THE GREATEST SONGS OF THE 1960s THAT NO ONE HAS EVER HEARD
2,156) Damon — “Don’t You Feel Me”
This ’68 A-side by L.A.’s Damon (see #1,166, 1,421) is “a [g]reat psych brooder” (charonbadmann8904, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vnfEqr36aU), a “slow/mid-tempo psychedelic rock/acid rock song with vicious guitar fuzz, hypnotic vocals, some reverbs and a mysterious feeling”. (roquecolor, https://rateyourmusic.com/release/single/damon/dont-you-feel-me-poor-poor-genie/) Egon writes:
[It was] released as one of the 45 RPM singles from [Damon’s ’68 LP Song of a Gypsy] simply because Damon liked the song the most, [and] stands out in an album full of great songs. A powerful, triumphant celebration of the feeling of longing that the Portuguese call “saudade,” “Don’t You Feel Me” reaches from Los Angeles to the Mediterranean in its other-worldy sound and universal message.
liner notes to the CD comp Forge Your Own Chains (Heavy Psychedelic Ballads And Dirges 1968-1974), https://www.nowagainrecords.com/forge-your-own-chains-damons-story/
Damon described the song as “Just what the words say. You can feel someone you love even when you’re apart.” (https://www.psychedelicbabymag.com/2013/12/damon-interview.html) Decades later, it was featured on the TV series True Blood (https://trueblood.fandom.com/wiki/Don%27t_You_Feel_Me) and Teen Wolf, leading skovesk8s to complain that “I hate it when the pop culture of today soils the mysterious seduction of these songs that I play for women, now they think I watch that garbage.” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-BnMoV8i_U)
Of the LP, tymeshifter writes that “[a] Lounge Lizard becomes Lizard King and gives us a mystical and almost mythical LP that ‘just oozes lysergia’.” (https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5DDDE08017204B40) Eothen Alapatt ponders that:
It seemed that this homespun, funky psychedelic monument borrowed from nothing and sprung from nowhere. . . . Damon’s album leapt from the tortured mind of its curious creator at the perfect time. Damon’s unique, introspective songwriting and nuanced voice, the interplay between he and lead guitarist Charlie Carey and an atmosphere that so perfectly captured the last bloom of the flower power era as it decayed into the dark haze of the ’70s underground could only have arisen from a spark of auspicious genius.
http://rockasteria.blogspot.com/2015/07/damon-song-of-gypsy-1959-68-us-gorgeous.html?m=1
Ashratom writes:
[Song of a Gypsy] combines the loner, real people, authentic lost-soul archetype with screaming fuzz psychedelics. It’s almost too good to be true. But it is absolutely real, and thus . . . is most certainly in the top 10 of sought after psychedelic LPs, if not #1 for those who love the obscure.
https://rateyourmusic.com/release/album/damon/song-of-a-gypsy
Patrick Lundborg muses that it is “[o]ne of the classics of the private press field . . . a great and special experience in my ears. . . . [T]ranced out gypsy Arabian acid fuzz crooner psych with deep mysterious vocals, a captivating soundscape (no one has used finger cymbals better) and excellent, succinct songwriting”. (The Acid Archives, 2nd ed.) Thanks, Patrick, that is the single greatest dead-on (and deadpan) description of an album that I have ever come across.
Klemen Breznikar says:
[The LP] is a true monster of U.S. psychedelic music. . . . contains very laid-back, stoned vocals with nice fuzz guitar and even a sitar and it’s truly among the pillars of rare psych albums. . . . the last bloom of the flower power movement before it decayed into the haze of the 70s underground. It traces a pop hopeful descending into chaos, and becoming the tortured soul who would create an LP to file alongside works by other lost greats of the late ‘60s . . . .
https://www.psychedelicbabymag.com/2013/12/david-damon-del-conte-talks-about-song.html
Damon himself says:
The songs were about my life as it was at the time. . . . My concept was to write what I was living. Song after song just came into my head. . . . Drugs, life, love, pain, pleasure passion – all had a role in my music. . . . The black [version of the LP] was expensive, but I felt the music was worth it. I pressed 500 Black Gatefold albums and 500 White ones because of the cost.
https://www.psychedelicbabymag.com/2013/12/david-damon-del-conte-talks-about-song.html
Richie Unterberger gives us some history:
Singer/songwriter Damon . . . put out an extremely obscure, folk-tinged psychedelic album in 1969, Song of a Gypsy . . . . Such is its rarity that mint copies have gone for as much as $1000 or more. There’s a droning, slightly raga-modalish flavor to the melodies and guitar lines, with a gypsy touch in the percussion and questing, spiritual lyrics. The gypsy element . . . is not just an extrapolation from the title, but a deliberate action on Damon’s part, who came to think of himself as a gypsy while wandering around California in the late ’60s. After one 45 . . . the LP was recorded by Damon and other musicians in Los Angeles, its existence barely even suspected by most psychedelic collectors for years.
https://www.allmusic.com/artist/damon-mn0000951479#biography
Eothen Alaoatt gives us more early history:
When Damon was eight, his parents . . . . moved to Alhambra, California. It was the beginning of what he now regards as his “predestined life as a gypsy,” as his parents moved constantly within Los Angeles city limits . . . . Theirs was a tight knit Italian American family . . . . In 1960 his high school sweetheart Katy told him she was pregnant. She was sixteen, he was nineteen. They married, and their union bore him his three girls. Beginning in the seventh grade . . . he had dreamt of becoming a musician. . . . He was an avid surfer so, in late 1960, newlywed . . . he wrote and recorded “The Lonely Surfer” (groovy, if standard surf rock) and cut to wax his first stab at “Don’t Cry” (blue-eyed doo-wop). . . . He then moved on to the even more obscure Harmony Records for the “Twist’-inspired “Bowling Alley Jane” and his second version of “Don’t Cry,” this time called “Don’t Cry Davy.” After a detour with Associated Artists – “Little Things Mean a Lot /The Glory of Love” feature only his backing vocals, but were inexplicably released under his name – he founded his own Del Con label and issued promotional and commercial versions of “A Face In A Crowd” and “I Lie,” the latter establishing his preference for garage-rocking soul.
http://rockasteria.blogspot.com/2015/07/damon-song-of-gypsy-1959-68-us-gorgeous.html?m=1
And Damon tells us of his life:
I began singing in a rock band. I soon moved in to top 40. Eventually I became a jazz singer. I then moved on to become a lounge singer. I actually enjoyed that. I could do show tunes, songs in other languages, ballads, and light rock. It was fun. Pretty soon I realized that I had to be more ME, and then became a folk singer. . . . I sang mostly in Southern California until around 1967 when I began traveling as a gypsy folk singer. . . . I enjoyed being a lounge singer . . . . But I saw no future in it. Singing other people songs left me a bit empty. I needed to do my own music. . . . [I]n time I realized that I was becoming a “Lounge Lizard” and I didn’t want to end up that way in my “later years”. . . . That’s what brought me to “Gypsy Rock” music. It was mine. . . . . [S]omewhere in the 1960s I had become a junkie. Strung out on Heroin, used LSD often, and was bailed out of jail a lot. In 1979 I gave my life to Jesus.
https://www.psychedelicbabymag.com/2013/12/david-damon-del-conte-talks-about-song.html
Live, decades later:
An instrumental version, decades later:
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