Life after hits
Guitarists Ed King and Paul Atkinson played in bands that released some of the biggest records of the '60s.
I’ve been fortunate enough to meet a lot of amazing musicians in my life. Just this week, I spent a couple of hours in a studio with a guy who’s one of the titans of Texas garage rock and listened while he cut some guitar tracks. That’s a story for another day, probably after the produced announces the top secret album project they were working on.
Since I’m supposed to be using this forum as a place to write down stories as I remember them, I’m going to share my memories of the times I met the guitarists Ed King and Paul Atkinson. You may know Ed as 1/3 of the guitar army in Lynyrd Skynyrd, but he’ll always be the guy from the Strawberry Alarm Clock to me. Paul was a member of the Zombies, but I met him during his time as a successful A&R executive at RCA Records.
All my stories are based on whatever I remember from the time, and I’m trying to remain a minor player and focus on what’s interesting to me about the careers of these people whose music has had a huge impact on me. I’m just the messenger here.
Ed King, Lynyrd Skynyrd Strawberry Alarm Clock
I met Ed King backstage when my management clients Drivin⬥N⬥Cryin opened for Lynyrd Skynyrd ’91 in the summer of 1991. I was thrilled to meet him and wanted to know everything he could tell me about his band the Strawberry Alarm Clock’s appearance in Russ Meyer’s epic movie Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. Ed was not pleased.
Note: I’m using the era-appropriate spelling and punctuation for Drivin⬥N⬥Cryin. I’m the guilty party who promoted the capitalization and diamonds. I’m sorry about that now.
There’s a lot going on in that paragraph, so I’ll rewind and give some context that I didn’t have back when I met Ed. If I’d known more about his background, I might not have opened a conversation with the Strawberry Alarm Clock.
Ed was the guitarist in the Strawberry Alarm Clock for all four of their original albums on Uni Records back in the ’60s. They’d most likely be forgotten today if they hadn’t released a massive #1 single in 1967 with “Incense and Peppermints.” The followup 45 “Tomorrow” limped to #23, and they never made the Top 40 again. Don’t lie and say you know “Tomorrow.”
Even though Ed stuck it out until the end, there’s a good reason why he might not have harbored fond memories of his Strawberry Alarm Clock days. West Coast labels may have signed a ton of garage bands in the mid-’60s, but most of them didn’t see those bands as cohesive units deserving of A&R respect.
The music on more than a few hit records by the Beach Boys, the Byrds, the Grass Roots, the Monkees, and Paul Revere & the Raiders was actually performed by a rotating group of session musicians nicknamed the Wrecking Crew. Some of those bands obviously managed to take over the means of production and play on their own albums after they became popular, but it’s safe to say that a band’s structural integrity wasn’t a priority for the label industry.
Which brings us to “Incense and Peppermints,” a song started by King and keyboardist Mark S. Weitz. Weitz says that the band finished the instrumental track but their producer Frank Slay thought they could use some help with nailing down a melody and lyric, so he sent the completed track to another band he was producing, the Rainy Daze. Band members John Carter and Tim Gilbert came up with the final melody and lyric.
It turned out that the Strawberry Alarm Clock’s singer Michael Luciano couldn’t nail the lead vocal, so Slay swapped in 16-year-old singer Greg Munford, who was in the studio to perform backing vocals on the tracks.
This is where things get weird. Weitz’s version of the story is that Strawberry Alarm Clock manager Bill Holmes insisted that he and all members of Strawberry Alarm Clock share writing credits with Carter and Gilbert instead of the song being a four-way split between Carter, Gilbert, King, and Weitz.
Slay apparently insisted the publishing credits could include no more than four credited writers, but Holmes stood his ground. When it was time to turn in the label copy, Slay listed Carter and Gilbert as the only writers.
Song goes to #1, the two original writers get nothing, and the band never has another hit single. The band soldiered on for three more albums, but Ed King and Mark Weitz got screwed out of millions. While it’s hard to figure why the kids didn’t rush out to buy an album called Wake Up…It’s Tomorrow, Strawberry Alarm Clock became the definition of a one-hit-wonder.
It’s my happening, and it freaks me out!
By the time skintastic director Russ Meyer recruited the Strawberry Alarm Clock to appear as the house band in 1970’s Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, the band was yesterday’s news.
World War II veteran Meyer had built a mini-empire as a director of independent movies like Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! and Mudhoney. The director’s work featured women with massive chests and schoolboy humor that Meyer surely thought was sly.
