Reflections on John Carter, the Man Who Brought Us the Classic "Beach Baby"

PART ONE--WISTFUL THINKING: When it comes down to it, every pure pop obsessive is looking for a recording that, right on the first listen, evokes the magic, goose-bump feeling of having heard it before. Such transcendental experiences are by nature rare and unexpected, yet their rewards are great enough to make us go out of our way to seek out recordings that combine the new with the familiar. I believe that there is one quality that distinguishes such special music from that great mass of almost-but-not-quite tracks that could be called "impure pop". That quality, my friends, is wistfulness.

The best pure pop combines words and music to express a yearning that words alone cannot express. Even if that yearning is for a concrete object--e.g. a girl--it at least pretends to be attracted to some ethereal quality of its object, something beyond the physical. For example, even though the Rolling Stones' "Back Street Girl" and "Satisfaction" are both, on one level, about wanting a woman for the proverbial One Thing, the plaintive "Back Street Girl," with its sense of longing, is pure pop, while the no-nonsense "Satisfaction" is 100% impure. Likewise, the Who's "I Can't Explain," with its famously inarticulate attempts to reach for a truth beyond words, is pure pop, as is pretty much every Pete Townshend composition of the Sixties. ("Squeezebox," on the other hand...)

PART TWO--GET CARTER: True obsessions never die. They just go into hibernation, re-emerging when you are most vulnerable. So, what better time than the dog days of July to revisit my 13-year obsession with the music of John Carter, the man who brought us "Beach Baby"? Now, there's a pure pop classic. Really, you can't get any more wistful than "Beach Baby," with its lyrical and musical evocation of what Beach Boys biographer David Leaf would later call "the California myth". John Carter cowrote (with his wife and lyricist, Gill Shakespeare), produced, and sang background on that 1974 hit by First Class, which featured a lead vocal by session dynamo Tony Burrows. Carter also cowrote such gems as Sagittarius's "My World Fell Down", Herman's Hermits' "Can't You Hear My Heartbeat," and the Music Explosion's "Little Bit of Soul," as well as British smashes by his own groups the Ivy League and the Flowerpot Men.

Scientists often do research on addictions by training laboratory animals to press a button whenever they want a certain drug that is suspected to be addictive. Lacking controlled substances, I have done similar experiments at home with my CD player's repeat button. They confirmed my longtime suspicion that "Beach Baby" is aural heroin. Once you have popped it into your CD player [it sounds especially hot on Varese Vintage's Tony Burrows comp], it becomes frighteningly easy to just keep pressing the "back" button when it ends. (Or do like me and save yourself the trouble; just program the track to "repeat".) There's so much going on in that mix, from the "Good Vibrations" organ note that opens it, to the evocative French horn riff (which Strawberry Switchblade used to add some readymade wistfulness to their UK Top Five hit "Since Yesterday"), to the kitchen-sink fade (where you can even hear John Carter singing the hook from the Flowerpot Men's "Let's Go to San Francisco"). Moreover, the whole thing's so damn bright. Even on CD, it jumps out of the speakers the way God intended 45s to do.

My obsession with John Carter's recordings was reawakened by two recent CDs: the Flowerpot Men's Peace Album/Past Imperfect (Repertoire [Germany]) and John Carter's The Essential Works in the Studio: 1963-1982 (em music [Japan]). Since the latter is extremely hard to get, being legally available only in Japan, I will dwell on the Flowerpot Men disc, but both are packed with fab rarities. (N.B. Em music has also released another John Carter-related CD, The Essential Collection of the First Class, which I have been unable to find. It includes First Class's unreleased third album.)

The Flowerpot Men began as a studio group led by John Carter and his longtime musical partner (and fellow former Ivy Leaguer) Ken Lewis. The two of them sang lead on "Let's Go to San Francisco," which was a big hit pretty much everywhere but the U.S. during the Summer of Love. In the wake of its success, Carter and Lewis moved to the background, forming an official touring and recording Flowerpot Men lineup, which featured Tony Burrows. By 1969, however, Burrows's Flowerpot Men had run their course, so Carter and Lewis reclaimed the group's name as an outlet for their studio creations.

Peace Album/Past Imperfect contains not one, but two entire unreleased albums by the Flowerpot Men. By that, I don't mean merely two albums' worth of material. Rather, they are works that were conceived as actual concept albums, yet, by some quirk of the music business, they have never been released in their intended form until now. As fans of psychedelic-era music know, it is not often that a single unreleased concept album emerges, let alone two, so Peace Album/Past Imperfect is quite a find.

That the creation date of Peace Album/Past Imperfect is 1969-1970--a couple of years after psychedelia's glorious 1967 peak--might make one assume that its music is, like much of that era's sounds, heavy, self-indulgent, or just not pop. Just the opposite: John Carter, like such Fufkin faves as Graham Gouldman (whom I covered in my June column), Curt Boettcher, and Emitt Rhodes, is one of those few brave, dyed-in-the-wool popsters who kept hooks and harmonies alive during hostile times.

