KARMA CHAMELEON
In a rare live show, '60s hitmaker P.F. Sloan offers old faves and new works with self-deprecating h
By Don Waller
In a rare live show, '60s hitmaker P.F. Sloan offers old faves and new works with self-deprecating humor
"Eve of Destruction" for Barry McGuire; "Secret Agent Man" for Johnny Rivers; "Where Were You When I Needed You" for the Grass Roots; "You Baby" and "Let Me Be" for the Turtles; "Must to Avoid" for Herman's Hermits; "Take Me for What I'm Worth" for the Searchers; "Kick That Little Foot Sally Ann" for Round Robin; and - stop me before I run out of fingers - "Tell 'Em I'm Surfin'" for the Fantastic Baggys.
P.F. Sloan wrote - or cowrote with his then-partner Steve Barri - 'em all (and then some). Making his first local public performance in 10 years at the Quon Bros. Grand Star jazz club in Chinatown last Sunday night (June 6), Sloan played every one of these mid-'60s chart records (and more).
The evening began with local Scram fanzine editrix Kim Cooper reeling off a similar litany of Sloan's greatest copyrights, followed by local Garage & Beat fanzine editor Edwin Lechter reciting an insane - and, truthfully, only partial - list of acts, from Willie & the Wheels to the Trash Cleaners to the Surfing Lungs, that were mere noms de disque for the Sloan-Barri team. (Both zines' current issues feature rare interviews with the hitherto reclusive Sloan.)
Ambling onstage to rapturous applause from the full house, Sloan sat down, picked up an acoustic guitar, and dedicated his opening song, "Karma (Study of Divinations)" - from his ill-starred solo career; more about that later - to Cooper.
The tune is not nearly as pretentious as the title might imply; matter of fact, it wouldn't sound out of place on a recent Leonard Cohen album. The remainder of the two-hour show veered between the aforementioned hits, cult classics from Sloan's solo LPs (the absolutely sweet Bob Dylan homages "The Sins of a Family" and "Halloween Mary," and the folk-rocking "From a Distance"), and a fistful of new compositions, ranging from country-blues ("Wild Strawberries"), pure pop ("Getting Happy Naturally"), and folk-rock ("She's Still Waiting" and "Love Is Forgiving") to classical pastiche ("My Beethoven") and the go-for-baroque stylings of "Reincarnation Machine Gun Blues Baby."
Sloan, now 57, proved an offhandedly adroit guitarist, a surprisingly supple vocalist, and an effective pianist. He's also corrosively - and often self-deprecatingly - hilarious, whether refusing requests for "Horace the Swinging School Bus Driver" ("'cause I don't take drugs anymore"); removing his sweater to accidentally reveal his soft white underbelly ("You're looking at 30 years of baby fat; I went to India and lived on papaya juice, and I still can't lose it"); or casually noting that, in 1970, he was "one of the first people to move back in with Mom and Dad." (He would quit making records for 22 years - and hasn't made one in the last 10.) That same year, tunesmithing giant Jimmy Webb penned the ultimate song-about-a-songwriter, "P.F. Sloan," and Sloan's early solo efforts were anthologized in '86 and again in '93.
So, what happened? Well ... local teen gets a staff songwriting contract and cranks out all manner of chartbusters, then falls under the spell of Dylan's lyrical innovations and writes his own "protest song" ("Eve of Destruction"), which rockets to No. 1 and inspires a right-wing "answer record" (the Spokesmen's "Dawn of Correction," which hits No. 36). He gets roundly kicked in the teeth for his temerity by the reigning hipocracy, who denounce him as a mere bandwagon-jumper, as well as his record label, which prefers him to just write hits for its acts and so does next to nothing to promote his solo discs.
He winds up leaving the label (and most of his rights behind), makes two more solo records that drop stillborn from the presses, and spends the next 30 years dealing with success and failure in life and love - taking him on a spiritual journey that, inevitably, ends somewhere in the Eastern hemisphere. Which makes Sloan's closing monologue about the message to be found in notoriously enlightened action star Steven Seagal's current Bud Light TV spots even more side-splitting.
As Mojo Nixon & Skid Roper once sang - in 1986's "I Hate Banks" - "If I were P.F. Sloan, I'd tell Dow Jones to suck my bone."Published: 06/10/2004
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