Description
Psychedelic Rock with Soul influence CD that includes many tracks off the group’s 1968 collector LP that sells for $1500 in mint condition.
Volume 3 will be the authorized reissue of the infamous 1968 psychedelic classic, The Square Root of Two which is valued at $1000 in mint condition (Ref: Jerry Osborne’s 1997 Edition of Rockin’ Records) PLUS additional psychedelic, socio-political and satirical tunes unavailable to collectors for the past 30 years. 66 minutes) The Night Shadows, one of the earliest garage bands in America, started performing in the 1950’s at a time when Rock & Roll was very young and Rhythm & Blues had reached maturity. Playing the type of music that often created racial turmoil in the deep South, the band pioneered the way for the plethora of rock groups that came along after the English “”invasion”” of 1964. The Square Root of Two , a 1968 psychedelic album by The Night Shadows, is valued at $1000+ in Jerry Osborne’s 1997 Rockin’ Records catalogue.
Track Listings
1. Prologue (The Voice of Electric Bob)
2. So Much (1967 Version)
3. I Can’t Believe
4. Plenty of Trouble
5. In the Air
6. Anything But Lies (Time After Time)
7. Gimme, Gimme
8. Don’t Hold Your Breath
9. Listen to My Heart
10. Fly High
11. 60 Second Swinger
12. Psychedelic Illusion
13. Little Phil Jokes with the Audience
14. Anything But Lies (Lost Live Version)
15. Turned On
16. Hot Dog Man (Stoned Version)
17. Epilogue: Fly High Reprise
18. Excerpt from a 1979 Radio Retrospective on Little Phil
19. Garbage Man (1961)
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The Atlanta-based Night Shadows were one of the earliest and longest-lived garage bands in the U.S., with a career that extended from the formative days of rock & roll to the psychedelic era. Guitarists Ronnie “”Goose”” Farmer and Johnny “”Cha Cha”” Pitner and drummer Craig Wemmers formed their first band, the Kavaliers, in 1956 — the teens soon recruited friend Aleck Janoulis to play bass, followed by the 1958 addition of keyboardist Mike Moore, who also brought to the proceedings a homemade theremin capable of creating cosmic sonic embellishments that foreshadowed the group’s later evolution into acid punk.
In mid-1959 drummer Ray Massey signed on in place of Wemmers, and with the inclusion of trumpeter Donald Adams, the Kavaliers’ lineup was complete. With a repertoire comprised primarily of R&B covers, the group slowly built a local fan following, although their roster remained in seemingly constant flux — around the time that Adams left for college in the fall of 1959, Bobby Newell replaced Moore, and singer/harpist Bobby “”Bones”” Jones was installed as frontman. At this point, Janoulis (the de facto leader) changed their name to the Night Shadows, and the rechristened unit made its public debut in mid-December at the Maid of Athens Annual Masquerade Ball.
The Night Shadows spent the better part of 1960 and 1961 serving as one of two house bands at the Misty Waters skating rink, splitting time with local rivals the Zots. This iteration of the group also was the first to make any official recordings, cutting an acetate of the song “”Blindside.”” Jones and Massey left the Night Shadows in the spring of 1961, with the male/female duo of Ervin Barocas and Helene Kopell (aka Little Erv & Helene) tapped as lead vocalists and Charles Spinks installed on drums; in 1962, the group issued its first commercial single, the risqué frat rock stomper “”Garbage Man”” — another early release, “”The Elevator,”” is perhaps more notable for its flip side, “”Station Break,”” a jazz-rock instrumental that is almost certainly one of the very first attempts at fusion.
Upon first hearing the Beatles in late 1963, the Night Shadows immediately shifted gears and adopted a more British Invasion-like sound — by this point Little Erv & Helene were no longer in the picture, and the remaining members (Janoulis, Newell, Spinks, and guitarist Jimmy Callaway) hired new vocalist “”Little Phil”” Ross, a high-school freshman equally adept at belting out R&B standards and Beatlesque rockers. The Night Shadows refined their new approach throughout 1964, although collegiate audiences throughout the South still preferred beach music classics to contemporary rock & roll — in fact, in an ironic twist of reverse discrimination, many white fraternities refused to book the group on the grounds that they preferred African-American R&B acts.
