Run here, my towhead grandchillen, and let this geezer dandle you upon his knee. While you still recognize me, you litte maniacs. You know the gong has tolled, it’s that time again. Now, let me set my old brain a-ruminatin’, ah, what upbuilding tale from days of yore shall I relate today?

“What’s all this shit about the Yardbirds?”

Ah, the Yardbirds. Yes indeedie, those were the days. 1965, and I were an impetuous young squirt, just fell in puppy love first time, she used to push my hand away and sniff/‘I’d like to but I don’t wanna turn into a tramp.” The girls were actually like that in those —

“Ah, cut the senile drool an’ get on with the fuckin’ archaeology or we gonna de-dandle off yer knee an’ go scratch up some action! Oldster7”

Okay, kids, okay, just bear with me; no reason to get excited . . . now, as I was saying, it was glorious 1965, and I was starve^! for some sounds that might warp my brain a little. You see, there wasn’t much going except maybe “I’m Henry VIII, I Am” — no, I won’t get that one out, I know it sounds good', but believe me . . . we were just stuck in one of those musical recessions we used to have every once in awhile, back before we started trading Intra-Solar System package tours ... I recollect another mighty sad downer stretch long about the beginning of the 70s . . . ’xcept that one lasted so long we damn near dried up an’ boycotted records entirely till Barky Dildo and the Bozo Huns showed up to save our souls . /.

“Ahhh, man, how could you like those guys? That stuff was the most reactionary, chickenshit fad in history! I mean, what’s so big deal about playing buzzsaw fiddle an’ catgut snorkhollerers? Jammin’s fine, but those cats even resorted to 4/4 time and key changes! Now I ask you, LJrandud, what kind of shit is that?”

All right, all right, I know I shouldna digressed again! From here on out I’m stickin’ to the straight facts, and if you sassy tads interrupt me one more time I’m gonna paste one o’ yuz right in the mouth!

“Which one?”

Random choice, O seed of my seed, random like everything else in this fuckin’ madhouse of a world you guys got which I shall soon be gratefully bowing out of.

“Ahright, go head an’ bruise yer knuckles so you can go soak ’em in hot beer, but don’t say we didn’t warn ya. You oughta know that yer the only old sod around here that SkeWey, Ruey and Blooie’ll take any crap off of . . . and what’s this bowin’ out shit? Who’s grateful to be dead?”

Well, as a matter of fact, at one time there were a whole lot of marks who were just that. But that’s another story. I’ve gotta get down to this Yardbird saga or we gonna digress ourselves right into the ozone. So listen now an’ listen good, and hold your questions till the end.

The Yardbirds, as I said, were incredible. They came stampeding in and just blew everybody clean off the tracks. They were so fucking good, in fact, that people were still imitating ’em as much as a decade later, and getting rich doing it I might add, because the original band of geniuses just didn’t last that long. Of course, none of their stepchildren were half as good, and got increasingly pretentious and overblown as time went on until about 1973 a bunch of emaciated fops called Led Zeppelin played their final concert when the lead guitarist was assassinated by an irate Strychnine freak in the audience with a zip gun just 58 minutes into his famous 2 Vi hour virtuoso solo on one bass note. Then they grabbed the lead vocalist, who was so strung out on Datura he couldn’t do much but cough “deep gleep gug jargaroona fizzlefuck” type lyrics anymore anyway, and they cut off all his hair and stomped his harmonica, gave him a set of civvies (an outsized set of Lifetime Chainmail Bodyjeans, I think it was) and ran him outa town on a rail. Last we heard he was trying to sing “Whole Lotfa Love” to a buncha sentimental old hashheads in some Pudunk club. Maudlin as hell.

