The History of The Seeds | 60s Punk Pioneers [Mini-documentary] 

when I was about 14 years old, I was a bass player in a band. I switched guitars with the lead guitar player of that group and the first song I played lead guitar was pushing too hard. I am now 70. I have an all-original catalog of songs starting about 26 years ago that have been recorded and still have radio plays. Thanks to the seeds!

Love The Seeds, especially The Flower Lady And Her Assistant ❤❤

Thanks for this episode. Back in the summer of 1986, I spent two weeks crashing at a friend's apartment on Venice Beach. I was checking out a record store (remember those?) about two blocks away when a really hopped up guy walked in started making this announcement. "Sky Saxon is coming to Venice Beach! The legendary Sky Saxon of the Seeds is coming in one hour to play a free concert! Right here on Venice Beach! I'm playing keyboards in the band. You've all got to be there! Sky Saxon is going to be here in an hour!!! Don't miss it!!!" As soon as he left, everyone in the store started laughing. But yes, I did check out the concert. Sky played for about an hour covering all of the hits. That was the most California thing that ever happened to me. I was glad to get back to New York City after that!

Sky Saxon had a tract house in Big Rock Canyon in Malibu in the late 60s or early 70s and as kids we would literally listen to them play in the garage.

Years ago, I met an older fella who'd been around "the scene" in 1960s Brighton, England. He couldn't stress hard enough that: "back then, nobody was listening to the Beatles or Stones, we were listening to the SEEDS!" - I'll never know exactly how true that was but I'm willing to take it as gospel.

Thank you, YP. This episode was a trip down memory lane for me having grown up in the LA area. There were two sisters that lived next-door to us, whose parents bought The Seeds album and we were influenced by it. The two sisters, and my sister and I formed a ‘band’ in which we composed our own songs. I was laughing out loud watching this episode when I heard the song ‘Girl I Want You.’ Our little group composed a song called Tough. It was our anti-authoritarian anthem in response to being told no by a parent. The melody to our little song was pretty much note to note of Girl I Want You. Glad we never became popular or we would’ve found ourselves in trouble plagiarizing. A kind correction, if I may... It was mentioned that KBLA radio was in Santa Monica. The current incarnation that has those call letters is in Santa Monica. The KBLA during the 60s was ‘The Super 15’ (1500 on the AM dial) was located in Burbank (in the San Fernando Valley where I grew up). It became KROQ and eventually moved to the FM dial. Sorry for the long-winded comment.

You did your homework on a band that deserves being called an influence on punk music...I remember getting Nuggets in the 70's and I that was the first time I heard The Seeds. Timeless. Great job👍

I WAS 15 IN 1965 , I WAS UP ON THE SUNSET STRIP ALMOST NIGHTLY I SAW EVERY GROUP OUT THERE IN THE 80s I PLAYED NIGHTLY ON THE SUNSET STRIP LOS ANGELES TOP JIMMY & the RHYTHM PIGS I SAW THE SEEDS SO MANY TIMES MITCH MITCHELL AND I PUT A GROUP TOGETHER TO BACK UP SKY SAXON AT GLEN ELLEN DECADES LATER CARLOS GUITARLOS 90042 USA

Great video! I saw Sky Saxon live in Paris (around 2005) with a later incarnation of the Seeds. It was great!! He was opening up for Arthur Lee. It was such a night!!!!!

This is actually better than the official Seeds documentary made and buried a few years ago by GNP...

9:02 🍀😄 Excellent documentary about this near-mythical band! Thanks!

A good friend of mine in Belfast got me into them. Great band and a great video.

Thanks for posting this video, after a particularly long day at work this video about one of my favorite bands is like a kind of refreshing experience for me. The sad part is to learn that Jan Savage has passed away (4 years now!). I had the chance to meet him after a concert in Spain in 2003 and I found him quite nice and talkative. I didn't have the nerve to ask him what I always wanted to ask: If Mothers' Jimmy Carl Black catchphrase was about him ('Hi boys and girls, I'm Jimmy Carl Black and I am the Indian of the group'). Sky was there too, or most likely in a galaxy far far away, but anyway, the gig was great. The venue was Sala Los Picos, Cantabria, North of Spain.