In 1965 the Night Shadows landed a deal with Dot Records, but the escalating conflict in Vietnam forced Callaway (the only member not attending high school or college) to take a job as a fireman in order to support his pregnant 14-year-old wife. Janoulis lured co-founder Ronnie Farmer back to the lineup after a two-year absence, and thanks to academic commitments and subsequent occupational deferments, all five Night Shadows were able to avoid the military draft, but also severely limited their opportunities to tour outside of the Deep South. Their first Dot single, “”So Much,”” appeared in January 1966, enjoying hit status in seemingly random regions of the U.S. — a national fan club was even established in Texas. The group then opted to re-record an early crowd favorite, the “”Garbage Man”” single’s equally naughty B-side, “”The Hot Dog Man”” — Dot executives blanched, however, and the single instead appeared surreptitiously on the Banned Records label.
By mid-1966 the Night Shadows were experimenting with guitar fuzz, vibrato, and reverb — their sound eventually grew so distorted that Janoulis was forced to use amplifiers during live performances. When Lockheed Aircraft, where he worked as an aerospace engineer, assigned him to a six-month project based in Ohio, Janoulis booked the group a stint as the house band at the Atlanta nightclub the Pigalley, recruiting cousin Danny Stephens and friend Dave Gallagher to play bass in his absence. He did return to Atlanta long enough to record the cult classic “”60 Second Swinger,”” issued on the Gaye label in late 1966. This single represented the first recorded fruits of the Night Shadows’ evolving acid punk sound, and by the time of an April 1967 appearance at Emory University, the group had undergone a total psychedelic overhaul, performing with strobe and liquid lights.
While still under contract to Gaye, they next cut the single “”Don’t Hold Your Breath”” for the local Baja label, crediting the record to the Square Root of Two to avoid legal hassles. That summer, Janoulis began work on a full-fledged psychedelic opus, also titled The Square Root of Two — cobbled together from a variety of tapes recorded on portable cassette machines, the resulting LP appeared in 1968 and remains an underground classic of the era, with original copies fetching upwards of $1,000 on the collectors’ market. In August of 1969 Newell left the Night Shadows, bringing to an end the group’s heyday — other members came and went (among them guitarist Barry Bailey, later to resurface in the Atlanta Rhythm Section) before the group finally called it quits in mid-1969
The long awaited collector CD of The Night Shadows’ psychedelic period has finally been released. Volume 3 features many of the selections found on The Square Root of Two LP, their 1968 acid-rock classic that recently sold at auction for $1500 in mint condition. Production effort on this release actually began in 1986 as a two-disc vinyl album project but took 15 years to complete as a three-volume trilogy on compact disc. The crash of a light airplane in 1987 destroyed most of the original artwork, photographs, and negatives that were being air freighted to an album production facility. Finding quality copies of photos, the changeover to compact discs, and many other legal, financial, personal and technical issues delayed this volume until now. Luckily, some great, unreleased psychedelic tracks were discovered during this long delay and are included on this CD.
Track 1, The Prologue features a 3-minute, one sentence soliloquy by Electric Bob on the cause and effects of LSD mind expansion juxtaposed over a wild psychedelic performance that ends with the mantra that “acidity-unity is such a good thing.” So Much is a later version of their Top 40 hit that was updated for the psychedelic market in 1967. A mandatory ingredient of psychedelic shows and concerts in the late 1960s was the long instrumental jam that allowed acidheads to mind-trip. I Can’t Believe begins with an angst-laden Little Phil vocal on an ill-fated love affair and transcends into a long improvisational psychedelic jam that delighted acid-trippers. The jam’s mind-blowing melodic ups and downs were accented visually with erotically pulsating liquid lights. Recorded long before Santana burst onto the music scene, Plenty of Trouble demonstrates the Night Shadows ability to blend Latin American rhythms with the intensity and power of acid rock. In the Air is the psych version of the B-side of 60 Second Swinger, a pic-sleeve single originally on Gaye Records. This tune is also a good example of the folk-rock influence of the mid 1960s that featured jangling 12 string electric guitars, but is played differently with a melodic “circular rhythm feel” characteristic of Hendrix compositions.
Anything But Lies (aka Time After Time) is a truly unique psych recording that utilizes a guitar amplifier tremolo and a spinning microphone to create the trippy background vocals that counterpoint the lead vocal. Followed up by a psychedelic satire on the rising divorce rate of the late 1960s, the tune Gimme, Gimme also includes some primitive synthesized sounds using tape loops of organ notes blended with a theramin, the electronic device used for weird sound effects in 1950s sci-fi films. Don’t Hold Your Breath is political satire presented in a Zappa-like tune that ends abruptly like most political ads on radio and television. The abrupt ending was a mind-blower for acid-tripping hippies that left them “floating.” The track Listen To My Heart offers the listener a rare slice of Night Shadow band life in 1969 by recording some of their creative chatter at a recording session where this new song is being arranged and played for the first time.