But the Yardbirds, you know, even though they turned it all around they only lasted a coupla years. And some of the imitators they had! Man, I used to get my yuks just lookin' at those records! Like when they did “I’m a Man” and made the Top Ten with a mixture of Bo Diddley (ahh, he was this old fat cat cooked up this sorta famous shuffle beat, . .1 think it was already passe before you guys were even born. Yeahy fact, when they finally junked the whole idea of a steady bottom pulse' altogether I think you guys were still too young to remember the big cultural civil war about it, Jagger ambushin’ Zagnose right in , the streets and Beefheart taking to the hills of Costa Rica to hide till things cooled down some . , ) and feedback, everybody just, blew their wads and flopped over, ’cause all that electro-distort stuff that rocked you guys to sleep when you were first tokin’ in your cradles was really unheard-of then, a real earthquake mind fuck. Some people found it vaguely indecent, like the naked nerve inside a wire gleaming all crazy at ’em, but us smokestack whizzband jive cats were hip to the cultural shift right from the start. We were just waitin’ for somebody to come along and kick out the jams, yessir . . . oh, that phrase? Yeah, well, that’s another one. Yeah, it does have a nice jagging ring, doesn’t it. You’ll laugh again, but we had a lotta zingy lingo when I was a tad — sharp riffs like “Right on!” and “Peace, brother!” . . . not like all this simpleminded telegraphic shit that passes for communication among you banal brats today. Why, I recall when I was in high-school (oh, I told you — that was kind of where they put you when they didn’t know what to do witlTyou — when you were too big for the Kiddie Kecoons and didn’t yet want go out an’ hafta assume what we used to call Manhood, which involved going at the same time every day to some weird building and doing some totally useless shit for hours on end just so you could get some bread and everybody respect you) — when I was in high school, we used to have some mighty snappy patter. For instance, if. somebody did something stupid, we used to say, “Whattaya got, shit for brains?” And another good one was, when you were jhad at somebody, you could call ’em “You rotten sack o’ shit!” Or a bunch of us, a gang of hoodlums about like you guys,

■ would be driving up to a liquor store to get some cokes and potato chips, the guy riding shotgun — later, later ^ would groan, “Mack down! . . twhich meant the act of eating, of course. A few years later some imaginative souls started to call food “munchies,” but luckily that moronic term didn’t last long. ■ '

And even years before that we had a very mysterious incantation: “I don’t make trash like you, I burn it!” You could say that and people would get confused. Or kids would, at any rate. I forget just what it signified — I kinda think it was a sort of Zen kean so when you were having a disagreement with somebody you could shoot that ’un their way and their analysis of it could either make peace or end up in a fist fight.

But I’m digressing again. Shit, you kids are right, I’m turning into a waxy-eyed old goat. With shit for brains. Soon as we finish this here anecdotal session I’m gonna/go get under the Morphones and sedate my fevered brain an'hour or two. I gotta date with Delilah Kootch tonite an’ I gotta be refreshed if I wanna still be bangin’ when the cock crows, Organoil or no Organoil . . . 90 is a year for moderation. But as I was recounting before I wandered down the fleecy path, the Yard birds themselves didn’t hold together for many moons, , and when they hit with “I’m a Man” they’d already started gettin’ raided (someday I’ll tell ya ’bout Paul Revere 1 and the Raiders; hah, you wouldn’ even believe rpe . . . ) by little Teeno groups everywhere who immediately recorded windup versions of “I’m a Man” to fill out their , debut albums, bands like the Royal Guardsmen, who had two Number One hits with the gimmick of this dog named Snoopy shootin’ down old Germans in antique planes, I swear to God, and then punk bands started cropping up who were writing their own songs but taking the Yardbirds’ sound and reducing it to this kind of gooriy fuzztone clatter . . . oh, it was beautiful, it was pure folklore, Old America, and sometimes I think those were the best days ever.

No, I don’t just think so, I know they were, been havin’ that feeling ever since about 1970 when everything began to curdle into a bunch of wandering minstrels and balladic bards and other ^such shit which was already obsolete even then. Man, I used to get up in the morning in ’65 and’66 and just love to turn on that radia, there was so much good jive wailing out. Like there was tfiis song called “Hey Joe” that literally everybody and his fuckin’ brother not only irecorded but claimed to have written even though it was obviously the psychedelic mutation of some hoary old folk song which was about murderin’ somebody for love just like 9/ 10s of the rest of them hoary folk ballads. And a group called The Leaves had a killer (that’s, another word you' ought to add to yer little yak-sacks) hit with “Hey Joe” and then disappeared after a couple of wierd albums, though they did have one other good chart, “Doctor Stone” it was, a real heavy-handed double-entendre dope song. Every, other fuckin’ record was cram fulla code words for getting stoned for about a year there cause people were just starting to in a big way and it was a big furtive thrill, but the stupid government didn’t figure the codes out, FBI and CIA and all, until about four or five years later, at which time they came out with this pompous expose, this dude who looked lil^e a cross between a gopher and the American Eagle and had a real killer vocal sound took off for this geriatric resort in the desert where people went for the jaded thrill of tossing their money away, he shot out there and/delivered this weighty Oration intended to let the country in on the secret that drugs and music were related when everybody already knew it anyway, and the whole shebang was hilarious because all the songs he used for examples were old as hell and everybody was already so stoned by that time they didn’t need to serenade people into getting high anymore. $

