Episode 86: “LSD-25” by the Gamblers

A history of folk music and 500 songs.

Episode 86

LSD 25

by the Gamblers

On the 16th of April 1943, Albert Hoffmann, a research scientist in Zurich, had a curious experience after accidentally touching a tiny speck of the chemical he was experimenting with at the pharmaceutical lab in which he worked, and felt funny afterwards.

Three days later, he decided to experiment on himself and took a tiny dose of the chemical to see if anything happened.

He felt fine at first, but asked a colleague to escort him as he rode home on his bicycle.

By the time he got home, he was convinced that his neighbour was a witch and that he had been poisoned.

But a few hours later, he felt a little better, though still unusual.

As he would later report, Little by little I could begin to enjoy the unprecedented colours and plays of shapes that persisted behind my closed eyes.

Kaleidoscopic, fantastic images surged in on me, alternating, variegated, opening and then closing themselves in circles and spirals, exploding in coloured fountains, rearranging and hybridizing themselves in constant flux.

The chemical he had taken was a derivative of ergotamine that had been discovered about five years earlier and mostly ignored up until that time, a chemical called D-lysergic acid diethylamide tartrate.

Sandoz, the company he worked for, were delighted with this unusual chemical and its effects.

They came up with some variants of the molecule without those effects, but which still affected the brain, and marketed those as migraine treatments.

The chemical itself they decided to make available as an experimental drug for psychiatrists and psychologists who wanted to investigate unusual states of consciousness.

It found some uptake among experimenters who wished to experience psychotic symptoms in a controlled environment in order to get a better understanding of their patients, or who wanted to investigate neurochemistry, and it had some promise as a treatment for alcoholism and various other psychiatric illnesses.

And throughout the 1950s, it was the subject of much medical research under the trade name Sandoz came up with for it, Delicid.

But in the sixties it became better known as LSD twenty-five.

There are some records that one can look back at retrospectively and see that while they seemed unimportant at the time, they signalled a huge change in the musical culture.

The single Moondog, backed by LSD 25, by The Gamblers, is one of those records.

Unfortunately, everything about the Gamblers is shrouded in mystery.

The story I am going to tell here is the one that I've been able to piece together from stray fragments of recollection from the main participants over the years, but it could very well be wrong.

Put it this way.

On the record, there are two guitarists, bass, drums, and keyboards.

I have seen 15 people credited as having been members of the group that recorded the track.

Obviously, those credits can't all be true, so I'm going to go here with the stories of the people who are most commonly credited, but with the caveat that the people I'm talking about could very easily not have been the people on the record.

I have also made mistakes about this single before.

There are a couple of errors in the piece on it in my book California Dreaming.

Part of the problem is that almost everyone who has laid claim to being involved in the record is or was, as many of them have died, a well-known credit thief.

Someone who will happily place themselves at the centre of the story, happily put their name on copyright forms for music with which they had no involvement, and then bitterly complain that they were the real unsung geniuses behind other records, but that some evil credit thief stole all their work.

The other people involved those who haven't said that everything was them and they did everything

were for the most part jobbing musicians who, when asked about the record, would not even be sure if they played on it, because they played on so many records, and weren't asked about them for decades later.

Just as one example, Nick Vernay, who is generally credited as the producer of this record, said for years that Derry Weaver, the credited co-composer of the song, and the person who is generally considered to have played lead guitar on it, was a pseudonym for himself.

Later, when confronted with evidence that Derry Weaver was a real person, he admitted that Weaver had been a real person, but claimed that it was still a pseudonym for himself.

Vernay claimed that Weaver had died in a car crash years earlier, and that as a result he had been able to use his social security number on forms to claim himself extra money he wasn't entitled to as a staff producer.

The only problem with that story is that Veray died in 1998, while the real Derry Weaver died in 2013.

But Weaver only ever did one interview I've been able to track down, in 2001, so Veray's lies went unchallenged, and many books still claim that Weaver never existed.

So, today, I'm going to tell the story of a music scene and use a few people as a focus, with the understanding that they may not be the people on the record we're talking about.

I'm going to look at the birth of the surf and hot rod studio scene in LA, and of Bruce Johnston, Kim Fowley, Derry Weaver, Nick Vernay, Sandy Nelson, Elliot Ingber, Larry Taylor, Howard Hirsch, and Rod Schaefer, some or all of whom may or may not have been the gamblers.

