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Post by duckbarman on Nov 6, 2015 17:08:35 GMT
 It was from the "SPEC" Spring 1969 edition of 16 magazine - Les was gone soon after, and I was wondering did it play any part in the mounting tensions that were around at the time... actually, I think you guys might have missed a trick in not featuring Les more, and marketing yourselves as a teenybopper band!! That's Thom Mooney from the Nazz also in that shot, and that seems to be what their management was going for back then...  |
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Post by Buck on Nov 9, 2015 20:13:30 GMT
The teen mag people were willing to give Les some ink, and they started to. There really wasn't much tensions around Les' departure from SWU, other than the setback of SWU's recording career and the beginning of the problems with Elektra Records. It was caused by Les' failure to complete release quality vocals on the first SWU record, and I think Les probably thought he didn't want to be trapped in the mold of SWU's vocalist, and working under the strong influence of Sandy Pearlman, that it wouldn't allow him to fully be himself and he'd be better off going on his own. Les touches on that in his song "Rational Passional." The second verse of that deals specifically with his relationship to Sandy.
As for SWU as teenybopper band, who knows. In retrospect, 16 didn't do much for either Les or Thom Mooney. But you get the sense these mags were always looking for the next young heartthrob to promote.
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Post by duckbarman on Nov 10, 2015 12:16:00 GMT
The second verse of that deals specifically with his relationship to Sandy. Thanks for the insight. Funnily enough, I've been trying to make out the lyrics for that second verse and wondering what it was about and what does he mean by "Pedant from the Island", etc if that is indeed what he says... Did Sandy know about that, I wonder, and could that be part of why he wasn't keen on it going on the LP (the recording of Rational kept getting delayed and then a coin flip determined its inclusion, according to Les)... Now that we've all had a chance to listen to demos of those early SWU tracks on youtube, I have to confess to greatly enjoying them - you can clearly hear the band's influences at the time and it might be argued that these influences slightly masked SWU's own identity, going by these early demos, but they do throw up the intriguing possibility of "the road not taken"... Obviously we're all BOC fans because Eric joined and the band then took on a rockier, harder edge (though I don't think they lost any of their "quirkiness") and we wouldn't sacrifice that for anything, but if the original band had been able to continue to develop along Les-shaped lines, I often wonder what sort of butterfly would have emerged from that chrysalis? |
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Post by Buck on Nov 10, 2015 14:07:50 GMT
The SWU's greatest strength with Les up front was our improvisational performance. Les would get an idea keying off the audience or current events, or whatever, and we'd back him on the fly and the result would be some real magic out of thin air. He'd make up lyric in the moment, and it was all very hippy jam band, but it could be spell binding.
I do think he was uncomfortable doing primarily Pearlman and Meltzer lyrics, but Les' songwriting was IMO less imaginative and clever by comparison. I think the band at that moment would have been remarkable if the Elektra record had been released with Les (and Andrew Winters) at the time, but it was in retrospect, Les' decision by his actions, to leave.
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Post by Cheryl on Nov 12, 2015 15:07:38 GMT
Interesting reading. I'll have to see what I can find on You Tube etc. for music and more reading regarding this conversation.
As for right now... I'm working on The Career of Evil series..
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