Category: GUITARISTS

Danny Harris (65) – West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band – was born Daniel Duffy Harris in Colorado Springs, Colorado in March 1947. Danny Harris and his brother Shaun grew up in a musical family — their father, Roy Harris, was a respected composer, and their mother, Joanna Harris, was a pianist who taught at Juilliard. Both of his parents were classical music legends, Roy and Johana Harris. When John F. Kennedy made his Time Capsule of his years in the White House, Roy Harris” 3rd and 5th Symphonies were included.

In 1962, their family relocated to Los Angeles and the Harris Brothers joined a local rock band called the Snowmen, with Danny on guitar and Shaun on bass. Danny and Shaun attended the same high school as Michael Lloyd, who was playing guitar in another, more successful local group called the Rogues; Shaun was recruited to join the Rogues as bassist, and soon Michael, Shaun, and Danny began working together on music of their own. They installed a makeshift recording studio at Lloyd’s house, and cut a handful of fine singles under the name the Laughing Wind, with John Ware as their drummer. Danny played guitar in bands such as Brigadune, California Spectrum, Markley, The Laughing Wind, The Rogues (5), The Snowmen (4), The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band and Scorpio Rises

 The Laughing Wind had become acquainted with noted L.A. producer and scenester Kim Fowley, and Fowley introduced the band to Bob Markley, the Oklahoma-born son of a wealthy oil tycoon who had studied law but had ambitions of making a name for himself in music, having released an unsuccessful single for Reprise Records.

Markley owned a large mansion in Hollywood where he played host to the Yardbirds, who played a party at his home when they found they couldn’t book a public show due to problems with work permits. Markley was impressed by the attention the band received from the audience of music business insiders and teenage girls, and decided he wanted to form a band rather than work as a solo act. Markley liked the Laughing Wind well enough that he made them an offer: if he could join the group as vocalist and lyricist, he would bankroll touring expenses and new gear, including a full light show. The band agreed, and soon Markley had renamed the group the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band; he also drew up contracts that saw to it that he owned the group’s name, as well as their publishing.

And thus, one of the more offbeat acts to emerge during the psychedelic era, the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band were certainly eclectic and ambitious enough to live up to their slightly clumsy moniker, capable of jumping from graceful folk-rock to wailing guitar freakouts to atonal, multilayered, avant-garde compositions at a moment’s notice, but they also reflected a strongly divided creative mindset, with Bob Markley, the lyricist and ostensive leader of the group, on one side and the rest of the band on the other.

In 1966, Markley arranged for the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band to release their first album, Part One, which appeared on a small local label, Fifo Records; it was largely devoted to covers (many recorded by the Laughing Wind before Markley’s involvement), though he did contribute some originals such as “Insanity” and “Don’t Break My Balloon.” While the album’s sales were modest, the band won a following in Los Angeles for their adventurous sound and elaborate light show, and they landed a deal with Reprise Records. The WCPAEB’s first major-label album, Part One, was the first full flowering of the group’s musically ambitious side, through Markley’s lyrics tended to draw a polarized reaction from listeners; the album also saw the group expand into a sextet with the addition of monster guitarist Ron Morgan, another former member of the Rogues who arrived as tensions grew between Markley and Lloyd, the latter of who thought little of Markley’s talents.

In August 1967, just prior to recording sessions for the WCPAEB’s second Reprise album, Shaun Harris took a hiatus from the band. His departure was partly due to his disillusionment with the group, primarily with the WCPAEB’s lack of success, and it served as a waiting period while his brother, Danny, was being treated for depression. Lloyd was gone from the lineup for their third LP, Vol. 2: Breaking Through, released later in 1967, with all but two songs credited to Markley and Shaun Harris. By the time the group began work on their third album, the WCPAEB were beginning to splinter — Danny Harris left the band due to health problems, with guitarist extraordinaire Ron Morgan handling all the guitar chores, and John Ware was out as drummer, with session musician Jim Gordon taking his place. The finished product, A Child’s Guide to Good and Evil, is often cited as the band’s best and most adventurous work, but Markley’s convoluted lyrics became increasingly pretentious and bizarre, and when the album failed to sell, they were dropped by Reprise.

The Harris Brothers and Lloyd formed a short-lived group called California Spectrum with Danny, Lloyd, and Jimmy Greenspoon., but when Jimmy Bowen, who had produced the group’s earlier work, launched his own label, Amos Records, the WCPAEB landed a new record deal. The group’s 1969 release Where’s Daddy? credited Markley and the Harris Brothers, though Michael Lloyd and Ron Morgan also played on the sessions; the album featured several songs that dealt with young women in a somewhat disturbing manner, and once again they failed to connect with a larger audience. California Spectrum toured the Midwest with Markley’s state-of-the-art light show, and released two singles in its brief recording career, “Sassafras” (the same version featured on Volume One) and a cover of the Left Banke‘s “She May Call You Up Tonight”, none of which were met with much attention. When Harris returned to the WCPAEB in 1968, he touted a completely different line-up, and promoted the California Spectrum with his column in the teen zine Tiger Beat until the group disbanded sometime in early 1969. 

Lloyd negotiated with Curb to distribute the group’s fifth and final album on Forward Records. Released in 1970, Markley insisted the album, originally self-titled, should be released under the name Markley, A Group. The album benefited from the full involvement and production experience of Lloyd, who sang the majority of the lead vocals, provided keyboards, and organized the orchestral arrangements. Danny Harris was a key influence on the album, writing half of its tracks. However, although the album is generally considered an improvement over Where’s My Daddy?, the group could no longer cope with Markley’s erratic behavior, and disbanded soon after the album’s release.

Even by this band’s standards, the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band’s swan song was curious: Markley opted to rename the group Markley, and recorded an album titled A Group, though the full WCPAEB lineup appeared on the LP. A Group received little notice, and soon the group was history under either name. Lloyd went on to a successful career as a producer and A&R man, Shaun Harris launched a brief solo career before going into film, Ron Morgan first enriched the Electric Prunes and then went on to play with Three Dog Night.  Bob Markley produced material for other artists until he died in 2003. From the break-up on Danny Harris divided his time between acting and folk music.

Danny married his wife Victoria in 1984 and performed as a folk music duo for the full 28 years of their marriage, seven of these years in Sweden, where they resided near Stockholm. Daniel had left the band business after the demise of Westcoast Popart Experimental Band and worked in films and became a SAG member in 1997. His best role was the prison minister in The Green Mile.

Danny and his wife Victoria moved to Cambria in 2007 to care for Victoria”s mother, Irina Wilson, and remained residents in the same home. They performed locally as a duo at Sandy”s Deli and CARES, as well as Tognazzini”s Dockside in Morro Bay.  Daniel also became a member of the Cambria Chorale after having read in the Cambrian that director Michael Bierbaum”s favorite influences had been his father, Roy Harris.   Daniel also had performed in the Pewter Plough”s production of “Love Town.

Although Danny Harris was initially disillusioned with the music industry, he recorded the gospel album Thank Him Every Day in 1980. He also worked as a folk musician and actor before dying on the set of Saving Mr. Banks from a heart attack, during a noteworthy California heat wave on October 1, 2012. 

West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band – WCPAEB – A Veritable Rabbit Hole

To begin with there was the name itself. Long and unwieldy, it seemed designed to defy recollection and sink the heart of poster designers everywhere. Was it a six-word manifesto of creative intent, or simply a cynical attempt to climb aboard the ‘psychedelic’ bandwagon? Then there were the song credits and album photos, according to which a certain Bob Markley was the band’s driving force, a position seemingly confirmed by the appearance of his final ‘solo’ LP: ‘A Group’. Yet, somewhat confusingly, on the back of that album’s sleeve there appeared – for the first time since the band’s debut on the Fifo label – pictures of all four original members. Last, and definitely not least, there were the songs themselves. Along the way the music encompassed almost every musical genre – harmonic guitar pop, acoustic folk, psychedelic rock, jazz and avant-garde; and then there were those extraordinary lyrics – some starkly political, others naive and child-like; at times dark and sinister, at others simply insane. As Brian Hogg observed in his sleeve notes to Edsel’s mid-80s compilation ‘Transparent Day’: “(t)here are few groups as enigmatic, as mysterious or as plain contradictory…” This article does not pretend to be a definitive account of the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band – indeed, it now seems clear that some questions will never properly be answered – but the story which emerges is fascinating nevertheless, not least as an insight into how extraordinary music could emerge from a group driven by internal conflicts and held in the thrall of a man driven by dubious motives.

Born in Colorado Springs in 1946 and ’47 respectively, Shaun and Danny Harris were brought up with three sisters in an atmosphere of prodigious, but decidedly eccentric, talent. Their father, Roy Harris, was the world-renowned composer of sixteen symphonies while their mother, Joanna, was a classical pianist who taught post-graduate at New York’s Julliard School of Music. As Shaun ruefully recalls, such an environment proved to be something of a mixed blessing: “One day our mother was showing us a couple of harmony things on the piano and my dad came in and said to us: ‘You’re never going to even approximate my success, so let’s go out to lunch!’ Neither Danny nor I were trained in instruments when we were young and our parents didn’t force us. I think that was unfortunate. Later I would be asked to compose movie scores but I had to turn the work down because I didn’t know how to write music.” Years later, Shaun and Danny would proudly play their father the test pressing of the first Reprise album. As Dan recalls: “He listened to it in silence and then told us to sit down. We thought he really liked it until he said ‘It’s like bringing you up for seventeen years and realizing you’re members of the Hitler Youth Movement’! It was just so far removed from his way of musical thinking. That kind of thing has happened all our lives.”

