Yodship Suite 3: In Praise Of Our Father

Yodship Suite 3: In Praise Of Our Father is a free-form psychedelic jam recorded in 1973 and released sometime afterwards on a privately-pressed vinyl album. Copies of the record are arguably the rarest of all Sky Saxon collectibles. Copies are known with one 15-minute side and the other side blank; a green-vinyl copy was sold on eBay in 2016 featuring Yodship Suite 3 on one side and part of Lovers Cosmic Voyage on the other. (Yodship Parts 1 and 2 were released on a record called Yodship).

Yodship Suite 3 was reissued in 2016 as In Praise Of Our Father on a purple vinyl LP by Swordfish Records that included all of Lovers Cosmic Voyage plus two latter-day bonus tracks from Sky Saxon. About thirty seconds from the middle of Yodship Suite 3 were edited out of this reissue so to truly hear everything you’ll need an original copy of the record. Good luck.

Yodship Suite 3 is rare – and misunderstood: a review on allmusic makes the mystifying claim, “It’s been rumored that Sky Saxon is on lead vocals, though it’s impossible to tell conclusively from listening to the record”. In fact, not only is it possible to tell, it is obviously Sky Saxon on ‘lead vocals’.

All three Yodship Suites were likely recorded at the same time and by the same (or mostly the same) musicians, a band called Spirit of 76 made up of members of the Source Family cult. The sessions were apparently the idea of the group’s spiritual leader Father Yod who felt that Sky needed an outlet for his musical impulses. (Sky was not involved with the group’s regular albums because the vocals there were taken care of by Father Yod. You can imagine Sky’s frustration.)

Ah here I go again
I’m in the abyss
Ah la la la la la…

As do Suites 1 and 2, Yodship Suite 3 features much directionless noodling over which Sky Saxon druggily intones his idiosyncratic hippie mysticism and whatever unfiltered phrases were popping into his head. It’s a chance to hear Sky on a heightened, cosmic plane with absolutely no restraint on his psyche – the purest art possible. While The Seeds were punky and psychedelic, this music can be a shock for Seeds fans expecting anything recognizable. Yodship is way out there.

Yodship Suite 3 is presented spliced together from two separate performances. The first is an eight-minute chunk taken from an electric session. The band are already cookin’ when it fades up at the start, at exactly the point that Suite 2 had faded out at the end of Yodship; who knows how long these sessions actually lasted. These recordings are like finding fragments of ancient writings; you have to appreciate them in an abbreviated form – cut-up without context.

Instrumentally, there is a drum kit, murky bass, organ, and a very psychedelic, Syd Barrett-like electric guitar. Sky’s lyrics for this part are rather more aggressive and angry than those of Suites 1 and 2; he seems to be warning of the apocalyptic denouement to earthly human existence, brought on by a disrespect of nature.

Underneath Sky’s fearsome ranting, the band plods and lurches around in a cloud of feedback and semi-controlled chaos; it’s very reminiscent of “Interstellar Overdrive”, the Piper At The Gates Of Dawn version, after the main theme when the musicians begin floating away but the drums are still keeping a beat. The guitar here rises up and then pops like a firecracker; the organ paints shadows in the corners. All around, a heavy buzz percolates, sometimes quieting down to let the listener fill in the empty spaces by him or herself. At one point – after Sky sings, “But Man saw death instead” – everything stops and there is nothing but Sky’s own amateur piano to slow things down until the electric band kicks back in, finally ending on long, drawn-out, stinging feedback. (This final bit of feedback is the section missing from the 2016 reissue).

There is then a crude splice, just after the 8:00 mark; the last six minutes of Yodship Suite 3 are far gentler, taken from a recording session driven by rolling piano and a flute, with acoustic and electric guitar accents hidden here and there. It’s very similar to the bare piano section that comes before the splice and especially to Lovers Cosmic Voyage. The piano is played by Sky Saxon himself; fans clamoring for more music like the Voyage record will enjoy this section. (The crude splice is smoothed over on the 2016 reissue.)