Yet, as Peace Album/Past Imperfect makes clear, Carter has more in common with auteurs like Boettcher than a mere pop sensibility. His work is marked by an attention to detail that is so obsessive that it could almost be called perverse, were it not so obviously innocent. Unfortunately, the innocence is often lost on a certain school of modern-day listeners who think of "sunshine pop" as mere campy fun. (These are the same people who, five years ago, considered themselves quite hip for shelling out $16 apiece for Raymond Conniff reissues.) They are unable to enjoy pure pop on a non-ironic level, so they assume that anyone who would go to such great pains to craft such recordings must be in it only for the money.

I mention this assumption because, while it is occasionally correct with other producers and artists (Kasenetz and Katz come to mind), with John Carter, it is completely off base. Anyone with a gut-level appreciation of Sixties Britpop and folk-rock who listens to his music with an open mind will recognize in him a true kindred spirit. That is why, while I do get a kick out of the obsessiveness in Carter's work, it is not because of any feeling of superiority. As one who adores the genres in which Carter works, his recordings have the effect of a funhouse mirror, taking my own obsessions with perfectly-crafted pop and magnifying them to the limits of comprehension. The effect is sometimes funny, often exhilarating, and, in a way, even validating.

The first album on the Flowerpot Men CD, Peace Album, is the stronger of the two by a hair. [That hair would probably belong to Ken Lewis, as he coproduced the album and cowrote half of its songs. He contributed less to Past Imperfect, as he was then dropping out of the music business.] Peace Album's structure is similar to that of classic 1967 concept albums like Chad & Jeremy's Of Cabbages and Kings, with a lushly orchestrated "Prologue" and "Epilogue". However--and, I might add, refreshingly--the eight tracks that "Prologue" and "Epilogue" frame are all vocal numbers, with none of the instrumental filler that marred the Chad & Jeremy disc or other conceptual works like the Moody Blues' Days of Future Passed.

Actually, although the Flowerpot Men were undeniably British--songs of theirs like the single "Mythological Sunday" (included on Peace Album) are acknowledged classics of UK pop-psych--they took most of their cues from the West Coast. Carter, after all, had penned the aforementioned "My World Fell Down," a song with such a strong Brian Wilson/Pet Sounds influence that Gary Usher chose it for his Los Angeles session supergroup Sagittarius. While Carter hadn't heard Sagittarius's or the Millennium's albums at the time that he made the Flowerpot Men albums, he was clearly simpatico with those artists, as can be heard in the numerous Los Angeles touches on Peace Album.

Fans of such Wilson/Boettcher/Usher tricks as vocal panning will have a field day with Peace Album, which often features multilayered, reverb-soaked harmonies that waft from speaker to speaker like a Pacific Ocean breeze. That same spirit wafts through "Blow Away," only this time it's the guitars that ripple. Three-part harmonies soar over a Wall of Rickenbackers, capturing not only the sound but also the spirit of vintage Byrds rave-ups. Think of a trippy janglefest like Younger Than Yesterday's "Thoughts and Words," overlaid by a haunting antiwar lyric reminiscent of The Notorious Byrd Brothers' "Draft Morning". Bass and drums on that track, as well as the rest of Peace Album/Past Imperfect, are provided by the ace team of Richard Hudson and John Ford, formerly of Elmer Gantry's Velvet Opera, who later joined the Strawbs.

While the American sound carries onto Past Imperfect, the main influences pass from the Byrds and Beach Boys to more acoustic-guitar-based acts like Simon & Garfunkel and Crosby, Stills & Nash. The latter's sound is especially present in the leadoff cut, "Now and Then," which boasts sparkling double-tracked three-part harmonies and "Suite: Judy Blue Eyes"-style guitars (with a neat ARP synthesizer thrown in).

Not surprisingly, Past Imperfect has a more laid-back feel than its predecessor, but there are notable exceptions like "Journey's End," a minor-key rocker that veers psychedelically between a 4/4 verse and a Celtic-tinged 6/8 chorus. The album's tracks are tied together by snippets of interviews with snippets of "man in the street" interviews, a McLuhanesque technique used at the same time by the Move on Shazam.

If that's not enough John Carter for you, there's The Essential Works in the Studio: 1963-1982...if you can find it, that is. It is a truly incredible package, the kind of thing only the Japanese can do: 21 tracks, many never-before reissued, plus a 40-page booklet (!) stuffed with photos. Sad to say, the liner notes are in Japanese, but the copious track credits are in English, as is the nine-page discography. In addition to hits like "Let's Go to San Francisco" and "Beach Baby," the disc contains tracks by Carter's first band, Carter-Lewis & The Southerners (including "Skinny Minnie," with glass-cutting guitar work from Jimmy Page); and lesser-known studio acts such as Stamford Bridge; Kincade; Dawn Chorus (ahem); and Starbreaker. Some tracks are better than others (the ABBA-influenced track by Circus reminds me of Nico's famous comment that stereos should come with a "no flute" button), but the best, like National Velvet's "Singing Your Praises," are downright wistful.

P.S. Got a spare copy of em music's The Essential Collection of the First Class? Please e-mail me at

dawn_eden@fufkin.com

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