![]() This congratulatory photo for a Gold Album appeared in the Dec. They spent the spring of ’67 in the tiny Ultra-Sound and Mirasound recording studios, basically playing their club set without overdubs, linking the songs, none original to them, with some abstract noodling they dubbed “Illusions of My Childhood.” Morton had caught lightning in a bottle-the power of the band was shocking, and jumped out of the grooves. With the patronage of George Francis “Shadow” Morton, an extremely talented but somewhat unhinged producer-about-town, the group known as Mark Stein and the Pigeons, who’d impressed Morton with their showmanship and instrumental expertise, was transformed into Vanilla Fudge and signed to Atlantic’s ATCO subsidiary. Some club owners complained that their slow, moody, stop-start, whisper-then-scream arrangements of songs like “Ticket to Ride,” “People Get Ready” and “Eleanor Rigby” were emptying dancefloors. Listen to the full-length album version of “You Keep Me Hangin’ On”īogert, Stein, Appice and Martell, tightly bound by shared professional and personal experiences and, like most teenagers and young adults in ’67, enticed by experimental drugs and “free love,” had transformed their sound. When local phenoms the Young Rascals signed to Atlantic Records in 1965 and the Vagrants to Vanguard the following year, “the Long Island scene” began to be a possible ticket to the big time. Patrons furiously frugged and hully-gullied to current pop tunes at Ungano’s, the Peppermint Lounge, Cheetah Club and other working class or posher joints groups supplied the choreographed dance moves, snazzy matching suits and five-sets-a-night repertoire, often featuring the driving Hammond B-3 organ. It was dark and light, black and white-maybe the group name wasn’t so silly after all.Īll four members of the group had spent years singing on street corners and playing with bar bands in the extensive go-go club circuit that stretched from New Jersey through New York City to Long Island. It was a musical hybrid that melted doo-wop, classical and Top 40 pop into an audio LSD trip. It was rock music pushed to its limits, with a radical use of soft-loud-soft dynamics and the emotional drama of rhythm and blues and soul. It fit in with contemporary releases by Cream, Jefferson Airplane, the Doors, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Pink Floyd and the Grateful Dead, and yet remained its own strain of weird. In fact, Vanilla Fudge was in many ways the most confounding, exciting, unusual, psychedelic and downright heavy debut of 1967. ![]() It was definitely not a joke the album actually represented a new kind of genius.
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