Say a prayer for The Chocolate Watchband. The garage rock group out of San Jose was one of the first to incorporate the psychedelic sounds emanating from up north in acid-drenched San Francisco—imagine the Rolling Stones shacking up with the Jefferson Airplane and you’re pretty much there. And they came out of the starting gates fast with a few rip-roaring singles, along with a pair of explosive songs that found their way into the 1967 hippie exploitation film Riot on Sunset Strip. Then they got their opportunity to record a debut LP, and that’s where things got… weird.
The problem—which would color their legacy and confuse listeners for decades—was producer/Svengali Ed Cobb. Cobb had real genius—he wrote “Tainted Love” for Gloria Jones (yes, the Soft Cell hit) and “Dirty Water” for the Standells. Unfortunately Cobb had a bubblegum mentality. If he felt like replacing the band’s lead singer’s vocals with some ringer’s, he did it. Indeed, if he felt like including whole songs on which the band didn’t even play, he did it. He was looking for hits, and wasn’t about to let alien concepts like artistic integrity get in his way. He reminds me of the famous story about the Ohio Express, those bubblegum unfortunates who showed up at a gig in Cincinnati only to find the audience clamoring for “Chewy Chewy,” a song they’d never heard in their lives but was climbing the charts under their name.
In the case of the Ohio Express producer hijinks led to shock and possible catastrophe—the boys in the band might have been stoned to death by that crowd demanding to hear “Chewy Chewy.” The Chocolate Watchband reacted with disgust. Lead singer Dave Aguilar—who suffered the most at Cobb’s hands—told writer Richie Unterberger that when the band received a copy of the their 1967 debut No Way Out, “We took a look at it, played a couple of songs on it, and said ‘What the hell is this shit?’ And somebody threw it in the trash.” But at another level they didn’t care. They were getting their kicks playing live; it was all that mattered to them. They were opening for a lot of big name acts at the time and took great pride in blowing them off the stage. Indeed, they cared so little they let Cobb pull the same bait and switch act again on their 1968 sophomore LP, Inner Mystique.
No Way Out holds up, but it hardly does full justice to the scrappy outfit that was taking on the likes of The Yardbirds and the Grateful Dead. And Cobb’s manipulations make it necessary to add footnotes to some of the songs—The Chocolate Watchband are like a baseball player kept out of the Hall of Fame because they were caught using steroids. Take opening cut “Let’s Talk About Girls.” It’s such a badass slice of gritty garage rock (with some psychedelic guitar licks tossed in) it found its way onto 1972’s Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era, 1965–1968. Which is as high an honor as a psychedelic garage rock band can receive. The problem with the song is that while Cobb kept the band’s savage performance, he excised Aguilar’s vocals and replaced them with those of singer, songwriter, and sessions guy Don Bennett. And the worst part is the switcheroo makes little sense. Bennett was black and his vocals had muscle, but I can’t help but think the song would have sounded better with Aguilar’s snotty Jagger sneer.
Aguilar gets shoved aside again on the band’s fiery take on the Steve Cropper and Wilson Pickett classic “In the Midnight Hour.” But at least it makes some kind of sense—Bennett’s vocals were big, brash, and soulful, and they work. (Still, who wouldn’t kill to hear the Aguilar version?) What doesn’t work are the organ flourishes Cobb tacked onto the finished product without the band’s knowledge. Fortunately, Cobb chose to stick with Aguilar’s vocals on The Chocolate Watchband’s juiced-up cover of Chuck Berry’s “Come On.” Aguilar’s vocals are all grit and amphetamines, and the they perfectly complement the band’s punk approach.
“Dark Side of the Mushroom” (far freaking out, man!) is a groovy psychedelic instrumental and what you’d get if you crossed a bad trip with a spy movie soundtrack—the guitar’s all reverb and the organ is pure Doors. Unfortunately The Chocolate Watchband had absolutely zilch to do with it—Cobb recorded it with an anonymous cast of ringers. The same is true for the effects-heavy cosmic instrumental “Expo 2000,” on which Cobb does his level best to become the American equivalent of Joe Meeks. It’s freakier than “Dark Side of the Mushroom”—it sounds like an unholy mix of the psychedelic-era Byrds and early Pink Floyd. But I can only imagine what the down-to-earthers in the Watchband thought of it—I’m guessing this is the one that led them to consign the album to the old circular file.
Aguilar again gets the heave-ho on the band’s cover of Stephen Stills’ “Hot Dusty Roads,” and once again I don’t get it. It’s a laid-back number, and it doesn’t help that Bennett sounds so nice—what it needed, to put some life into it, was an injection of motor oil and bad attitude. Fortunately for all involved, the great “Are You Gonna Be There (At the Love-In)”—which, ironically, was co-written by Bennett—was lifted as is from one of the band’s singles. And forget about the peace and love title—Aguilar’s vocals are all Jagger swagger and menace, and the lyrics make clear he sees right through that big peace symbol hanging around your neck. “Are you gonna be there,” he sings, “When I make my mark?/Are you gonna be there/When I set the spark?/At the love-in/With your head in the air.” You can be sure Aguilar won’t have his head in the air—odds are you’ll find it under your girl’s miniskirt.
Aguilar’s “Gone and Passes By” is the only tune on the LP written by the band, and Cobb seems to have completely kept his hands off it. And good thing. It’s a laid-back “Bo Diddley goes to the Haight and drops acid” kinda number, something you might have heard at one of the Acid Tests. Even better is the great title track, which is so psychedelic it practically bleeds paisley. It too was a single before it found its way onto the LP, and it’s a taste of what might have been—Aguilar goes full Jagger, but he doesn’t paint it black—dayglo colors only, thank you very much.
Finally we have the spacy trifle “Gossamer Wings,” which the band had virtually nothing to do with. Cobb and Bennett simply borrowed the basic track from the Watchband’s 1966 single B-side “Loose Lip Sync Ship” and went from there. Which was a mistake, because the B-side is hilarious—a stoned goof that features Aguilar saying (with mock-saccharine sarcasm) “Oh baby, I loved you/Please… come… back… to… me/I miss you… you’re the best/Oh baby without you by my side/My whole complexion is a mess.” Then you get some silly chatter, followed by maniacal whooping and hollering over deranged lounge piano, and finally an organ-driven “sermon” by Aguilar that devolves into his singing, very off key, the “hymn” “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.” The stuff of greatness it ain’t. But it makes for a Zappa-style souvenir of its time, whereas “Gossamer Wings” just kinda lays there, hoping you won’t kick it.
On one hand Ed Cobb screwed The Chocolate Watchband—thanks to his shenanigans, we’ll never have an album that fully represents them in all their psych-punk glory. And Cobb’s machinations went for naught—the LP tanked. On the other hand, The Chocolate Watchband needed an Ed Cobb—just not the Ed Cobb they got. The Chocolate Watchband needed someone—and they found it in Cobb—who could write great songs or knew where to find them, because they weren’t particularly focused on writing them themselves. What they didn’t find with Ed Cobb was a producer willing to let them cut loose in the studio without then turning around and bringing in ringers and adding songs they had nothing to do with. But they were young—in their teens—and naive, and they were focused on playing live. So they got what they got, and they got it good and hard. It’s a pity, it really is. But hey, things could have been worse. Just ask the Ohio Express.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
B
