Search - Seeds :: Seeds/a Web of Sound

The Seeds: Garageland's Super Group

Gavin B. | St. Louis MO | 03/18/2002

(4 out of 5 stars)

"All praise and glory to the Seeds! These L.A. based rockers were the only garage band, Stooges aside, to reach superstardom. The Seeds were wonderfully inept and so limited musically that they were a beacon of hope for every tone deaf kid who just bought guitar. This CD is actually the first two Seeds vinyl albums on Crescendo, isssued in 1966. In 1966 the Seeds were on the top of the heap of Sunset Strip bands and their primary rival was Arthur Lee's legendary group, Love. When the Seeds played clubs like the Whiskey, the Sea Witch or the the Trip they drew huge crowds and groups like Zappa's Mothers of Invention, the Doors, and Captain Beefheart actually were opening acts for the Seeds! The Seeds were the group that coined the term "flower power" and along with Love, were the first groups considered to be psychedelic. The pummeling, repetative 2 chord rock of the Seeds was anything but psychedelic, however. It was the bizarre free asscociation lyrics of lead singer Sky Saxon that made the Seeds unusual. "Pushing Too Hard", a garage classic, is on this collection. There is a certain brillance needed to make a song simplier than "Louie, Louie" a top 40 hit. "Pushing Too Hard" features Saxon's bratty half spoken vocal and the snarling, reverb soaked lead guitar of Jan Savage. The second album, "Web of Sound" is the Seeds finest hour. In this one, Saxon's lyrics and vocal style are over the top. "Up In Her Room" is a 14 minute epic where Saxon improvises lyrics which become increasingly derranged. "Tripmaker" and "Pictures and Designs" are incoherent, yet mezmerizing songs about the delights of LSD. "Mr. Farmer" is a defining moment in the history of rock and roll. The band plays a mid- tempo marching beat and Saxon mournfully pleads with Mr. Farmer to let him water his crops..."Mr. Farmer, I want to be just like you." It doesn't get much better than this. The Seeds put out a couple of more albums after the first two, but Sky Saxon's songs like, "900 People Making It Daily", "Falling Off The Edge of My Mind", and "Love In A Summer Basket" became too psychedelic, even for their chemically fueled devotees. By 1969, the band was pretty much gutted, but the Seeds will always be the headline act in Garageland."

Worth it for garage fans

Hans Pfaall | Connecticut, USA | 12/15/2004

(3 out of 5 stars)

"In my opinion, the repetitive (and in some cases obviously derived) nature of the first album is enough to warrant a mixed rating for this release. It would be an unfair overgeneralization of the Seeds for one to say that every song is like the classic "Pushin' Too Hard," but as noted by other reviewers, a number of the songs (No Escape, Evil Hoodoo, etc.) do tend to recycle riffs and ideas from the band's lone top 40 hit. In addition, the track "Nobody Spoil My Fun" sounds like an obvious re-write of the Stones cover "Down Home Girl." That said, the first album is still a lot of fun - sort of a wild and trashy brand of rock'n'roll with strangeness and attitude. Also of importance, the electric piano has a mysterious sound, one unique to the Seeds. The instrument is not one often found in garage rock.



I find the Seeds "minimalism" to be charming, if not wholly artistically successful. Case in point, "Evil Hoodoo" reminds me of some of what the Velvet Underground would later accomplish with their own seeming brand of drug induced instrumentation, yet it doesn't have the strong lyrical flourishes Lou Reed was known for. Another highlight was the almost top 40 "Can't Seem to Make You Mine." This cut gets me every time, as Saxon sounds completely out of his mind in his desire for a girl.



The second album Web of Sound was an improvement, and wound up as the best album the Seeds ever put out. This was chiefly because on Web of Sound, the Seeds had more adventure and variation in the songwriting. Indeed, I would argue that "Pictures and Designs" represents a top-notch effort in early psychedelia with its dark organ, snarling fuzz, sinister vocal exclamations, and out and out dementia. "I Tell Myself" was also a fine Stones-like lighter number. In addition, the overlong "Up In Her Room" has to be considered innovative on some level, because there would be some similarity in the Velvets' "Sister Ray" a little over a year later. And let us not forget the oddball "Mr. Farmer," where Saxon utters the ludicrous line "Mr. Farmer let me harvest your crops [sss]." Though a mixed bag, I would say that the second album was the one to most clearly represent the vision of Saxon and company. All in all, I would recommend this CD, which includes all of the Seeds first two albums, to music fans interested in garage rock."

The First Two...and The Best Two

BluesDuke | Las Vegas, Nevada | 01/14/2005

(4 out of 5 stars)

"When the conversation turns to the Seeds, their first album tends to be the one highlighted by those who strain for the least arduous way to let the uninitiated hear why this loopy quartet earned their legend as garage proto-psychedelics. It's the band's most accessible set (not merely because of the presence of their two bona-fide hit singles, "Can't Seem To Make You Mine"--which the Ramones couldn't resist including on their own 60s tribute, "Acid Eaters"--and "Pushin' Too Hard," the Seeds single even nonfans don't mind hearing once a year at minimum) and, over a decade before the Dead Boys picked the phrase for their own debut, the Seeds were young, loud, and snotty (just listen real carefully to Sky Saxon's warbling snarl) without aiming merely to blow out the woofer.



But the hardcore Seedlings point to "A Web of Sound" as the band's unqualified masterwork. You can pick any number of reasons why, from the stripped-Doors style of "Pictures and Designs" and "A Faded Picture" (which, in its idiosyncratic ballad delivery, anticipated the original Modern Lovers' "Hospital") to that impeccable epic of teenage lust smothered in a hookah haze, "Up In Her Room," which wrings out what "Gloria's" subject and protagonist were really up to after midnight, assuming a small quantity of controlled substances were among the consumables consumed. If their publicity was deliberately affected and pretentious ("...leader Sky Saxon's lyrics say today's teens are...the seeds of the next generation which will flower into something very beautiful," went one blurb I remember seeing; "Our music is definitely not rock and roll; our music is blossoming forth with power and colour," went another, attributed to Saxon himself, which was pretty audacious for a guy whose rock and roll heart probably was "Up In Her Room," after all), their attack was anything but. This was rock and roll just before it became just too cool to be mere rock and roll anymore.



And the Seeds themselves seemed to know it going in. It's probably a good bet that the band--or Saxon himself, anyway--had more than a small quantity of said substances in their system for what transpired afterward. When they came back down from up in her room, they went on to make one badly-advised and executed concept album ("Future") and a weakly-recorded live album ("Raw & Alive," though you get enough indication that these guys were pretty fly in front of the right audience), in between which appeared what was a blues album ("A Spoon Full of Seedy Blues," credited to the Sky Saxon Blues Band) just about in name only.



The Seeds might have graduated from there into just a pleasant if loopy memory if Lenny Kaye hadn't butted in and included "Pushin' Too Hard" among the "Nuggets" of his classic original 1960s psychedeligarage anthology. From there, at least a couple of new generations used that entree to give bands like the Seeds a deeper pull. Usually meaning the first two albums. Appropriately.



Those are still the two main reasons the Seeds mattered in the first place. A secondary reason, possibly: the sound and style on those two sets--the cheeseball organ riffing, the cheapo-distorto guitar, the rumbling drumming, Saxon's snarling warble--probably planted more seeds into what was to come from the original (read: the electric) Modern Lovers, the Fleshtones, maybe even Iggy and the Stooges (who could have been the result of what went down "Up In Her Room," if you thought hard enough about it), than people including those who populated those bands (and others) might suspect."