The Psychedelic EraApart from "King Midas In Reverse," it is probably news to most casual listeners in America that The Hollies ever made a significant contribution to psychedelic music. This is mostly a result of the poor sales of their albums, coupled with the changes that were made in the song line-ups of their long-players upon release in the United States, and the fact that they changed labels immediately prior to releasing this material. By 1967, leaving Imperial Records was a gilt-edged priority for the band and its management, who by now had realized that the label would never get seriously behind their records. The group's final Imperial single, "On A Carousel," was released in February 1968, and the band's next single, "Carrie Anne," released three months later, marked the start of a 10-year relationship with Epic Records. "Ron Richards and Harold Davidson engineered our exit from Imperial," Elliott remembered. "It happened after Imperial rejected Butterfly as not commercial enough. We were happier with Epic, because they took a much more active interest in promoting the records--they were a larger company also, and that was a help." In June 1967, Epic Records released a 10-song version of Evolution, shorn of "When Your Light's Turned On," "Leave Me" and "Water On the Brain," but with "Carrie Anne" added. The album never charted, but "Carrie Anne" did reached #9, a fair achievement at the time and one of the group's better showings in the U.S., only "Bus Stop" and "Stop Stop Stop" having done better. The year 1967 saw the band release not one, but two long-players, Evolution and Butterfly, that can only be regarded as classics of the psychedelic era. Either record can command a place alongside the Beatles' Revolver or Sergeant Pepper, or even that Pink Floyd standard, Piper At The Gates of Dawn. To date, however, only hard-core Hollies fans have ever picked up on either album, a genuine tragedy for those who are missing them. Evolution is probably the equal of the best psychedelic album ever recorded by any band. Released in June 1967, just as the Beatles' Sergeant Pepper album was sweeping the media and the public, Evolution was a 12-song classic in its own right. It has its weird, spaced-out side, embodied in songs like "Water On the Brain," and material ("Ye Olde Toffee Shoppe") dressed up in the obligatory tinkling harpsichords and tremolo effects, as well as softly sung ditties ("Stop Right There") about druggy, romantic states of mind. But it also has balls, something most psychedelic albums were missing in their quest to depict the next level of cosmic consciousness. In the course of writing drug songs, The Hollies never gave up their core purpose as a performing band. Anyone who loves Beatles' songs like "Fixing A Hole" for its loud guitar break may well melt over "Then The Heartaches Begin," "When Your Light's Turned On" or "Have You Ever Loved Somebody," the latter a Clarke-Hicks-Nash original that is, unfortunately, better known for the smoother, poppier version done by the Searchers as a single. Allan Clarke was largely responsible for both the album opener, "Then the Heartaches Begin," as well as "Have You Ever Loved Somebody," the two best hard rock songs on the album. Of "Have You Ever Loved Somebody," he admits, "I rather liked the Searchers' version. I felt they should have had a hit with it." Tony Hicks's searing guitar on "Have You Ever Loved Somebody" leaves no doubt that these guys were still a rock 'n' roll band, and presents Hicks's single guitar sound to better advantage than any other records by the band--this is what psychedelic music played by his much-idolized Pirates might've sounded like. Even "You Need Love," a rather urgent love-song with a radiant chorus built around the title phrase and embellished with brass flourishes, is credible rock 'n' roll. "Lullaby To Tim" anticipates the tremolo-vocal effect later used to great effect by Bill Wyman on "In Another Land" from the Rolling Stones' album Their Satanic Majesties' Request, except that the song has a better melody and more intelligible lyrics; it also anticipates "Lady Of The Island" from Nash's "Lady Of The Island" from the first Crosby, Stills and Nash album. And "Rain On the Window" seemed to deliberately recall "Bus Stop," embellished with beautiful horns, while the basic acoustic guitar track drives the piece along. On song from the group's psychedelic era that Clarke would like to forget is "Water On The Brain," a number from the British LP Evolution that has only appeared of "King Midas In Reverse." A weird, spaced out number with a frantic, bongo-laden opening, strange tempo changes, a flugelhorn played over the break, and a bizarre chorus of "Drip, drip, it's driving me wild," the song is a kind of cult classic among hard-core Hollies fans, but at the time it got the band a lot of critical mail.