Possibly the best place to start the story is at University High School, Los Angeles, in the late 1950s.

University High had always had more than its fair share of star students over the years.

Judy Garland, Marilyn Monroe, and Elizabeth Taylor had all attended in previous years, and over the succeeding decades, members of Sonic Youth, The Doors, Black Flag, The Foo Fighters, and the Partridge Family would all attend the school, among many others.

But during the period in the late 50s, it had a huge number of students who would go on to define the California lifestyle in the pop culture of the next few years.

There was Sandra Dee, who starred in Gidget, the first Beach Party film, Annette Funicello, who starred in most of the other Beach Party films, Randy Newman, who would document another side of California life a few years later, and Nancy Sinatra, who was then just her famous father's daughter, but who would go on to make a series of magnificent records in the sixties with Lee Hazelwood.

And there was a vocal group at the school called The Barons, one of the few interracial vocal groups around at the time.

They had a black lead singer, Chuck Steele, a Japanese tenor, Wally Yagi, two Jewish boys, Arnie Ginsburg and John Saligman, and two white kids, Jan Berry, who was leader of the group, and Dean Torrance, his friend who could sing a little falsetto.

As they were all singers, they were backed by three instrumentalists who also went to the school, Berry's neighbor Bruce Johnston on piano, Torrance's neighbor Sandy Nelson on drums, and Nelson's friend Dave Szostak on saxophone.

This group played several gigs together, but slowly split apart as people's mothers wanted them to concentrate concentrate on school, or they got cars that they wanted to fix up.

In Sandy Nelson's case, he was sacked by Berry for playing his drums so loud.

As he packed up his kit for the last time, he told Berry, You'll see, I'm going to have a hit record that's only drums.

Slowly, they were whittled down to three people, Berry, Torrance, and Ginsburg, with occasional help from Berry's friend Don Altfeld.

The Barons cut a demo tape of a song about a prominent local stripper named Jenny Lee, but then Thomas decided to sign up with the Army.

He'd discovered that if he did six months' basic training and joined the Army Reserves, he would be able to avoid being drafted a short while later.

He thought that six months sounded a lot better than two years, so he signed up, and he was on basic training when he heard a very familiar sounding record on the radio.

pa pa pa pa pa pa pa pa pa many a girl

and ever

sweet

but much of the childy.

He was surprised to hear it, and also surprised to hear it credited to Jan and Arnie, rather than the Barons.

He called Berry, who told him that no, it was a completely new recording, though Torrance was absolutely certain that he could hear his own voice on there as well.

What had happened, according to Jan, was that there'd been a problem with the tape, and he and Arnie had decided to re-record it.

He'd then gone into a professional studio to get the tape cut into an acetate so he could play it at parties, and someone in the next room had happened to hear it, and that someone happened to be Joe Lubin.

Lubin was the vice president of Arwyn Records, a label owned by Marty Melcher, Doris Day's husband.

He told Berry that he would make Jan and Arnie bigger than the Everly brothers, but Jan didn't believe him, though he let him have a copy of the disc.

Jan took his copy to play at a friend's party, where it went down well.

That friend was Craig Brudelin, who later changed his name to James Brolin and became a major film star.

Presumably, Brudelin's best friend Ryan O'Neill, who also went to University High, was there as well.

I told you, University High School had a lot of future stars.

And Jan and Darney became two more of those stars.

Joe Lubin overdubbed extra instruments on the track and released it.

He didn't quite make them bigger than the Everly Brothers, but for a while they were almost as big.

At one point the Everly Brothers were at number one in the charts.

Number two was Sheb Woolley with the Purple People Eater.

And number three was Jan and Darney with Jenny Lee.

And Dean Torrance was off in the army, regretting his choices.

We'll be picking up on what happened with those three in a few months' time.

But what of the other barons?

The instrumentalists, Bruce Johnston, Dave Szostak, and Sandy Nelson, formed their own band, the Sleepwalkers, with various guitarists sitting in.

often a young blues player called Henry Vestine, who had already started taking Galastea at this time, though none of the other band members indulged.

They would often play parties organised by another university high student, Kim Fowley.

