Reissue CDs Weekly: Beachwood Sparks, John’s Children

Beachwood Sparks: Desert Skies

Beachwood Sparks didn’t become Fleet Foxes, but their DNA is integral to the harmonious Seattleites. Both bands have been issued by the Sub Pop label, but after two albums Beachwood Sparks drifted apart in 2002. Fleet Foxes picked up the torch in 2008. The connection is more than a shared label and general musical preferences. It’s through the torch held for Gram Parsons's “cosmic American music” and the debt both owe to David Crosby’s 1971 solo album If I Could Only Remember my Name. Beachwood Sparks had started something – a parallel path to, but not, Americana – a fact acknowledged when they reunited last year to make the Tarnished Gold album for Sub Pop.

Back in 1997 and 1998 though, Beachwood Sparks were trying to fuse a fascination with country rock with the previous decade's Paisley Underground of their home-base Los Angeles and pre-Oasis Creation Records. Desert Skies is the first-ever issue of the album they completed but shelved before hooking up with Sub Pop. It catches them as a six-piece beginning to find its way.

In his frank essay in the booklet, bassist Brent Rademaker engagingly details all their constituent parts: even revealing where they found their clothes. Musically, he namechecks Spiritualized, The Flying Burrito Brothers, Belle & Sebastian, The Teenage Fanclub, Orange Juice, The Who, Crazy Horse, Dinosaur Jr. and more. Beachwood Sparks knew what they were searching for. It first coalesced in what’s heard on Desert Skies.

The album opens with the title track, which would also kick their eponymous debut Sub Pop album off. Its nascent form marries LA psychedelic champions The Rain Parade’s “1 Hour 1/2 Ago” with The Teenage Fanclub. "Canyon Ride" would also be issued in 2000, but otherwise Desert Skies is a new experience. Beachwood Sparks had not yet become psychedelic space cowboys, but when they stretched out on “Watery Moonlight” and, especially, “Midsummer Daydream” (re-recorded later for a Sub Pop 45) they pull off the neat trick of merging inner and outer space. An essential archive exhumation.

John’s Children: A Strange Affair

Although having Marc Bolan as a short-lived member guarantees John’s Children a posthumous significance denied many of their similarly unsuccessful Sixties contemporaries, they actually had so-strong an identity that even the warbling vocals of the future bopping elf took a back seat when amalgamated with their rough-edged whole. John’s Children were marketed by their manger Simon Napier-Bell as pioneers of psychedelia and did promo shots naked, with their privates obscured by a few au courant flowers. He didn’t make Wham! do that after becoming their manager. But John’s Children weren’t hippies or flower children. As singer Andy Ellison makes clear in his liner notes, their ambitions included out auto-destructing The Who. Their music was, at its best, punk-rock coarse.

This 52-track double CD is going to be the final word on John’s Children, even though it does not include their often bootlegged BBC radio session. During their lifetime, the original band issued six singles. After splitting in 1967, their shelved album, Orgasm, was issued in 1970. These take care of 21 of A Strange Affair’s tracks. The remainder is Andy Ellison solo material (some including band members), early recordings as The Silence, alternate versions and odd contemporarily unreleased songs. The latter included an early version of Bolan’s “Hippy Gumbo”.

Early cuts are triumphs of ambition over talent and sound like The Small Faces in a wind tunnel

Throughout their barely more than a year as John’s Children, Napier-Bell had the band court publicity, which Ellison and co were clearly happy to go along with. As well as seeking controversy by titling the album Orgasm – meant as the ultimate live experience: a con as it was studio recordings with dubbed-on screaming filched from a Beatles’s concert – their first single was supposed to be “Smashed, Blocked”, a reference to amphetamines. It was issued as “The Love I Thought I’d Found”. There were also the naked pictures, a single banned by the BBC due to its risque lyrics and a tour supporting The Who, where they encouraged the German audience to riot, stealing the headliner's thunder.

As more than demonstrated here, the stunts were ultimately pointless and failed to sell records. They obscured the fact that they were a fine, idiosyncratic and thrilling band. The early cuts as The Silence are triumphs of ambition over talent and sound like The Small Faces in a wind tunnel. Singles “Midsummer Night’s Scene” and “Come and Play With me in the Garden” are furious mod-beat gems with an aggression bordering on the boot boy. They could never have been more than a one-hit wonder, and it’s a wonder they recorded so much material. Get this.

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Watch the video for “Make It Together” from Beachwood Sparks’s Desert Skies