20th-Century Fox Studios had enjoyed a huge hit with Valley of the Dolls and wanted to make a sequel, but the original novel’s author Jaqueline Susann hadn’t written one. Some junior exec decided that Meyer was the guy to update the story and Meyer recruited the young movie critic Roger Ebert to write a script about a naive young all-female rock band’s adventures in Hollywood. Ebert reputedly shared Meyer’s obsession with well-endowed women.
Rather than get a hip screenplay that echoed independent exploitation pictures like Riot on Sunset Strip or Wild in the Streets, Fox got a movie that portrays ’60s youth culture through a reactionary lens, confirming every depraved story that Goldwater and Nixon voters told themselves about what was going on in decadent Hollywood.
That’s shouldn’t be surprising. After all, Fox handed the keys to a director old enough to be the father of the movie’s band members and to a 27-year-old Midwestern screenwriter who would have never have gotten past the door security at a Laurel Canyon rock party.
Beyond the Valley of the Dolls features plenty of what are now considered questionable attitudes about race and drugs, and even more problematic depictions of trans and lesbian characters. Even though old Russ was using all of this for titillation in 1970, it was revolutionary that any of these characters were appearing in a studio picture at that time.
I first encountered Beyond the Valley of the Dolls in the mid-’80s at a health food restaurant that showed underground movies on weekends. They set up a folding screen at one end of the restaurant, and played the films on a projector like the ones used in high school health and driver’s ed. classes all over America. Home video rental wasn’t a thing yet, and Meyer’s movies weren’t circulating on the revival house circuit. This was the only way to see movies that seemed forbidden at the time.
There really wasn’t anything that could have prepared a bunch of college kids for this psychedelic swirl of a movie. Record producer Ronnie “Z-Man” Barzell was a twisted cross between Phil Spector and Hugh Hefner, while prize fighter Randy Black has echoes of Muhammad Ali. There are Nazis, gigolos, porn stars, and sleazy lawyers circulating in Z-Man’s world, and all their decadent choices will lead everyone down the road to hell.
The Strawberry Alarm Clock appears in a party scene where members of the all-girl band the Carrie Nations get an introduction to their wicked futures. Z-Man gives lead singer Kelly McNamara an introduction to the players as the band plays “Incense and Peppermints.”
I’d embed a YouTube video of that scene here, but it’s age-restricted because of the nudity. Click here to watch.
Russ Meyer movies were beloved by kids in the ’80s and ’90s subculture in an era where there was very little representation of the kind of characters we see in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls and Meyer’s other movies. With a couple of decades of extra perspective, it’s obvious that old Russ doesn’t deserve a gold star for his progressive attitudes.
Plenty of ’80s kids were pushing back against the Rolling Stone magazine narrative about the ’60s, championing the Byrds, Velvet Underground, Stooges, MC5, the Creation, the Chocolate Watch Band, and dozens of other bands who hadn’t gotten the official seal of approval. Beyond the Valley of the Dolls was a relic of that alternative version of the ’60s, and we loved it.
Twenty years later…
One of my can’t-miss strategies when meeting rock stars has always been to ask them about their garage band pasts. If I’d ever met Paul McCartney, I would have busted out some questions about the Quarrymen. Establish that you both know a little something and care about their earliest creative efforts, and most people open up pretty quickly when they realize there’s a new or at least different conversation we can have.
Fortunately for Ed King, he went on to cowrite Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama,” “Saturday Night Special,” Workin’ for MCA,” “Whiskey Rock-a-Roller,” “Poison Whiskey,” and “Swamp Music,” so he eventually got some of those big publishing checks even if none of those Skynyrd hits quite matched the income from “Incense and Peppermints,” a #1 single that has never dropped off the radio over the past 55 years.
The Lynyrd Skynyrd story suggests that leader Ronnie Van Zant liked to run the band like an armed militia, locking them in a metal shed and making them practice for hours and hours each day when the group first started playing together.
Ed met Ronnie when the pre-Skynyrd garage band One Percent opened for the Strawberry Alarm Clock in 1968. When bassist Leon Wilkeson quit Skynyrd in 1972, Ronnie invited Ed to replace him. Leon quickly decided he’d made a mistake and asked to rejoin the band. Ed’s first instrument was guitar, so he shifted over from bass and joined Gary Rossington and Allen Collins to create Lynyrd Skynyrd’s three-guitar army.