Now, Fowley is the person who spoke most about this time on the record, but he was also possibly the least honest person involved in this episode, and, if the accusations made about him since his death are true, also one of the most despicable people in this episode, which is quite a high bar, so take this with a grain of salt.

But Fowley claimed in later years that these parties were his major source of income, that he would hire sex workers to take fellow university high students who had big houses off to a motel to have sex with them.

While the students were otherwise occupied, Fowley would break into their house and move all the furniture, so people could dance.

He'd get the band in, and he'd invite everyone to come to the party.

Then dope dealers would sell dope to the partygoers, giving Fowley a cut, and meanwhile friends of Fowleys would be outside breaking into the partygoers' cars and stealing their stuff.

But then Fowley got arrested, according to him, for stealing wine from a liquor store owned by a girlfriend who was twice his age, and selling it to other students at the school.

He was given a choice of joining the army or going to prison, and he chose the army, on the same deal as Dean Torrance, who he ended up going through some of his training with.

Meanwhile, Johnston, Shostak, and Nelson were trying to get signed as a band.

They went to see John Dolphin on February 1st, 1958.

We've talked about Dolphin before, in the episodes on Gene and Eunice and the Penguins.

Dolphin owned Dolphins of Hollywood, the biggest black-owned record store in the LA area, and was responsible for a large part of the success of many of the records we've covered, through getting them played on radio shows broadcast from his station.

He also owned a series of small labels which would put out one or two singles by an artist before the artist was snapped up by a bigger label.

For example, he owned Cash Records, which had put out Walking Stick Boogie by Jerry Cape Hart and Eddie and Hank Cochrane.

He had all the people standing in the ring.

Doing the walking stick, boogie.

Watch the walking stick, boogie.

He's the fastest man that ever danced into town.

He also owned a publishing company, which owned the publishing on Buzz Buzz Buzz by The Hollywood Flames.

Buzz, Buzz, Buzz goes the bumblebee.

Tweed liddy liddy goes the bird.

But the sound of your little voice, darling, is the sweetest sound I've ever heard.

I've seen the beauty of the red, red rose, see the beauty when the sky's blue.

See the beauty of the evening sunset,

but the beauty of you.

Sweet is the honey from the honeycomb, sweet are the grapes from the vine.

But there's nothing as sweet as you, darling.

And I hope someday you'll be mine.

Johnston, Shostak, and Nelson hoped that maybe they could get sound to one of Dolphin's labels, but they chose the worst possible day to do it.

While they were waiting to see Dolphin, they got talking to an older man, Percy Ivy, who started to tell them that Dolphin couldn't be trusted, and that he owed Ivy a lot of money.

They were used to hearing this kind of thing about people in the music business, and decided they'd go in to see Dolphin anyway.

When they did, Ivy came in with them.

What happened next is told differently by different people.

What's definitely the case is that Ivy and Dolphin got into a heated row.

Ivy claimed that Dolphin pulled a knife on him.

Witness statements seem confused on the matter, but most say that all Dolphin had in his hand was a cigar.

Ivy pulled out a gun and shot Dolphin.

One shot also hit Shostak in the leg.

Sandy Nelson ran out of the room to get help.

Johnston comforted the dying Dolphin, but by the time Nelson got back, he was busily negotiating with Ivy, talking about how they were going to make a record together when Ivy got out of jail.

One presumes he was trying to humour Ivy to make sure nobody else got shot.

Obviously, with John Dolphin having died, he wasn't going to be running a record company anymore.

The shot part of his business was, from then on, managed by his assistant, a failed singer called Rudy Raymoor, who later went on to become famous playing the comedy character Dolomite.

Then the Sleepwalkers got a call from another acquaintance.

Kip Tyler had a band called the Flips, who had had some moderate success with Rockabilly records produced by Milt Gabler.

And this is one of the points where the conflicting narratives become the most confusing.

According to every one of the few articles I can find about Tyler, before forming the Flips, he was the lead singer of the Sleepwalkers, the toughest rock and roll band in the school, when he was at Union High School.

According to those same articles, he was born in 1929.

So either there were two bands at Union High School a decade apart called the Sleepwalkers, one of which was a rock and roll band before the term had been coined, or Tyler was still at high school aged 28, or someone is deeply mistaken somewhere.

Kip and the Flips didn't have much recording success and kept moving to smaller and smaller labels, but they were considered a hot band in LA.