The band's next album, Butterfly, was even better, a venture into psychedelia on a more sophisticated level. Released in November 1967, it was clearly done in the wake of the explosion in druggy ambiance heralded by the Sergeant Pepper album and its success. Opening with "Dear Eloise," which was never a single in England, the record ran through myriad psychedelic, trippy, spacey, generally upbeat numbers. Some of the album's songs, such as "Away Away Away," with its flute and horn section arranged by Johnny Scott, or "Wishyouawish," were pure pop that simply fit into the mood and sound of the times, while other tracks, such as the sitar-laden "Maker," were unique creations of their period. "Maker" holds up about as well as any song of the era built around sitars and the process of meditation, with a catchy, poppy middle chorus that took it more into typical Hollies territory. "Would You Believe" was a love song, strongly reminiscent of "King Midas In Reverse" (with the same kind of dense string backing), decked out in bells and lots of echo on the vocals, but lacking the single's beat or memorable choruses. One song that didn't make it onto the American release of Butterfly, rather awkwardly titled Dear Eloise/King Midas In Reverse (with the latter single added on) was Tony Hicks's "Pegasus," a thoroughly beguiling, hauntingly beautiful composition, that could easily be a drug song masquerading as a lullaby, or which could just as easily be another "Puff The Magic Dragon," a perfectly innocent song that is easily misinterpreted. The chorus featured what could be either a saxophone played backward, a la the Beatles' "Baby You're A Rich Man," or a Mellotron--it is difficult to tell amid the layers of production and overdubbing (but, then, that's half the fun of most of the best records made during this period). Graham Nash's "Postcard" is proof that less is more, and really should have been a single, a driving love song with a bunch of memorable hooks, gently harmonized and featuring a stripped-down sound compared to the rest of the record, nothing but acoustic guitar, drums and bass, with a few unobtrusive sound effects and a celesta coming in at the end. "Charlie And Fred" was one of those weird songs of eccentrics that every British band used to have at least one of during the psychedelic era--Cream had "Pressed Rat And Warthog" and Pink Floyd had "Arnold Layne"--with a memorable middle verse ("He lived all alone in a hovel ... " ) and a lovely acappella final chorus. "Try It," written by Allan Clarke, has remained somewhat familiar to American listeners by virtue of its having been included on several compilations, as the B-side of "Jennifer Eccles" in America, it is one of a relative handful of Hollies tracks from the period that Epic Records has held onto in the United States. This was The Hollies' attempt to do a pure psychedelic ode, embellished with lots of tape loops and sound effects. "Yes, 'Try It' was mine," Clarke recalled. "I was always the member of the band into experimenting with astral projection, meditation and that sort of thing. We all got into the psychedelic scene--Tony was playing a sitar. Not a Ravi Shankar-type sitar, but an electric sitar." Amazingly, it works, though it is as much of a period piece as any other example of psychedelia from this era. "Elevated Observations?" was a somewhat ironic ode to the joys of psychedelic experience, even featuring the line "Ego is dead" in its chorus--somehow, when The Hollies sang "It's so high up I touch the sky," the latter reference lacked the urgency of Jimi Hendrix's use of the phrase, but the song was quite pretty. "Step Inside" was a love song, whose upbeat, glowing, radiant vocals and mood were contrasted with the offer of "tea and crumpets" to the lady being wooed, a lovely song, that even today, seems to recall the conundrum about British pop-rock of the era once offered up in the pages of Rolling Stone (talking of the Rolling Stones' "She's A Rainbow," and the line "She comes in colors," some wag commented that when Donovan used the word "come," you knew it was for tea…). And then there was "Butterfly," the most sublimely beautiful record that Nash ever recorded with The Hollies. A song of lost love and fading beauty, embellished with flutes, a full string section, and horns. A haunting love song sung by Nash alone, "Butterfly" was resplendent in a set of images that, to this listener, at least, recall the opening sections of "Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds" in a favorable way. The song was doubly enticing because it became part of The Hollies' concert set in late 1967. The allure of The Hollies' psychedelic period was enhanced by the fact that, unlike the Beatles, who ceased touring at roughly the time they started moving into this side of their repertory, or the Rolling Stones, who were off the road for most of the 1967 and 1968, when they might've actually done a song or two from Satanic Majesties, The Hollies remained a working rock band, and chose to integrate their psychedelic repertory into their stage performances.
