My only beef is that all their LPs were in the 30-min range. Rule o’ thumb: I hate 30 minute albums!! Just when you get comfy with them, they’re done. Many of my favorite albums are this short, though, and it’s probably better than if they were clogged with lame filler. Still, it’s much better if you can hear the is-this-crap and make the call. I’m the sort of rabid completist who, having fallen hopelessly in love with a band, will search out and prize every mangy scrap of b-side and outtake and bootleg I can get my grubby paws around. So if the stuff existed, they might just as well have cluttered up their albums with it to save me money. Fact is that a lot of these bands were too stoned to be incredibly prolific, so you just have to roll with it.

Not so for the WCPAEB, though; the extra goodies did exist. Two albums worth of material was recorded before their official 1967 debut, Part One. Some of it got bootlegged and some didn’t, but the good folks at Sundazed have seen to it you can hear it all on one CD. The four official albums wound up on another two CDs in Europe. In the States, it’s reported that Reprise will issue the definitive “Best Of,” including even more outtakes. Life is good.

The strength of these guys as well as their Achylles heel was their very diversity. They covered so much ground that there was no way to pigeonhole them. Which makes them a rare find--any self-respecting vinyl junkie remembers hearing them for the first time, because a band like this is a treasure for a lifetime. I first ran across them in 1984, picked them up the same day as Ultimate Spinach’s Behold And See. FINALLY there was a local store selling old psychedelic vinyl! I’d been searching for years. To have zeroed in so immediately upon the WCPAEB was pure beginner’s luck, and something for which I’ve been thankful ever since. One quickly learns: very few are the people so foolhardy as to trade in an old WCPAEB album. (What if the Spinach was the best that store had had to offer? I shudder to think.) The Spinach LP is too complex a beast to get into here, but within 30 seconds I knew I’d be listening to WCPAEB years later--no way was this album ever gonna get tossed into the this-is-crap pile with Central Nervous System, the Silver Apples and the Mystic Astrologic Crystal Band. Bands like that blew their entire wad (such as it even was) on the first 30 seconds, and then commenced to merely repeat themselves over the next 40 minutes. (Without even the imagination to simply put the good stuff on a tape loop and wind out an LP side that way.)

The WCPAEB? They would have needed another half dozen albums to fully explore all the possible directions (hell, complete careers for lesser bands) hastily sketched in on their first two or three records. The debut album alone contained a few luminous, gorgeous Byrds soundalikes (every bit as good as the best of what the Byrds themselves were doing), and two or three other flavors of psychedelic folk-rock (one of them in 5/4 time). One of the prettiest was “Will You Walk With Me.” Dan Harris grabbed a composing credit, but it’s the same tune the Dead did as “Morning Dew.” (They credited Bonnie Dobson.) The WCPAEB version is better, being a mere three minutes long and featuring the same celeste sound John Cale used so effectively in “Sunday Morning” and “Stephanie Says.” (When you’re doing folk-rock, celeste is a sure thing--the only way it would sound bad is if the band spilled bongwater on the master tape.)

There was also a nice little cowpoke instrumental called “High Coin” (a Van Dyke Parks cover), but good as they were at the “folk-rock” schtick, Part One is primarily remembered as a trailblazing psychedelic LP. Part of the reason is the squishy logo and double-exposure photography splattered all over the sleeve, but primarily it’s for such psych freakouts as “1906.” Each verse of that one was simply four chords accompanying three lines of babble, capped with the chorus that stated simply, “I don’t feel well.” They tossed in a guitar solo in one of those snake-charmer modes, just for the fun of it. Great cheesy four-track production on this tune, too--the entire drum kit is in one channel. Is there a professional producer alive who would dare do something so utterly wrong as that today? Of course not--which is a damn good argument for 1) making certain never to learn what the “rules” are, and 2) in blissful ignorance, proceeding to mix the damn record yourself. And that’s exactly what Markley did. (By the way, the guitar tablature for “1906”--of all things!--is currently available online. Don’t ask me why; I don’t even play guitar. It’s just good to know someone else is out there posting things beyond the ordinary.)

We can’t get away from this album without mentioning “Help I’m A Rock.” It’s the first-ever Zappa cover, and a brilliant one, a total reworking that bore no sonic resemblance at all to the original, yet was even more goofy (how often does a Zappa tune get described as “goofy?”). You need to hear it. The phrase “help I’m a rock” is repeated endlessly, but in dozens of different voices--there’s one low, gargly one that somehow sounds just like you’d expect a rock to sound, if it could talk. And there’s a high-soprano lead guitar that enters once or twice and SHRIEKS “help I’m a rock” at you too, all done by human hands, no talkboxes or electronics involved.

And that’s just one track.

The next couple of albums found them equally adept at late-night mellowness such as “As the World Rises and Falls,” chunky latter-Doors rockers like “A Child of Few Hours is Burning to Death” (“Forgive us forgive us...napalm is perfect for women and children...it’ll be clipped for tomorrow’s news show”), the blues-riff-with-heavy-temple-gong number “Buddah,” built around the desperation of the rejected neophyte supplicant (“You have a perfectly round tongue/Painted green/And a fountain/And a mountain/And a tunnel for me to follow/And a door inside your mind that you won’t open”). A friend of mine used to call people like that “bar Buddhists.” The twist is that “bar Buddhists” think they are enlightened and usually aren’t, whereas Markley was certain he wasn’t enlightened, so perhaps he was.

