RIP Sky Saxon

by **withahip** » Thu Jun 25, 2009 6:23 pm

I really loved this band when I was a kid.

Sky Saxon, founder of the brilliant ’60s garage band the Seeds, died Thursday morning at St. David’s Hospital.

The newly minted Austinite, born Richard Marsh, was hospitalized Monday with what doctors suspected was an infection of the internal organs, but cause of death has not yet been released.

Saxon fell ill last Thursday, but performed at Saturday at Antone’s with recent Austin collaborators Shapes Have Fangs.

Sky’s wife Sabrina Saxon posted news of his passing on Facebook this morning: “Sky has passed over and YaHoWha is waiting for him at the gate. He will soon be home with his Father. I’m so sorry I couldn’t keep him here with us. More later. I’m sorry.”

We are sorry as well.

Saxon was the founder of the Seeds, one of the all-time great first-wave garage rock bands. If the Rolling Stones was the sound of five British guys trying to imitate Muddy Waters and Howlin Wolf and failing in new and strange ways, ’60s garage rock was the sound of American kids trying to imitate the Stones and (similarly, brilliantly) missing the mark.

The Seeds fell together in 1965 around a core of Saxon and guitarist Jan Savage with keyboardist Daryl Hooper and drummer Rick Andridge. The bands’s first couple of singles — ‘Can’t Seem To Make You Mine’ and ‘Pushin’ Too Hard’ — are ’60s punk classics, snotty and fuzzy and brief. Check out their first two albums — ‘The Seeds’ and ‘A Web of Sound,’ both from that magic rock year 1966 — for perfect examples of proto-psychedelic roar.

After a few more records, Saxon broke up the Seeds in 1970, joined the spiritual commune the Source Family, adopted the name Sunlight and played with the Source Family band YaHoWha 13 now and then.

He continuted to make albums since with various lineups, distributing his music via the Internet at www.skysaxon.com. He came to Austin in March for the second annual Psych Fest and never really left, according to his publicist, keeping a very low profile until recently.

Great interview:

http://www.austin360.com/music/content/ ... music.html

by **withahip** » Thu Jun 25, 2009 6:25 pm

Fest hosted by Austin's guardian Angels of psych

By Joe Gross
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Thursday, March 12, 2009

Ithas been said before and it bears saying again: All respect to San Francisco and all, but Austin is the birthplace of psychedelic rock, Texas is the soil from which it sprouted. Starting with the 13th Floor Elevators, continuing with Golden Dawn up through the Butthole Surfers in the '80s and '90s and the Black Angels, Cavedweller and Shapes Have Fangs today, psychedelia is as important to the musical fabric of Austin as blues, folk or country.

Which is why the folks in the Austin psych rock act the Black Angels are throwing their second annual Psych Fest this weekend at Radio Room, sort of a warm-up gig for that venue before it's used for South by Southwest.

Trippy buzz bands such as the Wooden Ships, Dead Meadow and A Place to Bury Strangers join the aforementioned locals and dozens more, including Sky Sunlight Saxon of legendary Los Angeles garage rock titans the Seeds. Not too shabby for a festival that's only on its second year.

Black Angels leader and fest organizer Christian Bland wasn't wild about last year's middling attendance at the first Psych Fest and wasn't sure if a second was possible. "Then my friends started asking about it," Bland says. " We had more buzz than I thought."

Most of the out-of-town bands on the bill are acts the Black Angels have played with, including louder-than-God shoegazers A Place to Bury Strangers and stoner rockers Dead Meadow, who have mastered the unique lope of their particular brand of hard rock.

A few couldn't make it this year: "The Ravonettes were supposed to headline one night," Bland says. "And Brian Jonestown Massacre were going to play one night; it was going to be us, Brian Jonestown, then us with Roky, but that wasn't able to happen."

Oh, yeah. Roky.

The Black Angels have moseyed to the head of the current crop of Austin psych rockers. Not only does their music blend the fevered noise of the Velvet Underground with the sun-staring trippiness of Pink Floyd, they've also had their hip card punched in a way very few others have — they backed up Roky Erickson on a short West Coast tour last year. While Roky couldn't play this year's Psych Fest, Bland is effusive about the experience playing with him.

"It was as amazing as it was surreal," he says. "The Elevators are a band that we all adored. It took a little while for him to warm up to us, I think, but eventually he felt comfortable enough with us to play a few more Elevators songs than he usually plays. We ended up learning the first five songs on their first album, 'You're Gonna Miss Me,' 'Splash One,' 'Reverberation,' 'Rollercoaster' and 'Don't Fall Down.'" Bland says the Halloween 2008 show in Los Angeles was filmed, and they hope to have a DVD available by Friday.

Sky Saxon captures the spirit of psychedelic rock

The most unexpected guest at Psych Fest 2009 is Sky Saxon. Born Richard Marsh, Saxon formed the Seeds in Los Angeles in 1965. The bands's first couple of singles — 'Can't Seem To Make You Mine' and 'Pushin' Too Hard' — are garage punk classics, snotty and fuzzy and brief. Their first two albums — 'The Seeds' and 'A Web of Sound,' both from that magic rock year 1966 — are perfect examples of proto-psychedelic rock. After a few more records, Saxon broke up the Seeds in 1970, joined the spiritual commune the Source Family, adopted the name Sunlight and played with the Source Family band YaHoWha 13 now and then.

Saxon has made many albums since with various lineups. These days, he distributes his music like many truly independent artists, especially those who like to keep a lot of music in print — via the Internet at www.skysaxon.com. At the Psych Fest, he'll be backed by Shapes Have Fangs, which he has renamed World Spirits Band for the occasion.

'I needed a name I could get behind,' Saxon said from his home in California. 'Sky Saxon and World Spirits Band initiates this band.'

As you might have guessed, Saxon is old school — he talks like a man who has spent more time than most on the business end of psychedelic technology, musical, chemical, spiritual, whatever. We touch on everything from oil ('you can't just take it out of the ground and not expect payback from the planet' — a pretty fair assessment) to file sharing ('Music takes a long time to make and as soon as you make it, it's out there. I can see a Third World country bootlegging your music and that's OK, but Americans doing it to Americans, come on.').

He's perfect for Pysch Fest 2. He might not be from Texas, but it's that sort of one band against the world spirit (so to speak) that infuses psychedelic rock then and now — it's a state of mind.

— Joe Gross