All I knew about the eponymous debut album by the Serpent Power - note the suggestion of Sgt Pepper in that name - before finding a copy and listening to it was that Christgau rated it the 28th best album of 1967 and I wanted to know why; they made further records, but this is the only one remotely findable in the UK, and indeed finding it was a remote and lengthy pursuit. Leader David Meltzer (whose wife Tina appears on co-lead vocals – I have no idea whether either is related to Richard but am presuming not since they do not appear anywhere in The Aesthetics Of Rock) is a noted second-stage Beat Generation poet, and some of that is evident in the poems printed on the album’s sleeve (one haikuesque offering, “27 April 67,” reads:
“No one to write to
but to myself tonight
Not even the familiar phantom
behind my chair
Who scans all words for immortality”).
Musically, however, The Serpent Power offer what on the surface is something fully to be expected from early ’67 SF; a mixture of post-Yardbirds frat blues yowling (with David doing the yowling – check out his splendidly boyish tantrum on “Nobody Blues”: “I’m gonna walk into my closet…and I’m gonna shut the door…and I’m gonna cry!...I’m gonna SOB!” which is all the more effective by coming directly after Tina’s wistful “Flying Away” in which she threatens “If you tell me one more lie/I will run away and cry”) with John Payne digging into his Mysterians organ, hopeful Monkees/Mamas and Papas-type anthems to the new spiritual sunrise (mostly sung by both David and Tina - from “Open House”: “The black cloud’s moved away!...Open up your door!”) and ethereal folky musings (mostly sung by Tina, who only really loses her immaculate, pre-Linda Perhacs cool towards the end of “Forget,” when she sighs “Oh I HATE tomorrow!”). Unlike, say, the Velvets, the music doesn’t scream RADICAL in the listener’s face, and the first few listens may lead to nought beyond a shrug of the shoulders, but there are other subtly restless factors at work; the unexpected harmonic amplifications of “Gently, Gently,” where the group doggedly descend down the semitone scale, the harmonic ambiguity which greets the “Forever!”s of “Open House” and at times even points a generation ahead to Tortoise. Its less than formal (or legal?) atmosphere leads to tracks being faded almost randomly, as though merely recording excerpts from a performance too long to fit into 40 over-convenient minutes.
But “Endless Tunnel” was the big finish to the record, the standard epic raga/mindblowing freakout. Except in its thirteen or so minutes it never really freaks out. Here David offers the usual metaphor of train journey as passage to who knows where, and gets increasingly frantic in his requests: “Oh Mister Conductor, tell we where are we going?...But Mister Conductor, he just walked on by,” until he resorts to petulant, extended squeals of frustration over the lack of an answer as he proceeds through the train, car by car, passing through cobras and pythons who “hissed out a welcome,” hawks pecking out his eyes, platoons of ladies looking for a lover, and so forth. The sort of thing which in normal circumstances would fully deserve standing in the corner and writing a hundred lines.
It came out a few months ahead of “The End” and the similarities are marked (though there is no climax as such) but in truth it’s much more fun and enterprising than dull old Jimbo and his Oedipal integrity kick; everyone digs in for the instrumental sections, none more so than one J P Pickens, who guests on “electrified 5-string banjo” and wails up a storm with his plucking, nearly walking away with the track (you’ll believe that a banjo can scream) before Meltzer’s lead guitar comes in to plot a more considered route to its orgasm, with his characteristic rapid, blunt picking of notes as though he is attempting to use his guitar to wax and pluck Ralph Gleason’s moustache. He audibly realises the absurdity of the journey halfway through – you can hear him turning over his lyric sheet – but continues to go for it anyway; with “bloodlike lake water seeping through my shoes” he tries to gain access to the engineer’s cabin, offering every conceivable variation on the “let me in” motif, and when he is finally let in and asks the engineer, again, where we are going, he turns round, grins and replies “I don’t know…I’m just following the tracks…up and down the tracks…” whereupon both train and song speed out of the picture. Try and track the whole album down, though; already its tracks are bearing that sense of near-instant familiarity that makes you want to listen to it in its entirety. OK, maybe it’s 1967’s 37th best album. For now.
“No one to write to
but to myself tonight
Not even the familiar phantom
behind my chair
Who scans all words for immortality”).
Musically, however, The Serpent Power offer what on the surface is something fully to be expected from early ’67 SF; a mixture of post-Yardbirds frat blues yowling (with David doing the yowling – check out his splendidly boyish tantrum on “Nobody Blues”: “I’m gonna walk into my closet…and I’m gonna shut the door…and I’m gonna cry!...I’m gonna SOB!” which is all the more effective by coming directly after Tina’s wistful “Flying Away” in which she threatens “If you tell me one more lie/I will run away and cry”) with John Payne digging into his Mysterians organ, hopeful Monkees/Mamas and Papas-type anthems to the new spiritual sunrise (mostly sung by both David and Tina - from “Open House”: “The black cloud’s moved away!...Open up your door!”) and ethereal folky musings (mostly sung by Tina, who only really loses her immaculate, pre-Linda Perhacs cool towards the end of “Forget,” when she sighs “Oh I HATE tomorrow!”). Unlike, say, the Velvets, the music doesn’t scream RADICAL in the listener’s face, and the first few listens may lead to nought beyond a shrug of the shoulders, but there are other subtly restless factors at work; the unexpected harmonic amplifications of “Gently, Gently,” where the group doggedly descend down the semitone scale, the harmonic ambiguity which greets the “Forever!”s of “Open House” and at times even points a generation ahead to Tortoise. Its less than formal (or legal?) atmosphere leads to tracks being faded almost randomly, as though merely recording excerpts from a performance too long to fit into 40 over-convenient minutes.
But “Endless Tunnel” was the big finish to the record, the standard epic raga/mindblowing freakout. Except in its thirteen or so minutes it never really freaks out. Here David offers the usual metaphor of train journey as passage to who knows where, and gets increasingly frantic in his requests: “Oh Mister Conductor, tell we where are we going?...But Mister Conductor, he just walked on by,” until he resorts to petulant, extended squeals of frustration over the lack of an answer as he proceeds through the train, car by car, passing through cobras and pythons who “hissed out a welcome,” hawks pecking out his eyes, platoons of ladies looking for a lover, and so forth. The sort of thing which in normal circumstances would fully deserve standing in the corner and writing a hundred lines.
It came out a few months ahead of “The End” and the similarities are marked (though there is no climax as such) but in truth it’s much more fun and enterprising than dull old Jimbo and his Oedipal integrity kick; everyone digs in for the instrumental sections, none more so than one J P Pickens, who guests on “electrified 5-string banjo” and wails up a storm with his plucking, nearly walking away with the track (you’ll believe that a banjo can scream) before Meltzer’s lead guitar comes in to plot a more considered route to its orgasm, with his characteristic rapid, blunt picking of notes as though he is attempting to use his guitar to wax and pluck Ralph Gleason’s moustache. He audibly realises the absurdity of the journey halfway through – you can hear him turning over his lyric sheet – but continues to go for it anyway; with “bloodlike lake water seeping through my shoes” he tries to gain access to the engineer’s cabin, offering every conceivable variation on the “let me in” motif, and when he is finally let in and asks the engineer, again, where we are going, he turns round, grins and replies “I don’t know…I’m just following the tracks…up and down the tracks…” whereupon both train and song speed out of the picture. Try and track the whole album down, though; already its tracks are bearing that sense of near-instant familiarity that makes you want to listen to it in its entirety. OK, maybe it’s 1967’s 37th best album. For now.
