Sunshine of your love...

[less lee]

Somebody mentioned this song yesterday, I thought this was a cute article....

Sunday, July 31, 2011

Adventures In Garage-Land (Part 2)
(Sunshine of your love. 1967)

While 1967 was a landmark year for the Baby Boom generation, at 13, I was doing other things. Oh, I saw changes happening all around me. A group of hippies moved in across the street from my house on Martel Avenue. Right next door to me, a garage band played regularly. Kids at my junior high school were freaking out! Well…sort of. The counter-culture movement amused my dad. He told me that they all reminded him of the 1950’s Beatniks. By 1968, he would change his tune. He came to hate the entire youth rebellion by then.
I was into the L.A. gang culture. For some odd reason, I admired the Cholos of the city’s east side. I even learned gang graphics! What a waste of knowledge. I started my own neighborhood gang, which was really just a bunch of goofy white kids hanging out to together and getting into trouble. Oh…the name of this vicious gang?, “The Devil’s Children”. We got the name from a Top 40 song called, “Ballad of Bonnie and Clyde” by Georgie Fame. One verse went: Bonnie And Clyde! They were the Devil’s Children. My gang lasted two years.
1967—I remember that year vividly. In those days, most gang bangers were into Soul, R&B, and Motown. The only radio station they’d listen to was KGFJ on the AM dial. It featured nothing but Black music. It was very funny to learn that most of the disk jockeys there were white guys imitating black DJs. One thing I didn’t understand about Chicano gang bangers was that they hated black people, but loved their music. Me? I liked Rock & Roll. From my very first job—selling newspapers every Sunday morning on the corner of Beverly & La Brea—all my money went to buy records.
One album I bought was by the British power trio, Cream. Its title was, “Fresh Cream.” I learned to play one song from that L.P. on my guitar—“I’m So Glad.” That was in ‘66. Their second L.P. release, “Disraeli Gears,” was a psychedelic classic. However, it featured one song that took the piss out of me…that was, “Sunshine of Your Love.” Ouch! I can’t even say it. AM radio was not all that glamorous. They had one major fault: overplaying the latest Top 10 releases. In the radio business, it was known as, “heavy rotation,” which meant they’d play the same song twice every hour. When “Sunshine of Your Love” hit the Top 10 in 1968, they played it to death! I recall being in bed with the flu, my transistor radio under my pillow. When I turned the radio on and heard “Sunshine of Your Love” on KHJ, I tuned in to KFWB, and they were playing the song, too! I changed the station to KRLA and, wouldn’t you know it? They were playing it! My last resort was KFI and—you guessed it: “Sunshine of Your Love” was on! I yelled, “Damn! DAMN!! I hate that song!” My mom came into my room and asked, “Are you all right?” I lied and told her, “Oh! I heard on the radio that the Dodgers lost to the Mets again. Otherwise, I’m fine.”
At the time, my younger brother, Irwin, was learning to play guitar. His friend, Jack, would come over and they would rehearse in his room, both on guitars while sitting on the bed. I came into the room just to see how they were doing. Guess what song they were playing!?!
Next door to my house lived the Rieters. This Jewish family had two sons named Steve and Gary. Now, the mother was a stay at home mom. My bedroom window looked out across the driveway to their dinning room. Like most Americans, they watched T.V. while they ate. That television was on all God damned day, and I never complained about it! But, when I played my records or my electric guitar, holy shit! Mrs. Rieter went on a Jihad!
“Stop it! Turn it down! My husband is sick and you’re killing him!” She’d scream out of her dining room window. This went on for four years! But, to add insult to injury, her oldest son, Gary, had a garage band! They did cover tunes. He would grow up to be a Jewish stereotype: he became a doctor. Every weekend, they rehearsed in their garage. Gary was a perfectionist, known in psychology as, “Anal Retentive.” The golden rule of life is: Never let an Anal Retentive become a musician, unless you are a masochist!
One Saturday his band was rehearsing in the garage and played, “Sunshine of Your Love” over and over again! If the drummer missed a beat, they’d stop and start over again. I couldn’t take it!—I had to leave my house!! This went on for a year until he finally left for college. Before he left, however, his parents were out of town. Those kids had the most rowdy party I’d ever seen! From my bedroom window, I could see that they were injecting something into their arms with hypodermic needles! I didn’t know what it was. They had a swimming pool in the backyard and they played Jimi Hendrix over their sound system while they swam nude! I was 14 at the time and getting into girls. To see those big-breasted Jewish girls with long, black, curly hair jump in and out of the pool—bare assed—would be an image stored in my masturbation memory forever! The guys I didn’t care to see. It was like taking a shower in gym class; plus, I was very homophobic back then.
For four years, as the entire planet was changing, I was in my own little world. In the summer of ‘69, some gang jumped me in an alley and I got the living shit kicked out of me! Well, my admiration for gangs ended that summer and I became a part of the “Freaking Fag Revolution!”
To this very day, I cannot listen to “Sunshine of Your Love!”
Check out this video….
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smOfoAOMYR0