Dedicated to society: The Seeds

Sunday 6/14/26

I saw an anecdote that someone had shared about Sky Saxon, lead singer and I suppose you could say lead visionary of the 1960s Los Angeles garage band the Seeds, a group I've been listening to since I was first driving around in high school. Someone they knew--could have been a relative, I don't recall--was hosting Saxon overnight following his gig in the area. After the show and at this person's home, Saxon did all the drugs, wanted to have group sex, and would only listen to the Moody Blues.

This could be made up, but it definitely tracks as I have always understood Saxon. I'd have expected nothing else from him. He liked to say the word "baby" as often as possible in the Seeds' songs. But the Seeds really were pretty good. I'm serious about that.

One must hear their self-titled debut. Garage canon. Its follow-up, A Web of Sound (both LPs being from 1966, garage's ultimate year), is also a cool LP. Then the Seeds got trippier with 1967's Future. I love the expanded version of their live album, Raw and Alive: The Seeds in Concert at Merlin's Music Box. The original record came out in 1968 and wasn't actually live but that didn't seem to matter. It was cut live-in-the-studio with crowd sound dubbed in later.

The Seeds treated the recording session like a live date, though. Positioned themselves as though they were on the stage. Basically pretended they were playing to an audience.

The reissue on Big Beat collects both the overdubbed recordings and the Seeds' "set" sans the overdubs as well as a real live recording in the sense that there was an audience present. Trying to get different results, the Seeds invited their fan club--that's awesome--to be the audience for an in-studio concert. I really dig this reissue. Essential garage listening.

I can't help but be curious as to what being a member of the Seeds' fan club was like as well as people bonding and coming together because of the Seeds. I guess it makes sense to me that they had a fan club, but then again, I'm unsure why it makes sense. The LA angle? For instance, I have a much harder time envisioning the Count Five as having a fan club, but I suppose maybe they did.

The Seeds were definitely garage-ists, but if you listen to how they were introduced at their shows, you also pick up on how they were being pushed as progressive, even, dare one say, flower power-y, which is rather at odds with a lot of their material. Then again, there is their extended number "900 Million People Daily (All Making Love)."

My feeling is that the Seeds fed MCs these lines and encouraged the rhetorical push that they were advancing somehow. They seemed like a band that genuinely wanted to stick and knew that in order to stick they would need to change. That's a great thing about rock music at this time in the mid to late 1960s: there was an onus to grow.

The Seeds are the rare garage band who has bootleg recordings after a fashion. There's one from Anaheim's wonderfully named MelodyLand Theater in July 1968 and another from the Hollywood Bowl shortly before the start of the Summer of Love in 1967.

Saxon would dedicate the Seeds' biggest hit, "Pushin' Too Hard," to "society," which is awesome. But perhaps the Seediest of Seeds numbers, if you will, is "Up in Her Room." Every extant version of it should be heard. It's like the garage version of the Doors' "The End."

What else was part of that cassette tape rotation when I was first driving at sixteen and seventeen? Rolling Stones, Yardbirds, the Velvet Underground, the Blues Magoos. Especially albums like Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out, The Velvet Underground and Nico ("European Son" is a great solo driving song for wooded Connecticut at night), Live Yardbirds: Featuring Jimmy Page, Psychedelic Lollipop, and a heavy dosage of the Yardbirds' pre-fame recordings taped at the Crawdaddy Club in 1963, which has hardly ever been mentioned by anyone but are awesome.

How did I come to listen to this music as a teenager? Did my parents? No. I came by it the same way I have come by everything. I am a searcher. You have to go to the good things. When you wait for things to come to you, you usually become the kind of person who can only watch Netflix and the likes of Love Island. Whatever nonsense that barges through your door simply by being alive/a de facto, passive consumer of whatever Lowest Common Denominator society belches out at you barrage-style and is seen and known to exist simply by walking out your door to have the latest flood of vomit in the streets wash over you, the idea being that anything you partake of has to come to you rather than you go to anything good on your own, effacing any ability you might have to tell what's actually good or what anything truly is for that matter in the process, which I would maintain isn't actually being much alive, but that's a conversation for another day.

You could probably have had that conversation with Sky Saxon, who was something of a philosopher, or fancied himself as one anyway.

As a sophomore album, I put A Web of Sound in the same qualitative category as the Vines' Winning Days from 2004. You got the sense that Winning Days was made from songs that were left off the band's first record Highly Evolved, or were inchoate form at that time, but they were still solid enough to help make a worthwhile album which some people would prefer, as some people preferred the Strokes' Room on Fire to their debut Is This It. Another for this category, but the songs on Room on Fire are stronger on the whole.

These kinds of sophomore efforts can almost feel like collections because they have a vague (or not so vague) round-up quality. It's a compilation obviously, but think of the Smiths' Hatful of Hollow. Same kind of feeling as these non-comp studio efforts.

I like this kind of album. You can only do it the once, though. If you don't have the new thing on album three, things are trending downhill for you creatively. I believe that's why the Seeds made such a hard push to work a different mine on Future. They were searching for one.