Here’s a preview of the Strawberry Alarm Clock’s upcoming recording of “Mr. Farmer” by the Seeds. Turn it up!
Read about the Strawberry Alarm Clock’s new CD and view a track-by-track history of its songs.
Psychedelic rock & power pop spanning 2 centuries
Here’s a preview of the Strawberry Alarm Clock’s upcoming recording of “Mr. Farmer” by the Seeds. Turn it up!
Read about the Strawberry Alarm Clock’s new CD and view a track-by-track history of its songs.
Lee Freeman, our bandmate and brother, passed away in early 2010.
The L.A. Times asked SAC bassist George Bunnell about Freeman, whom he called “a gentle soul and free spirit — you can hear it in his songs.”
Bunnell told this story about guitarist Freeman:
“We were asked by Dick Clark to take part in his movie ‘Psych-Out.’ He asked us not only to appear in it as ourselves, but to provide several songs as the landscape.
“More importantly he asked us to write the theme song. He had been using Simon & Garfunkel’s ‘Sounds of Silence’ as the temporary theme. He wanted something along those lines as the central character played by the late Susan Strasberg was deaf and blind.
“Lee immediately had an idea for the lyrics and along with our guitarist Ed King they wrote and sang one of the most gorgeous pieces of psych pop ever recorded, ‘Pretty Song From Psych-Out.’ Not the title they had intended the song to have … but, oh well.”
Like most of the long-term band members, rhythm guitarist Freeman was in and out of the band a few times over its history. He was an original member of Thee Sixpence in 1966 and remained as the band gained new members and morphed into the Strawberry Alarm Clock.
The garage band rocker “Lose to Live,” which he wrote with keyboardist Mark Weitz, was a highlight of the Strawberry Alarm Clock’s first album.
In the B-movie “Psych-Out,” Freeman was seen playing drums because drummer Randy Seol was up front, playing bongos and singing.
He was key in reuniting the band in 1982. The story goes that he saw an ad for the Strawberry Alarm Clock playing a club. Suspecting yet another group was living off his famous band’s name, Freeman attended and found out the ad was a ploy by the club owner to reunite the original Strawberry Alarm Clock. He succeeded.
Freeman continued to play with the band in the reunions of recent decades and participated in some of the group’s recordings in the new century.
His “Love Story” rocker of 1995 was the band’s contribution to the sprawling various-artists compilation “World Jam,” which raised funds to fight hunger. (Video below. Also, hear “Love Story” on MP3. It was produced by Steve Bartek. Aside from its residency as a Freeman memorial on YouTube, “Love Story” remains an SAC rareity.
Freeman’s participation with the band faded over the next several years, as he became increasingly frail and sidelined by illness.
Freeman was born Nov. 8, 1949, in Burbank, and died of cancer Feb. 14, 2010, at his home in the Bay Area.
The Strawberry Alarm Clock is ready to unleash its recent recordings on the group’s first album in 40 years.
Here’s the lowdown on each of the tracks destined for the new Strawberry Alarm Clock CD, “Wake Up Where You Are” (in running order).
Mr. Farmer: The old Seeds song written by Sky Saxon and a cult classic. Long story short, Mark Weitz (keyboards, vocals) played a Saxon memorial concert in L.A. with Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins. Saxson’s widow, Sabrina, asked the Strawberry Alarm Clock to participate in a multidisc tribute album set for release later in 2011. “Right off the bat, I said I wanted to do ‘Mr. Farmer,'” Weitz says. “Going with the less obvious.” Weitz listened to the original Seeds single for two weeks, added a few lyrics and then the Strawberry Alarm clock blasted it out in the studio, with Weitz on vocals. The result is a driving hard-rocker sure to startle a few fans. If the CD has a hit single, this is it. (Two versions of the song are on the CD — a single version and a seven-minute take with some serious acid rock going down.)
Strawberries Mean Love: From the first SAC album, written by teenagers George Bunnell and Steve Bartek. “We were really proud of the vocal harmonies on the new version,” Weitz says. The song gets fresh keyboard parts and a modern feel.
Hummin’ Happy: Another song from the first album, written by Bunnell and Randy Seol.
Birds in My Tree. Bunnell and Seol wrote this and it first appeared on the debut album.
World Citizen: A new song created by the band for Garry Davis’ World Citizen organization, which promotes and issues global passports. SAC’s “World Citizen” was used in an award-winning short film. Think world music filtered through Oingo Boingo. Producer Steve Bartek (a veteran of that ’80s band) plays flute. Lyrics by Randy Seol of SAC and Arthur Kanegif. Seol sings.
Drifting Away: Mark Weitz wrote this several years ago, after his wife passed away. Weitz sings with backup vocals by Howie Anderson, who also adds some tasty guitar work. “It’s a difficult song (to play), Weitz says. “It sounds like something out of a movie.”