Ed played and wrote on the band’s first LPs for MCA, but walked out when he got tired on Ronnie riding him the way he yelled at the other members of the group. That eventually led to Steve Gaines replacing Ed in the band. Both Steve and Ronnie were killed along with four others when the band’s plane crashed in 1977.
The band reunited in 1987 with Ronnie’s younger brother Johnny Van Zant as lead singer and recorded a live record as a tribute to Ronnie. They returned to the studio and released Lynyrd Skynyrd 1991 in June that year and set off on a summer tour of sheds.
Here’s where things get dicey for me. Drivin⬥N⬥Cryin had been hanging on for a few years as Chris Blackwell’s least favorite artist on Island Records. Their 1989 album Mystery Road had been a massive hit in the South but underperformed in the rest of the world. They’d rocked up their sound for the 1991 album Fly Me Courageous and had enjoyed a breakthrough at rock radio. The record was selling.
A spring run of West Coast shows with Neil Young & Crazy Horse and Sonic Youth had been amazing, exactly the kind of bill that fit what the band was about. Island’s promo team had a strong story to tell and insisted that all they really needed was another big arena tour for the band to kick down the door and break through to platinum.
The only arena tour that was on offer was opening for Lynyrd Skynyrd. I thought it was a terrible idea but couldn’t exactly explain why in a way the resonated with the label or the faction in the band that had come to enjoy touring in a luxury coach.
What I felt coming was Nevermind, released on September 24, 1991. That record changed the world in a week and bands that had opened for ersatz Skynyrd were never going to be invited to hang with the cool alternative kids ever again.
So, I meet Ed when I’m backstage with Drivin⬥N⬥Cryin. He just cuts me dead when I ask about Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. I’ve got an all access working laminate, so I’m not getting tossed from the venue, but I’m smart enough not to approach him again during the tour.
Now that I know more about Ed King’s history with the Strawberry Alarm Clock, I understand why he didn’t want to talk about his time in the band. My enthusiasm for that part of his life was real, but I can’t imagine walking around for decades knowing that you’d been cut out of songwriting royalties for a #1 hit.
Paul Atkinson, the Zombies
In 1987, I was working in the Los Angeles headquarters of Big Time Records (America), home to Alex Chilton, Redd Kross, the Dream Syndicate, Dumptruck, Christmas, the Go-Betweens, Love and Rockets, the Hoodoo Gurus, the Lucy Show, the Hard-Ons, and the Lime Spiders. Truly, stars after stars after stars.
Big Time’s owner Fred Bestall had made his money as manager of Air Supply. How he got from there to owning a hip LA underground label is a tangled story that I’ll save for another time.
RCA Records was in dire need of some street cred and, ignoring all signs that Fred was a fraud, decided to invest in Big Time and put up the money for the label to license the U.S. rights for Love & Rockets from Martin Mills at Beggars Banquet.
The folks at RCA’s Los Angeles office were generally pretty nice to the snotty kids from Big Time. Stars subscriber (and regular commenter) Randy Miller was a young product manager who did an excellent job of distracting Fred from his schemes and keeping the label’s releases on track.
Note: The Big Time offices were on the seventh floor of the old Security Pacific bank building at the corner of Hollywood and Highland, and the company originally did its banking there. At some point late in my time at the company, Fred moved the accounts to a different bank on the other side of Beverly Hills. I particularly remember a Friday when the office manager urged all of us to race over to BH to cash our paychecks because Fred had a boat payment due on Monday and he was probably going to use any money left in the account after the weekend to keep the marina repo man from sailing away with his boat.
Before 1987, the Zombies were a band that had enjoyed a couple of massive hit singles in the United States. Both “Tell Her No” and “Time of the Season” were still in heavy rotation on oldies radio, but the band’s albums were mostly forgotten except by a few of us college radio types who were trying to rewrite the musical history of the previous generation.
Rhino did a proper reissue of Odessey and Oracle in the fall of 1987, and the band slowly started to get the attention they deserved. They were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2019, recognition that was fueled more by younger generations who weren’t old enough to band the band’s records when they were originally released.
Zombies guitarist Paul Atkinson had become a music executive after the band broke up. His A&R career got off to a roaring start when he reportedly signed ABBA for a £1000 advance. By 1987, he’d landed at RCA in Los Angeles and was enjoying massive success with Bruce Hornsby & the Range.