Born and raised (1996) in Los Angeles and I fucking love the Seeds. Just hearing their sound every time reminds me of California. My father moved to LA in 57 and to this day he still gets hyped when Pushing Too Hard plays.

Is this the best video you've ever made???!!!?? Love it! The Seeds never made a bad record but being on GNP Crescendo kept them in the small time. Having you call attention to the obscure stuff like Wish Me Up and Did He Die is a total gas. Had they been on a major label and gotten a better push they could have played Monterrey Pop and Woodstock and really made it. They certainly had their own sound. Way back when I was a record store clerk and when the boss was away I started a SEEDS marathon in the store and promised customers free records if they came in and we weren't playing a Seeds album! One day we played Up In Her Room again and again just to try to drive people crazy but they mostly laughed or ignored it. KEEP UP THE GOOD WORK. Excellent video. You should follow this up with one on George ZOOT Money and his Big Roll Band who morphed into Dantalions Chariot before he and Summers joined the Animals for one of their best psychedelic albums, Love Was. Rock on!

Great to have the chronology complied together in a nice way. They were really early exponents of psychedelia, long-hair-fashion and blueprints for the Doors (you nailed it). I think that Satisfy You / 900 Million People Daily single is their psychedelic highlight. If my memory serves me right, "The Other Place" was a club in L.A. at the same crossroads diagonally opposite to the the "Whisky a GoGo". You know: "Where it's at!" 🙂

I remember discovering the seeds and the 13th floor elevators in the 80’s everything else from the 60s sounded derivative ,loved it

Fantastic job. What an amazing band they were and you've really done them justice here.

Thank you, great video. Have to say, that one of the punk pioneers was Hasil Adkins in the early 60s.

I love The Seeds! Thank you for this special on the band!

I seem to remember hearing Michael Jackson had died when I was in a bar, then getting home to discover Sky also had. According to a close source, he had been ill for a while but hated doctors. Sky's wife suggested I do a track for a tribute LP; I did this. James Lowe, The Electric Prunes did one, I believe Iggy Pop did. James and I discussed the project, but I believe there were problems with it, I don't know if anything became of it. I love the film. Having not heard them for a couple of years, the distinctiveness of their sound really hits me. I saw Sky live maybe around 2005, with a line up. As soon as the keyboards kicked in, goosebumps because the organ was right, not some synthesised sound. AC30 amp with fuzz pedal for guitar and spot on drums, it was great with Sky looking dapper and dancing, in pin striped suit with red brothel creepers. I told Sabrina Pushin' Too Hard was played at a club I went to and packed the dancefloor, " That's so cool" she said.

Great job YP! I was a dumb kid in the 80's when I first heard the Nuggets record my brother bought. I thought the bands were all new bands or something. The Seeds were my favorite band and I actually got kind of pissed when MTV wouldn't play them, or the Electric Prunes for that matter, aw youth! Years later, I got a bit wiser and started my own bands. Surf Garage Rock and Roll. Flash forward around 2005 my buddy Dave was part of the new Seeds with Sky. I caught their show in San Diego around that time. The place was packed and I couldn't breathe. As I was going thru a case of social anxiety, I stepped out of the club for a breather. No one was around outside the back door, & the cold air felt good. Sky was in great form and the band was cookin', but close to the end of the their set. Then out of nowhere out came Sky. He saw that I was alone and he came out and started talking to me. It was surreal. Of course I gushed about how cool I thought he was was, but he was so natural and made me feel at ease. We started talking about the low flying planes over the club (the Casbah), among other random stuff. We chatted for a bit, but then out came their manager who asked him to come out for the encore. He just smiled at me and headed back inside. What a great little life moment. I met Daryl Hooper a couple times for the screening of the Seeds doc. What a genuine and down home guy, he was so gracious and royal. Long may the Seeds grow. Flower Power~!

Excellent mini-doc. I'll always cherish meeting Sky at Bido Lidos in the late 80s, he liked the sweater I was wearing and asked if he could borrow it & wear it onstage, what a character!

