The Seeds Albums (4)
'Raw & Alive: The Seeds in Concert at Merlin's Music Box'
Release Date 1/1/1967
Tracks 11
Label GNP
See Album Tracklist and Review
What The Critics Say
The Seeds were an exceptional band that never achieved the success that they inspired. This album has a truly psychedelic cover with too-dark-for-pastel colors, swirling letters over eerie faces, and dynamic black and white photos on the back. If you want to see the image of Iggy Pop clothed, just look at Sky Saxon in the bottom right photo on the back cover with the screaming girl holding a flower grabbing at him. He had the image down, as well as the music. "900 Million People Daily All Making Love" sounds so much like the Doors and Jim Morrison's "When the Music's Over," one has to wonder which came first, or did they copy each other? "Mumble and Bumble" is a trippy "Alabama Song," but where Morrison is looking for the next whiskey bar, Saxon is off looking for flowers and magic mushrooms. The band has great energy which is pierced by annoying canned applause à la the Rolling Stones' Got Live If You Want It. This is a record album, not a situation comedy TV show, after all; what's the point of overdubbing an audience onto what is really good music? Sure, "No Escape" is a prelude to the closer and hit "Pushin' Too Hard" with a tip of the hat to Martha & the Vandellas, while "Can't Seem to Make You Mine" is placed nicely in mid-set, a song after the truncated "Up in Her Room." The revelation that is this "concert" album is what a great band the Seeds really were, and how Sky Saxon's vocals have a gritty edge that he held back on us in many of the studio recordings. "Gypsy Plays His Drums" has a great chug-chug guitar, nice off-key backing vocals, and a driving pulse which is present throughout the performance. If you can ignore the extraneous additions, a song like "Forest Outside Your Door" shows really how creative and influential this pioneering band was, while "Satisfy You" is Saxon's direct sexual rock to Mick Jagger's "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction." Sky claims he can get satisfaction, and can satisfy you at the same time. He then veers off into more familiar psychedelic territory with "Night Time Girl" which combines the sex and the psychedelia. If they taught rock & roll in school, "Raw & Alive" would have to be the textbook for image, design, and content. ~ Joe Viglione, All Music Guide
What The Critics Say
The "A Thousand Shadows" 45 rpm from this album, Future, came in a pink sleeve decorated by gray four-leaf clovers and a negative picture of the Seeds next to a sign that says "Wishing Well - Help Us Grow." "A Thousand Shadows" is the melody as well as the feel of their Top 40 1967 hit "Pushin' Too Hard." Breaking no new ground, the band insisted on revisiting its formula, reinventing new versions of "Pushin' Too Hard" like "Flower Lady & Her Assistant." This is a sophisticated package with a gatefold which includes lyrics over pastel sunflowers as if the band was Joni Mitchell. Three colorful pages come inside the album, including two beautiful photos of the group along with single flowers representing the songs on the disc with instructions: "Cut out paste on whatever" for grade schoolers or those so strung out on LSD they have regressed to that point. "Six Dreams" is Black Sabbath's Ozzie meeting George Harrison in some biker film soundtrack with weird sound effects and a sitar. The harp on "Fallin'" underscores Saxon's passionate garage vocal. Imagine, if you will, Brian Jones during the recording of Satanic Majesties deciding to bare all the excesses of rock stardom. This album is a trip, not because it reflects the ideas captured in the Peter Fonda film of the same name, but because a band had the audacity to experiment with record company money and make something so noncommercial and playful. Droning organ sounds penetrate "Fallin'," the seven minute, 40 second final track. Saxon writes in the inner-sleeve essay "Originations of the Flower Generation" "...The farmer lives by the elements alone, the sun, the rain, and the earth, but the earth needs its seeds to sow the flower generation of the leaf...." It's heady stuff, and the melody and sound of "Pushin' Too Hard" permeates incessantly. Hardly a Future, as the title proclaims, this is actually the Sgt. Pepper of the flower-power set, a reinvention of past efforts, but no "Strawberry Fields" or "Day in the Life" to bring it out of its cult niche. Very listenable, highly entertaining, and totally not for the mass audience. GNP stands for Gene Norman Presents, and the label should be commended for allowing such creativity which inspired Iggy Pop and the Lyres' Mono Mann. Saxon played his game to the hilt, and that followers like Mono Mann and Jeff Connelly would get stuck in his groove is only testament to how original and enthralling these sounds are. Tunes like "Now a Man" are low-key Ventures riffs with naïve guitar and Saxon being as indulgent as humanly possible. Fans should also seek out a 45 on Expression records, "Beautiful Stars" by Sky Sunlight and Thee New Seeds featuring Rainbow. Despite its musical limitations, Future holds up quite well to repeated plays by sitting firmly in the past. ~ Joe Viglione, All Music Guide
What The Critics Say
Web of Sound by the Seeds should be a garage rock classic. Everything about this record is superb '60s underground rock, from the cover concept (by band leader Sky Saxon) of the four musicians trapped in a spider's web to the back cover black and whites, and the bizzaro liner notes by producer Marcus Tybalt, who also penned a couple of tunes here. Unlike other albums by the Seeds, nothing on here sounds like their hit "Pushin' Too Hard," and that is a plus; not because that inverted Kinks riff isn't great -- it is, but Saxon had a penchant for trying to recapture that original butterfly. The six songs on side one are fun punk rock that helped inspire the new wave of the late '70s. But it is side two, with its four-minute "Just Let Go" and the fuzz pop of Saxon's "Up in Her Room," that cuts across '60s boundaries. Where "In a Gadda Da Vida" needed more melody and lyrics and Rare Earth's long version of "Get Ready" has too much drum solo, the Seeds take Van Morrison's then-censored Them hit, "Gloria," and kind of explain what happens once Saxon gets her up there, "making love in her room." The keyboards and Rolling Stones-wannabe blues guitar build a nice foundation for the fuzztone that follows Saxon as he keeps repeating the title of the song. He seems to be parodying the Beau Brummels, the Shadows of Night, and Them, all who preceded the Seeds by a year or two. The funny thing is, although the riff to "Pushin' Too Hard" is missing from this album, the melody to "Up In Her Room" is "Pushin' Too Hard." "Up in Her Room" has a fabulous '60s organ like ? & the Mysterians, and exactly like the fuzz organ in the middle of the Velvet Underground's similar epic, "Sister Ray," even ending with the same vamp as "White Light/White Heat," the title track of the album where "Sister Ray" made her debut. Saxon was clearly aware of what other people were doing at the time and A Web of Sound stands as a superior garage rock effort. It is just too bad tunes like "The Farmer," "Just Let Go," and "Tripmaker" didn't have the Top 40 charm of, say, Paul Revere & the Raiders' "Just Like Me" or "Kicks." The inclusion of a hit on that scale would have opened up many minds to the lunacy of the Seeds' "Pictures and Designs," with Saxon's growl that Iggy Pop copped so wonderfully. By drawing from the elements that made Moulty & the Barbarians, the Leaves, and Them so charming, A Web of Sound gave direction to the Stooges, Alice Cooper, and other acts who took it all a few steps further. Saxon does it all with great flair here, aided and abetted by organ and guitar sounds in "I Tell Myself" that imitators have not been able to accurately duplicate. ~ Joe Viglione, All Music Guide
What The Critics Say
As mid-'60s L.A. garage bands go, the Seeds were perhaps the most primitive, which isn't necessarily a virtue. Whereas the Standells had good lyrics, the Leaves could write pop, and Love was gifted beyond comparison, Sky Saxon and company had to settle for attitude and an unintended comicalness. Their debut record is just that. It's comprised of snotty boy-girl songs and teeters on the edge of musical ineptness, though it does contain the garage classic "Pushin' Too Hard" (whose arrangement is recycled at least once here). The other significant tune is "Can't Seem to Make You Mine," which features a repetitive, haunted-house guitar riff. The rest of the record, though fairly forgettable, still reinforces the truth that pure punk appeared long before the Sex Pistols. ~ Peter Kurtz, All Music Guide
