What's Exactly The Matter With Me?

P.F. Sloan

Description

“I have been seeking P.F. Sloan, but no one knows where he’s gone” ‘P.F. Sloan’ by Jimmy Webb

“Absolutely none of ’em could beat ol’ P.F.” Lester Bangs, Rolling Stone magazine

What’s Exactly The Matter With Me? is a first-person account of an extraordinary life and pilgrimage through the most fascinating years of American and English musical culture. This is a story of dreams, success, destruction, and miraculous resurrection; the incredible, heartbreaking, and ultimately inspiring story of one of the greatest songwriters in American music—and also one of the most elusive and mysterious.

P.F. Sloan was one of the most prolific and influential geniuses to emerge from the golden age of the 60s, and a pioneer of folk-rock. Between 1965 and 1967, 150 of his songs were recorded by major acts, and 45 of those made the charts. No other songwriter has ever come close to achieving so great number of hits in such a short period of time.

From his little studio at Dunhill Records, P.F. Sloan was a veritable hit-machine, writing for The Mamas & The Papas (that’s Sloan’s infectious guitar lick on ‘California Dreamin’’), Jan & Dean (the falsetto you hear on most of their hits is Sloan’s), Barry McGuire (the brilliant and controversial ‘Eve Of Destruction’), Johnny Rivers (‘Secret Agent Man’), The Turtles, The Fifth Dimension, and many, many more.

He wrote so many songs, in fact, that Dunhill sold him as seven different acts. Unsurprisingly, he wound up exhausted and broken, thus beginning a long journey into the wilderness—a journey of UFOs and psychiatric hospitals, healing and survival, and, ultimately, redemption.

Sujets

• Musique
• Histoire de la musique
• Music
• Musician
• Individual Composer

Informations

• Publié par: Jawbone Press
• Date de parution: 17 juillet 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781908279583
• Langue: English

Extrait

What’s Exactly The Matter With Me?
Memoirs Of A Life In Music
P.F. Sloan & S.E. Feinberg
 
A Jawbone book
First edition 2014
Published in the UK and the USA by
Jawbone Press
2a Union Court,
20–22 Union Road,
London SW4 6JP,
England
www.jawbonepress.com
 
Edited by Tom Seabrook
Jacket design by Mark Case
 
Volume copyright © 2014 Outline Press Ltd. Text copyright © P.F. Sloan and S.E. Feinberg. All rights reserved. No part of this book covered by the copyrights hereon may be reproduced or copied in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in articles or reviews where the source should be made clear. For more information contact the publishers.

In the studio in full armor—suede coat and hat—c. 1965. Photograph by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images.
Contents

Foreword by Rumer
Writing With P.F. Sloan by Stephen Feinberg
Introduction: The Birth Of P.F. Sloan

Book One: 1955–1967
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen

Book Two: 1968–2014
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two

Afterword by Creed Bratton
Illustrations
The P.F. Sloan Songbook
Select Discography
Acknowledgments
Foreword by Rumer
I first saw the name P.F. Sloan in 2007, when I was browsing through Paul Zollo’s book Songwriters On Songwriting . I had never heard of P.F. Sloan or his music. In the book, Jimmy Webb talks about how much he appreciated P.F. Sloan’s work. I learned that, by 1965, Sloan was a pioneer singer-songwriter before anyone had branded the term.
In the book, there is also a tale of how, in 1971, no longer with a recording contract, Phil’s at a hot-dog stand in Hollywood, trying to ‘scrape together 50 cents for a hot dog,’ when a song comes on the radio. It’s ‘P.F. Sloan,’ sung by The Association and written by Jimmy Webb.
I was a struggling unsigned singer-songwriter at the time, working as a waitress, and the story moved me. A few years later, while researching my covers record Boys Don’t Cry , a collection of songs written in the 70s by male singer-songwriters of the era, I sat down to study ‘P.F. Sloan,’ only to find the lyric mysterious. Nixon, a fake London Bridge, a stuffed horse? What did it all mean? In typical Jimmy Webb fashion, it left me scratching my head.
After some exploration and a conversation with a friend, it struck me that each verse was perhaps a portrait of phoniness, crafted by Jimmy to highlight the authenticity of the song’s namesake. I’m ashamed to say that I was so deeply involved with trying to figure out who the character in Jimmy’s story was—and why he was being compared to a stuffed horse—I barely explored the real Sloan’s extraordinary body of work.
Then, after my version of the song was released, I received a mysterious phone call from the man himself.
We arranged to meet in a hotel lobby in Los Angles. As he greeted me, Phil handed me a beautiful tiny music box that played Beethoven. Over dinner, he told incredible story after incredible story. I was so transfixed that I didn’t even notice the hours pass and the restaurant closing up around us.
We continued our conversation into the parking lot. I was cold, so he gave me his jacket, and I smoked all of his cigarettes. In his words, and in these small gestures, I felt a warmth from him that was otherworldly.
I left that night knowing that P.F. Sloan was and still is the real deal, just as Jimmy Webb said he was. I have since spent more time talking and playing music with him, and I can honestly say that Phil is beyond being the hero of any popular song, and more incredible than all of his stories. Phil Sloan is a multi-dimensional being, a magical person with the kindest, most loving heart.
If he has ever felt at odds with the world, one should question the sanity of the world, because Phil Sloan is the sanest person I have ever met.
Writing With P.F. Sloan by S.E. Feinberg
I was sitting in front of the television on September 20 1965, when, on Hullabaloo , Jerry Lewis introduced ‘Eve Of Destruction,’ sung by Barry McGuire, to America. I’ll never forget Barry singing on a junkyard set with abstract dancers in the background. I had never heard or seen anything like it. I listened and felt that I was being spoken to by someone with important wisdom to impart—a message from beyond my point of view.
In a little over three minutes, my life had changed. For some reason, the line this whole crazy world is just too frustratin’ shot through me like adrenaline into an asthmatic. I could breathe again. I wasn’t alone.
I bought the record at Central Music in Brockton, Massachusetts, and played that thing hundreds of times. When you play a record that many times, it becomes ingrained into your consciousness. I felt that I had just been given a ticket to the game.

