VENETIC

Great Psychedelic Albums:

Markley: A Group

by Bob Markley

Bob Markley is one of the most controversial and disliked figures of the 60s psychedelic music scene. His band, The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band, was derided by the trend-setters of the day, and more or less typified everything that Rolling Stone magazine, that San Francisco-based arbiter of hippy taste, despised about LA psychedelic bands. In much the same way that the mag derided the Velvet Underground, Markley and his boys were considered by Jann Wenner and his staff to be unhip “try-hards” yet, unlike the Velvet Underground, the band was not subsequently to be vindicated by meeting with posthumous acclaim decades later.

The detractors’ version of events is that Svengali-like Markley, the “older man” in his early thirties, roped in three talented innocent teenage musicians (Michael Lloyd, and brothers Dan and Shaun Harris) to do his bidding, and then, over a series of albums, proceeded to mar and distort the beauty of their music with his talentless singing and atrocious lyric-writing. Markley’s megalomania and the ham-fisted results, which sold increasingly poorly from the mid to late sixties, eventually led to the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band’s demise and the talentless Markley faded into obscurity, while Michael Lloyd went on to enjoy a successful production career, clocking up over 100 platinum and gold records working with the likes of The Osmonds, Shaun Cassidy and Leif Garrett. Shaun Harris worked with him on these production projects, before becoming president of Barry Manilow’s publishing company, while his brother Dan continued with a visible but less successful solo musical career.

Looking back, Shaun Harris echoes the conventional view of his early career, and gave Shindig magazine this hostile summation of it: “I think if we had not had Markley insisting we do asinine stuff it would have been very good. If I had my choice again I wish we had got a record deal without him. It would have been something else, but I think we would have had more mainstream success. I don’t mean a cop-out, but if you had taken any artist of the period and made them do the same thing I think it would have had the same kind of negative effect.”

I am going to beg to differ with this conventional interpretation. For me, Michael Lloyd’s 100+ platinum and gold records with shining lights like The Osmonds are of far less importance musically, and are a lot less original, than the handful of albums he and the Harris brothers recorded with Bob Markley from 1966 to 1969. Love him or hate him, Markley acted as the grit in the oyster that created a musical pearl. And of those records, one in particular, that even the fans of the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band tend to disregard; 1969’s Markley: A Group, stands out. In spite of the name of the group, this album was in fact a West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band album, as the line-up that recorded it consisted of Markley, the brothers Harris, and Michael Lloyd. It was the final album that they recorded together and, in my humble opinion, is their most accomplished musical creation.

Shaun Harris may prefer to think otherwise, but it was partly thanks to Bob Markley that his musical career got off the ground. Robert H. Markley was the adopted son of an oil millionaire, and had a privileged upbringing that most people can only dream of. Public records state that he was born on 25 August 1935 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and it has been suggested by Shindig magazine that his adoption was due to one Lieutenant Robert H. Markley, who was the first Oklahoman casualty of World War II, and who is presumed to be Bob Markley’s birth father, being killed during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour. Whether this is true or not should be treated with caution. Shindig also erroneously stated that Markley was “probably born in Tulsa on the 29^th of August ’35 or ‘36”, which does not point to any serious scrutiny of the public record on their part.

Markley was a law graduate who got his break in show biz in 1958, when he began presenting the TV show Oklahoma Bandstand, a local equivalent of Dick Clark’s American Bandstand. A Warner Brothers executive spotted him and signed him to the label, for which he moved to Hollywood, buying a luxury mansion in Hollywood to serve as his base. His two singles for Warners under his own name, featuring his very own bongo playing, flopped. Various singles with Markley on them were subsequently released on minor labels, including songs credited to him, which belies the myth that Markley had no musical ability, even though it enjoyed no success at that time. Markley was however a wealthy man with contacts and management skills who bankrolled the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band, and steered it on a path of his making, even though he did rely on the musical talents of the young Harris brothers and Michael Lloyd in order to do so. Still, it is singularly unlikely that the latter three, who were still teenagers at the time of the band’s formation in 1966, would have parlayed a multi-album deal with Warner Brothers on their own (Markley was friends with Jack Warner). They might have privately been unimpressed with Markley’s singing and tambourine-playing on stage, but they would not have managed to get themselves on the same bill that year as performers like The Mothers of Invention, The Yardbirds, Moby Grape, or Captain Beefheart were it not for Markley’s management skills and extensive social contacts on the LA entertainment scene.

