Rising from 'Destruction' PF Sloan

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Rising from 'Destruction'
- j. poet
Sunday, September 24, 2006
"PF Sloan was born sometime between midnight and dawn on an inspired evening in 1964," PF Sloan says from his small Los Angeles apartment.
That was the night he wrote "Eve of Destruction," possibly the most famous and definitely the most commercially successful protest song of the '60s, a monster hit for Barry McGuire. Today, Sloan is back with "Sailover," his first album of new tunes in more than 30 years.
"Up until the night I wrote 'Eve' I'd been Phil Sloan, pop songwriter. I was half of (surf duo) the Fantastic Baggys with my writing partner Steve Barri. I'd been cranking out product for the pop music machine since I was 16, stuff like Round Robin's 'Kick That Little Foot,' 'Sally Ann' (a regional hit in Los Angeles), and producing and playing on a lot of the early sides at Dunhill Records. (Sloan was part of the Mamas and the Papas' studio band and created the guitar hook that opens "California Dreamin'.") At the same time, I'd started listening to Dylan, Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger and other folkies. That music opened up a level of consciousness I'd never experienced. I decided to move away from the pop stuff and created PF Sloan to be my folk-singing identity."
On that night in 1964, Sloan wrote five songs, including "Take Me for What I'm Worth," later recorded by the Searchers; "Sins of a Family," a hit for Sloan in England; and "Eve of Destruction," his greatest success and his nemesis as well. When McGuire took "Eve" to the top of the charts in 1965, it created a huge backlash. The pop music people he'd been working with refused to publish "Eve," or any other PF Sloan tunes.
"Until that happened, I didn't realize how conservative some people in the music business were," Sloan says. "There were quite a few people with the mind-set we now call neo-con."
The folk community accused him of trying to cash in on the folk-protest movement, somehow overlooking the fact that protest songs were commercial suicide for most artists. Sloan had a few more successes in the next two years, including the Grass Roots' "Where Were You When I Needed You" and Johnny Rivers' "Secret Agent Man," but "Eve" effectively put an end to Sloan's career as a pop songwriter. He was drummed out of the music business and crashed into a clinical depression that he tried to self-medicate with drugs and alcohol. He spent time in a mental hospital and moved back in with his parents, living with them until they died. He then spent years sleeping on a couch in his sister's apartment.
"If I knew then what I know now, would I have written that song?" Sloan wonders aloud. "If someone told the 20-year-old me that after you write this song you're going to get this quick burst of success, then spend the next 40 years wandering in the desert, would I have done it? I honest to God don't know, but I've learned so much in poverty that I probably would. Bob Dylan and Judy Collins were the only people who stood up for me. Everyone else in the folk community put me down. PF Sloan was supposed to change my life, but I didn't know those songs would get me kicked out of the music business. My publisher pulled out the old cliche and told me: 'You'll never work in this town again, kid. You'll never get any money from these songs as long as I'm alive.' They took all my money, and while I got out with my life and my integrity, I didn't know how to survive without music. I didn't do too well after that."
Even more strange is the fact that "Eve of Destruction" was the B side of McGuire's first single.
"(Barry had) just started his solo career after years in the New Christy Minstrels and wanted a hit. I played him 'Exactly What's the Matter With Me,' and he signed with Dunhill to record it. He needed three more songs for the session, and 'Eve' was the last one he chose. Eventually, some DJ turned the record over and the phones lit up with people saying: 'Don't play that record again,' or 'Play it again, right now.' The rest, as they say, is history."
Sloan put down his guitar for almost 40 years and made a living with blue-collar jobs -- delivering beer, doing telephone solicitation and "rearranging sunglasses at a Thrifty Drug Store." In 1991, he met musician and producer Jon Tiven.
"For the last 14 years, he's been calling me three times a year asking me to do an album," Sloan says. "I always said no."
Tiven finally persuaded Sloan to buy a guitar, and he started playing again.
"The songs I was writing in my head didn't seem worth putting down, but suddenly the kid that was killed in 1966 re-emerged and wrote three songs in three days," he says. "There was an explosion of creativity after that, which was pretty cool after 22 or 23 years of not knowing if it even existed anymore."
Sloan and Tiven went to Nashville and cut "Sailover" on a tight budget. The musicians on the album -- including Frank Black (the Pixies), Felix Cavaliere (the Rascals), and Americana icons Buddy Miller and Lucinda Williams -- all admired Sloan's work and donated their talents. The album mixes hits -- "Eve" and "Where Were You When I Needed You" -- with new tunes such as the smoky R&B ballad "If You Knew" and "PK and the Evil Doctor Z," a free-form surrealistic rant that tips its hat to Dylan. The CD has an organ-driven, '60s folk-rock vibe that sounds timeless. Sloan's vocals are smooth and mellow, without the edge of anger he had in his youth.
"I started a spiritual practice years ago," Sloan says. "I sing bhajans (Hindu devotional songs) every week for two hours, and I've been living a clean life, no alcohol or drugs, although I do smoke too much."
Sloan now considers singing and songwriting a spiritual practice.
"When I sing 'Eve of Destruction' today, I sing it as a prayer," he says. "I'm singing to God and waiting for an answer. Back then, the line 'You don't believe we're on the eve of destruction' was a message to my peers. I was saying, despite what was going on, we didn't believe we were on the eve of destruction. At 20, I thought in five years we'd clean up the mess, deal with racism and war and greed and have a better world. 'Eve' was my diagnosis of what was killing the country.
"The question is still the same: 'Why do all these bad things happen and why do we let them happen?' It's insane that it's still topical after all these years."
PF Sloan plays at 8:30 p.m. Thurs. at Cafe du Nord, 2170 Market St., San Francisco. $16. (415) 861-5016, www.cafedunord.com.
j. poet is a freelance writer.
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URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/09/24/PKGCBL2U9V1.DTL

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Kimber Kable

Topic - Rising from 'Destruction' PF Sloan - LWR 18:28:21 09/26/06 (3)

what a wonderful world - dave c 19:43:29 09/26/06 (2)

It eats it's young - LWR 19:54:13 09/26/06 (1)

I thought that was America... - dave c 21:03:27 09/26/06 (0)

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