Lose to Live: Another number from the first album, written by Weitz. Lee Freeman sang the original. Seol handles the vocals this time, with Weitz taking over in the middle section. Bartek plays harmonica.
Barefoot in Baltimore: Weitz wrote this song for the first album with former guitarist Ed King. Original concept was to have a Motown sound, “but it never turned out that way,” Weitz says. New version includes a keyboard section that mimics vibes. From the second SAC album; single reached No. 67 on the record charts.
Charlotte’s Remains: One of the first songs performed by the band when they started playing together again in 2007. Cover of a moody rocker by the current king of garage bands, the Fuzztones.
Sit With the Guru: Another ’60s song, a fan favorite written by Weitz with the help of guitarist King. “It has a modern twist now,” Weitz says. Bartek plays an electronic sitar and there’s a touch of oboe, giving the number a Middle Eastern vibe. An extended alternate take is the CD’s last track. The original was on the second SAC album, and charted as a single peaking at No. 65.
Tomorrow: The band stretches out via a longer ending than on the original. Seol sings the song, a single written for the second album by Weitz-King that peaked at No. 23 on the charts.
Wake Up: A new song written by guitarist Anderson with his friend Brad Swanson. Anderson sings as well. Psychedelic touches such as backward guitar and cymbals. Heavy like the Who. The extended ending is a studio jam that broke out after “Wake Up” was recorded but proved too good to throw away.
Mr. Farmer: The long version. Big guitar in the beginning and a ’60s-style freakout at the end. “Steve’s arrangement shines,” Weitz says.
Sit With the Guru: The long version with Seol’s 10-minute drum solo.
Sources: Mark Weitz, George Bunnell
In the later part of 1967 and the spring of 1968, the Strawberry Alarm Clock toured the country with the Beach Boys and Buffalo Springfield.
“Everyone traveled on the Beach Boys’ private plane,” SAC keyboardist Mark Weitz says. “It was an amazing time.” Then-SAC guitarist Ed King recalls: “The tours with the Beach Boys in ’67 and ’68 outshine any other period in my life.”
The talent assembled on that tour still boggles the mind: Carl Wilson, Neil Young, Steven Stills, Jim Messina, Richie Furray, Mike Love and of course the guys in the Alarm Clock.
(Photo, top left: Dennis Wilson learning the flute intro to “Sloop John B.” To his right are SAC bassist George Bunnell and Carl Wilson.)
“We played colleges, giant county fairs, all over the South,” Weitz says. “Often we did two shows the same day. I remember driving around in a car in New Orleans with Stephen Stills next to me in the back seat and Neil Young up front.”
SAC guitarist King, who would go on to more rock stardom in Lynyrd Skynyrd, recalls one amazing moment on the tour: “(Beach Boy) Carl Wilson coming over to my room to show me the chords to ‘God Only Knows.’ The memory “far outweighs any Skynyrd experience,” King says.
The April tour with the Beach Boys and Buffalo Springfield came to a halt, briefly, when news came of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in Memphis. About a half dozen tour dates were cancelled in the ensuing national emergency. George Bunnell says the band was in Alabama or Atlanta at the time: “We were told to stay in the hotel and not to step foot outside.”
Incredibly, during the tour’s swing through Florida, the SAC was booked for Miami and Honolulu on the same day.
“The Beach Boys let us leave their tour and fly to Hawaii for the day,” Bunnell says. “We played at the (then) Honolulu International Center on a Dick Clark show with the Animals, the Rascals, Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels and John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers. We flew straight back to Florida after our performance and from the airport were driven straight to the Beach Boys show. Insane!”
Shortly thereafter, the Strawberry Alarm Clock fired their manager.
The Beach Boys were still playing surf music and their monster hits, but the band was in transition, with leader Brian Wilson back home in L.A., trying to counter the Beatles’ next masterful recording with one of their own — following up on the transcendent “Pet Sounds” and “Good Vibrations. (Singer Mike Love wasn’t thrilled with the new music, preferring the “Fun, Fun, Fun” formula.) The band sought a place with the hipster elite that dug the Buffalo Springfield, no easy turnaround for the gents from “Surf City.”
Buffalo Springfield performed the same songs they played on the 2011 reunion tour, many classics of country/alt rock. The band was nearing the end of its two-year lifespan, with Neil Young (pictured on the plane, right) in hurry to exit in favor of a solo career. “The band was not a group in 1968,” the liner notes from the Buffalo Springfield box read. One fan who took a photo of the band on the tour recalls Young walking away from his camera, not wanting to be pictured with the others. Buffalo Springfield played its last concert on May 5, 1968.