Meanwhile, in Beverley Hills, despite the fact that neither of his parents were professional musicians, Michael Lloyd‘s mother insisted that he take lessons from a young age: “I had been playing classical piano since I was four. In the 4th grade of grammar school I met Jimmy Greenspoon who was a piano player too and we started playing duets and writing our own little instrumental songs. At that time we didn’t really sing so we decided that one of us had to learn the guitar. We both tried, but since Jimmy was more of a piano player than a guitar player, I learnt the guitar and that was when we started to play Surf music.” In 1962, while still at junior school, Michael and Jimmy formed their first band, the Dimensions, and began to play Surf instrumentals inspired by bands like the Ventures. The following year, having built up an impressive reputation locally as a live act, the New Dimensions [as they had now become] cut their first record at Stereo Masters, the 2-track studio where The Beach Boys had made their debut two years earlier: “We actually played with The Beach Boys at a couple of concerts, but we never thought of them as a Surf band because as far as we were concerned the real Surf music was instrumental!” Despite releasing several albums [recently compiled on a Sundazed CD], Lloyd’s band had little of the success of their illustrious predecessors, but it was while recording at Stereo Masters that Lloyd had a chance meeting which was to prove prophetic. As Kim Fowley recalls: “I was there mastering one day when I saw this kid being dropped off by his mother with several reels of tape under his arm. I guess I was 24 and he was 14. I said to him “Excuse me young man, are you a musician, engineer or producer?” He said “All three. Who are you?” It was the beginning of a friendship that was to prove highly significant, not just for Fowley and Lloyd, but also for the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band.

When The Beatles invaded America in 1964 Michael Lloyd, in common with many others, realized that the future belonged to vocal music. For a brief period the New Dimensions performed and recorded as a vocal group under the name the Alley Kats, but when the members drifted apart Michael formed a new group, the Rogues. In the Fall of ’64 he left High School and entered the comparatively liberal atmosphere of Hollywood Professional School and it was there that he met the Harris brothers for the first time.

Shaun and Danny had been living very much in the shadow of their parents’ musical careers, which had taken them all over North America and beyond, but in 1962 the Harris family settled in Los Angeles. It wasn’t long before the two brothers joined the Snowmen, a local band who had already had a minor hit, ‘Ski Storm’, under the guidance of producer Kim Fowley. Shaun remembers: “The guitar player was Chris Gordon who I met at a Summer Camp for entertainers’ children in the mountains. I contacted him when we got back to LA and we ended up in that band. We had a rehearsal place behind one of the members’ houses. Up until then Danny and I had been playing more like folk music and I had never used an electric guitar – only a nylon stringed acoustic – but I really liked playing this guy’s Stratocaster and twin reverb amp. I liked being in a band but I never felt I had the stage presence for it – I just liked the music. The first recording I actually remember was called ‘While I Was Away’, or something like that. When it was pressed up I drove out to California going to little radio stations, but I had no idea of the complexity of the record industry. I heard it played a few times, but it never really saw the light of day. That was quite dispiriting really. When Danny and I went to Hollywood Professional School Lloyd was in a band called the Rogues and we were in the Snowmen. There was a little bit of competition and I remember them coming to see us one night. Michael had real dedication but the rest of his band were just High School students looking for something extra to do [one member of the group, Michael Lembeck, went on to be the Director of the TV show ‘Friends’]. Danny and I had a whole lot of dedication too and I started playing bass in the Rogues. I had never played bass guitar before, but Michael showed me how in about 5 minutes.” For a short while Shaun played bass in the Rogues and whilst he was a member the band released a single on Fowley’s Living Legend label. Entitled ‘Wanted: Dead Or Alive’ b/w ‘One Day’, the A-side was a joint composition between Michael and Shaun.

Danny also remembers this time: “I went to the same Santa Monica High School as Ry Cooder and we would play Bluegrass together. When Shaun and I joined the Snowmen I was 16 and he was 17 and we played every night at the Methodist Church in Pacific Palisades. Although I could play great Bluegrass and Country guitar, I was such a bad electric guitarist that they only allowed me to play a nylon acoustic and no one could hear me! It was just at this time that we met Michael who had his own band the Rogues. Shortly after that we started our last years in High School at the Hollywood Professional School. At that time Michael was living in Beverley Hills and we were living in Malibu, so we would come by and pick him up on the way into school. The teachers there were all at least eighty years old with shiny blue hair. I stood for Student Boy President and won! So I got to meet people like O.J. Simpson. He spoke at the Police Academy and told me: ‘Stay at school Dan and get into your music, but stay healthy!’ Kim Fowley and Michael came out to hear us playing at the church. That was the time when he had groups like the Laughing Wind who were recording on Tower Records. It was a week after that we started playing together. You could say that it happened over night. We were going to the same school and all playing in bands.”

After the trio realized that they shared a common passion for music, they used some recording equipment borrowed from Shaun and Danny’s father to set up a small studio in Michael’s bedroom. It was there that they made some of the rudimentary recordings which would later appear as ‘Volume 1’ on the Fifo label under the name of the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band. Shaun: “My dad had some old Ampex recording equipment in his garage and we took this stuff over to Michael’s house. We would work all night and have school the next day and make demo records for people like Kim Fowley. The personnel in those days were Danny Belsky [who had already played sax with Lloyd in the Dimensions], Michael, Danny and me. Dennis Lambert was a guitar player in the band in the early days and later we added John Ware [who replaced Belsky] on drums. My girlfriend took the picture on the cover of the Fifo album – I think that was outside our recording studio in Beverley Hills.”
As Lloyd recalls: “We sat in my bedroom for a while with some Ampex tape machines and did some stuff there, but then that got to be crazy – we couldn’t have any drums. So we found a little place to rent nearby and we ended up putting our version of a little studio in and recorded all kinds of things, including that record. It was two track and Mono and we really squeezed by on whatever was handy – which wasn’t much – but it was fun. I remember at about that time the Yardbirds were playing in a club over in Hollywood and we hung around with them for a little while, specifically for Jeff Beck, and watched them play. So when we did the Fifo album it was, you know, Fender amplifiers up full and we would hit them and that’s what’s happening in our version of ‘You Really Got Me’. I don’t know if I could get the same sound again. It is just so over-driven, so much distortion – it was crazy! And that’s what all that was about. We would just kind of do each song, see what it sounded like, and then go on to the next one. Not a lot of time was spent on it.”

Danny: “The Fifo album was recorded in the Burton Way studio. The equipment was so good that word got around that we were not just a demo house – we were mastering. We would watch the British invasion on ‘Shindig’ and we loved the sounds. The harmonies of Peter & Gordon and Chad & Jeremy. We loved Marianne Faithfull, we thought the Dave Clark Five were stupendous and, of course, we saw The Beatles at the Dodgers’ Stadium. That was a catalyst to us in the sense that we thought: ‘If these guys can do it then so can we!’ After all, if it hadn’t been for Brian Epstein they might have stayed in Hamburg or Liverpool.”

Judging by their achievements thus far, it is clear that Shaun, Danny and Michael lacked neither the talent nor the ambition to achieve considerable success – had they been left to their own devices. According to Lloyd, the trio had already released a single on Tower records – ‘Good To Be Around’ b/w ‘Don’t Take Very Much To See Tomorrow’ – under the guise of the Laughing Wind. Their destiny was, however, about to take a rather unusual turn, for it was during the period of these early recordings that the fateful meeting with Bob Markley came about.

The unwitting introduction was made by Kim Fowley: “I first met Markley in 1960 because we shared the same Attorney. He was about 7 years older than me and was a guy in the tradition of Robert Conrad. He had a Colgate smile and he looked like an actor. As a child he had been adopted by an oil millionaire. He got a degree in law and was in college groups playing the bongos – a beatnik kind of thing – and he had a TV show in Oklahoma which was like American Bandstand. So there he was as the Dick Clark of Norman, Oklahoma when this Warner Bros executive came through town, saw him on camera and said: “Gee, why don’t you come to Hollywood and be an actor?” So he went to Hollywood and got signed to Warner Bros, but he failed as an actor and then he recorded that single – it was worse than Fabian! Luckily he still had his inheritance and his big house. So he was an actor, singer and lawyer who didn’t act, couldn’t sing and never practised law!” That single was, of course, the infamous Bob Markley ’45 released on Warner Bros: ‘Summer’s Comin’ On’ b/w ‘It Should Have Been Me’. Although on its surface a fairly standard piece of teenage doo-wop, there is something decidedly weird about the record and Markley’s spoken ‘rap’ anticipates the vocal style which he would later adopt on songs like ‘1906’. It would be no coincidence when, a few years later, the Reprise subsidiary of the same label released three albums by the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band.

 In 1965 the Yardbirds followed hot on the heels of The Beatles with their first US tour. It was not a runaway success. As Kim Fowley recalls: “When I was in London in 1964 I met the Yardbirds at Richmond Athletic Club and became friendly with Giorgio Gomelsky. When they came to the States the following year he rang me up to tell me that they were in danger of being thrown out of the country because they didn’t have work permits. Apparently the only way they could perform was by playing a private party. So Giorgio asked me if I could fill a house with people that would break the group and I agreed.” The chosen venue was a smart mansion which Markley had rented in a fashionable district of Beverley Hills. “I told Epic to invite all the radio programmers and rock critics and we had over 180 industry journalists, programme directors, disc jockeys and a handful of the in-crowd. Al Kooper was the warm up act and Phil Spector came with his binoculars so he could watch Jeff Beck’s fingers. The Yardbirds started playing in the dark and when we put the lights up people cried and threw roses.” Amongst the guests were three awestruck teenagers – Michael, Shaun and Danny Harris. They were ‘blown away’ by the band and, like Spector, a certain member’s highly unorthodox guitar technique. As Lloyd recalls: “Jeff Beck was hitting the amplifier with his guitar and using an Vox AC30 to overdrive an AC100. In those days there weren’t any of the little attachments to produce that distorted feedback kind of sound. So there they were playing and I remember in the middle of ‘For Your Love’ and ‘I’m Your Man’ he was doing all these amazing things and we had never heard anything like it”.

But Markley was, apparently, less impressed by the Yardbirds than he was by the crowd which they had drawn to his house – especially the large number of teenage girls. So when Fowley introduced him to Michael, Shaun and Danny and told him that they had a band of their own, he took an immediate interest. According to Lloyd: “He seemed like an OK guy. We were really impressed that he had this great house and he knew all these starlets and stuff. At that time we didn’t have too much equipment and we wanted to get a light show, and so here was this guy who was saying to us: ‘Well, I want to be in your band. What I’ll do is I’ll get the equipment and I’ll just play the tambourine or congas or something’. So that is what happened. He had seen the incredible amount of girls that thought rock and roll was really cool and that was his only motivation.”

Kim Fowley adds another insight: “Knowing Markley he hustled the younger guys. He saw that with Michael and the Harris brothers he could have a Hollywood Surf version of The Velvet Underground with some Frank Zappa thrown in. The Velvets had played in New York and nobody had paid much attention, but Markley followed the media – he wasn’t stupid.” So it was that in this unlikely alliance the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band was born.

