Press - Bubble Puppy Liner Notes
Mike Fornatale
SHINDIG
Magazine
If this is the first time you’re ever hearing ‘Hot Smoke and
Sassafras,’ I feel for you.
‘Ah,’ you’ll think
‘It’s The Yes Album by way of The MC5 and Kansas.’ Not that that wouldn’t be
enough to pique your interest right there, mind. But imagine that
you were hearing this song in 1968 -- when two out of those three
bands didn’t even exist yet.
‘Hot
Smoke’ was an unexpected blast from the ether on US radio, in a
year full of such blasts; it sounded like nothing else. A blinding
hard-rocking intro; followed by full-stops, time-changes, folk-rock,
signature Texas blues guitar, and the kind of textured, layered vocal
harmony that bands like Yes and Crosby Stills and Nash would later
make millions with. The song was a Top 40 hit nationwide, in cities
far away from the band’s Texan home base -- in fact, it was #1
on Chicago’s WLS for three weeks. Bubble Puppy can lay claim
to having the biggest-selling record ever released on the
International Artists label (which you’ll recognize as the home
of The Thirteenth Floor Elevators and Red Krayola, so no mean feat
there.) They can also lay claim to being one of very few bands whose
music provided an easy link between the trippy psychedelia of 1967
and the harder American rock of 1969.
Their
story begins in 1964, when Rod Prince (vocals/guitar) forms The Bad
Seeds -- by all accounts the garage-band-to-beat in Corpus Christi,
Texas. That band split up in 1966, and was re-formed by Prince and
Roy Cox (vocals/keyboards) as The New Seeds. (Spinal
Tap,
anyone?) The New Seeds didn’t last long, and when Prince and
Cox moved to San Antonio they started a new band, yet unnamed, with
Cox switching to bass. They recruited young Todd Potter
(vocals/guitar), originally from Austin, who actually quit high
school to join the new band.
Apparently
they first appeared in public as ‘Willowdale Handcar,’
with a lineup that included a sax player. At some point that name
fell out of favor, and a phrase from Aldous Huxley’s Brave
New World
-- ‘Centrifugal Bumble-Puppy,’ a fictitious children’s
game -- was tapped and mutated into ‘Bubble Puppy.’
Of
course, you’re now waiting for the part of the tale -- the part
that seems to exist in all 60s-band stories -- where the group gets
the kind of insanely-amazing break that leaves you wondering about
the incredible magic of an era when such things could actually happen
to real (and deserving) people. And you won’t be disappointed.
In mid-1967, without having played a single show, anywhere, ever,
Bubble Puppy was tapped to open a bill at The San Antonio coliseum.
The headliner: The Who.
David
Fore, who was Prince’s 17-year-old motorcycling compadre
and had known him for years (they had, in fact, biked all the way to
California together at some point with an eye toward starting a band
together, an idea that never panned out) came to the show. Blown
away by his friend’s band, he -- just like Potter head, earlier
-- quit high school in order to join up, replacing drummer Craig
Root.
The band then moved to Austin -- then, as now, regarded as the Texan
oasis of weirdness amidst a sea of tight-lipped conservatism -- and
set up house together in a house on Riverside Farms Road, well off
the beaten track. ‘We were a real brotherhood, we had a kind
of a family feel,’ says Fore today. ‘We all lived in the
same house right up until we moved to California.’
It’s hard to imagine how easy it was in 1967 for a band to set up house
together, somehow pay the bills, and live in relative comfort; but
that’s exactly what Bubble Puppy
(and countless other American bands) managed to do. ‘It was
pretty cheap to live back then,’ says David. ‘And
Austin, at the time, was one of the cheapest places to live. Of
course, it’s the opposite now. But we lived on virtually
nothing. It was pretty relaxed and groovy. We’d get up late
and go swimming, behind Barton Springs…then have lunch…mess
around, play cards, eat dinner. Then at about eleven PM somebody
would say, “Well, do you wanna rehearse?” and we’d
start playing. And we’d go till 4 or 5 in the morning. AndP>
then get up the next afternoon and do it all over again. [laughs]’
Between
the woodshedding and a residency at a local Austin club, The Vulcan
Gas Company, Bubble Puppy became a strong, tight band -- able to zip
through their intricately-constructed folk/pop/blues/rock/progressive
repertoire with the kind of effortless abandon you rarely see in
bands playing anything any more evolved than ‘Louie Louie.’
By 1968, they had ventured as far away as Houston -- significantly,
the home of International Artists Records -- to play at a club called
Love Street Light Circus.
Some
time thereafter, David and Todd were home in Austin while Roy and Rod
had gone back to do some session work (time has obscured the memory
of whom the session was for) -- when suddenly, just like in the
movies, they received a Western Union telegram. Not a phone call,
that wouldn’t have been cinematic enough!
‘Roy
and Rod met some record-company people up there, from International
Artists, and played them tapes of some of our songs,’ says
Fore. ‘Next thing you know, we get a telegram: “Move to
Houston STOP record deal STOP!” [laughs] That was all it
said! So we packed up the van and moved to Houston. And the record
came out a couple of months later, and took off like a shot!’