In particular, they were the house band at Art LeBeau's regular shows at El Monte Stadium, the shows which would later be immortalized by the Penguins in Memories of El Monte.

The Shields would sing, You cheated,

you lied,

and the

But then the group's piano player, Larry Nectel, saxophone player, Steve Douglas, and drummer Mike Bermani all left to join Dwayne Eddie's group.

Kim Fowley was, by this point, a roadie and gemball hanger-on for the flips, and he happened to know a piano player, a saxophone player, and a drummer who were looking for a gig, and so the Sleepwalkers joined Kip Tyler and guitarist Mike Deasy in the Flips, and took over that role performing at El Monte, performing themselves but also backing other musicians, like Richie Vallons, who played at these shows.

Sandy Nelson didn't stay long in the flips though.

He was replaced by another drummer, Jim Troxell, and it was this line-up, with extra sacks from Dwayne Eddie's sacks player Jim Horne that recorded Rumble Rock.

We're going to rock and roll.

We're going to have a ball.

We're going to rumble and ride.

Whoa,

yeah.

We're going rumbling

Nelson's departure from the group coincided with him starting to get a great deal of session work from people who had seen him play live.

One of those people was a young man named Harvey Phillips Spector, who went by his middle name.

Spector went to Fairfax High, a school which had a strong rivalry with University High, and produced a similarly ludicrous list of famous people, and he'd got his own little clique of people around him with whom he was making music.

These included his best friend Marshall Lieb, and sometimes also Lieb's girlfriend's younger brother, Russ Teitelman.

Spectre and Lieb had formed a vocal group, the Teddy Bears, with a girl they knew who then went by a different name but is now called Carol Connors.

Their first single was called To Know Him is to Love Him, inspired by the epitaph on Spectre's father's grave.

To know,

know him is to love,

love,

love him.

Just

to see him smile makes my life worthwhile.

To know, know,

know him

is to love,

love,

love him,

and I do and I do and I do, and I you and I and I you and I and I.

Sandy Nelson played the drums on that, and the track went to number one.

I've also seen some credits say that Bruce Johnston played the bass on it, but at the time Johnston wasn't a bass player, so this seems unlikely.

Even though Nelson's playing on the track is absolutely rudimentary, it gave him the cachet to get other gigs, for example playing on Gene Vincent's Crazy Times LP.

Well, she, she, she, little Sheila,

the best looking girl in town.

Well, she, she, she, little Sheila,

with your hair so long and brown.

Well, you never, never, know what my sheila's put them down.

Well,

Clark said you're the best looking girl on his big bandstand.

Another record Nelson played on reunited him with Bruce Johnston.

Kim Fowley was by this point doing some work for American International Pictures and was asked to come up with an instrumental for a film called Ghost of Drags Drip Hollow, a film about a drag racing club that have a Halloween party inside a deserted mansion, but then discover a real monster has shown up.

It's not as fun as it sounds.

A songwriter friend of Fowley's named Nick Vernay is credited with writing Geronimo, although Richie Pollidor, the guitarist and bass player on the session, says he came up with it.

Pollidor said, There are three guys in the business who really have no scruples whatsoever.

They are Bruce Johnston, Kim Fowley, and Sandy Nelson, and I was Mr.

Scruples.

I wrote both Geronimo and Charge, but they were taken away from me.

It was all my stuff, but between Nick Vernay, Kim Fowley, and Bruce Johnston, I had no chance.

It was cut in my studio, I did all the guitars.

I wrote it, and Nick Vernay walked away with the credit.

Veray did the howls on the track, Johnston played piano, Nelson drums, Polidor guitar and bass, and Fowley produced.

Meanwhile, Phil Spector had become disenchanted with being in the teddy bears and had put together a solo instrumental single under the name Phil Harvey.

Spectre wanted a band to play a gig to promote that single, and he put together the Phil Harvey Band from the members of another band that Marshall Lieb had been in before joining the Teddy Bears.

The Moondogs had consisted of a singer called Jet Power, guitarists Derry Weaver and Elliot Ingba, and bass player Larry Taylor, along with Lieb.

Taylor and Ingba joined the Phil Harvey Band, along with keyboard player Howard Hirsch and drummer Rod Schaefer.

The Phil Harvey Band only played one gig.

