked away with the credit. Renee did the holes on the track. Johnston played piano. Nelson drums, Polidore, guitar and bass, and fouly produced. Meanwhile, Phil Spector had become disenchanted with being in the Teddy Bears and had put together a solo instrumental single under the name Phil Harvey. Spector wanted a band to play a gig to promote that single,

and he put together the Phil Harvey band from the members of another band that Marshall Leeb had been in before joining the Teddy Bears. The Moondogs had consisted of a singer called Jet Power, guitarist Derry Weaver and Elliot Inber, and bass player Larry Taylor, along with Leib. Taylor and Ingear joined the Phil Harvey band, along with keyboard player Howard Hirsch and drummer Rod Schaefer. The Phil Harvey band only played one gig. The band's concept was apparently a mix of Dwayne Eddy-style rock guitar instrumentals and complex jazz, with the group all dressed as mobsters.

But Kim Fowley happened to be there and liked what he saw, and made a note of some of those musicians as people to work with. Spector, meanwhile, had decided to use his connection with Lester Sill to go and work with Libre and Stoller, and we'll be picking up that story in a couple of months. Meanwhile, Derry Weaver from the Moondogs had started to date Mary Jo Shealy, the sister of Sharon Shealy, and Sharon started to take an interest in her little sister's boyfriend and his friends.

She suggested that Jet Power change his name to PJ Proby, and she would regularly have him sing on the demos of her songs in the 60s. And she introduced Weaver to Eddie Cochran and Jerry Capehart. Cochran taught Weaver several of the guitar licks he used, and Capehart produced a session for Weaver, with Cochran on guitar, Jim Stivers on piano, Gebo Smith on bass, and Gene Riggio on drums. That track was not released until decades later,

but several other songs by Weaver, with no Cochran involvement, were released on Cape Hart's own label, under the misspelled name Dary Weaver. And Capehart was Weaver's manager for a little while. Weaver was actually living in the Shealy residence when they received the phone call saying that Eddie had died and Sharon was in hospital and it haunted him deeply for the rest of his life. Another record on which Gebo Smith played at this time

was one by Sandy Nelson. The flips had split up by this point. Mike Deasy had gone on to join Eddie Cochran's backing band and Bruce Johnston was playing on random sessions. So he was here for what was going to be Nelson's single that was only drums. It wasn't quite only drums. As well as Nelson on drums, there was Smith on bass, Johnston on piano and Polidore on guitar.

The musicians on the record have said they all deserved songwriting credit for it, but the writing credit went to Art Labo and Nelson. Team Beat went to number four on the charts, and Nelson had a handful of other hits under his own name, including Let There Be Drums. Less successful was a ballad released under the name Bruce and Jerry, released on Arwin Records after the owner's son, Terry Melcher, had remembered seeing the sleepwalkers

and was desperate for some more rock and roll success on the label like Jan and Arney, even though Melcher was a student at Beverly High, and, like Fairfax, everyone at Beverly hated people. at university high. Take This Pearl was sung by Johnston and Jerry Cooper, with backing by Johnston, Shostack, Deasy, Nelson and bass player Harper Cosby, who would later play for Sam Cuck. Take This Pearl by Bruce and Jerry did nothing, but Terry Melcher did think that name sounded good, except maybe it should be Terry instead of Jerry. Meanwhile, Nick René had got a production role at World Pacific Records, and he wanted to put

together yet another studio group. And this is where some of the confusion comes in, because this record was important, and everyone later wanted a piece of the credit. According to Nick Renée, the gamblers were originally going to be called Nick and the Gamblers, and consisted of himself, Bruce Johnston, Sandy Nelson, Larry Taylor, and the great guitarist James Burton, with Richie Palladour Engineering and Kim Fowley involved somehow. Meanwhile, Fowley says he was not involved at all, and given that this is about the only record in the history of the world that Fowley has ever said he wasn't on, I tend to believe him.

Elliot Inber said that the group was Inbba, Taylor, Derry Weaver, Howard Hirsch, Schaefer. Bruce Johnston says he has no memory of the record. I don't know if anyone's ever asked James Burton about it, but it doesn't sound like him playing. Given that the A-side is called Moondog, that Weaver and Taylor were in a band called The Moondogs, that used to play a song called Moondog, and that Weaver is credited as the writer, I think we can assume that the lead guitar is Derry Weaver, and that Elliot Inba's list of credits is mostly correct. But on the other hand, one of the voices singing the wordless harmonies sounds very much like Bruce Johnston to me, and he has a very distinctive voice that I know extremely well.

