“Love In A Summer Basket”
by The Seeds
1970 song
The A-side of The Seeds’ last real 7″ was the bucolic "Love In A Summer Basket". It’s a lovely slice of psychedelic pop that showed the band’s powers hadn’t diminished one iota, despite a couple of years of industry indifference. Gently, Sky requests that you bring him “your love in a summer basket” while Daryl Hooper’s psych keyboard glows brightly, drifting through like breeze through a sunny picnic.
Faster and harder guitar-led breaks throw the world of "Love In A Summer Basket" on its side, but they are mere detours – the main theme always returns to smooth things over again. "Love In A Summer Basket" and its terrifying B-side "Did He Die" made it onto a promo 45 on MGM in November 1970, weeks after being recorded on October 26. It was quickly withdrawn when The Seeds were dropped by their new label; the band never recovered.
"Love In A Summer Basket" was added to two European rarities LPs in the early 1980s, both without anyone’s approval and both using copies of the promo single as sources: 1982’s Bad Part Of Town and 1983’s New Fruit From Old Seeds.
In 1987, from a copy of the Bad Part Of Town LP, Sky recorded the song onto tape in a studio and added new overdubs to the 1970-via-1982 song. Satisfied, he released the resulting patchwork of a song on Takes & Glories, an LP released in Germany on white vinyl. It was retitled "Picnic In The Grass".
Then in 2001 Sky put out a mail-order CD-r called Golden Vaults Volume 1: Timeless which included the 1970 recording of "Love In A Summer Basket"; sound quality was poor and it was again retitled, this time as "Summer Basket".
The song was released in 2013 by Sundazed as part of a double 7″ for Record Store Day. It was then added, with the other three MGM songs, to the Big Beat CD Singles As & Bs 1965-1970.
