RIP... P.F. SLOAN...Mr Eve Of Destruction.

[jamestkirk]

P.F. Sloan, 'Eve of Destruction' Songwriter, Dead at 70
Singer-songwriter penned hits for the Turtles, Jan & Dean, Herman's Hermits and more

BY DANIEL KREPS November 16, 2015 © Rolling Stone 2015





P.F. Sloan, the songwriting great behind classic singles like Barry McGuire's "Eve of Destruction" and Johnny Rivers' "Secret Agent Man," passed away Monday night after a short bout with pancreatic cancer, the musician's representative confirmed to Rolling Stone. Sloan, who was born Philip Schlein, was 70.

"Phil was a key element on the music that became the sound of the Sunset Strip. Phil was a true prodigy, signing his first record deal with Aladdin Records when he was thirteen," Sloan's reps said in a statement. "P.F. Sloan's 'Eve Of Destruction' was an anthem for a generation. It is as relevant now as it ever has been."

After recording his debut single "All I Want Is Loving" / "Little Girl in the Cabin" for the Aladdin Records label, the still-teenaged Sloan got a job with music publisher Screen Gems, who hired Sloan to work with surf rock duo Jan & Dean; Sloan is heard on that group's 1964 hit, "The Little Old Lady From Pasadena." Sloan then moved to Dunhill Records, where he penned hits for artists like Herman's Hermits, the Turtles, the Searchers, the Grass Roots and Barry McGuire.

It was McGuire who was the recipient of Sloan's most enduring song, "Eve of Destruction," an ominous, apocalyptic and catchy single that prophesized the anti-war protests and civil rights movement percolating in the United States in the mid-Sixties. Despite its political undertones, "Eve of Destruction" hit Number One on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1965.

Bob Dylan once said of "Eve of Destruction," which was originally penned with the Byrds in mind, "There are no more escapes. If you want to find out anything that's happening now, you have to listen to the music. I don't mean the words. Though, 'Eve Of Destruction' will tell you something about it."

"I was a songwriter and my record label really didn't want me out there in the public," Sloan told Rolling Stone in 2014. "The label thought if I knew how popular I was, I'd want more money. I was literally destroyed three months later. The label told me to sign away everything I'll ever earn and earned and sent out word that I was persona non grata. They wanted to destroy me and this kind of music. They thought Bob Dylan was an idiot and a communist. "

Sloan was also a singer in his own right, recording a pair of albums of Dunhill (1965's Songs of Our Time, 1966's Twelve More Times) alongside a handful of other solo LPs spread across the past decades. However, after branching out on his own, Sloan claimed the music industry shunned him. "I wasn't taken seriously as a talent," Sloan told American Songwriter. "Except by Dylan. Dylan told me that the word was out and they were out to destroy me." In 2014, Sloan released his last album My Beethoven as well as his memoir, What’s Exactly The Matter With Me?.

You Baby (Sloan) by The Turtles
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0p5wB0l0BQ

[jamestkirk]

A sad loss indeed.

Sloan loomed large in the history of the 1960's as that incompatible decade of music unfolded.
Here is another fine bit about Sloan from musenik.blogspot.com

P. F. Sloan--A Passel of Passionate 1960s Demo Recordings
June 17, 2014

by Frank M. Young

Eve of Destruction sung by its author, Pf Sloan...tells his story as a young 19 year old songwriter as part of the Goffen-King stable, but stationed in the "West Coast dead letter office".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfiDvWh0uMU

Sloan's reading of Eve Of Destruction is low key, but 50 years on it is chilling and so powerful, much more than the original hit single.




I summed up the musical career of Phil Sloan in the liner notes for the Ace Records compilation You Baby: Words and Music by P. F. Sloan and Steve Barri, which was released in 2010. Buy it, why don'cha? I put a lot of work into this project, including in-depth interviews with Sloan and Barri. I made 400 bucks for my trouble. I am, apparently, persona non grata at Ace Records, for reasons I shall never know.