The band's concept was apparently a mix of Dwayne Eddy style rock guitar instrumentals and complex jazz, with the group all dressed as mobsters.

But Kim Fowley happened to be there and liked what he saw, and made a note of some of those musicians as people to work with.

Spectre, meanwhile, had decided to use his connection with Leicester Sill to go and work with Libre and Stoller, and we'll be picking up that story in a couple of months.

Meanwhile, Derry Weaver from the Moondogs had started to date Mary Joe Shealy, the sister of Sharon Shealy, and Sharon started to take an interest in her little sister's boyfriend and his friends.

She suggested that Jet Power change his name to P.J.

Proby, and she would regularly have him sing on the demos of her songs in the 60s.

this side of

town.

Wow,

but they don't understand.

Love's not money in the hand.

And for you, hmm, I'd put them all down

and prown it ill

on the other side of town.

And she introduced Weaver to Eddie Cochrane and Jerry Jerry Capehart.

Cochrane taught Weaver several of the guitar licks he used, and Cape Hart produced a session for Weaver with Cochrane on guitar, Jim Stivers on piano, Geebo Smith on bass, and Gene Riggio on drums.

you live this way?

When you told the love we should,

I cried.

When you told me that you loved me, oh you lied.

Well I'm finding out again, didn't you love I should have fought?

That track was not released until decades later, but several other songs by Weaver, with no Cochrane involvement, were released on Cape Heart's own label, under the misspelled name Darry Weaver.

And Cape Hart was Weaver's manager for a little while.

Weaver was actually living at the Sheeley residence when they received a phone call saying that Eddie had died and Sharon was in hospital, and it haunted him deeply for the rest of his life.

Another record on which Geebo Smith played at this time was one by Sandy Nelson.

The flips had split up by this point.

Mike Deasy had gone on to join Eddie Cochrane's backing band, and Bruce Johnston was playing on random sessions.

So he was here for what was going to be Nelson's single That Was Only Drums.

It wasn't quite only drums.

As well as Nelson on drums, there was Smith on bass, Johnston on piano, and Polydor on guitar.

The musicians on the record have said they all deserved songwriting credit for it, but the writing credit went to Art LeBeau and Nelson.

Team Beat went to number four on the charts, and Nelson had a handful of other hits under his own name, including Let There Be Drums.

Less successful was a ballad released under the name Bruce and Jerry, released on Arwin Records after the owner's son, Terry Melcher, had remembered seeing the Sleepwalkers and was desperate for some more rock and roll success on the label like Jan and Darney, even though Melcher was a student at Beverly High and, like Fairfax, everyone at Beverly hated people at University High.

Take This Pearl was sung by Johnston and Jerry Cooper, with backing by Johnston, Szostak, Deasy, Nelson, and bass player Harper Cosby, who would later play for Sam Cook.

Love me, love me

all

the time.

You know

what?

I love you so well.

Please

say

that you

be my girl.

Take this Pearl by Bruce and Jerry did nothing.

But Terry Melcher did think that name sounded good.

Except maybe it should be Terry instead of Jerry.

Meanwhile, Nick Vernay had got a production role at World Pacific Records, and he wanted to put together yet another studio group.

And this is where some of the confusion comes in, because this record was important, and everyone later wanted a piece of the credit.

According to Nick Verne, the gamblers were originally going to be called Nick and the Gamblers, and consisted of himself, Bruce Johnston, Sandy Nelson, Larry Taylor, and the great guitarist James Burton, with Richie Pollidor Engineering and Kim Fowley involved somehow.

Meanwhile, Fowley says he was not involved at all, and given that this is about the only record in the history of the world that Fowley has ever said he wasn't on, I tend to believe him.

Elliot Ingber said that the group was Ingber, Taylor, Derry Weaver, Howard Hirsch, and Rod Schaefer.

Bruce Johnston says he has no memory of the record.

I don't know if anyone's ever asked James Burton about it, but it doesn't sound like him playing.

Given that the A-side is called Moondog, that Weaver and Taylor were in a band called The Moondogs that used to play a song called Moondog, and that Weaver is credited as the writer, I think we can assume that the lead guitar is Derry Weaver, and that Elliot Ingba's list of credits is mostly correct.

But on the other hand, one of the voices singing the wordless harmonies sounds very much like Bruce Johnston to me, and he has a very distinctive voice that I know extremely well.

