The Seeds- Raw and Alive- Merlin's Music Box- GNPS 2043- Sealed
$
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Description
First thing's first: Raw And Alive — The Seeds In Concert Merlin's Music Box is not a live album — it's a studio album. The sounds of screaming fans were grafted on after recording. Crass, perhaps, from today's perspective, but The Seeds weren't the first sixties band to do this. Raw And Alive was released around May 1968.
And it is a Seeds album and should be judged on its musical merits. Raw And Alive remains some fans' favorite Seeds record, due to its energetic performances and its many truly fantastic new songs. It was the band's first album since the unexpected hard blues fourth LP A Full Spoon Of Seedy Blues, and represents something of a return to the form of Future, the band's adventurously psychedelic third album.
Five of Raw And Alive's eleven tracks are re-recordings of older Seeds songs, and the updated "Can't Seem To Make You Mine", "Mr. Farmer" and "Pushin' Too Hard" are examples of how a more experienced band can tackle its old stuff with panache. (The other two remakes, "No Escape" and "Up In Her Room", sound fine in their new forms here too; the former has all the sped-up punk of the original while the latter, at nine minutes, is five shorter than the original on A Web Of Sound but is just as groovy and sexy.)
But it's the new songs, unavailable elsewhere, that make Raw And Alive truly notable, and necessary. "Satisfy You" is one of The Seeds' very best pop-punk songs, with a tricky little structure and sneering Sky Saxon vocals, while "Night Time Girl" is a straightjacketed punk-raga nightmare, as only The Seeds could and would have done. "Gypsy Plays His Drums" is as snakily psychedelic as its title suggests.
"Mumble Bumble" is a musical two-step return to "March Of The Flower Children", without the tuba, and adding a fractured chord and melodic structure reminiscent of the deranged "I Tell Myself". "Forest Outside Your Door" sounds like an account of a lost afternoon the protagonist of "The Wind Blows Your Hair" might have experienced in his more manic, single days — before his Satanic wedding calmed him down somewhat. Maybe he even met his future wife while lost in the forest he sings about.
Perhaps most infamous of all is the track "900 Million People Daily (All Making Love)". A slow-burning, moody, organ-led meditation on sex, love and drugs, it continues the tradition of long Seeds songs like "Up In Her Room" and "Fallin'". Unfortunately, the studio recording was cut to five minutes on the album; the full-length version was eventually released decades later (see below).
'Clean' studio versions
Three of the performances on Raw And Alive have been subsequently released complete, and without superfluous crowd noises; all are available on the indispensable 1993 rarities CD Travel With Your Mind.One track is the entire ten-plus minute version of "900 Million People Daily (All Making Love)", a highlight of The Seeds's carreer. Travel With Your Mind also includes the 'clean' studio versions of "Satisfy You" and the alternate Raw And Alive take of "Pushin' Too Hard". This 'clean' version of "Pushin' Too Hard" (very similar to the 1966 original) was released on the 1977 rarities LP Fallin' Off The Edge, where it was designated a 'rehearsal'.
In April 2011, a 10" vinyl EP featuring "Evil Hoodoo" was released for Record Store Day that represented the first vinyl appearance of the 'clean' "Satisfy You".
Merlin's Music Box
There really was a place called Merlin's Music Box where The Seeds sometimes played, and when fans first heard Raw And Alive there was nothing particularly suspicious about its status as a live album. There is screaming, an introduction by local disc jockey 'Humble' Harv Miller, and Sky even addresses the "crowd" before "Pushin' Too Hard" just as he did in real Seeds concerts of the time (dedicating the song to 'society').
It wasn't until some of the songs started being released without crowd noises that people began to notice the curious lack of connection between band and audience, and ponder why the album seemed so well-produced (with effects like Sky's voice echoing back and forth across the channels being an unlikely feature of a live album).
Hopefully, all of Raw And Alive will eventually be released with no crowd noise and no editing. It would be great to hear clearer versions of The Seeds circa 1968 — what would be the original lineup's last hurrah. Until then, Raw And Alive is vital for Seeds and Sky Saxon fans, and is available in a variety of formats (including MP3). It has been released on CD with several bonus tracks from The Seeds' career on a single CD collectively called Raw And Alive — The Seeds In Concert/Rare Seeds.
-skysaxonseeds.com
Track listing
1. "Introduction by 'Humble' Harv"2. "Mr. Farmer"
3. "No Escape"
4. "Satisfy You" - 'Clean' version available on Travel With Your Mind
5. "Night Time Girl"
6. "Up In Her Room"
7. "Gypsy Plays His Drums"
8. "Can't Seem To Make You Mine"
9. "Mumble And Bumble"
10. "Forest Outside Your Door"
11. "900 Million People Daily (All Making Love)" - 'Clean', full-length version available on Travel With Your Mind
12. "Pushin' Too Hard" - 'Clean' version available on Travel With Your Mind
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