But for me and a lotta other folks that point, when nobody cared anymore because everybody’d been'converted to the new setup, was precisely where things started to go downhill. Instead of singing about taking tea with Mary Jane and boppin’ yer dingus on ol’ Sweet Slit Annie it was help me God I don’t know the meaning of life or I believe that love is gdnna cure the world of psoriasis and cancer both and I’m gonna tell the people all about it 285 different ways Whether you like it’ or not. And Why is there war well go ask the children they know everything we need to know, and Gee I sure like black folks even if my own folks don’t and endless vinyl floods of drivel in similar veins. At that point I started to pack in and'resort back to my good old ’66 goqf squat rock. I got out records like 96 Tears by Question Mark & the Mysterians, who were mysterious indeed, and re-whooped to jungle juju cackles like “Wooly Bully,” which is indescribable and was recorded by a bunch of guys who drove around in a hearse wearing turbans.

That was also when I got back into those junior jiver Yardbirds imitations in a big way. Like there wax Back Door" Man by the Shadows of Knight, who were really good at copping the Yardbird riffs and reworking ’em, and Psychotic Reaction (Double Shot DSM 1001) by Count Five, who weren’t so hot at it actually but ripped their whole routine off with such grungy spunk that I really dug ’em the most! They were a bunch of really young guitar-slappin’ brats from some indistinguishable Los Angeles suburb, and just a few months after “I’m a Man” left the charts they got right in there with this really inept imitation called “Psychotic Reaction.” And it was a big hit, in fact I think it was an even bigger hit than “I’m a Man”, which burned me up at the time but was actually cool now that I think about it, yeah, perfectly appropriate. The song was a real schlockhouse grinder, completely fatuous. It started out with this fuzz guitar riff they stole off a Johnny Rivers hit that escapes me just now — it was the one just before “Secret Agent Man” — then went into one of the stupidest vocals of all time. It went, let me see, some jive like: “I feel depressed, I feel so bad/Cause you’re the best girl that I’ye evej had/I can’t get yer love, I can’t get affection/Aouw, little girl’s psychotic reaction . . .An’ it feels like this!”, and then they’d shoot off into an exact “I’m a Man” ripoff. It wa^ absolute dynamite. I hated it at first but then one day I was driving down the road stoned and it came on and I clapped my noggin: “What the fuck am I thinking of? That’s a great song!”

I never could get up the nerve to buy the album (Double Shot DSM-1001) though. It had a killer cover, too — the photo was taken from the bottom of a grave, around the rim of which stood the members of the group, staring down atcha in the sepulchre with bugeyed malice. Really eerie, except that they were all wearing like madras shirts and checkered slacks from Penney’s. Which was not so eerie, but a niqe touch in the long run. The colors and lettering were nice, too.

The back had four pictures of them: Count Five standing rather awkwardly in Lugosian Capes on the lawn in front of an old mansion/trying to look sinister; CountFive on some L.A. dancetime show ravin’ it up while a crowd of blooming boppers, presumably cordoned off from their idols, pushed eagerly toward them from the right side of the picture; Count Five in the TV studio; and Count Five loading luggage in the trunk of their car with proper sullen scowls on their faces, gettin’ ready , for the Big Tour as all Popstars must (they probably to0k it in the manager’s wife’s station wagon).

Unlike the many asininely obfuscating album jackets of the lamer latter years, when groups started forgetting to put any kind of information on the back except maybe song titles and some phony Kodachrome nature-study which would have them passing around a dying redwood or something, Count Five’s first eruption was on its backside just packed with all the essential info. Like the names, nicknames, instruments played, and ages (the oldest were 19) of everybody in the band. The song titles looked promising too: aside from two ripoffs from the Who, they were all originals, and with names like “Double-Decker Bus,” “Pretty Big Mouth” and “The World,” to name only the first three, they could hardly seem to miss.