It seems that much of the material which made up the Fifo album was already completed by the time Markley became involved. However, the inclusion of certain tracks – ‘Don’t Break My Balloon’ [a prime example of Bob’s ‘singing’] and ‘If You Want This Love’ – indicates that he must have had some influence over the sessions and, more to the point, their subsequent release on vinyl. As Shaun concedes, it was Bob who had the money and the contacts: “The Fifo album came about because Markley was the one who had the money to press up the records and wanted something tangible. He came up with the name – I think it was after he saw The Velvet Underground – but I thought it was pretentious and over-long. We started playing at a trendy club called The Other Place (so-called because there was a trendier club nearby called The Daisy) on Tuesday nights and we had the first on-going light show with a movie screen [see the back cover of the first Reprise album]. Markley would bring people out to watch us and that probably led to the deal with Reprise.”

Danny’s recollections are similar: “How did we end up on Reprise? That’s where Markley came in. It all happened in about six months from the time of the Yardbirds party where he heard about us, but I don’t give Markley any credit. He didn’t discover us. We already had our own studio and he had a volcanic rock pool! Starlets would come up to his house on a Sunday and we wandered into that. It was a kind of trade-off. We said: ‘OK. We’ll record these songs and put them out as a West Coast Pop Art thing and in return we want to be able to come up here and hang out’. Markley was ten, maybe fifteen years older than us and with his long hair and expensive clothes he personified the sixties look, but he had the mind of an astute lawyer. He was gifted with his tongue but not in a musical way. The biggest taunt we could give him was when he was throwing a party and we would put on that single that he did for Warner Bros!
Markley was very good at meeting people and ingratiating himself. He said ‘I’m from Tulsa, Oklahoma, son of an oil tycoon, I own my own house, I lease my place up here on the Strip and all I have to do is find a band, become a non-musical member and look the part’. Then he said that he had registered the name and not the members of the group, that he could replace anyone he chose and even sack the band. He put all the publishing through his own company – that was a typical Attorney’s move – and even though we played some big places like Birmingham, Alabama, all our earnings were nothing like they should have been.”

According to Lloyd, Bob “came to Hollywood, he had a lot of money and he liked to meet people. He played tennis at Jack Warner’s house, who used to own Warner Bros. It was a whole different kind of echelon from what we were working with – we would have been lucky to meet Jack Warner’s gardener!” As for the name, Lloyd explains: “The ‘Pop Art’ stuff was because of Andy Warhol, ‘Experimental’ because we could do almost any kind of music at that point and ‘West Coast’ because we were on the West Coast which at the time was this mystical, special place. Also it was just an odd name. It wasn’t a very serious statement of intent. I think we were just trying to put something together that sounded interesting.”

In the early days the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band appeared fairly regularly on the Los Angeles live circuit and it wasn’t long before they ventured beyond the rather cramped confines of clubs like The Other Place. As Shaun recalls: “The Velvet Underground’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable had been up on Sunset and Markley assembled the light show. We played live at that time and I remember playing at some Exhibition Centre with Frank Zappa and Little Gary Ferguson.” A flier for a gig at The Shrine Exposition Hall on the 17th of September 1966 shows the group sharing a line-up with the Mothers of Invention, the Count V, Lowell George’s Factory and the ‘sensational 7 year old’ Ferguson. The band’s photo shows Lloyd, Markley, the Harris brothers and John Ware sitting in field of flowers. “That was an old picture. Danny is wearing the glasses and the guy on the right was John Ware who played drums.” The latter’s fairly scathing account of the band’s early days, given in an interview with the Omaha Rainbow in 1981, is well known. According to Ware the band’s live performances, dominated by an ambitious light show directly inspired by Andy Warhol, were “the ultimate street happening for a while”, but he suggests that Markley was cynically motivated by the commercial exploitation of his largely teenage audience. He concludes: “It was so dumb. It had nothing to do with music.” Shaun is not impressed: “Ware had a way of saying things which was pretentious, you could say delusional, even. We didn’t make tons of money.” The light show was clearly a large part of the band’s appeal. As Fowley recalls: “I only saw them play once – at The Daisy. It was full of lots of teenagers who Markley had assembled to witness his greatness. They had a great light show done by Buddy Walters, a Hillbilly guy who later did the lights for Hendrix and The Animals.” And Lloyd said: “I think we had some sort of a following around here, I mean the Mothers of Invention opened up for us at the Shrine Auditorium when we played there. It was this gigantic light show that we used.”

With a certain irony, in the summer of 1967 the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band actually played with the Yardbirds [although Jeff Beck had by this time been replaced by Jimmy Page]. Also on the bill at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium were the Strawberry Alarm Clock, Captain Beefheart and Moby Grape and a review of the gig appeared in the LA Free Press. Despite describing the band as “instrumentally quite good” the reviewer took no care to disguise his contempt for their “non-participating producer and general hypester”, observing that “a kid in the audience was keeping better time on his tambourine than Markley.” How far this was a genuine reflection of the group’s live act, and the talents of their apparent leader in particular, is hard to judge – the Free Press was a notoriously left-wing newspaper which would inevitably have taken an antagonistic stance to a band from Beverly Hills – but photographs taken of the group playing at The Other Place the previous year, do show Markley brandishing a tambourine, his microphone conspicuous by its absence.

Wherever the truth lay, the Reprise debut album ‘Part One’ was a stunning album, not least on account of its lurid orange cover, which attempted to convey the excitement of the band’s live performance. In the effusive words of the Los Angeles Times reviewer quoted on the back cover, this was “a total experience. The group developed an S.R.O [standing room only] following”. The music occupied a broad scope, ranging from anthemic pop songs and acoustic ballads to harder-edged psychedelic numbers, but the eclectic mixture said much about the band’s internal contradictions. Markley’s influence surely lay behind the unlikely choice for the album’s only single: ‘1906’ b/w ‘Shifting Sands’. Since the songs were credited to Markley/Morgan and Baker Knight respectively, it was obvious who was in control. Despite being on a major label and having a limited release in France, the single, like the album, was not a commercial success and, given the A-side’s bizarre lyrics, this was hardly surprising. For example:

From the very beginning the rest of the band were unhappy with Markley’s dominance in the studio which was, in their opinion, out of all proportion to his musical ability. According to Shaun: “In the early days we had to acquiesce with Markley telling us what to do. The part that was frustrating was that he had no musical aptitude of any kind and so what he was trying to do to be different and innovative ended up sounding contrived. It was an embarrassment. I still feel that way.”
Danny agrees: “The musical talent in the band belonged to Shaun, Michael and myself, period. Shaun was an incredible bass player and on the first Reprise album I did a lot of the finger-picking stuff. But not only that. There was a lot of feedback, a lot of spontaneous stuff, a lot of one-take cuts.” It is arguable, however, that such internal tensions contributed much to the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band’s unique sound, since one of the undoubted strengths of their three Reprise albums lay in the constant juxtaposition of musical styles; not just between songs, but also within them. One of those extraordinary tracks was ‘Leiyla’, another was the ‘Overture’ on ‘Volume Two’. Danny: “While decibels of sound were exploding outside I would be sitting in an isolation booth listening on headphones where I would lay on a little classical thing – like a Bach cantata – right into the song.”

Although Jimmy Bowen was co-credited with Markley as the album’s Producer, he apparently made little contribution to the actual recording. As Danny recalls: “Bowen would come in with his wife at the top of the sessions at United Western recording studios and then come back after three or four hours to check it out. By that time we would have finished a song, including the vocal harmonies and everything, and he would say: ‘My god! A silk purse from a sow’s ear!'” But the presence of Bowen, who had begun his career in Texas with Buddy Holly and later went on to be a Country music producer for MCA, may have had more to do with why the band were able to record for Reprise in the first place.

Shaun: “Jimmy Bowen was basically a southern guy and Markley was from Oklahoma and that was probably how they met.” Another southern contact was Baker Knight, who composed both ‘Shifting Sands’ and ‘If You Want This Love’. “Markley had a friend called Baker Knight who wrote Ricky Nelson’s songs and ‘The Wonder Of You’ for Elvis. Because they had been hits he acted as if he could write songs for any genre – even psychedelic music. He had written very good pop songs but these were fifteen years before. ‘Shifting Sands’ was a good song but I think this owed as much to our arrangement as anything else.” According to Fowley: “‘If You Want This Love’ was originally a hit on Aurora Records for Sonny Knight, a black artist. I remember Markley told me a story once that Baker Knight had tried to commit suicide by sticking his head in a gas oven and lighting a match and he had to have plastic surgery.” By an interesting coincidence [or was it?] Jimmy Bowen’s wife, Keely Smith, had also recorded a swing version of the song under the title ‘This Love of Mine’. Danny: “We changed the time signature and made it very driving. I remember when Baker Knight first heard the playback he didn’t know what to make of it and said [adopts gruff southern drawl]: ‘Hey! I thought this was a Country song!'”

The group’s more commercial side was represented by two tracks which showcased their immaculate harmonies. According to Danny ‘Transparent Day’ “came about in the studio, much like the Everly Brothers. Shaun and I wrote that with Michael.” ‘Here’s Where You Belong’ was, of course, written by the immortal P.F. Sloan: “We were recording a thing for the Ed Sullivan show at The Other Place. It wasn’t a live recording, they were taping our group with our lightshow. Phil Sloan came by with this tune of his – it was this folk-rock Byrds kind of song – and I think Shaun had heard some of his stuff and felt that, if it was embellished with some electric guitar and our three-part harmonies, it could become a very powerful song and help our album out. Michael agreed and so the three of us met with Phil and he had to show us sheet music and how it sounded – these were the days before you had demo tapes – and I guess we recorded that about two weeks later.”
Lloyd recalls: “P.F. Sloan was a big name around here, he was like a big time songwriter. We were going to do a another of his songs called ‘Where Were You When I Needed You’, but I think, because the Grass Roots had the hit, we just didn’t get it recorded in time.” Further contrast was provided by the tracks which closed each side of the album. According to Dan, ‘Will You Walk With Me’ was “primarily coming from a classical background – there’s a string quartet and a celeste.” The song was also a good opportunity for him to demonstrate his ability on the acoustic guitar. The announcement ‘Part 1: The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band’, which introduces Van Dyke Parks’ ‘High Coin’, was an echo of the group’s live act, where the piece would be used to open each portion of the show.
Danny: “Parks was a brilliant musician. His was a piano rendition but for that first album I made my own arrangement so that it became like our break song. To me that was the high point were we blended the acoustic and electric sounds and tied it together with harpsichord.” As Lloyd recalls: “When we played live that was how we used to end each set and begin the next and that’s how ‘Part 1’, ‘Part 2’, etc. came about. We always liked that chord progression – it would fit into our folk kind of thing – but we never really knew the song.” The tune would later reappear on Lloyd’s wonderful Smoke album under the title ‘Daisy Intermission’.