Sky’s lyrics are warmer and more celebratory here, praising Father for various natural wonders – as on parts the first section, but without the scary fire-and-brimstone prophecies. Thus is Yodship Suite 3 a self-contained tale: the raging violence brought on by man’s unrighteous ways, then Father’s emergence as gentle and benevolent savior who lifts humanity up to Venus on the good ship Yodship.

While Suites 1 and 2 of the original Yodship record were reissued in the early 1990s on vinyl, and again on CD for the God And Hair box set in 1998, for some unknown reason Yodship Suite 3 wasn’t revisited until Swordfish’s 2016 reissue. (Why all 45 minutes of Yodship Suites 1-3 weren’t just made into a single album at the time is of course unknown as well.)

Transcription of Sky’s lyrics

The performances on Yodship Suite 3 are unstructured and improvised; the “lyrics” are more like blissed-out, free-form mystic chanting from Sky Saxon and, occasionally, a female or male voice (Zoroaster and Djin Aquarian) warbling briefly in the background.

Here is an attempt at a transcription of Yodship Suite 3 (words sung by someone other than Sky are in italics):

…light up the world
God has endured just about all he can bear
Your Father has taken just about all he can bear
Put the chains around him and he could not break them
For it would show who he was
But watch out for you have made the gods angry
It was written near the end the stars would fall
It was written near the end some of the stars would fall
Let that be a sign to man
You just about
You just about pushed the Father too far
Now feel the might of Yod
As the sun grows brighter every day
Now feel the might of your Father
As the unseen becomes the seen
Ah yee, Ya Ho
Ah yee, Ya Ho
Watch out! Watch out!
The chains are soon gonna get snapped
Watch out! The chains are soon to be broken
Like a camel
Like a straw that broke the camel’s back
Hear your Father’s voice in the wind
Ooh, hear your Father speaking in the wind
[Female voice: Gentle breezes, gentle breezes…]
White light! White light!
And sunlight
All surrounding your planet now
And the nations that couldn’t come together and feed the people like they should
Are gonna see the anger of the people that are starving
All the people that are starving
And you would starve God too
Feel the anger of the gods
And the Father gave you everything
He gave you the forest green
He gave you the deer and the antelopes
So you can watch them when they play
And the fields he surrounded with flowers of every different color and shape
And the fragrance of the breath of the angels
But Man saw death instead
And he gave you the ocean, the shores and the waves
The magnificence of your Father you placed on this star
The animals were the circus for man to fall in love
Open your eyes, man, and see what you’ve done instead
Your automation is killing my brothers’ and my sisters’ minds
And now the thunder and the heavy rains are about to begin
See the light, see the light
See the light of your Father
He’s come for his children
See the light in your Father’s eyes

[splice]

…love
That’s how much your Father loves you
Ah here I go again, I’m in the abyss
Ah la la la
My friend, my old friend
La la la la la…
Dear Father, dear Father
How great you are
Let my songs be only for you
Oh with your great love I’m sure that I will come through
And here I am, I feel like a child again
Back, back I go
Any one of you, yes any one of you could do it at any time
From king to prince to boy
And tot to ?? to baby [?] [tots and lots of babies??]
Yes you are a baby again
With your eyes open you see your Father
But your eyes can no longer cry anymore
Mmm, la la
Sweet summer
God bless you forever
‘Cause everything he gave us was like Christmas presents
He gave us the warm, sweet sun
He gave us the flowers and their sweet fragrance
[Male voice: Ya Ho Wha…]
Ya Ho Wha
Jehovah
Here I go again
Just like, ooh, I was born again
Ah, thank you Father
Thank you again
[Male voice: We are home again…]
We are home again
We are home again
We are home again
[Male voice: Yodship…]
Yodship
Yodship
Yodship

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