Butchillen, I’m tellin’ yaYhat it took me many weeks of deliberation, and many an hour’s sweat hunched over a record counter, before I filially got up the nerve to buy that album. Why? Well, it was just so aggressively mediocre that I simultaneously could hardly resist it and felt more than a little wary because I knew just about how gross it would be. It wasn’t until much later, drowning in the kitsch-vats of Elton John and James Taylor, that I finally came to realize that grossness was the truest criterion for rock ‘n’ roll, the cruder the clang and grind the more fun and longer listened-to the album’d be. By that time I would just about’ve knocked out an inciser, shaved imy head or made nearly any sacrifice to acquire even one more album of this type of in-clanging and hyena-hooting raunch. By then it was too late.

I tried and tried to buy the Psychotic Reaction LP — I’d go down to the Unimart stoned on grass, on nutmeg, vodka, Romilar or coming glassy-eyed off ten Dexedrine hours spent working problems in Geometry (I was a real little scholar — when I had the magic medicine which catapults you into a maniacal, obsessive craving for knowledge), I tried every gambit to weaken my resistance, but nothing worked. Shit, I had a fuckin’ split personality! And all over a fuckin’ Count Five album! Maybe I was closer to the jokers’ jailhouse than I ever imagined! On the other hand, what else could I or any other loon from my peer group ever possibly become schizoid over, but a lousy rock ‘n’ roll album? Girls? Nahh, that’s direct, simple, unrationalized. Drugs? Sure, but it’d be them on me, “Yer gonna pay for messin’ with us, boy!,” not my own inner wrack of dualistic agony. Nope, nothing more nor less than a record, a rock ‘n’ roll album of the approximate significance of Psychotic Reasction (who could contract barking fits from a Stones platter, much less the Beatles?), could ever pulverize my lobes and turn my floor to wormwood. I knew, ‘cause I had a brief though quite similar spell of disorientation once over the Question Mark and the Mysterians album! I was at a friend’s house, and I was high on Romilar and he on Colt 45, and I said: “Yeah, I bought the Question Mark and the Mysterians album today,” and suddenly the equilibrium was seeping from my head like water from the ears after a sea-plunge, a desultery vortex started swirling round my skull and gradually spun faster though I couldn’t tell if it was a breezy just outside or something right between the flesh and bone. I saw my life before niy eyes, and that is no shit — I mean not that I saw some zipping i montage from birth to that queasy instant of existential vertige, but that I saw myself walking in and out of countless record stores, forking over vast fortunes in an endless chain of cash-register clicks and dipgs at 3.38 and 3.39 and 3.49 and all the othejr fixed rates I knew by heart being if never on the track team unquestionably an All-American Competitive Shopper, I saw litter bins piled high with bags that stores all seal records in so you won’t get nabbed for lifting as you trot out the door. I saw myself on a thousand occasions walking toward my car with a brisk and purposeful step, turning the key in the ignition and varooming off highu as a hotrodder in anticipation of the revelations waiting in 35 or 40 minutes of blasting sound soon as I got home, the eternal promise that this time the guitars will jell like TNT and set off galvanic sizzles in your brain “KABLOOIE!!!’! and this time at least at last blow your fucking lid sky-high. Brains gleaming on the. ceiling, sticking like putty stalagtites, while yer berserk body runs around and slams outside hollering subhuman gibberish, jigging in erratic circles and careening split-up syllables insistently like a geek with a bad case of the superstar syndrome.

But that’s only the fantasy, the real vision, the real freaking flash was just like the reality only looped to replay without end. The real story is rushing home to hear the apocalypse erupt, falling through the front door and slashing open the plastic sealing “for your protection”, taking the record out — ah, lookit them gooves, all jett-black without a smudge yet, shiny and new and so fucking pristine, then the color of the label, does it glow with auras that’ll make subtle comment on the sounds coming out, or is it just a flat utilitarian monochromatic surface, like a schoolhouse wall (like RCA’s and Capital’s after some fool revamped ‘em — an example of real artistic backwardness)? And finally you get to put the record bn the turntable, it spins in limbo a perfect second, followed by the moment of truth, needle into groove, and finally sound.

What then follows is so often anticlimactic that it drives a rational man to the depths of despair. Bah! The whole musical world is packed with simpletons and charlatans, with few a genius or looney tune joker in between.

