Private Party – Live At The Cavern Club

Sky Saxon’s second release on Voxx Records — the first being half of a 1986 EP with SS-20 — was a live album, Private Party — Live At The Cavern Club, credited to Sky Sunlight Saxon and Purple Electricity. The performances on the album are from a show at Hollywood’s Cavern Club on March 7, 1986.

The one-off band consisted of Sky on vocals, Jeff and Steve McDonald of Redd Kross on bass and guitar, respectively, and Brian Corrigan from The Primates as drummer. They play mostly Seeds originals, haphazardly retitled (it’s not clear if this is for legal or chemical reasons — not all are changed) and with new lyrics (certainly chemically-induced). There are audible splices between songs on the record; the whole show may still exist and be released as an expanded package someday. I’m not holding my breath, but one can hope.

On Private Party, Sky and his band (whom he formally introduces with the truncated designation “Sky and Purple Electricity”) begin with a short improvised instrumental version of Led Zeppelin’s “Dazed And Confused”, here called "Sky's Theme". (Despite the title, Sky in fact is the only one on stage not involved.) Sky makes it to the stage and says hi, then invites the audience to dance or “whatever you do”. He spacily promises to try to get royalties to the audience members for a video he claims to be shooting of the show (!), then the band begins to play a wired version of "Pictures And Designs" that features mostly new, made-up-on-the-spot words from Sky. "Pictures And Designs" is listed as "You Blow My Mind" on the album.

Another re-titled Seeds song, "The Flower Lady And Her Attendant" (née “assistant”) comes next, buried in twisted, grunge guitar, burbling bass, dashing drums, and Sky’s weary-sounding improvisations about the grim reaper. In fact, the song is largely unrelated to the 1966 Seeds track, although the bass guitar keeps up the original’s vocal melody. The Seeds theme continues with a bizarre, feedback-deranged version of "No Escape", with its original lyrics largely intact. "Out Of The Darkness Into Peace, Love And Understanding" finds Sky Saxon just howling into the poor microphone over a nice and completely unrelated groove by the band.

"Girl I Want You" also stays fairly faithful to the Seeds original, though the tinny Eastern-tinted psych of the original is replaced by a growling rawk guitar sound. "Up In Your Bed" is announced by Sky as Purple Electricity’s “extension” of "Up In Her Room", but (apart from its fifteen-plus minute length) is totally unrelated to the Seeds classic.

The Private Party album ends with a two-minute wall of feedback called "Like A Backwards Frog", which like the opening "Sky's Theme" does not feature Sky Saxon. It closes the record on a suitably chaotic note.

Sky’s behavior in Los Angeles ca. 1986

Some purported first-hand accounts of run-ins with Sky around this time, preserved on Usenet discussions on Google Groups from the late 1990s, may give some insight into Sky’s activity and behavior around the time of this show.

Basically, the Cavern Club at 3419 Hollywood Boulevard was a small club run by Greg Shaw of Bomp Records, and was the scene of a mod-psych 1960s revival in LA at the time. Sky Saxon was infamous for asking every band who happened to be playing if he could get onstage with them; most obliged, even when the novelty wore off and Sky had become an irritant. Some versions of the story mention that the show preserved on Private Party was concocted especially to appease Sky and get his eagerness to jump onstage out of his system.

Mid-1980s Sky Saxon anecdotes from Google Groups:

by Kim Wilson, Feb 1, 1994:
I ran into Sky Saxon from the Seeds in 1985 at the Cavern Club in LA. I got the impression from the reactions of the regulars that he’d been making a pest of himself for some months, getting on stage with any Paisley Underground band that would let him and making them do "Pushin' Too Hard". That night he played with Berlin’s Legendary Golden Vampires, and damn, did he suck. Later he attempted to stroke my hair and told me he was making a film about crystals that I should try out for.