There has long been confusion about who actually participated in the band’s recordings once they were signed to Reprise. According to Shaun: “We recorded the first Reprise album some time in 1966, although it wasn’t released until the following year. I was playing bass, Danny was playing acoustic guitar and either Hal Blaine or Jimmy Gordon played drums. I’m trying to remember who played guitar – I think it was Ron Morgan. Ron was friends with some of the Standells. He was a great guitar player but he had no sense of responsibility or being on time. Sometimes he wouldn’t turn up at all – he wouldn’t even get out of bed to catch a flight! The last I heard of Ron he was driving a cab in Denver.”
The involvement of Morgan, whose distinctive lead guitar playing can be heard on this and all their subsequent albums, has long been overlooked.

A clue to his involvement can to be found on the labels of the records themselves, where he is credited (alongside Markley) with writing some of the most significant songs: ‘1906’, ‘Smell Of Incense’, ‘Eighteen Is Over The Hill’, ‘As The World Rises And Falls’ and ‘A Child Of A Few Hours Is Burning To Death’. Despite this, he appears in only a single album photo – as the mysterious mustachioed figure in the round glasses and cowboy hat on the back of ‘A Child’s Guide To Good And Evil’. He would look much the same a year or so later when he turned up as a member of the ‘new improved’ Electric Prunes on their dismal Reprise swan song ‘Just Good Old Rock And Roll’.

The involvement of Ron Morgan also had another significance, because it seems that his arrival coincided with the departure of Michael Lloyd, an early casualty of the internal conflicts which would eventually destroy the band completely. According to Shaun: “Morgan got involved to replace Michael which was a thing between him and Markley – that was the time when Michael was starting his other projects.” Danny recalls: “I was never involved in that. It wasn’t Michael’s fault. It was a personality conflict because people liked Michael and they didn’t like Markley. The people who liked Markley were the sort of people who wanted to hang out at his house and meet starlets. I remember we were recording an album and there was an argument between Michael and Markley about who was going to walk out of the studio with the master tapes. It developed into a fistfight and Michael broke a guitar over Markley’s back. He just decided ‘Who needs this when I can do this by myself?’ So the studio was shut down over at Burton Way and he had a custom-made 16 track put in his own home. At that time another guy was hired just to play the guitar – that was Ron Morgan. He was a very good lead guitar player and when the band dissolved he went on to play with Three Dog Night. Unfortunately he died last year in a car accident.”

Lloyd himself has difficulty recalling exactly which of the group’s recordings he participated in, but in view of the vast number of other projects in which he was involved this is hardly surprising. During 1966 and ’67, as well as doing production work for Kim Fowley and Mike Curb, he also produced, played and sang on LPs by October Country and his own band the Smoke. He even found time to score Steven Spielberg’s first short film ‘Amblin”. Lloyd only shared one song-writing credit on ‘Part One’ – the beautifully understated ‘I Won’t Hurt You’ – and although he had sung lead on the Fifo version of the track, the Reprise recording was sung by Shaun, who also took lead vocals on most of the other songs on the album. Michael’s name or voice would not reappear on any of the band’s records until the ‘Where’s My Daddy?’ LP. According to Lloyd: “The problem was that, after a little while, it became more and more difficult for the three of us to be in a group with Markley. I don’t want to make it sound like we hated him or that it got into a huge scene, but he started to believe that he was like, you know, the real deal, as opposed to the guy who doesn’t sing and doesn’t really have any musical thoughts and stuff like that. He wasn’t content anymore just being the guy who ended up with the girls that he could get from it. Now he wanted to be respected or something – he wanted more out of it. Well, we had a lot of problems with that, because that wasn’t the deal and yet we were in this kind of symbiotic relationship. So I ended up getting a deal with Tower and Shaun and Danny and I did some stuff over there as the Laughing Wind, but nothing really happened with that.”
On the question of who sang on the records, Lloyd says: “Sometimes all three of us would sing at the same time, like on ‘Sassafras’ for instance. We recorded that as the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band, but never used it and put it out later as the California Spectrum. Occasionally we did stuff like that, because Shaun and Danny were kind of folk based – acoustic guitar, finger-picking stuff, you know – and they were used to singing kind of group stuff together. Not like lead singer / backing singer, which I was used to, but people singing harmony all at once. That was something a little different for me and it was a good influence. We did a lot of stuff like that – I don’t remember now on a song by song basis – but a lot of them were Shaun alone. Who sang kind of depended on who was fighting with Bob at the moment and who wasn’t, you know. Before, on the first recordings, it was almost always me and then later, when I had a falling out with Bob, it was mostly Shaun. It was like ‘Well see, he’s my favourite now’, you know.”

Recorded and released in 1967, ‘Volume Two’ (Reprise RS 6270) was a more ambitious work than its predecessor, with all of the tracks credited either in whole or in part to members of the band. The cover art was particularly striking, at its centre a photograph taken through a fish-eye lens showing Shaun, Bob and Danny sitting bare-chested on the floor of a silver bathroom. Inspired, apparently, by the Bond film ‘Goldfinger’, the interior was also highly reminiscent of Warhol’s foil-covered Factory in New York. If one looks very closely, Markley appears to be grinning from ear to ear. On the back of the LP the band’s name appeared beneath the slogan: ‘Breaking Through’ and at the bottom was the declaration: “Every song in this album has been written, arranged, sung and played by the group. No one censored us. We got to say everything we wanted to say, in the way we wanted to say it”. Markley, no doubt, saw this as the perfect expression of the agenda which, like the name, he had foisted on the band, but as far as Shaun Harris is concerned, for ‘we’ read ‘Bob Markley’: “The cover was an Art Director’s bathroom in a house in LA. It was probably someone who Markley knew, but if you look at the back cover you’ll notice that his picture is bigger than Danny’s and mine and this is a guy who is hardly on the record!” Well, in one sense that is true, for, as on the other records, Bob did not play any instrument (with the possible exception of percussion) and even though he contributed some of the vocals this was generally limited to his manic speaking, leaving the actual singing to the Harris brothers. But his ideas and, of course, his lyrics, dominated the record.

The album’s startling opening was ‘In The Arena’, a bold, if not entirely convincing, political satire dominated by Morgan’s strident guitar, Markley’s megaphone-sounding voice and Shaun and Danny’s cascading quasi-religious harmonies. But none of this quite prepared the listener for what followed. ‘Suppose They Give A War And No One Comes?‘ was again dominated by Markley’s extraordinary lyrics, although in this instance the missing credit should have gone to Franklin D. Roosevelt. The opening lines were borrowed from part of a famous anti-isolationist speech which he delivered at Chautauqua, New York State on the 14th of August 1936:

“I have seen war. I have seen war on land and sea. I have seen blood running from the wounded. I have seen men coughing out their gassed lungs. I have seen the dead in the mud. I have seen cities destroyed. I have seen two hundred limping, exhausted men come out of line – the survivors of a regiment of one thousand that went forward forty-eight hours before. I have seen children starving. I have seen the agony of mothers and wives. I hate war.”

Complete with ‘primitive’ noises, an army of percussion and building to an impressive climax before ending with the sound of a baby’s cries the composition stretches the listener’s credibility to its limits.
Dan: “Here’s this song with a strong rhythm behind it and we would slowly build up a wall of sound from the bottom up and the vocal was almost the least important part. The harmonies were right but the lyrics… well we thought that Markley was just an idiot who was trying to fit into a groove that he just wasn’t into.” Depending upon your point of view, it’s either one the most pretentious things you’ve ever heard or a brilliant expression of anti-war sentiment.

Despite co-writing and singing on the next track, ‘Buddha’, Shaun was not impressed with the results: “Believe me, I’m not going to ask that they play that at my wake! Markley would give you a page of lyrics and tell you what sort of song he wanted it to be – that would be ‘slow’ or ‘fast’ – but he couldn’t tell you nuances or anything like that.”
The album’s undoubted highlight, however, was ‘Smell of Incense’, which featured some wonderful interplay between Morgan’s hypnotic guitar, Shaun’s excellent bass playing and some extraordinary drumming from either Blaine or Gordon topped with the Harris brothers’ breathy vocals. Despite the track’s somewhat heady atmosphere, Danny insists that none of the band’s music was drug inspired: “We lived the legend without the drugs. Shaun and I were Irish kids so we both drank a bit, but Michael had a very strict upbringing so he never even drank and Shaun never smoked.” Kim Fowley adds to this: “I didn’t drink, Michael Lloyd was brought up strictly and he didn’t drink and Markley didn’t drink either. All this madness was done without drink or drugs – not even dope. All of Babylon was raging about us but Pat Boone could have walked in and not been offended!”

On the vexed question of what category the band’s music fell into, Danny has this to say: “Was our music psychedelic? I would say that it needed a moniker and all the rest of the stuff was bullshit. We were a band who considered that we could play any style of music – we had classical nuances in all of our albums. Many of these songs were created in the studio and Ron Morgan was a definite influence on the album – this was the one where Michael wasn’t there. Ron’s father was a jazz musician who played in pizza restaurants in Denver. Because he was a lead player I taught him how to fingerpick. This was an opening up our music into an honest statement of what it was – not when we were still searching for some common ground that people would buy. We never cared if it sold or not.”

After the Overture, with Danny’s short but beautiful coda, closed the first side, the flip was something of a contrast. For the first time – but not the last – the dominating theme of Markley’s lyrics was either girls or women, although the distinction between the two seems deliberately ambiguous. ‘Queen Nymphet’ opened the side with the words: “You’re too young / You’re just a child” and continued with the refrain “When you’re older”. ‘Unfree Child’, the B-side to the group’s second and last single – an edited version of ‘Smell of Incense’ – was also the nearest which Bob ever came to singing on record. Beyond the atmospheric beginning of slowed-down tape effects and echoing guitar and tabla the song addressed the unfree child “sitting at a dull desk in a dull school”, then built slowly to a climax before Markley declared: “Let her be free. Let her sneak off on an adventure. Come tomorrow we’ll watch the dawn. Delicate fawn. Let her be free.”