All this I saw whilst sitting there in the throes of the Question Mark & the Mysterians frieze, and more, I saw myself as a befuddled old man holding a copy of the 96Tears album and staring off blankly with the slack jaw of a squandered life’s decline. And in the next instant, since practically no time had elapsed at all, my friend said with obvious amazement: “You bought Question Mark & the Mysterians?”

I stared at him dully. “Sure,” I said. “Why not?”

I realize that all this sounds rather pathological — although I never thought so until laying it all out here — and the Freudian overtones and all that is child’s play, I guess. But what I don’t understand is what it all signifies. Don’t get the idea that my buying of and listening to records per se has always been marked by such frenzy and disorientatipn, or even any particular degree of obsession and compulsion. It’s just that music has been a fluctuating fanaticism with me ever since — well, ever since I first heard “The Storm” from the William Tell Overture on a TV cartoon about first grade. And riding in the car through grammer school when songs like “There Goes My Baby” would come on the radio, and getting a first record player in fifth grade, and hearing for the first time things like John Coltrane and The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady and the Stones and feedback and Trout Mask Replica. All these were milestones, each one fried my brain a -little further, especially the experience of the first few listenings to a record so total, so mind-twisting, that you authentically can say you’ll never be quite the same again. Black Saint and the Sinner Lady did that, and a very few others. They’re experiences you remember all your life, like your first real orgasm. And the whole purpose of the crack-brained, mechanically persistent involvement with recorded music is the pursuit of that priceless experience. So it’s not exactly that records might unhinge the mind, but rather that if anything was going to drive you up the wall it might as well be a record. Because the best music is strong and guides and cleanses and is life itself.

So perhaps the truest autobiography I could ever write, and I know this holds as well for many other people around, would take place largely at record counters, jukeboxes, pushing forward in the driver’s seat while AM walloped you on, alone under headphones with vast senic bridges and angelic choirs in the brain through insomniac post-midnights, or just to sit at leisure stoned or not in the vast benign lap of America slapping on sides and feeling good.

So I finally got the courage of my lunacy and bought Count Five. I guess the last straw was when I read in a Teen Fan magazine (the only recourse thert for some hardy listener trying to figure out what’s going on with each new sluice of product) that Count Five claimed to have turned down “a million dollars in bookings” because it would have meant that they would have to drop out of college and, said their manager, all the boys realized that getting a good education was the most important thing they could do. What a howl! That really appealed to my sense of absurdity, so the next time I perused the album in the racks I snorted, “The boys who went back to school . . .” That’s a certain claim to distinction — imagine Mick Jagger suddenly tripped by an attack of remorse now, and right in the middle of a glug of champage at some jet-set hot-spot the ineluctible truth hits him: You’ve got to get an education boy. You may have millions, but do you think you’ll be a popstar all your life? Decidedly not. What will you do in those long years of dark autumn? Do you want to end up like Turner, having someone come up and blow your brains out because you can’t think of any other diversions at the moment? It’s not too late! Get back to the London School of Economics and get that degree. Man must have some form of constructive work to do; otherwise he’s an ignoble weasel without meaning. So he gulps the rest of the champagne, disengages himself from the sweet thing at his side, and runs off to register. Eventually he earns a degree in Art and when the Stones fold he settles down to teach the drawing of the straight line to a succession of eager moppets. What an example that would be! He might even get blessed live and in person by the Pope, or invited to the White House! But of course that will never happen, because Mick Jagger is made of baser clay than Count Five.

I bought the album. It was the same day I got Happy Jack by the Who. I rushed home, found in Happy Jack a mild satisfaction, gagged at Psychotic Reaction.

But Psychotic Reaction was the album I kept coming back to. I played it gleefully and often for a year or so until it was ripped off by some bikers, and when I finally found it once more in 1971 in a used record store, man, I up and danced a jig. Then, however, I did something oddly petty and avaricious. It was in the $1.98 rack, right next to things like Cosmo’s Factory and Deja Vu, and somehow that seemed inappropriate to me — it should have been in the 89c grab bag rack where it belonged, right there with all the other down-and-out relics of yore, between Do the Bird with the Rivingtons, which I also purchased, and 96 Tears, which was actually there and proved my point, the clerk having had the sense this time to file it where it would be most comfortable (if this personalization bothers you, don’t worry: once when I was in the 7th Grade I went back to visit the town where I’d lived the year before and get back a copy of the Henry Mancini Mr. Lucky soundtrack album which I’d loaned to a friend and failed to retrieve before moving. When I got back home, I put the Mr. Lucky album into the record rack next to its old neighbor, the Peter Gunn album. Looking down on them sitting there like that, I felt glad for them. I was thinking that the two old friends, among the very first albums I ever bought, must be delighted to see each other again after so long. Maybe they even had some interesting tales to relate.).