The Strawberry Alarm Clock enjoyed chart success with the single “Tomorrow” during this period and reconnected with their audience with the classic album “Wake Up … It’s Tomorrow.” The group had just recorded many of its best songs, including “Sit with the Guru” and “Barefoot in Baltimore.” This was primetime for the SAC (but bassist George Bunnell and singer/drummer Randy Seol would leave the band months after the second Beach Boys tour).
Fans, no doubt, were amazed by the tour’s trifecta of now-legendary bands.
“It was a great night of music for me, and a night that remains burned in my heart and my head forever,” recalls Tim Pollard, a fan who posted recently about his experiences at the April tour stop in Charleston, S.C.
The Strawberry Alarm Clock were inspired by the Beach Boys’ experiments with transcendental meditation. “It seemed the cool thing to do,” Weitz says. “So before each concert we always meditated for 10 minutes sitting Indian-style doing our mantras.”
Here are some of the key stops on the Beach Boys’ fifth annual Thanksgiving tour of 1967 with the Strawberry Alarm Clock and Buffalo Springfield:
Nov. 17-26: Detroit, Syracuse, Buffalo, Richmond, Washington D.C., Hartford and Fairfield (Ct.), White Plains, Pittsburgh, Boston, Providence, West Point, Jamaica (N.Y.), South Orange (N.J.), Baltimore.
(The Soul Survivors played some of the tour stops. The Pickle Brothers also found their way onto the bill.)
Here are some key cities played on the April tour with the Beach Boys and and Buffalo Springfield:
April 6-24: Clemson (S.C.), Orlando, Daytona Beach, Gainesville, Jacksonville, Tampa, Fort Lauderdale and Miami (Fla.), Oklahoma City, Baton Rouge and New Orleans (La.), Birmingham and Montgomery (Ala.), Austin, Houston, Fort Worth, Dallas and Houston (Texas), Little Rock (Ark.) and Memphis.
(Bobby Goldsboro was an added act on some Florida dates.)
View list of 1960s concerts by the Strawberry Alarm Clock
The Strawberry Alarm Clock rocked out in two B-movie classics, “Psych-Out” with Jack Nicholson and “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls,” directed by Russ Meyer. Above, band members at “Ebertfest” in 2007, where “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls” screened.
The Strawberry Alarm clock went Hollywood in 1968, appearing in “Psych-Out” with a young Jack Nicholson. The SAC songs in the film are “Incense and Peppermints,” “Rainy Day Mushroom Pillow,” “The World’s on Fire” and “Pretty Song From Psych-Out.”
“Pretty Song” is the title number and the full band performs “Rainy Day Mushroom Pillow” (video below). Personnel: Randy Seol (vocals and bongos), Mark Weitz (keyboards), Ed King (guitar), Steve Bartek (flute), George Bunnell (bass) and Lee Freeman (drums).
Shot mostly in Los Angeles but set in San Francisco, “Psych-Out” told the tale of a deaf hippie runaway (Susan Strasberg) who hooks up with Nicholson’s character and his pals. Nicholson’s fictional band plays a big gig at “The Ballroom” on the same bill as the Strawberry Alarm Clock.
Other “Psych-Out” cast members of note include Bruce Dern, Dean Stockwell, Henry Jaglom and Adam Roarke. The movie was directed by Richard Rush, best known for “The Stunt Man.” Alas, MGM’s “Midnight Movies” DVD of the film cuts 11 minutes or so from its running time in order to make room for Peter Fonda’s “The Trip.”
The soundtrack album (unavailable on CD) has two Strawberry Alarm Clock tracks — “Rainy Day” and “The World’s on Fire” — but it begins with their “Pretty Song” performed by the Storybook, another Valley band. SAC plays the song in the film.
Bassist Bunnell recalled:
“We were asked by Dick Clark to take part in his movie ‘Psych-Out.’ He asked us not only to appear in it as ourselves, but to provide several songs as the landscape,” Bunnell told the L.A. Times.
“More importantly he asked us to write the theme song. He had been using Simon & Garfunkel’s ‘Sounds of Silence’ as the temporary theme. He wanted something along those lines as the central character played by the late Susan Strasberg was deaf and blind.
“Lee (Freeman) immediately had an idea for the lyrics and along with our guitarist Ed King they wrote and sang one of the most gorgeous pieces of psych pop ever recorded, ‘Pretty Song From Psych-Out.’ Not the title they had intended the song to have … but, oh well.”
Trivia: Guitarist Ed King’s Vox guitar abruptly changes to a Fender Telecaster during “Rainy Day Mushroom Pillow.” Guitarist Lee Freeman played drums because Seol was up front singing.
In 1970, the Strawberry Alarm Clock returned to the big screen in Russ Meyers’ “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls,” contributing the songs “Incense and Peppermints,” “I’m Comin’ Home” and “Girl From the City.”
