by scl second guitar » Sat Feb 15, 2014 6:53 am
An interesting point (by Tonto1967) by one who was there with the band for a while during that first year, although I wouldn't agree with his conclusion, that it was the lack of songwriting skills (not up to industry standards) which eventually led to their demise as a group. Most of the beauty (for those who perceived it as such) of the material, on SRC's debut Capitol Records album released at the end of the summer of 1968, had yet to even begin to unfold until several months after Tonto1967's departure. So he was not around the band, or direct witness to the process, when that songwriting process was happening, which was very different from the scatterbrained attempts to be creative during the "I'm So Glad" and "Who Is That Girl?" heyday of the summer of 1967. As for so-called industry standards, that first album's material was done with a total disregard for those tin-pan-alley standards, an attempt to compose based upon what represented the inner moving force of SRC's mindset, without fitting the ideas into the standard A-A-B-A-B songwriting mold. Did that method successfully work? Some would say "yes" in that it was a very unique style. But perhaps most would say "no" especially because the band and recordings were not very successful with the public. The debate, on all of that, if anybody really cares after all these years, is too complex to deal-with here, but I would really say it was primarily other factors which led to SRC's demise, particularly internal personal frictions between members, which were hidden from the outside, plus the complexity of trying to write songs as a group, which didn't work as well as imagined.