-What I did, then, was to take the Count Five album, the one I’d dug so cool before and wished I still had so many times, and held it up in the air and say to the store’s manager: “What the hell is this thing doing in the $1.98 rack? Nobody’s going to pay $1.98 for this!”

He looked at it a second, musing. I seized the time: “How long has this thing been sitting here? I bet it musta sat here a year or two at least, while other albums came and went. It belongs over there! 89c!”

“Hmmm, I think you’re right,” he said. “I believe that record — no, the whole band, that’s right — is one of the all-time clunkers of history. Yeah, put it over in the 89c rack.”

“Sold!”, I hollered, went over and threw him a buck and rushed out. I had it! The artifact! A stone tablet from Tutankhamen’s tomb! A long-lost gem! Priceless — and I got it for only 89c!

Well, rest assured, kids. Time hadn’t dimmed the greatness of the Count Five album! In fact, it still hasn’t. It sounds just as grungy and jumbled now as it did way back in 1967. I may not have played Happy Jack more than five times since that day I bought them, even though I never got rid of it (those Class albums that you just don’t get any kicks out of will all reveal their worth and essential appeal someday, you always reason — perhaps you yourself must become worthy of them. Huh.), but I’m gonna rock it up and kick out the jams with Psychotic Reaction forever. In the first month after reacquiring it I must’ve played it ten times, and that’s saying something. A poorboy of Port or Tokay, Psychotic Reaction blasting off the walls and my brain would burn with pointless joy as I hopped and stomped around the turntable and couldn’t have sat down if I’d tried.

Track for track, you couldn’t have found a better deal in a whole year’s releases from Warner/Reprise. “Double Decker Bus” and “Peace of Mind” mashed the Yardbirds into masterpieces as vital as the title hit, the latter for one of the most perfect examples of the rigidly mechanical riff in history, the former for its truly cosmic lyrics (“Well just you walk/Down any street/If you don’t see one of us/You’re sure to see/A double-decker bus!”)

But the real classics on the first Count Five album that, while ignored in their own time, might have proven vastly influential if mere people had been able to comprehend what the band was doing. “Pretty Big Mouth” was a crunching Tex-Mex street jam, somewhat reminiscent of a Caucasian crew of Red Mountain manachis, which anticipated the even earthier excursions of their second album and scored with some of the greatest male chauvinist lyrics of all time: “I ended up in the deep deep South/Makin’ love to the woman with a real big mouth!”

“They’re Gonna Get You”, somewhat similarly, was a sprung-rhythm essay in barbershop paranoia, particularly shining by a vocal which veered deliriously between a sullen plaint anticipating Iggy and a cartoon falsetto. But the real mind-crusher was “The World,” a crazy clatter whose very monotony buckles under your feet like one of those moving ramps in the crazy house at an amusement park, while the lyrics consisted of a spartan minimum of phrases — “I’ll tell the world, you’re my girl, you’re so fine, you are mine” — crowed in a series of whoops and gnashings goggle-eyed with glee and lunatic pride.

Unfortunately, Psychotic Reaction was the only Count Five album to be widely disseminated and recognized in its own time. Double-Shot, a company nearly as erratic in promoting West Coast talent as ESP-Disk’s handling of New York innovators like the Godz, all but buried their second and third releases, giving them promotion and distribution equalled in its myopia and indifference only by Decca’s handling of the early Who. The band was lucky enough, however, to have a dynamite manager with the vision to comprehend their potentials and enough hardnosed hucksterish drive to eventually land them a contract with Columbia records, where they made two more fine albums which, though given the production and promotion they had always merited, still fell flat sales-wise. Ignorant people were still writing them off as nothing more than a Yardbirds rip-off, critics ignored or smeared them with their snidest categorizations, and the sad result was that their most important work has never been given the attention it truly deserves.