According to Shaun the blistering guitar track ‘Carte Blanche’, with its repeated “Hey Trish, come on home!” and lines like “You left behind a hotel chain and a stately reputation”, was based on a real person: “Carte Blanche was a credit card tied to the Hilton Hotels and Markley was friendly with Trish Hilton who was married to one of the family.” One of Danny’s contributions to the album was the banjo-driven ‘Delicate Fawn’: “That was a very polite little song about a guy who falls in love with a girl and wants to take her riding on his BSA motorbike. I said ‘I don’t want a bass player on this, it’s too heavy.’ So we used a tuba instead and we brought in a bagpipe player who was from the Black Watch – we got him through the Musicians’ Union! We didn’t know how to end the song so we just had him let the air out of the bag”. The song ended with the line “Stay away from dirty old men.” Says Shaun: “If Markley was obsessed with children it wasn’t in a positive way.”

Unfortunately, the inspiration behind the most obviously biographical song, the jazz-flavoured ‘Tracy Had A Hard Day Sunday’ – about a girl who “lit her candle at both ends and started flipping out on Monday” – remains a mystery. According to Shaun: “These were always personal glimpses, these were people Markley knew.”

By 1968 the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band were poised to release their fourth album – but their last for Reprise. Thus far, in terms of record sales at least, they had conspicuously failed to set the world alight – or even the small corner they call Los Angeles. Yet in many ways ‘Volume III – A Child’s Guide To Good And Evil‘ was the group’s most extraordinary achievement. A newspaper piece of the time – the only contemporary record of Markley’s words beyond his lyrics and sleeve pronouncements – provides us with a tantalizing insight into the creative processes at work within the group. After describing a rare live appearance by the band at a Teenage Fair in Portland, Oregon – at which six girls apparently fainted – Bob was quoted as saying this about ‘A Child’s Guide’: “The lyrical content is so meaningful and gets in so deep that we are treading the fine line of perfect taste. Donovan did it on his ‘Sunshine Superman’ album, Dylan did it on ‘John Wesley Harding’ and I hope that we did it here. What I try and do is take as much material about a subject as I can, condense it to an exact point and hope to capture all the meaning that maybe forty pages of material would have.” The article pointed to the album’s closing track, ‘Anniversary Of World War III’, as the perfect example of Bob’s economy with words – three minutes of total silence.

Whether one views the comparisons with Dylan and Donovan as justified – or merely as evidence of Markley’s delusions of grandeur – the album was certainly the band’s most complex offering to date. As its title suggested, the work was a fusion of innocence and malice, the subject matter perfectly reflected in John Van Hamersveld’s striking cover art work. If the ‘butterfly mind’ represented both the transience of innocence and the psychedelic possibilities of a mind in free flight, its stark black and white setting rendered the image distinctly sinister. Hamersveld, who began working as an Art Director for Capitol Records in 1966, produced some of the most enduring images of the age, including the poster for cult surf movie ‘Endless Summer’ and album covers like Jefferson Airplane’s ‘Crown Of Creation’ and the Stones’ ‘Exile On Main Street’. In 1967 he formed the Pinnacle partnership and promoted gigs at the Shrine Auditorium by the likes of Jimi Hendrix, Cream and the Velvet Underground.

John recalls his work on ‘A Child’s Guide’: “Bob Markley wanted a photograph of the band on the back so I took them up onto a hillside near Burbank and photographed them in colour with a Hasselblad camera and a wide angle lens. For the front cover I used the face from a photograph of Stevie, an artist friend who would pose nude for me. I combined my drawings and letterforms in black and white to create a stark contrast in the record racks. Black and white was also an issue in terms of dark and light karma. The butterfly’s wings are a psychological symbol for reading in to the mind, like an ink blot test by a psychologist, but as art. In this image, the head is thinking of the butterfly image – freedom from the karma in the well of darkness.” It was surely one of the most powerful and iconic cover illustrations of its era.

The contrast between light and darkness extended into the music, with the naive peace-and-love message of some of the songs sitting uneasily beside the ironic cynicism of tracks like ‘A Child Of A Few Hours Is Burning To Death’ (“We should have called Suzie and Bobby / They like to watch fires!” Bob cheerfully intoned). Once again, Shaun was distinctly unimpressed with Markley’s ideas and he is at a loss to explain the meaning behind many of the song titles – let alone the lyrics. Take ‘Our Drummer Always Plays In The Nude’, for example: “That certainly wasn’t true! It was just another of his contrived attempts to be hip”. Or ‘Until The Poorest People Have Money To Spend’: “Rest assured that Markley would have been the last person in the world to give anyone a farthing!” Shaun had grown increasingly tired of the way in which his carefully crafted pop compositions were being highjacked by Markley’s bizarre musical agenda: “There would be times when you would have a good melody and you would think: ‘I don’t want to waste it on this…'” Yet, arguably, it was precisely these contradictions which made the work so powerful and unnerving, the disparate words and music often entwining with remarkable effect. Nowhere were the group’s internal conflicts better highlighted than on the album’s title track. The song opened with Shaun’s gorgeous riff and the harmonic fanfare of the wordless chorus before descending unexpectedly into another of Markley’s extraordinary monologues:

The mixture of the magical and the macabre was reminiscent of the ‘fairy’ tales of the brothers Grimm, Lewis Carroll’s ‘Alice In Wonderland’ or ‘The Wizard Of Oz’, but set to music, as it was here, the unnerving contrast between verse and chorus made the song hauntingly effective.

Another highlight was the Markley / Morgan composition ‘As The World Rises and Falls’. The song’s irresistible guitar line evoked the chord progressions of ‘Smell Of Incense’ while the lyrics were some of Markley’s most mysterious and poetic. Sung by Shaun, the dreamy, echoing vocals and lead guitar leant the song an eerie beauty:

Once more, Ron Morgan’s strident lead guitar dominated the record. For the first time electric sitar – the unmistakable sound of a Coral Electric – was much in evidence, featuring prominently on ‘Ritual #1’, ‘Until The Poorest Of People…’, ‘A Child’s Guide…’ and ‘Ritual #2’. As Morgan’s younger brother, Bob, recalls: “Ron could really put on his guitar antics! He would use some very unusual effects. He had a Magnatone which Seers Roebuck made for accordions and it had a wild organ-type of sound. He would also use a Lesley speaker and a lot of Vox equipment – amps and 12-strings – because the group were sponsored by them for a while.” The album also used some interesting tape effects. According to Shaun, the 3-note electric sitar line on ‘Ritual #1’ was pre-recorded and then looped. Even more bizarrely, ‘As Kind As Summer’ featured a speeded-up-and-slowed-down-tape sequence which sounded the same played both forwards and backwards but made no sense in either direction!

Like many classic albums (and, no doubt, many more deservedly forgotten) ‘A Child’s Guide To Good And Evil’ was recorded by a group in a state of crisis. Effectively, the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band had now been reduced to a trio. The same newspaper article quoted above listed the personnel for the LP as: “Ron Morgan on lead guitar, Shaun Harris on bass, and Markley on percussion instruments – all sing”. Danny’s involvement was either minimal or non-existent.

As Shaun recalls: “By this time Danny had become ill. He had a sort of manic depressive illness”. The photo on the reverse of the album reflected the same line-up, showing (from front to back) Shaun, Markley and – at last – the elusive Ron, in apparently heavy disguise. According to his brother, after moving to LA from Denver in 1965 Morgan had swiftly immersed himself in the local music scene, recording a demo with two future members of the Iron Butterfly and playing with the early incarnation of Moby Grape, Peter and the Wolves. It was probably through his studio work that he became involved with the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band. “After the first Reprise album he flew back to Denver and he was real happy with that. But he wasn’t very happy with the singing. He wasn’t a solo singer himself – he just did a little back up – but he was always disenchanted with the vocals. Ron kept coming back and forth from LA and Denver and that was how he missed the photo shoot for the second album. It seemed like the band wasn’t organized at all – it was just a case of throwing stuff together whenever they could – and Ron was always out of time. When he got disenchanted with something, he got flaky. I remember that bit about him not getting out of bed to catch a flight. He didn’t want to go back to LA because he knew what he was going into. I think he really wasn’t into it at that time and just wanted to stay in Denver. He said that he would go into the studio where they would have laid down a lot of stuff and he would try and over-dub, but it would have just been awful – it almost had to be done again. To him the musicianship just wasn’t up to snuff. A lot of people had trouble keeping up with Ron – it was quite funny to watch some times. But by the time of the third Reprise album, he told me that the whole thing was just a total embarrassment – it was pieced together so haphazardly. By this time Ron was heavily involved with Three Dog Night so when it came to the photo for the back of the LP he shaved differently and wore these silly glasses and hat in order not to be recognized. And I think he pulled it off!”

Closer investigation of the label credits suggested that, besides Bob Markley, Shaun and Ron, others also had a hand in shaping the album. The fake ‘live’ track ‘Watch Yourself’, with its over-dubbed crowd noises and some very tasty guitar playing, was solely credited to one R. Yeazel. Later a member of Denver outfit Beast, Yeazel’s name would appear on that band’s 1970 single ‘Communication’ b/w ‘Move Mountain (You Got It)’ alongside a familiar cast of characters: Ron Morgan, Jimmy Greenspoon and Roger Bryant. The plot thickened since Bryant, who had shared a credit with Markley on ‘Suppose They Give A War And No One Comes’, now turned up again on the track ‘As Kind As Summer’. An interesting story related by Morgan’s brother may shed some light on this: “According to Ron, Markley was a rare bird. He was off the wall, definitely. One time the band were rehearsing for a Santa Monica gig and they rented this studio at ABC. They were really killing on this one song ‘Watch Yourself’. That was by Bob Yeazel, a local guy. He’s in a bad way right now – got busted for drugs – music really took a toll on him! He was in the band for a short stint during that third album and so was the bass player Roger Bryant, who I also ran into not so long ago. An actor called Joey Bishop had his own TV talk show on the West Coast back then and he invited the band to come on that evening. They set up in the studio and all of a sudden Markley said: ‘Let’s do ‘Help I’m A Rock’. We’ve got to promote the first album!’ Ron couldn’t believe it. Of course the band completely bombed and they didn’t use it. Ron was really livid.”

