“Up In Her Room”
by The Seeds
1966 song
For Seeds fans in the know, "Up In Her Room" has always been one of the band’s most famous – and infamous – recordings. On one single, simple riff, it goes on and on, around and around to nowhere, for fourteen brutal minutes. It’s one of the first “long” songs of rock and roll; Dylan and the Stones had helped pave the way, although The Seeds were pioneers as well with their original 1965-era "Evil Hoodoo". "Up In Her Room", all about a sweaty evening in a groovy hippie chick’s psychedelic bedroom, takes up most of Side 2 of the genius 1966 LP A Web Of Sound.
It’s remarkable for a band, even one as “so-terrible-they’re-great” as The Seeds, to play a song this long with no embellishments or melodic detours. It just repeats the one riff – about four guitar notes long over a speeding express train of a rhythm section – forever. If growling garage-psych simplicity is your religion then “Up In Her Room” is the promised land. And if illicit teenage sex titillates you then Sky Saxon’s passionate performance is just what you’ve been panting for.
Sky was almost thirty when "Up In Her Room" was recorded but had the mind of a teenager and the outlook of a flower-child outlaw. He’s in her room; there’s marijuana and incense; there are lysergic trances and staring out the window at clouds; then there’s her body and her bed and feelin’ so good and feelin’ so good and a knock at the door but who cares. It’s not only the repetitiveness of the song that make it so fearsome, it’s the utter lack of narrative or background. We join the two in flagrante, at least as soon as the drugs are consumed and the mood gets really right.
Two takes of this epic tale were attempted, both at a session on July 14, 1966. The first was aborted when the tape ran out (!) while the second became the master. The entire performance, without overdubs or editing, made it onto the LP while a sub-four-minute edit became the B-side of "Mr. Farmer" when it was released as a 7″ single with a picture sleeve in 1966. (A non-picture sleeve version of "Mr. Farmer" was also released but with "No Escape" as its B-side.)
Other versions of “Up In Her Room”
On February 20, 1968, The Seeds recorded a 7:39 version of the song in front of several fans in the studio for an intended fake live album. The performance wasn’t used; nor was a second attempt on April 2. Finally on April 9, 1968, two more takes were attempted that proved fruitful. The first was a false start but the second was enshrined onto the notorious Raw & Alive album with fake crowd noises dubbed onto it. This version ran over nine minutes; a ‘clean’ version of it without crowd noises plus the February 20 take were released on the 2014 Big Beat edition of Raw & Alive.
"Up In Her Room" became a popular song at Sky Saxon live shows over the years. The decadent 1986 live album Private Party by Sky Sunlight Saxon and Purple Electricity features a fifteen-minute song called "Up In Your Bed"; it’s announced by Sky as an “extension” of "Up In Her Room" but appears largely unrelated.
The 1990 CD Breakin' Through The Doors by Sunlight Sky Saxon and The Dragonslayers features a new studio recording of "Up In Her Room" that lasts a mere four minutes.
Finally, Sky’s band Fast Planet does a six-minute version on their entertaining live cassette from 1995, Rockin' The Croc/West Coast.