Ironically enough, even as the “underground” press and self-appointed arbiters of public taste maintained their conspiracy of silence, it was the very despised trade journals of the “establishment” which first recognized Count Five’s achievement in its initial flowering: “Evolving like so many others from their crude beginnings, Count Five has at length distinguished itself as a subtle, sophisticated integration of solid musical workmen creating some of the freshest and least grating sounds in recent memory.” That’s Billboard, talking about.Count Five’s fourth album, Ancient Lace and Wrought-Iron Railings (Columbia CS-9733).

But when Snowflakes Falling On the International Dateline (Columbia MS-7528) came out, it blew everybody with ears, all the kids fresh and free enough to flip the opinion-mafia the bird, right out the door and all the way to the corner. It featured the unparalleled “Schizophrenic Rainbows: A Raga Concerto,” which no one who’s sat through its entire 27 minutes will ever be able to forget, especially the thunderous inpact of the abrupt and full-volumed entry of George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra in the 18th minute. On this basis alone it must be considered the masterpiece among their albums, though the melancholy “Sidewalks of Calais” which closed Side One was also superb, with its remarkable lyrical maturation: “Pitting patting, trying not to step on the cracks/In Europa, where we saw no sharecropper shacks/Reciting our Mallarme/Those films with Tom Courtenay/And your hand in mine/On the sidewalks of Calais/Oh no, I shan’t forget ...”

Unfortunately, that was their last release. After investing so much technology and money in such an ambitious project and being repaid with such total public indifference, both the band and Columbia grew despondent at last, their contract lapsed, and the musicians themselves split for parts unknown, though one, the incredible guitar stylist John “Mouse” Michalski, later emigrated to England and formed the legendary though short-lived Stone Prodigies with several ex-members of John May all’s Blues Breakers and Ginger Baker’s Airforce. That cluth of titans, as everybody remembers, made one incredible album, To John Coltrane in Heaven, then embarked .on their record-breaking ten-month tour of the States which was so grueling that afterwards the entire band were committed to rest hordes for the rest of their lives.

Between Psychotib Reaction and the Snowflakes swan song, Count Five produced three other albums, each equally great and each a seven-league step ahead of the last. My favorite has always, been their third, Cartesian Jetstream (Double Shot DSS 1023). Here we had the fullest development of Count Five as a band'that was intrinsically and still unqualifiedly rock ‘n’ roll (one need only give ear to the old Anglo-Saxon madrigals and Felicianoan pseudo-Flameneo of Ancient Lace & Wrought Iron Railings to realize where their true strength lay). Fine and professional, yet intensely driving and almost grungy (sophistication, like history, cannot be braked), it was truly exhilirating music, filled with the wild pulsebeat of life itself. Such dynamic originals as “Cannonballs for Christmas”, “Her Name is Ianthe,” and “Nothing Is True/Everything Is Permitted” bring me back to it again and again, as does the addition of Marion Brown, alto sax, Sun Ra, piano, and Roland Kirk, bass penny whistle, on the last track, “Free All Political Prisoners! Sieze the Time! Keep the Faith! Sock It to ‘Em! Shut the Motherfucker Down! Then Burn It Up! Then Give the Ashes to the Indians! All Power To the People! Right On! All Power To Woodstock Nation! And Watch For Falling Rocks!” That one was a true brain-blitz, and spotlighted some of the most original lyrics of the year.

The only Count Five album to fall totally flat was their (secqnd, Carburetor Dung (Double Shot DSS 1009). It can truly be said that this was Count Five at their grungiest. In fact, it was so grungy, that on most of the songs you could barely distinguish anything except an undifferentiated wall of grinding noise and intermittent punctuation of glottal sowlike gruntings. I suppose the best way to characterize/the album would be to call it murky. Some of the lyrics were intelligible, such as these, from “The Hermit’s Prayer”: “Sunk funk dunk Dog God the goosie Gladstone prod old maids de back seat sprung Louisiana sundown junk an’ bunk an’ sunken treasures/But oh muh drunken hogbogs/I theenk I smell a skunk.” Lyrics such as those don’t Come every day, and even if their instrumental backup sounded vaguely like a car stuck in the mud and spinning its wheels, it cannot be denied that the song had a certain value as a prototype slab of gulley-bottom rock ‘n’ roll. Other songs, such as “Sweat Haunch Woman,” “Woody Dicot,” and “Creole Jukebox Pocahontas” validated themselves by emerging slightly from the uniform one-dimensional sloppiness of the rest of the material.