My big brother took me to see the seeds when i was a kid my first concert here in la i was in the middle of the 60's music explosion great times indeed thanks YP CHEERS !

I met Sky Saxon in 1987 at a nightclub in LA. A nice guy and quite a character. Sadly, Jim Morrison was not well-liked by many in the Los Angeles music scene. Psych-Out was an interesting movie. No one saw Nicholson's stellar career coming

Another great documentary. Far much more than a simple usual video clip on yt. Very serious job, indeed. Hat's off again.

That was,as always,great!! I'd learned a lot. Thanks MATE❤❤❤❤

When we moved our recording studio into Jungle Records old warehouse, there was a box of old records that Johnny Thunders left behind, Alan gave me Johnny’s Seeds Raw and Alive album as a gift for recording and producing the Sky Saxon Transparency

Sky went for a psychotropic stroll, and he never came back. Sad, man. A lot of The Seeds' sound could have gone to the soundtrack of a mid-Sixties motorcycle movie. "Pushin' Too Hard" -- The Iggy Seal of Approval. Thanks a million, Yesterday's Papers.

Thank you Yesterday's Papers for this new time travel. The Seeds are such a great band!

I always loved The Seeds, who were awesome while they lasted! I remember a little article in Rolling Stone many long years where someone was attempting to interview Sky, a "Where are they now" piece, and he was talking about trying to trade a Michael Jackson album for gasoline at a service station a few days before. "Surf, sex, and sacred herb, man!" he said of his lifestyle. The poor man's mind was long gone; what a sad ending for such a unique talent, and punk pioneer. May I add I also love this great video, especially the interviews! And I remember that clip from "The Mother In Law". God, how bloody cringeworthy and painful, those plastic Hollywood people so unhip their bums were ready to fall off! A trip down memory lane! Great Job as always, Y.P.!

I always liked The Seeds. Sky Saxon always looked mysterious. I was able to see The Seeds at a psychedelic reunion concert at the Universal City Amphitheater in January 1989 alone with Arthur Lee & Love, The Music Machine and Big Brother & The Holding Company with a Janis Joplin sound-a-like. It was a great concert as they all jammed together at the end.

Great job as usual, it's cool that they survived into at least 1970. I had the chance to see Daryl Hooper 2 years ago with a newer touring version of the Seeds in Los Angeles and he still has got the chops. Too bad Sky went down a path that most likely wasn't the best one for him.

This was another excellent YP vid with some interesting facts about Sky S./The Seeds about which I was previously unaware. I hope you continue your dive into some of the lesser-known West Coast bands that you began with Sean Bonniwell and The Music Machine. I imagine you'll come round to Love, Arthur Lee's groundbreaking band at some point (a version of Love still exists with original lead guitarist Johnny Echols still in the lineup), as well as San Jose-originating innovators The Chocolate Watchband (whose lead vocalist Dave Aguilar, no slouch in the singing, writing, or performing departments, claims to have enraged Sky Saxon, who was in the audience, when the CWB did a note-perfect cover of The Seeds' most recent album), the Strawberry Alarm Clock (a band much more interesting and varied than their pop-psych hit "Incense and Peppermints" would suggest and who provided much of the soundtrack for the film "Psych-Out," mentioned in this vid), and the latter-day Renaissance man Kim Fowley, also mentioned in this vid, whose offbeat 1965 minor hit "The Trip" was one of the earliest to extol the benefits of psychedelics (Fowley's legacy has been clouded by credible allegations of sexual allegation by a member of '70s girl group The Runaways). Thank you again

Thanks for this one. From the moment I heard them as a 13 year old, the Seeds have been one of my favorite bands. I was lucky to catch Sky backed by the Mysterians live in '96 at Coney Island High. Great show with Mark Lindsey doing a few songs with him. Cheers.

Wow! You mean you know about Good Old West Coast Rock as well as Awesome British bands I'm so in Love with?

The best channel for rock retrospectives right here! Great piece on a super influential group. It's a crazy era where psych and Garage fused together like that. It's old but it sounds so contemporary in way or at least timeless to me.

