Have Fun, make Money, and meet Girls
The Syndicate Of Sound | Little Girl | Of all the souped-up, fuzzed-out garage punk classics from the ’60s—those that made it big at the time, like “Talk Talk” by the Music Machine or “Dirty Water” by the Standells, or those revered now in retrospect, like the Chocolate Watchband‘s “Are You Gonna Be (At The Love-In)” or “You’re Gonna Miss Me” by the Elevators—few bubbled with as much raw energy as the Syndicate Of Sound‘s “Little Girl,” a Billboard number eight smash in the summer of 1966. And no one encapsulated the attitude of the era any better than these recent additions to the one-hit-wonder wall of the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame, from San Jose, California.
“We’d heard about this new sound out of LA,” reveals the Syndicate’s lead vocalist, Don Baskin, who co-wrote their mega-hit with the band’s bassist, and fellow Camden High School grad and alto sax devotee, Bob Gonzalez. “It was this triplet figure with fast chord changes,” Baskin adds. The ground-breaking riff floating up from Smogtown, of course, was “Hey Joe” by the Leaves, also climbing the charts that summer. But the Syndicate were determined to add a few twists of their own. “As far as I know,” claims Baskin, “the changes we used on ‘Little Girl’—E/A/D/G/A—have never been used by anybody else. And then our lead guitar player, Larry Ray, suggested doing a round of sevens.”
Golden State Recorders
Baskin sensed from the first time they played the tune for the session’s producer, Garrie Thompson, at a Sunnyvale watering hole called the Brass Rail, that the song was destined for greatness. Believing the song would have to be absorbed by every aspiring top forty unit from Quincey to Nayak, Baskin and the boys decided to lay down the gauntlet. “We knew somebody was going to have to learn this,” he smiles, “so we said, ‘Let’s fuck with ’em a little.”
Ray — like keyboardist / rhythm guitar player John Sharkey and drummer John Duckworth on board since the days of the Syndicate’s prototype, a Link Wray / Duane Eddy combo called the Pharaohs—remembers being a little uneasy when the Syndicate entered Leo de Gar Kulka’s fledgling Golden State Recorders at 665 Harrison Street in San Francisco on January 9, 1966.
“I was really nervous,” he admits. “It must have been the adrenaline that made me strum the damn guitar like that.”
The Syndicate Of Sound | Little Girl
Producer Garrie Thompson — a co-worker with Gonzalez’ dad at Lockheed Missiles & Space in Sunnyvale—recalls they needed at least fifteen takes of the tune because of difficulties encountered with Ray’s electric twelve-string part.
“Larry had to hold his hand at a strange angle on the guitar’s neck,” says Thompson. “It was pretty awkward, and he kept shaking his hand because it was getting tired. After we finally got the take we wanted, I remember him saying, `I’d like to see anybody duplicate that.”
Duckworth’s drum line, though less demanding, was equally as effective. “I always wanted to show off and compete with these big ego guys,” he chuckles, “but I remember my uncle—who’d worked with my dad in the Sammy Kaye big band back in the ’30s—telling one of his drummers to ‘keep it simple, strong and steady on two and four, so people could find the beat and dance to it.”
Duckworth, the unsung hero of “Little Girl,” followed the family advice. “I prided myself on leaning into the beat so Bob on the bass could lean on its back end. And that created a lot of tension.” It also helped having Kulka as the session’s engineer. “Leo really knew how to get a great drum sound,” says Duckworth.
The Syndicate Of Sound | Little Girl
Baskin, whose self-assured vocal part swaggered arrogantly through the finished product, didn’t really have a clue what he was going to sing when the Syndicate began their head-on collision with destiny.
“I had no idea how I was going to interpret it vocally,” he admits. “It doesn’t really work putting a melody line on top of those changes, so we agreed I’d do it without a melody. But with an attitude.”
Ever the old pro, Thompson shakes his head at the haphazard approach these rookies took to recording. “They barely had the words to the song written down,” he recalls. “We re-wrote a lot of the lyrics in the studio.” Especially effective, claims Thompson, was the song’s conclusion. “We added that last line: ‘It’s all over for you’ and then the laugh so it all made sense.”
Not satisfied with a workmanlike job, Thompson and Kulka continued to stir the cauldron until the brew reached a rolling boil. “Carrie and Leo kept telling us that it wasn’t ready yet,” remembers Ray. “And then they’d add more tambourines and handclaps.”
Having a monster in the can meant nothing, of course, until the Syndicate found a way to unleash this menace on an unsuspecting public. Thompson shopped the track around with industry contacts in LA and, astonishingly, found no takers. The band soon tired of dead ends. “Finally we just said, ‘Screw it,” Baskin reveals. “Let’s put it out on Hush, Garrie’s own label.”
The Syndicate Of Sound | Little Girl
South Bay top forty station KLIV immediately went nuts over the disc, and Bay Area sales soon convinced Bell Records of New York to take a flyer on “Little Girl” for US distribution. The record broke nationally in Oklahoma City within weeks and entered Billboard’s top forty in June of 1966. “We’d buy the magazine every week after that,” says Gonzalez, “so we could follow it up the charts.”
Bell, their newfound record company, was eager to get San Jose’s newest hitmakers out on the concert circuit that summer, but one unpleasant bit of band business remained unfinished. In the weeks before “Little Girl” became a certified smash, Larry Ray was elbowed out of the group. And Ray claims it wasn’t just the decision of Syndicate kingpins Baskin and Gonzalez that found him on the outside.
“A lot of people entered into band decisions in those days, including the parents,” Ray declares. “But Don and Bob were looking to go in another direction, and they made an aggressive move by hiring Jim Sawyers, a steady guy who would hang more in the background and just play guitar.”
The Syndicate Of Sound | Little Girl
So it was Sawyers, formerly of Bay Area outfits the Topsiders and the Vejtables, who boarded that airplane to New York to begin the nonstop tour grind so common in those days.
“At first it rubbed me the wrong way,” says Ray. “I was disappointed in a way that I didn’t get to share some of the limelight when they took off on that first East Coast tour. It would have been fun to tour, but it just didn’t work out that way.”
Bell’s ecstasy at the band’s early success soon turned to pressure on the Syndicate to duplicate the feat, sighs Baskin.
“Bell gave us three weeks and fifteen hundred dollars—skimpy even by the standards of those days—to cut an album to bolster the hit. What we should have done was spend all summer cutting it.”
Out on tour, Baskin certainly had offers of material from budding songwriters. “Neil Diamond showed me ‘I’m A Believer’ after a show in Houston and asked if he should record it himself or give it to the Monkees. What I should have said was, ‘Hey, give it to us, pal.”
Wild styles
Styles were fluctuating wildly in 1967 with the addition of the mind-expanding San Francisco bands into the mix, and none of the Syndicate follow-up singles had much success with the public. The band soon lost Duckworth to the draft in late ’66, Sharkey in an acrimonious split in ’67 and finally Gonzalez, himself, tired of the grind, to exhaustion in 1968.
But the Syndicate Of Sound left behind one dynamite album that stands up to any of the classics of the day. The band’s only weakness, Thompson believes, was their lack of another original good enough to follow up “Little Girl.” Which might have been like asking On Vinci to knock off another Mona Lisa. “Our reasons to form a band,” insists Gonzalez, “were to make money, have fun and meet girls. And, believe me, we did ’em all.” To which Baskin adds: “When we first saw A Hard Day’s Night, something just clicked. That was the exact same attitude we had.” (Jud Cost Santa Clara, CA 1997)
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