On the other hand, you might be better off not to take my word, but just go into^my record library & check the album out for yourself — Dave Marsh loved it (he sed: “It’s one answer to just how far-out rock can go, one branch’s end, and one of the most humanly primitive sets I’ve ever heard. You’d have to be crazy to make music like this, and I’m glad they did it.”) Ed Ward told me he’d keep it forever because “it’s one of the funniest albums ip the history of rock ‘n’ roll,’ right up there with Blows Against the Empire and Kick Out the Jams; how can you pass up something like that?” Although Jon Landau absolutely refused to1 print a review of it ,in Rolling Stone: “Look man, I’m not in this business in the spirit of some kid who hides in an alley, sticks his feet out and trips the first person who walks by, then laughs his ass off when they fall on their face. Everything connected with this album is wrong. In the first place, it’s absolutely horrible, one of the worst monstrosities ever released. Secondly, the group who recorded it are just a front for studio musicians; I know this for a fact. You can’t tell me that the same group that recorded “Iron Rainbows On the International Dateline” or whatever the name of that thing was, whatever it was it was a beautiful piece of work — pretentious, overarranged, overproduced, verbose, egotistical and gauchej but beautiful nonetheless — the glocken-spiel player was wailing his ass off for 27 minutes — but you can’t tell me that that and this pile of crap were done by the same people. This probably is the band . v. good riddance. Another thing is that they’re on a terrible label. Whoever heard of Double Shot records? What kind of promotion and publicity do they get? Nada! How mahy records do they release a year? Who the fuck knows? The last decent act they had was Brenton Wood and that was four years ago. This album, I guarantee* will sell no copies. Just look at the cover: a rusty wheelbarrow, the body of an old Ford with no wheels or engine, and a cottonwood tree in the background. The sun has almost gone down and it’s so dark you can hardly see a fuckin’ thing. So the title’s up there in oxblook-colored letters. Oxblood! And now you come to me and you say we gotta print a review of this album in Rolling Stone because it’s the only one of its kind and if people don’t get it nqw, they may never have a chance to again. And you send this review comparing it to Louis Armstrong, Elmore James, Blind Willie Johnson, Albert Ayler, Beefheart and the Stooges! All so people will buy it when there’s no earthly reason why anybody interested in music should. Send the review to Creem. Make it the album of the year. Jesus Christ, I used to have some respect for you guys. Now I think you must all be either losing your minds or turning against rock ‘n’ roll. It’s getting to, where Creem won’t even cover an album unless it’s either free jazz or so fucking metalic, mediocre and noise-oriented that you’d do as well to stick your ear over a garbage disposal or a buzzsaw. But remember, man: the public ain’t buyin’ it. No response at all.”

Neither Jon nor I nurtured any bad feelings over this, however — it was just that he couldn’t stand ineptitude of any kind in music, which was perfectly reasonable, while I dug certain outrageous brands of ineptitude the most! Carburetor Dung just may have been the most inept album I ever heard — certainly it was right up there with Amon Duul and Hapsash and the Colored Coat Featuring the Human Host and the Heavy Metal Kids. Yes, kids, that was the real title of a real record — I’m given to fabrication of albums sometimes, like if I wish a certain album existed and it doesn’t I just make it up — but that one’s authentic. Carburetor Dung is authentic, too, but Double Shot didn’t give it any promotion for a combination of reasons (title, attitudes of various people both in the press and industry, publid indifference, and the fact iliat not one person at Double Shot was ever even willing to talk about it it was so embarrassing). I think it just quietly faded away, like Alexander Spence’s Oar and so many other notable albums. And as for Count Five, they finally went where all good little bands go — to that big Gas Station in the sky.

“Well, that’s all very interesting, keeping us here for the last four hours telling us about the meteoric career of the Carburetor Dungs—”

No, no, Count Five, Carburetor Dung was the —

“YEAH, FINE, BUT WHEN THE FUCK ARE YOU GONNA TELL US ABOUT THE YARDBIRDS?!”

Uh, hrmp — hmmmm, yes . . . well, that story’ll always be in reserve for another day. Besides, when you get right down to it, Count Five were probably about as important as the Yardbirds, in the long run. It’s just that some people are recognized in their own time, and some aren’t.

(COUNT FIVE FAN CLUB: 463 N. First, No. D, El Cajon, Calif. 92021)