For larger, more centralized gigs, the band was supported by the Mike Vickers Orchestra. A May 25, 1968 review of such a show, from a mid-May 1968 at Shrewsbury, on a bill with the Scaffold and Paul Jones, cited the presence of the orchestra, along with back-projected clouds, during "Butterfly." Other songs in the group's set that night included "On A Carousel," "King Midas In Reverse," "Carrie Anne," and covers of Bob Dylan's "Blowing In the Wind" and "The Times They Are A-Changin'." As Elliott pointed out, "Everybody was doing that sort of thing at the time, and so were we." As to how well the group really took to psychedelic music, Allan Clarke remarked, "The kaftans and the bells, and the sitars--Graham was really at home with all of that, more than the rest of us." Nash's enthusiasm for the changes taking place in the music scene was matched by his appreciation for many of the extra-musical diversions of the era. While virtually everyone working on the pop music scene was exposed to the drug culture during this era, Clarke, Hicks, Calvert and Elliott preferred the more mundane indulgence of a pint at the local pub to the more exotic chemical intoxicants in which Nash began to partake ever more regularly.
Additionally, Nash's attitude toward music was changing very rapidly. The songwriting team of Clarke-Hicks-Nash existed officially on paper, but it was becoming clear that Nash's work was becoming more personal in ways that the rest of the group did not care to share. Where Clarke and Hicks were content to write straight-ahead rock 'n' roll if the mood so struck them, Nash was looking for more outré and experimental subjects, and wanted to write songs that had meaning. Additionally, Nash was starting to chafe under The Hollies' continued image as a pop band, with a following centered on their singles and on younger listeners. Gradually, Nash was becoming closer to a couple of California-based musicians, Stephen Stills and David Crosby, whose acquaintance he'd made, and he began to do demos of his songs with them. No one in The Hollies seemed to mind. "He played us the demos he made with Stephen and David," Elliott remembered in a recent interview, recalling the developing split between Nash and the others, "and we didn't mind, we thought they were great. We had no problem with it." The Hollies had given him room for his own songs ever since "Fifi The Flea" back in 1965; during 1968, they'd even tried to record "Marrakesh Express," the song by which Nash later introduced himself, reconstituted from pop band member into a singer-songwriter, to a huge public on the first Crosby, Stills and Nash album, and on a single by the trio.
"Graham had reached a point," explained Clarke, "where he wanted separate credit for the songs that he wrote, instead of having everything credited to Clarke, Hicks, and Nash." Finally, in November 1968, following the group's return from a tour of Europe, it was announced that The Hollies would postpone a scheduled American tour. A few days later, it was announced that Graham Nash was leaving The Hollies. For The Hollies, the departure of Nash wasn't as big a crisis as, say, Paul McCartney's quitting was a problem for the Beatles. On the other hand, his exit was a good deal more important than the departure of a member who only played rhythm guitar. In fact, Nash had done relatively little of that, but his voice and his songwriting had made a significant contribution to the group's success. A lot of bands and musicians were sorting themselves out in 1968 and 1969. By that time, none of the Beatles (except Ringo) was exactly crazy about spending much of their time and energy acting as session men on the other members' songs, and McCartney was less than enthused about having the Lennon-McCartney contractual partnership survive into the era of John Lennon's political songs, much less the even more personal primal-scream-therapy-based compositions that were to come from Lennon. Steve Marriott, weary of the Small Faces' teeny-bopper appeal, exited his band at the end of 1968; and the Yardbirds, after numerous personnel changes over the preceding three years, split up in the spring of 1968 along a fault line dividing Jimmy Page and Chris Dreja's desire to get on with the business of playing blues-based rock 'n' roll from Keith Relf and Jim McCarty's embrace of psychedelia and the counter-culture. The difference for The Hollies--and one that speaks volumes about the sheer talent within the ranks of the group, and their loyalty to each other--was that, when the split with Nash came, the group survived intact and thrived, even as Nash successfully reinvented himself as a third of Crosby, Stills and Nash, and later as a solo artist. These differences came to a head in a series of events in the middle and end of 1968. Nash's frustration was only increased by the success of the single "Jennifer Eccles," which he and Clarke had authored as an almost deliberately superficial pop song.
And they did, with the new single reaching #7 in England and #40 in America. For many years, the story has circulated that the final straw for Nash was the group's decision to do an album of covers of Bob Dylan songs. But Nash participated in performances of Dylan songs by the group onstage during late 1968, and was involved in the early stages of planning the Dylan album. In any case, Nash's final project with the band was an obligatory appearance at a benefit concert at the London Palladium in late December 1968.
|