I spent a day with Sky… in Hollywood 2001… He was crashing on my friends pad. OMG something I’ll never forget… Smoking a lot of weed drinking a lot of booze… A day in the history of my life.

What an amazing band! Love their albums and their pioneering music! Thanks for sharing this great video! Don't forget Faded Picture. Their best track, the one that always brings tears to my eyes.

Great episode - such a distinctive sound. Love the first album especially. Also, that later single 'Wind Blows Your Hair' is so strong. All the best, Steve.

Just when you think this channel couldn't get any cooler! ❤

Of course I know the Seeds and have records by them but have never seen such a great overview of these Garage Royalties! For instance, I didn't know the Doors were influenced by them. They made a lot of memorable songs, thanks very much also for the nice film footage. Cheers! EJ

Excellent band,bought all their records at the time and still play them.

Hey, I'm 63, from the States, and this period of pop music history--the 60s--is MY UFCKING WHEELHOUSE yet I've only ever known The Seeds by name, having never before taken the time to do my due diligence and give them a proper hearing (or any other) after "Pushin' Too Hard" (which reminds me a lot of Electric Prunes' "I Had Too Much to Dream Last Night"). They were pretty good, though, weren't they?! Thanks for this.

I love The Seeds! I had the privilege of seeing them do a reunion show with Sky Saxon at The Casbah club in San Diego and they were fantastic! They sounded vibrant and alive and I think Sky came out with this long exotic wind instrument. Some of them had on shiny space suits. They played the songs tight and accurate. Wow. Good memories. Your channel has my vote as one of the very best for the really cool vids. Thanks for making this worthy tribute.

Nicely done video, great music, great history.

I love The Seeds, thank you Yesterday Papers.❤

Great mini doc about this pioneering band. Their influence on the Doors not to be under estimated and your film shows this clearly. Keep 'em coming!

Great video! looking forward to more!

The Bangles did a sharp cover of ' PUSHING TOO HARD ' .

Thank you very much for this. I love The Seeds.

I'll never forget picking up Web of Sound based on the cover art. I had no idea as to who the hell they were. Fortunately, I scored. Talk about a badass band.

thanks for giving the seeds some luv!

Great video. I heard about 5he Seeds iin the early 80s. I had a record by Johnny Thunder doing a cover of " Can't seem to make you mine" which sounded different to his usual and it got me into their music, thanks JT.

Very well done, ... quite thorough

I got to see Sky Saxon perform live in Detroit in around 2000 and meet him after the show. Great time. Signed my lp.

Brilliant video. I think this is now the psych chat room. May 25, 2024 3:55pm PT Doug Ingle, Iron Butterfly Founder Who Sang and Co-Wrote ‘In-a-Gadda-Da-Vida,’ Dies at 78 (as reported by Variety).

Wow....absolutely magnificent..,had totally forgotten about the band....and how great they were.....thanks YP.

Thanks again YP! I've always appreciated The Seeds. I've heard most of their records, minus 'A Spoonful' for good reason, but did not hear all of their B-sides. I enjoyed the mini-documentary on the Music Machine, too. Keep on doing what you do!

I had a Learjet 4-track in my car when I was in high school. I only had two tapes ... the Fugs first album and this one.

Love's 2nd album, Da Capo, also had a 18+minute song on the second side of the LP. You can really hear it's influence on the Doors.

Great documentary, thanks. Not the sort of music I would choose to listen to yet was absorbed all the way through.

Excellent documentary. I am going to look more into this band

The Seeds ‘Up In Her Room’ from their Web Of Sound album is still mind blowing to me.

The Seeds were a very original band with a real sound of their own. They were oddly signed to jazz label GNP Crescendo, only because label head Gene Norman liked their sound, even though all labels up to that point had rejected them. Even compared to other garage bands they were years ahead of the era. Future was a strange departure. Sky Saxon had started out trying to break into pop singing Buddy Holly and Bobby Vee type songs. He really did end up in a religious cult called The Source Family.

Sky did so much before the SEEDS - but I know this isn't about Saxon ... A beautiful documentary about this modern pop band that really left a mark - excellent work.