Still, I am proud of this project, even though some of its song choices are weak, and some key tracks are missing--mostly due to unreasonably high licensing fees.

Destined to be one of the most controversial and maligned figures in that potent decade of pop music progress, Sloan's 1960s Los Angeles career was short but sweet. The years 1964 to 1967 saw a large quantity of original songs, written in a dizzying array of styles, most often with his collaborator, Steve Barri, composed, demoed and sometimes recorded by other artists.

"Eve of Destruction" changed Sloan's life and career. A prior composer of pop, girl group, surf, rock and novelty songs, Sloan was suddenly seen as a serious composer--the first "new Bob Dylan" in pop-rock history.

Like almost all others who had that mantle put upon them, it was more burden than honor. While Sloan continued to write dynamite mainstream pop music material, he also strove to create more complex, advanced songs that uneasily straddled the boundaries of pop and folk musics.

Some of these songs are failures--over-wrought, over-written and awkwardly conceived. But the majority are bracing, exciting and sometimes deeply moving compositions that showed the pop music world that there was more than met the eye to what a commercial piece of music could contain.

Sloan was out of Los Angeles by the end of 1967, and his songs were largely forgotten. Meanwhile, countless other singer-songwriters trod the path he had unconsciously blazed, and his influence--as the first composer to meet the disparate ends of Dylanesque personal songwriting and mainstream commerical material--still hangs over the American musical landscape.

Sloan's solo recordings of this period rarely do him justice. Perhaps at the encouragement of record-label execs, Sloan affects a Dylanish whine to his vocals, and most of the recordings are badly balanced, overly sparse, and betray the lack of TLC afforded them. His two period albums, Songs of Our Times and Twelve More Times, have their moments, but fail to satisfyingly cohere.

Sloan's secret recording career, as the passionate performer of scores of demonstration recordings, was unheard outside the music industry at the time. Sung beautifully in his rich, distinctive voice, and often more elaborately orchestrated than his solo albums, these demos show Sloan at his early best.

A CD of some highlights of these demo recordings was commercially issued in 2001. That disc, Child of Our Times, is the first act of today's post. Though its graphics are shoddy, the mastering of the 20 songs therein is superb.

The disc represented just the tip of the iceberg. I've assembled a bonus volume, containing 25 more demo performances, HERE (no longer available sadly). These 25 songs more accurately show the schizophrenic aspects of Sloan's commercial songwriting. Everything from a cutesy boy-girl duet, and several songs for an apparently abandoned 1964 album project devoted to the "swim" dance craze, to devastatingly good pop songs such as "He's Just That Kind of Guy," "And I Cry Over You" and "Things Are Different Now" and more Dylanesque pieces ("Me And My Captain," "It's No Disgrace") are on deck. There's even a country-pop song, "I Love You More Than Yesterday," that seems to have been written on spec, but never used.

That was the sad fate of so many of these songs: disuse and indifference. 50 years later, we can hear these and marvel at how good they are, even the sillier of them. But back then, when they were part of the commerical currency of the music scene, they were ignored. The music biz is a ruthless profession, and it's chewed up and spit out some very talented individuals.

Sloan is alive and well, and still making music. He has a new album, My Beethoven, and a memoir called What Exactly's The Matter With Me? I own neither one yet (I believe the book is due out in late June), but I hope to acquire them soon. In the meantime, peruse these 45 demo recordings from the mid-1960s, and enjoy one of the era's most passionate voices.

Posted by Frank M. Young at 3:25 PM


RIP Mr. Sloan

[jamestkirk]

P. F. Sloan - From A Distance 1966
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IN8d3wbc_L8

P.F. SLOAN- "LET ME BE" ( Turtles hit but now here is the originator)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5czjBBBRas

P.F. SLOAN- "THE SINS OF A FAMILY"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jK9bSdP7KVc

P. F. Sloan : Secret Agent Man..always loved this one and the 60's TV series by the same name
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnvwh_gbOIU