Michael Lloyd and Kim Fowley were not a likely partnership. Fowley wasn't looking for partners, only victims. There were plenty back on Sunset Strip in the 'sixties, where he was a towering, Svengali-like egomaniac with a talent for self-promotion and an insatiable appetite for the young girls who drifted onto the Strip with confused dreams of stardom or freedom or whatever.
“Look at who I am," he said, as if self-awareness was enough in itself, and somehow admirable, "I’m an uneducated, untalented, bad social skills, horrible intimacy skills, unattractive, horrifying, dark, cadaverous, too-tall presence.” Groovy. "Because I’m basically an asshole, a piece of shit, no one’s interested in going any further to see if there’s any depth of talent, character or intellect.” There wasn't - what you saw was what you got, a hippie Trump whose sucking tentacles of ambition never reached beyond LA, where his name appears like a sexually-transmitted rash across the music industry.
The classically-trained Michael Lloyd had his own band at Beverley Hills High School, and recorded some early surf singles with Mike Curb. He also had the talent, good looks, and charm denied to Fowley, who signed him to a publishing deal, finagled him into recording his desperate Love Is Alive And Well album and introduced him to rich-kid wannabe rock star and tambourine slapper Bob Markley, another Sunset Strip sex creep. The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band was the Markley-funded masterplan to get little girls into his bed. However good the records are, and they are, his explicit lyrical confessions - or bragging - make them nearly unlistenable. Yikes.
Lloyd, apparently, floated over all this gutter filth without being touched by it. He helmed the proto-punk psychploitation Psychotic Reaction by the un-group The Fire Escape, and cut the St. John Green album [here - Ed] with Fowley, both on cash-grab labels.
Story so far: fresh-faced rich kid gets suckered into Sleazy Street by show-biz vampires. How does this play out? Not well, obviously - a descent into drugs and cults, sordid sex and an ugly death, the tragic waste of an All American Boy, and a lesson for us all. Except, not.
In '68, Lloyd wrote, played on, produced and arranged two albums: The Smoke, and October Country. He penned very nearly all the songs, produced and arranged everything, and Fowley only got to write some sleevenotes, boo-fucking-hoo. His absence is like a ray of sunshine. The qualities that made Lloyd valuable to Fowley - talent, mostly - had gotten him noticed by music biz professionals. Each of these albums is a gem, and better considered, given his total involvement, as by Michael Lloyd.
October Country (a real band) were uncomfortable with the groovy LA scene, and all became propane salesmen, Jehova's Witnesses, industrial felt pressers and pet beauticians. The Smoke was another un-band, but the full sound is distinctly LA session finest, an only slightly sub-Brian Wilson pocket pop masterpiece. Why weren't they marketed as Michael Lloyd albums? I'm guessing he was too modest, not that interested in being a star, and considered them as side projects, like the Fire Escape and St. John Green albums. Just records.
And then things went weird.
In 1969, Mike Curb appointed Lloyd, then aged 20, as vice-president in charge of A&R at MGM. Twenty freaking years old. What were you doing at twenty? I can't remember, but I certainly wasn't cruising Sunset Boulevard in a soft top Camaro. Curb, squarer than a bathroom tile, was purging MGM of anything vaguely drug-related (including the Velvet Underground and The Mothers), and Lloyd moved seamlessly into high-end MOR, squeaky-teen pop, and major movie soundtracks, his psychedelic pside projects quickly forgotten. He's still alive and scarily youthful and charming, and Fowley is none of the above. But as is the way of these things, Fowley is still revered for being "a character", "chameleon-like", and even a "legend", while Lloyd is mostly forgotten by zeitgeist types, and happier that way. Today's deliverable bundles The Fire Escape (a great little album, against all the odds), a re-covered October Country, and The Smoke.
Mike in the middle, of the road
This post funded by Mike Curb's Hair Helmets© - "all the protection of a crash hat, all the style of Dick Clark!"