Previously unreleased track Fly High is a tune that encourages all those under stress to drop acid and fly high to escape their problems. The tune was structured around two backward, out-of-sync guitar tracks that seem to float in and out of the stereo spectrum to create a musical mind-warp especially through earphones.
Tracks 11 & 12 are off The Square Root of Two LP. The industrial-mechanical psych sounds between these tunes are actually bedsprings and moans of a hippy love-in that were amplified and speeded up. As the tape speed slows down, a listener with a good ear can hear the final moan clearly at the beginning of Psychedelic Illusion. Track 13 demonstrates how Little Phil & The Night Shadows handled complaints from security guards and police about under-age drinking and wild, screaming fans at their shows with tongue in cheek humor. This segues into the long lost live version of Anything But Lies with a great vocal performance by Little Phil that includes the only known “gastronomical” ending of a psychedelic tune ever recorded. Turned On is a satire of psychedelic lyrics performed in a music style reminiscent of the 1920s with an outrageous solo featuring five kazoos in place of the standard fuzz guitar with wah-wah.
The Hot Dog Man, one of the group’s signature party songs was first released in 1962. The tune was rerecorded during a studio “freak-out party” with the zany Electric Bob and ample supplies of alcohol, amphetamines, opiates and hallucinogens to create psychedelic mayhem on tape. Listen to it through earphones while tripping out on acid. The last track from 1967-1969 period is The Epilogue, a Little Phil reprise of Fly High that ends the CD trilogy with his great vocal and first instrumental improvisation on harmonica. It also features unusual guitar effects, a Night Shadow trademark.
Tracks 18 & 19 of The Bonus Track Section are excerpts from an hour-long panel discussion and radio retrospective of Little Phil and The Night Shadows that was broadcast in 1979 ten years after the group broke up. After a brief story about some of the antics of Little Phil by one of the panel, the commentator plays The Garbage Man, a blues-rock party song recorded in 1961. It was considered very risqué more than 40 years ago.
A Mini-Bio of
The NIGHT SHADOWS 1956-1969
(AKA Little Phil & The Night Shadows)
The Night Shadows were originally organized in December 1956 as The Cavaliers. The spelling was changed to The Kavaliers in 1957 to avoid legal problems with another group using that name. After some personnel changes in the summer of 1959 the group became The Barons. In the fall of 1959 the lead guitarist wrote an instrumental he called Night Shadows that the bass player thought was the perfect name for their Blues group. Assuming leadership of the band and against everyone’s wishes, he changed their name to The Night Shadows on their business cards and quickly booked several months of gigs to make everyone relent. He also hired a front man for the group. From the fall of 1959 through 1961 The Night Shadows were primarily a Chicago-style Blues band featuring Bobby “Bones” Jones, a rowdy harp playing, skinny James Dean look-alike. Like the old-time blues men of the past, Jones went to prison for an alleged assault on someone with a brick mason’s hammer. He later lost three toes to frostbite passing out drunk in ten-degree weather on the bed of a pick-up truck. He still writes blues tunes as Sweet Papa Jones.
In 1962 the group changed to a Rhythm & Blues show band featuring Little Erv (Barocas) & Judy (Argo), an Elizabeth Taylor look-alike, as headliners. For the next two years, the group became one of the one most popular R&B bands for Southern college dances and formals since Black R&B (or “Beach) acts were considered “crude frat party bands” by snobbish southern faculty and alumni. In 1964 the English invasion changed the group’s primary direction to Rock relegating R&B, now called (East Coast) Beach Music to secondary importance. Little Erv quit the music business to get married and Judy Argo became a jazz diva appearing on NBC’s Tonight Show before a purported suicide attempt in New York derailed her career.
When 14-year old Little Phil (Rosenberg) was picked as their replacement to front the group, the other band members thought their leader “had lost it” since they were all in their early twenties. Over their protests of playing “nursemaid to a snot-nosed kid”, he knew that Little Phil could do “James Brown type” choreography as well as sing Rock, Blues and Soul songs. His gamble paid off, and 1965 turned into a watershed year for the Night Shadows. Johnny Brooks, a studio engineer and producer Janoulis had worked with on sessions since 1959, had opened his own recording facility and was seeking artists with original material. This gave the group an opportunity to record both the tunes Little Phil had collaborated on and some others that Janoulis had written.