So my guess is that the gamblers on this occasion were Derry Weaver, Larry Taylor, Elliot Ingba, Bruce Johnston, and either Rod Schaefer or Sandy Nelson.

Probably Schaefer, since no one other than Vinay has credited Nelson with being there.

I suspect Ingba is understandably misremembering Howard Hirsch being there because Hirsch did play on the second Gamblers single.

The B side of the record is credited as written by Weaver and Taylor.

That song is called LSD 25,

and while we have said over and over that there is no first anything in rock music, this is an exception.

That is, without any doubt whatsoever, the first rock and roll record to mention LSD, and so, in its way, a distant ancestor of psychedelic music.

Weaver and Taylor have said in later years that neither of them knew anything about the drug, and it's very clear that Johnston, who takes a very hardline anti-drug stance, never indulged.

They've said they read a magazine article about ACID and liked the name.

On the other hand, Henry Vestine was part of the same circle, and he was apparently already taking ACID by then, though details are vague.

Every single article I can find about it uses the same phrasing that Wikipedia does, talking of having taken it with a close musician friend, who might have been one of the gamblers, but might not.

So the B-side was a milestone in rock music history, and in a different way so was the A-side, just written by Weaver.

Moondog was a local hit, but sold nothing anywhere outside Southern California, and there were a couple of follow-ups by different line-ups of gamblers, featuring some, but never all, of the same musicians, along with other people we've mentioned like Fowley.

The Gamblers stopped being a thing, and Derry Weaver went off to join another group.

Kim Fowley and his friend Gary Paxton had put together a novelty record, Alioop, under the name The Hollywood Argyles, which featured Gayne L.

Hodge on piano and Sandy Nelson banging a bin lid.

There's a man in the funny papers we all know.

He lives way back a long time ago.

He don't eat nothing but a bear cat stew.

Well, this cat's name is our alley oo

That became a hit, and they had to put together a band to tour as the Hollywood Argylls, and Weaver became one of them, as did Marshall Lieb.

After that, Weaver hooked up again with Nick Verne, who started getting him regular session work, as Veray had taken a job at Capitol Records.

And Verney doing that suddenly meant that Moondog became very important indeed.

Even though it had been only a minor success, because Vinay owned the rights to the master tape and also the publishing rights, he got Moondog stuck on a various artists' compilation album put out on Capital, Golden Gases, which featured big acts like Sam Cook and the Four Preps, and which exposed the song to a wider audience.

Cover versions of it started to sprout up by people like The Ventures, The Surfaris, and The Beach Boys.

Larry Taylor's brother Mel was the drummer for The Ventures, which might have helped bring the track to their attention, while Nick Vinay was the Beach Boys producer.

Indeed, some have claimed that Derry Weaver played on the Beach Boys version.

He's credited on the session sheets, but nobody involved with the session has ever said if it was actually him, or whether that was just Vinay putting down a friend's name to claim some extra money.

While there had been twangy guitar instrumentals before Moondog, and as I said, there's never a first anything, historians of the surf music genre now generally point to it as the first surf music record ever, and it's as good a choice as any.

We won't be seeing anything more from Derry Weaver, who fell into obscurity after a few years of session work, but Bruce Johnston, Larry Taylor, Elliot Ingber, Henry Vestine, Nick Vinay, Kim Fowley, Phil Spector, Jan Berry, Terry Melcher, and Dean Torrance will be turning up throughout the 60s and in some cases later.

The records we looked at today were the start of a California music scene that would define American pop music in the 60s.

As a final note, I mentioned Gainel Hodge as the piano player on Ali Oop.

As I was in the middle of writing this episode, I received word that Hodge had died earlier this week.

As people who've listened to earlier episodes of this podcast will know, Gaynell Hodge was one of the most important people in the 50s LA vocal group scene, and without him there would have been no platters, penguins, or Jesse Belvin.

He was also one of the few links between that 50s world of black RB musicians and the white-dominated 60s LA pop music scene of surf, hot rods, folk rock and sunshine.

He's unlikely to turn up again in more than minor roles in future episodes, but I've made this week's Patreon episode be on another classic record he played on.

As well as being an important musician in his own right, Hodge was someone without whom almost none of the music made in LA in the 50s or 60s would have happened.

He'll be missed.

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