It was amidst this atmosphere of increasing disillusionment that the California Spectrum was born. Ever since the ‘Legendary Unreleased Album!‘ was released in 1980 by Lloyd and the Harris brothers – apparently in an attempt to kick-start the reissue of all of the albums – this group and its connections with the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band have been the source of much confusion. According to Shaun the origins of the California Spectrum lay in his own growing frustration with Markley’s domination of the group, stemming not only from his antics in the studio, but also his reluctance to promote the band seriously by touring. “Markley would sit there hyping everything and telling you ‘This is great!’ about the songs, but I was disenchanted. I would have been more prepared to believe that his way was right if the albums had sold zillions of copies and we had been really successful, but we weren’t. I think it took some effort to have three albums on Reprise – the same label as Jimi Hendrix – and never really see the light of day. We were never represented by a major booking agency and I don’t think Reprise ever really promoted the band so no one ever got a chance to hear us. I was always unhappy with the situation with Markley – I thought his ultimate aim was just to have an album to show some girl in LA and bring them up to his house. He wasn’t prepared to go out of town and play gigs, for example. Occasionally we would get a deal to play in places like Alabama, but that would have been a highlight – for the most part Markley didn’t aspire to anything other than playing in LA. He thought the Sunset Strip was the coolest place on earth and he was fixated with hustling girls. Twice a year he would get interest on his inheritance and so there were times when he had phenomenal amounts of money and times when he didn’t. He had his nice house up in Beverly Hills and he simply would not have done a hundred-day tour.

“I wanted to move ahead and start playing live more, so around 1968 I decided to take off with the California Spectrum. A guy named Bob Williams, who was this wannabe actor friend of Markley’s, approached us about going out on the road as a band and touring the mid-West, but we weren’t touring because Markley was keeping us in LA. I didn’t know what to do. Should I leave the band? I asked my father and he said he thought we should do it. So my brother and I bought this trailer and we used this drummer called Russ Olmstead. I forget who the guitar player was, but we went through a series of them. For eight months we toured around the central part of the US with a light show and played some West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band stuff, but it was really awful and we made no money. The highlight was playing in Chicago with the Animals in front of about 5,000 people, but we would also have to play beer bars in Illinois from nine ’til four in the morning. One time the Beach Boys were playing at a college nearby and Bruce Johnston, who was a friend of mine, joined us on stage, but no one knew who he was. That’s when I realised that I had made the wrong decision. On that trip I met a few people in the mid-West, bought a house and some offices in Denver and put out some records under the name of the California Spectrum on which I would sing. ‘She May Call You Up Tonight’ was done in just a few minutes at the end of a session Michael had, using musicians like Carol Kaye and Hal Blaine. I would go in and throw the music down and they would play it and later we would add vocals. I sang all the parts on that and I think I speeded it up. The B-side ‘Rainbo’ was just some electronic thing. It was released on Shana records [Shana 7915]. ‘Sassafras’ [later released as Raspberry Sawfly 9735, the B-side ‘Obviously Bad’ was a leftover from the Fifo period] came about in the same way. I would write columns in Teen Beat and Tiger Beat and promote the songs and get them played on record, but there was no band to hire!” Intriguingly, a publicity photo for the California Spectrum gave an address in Hays, Kansas and showed the Harris brothers, Lloyd and someone looking very much like Morgan – everyone, that is, except Markley.

Somehow, despite all this upheaval, the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band managed to record ‘Where’s My Daddy?‘, their fifth album and the last to be released under that six-word moniker. If their previous label had finally lost faith in the group then it appeared that Jimmy Bowen, at least, had not: the Amos label belonged to him. Nevertheless, after the consistently high standard of the trio of Reprise LPs, the new album was something of a disappointment. Quite apart from the quality of the songs and performance, the record simply sounded different. Whether or not the change of studio and engineer had anything to do with it (recorded at Wally Heider, Warner’s Joe Sidore, who had mastered the previous two albums, was replaced by Bill Halverson, engineer on the first Crosby, Stills & Nash sessions), the warm, echoing depth of its predecessors had disappeared and in its place was a crisp and closely-miked sound which appeared unsuited to the band’s style. Perhaps it was nothing more complicated than the absence of reverb, but although the record had its moments – particularly melodic songs like ‘My Dog Back Home’ and ‘Free As A Bird’ – much of the material simply sounded unrehearsed or even unfinished. Several of the songs – ‘Give Me Your Lovething’ and ‘Not One Bummer’ for example – were barely more than laboured riffs. The latter, in particular, suggested that this was a group running short of fresh ideas – if that guitar line sounded familiar that was because it had simply been lifted from Markley’s old single, ‘Summer’s Comin’ On’. Shaun offers a possible explanation: “On the first album we had been playing the songs live and working out arrangements beforehand, whereas later on the songs were just worked out in the studio whilst we were recording the albums.”

Lyrically, in place of the magic and mysticism of the previous album there was madness; instead of dreams, stark social reality. Many of the themes were familiar: the evil’s of wealth (‘Where Money Rules Everything’), conflicts with authority (‘Have You Met My Pet Pig’) and, of course, young girls. Although at first glance the album cover appeared innocuous, closer inspection revealed a distinctly unsettling image. A lonely, barefooted girl, clutching a doll and sitting beside a crumpled beer can, gazed straight into the eyes of the viewer, of whom she seemed to ask the question which was the album’s title. She was, most likely, the same girl whose shrill voice could be heard introducing the album’s second side with the words: “Part IV – The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band”; to be immediately followed by the song ‘Everyone’s innocent daughter’: “Licking her lollipop fingers / Soft is this girl / Wise is this child / Down below in the city / Faces as grim as granite / I want to run tell the world / How much fun you are…” Another track, ‘Coming Of Age In LA’, had even more questionable motivation. After a spoken opening which appeared to have something to do with puberty, Markley exhorted the listener with the cry: “Step right up folks and get your ticket to LA – the greatest freak show on earth!” Appropriately enough, the rest of the song ran through a bizarre list of lowlife characters, but the narrative began and ended with the tale of “Poor Patty, a beautiful orphan of ten in army surplus clothes” who finished up in court before a drunken judge having been beaten, raped and robbed. It ended abruptly with the voice of the same little girl as before exclaiming: “Judge! Not one bummer the whole beautiful summer!”

Against this backdrop the bare-chested photographs of the band on the album’s rear sleeve made an uncomfortable contrast – a return to the line-up of Bob, Shaun and Danny which had last appeared on the back of the second Reprise LP. The younger Harris brother, in particular, looked in a bad way. Shaun: “Dan was not in good shape. I look at that picture and I think that it was exploitative of Markley to allow him to have his picture taken at that time.” What is slightly puzzling, however, is the absence of Lloyd, despite the fact that he shared credits with Markley on three of the songs and could be heard singing on several tracks – ‘My Dog Back Home’ for instance. Likewise, Ron Morgan’s name was nowhere to be seen even though his spidery lead guitar could still be heard throughout the album. Perhaps he was still trying to remain anonymous.

The following year came ‘Markley, A Group‘. In all but name the last recording by the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band, the album’s title was hugely ironic. In the back sleeve photos a boyish Michael Lloyd appeared alongside a sinister, grinning shot of Markley and the rather more sombre-looking Harris brothers for the first time since the Fifo LP. Indeed, Lloyd was even allowed to share the production credit. Any ideas the others may have had about a new spirit of democracy within the band, however, soon evaporated when Markley insisted on star billing. According to Lloyd: “The Forward album was about the last of Bob being really coherent. He had progressed to saying: ‘Oh, we can’t call it the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band – it’s got to be my name’. Well, I had arranged this deal with Mike Curb to do an album by the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band, which made some sense to him – not a great deal – but some sense. Then Markley wanted to change it. That didn’t come up until we had finished the whole thing and by then, of course, it was too late. It was the same old problem we had with song writing credits and other things and that’s really the way it was across all of the albums, but eventually it just got to be horrible with Markley and contractually impossible. It was a stupid thing really. I mean, we should have called it the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band because at least we would have sold ten copies or something. I don’t know, at that point I think I probably just wanted to get out and get done with it.”

There was also a certain irony in the fact that the LP was on Mike Curb’s Forward label. After all, a year or so earlier it had been Curb who had famously thrown the Velvet Underground and the Mothers Of Invention off Verve (a subsidiary of MGM, of which he was President) because of their association with drugs and ‘weirdness’. Yet here he was releasing an album by a group of musicians who had not only adopted a name directly inspired by the former band, but who had also covered the latter’s ‘Help, I’m A Rock’ – and that was before one even went on to consider some of their own equally bizarre material. Lloyd speaks in Curb’s defence: “I think his motivation was honorable. When you think back to that period of time there were quite a few rock stars who were dropping dead from drug overdoses. Besides, by the time we joined MGM I don’t think the Velvet Underground were selling any more records and their contract might have been up. I went right through all of that and I never drank, I never used drugs – nothing – and I think it was a tremendous blessing. That was despite all of the influences around me, of course. In the 60’s you were almost an idiot if you didn’t take acid – you were like a downer – but I was very focussed on what I wanted to do and it wasn’t something that interested me at all. I didn’t need to feel better because I already felt great. I was doing all the things that I wanted to do.”

As the result, perhaps, of the inevitable confusion caused by the change of name, the ‘Markley, A Group’ album has long been overlooked. For those who favored the harder-edged psychedelic adventures of the earlier recordings, the change of direction after ‘A Child’s Guide’ must have been hard to swallow. Yet in a sense the band had come full circle. After starting out five years earlier in relatively humble fashion on the Fifo label, the high hopes of the three-album Reprise deal had ended with disillusionment and the virtual dissolution of the band. Now, after the low water-mark of the ‘Where’s Your Daddy?’ LP, the band emerged with a work which was, in many ways, a fitting end to their career. Inconsistent certainly, with the first side probably the strongest, the album still had many wonderful moments, particularly a number of delicately structured songs underpinned with subtle arrangements and over-layed with immaculate harmonies.