Whenever I visited RCA, I tried to see Paul and ask him some (probably dumb) questions about his time in the Zombies and he was always gracious and willing to chat about the band. This was before there were any reissues with liner notes, so I wasn’t asking any particularly insightful questions. I did have the good sense not to quiz him about why they spelled “odyssey” with only one “y” in their album title.
Paul Atkinson’s big A&R project in 1987 was Mr. Mister’s followup to their platinum 1985 album Welcome to the Real World, which spawned the #1 singles “Broken Wings” and “Kyrie” and also topped the album charts.
Expectations were massive for the followup Go On, set for release in September 1987, and RCA set up an elaborate listening party in the planetarium at the Griffith Park Observatory. I remember a specially commissioned light show that was designed to sync up with the music, but I’m sure at least one of my readers will remember more details than I do.
Unfortunately, no one in the band realized that they’d had a couple of #1 hits because they’d delivered a couple of well-crafted pop songs that spoke to a wide audience. Go On was a concept album about the state of the world and a record that fervently embraced every ’80s studio cliché. Hooks were too easy, and singer Richard Page had a message to deliver.
Our boss Fred thought that we’d earn brownie points if we all showed up for the big event. Everyone expected “Broken Wings Part II” and none of us kids were ready for the insane bombast of Go On.
I have long thought I exaggerated this experience (and I thought about it whenever I saw the observatory on the LA skyline), so I went back today and listened to Go On for the first time since that night in the planetarium. I think it may be even worse than I remembered.
The public sure didn’t like it. The album’s first single was“Something Real (Inside Me/Inside You)” and topped out at #29, a shockingly low chart position for a band coming off #1 singles. The album only made it to #55 and the band broke up.
I’ve been in situations where a hit artist didn’t want to embrace the musical traits that had made them successful in the first place. That year, Mr. Mister singer Richard Page had something to say, and he was damn well going to say it.
When I’ve been in similar difficult artist situations, I’ve thought about Paul Atkinson and Mr. Mister. Surely he knew what was coming before the record came out. He’d made classic records with his own band and been involved in some massively successful records before 1987 and later went on to sign Michael Penn and work with him on the great album March. Paul Atkinson knew what a good record sounded like.
Paul died in 2004, so he at least got to enjoy a few years in a world that finally appreciated the Zombies. The 1997 box set Zombie Heaven compiled by Alec Palao cemented the band’s reputation with my generation of music fans and likely helped inspire prominent music cues from the band in movies like The Krays, Kill Bill: Vol. 2, and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.
Did Paul Atkinson care that a kid who was asking him a ton of random questions about his old band? Was he flattered or just being nice when he answered me? I hope he was at least a little bit happy that I cared so much.
Nuggets, Part ∞
Last fall, I wrote about the Lenny Kaye & Friends Nuggets 50th Anniversary Celebration in North Carolina:
Have You Heard the Good News About 'Nuggets'?
Now there’s news that promoter and organizer Rick Johnson was so organized that he had the show recorded. He’s releasing a live album for Record Store Day in April.
Lenny Kaye & Friends: Live At The Cat's Cradle A 50th Anniversary Celebration of Nuggets is a limited-edition LP release with a run of only 900 copies. Rick is using my photo of Alejandro Escovedo’s performance of “I Wanna Be Your Dog” on the back cover. It’s an excellent track listing, with Kevn Kinney’s version of “‘You’re Gonna Miss Me” the only really obvious omission from the album.
That Beyond The Valley of the Dolls story is a movie in and of itself. Hilarious! Seth Rogen as Russ Meyer and Paul Giamatti as Roger Ebert. Write the screenplay!
Paul Atkinson was one of my first mentors. I learned so much from him as his gracious skill as an executive was an aspirational influence for me. I’m sure he was appreciative of your interest in his life as a Zombie.
RCA had a lot riding on that Mr Mister album as it was a big part of the financial plan that year. But its failure opened a window for a substantial commitment to Love And Rockets and a breakthrough from college radio to alternative and AOR radio.
I’m glad you remember the laser light show at the planetarium but it wasn’t for Mr Mister. It was for Marc Jordan’s album, Talking Through Pictures, a brilliant album that, unfortunately, got caught up in the politics of label and artist management.
Paul Atkinson was one of the loveliest men I ever met in the biz....supportive, interested, interesting - and he was very helpful to Carol (my ex)'s indie PR firm, when she was between Paisley Park and Capricorn. I last saw him at a Zombies lunchtime event at HOB on Sunset, before he died - it was a benefit of some sort for his care. He wasn't in great shape, at all. It was sad.