In the studio, Markley contributed a manic originality that really made the band stand out, perhaps more than its other members would have preferred. Epic lines declaimed by Markley such as: “Here is an African tribal chant that we wrote, called “Suppose They Give A War And No One Comes””, followed by his screaming of mock African gibberish, were cringe-inducing even by the standards of the day, but for all that, they are totally unforgettable. And in spite of their later pronouncements, the other members followed Markley’s lead in this respect, and fully interacted with his crazy approach to songwriting. On Markley: A Group, the opening track “Booker T. & His Electric Shock” is a colourful song reminiscent of Ken Kesey’s One Flew Round The Cuckoo Nest, but was in fact inspired by Dan Harris rather than Bob Markley, and provides a colourful account of Harris’s time in a mental institution when he was being given electroshock treatment:

“Reuben the Russian wears a robe

And swallows live frogs whenever he can find them

He stares at everyone

He starts one fight a day

Until they take him away

Then we sit in the sun between 11 and 1

Looking at the clock, having fun

Watching Booker T. get over his electric shock”

Dan Harris even plays the part of his Austrian psychiatrist at one point, putting on a phoney Germanic accent to great effect.

Another song on the album that contradicts the conventional interpretation of how the band worked is “Elegant Ellen”, sung by Bob Markley. It is a gentle ballad with words by Markley that offers a poignant portrayal of a girl grounded at home, dreaming of a time she can go out into the world and enjoy life more. The lyrics are in no way comic or goofy, and Dan Harris provides Markley with the perfect musical backdrop for Markley’s images. Michael Lloyd goes one step further in the following song, “Little Ruby Rain”, providing a string section backing for Markley’s loving homage to a dreaming woman and her vivid imagination. The effect is both poetic and romantic and shows how perfectly matched artistically Markley and Lloyd were:

“Toss and turn my friend until the end of the storm

underneath your sleeping eyelids

You’re the sun reflected in the sand of a faraway land

You’re a circus performer magnificently twirling

The acrobat inside you is usually suspended using no net

Destiny is below with its casual arithmetic waiting”

Not bad writing for a supposedly talentless Svengali…

If you want Markley being goofy, that stuff is there too, as is the case in “Truck Stop”, for instance. Regardless, what is striking about Markley: A Group is the maturity and delicateness of its lyrics, paired with gorgeous arrangements by Michael Lloyd and outstanding musical contributions by the Harris brothers. In my view, it is the greatest testament left behind by a band that, by then, had already abandoned its original name.

What became of Bob Markley is the stuff of legend and it is difficult to know for sure. What can be confirmed, because I am currently looking at a Web page with a photo of his tombstone on it, is that he died on 9 September 2003 in Gardena California, and he is buried at Memorial Park Cemetery, Tulsa. Beyond that, the accounts of his life to be found in magazines like Shindig and Mojo are second-hand and not necessarily to be trusted. Former associates offer tales of his predilection for young girls (a preference evident in various of his songs) getting him in trouble with the law and gang members, and a long spiralling mental decline fueled by the deaths of his adoptive father and his own son, that saw him end up in a mental home where he was supposedly being milked for his inheritance money by inscrupulous staff. Shindig’s sources of this information include people such as Kim Fowley, who is renowned for his ability to creatively interpret the past, and even Michael Lloyd’s comments to the magazine included less-than-conclusive statements like “then he went to the Bahamas, something like that” or “I guess he was in jail for a short time”, without offering much in the way of specifics.

It is going to take a serious investigation to piece together the real story of Bob Markley’s life, but until then, his lasting memorial will be the four albums he released with the Harris brothers and Michael Lloyd in the late sixties, which are still available in the 21st century, in spite of all the scorn that has been heaped upon them.

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