So my guess is that the gamblers on this occasion were Derry Weaver, Larry Taylor, Elliot Ingber, Bruce Johnston, and either Rod Schaefer or Sandy Nelson. Probably Schaefer, since no one other than Vennay has credited Nelson with being there. I suspect Inber is understandably misremembering Howard Hirsch being there because Hirsch did play on the second Gambler's single. The B-side of the record is credited as written by Weaver and Taylor. That song is called LSD 25. And while we have said over and over that there is no first anything in rock music,

this is an exception. That is, without any doubt whatsoever, the first rock and roll record to mention LSD, and so, in its way, a distant ancestor of psychedelic music. Weaver and Taylor have said in later years that neither of them knew anything about the drug, and it's very clear that Johnston, who takes a very hardline anti-drug stance, never indulged.

They've said they read a magazine article about acid and liked the name. On the other hand, Henry Vestine was part of the same circle, and he was apparently already taking acid by then, though details are vague. Every single article I can find about it uses the same phrasing that Wikipedia does, talking of having taken it with a close musician friend, who might have been one of the gamblers, but might not. So the B-side was a milestone in rock music history, and in a different way so was the A-side, just written by Weaver.

Moondog was a local hit, but sold nothing anywhere at. outside Southern California, and there were a couple of follow-ups by different lineups of gamblers, featuring some but never all of the same musicians, along with other people we've mentioned like Fowley. The gamblers stopped being a thing, and Derry Weaver went off to join another group. Kim Fowley and his friend Gary Paxton had put together a novelty record, Alleyoop, under the name the Hollywood Argyles, which featured Gain Al Hodge on piano and Sandy Nelson banging a bin lid. There's a man in the funny papers we all know.

That became a hit, and they had to put together a band to tour as the Hollywood Argyles. And Weaver became one of them, as did Marshall Leeb. After that, Weaver hooked up again with Nick Vennay, who started getting him regular session work, as Vennay had taken a job at Capitol Records. And Vennay doing that suddenly meant that Moondog became very important indeed. Even though it had been only a minor success,

because Vennay owned the rights to the master tape and also the publishing rights, he got Moondog stuck on a various artist's compilation album pot out on Capitol, Golden Gasses, which featured big acts like Sam Cuck and the Four Preps, and which exposed the song to a wider audience. Cover versions of it started to sprout up by people like The Ventures, the Surfaris and the Beach Boys. Larry Taylor's brother Mel was the drummer for The Ventures, which might have helped bring the track to their attention, while Nick Renee was the Beach Boys producer. Indeed, some have claimed that Derry Weaver played on the Beach Boys'

He's credited on the session sheets, but nobody involved with the session has ever said if it was actually him, or whether that was just Renee putting down a friend's name to claim some extra money. While there had been twangy guitar instrumentals before Moondog, and as I said, there's never a first anything. Historians of the surf music genre now generally point to it as the first surf music record ever, and it's as good a choice as any. We won't be seeing anything more from Derry Weaver, who fell into obscurity after a few years of session work, but Bruce Johnston, Larry Taylor, Elliot Inber, Henry Vestine, Nick Vennay, Kim Fowley, Phil Specter, Jan Berry, Terry Melcher, and Dean Torrance will be turning up throughout the 60s, and in some cases later. The records we looked at today were the start of a California music scene, that would define American pop music in the 60s.

As a final note, I mentioned Gain L. Hodge as the piano player on Ali Upe. As I was in the middle of writing this episode, I received word that Hodge had died earlier this week. As people who've listened to earlier episodes of this podcast will know, Gain L. Hodge was one of the most important people in the 50s L.A. vocal group scene, and without him, there would have been no platters, penguins, or Jesse Bellwere. him. He was also one of the few links between that 50s world of black R&B musicians and the

white-dominated 60s L.A. pop music scene of surf, hot rods, folk rock and sunshine. He's unlikely to turn up again in more than minor roles in future episodes, but I've made this week's Patreon episode be on another classic record he played on. As well as being an important musician in his own right, Hodge was someone without whom, almost none of the music made in LA in the 50s or 60s would have happened. He'll be missed. A history of rock music in 500 songs

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