The band — Gene Gunnels, Lee Freeman, Ed King, Paul Marshall — made a cameo during a party scene (pictured) and backed up one of the stars as she sang. Marshall joined the band in 1969, the year the film was made.
Roger Ebert co-wrote the Fox film (yes, that Roger Ebert). It has since become a cult classic, released as a collector’s DVD set a few years back.
In 2007, members of the Strawberry Alarm Clock reunited and performed at the famed film critic’s “Ebertfest” (Roger Ebert’s Overlooked Film Festival) in Urbana-Champaign, Ill., where “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls” unspooled as the closing film (pictured, top of page). Read Roger Ebert’s thank you letter to the band.
Ebert recalls hacking out the script in 1969 with Meyers, “laughing maniacally.” They intended to create “the first rock camp horror exploitation musical.” The movie had pretty much nothing to do with author Jacqueline Susaan and her original “Valley of the Dolls.”
The plot, such as it is, revolves around an all-girl band (the Carrie Nations), whose members are fresh off the boat in L.A. They’re soon plunged into a world of Hollywood hedonism teeming with sex, drugs and rock & roll. The movie has mild nudity, but enormous breasts popped up everywhere, in the cartoonish style of director Meyers (“Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!”). It was distributed with an X-rating, to Meyers’ surprise.
Fans often describe “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls” as “so bad it’s good.” “It is unclear whether this is a 5-star movie or a 1-star movie,” one viewer commented.
Trivia: The movie’s line “It’s my happening and it freaks me out!” (Z-man) was reprised by Mike Meyers in “Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery.” (View fan mashup of “Austin Powers” opening clips and “Incense and Peppermints.”)
“I am the luckiest guitar player on Earth,” Ed King declared.
King caught lightning in a bottle twice: First as a co-founder of the hitmaking Strawberry Alarm Clock and then as a member of the Southern rock giants Lynyrd Skynyrd.
As a teenager, King was a founding member of Thee Sixpence, the high school group that transformed itself into the Strawberry Alarm Clock. (Read King’s fan forum thread about the psychedelic group.)
He and keyboardist Mark Weitz wrote the music for the smash hit “Incense and Peppermints,” starting with a memorable riff dreamed up by Weitz. King contributed the bridge to the then-instrumental.
Weitz tells the story: “I couldn’t figure out a bridge for the song. Ed King lived pretty close. I called him and told him I need a bridge for this new song idea I’m working on. He drove over, and about 45 minutes later we had it.”
The single’s songwriting credits notoriously failed to note their role in creating the song, but “Incense and Peppermints” hit No. 1 in 1967 and remains a rock-pop radio staple to this day.
Credit for “Incense and Peppermints” went to a songwriting team that worked with the publisher. “We were told that was the price we had to pay to get started in the business,” King recalled in an interview with Classic Rock Revival a few years back.
He and Weitz collaborated again on “Tomorrow,” which charted at No. 23 in early 1968. Once again, King came to the rescue with a bridge.
King continued to write songs with Weitz as well as guitarist Lee Freeman. SAC songs that King co-wrote include “Sit With the Guru,” “The Black Butter Trilogy,” “Pretty Song From Psych-Out” and “Soft Skies, No Lies.”
King says, “The (SAC) tours with the Beach Boys in ’67 and ’68 outshine any other period in my life. Carl Wilson coming over to my room to show me the chords to ‘God Only Knows’ far outweighs any Skynyrd experience.”
King stayed with the band until 1972, when he took a flyer and joined a Southern rock band that had opened for the Strawberry Alarm Clock on a regional tour. That band was Lynyrd Skynyrd, which was heading into the studio to record its first album with producer Al Kooper.
King started out playing bass and then switched to guitar.
He formed a songwriting partnership with singer Ronnie Van Zant, which produced “Poison Whisky” on that album and then later “Sweet Home Alabama,” one of the band’s two signature songs.
Other Skynyrd songs co-written by King include “Saturday Night Special,” “Swamp Music,” “I Need You,” “Workin’ for MCA” and “Railroad Song.”
King left Skynyrd after three albums. That was two years before the fatal plane crash that claimed the life of Ronnie Van Zant and other two other members of the band.
In 1987, King joined the Lynyrd Skynyrd survivors reunion tour and played with the band until health problems forced him out in 1996.
In 2006, King entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of Lynyrd Skynyrd.
He retired from the music business, but wished he played on the Strawberry Alarm Clock’s new album, the band’s first in more than 40 years:
“The album is a labor of love,” King said in May 2012. “I wish I lived closer so I could take part. The guys play better than ever and the addition of Steve Bartek makes it now the way it should’ve been. I think his parents wouldn’t let him join the band! ‘Mr. Farmer’ is my favorite track. Mark Weitz NAILED it.”
Ed King died at his home in Nashville on Aug. 22, 2018. He was 68.
Top photo by Janine Goulet (2005)