ShockHound

When Michael Jackson died on June 25, the world understandably mourned. Unfortunately, lost in the media frenzy surrounding Jackson’s untimely death was the fact that legendary 1960s rocker Sky Sunlight Saxon died the same day, passing away at the age of 71 after a brief illness.
    Born Richard Elvern Marsh in 1937, Saxon formed the iconic garage rock outfit the Seeds in 1965. The band produced a handful of classic fuzzed-out “flower punk” hits like “Pushin’ Too Hard,” “Try To Understand,” “Can’t Seem To Make You Mine” and “Mr. Farmer,” and were praised by no less than Muddy Waters, who called the band “America’s Rolling Stones.” The Seeds’ music has since been covered by likes of the Ramones, Alex Chilton, Johnny Thunders, Garbage and Yo La Tengo, while beatmaster Diplo even sampled “Can’t Seem To Make You Mine” for his remix of Spank Rock’s “Put That Pussy On Me.”
    After the Seeds dissolved in the late ‘60s, Saxon joined an LA-based spiritual commune called the Source Family and became a follower of their leader, Father Yod. The collective owned and operated the organic vegetarian eatery known as The Source, where Saxon worked, which regularly drew the likes of entertainment elite such as John Lennon, Warren Beatty and Marlon Brando.
    But Saxon never stopped making music, and returned to the studio several times over the last 25 years, often backed by younger musicians who’d discovered (and had their minds blown) by the Seeds’ music decades after its original release. Saxon had most recently collaborated on a recording project with Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan and Pumpkins producer Kerry Brown. In this exclusive ShockHound interview, Corgan — who also put the longhaired Saxon in the Pumpkins’ “Superchrist” video, from 2007’s Zeitgeist — talks about how he and Brown met Saxon, what it was like to work with him, and what the Seeds mastermind meant to music, in general...

BILLY CORGAN: We were both familiar with Sky’s music before we ever met him. Sky was an incredibly pivotal figure in late ‘60s music, because the Seeds pointed the way to what would later turn into bands like Iggy and the Stooges, the Ramones and stuff like that. Basically, the Seeds were the precursor to the punk movement.
    So, he wasn’t walking in as just some guy who had been in a ‘60s band we had heard a few songs from. He walked in, in our eyes, as a legend. It was more of a curiosity; “Maybe we could see what he’s into today”. I guess maybe in the back of our minds we were thinking Johnny Cash/Rick Rubin stuff, where you can update somebody to where they’re at today, not try to just do what they’re most known for.
    We met Sky because I found this book about the Source Family that Kerry ended up buying because I was too afraid to buy it. Through the Source Family book, Kerry ended up getting in touch with Sky — and a week later, Sky was here with Djin the guitarist from YaHoWa 13, which was the Source family band. In walks this living free spirit mystic with another free spirit mystic, Djin, who — it turned out — was from Chicago so we instantly had that connection. Within one week, we went from, “Where is Sky Saxon?” to…he’s living here with his wife and his dog. [Laughs] It was total mayhem!
    I think [Kerry and I] were both, maybe not down about music, but a little bit uninspired with what’s gone on in the past few years. Music seems to be a little bit direction-less. Suddenly, we’re being reminded frontally by someone we really respect about why we are musicians and [do] what we do. Suddenly, we’re in contact with someone who is just living it full on. If it was a pose, that pose is long gone. He’s fully there. Suddenly we had all these people here and we’re writing songs and they’re all smoking weed and it was just like…crazy.



We really bonded over the course of a couple weeks, and I think maybe recorded four, five or six songs, none of which were fully completed. The idea was that, “We’re gonna come back and work on this later.” We looked at [the recordings] almost as demos. They wanted to put them out; we didn’t want to put them out. We didn’t make them in the spirit of putting them out that way. Everything was kind of first take, second take.
    It wasn’t just us — there was Atomic, Sky’s guitar player from the Seeds, [and] Gary, who’s in the “Superchrist” video. It was this kind of hippie thing where everybody gets a turn at bat. If you listen to the “Choose to Choose Love” that we put up [on Kerry’s Facebook], Atomic is soloing the entire time. It actually works, so we left it in. It’s not like we actually produced it like, “Oh, don’t play there, let Sky sing.” We had a great time, so we loved that were capturing the spirit of that. A lot of times when you do demos, if you can capture the spirit, you can recreate that later. Sky would improvise all his lyrics, every take was totally different.
    I would say he was probably the most sweet-hearted musician I’ve ever met. His spirit was so strong, he was not a real big guy, but he had a way that, when he turned on, it was like “Ah, now I see why he created what he created and started what he started.” It’s hard to explain. It was a vulnerability mixed with somebody who was a true punk. We talk about punk like Green Day punk, that’s all the pop versions of what punk originally was.
    Sky, in his strength of being, influenced so many people — but not because he was trying to influence anybody. The most influential people, who don’t always get credit, they don’t stop to discern whether today’s move is the right move or the wrong move. They’re not calculating. They’re too in the moment. [Sky] would say one brilliant thing, one crazy thing, one thing you’d think, ‘Well, that doesn’t make any sense’ and then the next thing would be the smartest thing you’d ever heard. He was so free that he didn’t think, “Well, I can’t say that.” When he’d say, “We’re going to play in front of a million people, it’s going to be awesome!” He believed it! It’s not like he was thinking, “I’m just going to say this and see what people think.” Those are the people that people like us end up imitating. We want to be like that, but we don’t want to pay the price. He paid the price. He lived up. He looked like he lived it.
    Somehow through his journey, instead of being bitter and defeated, he was optimistic and always looking forward. It’s hard to convey, but it’s very rare that you meet someone that makes you go, “Ah, this is what it means to be an artist.” Usually, history recognizes the guy who comes after the person and got it better [or was] able to copy the original in some way, shape or form. That’s where I think history can be unkind to a guy like Sky. If you called up Iggy Pop, he wouldn’t necessarily say, “Yeah, I stole from Sky Saxon” — but sometimes it takes a Sky Saxon to make the world change to where they can look at a guy like Iggy Pop and go, “Ah, now we understand.”

— Reporting by Tatiana Simonian

Related Artists Billy Corgan Sky Saxon The Seeds The Smashing Pumpkins