A box of Fudge

The first Vanilla Fudge album saved me a lot of time. I loved it, but afterwards I didn’t want or need to listen to anybody who might have been influenced by it. So no heavy metal, no pomp rock, not ever. Their elaborate, slowed-down rearrangements of other people’s classics (“Ticket to Ride”, “People Get Ready”, “She’s Not There”, “Bang Bang”, “You Keep Me Hanging On”, “Take Me For a Little While” and “Eleanor Rigby”), shaped and guided by the ephemeral genius of their producer, George “Shadow” Morton, were enough in themselves to satisfy my limited appetite for bombast.

But there was much more to Vanilla Fudge than that. Everything the Long Island quartet did, particularly in the vocal department, was infused with the strain of East Coast blue-eyed soul exemplified by New Jersey’s Young Rascals, their principal influences (along with all the British invasion bands). They had a great lead singer in Mark Stein, and the other three members contributed fully to their soulful harmonies (particularly on Curtis Mayfield’s “People Get Ready”).

They were good players, too. Stein was as effective an exponent of the Hammond B3 as Stevie Winwood, while the guitarist Vinnie Martell, the bassist Tim Bogert and the drummer Carmine Appice all had the chops to contribute to the multi-section arrangements and to sustain the solo passages featured in the 20-minute-plus “Break Song”, a highlight of their live act.

I bought that first album and went to Leicester in early October 1967, hoping to see them at the De Montfort Hall on a bill with Traffic (then a three-down after the departure of Dave Mason), Keith West and Tomorrow, and (yes, really) the Flowerpot Men. But they’d cancelled their appearance — illness, I believe — and I had to wait a few weeks to see them at Nottingham University. I wasn’t disappointed: they were impressively dynamic and highly exciting.

One small thing I remember is the way Stein, while holding a particularly dramatic note with his right hand, occasionally threw his left arm up, his hand open and fingers spread — a seemingly spontaneous gesture of exultant emphasis. From an essay by Mark Powell that accompanies the nine CDs of Where Is My Mind?, a box set he’s compiled of the Fudge’s recordings for Atlantic’s Atco subsidiary between 1967-69, I learn that this became Stein’s signature. It must have been a good one, because it certainly made an impression on me.

During that month-long visit to the UK, their audience at the Speakeasy, then becoming London’s leading rock and roll hangout, included Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, P. P. Arnold and Alan Price. In a formal concert at the Savile Theatre on Shaftesbury Avenue, they shared the bill with the Who. After returning home, in early December they played the Convention Hall in Asbury Park, and I’d love to know if Bruce Springsteen and Steve Van Zandt were there, because there’s a little bit of Vanilla Fudge in the E Street Band.

The box set includes mono and stereo versions of their first two albums, three more studio albums from that period (Renaissance, Near the Beginning and Rock & Roll), and two discs of live recordings from the Fillmore West in San Francisco on December 31, 1968, plus various bonus tracks, including edited 45s. The live stuff corresponds very closely to my memory of seeing them.

What’s most fascinating, though, is a chance to reassess their disastrous second album, The Beat Goes On. Devised and constructed by Shadow Morton seemingly as a survey of the entire history of Western music, built around the Sonny Bono song which had been a hit for Sonny and Cher, the album is a mosaic of music and voices incorporating the band’s capsule renderings of Mozart and Beethoven as well as ragtime, swing, Elvis and the Beatles, plus snatches of historic speeches from the archives: Roosevelt, Churchill, JFK and so on. Hugely ambitious, divided into four portentously announced “phases”,.it flopped for the simple reason that, as Stein tells Powell, there was nothing on it that could be played by AM radio, and the hip FM stations — happy to take a chance on the unorthodox — had yet to begin to exert their influence.

“We should have released The Beat Goes On eight albums down the line,” Stein says. He’s right. Although the subsequent studio albums still sound respectable, containing fine applications of their trademarked cover-version formula to “Season of the Witch” (on Renaissance) and “Shotgun” and “Some Velvet Morning” (on Near the Beginning), the band never regained the momentum established by their debut album and its hit single, “You Keep Me Hanging On”, which reached the US top 10 and the UK top 20.

For just over 50 quid, which is what I paid for it at Sister Ray in Soho, the box set is excellent value. I’m particularly glad to have the confirmation of their quality as a live band from a concert in which they performed “Like a Rolling Stone” as well as their established favourites to a hallucinogenically enhanced Fillmore West audience celebrating the arrival of 1969. “That was an incredible night,” Stein says. “The whole place was tripping out.”

And they’re still touring, with Stein, Martell and Appice joined by Pete Bremy, replacing Bogert, who died three years ago. If they came this way again, I’d go to see them, if only to witness Stein flinging his arm high as “She’s Not There” or “Bang Bang” reach their many climaxes. Vanilla Fudge did just one thing, really, but it was worth doing and they did it brilliantly.

* Vanilla Fudge’s Where Is My Mind? The Atco Recordings 1967-69 is released on Esoteric Recordings via Cherry Red.