P.F. Sloan did not want to write this book. He had spent years trying to put some very bizarre and painful memories to rest, and here I was asking him to dredge them up again. I knew at the outset that it was going to be sometimes rough but I felt like the story had to be told—this story of a musical prodigy who was an important influence in music during the 60s.
To so many, P.F. Sloan was a mysterious and elusive character—this man behind the red balloon. He was one of the deep ones, all right. There weren’t many. Some of them acted deep but weren’t. Janis Joplin, Phil Ochs, Bryan MacLean, Bobby Darin, Bob Dylan—they were deep. And P.F. Sloan was deep.
When Phil got his writing chops, after an apprenticeship in pop music (and what an apprenticeship it was!), he wrote with such savage honesty that his music scared people. It scared the record companies and it scared American society. At nineteen, two of his songs—‘Eve Of Destruction’ and ‘The Sins Of A Family’—were banned.
Phil Sloan was loved and hated. He was respected and despised. But all he was ever really about was making music. He kept writing and singing until it got too much for people and too much for him. He was cast out, but he kept on singing; and then he was locked away, but he kept on singing. And then, one day, he shut down and stopped singing. He stopped everything. He was hurt, and too wounded to make music.

Before we started this narrative, I had written a musical with Phil. We knew we could work with each other, but we really didn’t know what kind of dangers we were about to face as we navigated up the river in search of truth and clarity.
We discovered early on that by using humor—laughing at the most horrible elements of his story—we could get through it. As a matter of fact, we laughed hardest while writing about some of the most painful recollections. We discovered that by digging deep into the pain—as deep as we could go—we were able to tap into the absurd, and therefore the humor, and in that humor we found it possible to deconstruct and demystify a very complicated character, thereby enabling us to tell a simple story about a young man who was in love with music. We really wanted a book that was like the stories Phil tells between songs at performances: simple, poignant, and real.
Phil wanted the reader to know the truth as he saw it. Not out of revenge or spite or anger: he wanted to debunk the mythos that surrounds his life in music.
We had a difficult time deciding whether or not to include several of the stories in this narrative. They are the ones that deal with supernatural events—seeing James Dean two years after his death, for example. Phil was not sure if he should include it, as he knew that it may appear to be contrived for the sake of the abstract. I was concerned that if we included such a memory, it might cloud other stories and create doubt. We talked about it a lot and decided that what Phil saw is what he saw. Was it the ghost of James Dean? Or was it someone who looked like James Dean—a young man who was trying to emulate James Dean, perhaps? It didn’t matter. Phil saw James Dean, and that’s all there was to it. Phil told me that he trusted the reader and was not afraid to be honest. He encouraged honesty at every story. We spent much time sorting out the stories, chronologically and factually, to the best of our abilities.
I made a deal with Phil. We wouldn’t start off to write a book or anything else. I traveled over to his house once or twice a week to tape our conversations, very casually. Over the months we laid down forty or fifty hours of these. Then we took a look at it to see what we had, and we still weren’t convinced that a book would be written. Phil was concerned, because it seemed like everyone from back then was writing a book, and he had a shelf full of them—most of them mentioning him in one way or another—some of the authors revising the truth and others doing their best to be accurate. He and I were adamant about not wanting another rock book about being messed over by the record business—we both understood that Phil has no monopoly on that.
We wanted to share with the reader Phil’s witness of the events that truly shaped a generation, as well as the events that textured his own life. We also wanted to share the intricacies of the life of an artist-songwriter and hopefully shed a little light on how the foundations of the music business were then. While we were writing Louis! Louis!, our musical based on the writings and musings of Ludwig van Beethoven, I would allow myself ten or fifteen minutes after each session to ask Phil questions about his extraordinary musical legacy. He shared his opinions on music, society, spirituality, politics, literature, his ten trips to India—all aspects of life.
I think sociopathic behavior should be taught in every music college—how to d