The end result was a label deal with Dot Records, a very successful record company owned by Paramount Pictures in Hollywood, California. The single “So Much” featured Little Phil as lead singer. The other band members were Jimmy Callaway (guitar), Bobby Newell (organ), Charles Spinks (drums) and Aleck Janoulis (bass). Everything seemed to be going their way until the “conflict” in Viet Nam suddenly escalated into “war” and all able-bodied, single men between the ages of 18 to 26 were made eligible for the draft. Little Phil was still in high school and Janoulis, Spinks, and Newell were all in college. If the group left school permanently they would all be drafted except for Little Phil who was only 16. This prevented any extensive traveling to promote the record. As the record reached the Top Ten in three states, a corporate decision to make the record company a Country oriented label stopped all pop and rock promotion dead in its tracks.
Their follow up single “60 Second Swinger” was permitted to be released on Gaye Records and featured a full color sleeve. Due to contractual obligations the group then recorded for Baja Records under the pseudonym “The Square Root of Two”. This became the title of their classic 1968 psychedelic album on Spectrum Stereo which now sells for over $1200 to record collectors. Due to internal conflicts the band split up after their last concert on Memorial Day in 1969. Teen-age guitar prodigy, Barry Bailey, performed with the group in their final months (Ref: “Live At The Spot”) and later went on to form the hit-making Atlanta Rhythm Section. Janoulis formed the group Starfoxx in 1974 that had a nationally charted hit “Disco Rock” in 1977 and, as Big Al Jano, released the anti-AIDS cult single, “The Condom Man”, in 1987, based on the Night Shadows 1961 blues single, “The Garbage Man”. Little Phil was lead singer for Kudzu and Bandit in the 1970’s and has recently been recording some new material in the studio. Incredibly, Little Phil and the Night Shadows are still selling records and CDs to collectors all across the globe.
In 2002 a new vinyl LP reissue of the group’s mid-1960’s rock music will be released by Penniman Records in Spain. Vol.3 The Psychedelic Years (1967-1969) has been released by Hottrax Records to complete their historical trilogy on CD. For more information visit www. hottrax.com and The Smithsonian music collection at the US Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.
Since ‘Square root…’ hasn’t been re-released…
…this is as close as you get (only one number missing, which is on vol. 2). All fine tracks ranging from medium til killer!! The track ‘So much’ is killer psych-punk and a must in every collection 🙂
The Tyme-shifter Wow! This CD blew me away!
Even fans of this band that are familiar with their released material, including the Square Root… LP will still surely enjoy all the unreleased stuff on this collection. But for the uninitiated, hang on to your seats for one of the wildest rides in all of garage/psychedelia! How great to have been able to listen to this music as a teenager, and still get just as big a kick out of it now as back then. Bravo!
Barry L. Brown A wonderful peek into southern punk psychedelia in the late sixtes
Having purchased the “Square Root of 2” in the early seventies for four dollars, I was familar with the 67-69 period of Nightshadow insanity, but wasn’t prepared for the other outstanding non-released material. The non lp cuts are all gems and I now realize that the Nightshadow were able to give Bruce Hampton and his Grease Band a run for their money in the “wildassed-off-the-wall” department during their Atlanta heyday. It doesn’t matter how shameless are the occasional Byrds cops or Beatles steals, as the pure enthusiasim combined with cheesey mindbending lyrics show the Nightshadow could do no wrong. This CD represents truley driven psychedelic music that burns holes in the mind and will easily give “Electric Music for the Mind and Body” era Country Joe and the Fish stiff competition for mind melting madness. This music will maintain much greater relevance than anything out of San Francisco during the same era as teenagers will always be able to relate to it. Hands down, Little Phil was the Iggy Stooge and Sky Saxon of Atlanta and this CD is as close as you will get to a night at the 14th Street Catacombs loaded on 25!!
darren finizio you shouldn’t print my previous review
on second listen through good speakers and eq and more of a sense of humour i get the cd…true, there were probably the “square root” lp and some ’81 sessions to cull from when asembling the cd, counting out the cover-songs on the live album…so, all things considered its very lovingly put together…the radio interview at the end is hilarious and the studio chatter before a couple of songs is precious!…i din’t realize that the ‘square root’ songs were recorded on a 2 trk. — that explains the crowding and weird separation…theres an original and carefree quality to it all which shows the band was very enthusiastic — the bass playing is good even though its barely audibly at times…but, hey this isn’t about sound quality: it was the 60s…and, by the way, i like the octave guitar on the reprise of fly as well as the wacky panned vocal on one of the “square root” songs…the only thing i could complain about , then, is that the sources of the songs isn’t stated in the liners so one is left to speculate — although the pics and funny stories are great…i think i will check into vol. 2 and, after hearing the insanely vulgar ’61 bonus cut, the first volume as well. thx.
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