Also proto punk, The Missing Links (1965), Australia, an influence on The Saints. Stand out tracks: Wild About You, Mama Keep Your Big Mouth Shut (almost 6 minutes, guitar feedback) - they also released this song completely backwards. Radical for 1965.

I met the band when I was in grade school at my friends house. His much older sister was friends with my older sister and they were both at my friends house when this unknown band called The Seeds showed up. They had long, long hair that no boy I had ever seen had. They were playing at some biker bar, and nobody knew who they were. My sister who was an artist painted their bass drum head for them with the name of the band on it. Many years later I met Sky Saxon in Hollywood, California when he approached my friend and I and asked us if we wanted to pay a couple of joints. Sky looked like a drugged out, homeless person at the time. It was very sad to see.

That was a great time and great music. I cry when I think about it. Now everything is all screwed up!

What a great episode! Thank you!

WOW!! What a great post! Just love these blistering garage tunes and must admit to having only heard a few. That live LP sounds terrific and I'm going to hunt it down on RU-vid. That bit about if you eat an egg you're going to hell made me chuckle. Here in NYC in the mid to late 80's there were a few hardcore bands that espoused veganism and due to their sometimes very direct tactics got labelled "aggressive vegetarians" by some kids in the scene. I guess that's an oxymoron, like jumbo shrimp. Really excellent job, YP. You nailed it again!

A surprising and great choice for a band to focus on, many thanks. I always thought Sky Saxon sounded like a cross between Mick Jagger and early (THEM days) Van Morrison. But before his days with The Seeds, this Richard Marsh had a handful of solo singles issued in the States on various small labels under various names such as Dick Marsh, Richie Marsh, and - Sky Saxon from 1960-1864, all of which sounded early sixties High School Pop, occasionally seemingly influenced by Del Shannon, all of which sounded very rush recorded, and his voice then usually sounded very strained, typical of Teen Pop hopefuls of that era, and with no hint of his future Psychedelic material with The Seeds. They just sounded very forced. But like so many of his then-contemporaries who stood no chance of a hit, he could only get contracts with small local labels that came and went, and therefore stood little chance of his singles getting national distribution in the States, let alone a UK release. This was about the best he had to offer in those days. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-rThCnidviP8.html He had a compilation album in the States collecting his pre-Seeds tracks on the Norton label, for what they were worth. But if you want to become a Seeds' group completist, all their albums are reissued in the UK on the Ace label, some of them expanded to two CDs each, each of them containing loads of previously unreleased tracks and alternate takes, and another CD called Pushing Too Hard, containing alternate takes of previously released tracks. That album you mentioned Raw And Alive contained entirely re-recordings of tracks they already did before, but not as good as their originals. I always thought the electric piano riff of Pushing Too Hard sounded like the basis of The Stranglers' No More Heroes. Sky Saxon apparently died on the same day as Michael Jackson, but obviously, there wasn't nearly the publicity surrounding his death. He ironically visited London a few years before his passing. It is nice to know he did visit the UK. Now in contrast, I think I'll listen to my weekly Bells On Sunday.

In 1983 I was 15 and obsessed with The Seeds. To say my friends were confused with me is an understatement.

I saw the Seeds at the late 60s LA Free Press Benefit Concert in Hollywood. Also there was Capt Beefheart and Jethro Tull. An awesome concert, w/a co-worker , Julio , the Venezuelan hippie, who knew who was playing where. UP In Her Room remains great psychedelic rock. Sometimes I plAY IT on a bar jukebox. A bartender called it mellow, compared, I suppos, to todays psychotic rock.

"Up in her room" hit me hard. I'm a huge VU fan, so it's got that sound that hit, just like the The Stooges first album. Funny to hear Iggy bring up liking them, but said he hated the first VU album on first listen. Great work!

Excellent. Many thanks for putting this mini history together. Early Seeds singles and LPs were also released in Canada. And I remember that the first few Seeds LPs were quickly deleted in the late 1960s when mono releases were dropped from record dealer catalogues in mid-1968. You could find them in the bargain bins into the early 1970s for 99 cents or less. Fully agree that Nuggets really brought them a second life. Unfortunately I don't think The Seeds ever played any concerts up here.