That
sounds easy, yeah? Not quite: International Artists is known today
for having discovered some of the most revered talent in rock music
history, but they’re also known for spotty business sense and
less-than-stellar treatment of their artists. Fore, who has quite a
bit of music-biz perspective post-Bubble-Puppy, laughs it off
philosophically: ‘Rumor was that those guys won the label in a
card game. Lelan Rogers was involved in it but he was never there.
But the guys that ran the place on a day-to-day basis -- [laughs]
they were idiots.’
To
be fair, the tiny local label -- run on a shoestring -- managed
somehow to service an entire nation’s demand for the 13th
Floor Elevators’ breakout single ‘You’re Gonna Miss
Me’ -- and the even-greater demand for ‘Hot Smoke and
Sassafras.’ But the record, as big as it was, was completely
non-existent in some parts of the USA. More on that in a minute.
Under
the gaze of producer Ray Rush -- whose pedigree went all the way back
to Buddy Holly -- the band whipped through their repertoire in the
studio. And -- in another cinematic moment -- they wrote ‘Hot
Smoke and Sassafras’ while there. The title apparently came
from a throwaway line on a popular TV show: ‘We were sitting
at home after coming up with the idea for the song, watching The
Beverly Hillbillies,’
recalls Fore, ‘And Granny says “Hot smoke and sassafras,
Jethro, can’t you do anything right?”’
The
song stakes its claim rapidly -- with a menacing growl of feedback
that leads into a bizarre mutant blues lick (complete with tri-tone)
-- and then lurches into a runaway-train
introduction, propelled by a savage snare-drum fill and the kind of
guitar heroism that would be right at home on any MC5 or Blue Cheer
song. And just as you’re thinking it can’t get any
better, it suddenly stops and turns into something not unlike a
madrigal -- with three-part harmonies so perfect and concise that it
sounds like the same singer doing all three parts. And before you
even have time to say ‘Whaaa…?’ the drums repeat
their rat-a-tat and it’s back onto the runaway train, and
anyone who doesn’t hang on for dear life gets squashed.
How
this odd pastiche ever found its way onto American Top-40 radio at
all is a mystery; but, as Fore says, it did indeed ‘take off
like a shot.’ Where did this song even come from??
‘Well,
you know, maybe that was because we lived out in the country, away
from everything,’ says Fore. ‘I think we had three
records in the house: The
Youngbloods, Wheels of Fire,
and Steppenwolf.
And that was all the outside influence we had!’
The
song was recorded quickly, without Potter, who was sick and skipped
the session. He added his part later. Other than that, the
recording went fairly smoothly; the band, after all, had been playing
these songs (excepting ‘Hot Smoke’) every night. But
Fore chuckles as he recalls the band’s interaction with IA’s
producers and engineers, who -- like so many others of their ilk in
those innocent pre-1970 days, had no idea how to make a rock and roll
record: ‘I remember when Rod was playing in the studio, the
engineer came running out, yelling “You can’t have
distortion on your guitar on a record! You just can’t have
it!”’
The
finished LP has a fairly wide plethora of guitar tones on it, so one
imagines that each side may have won that particular tug-of-war a
couple of times. The guitars virtually scream on ‘Beginning,’
which closes the album -- but in several other places they sound
almost polite. In places where any other band would have turned the
amplifiers up to eleven, Prince and Potter keep it understated and
let the songs speak for themselves rather than burying them under
truckloads of overdrive -- relying heavily on that round, lugubrious
neck-pickup tone peculiar to Texas bands, and so under-used
elsewhere. Cox’s bass is supportive and melodic -- so much so
that you hardly notice it at all, but when you do you can’t
help but think ‘no one else would have played that.’
Meanwhile, Fore’s drums effortlessly channel Mitch Mitchell,
skittering and dancing in places where most other drummers would have
been relentless and heavy-handed.
But
the bulk of the LP wasn’t recorded till later on; ‘Hot
Smoke’ landed on the charts without an accompanying
long-player. And it landed there the hard way, too. Released in
December 1968, it was originally the B-side:
‘Actually,
“Lonely” was originally the A-side, but the DJs in
Houston flipped it over and started playing “Hot Smoke”
instead,’ says Fore. ‘So they really broke it for us.’
Smashing
your way into the American record-buying sensibility in early 1969
with a name like ‘Bubble Puppy’ was a blessing and a
curse. The love-it-or-hate-it ‘bubblegum music’ genre
was in full swing on the Top-40 charts nationwide, and there must
have been considerable confusion. In fact, outside of Texas, I’ll
conjecture that the name might have been what got the record listened
to at radio stations
in the first place. They can only have concluded ‘Well, this
is good ANYWAY…’ and deigned to play it.
In
fact, in the spring of 1969, Bubble Puppy found themselves
lip-synching ‘Hot Smoke’ on American
Bandstand,
the virtual pinnacle of pop-music television at that time. But, as
Fore recalls, ‘I think it was us and the 1910 Fruitgum Company.
