Creation
Pretty Things
But the music business is less like a tree than an ocean full of fish, the big ones gobbling up the small, some innovators languishing while others consolidate their gains and move on. Neither the Creation nor the Pretty Things scored very big in England, much less the States, and for years their releases have been difficult to find on CD. But late last year both bands were sprung from the where-are-they-now file when independent labels reissued their early records en masse. Retroactive’s exhaustive Making Time and Biff Bang Pow! collect everything the Creation recorded with producer Shel Talmy between 1966 and ’68, plus a few live TV performances. And the British label Snapper has reissued, with numerous bonus tracks, the Pretty Things’ first four albums–including S.F. Sorrow, the narrative concept album they recorded in 1967.
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In his new book Unknown Legends of Rock ‘n’ Roll, Richie Unterberger also notes that Phillips reportedly “declined an invitation to join the Who as a second guitarist.” But Phillips, who says he met Townshend during the Mark Four days, says it’s not true. He doesn’t know how the story got started, but Mike Stax, editor of Ugly Things, thinks it was probably planted in a fan magazine by the Creation’s management. Townshend didn’t respond to an interview request. And Talmy is hardly an unbiased source. In January 1966 the Who broke its contract with him. He sued, winning a 5 percent royalty on all the band’s albums through 1971, and as recently as 1997 he was withholding the original master tapes for The Who Sings My Generation from MCA’s series of Who reissues. After the Kinks ditched him too, Talmy moved on to the Creation, but he never got a genuine hit out of them.
Yet Phillips clearly was an audacious and original talent: along with Townshend and Jeff Beck, he pioneered the use of controlled guitar feedback. In 1964 Phillips bought a cherry-red Gibson ES-335, “which was semiacoustic, and through my gear it just used to howl, this thing. And I thought, wow, this is a strange thing, but if I could control it, that would be a bit of a laugh, you know. And make it make sense.”
The Creation was also experimenting with strobe lights, projected gels, smoke, and tape loops. “They had all the right chops going,” Talmy says in the liner notes. “They had volume, they had attitude–not a word anybody used back then–and they had the songs, and it seemed to me this was a very commercial band.” Yet “Painter Man,” the group’s biggest single, peaked at 36 on the British charts. The Creation lacked a power source like Who drummer Keith Moon–drummer Jack Jones muddles his way through the “My Generation” groove of the song “Biff Bang Pow”–and while Townshend and Roger Daltrey struck sparks with their internecine feud, the Creation squabbled itself to death. In August 1966, Pickett tried to bring in a new drummer, but his candidate didn’t last long, and after Jones was asked to rejoin the band, Pickett found himself the odd man out. By February 1967 the Birds’ Kim Gardner was playing bass and Bob Garner was the new front man.
Unlike the Creation, the Pretty Things maintained a fairly stable lineup for over a decade, releasing eight albums between 1965 and 1976, and they’ve reunited for many projects since then. Most recently the band members settled a prolonged court case that granted them rights to all of their original albums, and in September they celebrated with a live performance, heard worldwide on the Web, of S.F. Sorrow. But their persistence has never paid off in sales or popular recognition: they haven’t scored a top-ten single in the UK since “Don’t Bring Me Down” in 1964, and in the U.S. they’ve never charted at all. The band emerged from the same blues-obsessed art-school scene that spawned the Rolling Stones–in fact, guitarist Dick Taylor was the Stones’ first bassist–but their crudely recorded debut album, The Pretty Things, sounds more like the basement blues of the Stooges than the manicured R & B of those future superstars.
