THE GREATEST SONGS OF THE 1960s THAT NO ONE HAS EVER HEARD
1,491) The Seeds — “Up in Her Room” (not really live at “Merlin’s Music Box”)
From “one of the best Fake Live Albums ever . . . [this] almost-ten-minute rave-up . . . is some sort of crazed triumph” (Mark Deming, https://www.allmusic.com/album/raw-alive-the-seeds-in-concert-at-merlins-music-box-mw0000678031), “five shorter than the original . . . but . . . just as groovy and sexy”. (https://www.skysaxonseeds.com/albums/raw-alive-merlins-music-box-1968)
Of “Room”, Sky Sunlight Saxon and the Seeds tell us:
For Seeds fans in the know, “Up In Her Room” has always been one of the band’s most famous – and infamous – recordings. On one single, simple riff, it goes on and on, around and around to nowhere, for fourteen brutal minutes. It’s one of the first “long” songs of rock and roll . . . . all about a sweaty evening in a groovy hippie chick’s psychedelic bedroom[ and] takes up most of Side 2 of the . . . 1966 LP A Web of Sound. It’s remarkable for a band, even one as “so-terrible-they’re-great” as The Seeds, to play a song this long with no embellishments or melodic detours. It just repeats the one riff – about four guitar notes long over a speeding express train of a rhythm section – forever. If growling garage-psych simplicity is your religion then [it] is the promised land. And if illicit teenage sex titillates you then Sky Saxon’s passionate performance is just what you’ve been panting for. Sky was almost thirty when [it] was recorded but had the mind of a teenager and the outlook of a flower-child outlaw. He’s in her room; there’s marijuana and incense; there are lysergic trances and staring out the window at clouds; then there’s her body and her bed and feelin’ so good and feelin’ so good and a knock at the door but who cares. It’s not only the repetitiveness of the song that make it so fearsome, it’s the utter lack of narrative or background. We join the two in flagrante, at least as soon as the drugs are consumed and the mood gets really right. Two takes of this epic tale were attempted, both at a session on July 14, 1966. The first was aborted when the tape ran out (!) while the second became the master. The entire performance, without overdubs or editing, made it onto the LP while a sub-four-minute edit became the B-side of “Mr. Farmer” when it was released as a 7″ single with a picture sleeve in 1966. . . . On February 20, 1968, The Seeds recorded a 7:39 version of the song in front of several fans in the studio for an intended fake live album. The performance wasn’t used; nor was a second attempt on April 2. Finally on April 9, 1968, two more takes were attempted that proved fruitful. The first was a false start but the second was enshrined onto the notorious Raw & Alive album with fake crowd noises dubbed onto it.
The supremely seedy Sky Saxon and the Seeds (see #116, 446, 1,441) “combined the raw, Stonesy appeal of garage rock with a fondness for ragged, trashy psychedelia” (Stephen Thomas Erlewine, https://www.allmusic.com/artist/the-seeds-mn0000500664/biography)
Sky Sunlight Saxon and the Seeds tell us about Raw & Alive:
First thing’s first: Raw And Alive — The Seeds In Concert Merlin’s Music Box is not a live album — it’s a studio album. The sounds of screaming fans were grafted on after recording. Crass, perhaps, from today’s perspective, but The Seeds weren’t the first sixties band to do this. . . . And it is a Seeds album and should be judged on its musical merits. Raw And Alive remains some fans’ favorite Seeds record, due to its energetic performances and its many truly fantastic new songs. It was the band’s first album since the unexpected hard blues fourth LP A Full Spoon of Seedy Blues, and represents something of a return to the form of Future, the band’s adventurously psychedelic third album. Five of Raw And Alive‘s eleven tracks are re-recordings of older Seeds songs . . . examples of how a more experienced band can tackle its old stuff with panache. . . . Over the years there was a steady drip of Raw & Alive recordings without the offending crowd noises. . . . [T]he complete crowd-less Raw & Alive was released, in 2014 by Big Beat. Also on the CD is the original crowd version of the album plus an earlier live-in-the-studio performance done for a group of fans that was the original attempt at the LP. . . . There really was a place called Merlin’s Music Box for a brief time in Los Angeles but The Seeds probably never played there (it isn’t known definitively). Merlin’s was more of a quiet folk club but the name sounded nice for the album title. . . . [T]he album’s status as “live” didn’t seem to overly trouble anyone, and official word for decades was that it was really recorded in concert. After all, there’s screaming and an introduction by local disc jockey ‘Humble’ Harve Miller, and Sky even addresses the “crowd” before “Pushin Too Hard” just as he did in real Seeds concerts (dedicating the song to “society”). It wasn’t until some of the songs started being released without crowd noises that people began to notice the curious lack of connection between band and audience, and ponder why the album seemed so well-produced . . . .
https://www.skysaxonseeds.com/albums/raw-alive-merlins-music-box-1968
Mark Deming also writes about the LP:
[T]he Seeds were at their best when they kept things simple and to the point, and in 1968, uncertain where to go next after Future tanked, the band decided it would be a good idea to document their energetic live show with a concert album. However, in order to best control the audio, they ended up cutting a live set in a studio rather than taping an actual concert, laying in the sounds of cheering fans after the fact. The results were released as Raw and Alive: The Seeds in Concert at Merlin’s Music Box, even though it was recorded at Western Recorders studio in Hollywood rather than the folk-oriented coffee house namechecked in the title, and the incongruous-sounding cheers and applause, which rise and fall at unpredictable moments, give away the game that this is that curious artifact of the era, The Fake Live Album. However, as such things go, this is one of the best Fake Live Albums ever, and a better-than-average Seeds set as well. The songs really were cut live to tape, with no overdubs and edits, and the Seeds sound plenty tight and enthusiastic here, with Sky Saxon’s vocals reaching a near-feral intensity on “Satisfy You,” “Night Time Girl,” and “900 Million People Daily All Making Love,” and Jan Savage’s guitar work cutting significantly deeper than in the original recordings of these tunes. . . . Maybe not raw, but more alive than you think, and one of the Seeds’ best offerings.
https://www.allmusic.com/album/raw-alive-the-seeds-in-concert-at-merlins-music-box-mw0000678031
Of the Seeds, Stephen Thomas Erlewine says:
[T]hough they never quite matched the commercial peak of their first two singles, “Pushin’ Too Hard” [see #116] and “Can’t Seem to Make You Mine,” the band continued to record for the remainder of the ’60s, eventually delving deep into post-Sgt. Pepper’s psychedelia and art rock. None of their new musical directions resulted in another hit single, and the group disbanded at the turn of the decade. Sky Saxon . . . and guitarist Jan Savage formed the [band] . . . in Los Angeles in 1965. By the end of 1966, they had secured a contract with GNP Crescendo, releasing “Pushin’ Too Hard” [which] climbed into the Top 40 early in 1967 . . . . While their singles were garage punk, the Seeds . . . branch[ed] out into improvisational blues-rock and psychedelia on their first two albums . . . . With their third album . . . the band attempted a psychedelic concept album . . . .
https://www.allmusic.com/artist/the-seeds-mn0000500664/biography
Here it is with the fake audience:
Here’s the LP version:
Here’s the short version:
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