by Dan Iverson, Sep 29, 1998:
I used to work for Ken Stocks at his Retrospect Records shop just up from Fallout. He and Sky had been friends from waaaay back, apparently […] The impression I got with my few “conversations” with Sky was that he had never been very bright to begin with, but that thirty solid years of continuous substance abuse had fried his mean old hippy/con-artist brain something fierce. Although, when he was here he was still using everything he could get his hands on, so it might well be that I never encountered him sober (I’d believe it). I can’t say he wasn’t oddly entertaining at times, if only accidentally. He would trundle down the most incredible piles of indescribable crap and then try and convince us to buy it. Once he brought a broken glass tube (from a pipe?) and a scratched up ABBA record, claiming it was the gear Fleetwood Mac used to have cocaine blown up their asses.

by Larry Grogan, Sep 29, 1998:
Back in 1985, when I was doing a zine called Incognito … I did an issue with Sky Saxon on the cover. Inside I had a solicitation for a comp I was trying to put together of current bands, with the tag line ‘Wanna Be On A Record?”. A buddy of mine that was going to school in Florida saw Sky Saxon in one of Rolling Stone’s ‘Where Are They Now?’ issues and mailed him a copy (unbeknownst to me) at his home in Hawaii. One night, I get a call at work from my mom, who says that someone connected with someone from the 60s named ‘Sly Waxman’, or ‘Hy Jackson’ called and left a message. ‘Was it Sky Saxon?’ I asked. It was.

 

It turns out his wife got the zine in the mail (Sky was at the time hanging around LA and San Diego making everyone’s lives miserable) and thought I had a record label. She wanted to know if I wanted to put out a Sky Saxon album. She left his number in LA. I called the next day. A guy with a heavy Spanish accent answered the phone at what turned out to be the front desk of a motel. There were no phones in the rooms so he had to put the phone down and go running down the hall to get Sky. About five minutes of dead air go by before Sky picked up the phone. He sounded like a character from a Cheech and Chong sketch (probably for good reason). I explained to him what the situation was (that I did NOT in fact run a record label). He was disappointed but we struck up a conversation about the Seeds, and what he was up to now. He was DELUDED. I can’t say for sure if it was drugs (most definitely a contributing factor to his incoherence) or just ego, but he went on a tear … about how the Seeds were going to be the ‘next Beatles’ etc, etc, on and on, ad infinitum.

 

Later on I heard first-hand anecdotes from West Coast-ers about how Sky tried to elbow his way into every garage gig in LA and San Diego for a couple of years, no doubt anticipating a large scale ‘rediscovery’ of the Seeds … Sky just seemed like an overly opportunistic, but intellectually blunted relic of a bygone era.

by toml, Sep 29, 1998:
…but on the subject of funny Sky stories: For about two weeks straight he got on stage with every single group that played the Cavern Club. Some would get angry and try and throw him off, some would think it was cool for one song ’til they realized that Sky wasn’t gonna get off! He was wearing the clothes from that Sky Sunlight Saxon LP that still sits in Seeds bins in every oldies record store. The white outfit included moonboots, a cape and a GIANT purple Swatch watch! He’d get on stage and announce the tune, it was always the same: “This one’s called Sky at the Cavern”.

If these consistent-seeming tales are to be believed, Sky’s time in the mid 80s was marked by tons of drugs, erratic behavior, and a hope that he could ride a wave of 60s resurgence back to the top. Private Party then is a valuable document of his head at the time, similar to but rawer than his Destiny's Children album with Fire Wall he released the same year. At any rate, and whatever the provenance and motivations behind this live LP, it failed to do much for Sky Saxon’s career that a studio effort like Destiny's Children wasn’t more likely to achieve.

Track listing

1. "Sky's Theme"
2. "You Blow My Mind" [The Seeds’ "Pictures And Designs"]
3. "The Flower Lady And Her Attendant" [The Seeds’ "Flower Lady And Her Assistant"]
4. "No Escape" [The Seeds’ song]
5. "Out Of The Darkness Into Peace, Love And Understanding"
6. "Girl I Want You" [The Seeds’ song]
7. "Up In Your Bed" [an ‘extension’ of "Up In Her Room"]
8. "Like A Backwards Frog"

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