The record undoubtedly benefited from Michael Lloyd’s full involvement, bringing with him his now considerable production experience. Singing many of the lead vocals, his self-assured keyboard playing featured prominently on several tracks while his orchestral arrangements were exquisite. Danny, too, was once again a full participant in the album, co-writing well over half of the songs on the LP compared with only two on ‘Where’s My Daddy?’ and none on ‘A Child’s Guide’. A clue to his lack of involvement in the previous albums could be found in the opening track ‘Booker T & His Electric Shock’. Sung by Danny, the humorous lyrics belied their serious subject matter. According to Lloyd: “Danny had been a manic depressive and had gone through all kinds of horrible times from way before the band. That song was about a mental institution and the electric shock treatment which he had there. It happened many times and once it started it was almost impossible to stop. It was a horrible thing for him to go through – remember that this was a long time ago when they didn’t really know what to do – but eventually they found out that it was a lithium imbalance.” Shaun, by contrast, recalls having little to do with the album beyond singing on the re-recorded version of ‘Outside/Inside’. With its sweeping strings and trickling harpsichord this was an altogether more confident and polished version than the original, but once again Shaun regarded the lyrics – especially the line “I’m as rough as a cow’s tongue” – as a prime example of Markley’s misguided ruination of his melody.

It seems that Markley was particularly proud of his efforts on this final LP which, for the first time, came with a separate lyric sheet boldly declaring: “Lyrics by Markley.” They were certainly memorable. The usual tirade against wealth continued with ‘Zoom! Zoom! Zoom’ (“Money, Money, Money / Tear it to pieces / Money, Money, Money / I don’t care at all…”) and ‘Roger The Rocket Ship’ was a genuinely funny take on paranoia (“Look out for interplanetary spaceships and magnetic storms / Some sort of advance warning system should be set up / Look out for solar flares, polar bears, and a third eye / That watches every move you make, watches every step you take…”). Not for the first time, however, the abiding theme was childhood innocence facing corruption in an adult world, while a predilection for young girls was evident from the titles alone: ‘Elegant Ellen’; ‘Little Ruby Rain’; ‘Sarah The Sad Spirit’; and ‘Sweet Lady Eleven And The Tattooed Man’. It is tempting to look amongst his lyrics for clues as to how Markley saw himself: perhaps as “the last electric man in the last electric band” of ‘Next Plane To The Sun’; or “Bobby the Bad Bum” loved by ‘Sarah The Sad Spirit’. Amidst the apparently nonsensical words of ‘The Magic Cat’, however, there lay a passage in which Markley almost seemed to anticipate his impending fall:

If one track justified Markley’s arrogance, however, it was the beautiful ballad ‘Little Ruby Rain’, a song which proved that, despite the internal tensions, the band were still able to unite their disparate talents. Written by Markley and Danny Harris, the latter’s acoustic guitar, played alongside a gorgeous string arrangement, sounded like a mature reflection of his earlier composition ‘Will You Walk With Me’, while the lyrics, confidently sung by Lloyd, were among Markley’s most poetic:

If the ‘Group’ album was the last recording to be made by the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band, for Michael Lloyd it was only the beginning of an extraordinarily successful musical career which has, to date, netted him over one hundred gold and platinum records. After becoming the Vice President of A & R at MGM, aged 20, in the fall of 1969, Michael achieved his first major hit producing Lou Rawls’ single ‘A Natural Man’, winning himself a Grammy in the process. After forming his own band Friends, along with two Australians Darryl Cotton and Steve Kipner (ex-Tin Tin), Michael recorded an LP in 1973 only to see it pulled by MGM when he and Mike Curb left the label. Unperturbed he went on to record two further albums under the guise of Cotton, Lloyd and Christian. However, he soon discovered that his strength lay in producing and composing for others, most notably those toothsome Mormon siblings the Osmonds (including their ‘experimental’ ‘Crazy Horses’ period and Donny’s solo career), as well as other teen heart-throbs like Shaun Cassidy and Leif Garrett. His greatest achievement – in commercial terms at least – came with the 1987 film ‘Dirty Dancing’, for which he acted as musical supervisor as well as producing and co-writing much of the music. It went on to become one of the biggest-selling soundtracks of all time. Now married with four children, Michael lives in a mansion which used to belong to Oscar-winning actress Gloria Swanson, star of Billy Wilder’s ‘Sunset Boulevard’ and, by a strange coincidence, an early silent film called ‘Shifting Sands’…

Meanwhile, Shaun had also continued his career in music: “In the early 70s when Michael became successful producing Lou Rawls I would act as contractor for his sessions, calling up the musicians and co-ordinating the union contracts. I put together a reel-to-reel tape of four songs and sent them around. Through Michael a single off my album come out on Verve under the name Brigadune, but nothing happened. Then Capitol agreed I could do an album. Both my parents appeared on that – my father arranged some of it and Michael and Danny helped out as well. Unfortunately it came out on Capitol on the same day as ‘Dark Side Of The Moon’ – how could I compete? After that I realized that if you want to be the creative artist you should get someone else to cut your deal for you. It’s not easy to do both and it was stupid to have an album on a major label and have no manager. Nevertheless, it was the first time I had the chance to do what I wanted to do. From that point I worked with Michael and became president of Barry Manilow’s publishing company. After that I started getting calls from everybody.” Apart from his solo LP (‘Shaun Harris’ and the Brigadune 45 (‘I’ll Cry Out From My Grave (God I’m Sorry)’ b/w ‘Misty Morning’), Shaun also collaborated with Danny and Michael on other singles under names like The Grand Concourse and Rockit. Shaun eventually grew disillusioned with the Los Angeles scene and thereafter lived with his family in Oregon. In recent years he has taken up the cause of standards in education, written a play about his childhood and set up a highly successful children’s film festival – even playing host to Margaret Thatcher.

Although Danny admits to losing the plot somewhat during the 70s, in 1980 he also released a solo album, ‘Thank Him Every Day’, which combined synthesisers with religion. He got his life back on track and in 1984 he married Vicky, who he had first met years earlier when she was running an incense booth at one of those infamous Teenage Fairs at which the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band were playing. After they moved to Sweden, where he worked as an alcohol and drugs counsellor, he continued to play folk music – Ralph McTell’s ‘Streets Of London’ was a particular favorite – and recorded another album which has yet to be released. More recently he has established himself as a film actor, appearing in Jack Nicholson’s Oscar-winning film ‘As Good As It Gets’ where he can be seen dancing in the restaurant scene! He is now writing a book about his experiences in the band and beyond. He and Shaun and Michael remain close friends.

Despite being a founder member of Three Dog Night, Ron Morgan never got to share in their phenomenal success. As his brother recalls: “Ron didn’t do well under pressure. He suffered from bad stage fright, but it was really ‘drug fright’ – he was so high all the time that he became paranoid. They played the Whisky and when someone said Eric Clapton was in the audience he just froze. Ron found the pressure of living up to his image – and everyone’s expectation – was too hard to bear. When Three Dog Night gave him a contract he flew back to Denver and the family lawyer had a look at it. It didn’t look favourable for Ron so he didn’t sign and by the time he got back to LA they had already replaced him. He never thought it would amount to anything anyway. He would never admit it, but their success really bugged him. He felt persecuted.” Almost immediately another opportunity arose in the form of established Reprise act, the Electric Prunes, but unfortunately for Ron the group was about to hit the buffers. According to Dick Whetstone, drummer and vocalist with the final Prunes line-up, Ron became involved after John Herron quit unexpectedly during the sessions for the ‘Just Good Old Rock And Roll’ LP: “We knew Ron from a Denver band called Superband that included Jimmy Greenspoon on keyboards. The two of them had landed a gig with the original version of Three Dog Night prior to the first album release. Ron was anxious to play in a less structured band – he wanted more solos! He was a world-class guitar player. He joined us in time to help finish the last tracks on the album and began touring with us, along with his Harley. Ron lived to play music, but the lifestyle contributed greatly to his death.” After Three Dog Night and the Electric Prunes Ron moved back to Denver. Bob: “He was disenchanted, but he wasn’t going to sell out. He did drive a cab for a while – he loved the freedom of it, there were no pressures and he was his own boss – but Ron got in a bad way. He was strung out on ‘reds’ – addictive sleeping pills – which he had been popping with Three Dog Night and he ended up on the street. He had no skills apart from music, but after he got married in ’76 he sorted his life out and became a janitor. He still played and we used to jam a lot. Then he had a motorcycle accident and things went down hill. He got put in a psychiatric ward for a time. His wife divorced him and kicked him out of the house. It was while he was in hospital that he was diagnosed with Hepatitis C. The worst thing you can do with that is drink, but he had a strong constitution – he could always put away the drugs and alcohol. Unfortunately he didn’t know until it was too late. He died in his sleep in 1989 at 44. I can remember Ron getting his royalty cheques – they were usually for about 75 cents. Ron lived the way he wanted to, but I guess music never gave him the security he wanted.” Bob Morgan continues his brother’s legacy with his own band Blackwood Magazine.

And what became of Bob Markley? Appropriately enough his fate was the most bizarre of all. Towards the end of the sixties he was involved in a few other projects beyond the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band, most notably producing an LP by J.J. Light – actually Jim Stallings, bass player with the Sir Douglas Quintet – called ‘Heya’. Despite claims that this album also involved other members of the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band, none of those spoken to have any recollection of it, although the guitar playing does bear the unmistakable signature of Ron Morgan. The title track was a hit throughout Europe and Markley later shared a song writing credit on a re-recorded version (although not the original) on United Artists under the priceless name of Zonk. He was also involved with Lloyd and Danny Harris in a gospel album called Goodness and Mercy. After the ‘Group’ LP, however, it appears as if Markley simply dropped out of music all together.

Fowley takes up the story: “It was 1971-2 and I had grown tired of living in Laurel Canyon. There were forest fires and I didn’t want to burn. Markley was living on the beach at Santa Monica and at his suggestion I moved down there too. When I walked into his place I couldn’t believe it! Here was a guy who had lived in a big mansion on Sunset Strip and now here he was living in this 1920’s house which was tacky and furnished like a beachcombers shack. I asked him: ‘What happened, did you lose your money?’ He said: ‘I don’t want to talk about it, but girls down here don’t like nice things – they want you to look like you just washed up on the shore.’ He wore a torn T-shirt and he had a dog to attract girls – he really was like a character out of a surf movie! I moved in to a place ten minutes away and I would go down to the beach and see this Pied Piper figure walking around with short girls and his big St. Bernard talking beach jargon. That’s when he said to me: ‘Never come by unless you call me first’. Eventually I moved to England where I reconnected with Jeff Beck and Ian Hunter and I lived there for about a year from 1972 to ’73. Then in the middle of all this I got a message from LA: ‘Bob Markley has run into problems’. I knew it had something to do with women. Well, I came back from England to the story that he had disappeared. Then I remembered his rule: ‘Always call first’. Now Markley, with all his wealth and emphasis on physical possessions, was always something of a bully, but it was then that I realised that, for all his indulgences, at least he didn’t involve his friends in his other world – and whatever the issues were that caused his problems with law enforcement. Bob was always very secretive about his male and female encounters.”