You’d think with such a diverse catalogue that perhaps the band was trying desperately to obscure the fact that they had no idea how to jam, but then they pulled “Smell Of Incense” out of some alternate dimension, noodling around “in the zone” for a good four or five minutes till you realize that it hasn’t seemed nearly that long at all--like all the best Dead tapes. (Not that their “zone” sounded like the Dead’s “zone,” but it felt not-so-distant.) See what I mean about diversity? These guys had a song in common with the Dead, they could jam just as spaced and not half so self-conscious as something like “New Potatoe Caboose,” and there were plenty of bands who would have parlayed this one talent into a double-live Fillmore LP. Yet for the WCPAEB, it was nothing; rather, the fact that they could jaaaaamm, man was no more or less to them than anything else in their bag of tricks.

They could do that whenever they pleased, but they weren’t going to limit themselves. Certainly not if it meant they would have to sacrifice the very concise and utterly right song construction to be heard in fuzz-bass-and-elec-sitar pop rockers like “Till the Poorest of People Have Money To Spend (“Let’s go away...Bring your own lunch...avacados, tangerines, persimmons and lemons, AHHHHHHH...”), or the howling dementia of “Carte-Blanche.” That last is as close as they ever got to the Velvets’ “I Heard Her Call My Name.” (They didn’t get that close, but who else even tried?) And who’d want to deprive themself of a tune like “Our Drummer Always Plays In The Nude?” (“I like very comfortable girls/Who are straight/But not quite...”) I could go on, but you get the idea. I’ve had these albums for years, and they never fail to please. With some bands of this type, it’s at least partially a smirk, but for the WCPAEB, it’s always a smile.

That brings us to the matter of Markley’s vocal delivery. It’s so incredibly gauche it’s downright lovable. He had a talent for braying the most ridiculous one-liners at you, with a certain sophomoric smugness in the subtext (“People are papier-mâché...All my friends are beautiful people/People are papier-mâché...”). By all rights it would be a liability, exactly the sort of offense that gets a record yanked off the turntable and frisbeed across the room. Yet there was such a doe-eyed innocence to it (literally--I can just visualize him in front of the microphone staring into space like a deer caught in someone’s headlights) that one could never imagine getting the urge to swat him around a little. (He looked a little like Brian Wilson. You can't get much more innocent than that.) That sort of annoyance was my gut reaction to some of Ian Bruce-Douglas’ golden moments in Ultimate Spinach, but somehow with Markley you just wanted to pat him on the head, feed him a ’shroom, and ask him to tell you another one. “Now I’m some kind of freak.../Any day now, The Man/will come and bust me.” Well, Bob, whatever you do, don’t tell them you’re from Mars. Look what they did to Roky.

Much of Markley’s charm is in the way his lyrics captured the intertwining of profundity and bullshit to be found in the resin-stained scrawlings of just about every teenager with an IQ in excess of 150 who’d finally discovered the joys of spontaneous cumbustion. Chronic phonics, if you will (“Antique white lace/a plastic face,” “Laughing because/it’s right to laugh”). Friends and I still laugh about the time we roamed the fields neer the creek in the moonlight, a half dozen joints in our pockets and a half dozen more in our heads. The terrain got rougher, or perhaps it was the shadows cast by the full moon, but the landscape had become lunar, pocked and cratered. Suddenly, I shrieked: “We’re in Hendrix’s brain!! See? These are the pot-holes! Careful where you step--that’s the one where ‘Purple Haze’ used to be.” One guy swears that for a few fleeting seconds he was in Hendrix’s brain. Ahhh, if only Bob Markley could have been with us--not only would he have banged Jimi’s ganglia, he’d have written a song about it when he was through.

What nobody knew was that--ye gods--Markley was already 30 if not even older. His dad was ridiculously wealthy and Bob himself was a lawyer or something. He wanted desperately to be part of the scene, and so he bankrolled the band. Nowadays they’d sneer him away as a poseur, but it was a much kinder counterculture in those days; gentler, perhaps even wiser. All the other guys cared about was whether such a group would work. Since Bob’s heart was so obviously in the right place, at the right time and with the right band, it did.

I always wonder what happened to members of these bands after they “grew up.” The cynical 80s response is that if they didn’t OD then they’re mental vegetables. That’s not true; a lot of them probably ended up selling insurance--their own cynical 80s response, sadly enough. (In such cases, the part about being mental vegetables goes without saying.) Lots of these guys stuck with the music, though; far more than one might have thought. Ian Bruce-Douglas has been recording ever since--much better music, in fact. Sky Saxon of the Seeds has put out dozens of albums--and he still has his ten-LP version of the Bible in the can.

Things for the WCPAEB in the 70s weren’t nearly so glorious. The Harris brothers put out a country-rock album, which is the last thing the 70s needed but may well have been a little better than somebody else’s country-rock album. One or two of these guys wound up in Shaun Cassidy’s backup band at one point, though I can’t hold it against them. Bob Markley simply disappeared. What happened? Did he mutate into the yuppie scumhood that had been preordained for him? Is he a Republican activist somewhere, quaking in his boots that the lyrics of “Till The Poorest Of People Have Money To Spend” will someday come back to haunt him? (And envious of the way Sonny Bono was able to just let it all hang out--how far would the mighty have fallen, that Bob Markley could envy Sonny Bono.) Not all lawyers are inherently evil, though; Tom Rapp of Pearls Before Swine wound up in the public-interest sector, defending the little guy against the powers that be. Who knows? Maybe Bob blew all his money, works in a secondhand record store and buys a lottery ticket every week in hopes of starting a new band. The only fact at my disposal is this: Bob Markley has been unheard-from since 1981, but Mojo mag recently reported that the other original members have threatened to reunite, with or without him...... Speed the day! :)