THE SEEDS
Best known for their rock & roll standard "Pushin' Too Hard," the Seeds combined the raw appeal of garage rock with a fondness for ragged, trashy psychedelia. The Seeds were formed in 1965 following Sky Saxon.
Saxon, who had relocated to Los Angeles from Salt Lake City having already enlisted former bandmate Jan Savage as lead guitarist and Jeremy Levine as rhythm guitarist, Saxon recruited Daryl Hooper to use him as a keyboard player.
Sky Saxon wrote Pushin' Too Hard while sitting in the front seat of a car waiting for his girlfriend to finish grocery shopping at a supermarket. The Seeds recorded the song on September 14, 1965 at United Western Recorders in Hollywood. The song became the signature tune for the group and a template for their musical style.
Pushin' Too Hard' is one of the songs gathering people who were trying to celebrate or denigrate 1960s garage rock, and sometimes championed for precisely the same reasons as others put it down.
The Seeds chose Daryl Hooper because he was tasty playing keyboards and the bass notes with his left hand similarly as Ray Manzarek did with the Doors. Hooper's keyboard was always a bit off pitch and without that "out of tune" sound The Seeds would have been just another L.A. garage band.
The band secured regular gigs at the LA club Bido Lito's and quickly gained a local reputation for high-energy live performances.
Even though The Seeds never quite matched the commercial peak of their first two singles, Pushin' Too Hard and Can't Seem to Make You Mine, the band continued to record for the remainder of the '60s and eventually delving deep into post-Sgt. Pepper's psychedelia and art rock. The last Seeds album was Future as the band rolled into the psychedelic sound of the times.
As a live act, the band was one of the first to utilize keyboard bass. Although Saxon was credited as playing bass on the studio albums and would mime playing bass on TV appearances, they usually employed session player Harvey Sharpe for studio work.
The Seeds, appeared as the fictional band The Warts, as they performed Pushin' Too Hard on a 1968 episode of the television sitcom The Mothers-in-Law.
In 1989, the original lineup of the band reformed for a handful of live dates in the US.
In 2003, Saxon was persuaded to reform the Seeds with original guitarist Jan Savage (who departed through a European tour the same year due to ill health). Releasing two further studio albums, Saxon-led versions of the band continued to tour the US, UK, and Europe up to Saxon's death in 2009.
In 2017, founding member Hooper reformed the Seeds with a lineup of past and new members; they released a single in 2021 and continue to tour to this day.
Years ago, I remembered listening to The Seeds first album a dozen more times. When I first heard punk in the late 70’s I pulled the Seeds out once again!