Shaun takes up the story: “One day the police came looking for Markley. I was living next door to him at the time, near the beach. They hassled me and even Gray Frederickson who was one of the producers of the Godfather movies. I heard that Markley ended up getting beaten up in Detroit.” Lloyd: “What happened to Bob is he kept seeing younger and younger girls. He was living at the beach – very Bohemian. You would never guess this guy was a successful attorney who used to live in a fancy house. Then one day he came home and there was a bunch of policemen outside the door. Shaun was living in the next apartment and he heard everything about it because then the police busted his place. Apparently Bob had been seeing two very young sisters down at the beach. I guess he was able to get away and we didn’t hear anything about him for some time – maybe he called or something. Apparently he ended up in Detroit. He had some horrible run-in with like gang members, got hit on the head with a baseball bat, he was in hospital – horrible stuff. It was something to do with some girls he was involved with there. Then he went to the Bahamas, something like that. Anyway he was gone for quite some time. Eventually he came back to LA and got arrested. He went to trial and I guess he was in jail for a short while, or maybe he had bargained some sort of plea. I would like to think that was in the early to mid-70’s. Every once in a while Kim would tell us what was going on, or we would get a call from Bob out of the blue saying: ‘I’m in such and such a place. I’ve changed my name’ – crazy stuff. It was very sad. I mean we had antagonistic times and everything, but still this was our friend. It was a bad scene. Years later, in about 1980, I was recording Shaun Cassidy and Bob was the furthest thing from my mind. Then out of the blue he called me – he was strange sounding – and he said: ‘I’ve written more stuff, it’s the best thing I’ve ever done’. Then he sent me this tape and it was weird stuff – you can’t imagine how weird! I still have it, the notes and everything. Not long after that he disappeared again. The next person to hear from him was Kim.”

Fowley continues: “In about 1983 I was lecturing at UCLA as part of a music convention. I was standing talking to some students when this guy walked up to me with a scarred face and these strange eyes – he looked like the Scarecrow of Oz! All the students were recoiling in horror and at first I didn’t recognise him. Then he introduced himself. It was Bob. I asked him what he was doing and he just said ‘You know me, I just like to have fun!’ Then he left. The rumour I heard was that he had disappeared from California and ended up in Detroit. He fell in love with a black girl and her family didn’t like it so they had him beaten up. Then one day in about 1988-89 I dropped by my lawyer’s office and there was this thing in the corner of the room – like a broken body crumpled up in a chair, shaking with palsy. You know those pictures of Howard Hughes in the last years of his life: toothless, weighing 70 pounds with white hair. But it was Bob. Apparently his father had just died and he had come by to pick up some documents – he was now worth millions. I went up to him and he looked right through me. It was very scary. Then a few years later, in 1991 or ’92, I heard a story from J.J. Light, who was an old friend of Markley’s. He told me that Bob had been sitting in this rowing boat on a lake near Las Vegas – he was like a recluse. It got loose from its moorings and he drifted off alone for a day and a half. He was already pretty messed up, but he got very badly dehydrated. When they eventually found him he was taken to some hospital and placed on a life-support system, unable to speak or think. J.J. went to visit him there, but he said he was so spooked by what he saw in the hospital that he never went back.”

Back to Lloyd: “This was maybe five years ago, probably more. He was in a hospital at this point, like a vegetable. We’ve tried to call a couple of times, but we can’t get through – you can’t even talk to the doctor. He has no family, no one to call, no one to say anything – just bunches of money. To me, in an awful sense, it sounds like some place he has been put where they know he has got a lot a money and he is just going to sit there sedated, or whatever they do to these kind of patients, because there is no reason to do anything else. It sounds horrible to say, but to me that’s what it looks like – he’s just being slowly bled dry.” Kim again: “So in the end Bob Markley was like Dorian Gray! He’s probably dead by now. One factor in all of this was Bob Markley junior. Apparently Markley had made a girl pregnant while he was at college. I don’t know whether he knew at the time or not, but I heard that he didn’t meet his son until the early 70’s when the kid was 18. Bob was mind-blown – apparently he was a really nice kid. Then his son died in a car wreck. Do you think that the death of his long-lost son threw him over the edge and led to a downward spiral? His only contact with decency and normality was gone. He was a guy with a trust fund – smart but not immensely talented; clever but not brilliant. He threw parties and then decided to form a band and write songs. Then, when it was all over, he found out he had a child who he never knew – who almost immediately died – and he freaked out because he was growing old, his only child was dead and his rock and roll hobby was over – so why not terrorize the neighbourhood!”

Shaun: “Markley? I’ve heard he’s in a mental asylum. I called there once out of curiosity but I couldn’t even get to talk to him. He seemed to do so many things in life. I’m not very big on religion but if there’s such a thing as karma he could be the poster boy for it. He took advantage of people – not just in a dollars and cents way – but he was ethically indigent and morally bankrupt and it ended up being reflected in his life. I think he was an encumbrance. To even refer to him as musical is outrageous. Musically he was an embarrassment – he would have a dead microphone on stage. It was like dealing with a caricature. I’m not sure if meeting him was such a good thing in the end. When you look at bands like Buffalo Springfield who had record companies who were involved in their careers and had direction, they were making musical statements instead of having this nut with a fascination for hustling underage girls. That’s partly why I became progressively less and less interested. If you look at the first albums I was really involved, but by the end it was a dry hole – it was just a vehicle for him to be able to say that he had a new album out. And he wasn’t getting cured either. The fact that he had his name on the last one, for instance. Look at the Doors – without Morrison the band could do nothing – but Markley brought nothing to the table. I think if we had not had Markley insisting that we do asinine stuff it would have been very good. I wish we had got a record deal without him. It would have been called something else, but I think we would still have recorded. We would have had more mainstream success – I don’t mean a cop out – but if you had taken any artist of the period and made them do the same thing I think it would have had the same sort of negative effect. I ran into a woman once who said she was a program director in Boston for seven years and they played ‘I Won’t Hurt You’ for the sign-on song every day. If we had been handled like a regular band with a major booking agency and management firm things might have been different.”

Lloyd: “Markley constantly wanted to do weirder things, but we weren’t into that. It was like two bands on one record – you can see from cut to cut. He made the deals and that was both a good and a bad thing. It was a good thing because it existed, but it was a bad thing because we had to deal with him. This was our compromise: for every ‘Transparent Day’ there would have been something like ‘A Child Of A Few Hours Is Burning To Death’, or ‘In The Arena’ – that was Markley.” Kim: “Bob Markley created his own legend in his own mind and when he talked to me I almost wondered if it was a press release which he had written and then memorized. That was his downfall: he was narcissistic. He had certain musical ideas and wasn’t totally stupid, but there was so much psychedelic shit around in those days. Markley was attempting to be like the Mothers Of Invention but it was silly and a waste of time – except for getting laid. When Michael and the Harris brothers were left alone by Markley to sing and play it was remarkable – they were wonderful songs – but when there was all that weird shit, that was when Markley wrote the words and it was a waste of time.”

The history of music is littered with tales of missed opportunities and stolen chances, yet even amongst these the troubled story of the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band reads like a fable. Undoubtedly, much of the abiding fascination with the group stems from Markley’s involvement, but it would be a mistake to concentrate upon his contribution to the exclusion of all else. For whatever Markley brought with him, he also took a great deal away – perhaps quite literally. Had the more accessible compositions been chosen for the singles; had they received more promotion from their record company; had they gigged more widely without an aging front-man who could not sing; had they even chosen a less cumbersome name, then it seems certain that – within their own time at least – they would have received the recognition they so richly deserved. Looking back over the intervening years, it is clear that Michael, Shaun and Danny have decidedly mixed emotions about their experiences and, from the recollections of his brother, it appears that Ron Morgan, too, became gradually disenchanted. Inevitably, much of their disappointment is focussed upon Markley – and who can blame them. His motives for joining the band were dubious, to say the least, and the nature of his talent will always be open to debate. Yet the fact remains that, while others came and went, it was Markley alone who made his unmistakable imprint on every album. Indeed, of one thing we can be certain: if Markley had never become involved then the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band as we know them would never have existed. The essence of any classic band will always be something more than the sum of their individual participants and here was a group filled with contradictions: they recorded ‘psychedelic’ music while, for the most part, eschewing drugs; they railed against the evils of money despite the fact that most of them came from privileged backgrounds; and they sang anti-war anthems whilst they fought with each other.

Giving his own impression of the West Coast scene of the time, John Cale wrote once: “It was some kind of airy-fairy puritanism that was based on the suppression of adult feelings about what was out there in the world.”

Undoubtedly an egotist, Markley was a spoilt orphan who came to despise his inheritance and who seemed terrified of growing old. The sleeve photos bear witness to a man obsessed with looking younger, while the album covers, song titles and lyrics became increasingly preoccupied with childhood and the transience of beauty and innocence. Yet what set the music of the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band apart from many of their peers was the way they reached beyond such themes to explore the darker side of an age which, with the turning of the war in Vietnam, the assassination of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, riots in many American cities and – in Los Angeles itself – the Manson murders, was about to reach an ugly climax. If one record, above all, tells you all you need to know about the group – and the influence of Markley in particular – it is ‘A Child’s Guide To Good And Evil’. Its monochrome cover superimposed a butterfly’s wings upon a child’s face, while the songs dwelt on love and hate, greed and war and, above all, the concept of the innocence of every human being until corrupted. In doing so, it showed remarkable prescience.

Side one of the ‘Markley, A Group’ LP ended with the short, bittersweet coda ‘Message For Miniature’. Given that the missive was clearly addressed by an adult to a child and that its signatory had already appeared as an ageing, eccentric ‘hero’ on the J.J. Light album, it is tempting to assume that Henry B. Glover was Bob Markley. As things were to turn out, the song might serve well as his epitaph.

by Tim Forster