Thanks For Diggin' Up Some Seeds.

Love The Seeds... Love... The Doors.... those LA bands were awesome.

Cosmic documentary. I bought “Future” back in the mid 80s when I first got into psychedelia - remember thinking how unusual it was. I’ve just finished a book by Richard Norris (of electronic group The Grid) called “Strange Things Are Happening” and there’s a chapter where Norris befriends Sky Saxon, who had come over to England in the early 2000s to play some gigs. He was quite a character! As an aside the book is well worth a read, particularly if you’re interested in the 80s psychedelic reissue label Bam Caruso, as Norris worked for the label prior to his foray into the Acid House scene. 🤓👍

Love this video❤ I get to hear their stuff on 103.1 in Phoenix, they play Pushin’ too hard and Mr Farmer. And even on Mr Farmer I’m hearing the Velvet Underground as well. And yes folks, he’s got a ton of good videos. 😊

Just brilliant, more of the same YP , many thanks.

👏👏👏Well done

I saw Sky Saxon live at the Forum London (March1, 2004), he was opening for Arthur Lee.

Absolutely fantastic have a wonderful day also my favorite year is 2010 2011 2014 also 2016 to be honest yesterday's papers ❤❤❤❤❤❤😊😊😊😊😊😊

Another Great Vid. Surprisingly nobody has done a documentary on 60's American Garage Rock(originally called "Punk"). There is a Doc on RU-vid about the Fort Worth, Texas Garage Rock scene.

Outta sight, outta L.A. ❤❤❤❤

I really liked the album Future. Maybe I can see the Seeds movie before die. Good video, hope they can get more music loving fans. Thank you.

Interesting stuff. R.I.P. 🌱🌱🌱🌱🎸

I first heard about them via an interview with Ron Mael from Sparks in 1974 where he said that he was a fan of The Standells and The Seeds and The Electric Prunes, as they had a major impact on Halfnelson (the original name for Sparks) from 1968 - 1973 when they were cutting their teeth as off-the-wall rock stars.

Thank for this outstanding look at one of the great Californian psyche/garage bands. Saxon was around in Doo-Wop bands in the late 50's but really came into his own with the Seeds - Yet another band, like Love, who influenced so many without gaining major attention themselves. Not sure about the Velvets connection though - Reed was heavily into rockabilly, along with Cale's findings in mid 60's London (Small faces/Who - other mod bands and his predilection to classical music), the Seeds were more So-Cal surf to me - Whatever, this is a masterpiece of garage band research.

God ...forgot how good the seeds are

Another great summary from YP, altho' I never really discovered to the Seeds until the ninetes (apart from 'Pushing Too Hard', of course. Thanks to good old Ace Records! 🙂

Would love to have seen Buffalo Springfield with The Seeds opening ! Psych Out is on YT.

❤thanks

The farmer was growing pot, Darryl. My favourite band. Dumb, fun, repetitive and seriously trippy. Jan's fuzzed up guitar lines twist the mind. Sky taking up animal spirits especially wild cats with his sneering meowing. Good job Yesterday's Papers.

I'll tell you what, a round of applause for this one. You're doing great work recently with this and The Music Machine vid. Bravo.

I’m from Chicago & actually saw them in the 60s! Man, I’m old

Playing in a local band called 'The Beau Street Runners' in Franconia, Northern Virginia during that specific era, I can honestly say that no Seeds song was ever requested to be played by us at any pool party, back yard get together, or after football sock hop in the gym. We knew of that single song, but everything else on the set list was, the usual: Wilson Pickett, Stones, Animals, Yardbirds, et al...and of course, the dreaded 'Hanky Panky'. Sort of like 'The Music Machine'. LOVE the videos of L.A., Thanks YP~!

Added The Seeds to my playlist. Hope they collect compensation.

Marc Bolan had a vibrato vocal inflection similar to Sky Saxon. Not sure if he was influenced by The Seeds or if it’s just a coincidence . Excellent video. Thanks!