Tim Dawe — “Scarlet Woman”: Brace for the Obscure (60s rock)! — September 28, 2024

THE GREATEST SONGS OF THE 1960s THAT NO ONE HAS EVER HEARD

1,349) Tim Dawe — “Scarlet Woman”

Future nuclear physicist Tim Dawe (see #875) gives us a “[b]eautiful!” (annc8281, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GC8tRFETd70), grand and sweeping pop psych/folk rock epic. It is from his ’69 album Penrod, “an enigmatic mixture of psychedelia, early singer-songwriter moves, almost crooning troubadour folk, baroque classical influences, and inventively florid arrangements and orchestration” (Richie Unterberger, http://www.richieunterberger.com/dawe.html), featuring “a psychedelic-inclined, jazz-steeped, semi-orchestral freak folk band”. (Jay Allen Sanford, https://www.sandiegoreader.com/news/2018/aug/10/lost-local-bands-60s70s-tim-dawe-penrod/)

Unfortunately, as Craig Harris writes:

Had he recorded his best-known tune, “Junkie John,” a few months earlier, Tim Dawe . . . might have been a star. . . . [I]t had begun getting radio airplay when the FCC began to crack down on drug-oriented recordings. Stations stopped playing the single, while Dawe faded quickly into obscurity.

https://www.allmusic.com/artist/tim-dawe-mn0001559315/biography)

Stephane Rebeschini tells us:

Tim Dawe appeared on the scene in 1969 with an album on Frank Zappa’s Straight label. Penrod was a superb debut, full of psychedelic folk rock with lots of organ, harpsichord and brilliant acid guitar. . . . The result stands comparison to another more well known Straight artist, Tim Buckley. Quite surprisingly, however, the backing group doesn’t seem to have played on other albums (unless they were using pseudonyms). Dawe then wrote songs for Rod Taylor and It’s A Beautiful Day [see #56] (Places Of Dreams and Bitter Wine, on Choice Quality Stuff/Anytime). In 1976 he returned with an interesting west-coast album produced by the ex-It’s A Beautiful Day member Mitchell Holman, who also played bass on it. . . . In 1978, he produced A Night On The Wine Cellar . . . a live folk/ blues album on which he sang three new songs . . . .

https://www.donlope.net/fz/notes/penrod.html (source: Borderline’s Psychedelic Archive)

Dawe reminisced:

[Frank] Zappa was my mentor. My first album, PENROD, was released on Straight Records in late 1969. Those were heady times. We were going to change the world.  Herb Cohen managed my band, Zappa executive produced. Read Zappa’s last interview in Playboy. Straight Records was going to be the first of many great independant labels that would change the music business forever. As we know, that didn’t happen. But Zappa tried. Visions of Nirvana. His vision was smothered by the mega record companies and a paranoid government. . . . But I had a great fifteen minutes while it lasted. Thanks to Frank. Later I did other things, musical and otherwise. . . . Help keep Frank alive . . . .

https://www.donlope.net/fz/notes/penrod.html

Jay Allen Sanford adds:

Timothy Thorne Dawe was a theoretical nuclear physicist who in his youth dabbled in experimental rock music. . . . . Dawe at the time was mainly playing solo folk clubs around LA and northern San Diego circa 1968-1969 . . . . The harpsichord-heavy LP was produced by former Lovin’ Spoonful guitarist Jerry Yester, who’d produced Cohen’s client Tim Buckley for the label and would also produce the first album by former San Diegan Tom Waits . . . . Zappa executive-produced the album. The band was signed under the name Penrod to Herb Cohen’s management company, and they were among the first bands signed to Straight/Bizarre . . . . [T]he seven-plus minute “Junkie John,” received occasional underground radio play and was notable for incorporating early synth electronics, but its length and subject matter kept it from widespread exposure, especially after the FCC essentially banned radio stations from playing music that overtly referenced illegal drugs. . . . [Dawe later] become a physics professor . . . . As of 2010 [Dawe passed away in 2016], he was teaching physics at City College of San Francisco. “He’s an old hippie and will play guitar if you ask,” wrote one of his CCSF students on the RateMyProfessor.com website, “and he has found that each planet lies along the same intervals as nodes on a guitar soundwave.”

https://www.sandiegoreader.com/news/2018/aug/10/lost-local-bands-60s70s-tim-dawe-penrod/

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