We were anything but “bubblegum,” right? But maybe
somebody thought we were, because of the name.’
The
single rose to the dizzying height of #14 on the nationwide charts,
but there were problems. Ask anyone (like, for example, me) who was
a teenager with his ear glued to the radio at the time and who lived
in New York or Los Angeles, and he’ll tell you he never heard
the record. Ever. It wasn’t on the radio and it wasn’t
in stores. The first time I ever heard of Bubble Puppy or ‘Hot
Smoke and Sassafras’ was in the early 70s when I found it on a
WFIL (Philadelphia radio station) compilation album originally
released in 1969. ‘Hmm, probably some local one-hit band that
never made it outside of Philadelphia,’ I figured. Well, um,
wrong.
The
reason for this schism? You’ve guessed it already. Payola,
which virtually owned American radio in the early 1960s, had been
decimated by several crackdowns but still existed. The larger record
labels didn’t have any problems -- with their big budgets and
their big lawyers, they were able to either laugh off any appearance
in their offices by Doug-and-Dinsdale types. Or, if they were so
inclined, give them a couple of dollars and a used Cadillac and
appease them just for fun. But small labels like IA were the only
bread-and-butter the racketeers still had readily available to them
in 1969. Chicago radio, once notorious, had been somewhat cleaned-up
by 1969 -- witness ‘Hot Smoke’s’ three-week
residency at number one in that city -- but New York and L.A. were
still crawling with record-business thugs.
David
Fore offers the following recollection: ‘We were in the studio,
right? And these guys came there wearing black suits. And they
demanded money! They said they could stop the record from being
played in places like New York. And the guys from the label just
laughed at them.’
Regardless,
the rest of the nation embraced ‘Hot Smoke’ and so an LP
was needed quickly. A
Gathering Of Promises
shows the band’s amazing range, and even a cursory listen
belies the fact that it was recorded in a hurry. But when it was
finally released, the national furor over ‘Hot Smoke and
Sassafras’ had quieted down and the album never charted higher
than #176. And -- astoundingly -- it seems that IA was approached
regarding licensing the single in the UK by none other than Apple
Records -- and TURNED THEM DOWN. Imagine, collectors, your Bubble
Puppy single comfortably nestled in your collection betwixt Mary
Hopkin and, oh, I don’t know, The Plastic Ono Band. But it
wasn’t to be.
Regardless,
the band toured relentlessly through 1969 and well into 1970, making
heavyweight headliners like Steppenwolf pull out their A-game in an
effort to avoid being blown off the stage. Not surprisingly, though,
fortune didn’t follow fame -- they were shocked to find, after
the tours, that they apparently owed International Artists money,
instead of vice-versa. They eventually left the label in
dissatisfaction and moved back to Austin.
Finally,
Nick St. Nicholas -- Steppenwolf bassist, whom they’d met on
the road -- offered to manage the deal-less Bubble Puppy, if they’d
move to Los Angeles. They jumped at the chance. But that road had
some bumps in it as well: first, there was a potential problem with
IA over the Bubble Puppy name when the band signed to Dunhill (L.A.’s
premier rock label at the time, also home to Steppenwolf) -- and the
band elected to simply change their name. Diving into literature
again, they reasoned that they’d do well to follow Steppenwolf
in choosing a Herman Hesse title -- and thus became Demian. Perhaps
one of the top five most-often-misspelled band names in history, and
go right ahead and check eBay if you don’t believe me.
Also,
the communal whole-band-living-together situation came to an end,
according to Fore: ‘When we got to L.A. we were gonna rent a
house together there too, but Roy got an offer to come live in a
house that belonged to the guy who had the lead role in the L.A.
production of Hair
-- this guy had to go to New York to be in the show there. And he
let Roy rent his house, which was up on Hollywood Boulevard. So we
all split up into different places.’
Having
shed the name that gave them unwanted connections to ‘bubblegum’
music, but which was also a nationally-recognized brand, Demian
recorded one LP for Dunhill, released in 1971. With a slightly
harder edge, as befitted the times, it nevertheless racked up
disappointing sales figures. Dunhill was losing interest in the
band, and the band lost interest in the game -- finally throwing in
the towel in 1972 and returning, individually, to Austin.
Potter
and Prince reunited to form Sirius in 1977, releasing one LP in 1979.
Fore ditched the drums for a guitar and achieved some notoriety that
same year with D-Day, courtesy of his own song ‘Too Young to
Date.’ There was even a short-lived Bubble Puppy reunion in
the 80s.
The
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland actually has a Bubble Puppy
exhibit -- part of a larger corner called ‘One-Hit Wonders.’
Scoff if you like, but there have been hundreds upon hundreds of
‘one-hit wonders’ in the USA, and Bubble Puppy is one of
the few to have been selected for the exhibit.
Now
please slip this shiny disc into your player and find out what all
the fuss was about!
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