86: THE SEEDS
Pushin' Too Hard/ Try To Understand
(GNP Crescendo, 1966)

CALIFORNIAN ne'er-do-wells The Seeds thrust themselves into immortality of a kind in 1966 with two chords, no discernible talent to speak of and an extraordinary attitude which somehow prefigured both the dippiness of the Love Generation and the wounded surliness of punk.

The ace in their particularly dank hole was vocalist Sky Saxon, a mesmerising, magnetic figure who walked it like he talked it - ie, confusingly - and who furthermore cheeringly continues to do so to this day under the name of Sky Sunlight.

To try adequately describing The Seeds is a task which has defeated better men than I, but if pressed I would suggest that you try to imagine The Doors if they had been steadily drinking Thunderbird wine or drain cleaner for four months, and had then been handed their instruments with the proviso that each member's arms were tied behind their backs.

Then try to imagine Jim Morrison if instead of reading poetry in his childhood he had read nothing else apart from Justin Toper's horoscope columns. Now you're getting there.

Pushin' Too Hard is the very apotheosis of yelping adolescent ire. Wonderfully, the story goes that Sky Saxon wrote it while standing in a supermarket queue. You can just picture him, in his 40 cent love beads and Prince Valiant bowl cut, howling "you're pushin' too hard, pushin' too hard on MEEEE" at some old woman who has just nudged him with her trolley.

In the background, The Seeds bash forth the song's relentless Hiawatha-summoning B minor-to-A minor chord pattern with bludgeoning fervour, and guitarist Jan Savage peels off a fantastically inept Chad Valley solo halfway through which, with no word of lie, counts among my favourite guitar solos of all time.

The whole concept of garage rock probably began here: you can practically smell the sump oil and WD40.

With a characteristically messianic flourish, Sky Saxon noted that "Garage music is not bad, because Christ was born in a manger, which was probably like a garage of that time." We'll take your word for it, Sky. All I know for sure is that the world is a better place for the thick-eared but flower-bedecked canon which The Seeds bequeathed us; and as long as Sky's still out there doing his stuff, everything's going to work out ok for mankind in general.