THE GREATEST SONGS OF THE 1960s THAT NO ONE HAS EVER HEARD
1,288) Public Nuisance — “Strawberry Man”
This anti-Vietnam War song “stand[s] out as quite imaginative”. (Richie Unterberger, https://www.allmusic.com/album/gotta-survive-mw0001893156) “I love this track it starts off in fine pop/punk style then cuts . . . into a completely new song!” (sf scene, https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FrpXNz2HkWI&pp=ygUoUHVibGljIE51aXNhbmNlIOKAlCDigJxTdHJhd2JlcnJ5IE1hbuKAnQ%3D%3D) It was recorded by a talented Sacramento, CA, garage/psych band that never got to release a single single, in part because their legendary producer Terry Melcher went into hiding after the Manson Family’s murderous rampage at Melcher’s former residence (likely looking for him), then being rented by Roman Polanski and his wife Sharon Tate.
Two LP’s worth of songs recorded by PN were finally released a number of years ago as a comp titled Gotta Survive — “a gold mine of groovy obscurities.” (Jackson Griffith, https://www.newsreview.com/sacramento/content/evolver/14608/) “The songs are in a post-garage, slightly psychedelic rock/pop mode, equal parts energy and melody . . . . [A]s a whole Public Nuisance is more impressive than many long-term major label bands of the era.” (Aaron Milenski, The Acid Archives, 2nd ed.) “The music played by Public Nuisance was commensurate with the finest American garage rock of the period . . . . [f]rom blistering, fuzz-guitar-drenched freakouts to ambitiously loopy attempts at expanding baroque pretensions of 1960s-vintage psychedelic pop”. (Jackson Griffith, https://www.newsreview.com/sacramento/content/evolver/14608/)
As to the music and the band, Richie Unterberger writes:
It’s pretty extraordinary for a band who never even released a record to have a two-CD package prepared in their honor more than 30 years after they disbanded. . . . . largely devoted to unreleased recordings . . . from late 1968 and early 1969 . . . . Is it worth such unusual archival care? Yes, though in truth its appeal will mostly lie with aficionados of garage-psychedelic crossover sounds . . . . Public Nuisance made for the most part above-average, though not groundbreaking, insouciant garage psychedelia with raw and idiosyncratic, but not sloppy, blends of punk, pop, folk-rock, and songs that reflected both the angst-ridden confusion and exhilarating highs of the era. . . .. tapped into some of the boundary-stretching experimentation of psychedelia while retaining a surly, defiant attitude. . . .
The Sacramento outfit . . . [was] a respectable, though hardly phenomenal, group that integrated raw garage rock snarl with more experimental psychedelic guitar textures and song structures, with the occasional pop/rock influence as well. . . . They got into not only some ambitious sounds, but also some ambitious lyrics that reflected the era’s rebellion and questioning of established values, as well as expressing more conventional romantic sentiments. Public Nuisance’s roots were in the mid-’60s garage band the Jaguars, who changed their name to Moss & the Rocks. Under that moniker, they recorded a folk-rock-flavored garage single, “There She Goes”/”Please Come Back,” for the small local Ikon label. Later that year, they re-recorded both tunes for a single on Chattahoochee. Both 45s are very rare and by 1967, they had changed their name to Public Nuisance and gone in more psychedelic directions without forsaking their garage energy. Public Nuisance opened for acts such as the Doors, Buffalo Springfield, Sonny & Cher, and the Grateful Dead . . . . [T]hey didn’t have a record deal until some demos in late 1968 helped get them a contract with Equinox, run by noted Hollywood producer Terry Melcher . . . . At the end of 1968 and the beginning of 1969, they recorded an album’s worth of songs, but nothing was ever released . . . . Public Nuisance disbanded around 1970, with guitarist David Houston producing and playing keyboards with the new wave band the Twinkeyz in the 1970s and going on to produce Steel Breeze and Club Nouveau.
https://www.allmusic.com/album/gotta-survive-mw0001893156, https://www.allmusic.com/artist/public-nuisance-mn0000307045#biography
Jackson Griffith adds, after speaking with David Houston:
The group came together in 1964, calling itself the Jaguars. . . . its repertoire consisted of the instrumental surf-rock popular at the time. Tom Phillips, who played guitar in the Contenders and later in the New Breed, Glad and Redwing . . . . remembered seeing the Jaguars for the first time when they opened for the Contenders at a teen dance in Elk Grove in 1964. “Those guys were radical,” he recalled. “They had hair down to their waists.” Phillips recalled one other detail, about the Jaguars guitarist, David Houston: “David would go out and destroy his guitar onstage,” he said. “This was before the Who.” When . . . fretboard workouts like “Pipeline” and “Misirlou” [became] terminally uncool, the Jaguars added vocals and changed their name to Moss & the Rocks. And later in the decade, when rock music’s tonal colors grew darker and bluesier, Moss & the Rocks changed their name again—this time to Public Nuisance. . . . David Houston, who wrote roughly half the band’s songs; sang; and played guitar, keyboards and harmonica. . . . still can be found onstage at such local venues . . . or busy in his recording studio. Beyond that, his involvement runs like a thread through the fabric of Sacramento’s music scene. . . . [I]n 1966, Moss & the Rocks showed up at Ikon Records, a label and studio in East Sacramento. A Norwegian engineer named Eirik Wangberg was behind the boards. One Moss & the Rocks member told Houston he recalled that they had won some free recording time in a contest. Their manager was Gary Schiro, a surf-rock promoter from the Jaguars’ era who also managed New Breed and the Oxford Circle. Schiro had connections in L.A., which was one place you went as a Sacramento band that wanted to move to the next level. The other destination, of course, was San Francisco, and Public Nuisance later tried that option when it recorded a 1967 session—now lost—for Fantasy . . . . Schiro had the band cutting sides during the budget hours, after midnight and before sunrise. He’d worked out a deal for New Breed and Public Nuisance with Equinox Productions, a custom label with distribution through ABC-Dunhill Records that was run by record producer Terry Melcher . . . . Then, as Houston put it, the big fiasco happened. “Fiasco is an understatement,” he recalled. “When Charles Manson killed Sharon Tate and everybody, that was at Terry Melcher’s house. Terry Melcher [and] Dennis Wilson [see #666] rented this house; Dennis Wilson was friends with Charlie Manson [see #667]. Dennis was trying to get Charlie to record something. Evidently, Terry backed out of it, and something happened. I don’t know how true it is, but the story is that the people who went there were after Terry Melcher, not the people who were there.” Actually, Melcher and actress Candice Bergen had rented the house . . . but had moved out by January 1969, when film director Roman Polanski and his wife, actress Sharon Tate, signed a one-year lease. Melcher, understandably, went into hiding immediately after the murders and shelved all of his projects, including Public Nuisance. . . . So, Public Nuisance, which had been going down to L.A. on the weekends to record, came back to Sacramento. “We did a couple of shows trying to play at the Fillmore, on audition nights—Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, I don’t remember,” Houston said. “But we never got there. I don’t remember how many years we stayed together after that. It just fell apart.”
https://www.newsreview.com/sacramento/content/evolver/14608/
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