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Lost in the the shock and hysteria of Michael Jackson's death was the scant reportage of another pop passing: that of crazed LA garage-pop singer Sky Saxon, frontman of the Doors-ish Seeds. I've adapted a section of my LA music history Waiting For The Sun as a way of saying goodbye.--Barney Hoskyns, Editorial Director, Rock's Backpages

"Punk rock" was an important strain in the LA pop of the mid-Sixties, especially when bands began fusing the delinquent energy of the Stones and the Yardbirds with the freaked-out trippiness of the beads-and-bangles brigade.

In Hollywood, the sound of groups like the Standells was as opportunistic as it was exciting. "There were great punk records made in LA," said the late Greg Shaw, a scholar of the period, "but the bands were never able to free themselves from the presence of the industry. There was always one eye on the possibility of making money from this."

Far more exciting than the Standells were the Seeds, fronted by the unhinged Richie Marsh, aka Sky Saxon. Born a Mormon in Salt Lake City, Richie had tried to make it in the Teen Idol era with singles like "Goodbye" and "They Say" (not to mention "Do the Swim") but had reinvented himself and teamed up with guitarist Jan Savage, keyboard player Daryl Hooper and drummer Rick Andridge to form the Seeds.

Signed to Gene Norman's jazz-oriented GNP-Crescendo label, the band made its debut with "Can't Seem To Make You Mine" but did rather better with the timeless "Pushin' Too Hard," a Top 40 hit in early 1967. "Everyone in town had turned them down, but I liked them," the tall, snowy-haired Norman told me in 1993. "It wasn't my preferred music, but I could feel the intensity of it. Sky was a mercurial character with a sliver of talent that caught on, and the world seemed to be ready for what he had to say."

If there was something of the Dick Shawn of The Producers about Saxon, he was nonetheless possessed of a thrilling, Johnny-Rotten-esque voice and a nutty kind of conviction. "Pushin' Too Hard" remains the ultimate leave-us-kids-alone garage anthem (though Sky was already 30 when it was recorded!) "[Sky] was a nice, stupid guy--what you'd get if Mick Jagger had sex with a donkey," said Kim Fowley, who produced one of the band's last sessions for Norman. "He took too many drugs and wandered around with a picture of Jesus Christ as I.D."

The legend of Saxon as LA's numero-uno acid casualty is certainly one of the reasons why the Seeds have more currency than most of the punk-pop garage bands of the period. But Greg Shaw painted a more complex picture of the guy. "Sky was always out there, very schizoid," Shaw told me in 1993. "But at the same time he could be quite savvy and calculating. Even now, he'll go on and on about vibrations from Mars melting marshmallows in government vaults, but then suddenly he'll switch into a fairly together business mode. People who've known him since the early days say he's always been like that, that it wasn't the drugs."

With songs such as "Evil Hoodoo," "Pictures And Designs," and the thrilling 14-minute "Up In Her Room," the Seeds created a mesmerizing and slightly sinister Hollywood version of mid-Sixties punk rock. "There was real smog in Daryl Hooper's organ melodica," wrote garage connoisseur Lester Bangs, for whom the Seeds "best epitomized the allure that LA had then." Certainly Hooper's psych-Gothic electric piano sound was to become one of the Doors' trademarks (and one of the Stranglers' in the following decade).

Nor did the influence of the group's English manager "Lord" Tim Hudson, who came on board at the time of their third album Future and encouraged them to write such hilarious songs as "March Of The Flower Children," make much difference to their sound. Hudson may have claimed that "Seed music is the original Flower Power music," but the Seeds of 1968's in-concert Raw And Alive sounded exactly like the garage-psych outfit they'd been three years before.

"You could say that the Seeds were the proto-Doors," Mitchell Cohen noted last week on the Rock's Backpages blog, "except that I dig the Seeds more than the Doors, who never made a single as good as 'Pushin' Too Hard,' who never captured a vibe as sexy as 'Can't Seem To Make You Mine,' whose poetic aspirations made their longer pieces not nearly as much dumb fun as 'Up In Her Room.'"

When Cohen heard of Saxon's passing, he remembered the day he bought the Seeds' A Web Of Sound and brought it over to a pal's friend's house to play it. "We thought it was so cool and subversive and titillating."

He was right. R.I.P. Sky.

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