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thee Declyne

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Copyright (c) 2002

StanRay Entertainment Group

thee Declyne

I began losing touch with the guys a little after that weekend, mostly due to the fact that they were always so fucked-up. I worked about a dozen more live shows with them in early ’67 but it was more of a pain in the ass then anything else. Jeff and Lenny kept the rhythm tight and the band was still great, but you could tell that Eric and Ray were totally blasted out of their minds on acid. I’ll give them this…they were still writing some incredible music.

Hendrix had just come out, and he was blowing everyone away…but thee Wytches were not far behind when it came to psychedelic pop. I’d heard that they were recording new stuff for a proposed second album doing the same thing (recording at Eric’s) that they’d done earlier. The feeling now was that "Wylde Tymes Wyth", the phantom first album, was dated. After Hendrix and Sgt. Pepper came out, psychedelia was king. The band decided to take themselves further down those bizarre paths, and as far as I knew they were already doing more LSD than anyone east of Haight-Ashbury.

The thing was, they were still so damn unique. They always dressed completely in black and kept those wrap-a-rounds on at all times…and they were never flowery or hippie-dippy as were so many of their counterparts. There was always an inferred sense of violence and darkness around them. Their love songs were always kind of sad in a mysterious sort of way…and when they rocked they came at you with everything they had.

To this day I consider Thee Wytches to be the greatest rock band I had ever seen, and I've been around a long time. Like so many other poor slobs who couldn’t get college deferments in ’67, I got drafted into the army when I turned 18. I had kind of lost touch with the band in those days before I shipped off to basic. They just weren’t doing that much, and when they did I didn’t get called to help. I figured they were just too screwed up to get it together so I couldn’t take it personally. Besides, I had other shit on my mind, like having to go to Vietnam.

The last time I saw them was at an outdoor concert at a place called Salem Willows. It was a fun little park by the ocean that you could go and get away from the summer heat. To my knowledge that was Thee Wytches the last time they ever played together live. Eric and Ray were so fucking high that day that I thought they were gonna get lobotomized from the acid. Even Jeff and Lenny were barely coherent, which kind of surprised me. In spite of that, they were as good as ever. Every harmony was perfect, every note was tight.

It still pisses me off that they never got out of Massachusetts because there was so much garbage on the airwaves then; these guys could have done something great. C’est la vie.

I saw Pamela there, but Nikki was nowhere around. Turns out she had stayed in LA during one of Eric and Ray’s adventures. She supposedly dropped out of school and was seeing one of the guys from Captain Beefheart’s Magic Band. Eric was also in trouble of flunking out of Harvard, which would have made him draft bait. Ray was cool so far, but he was thinking of transferring to Berkeley just because he liked the scene.