Guest post by Nathan Arizona
When the Music Machine had its big hit “Talk Talk” in the mid-‘60s, hippies were wearing bright colors and flowers in their hair. The Music Machine was wearing all black and a snarl. No surprise for a band now seen as an important precursor of garage rock and punk.
“We were living in an age of ‘love ins,’ psychedelics everywhere, peace and love, barefoot hippies . . . a whole generation fueled by a drug induced haze,” lead guitarist Mark Landon recalled in an interview much later. “Being fuzzy-headed was not who were.”
Who they were was a focused band whose all-black attire extended to a single black glove they never took off in public. To reinforce their difference from the flower children they all dyed their hair black. They were also a band who knew how to adapt psychedelia for their own purposes with some hallucinogenic farfisa organ work and Landon’s distorted guitar.
They would sometimes never stop playing on stage. At all. Just one song banging into the next. Like a machine, you might say. A Music Machine.
Landon said their songs were about “the brashness, insecurity and the self-loathing and pain of youthful love and dreams unfilled.” But there wasn’t much money in it as they honed their skills in sleazy L.A. clubs and bowling alleys, or even after “Talk Talk” reached No. 15 on the charts.
“I had nothing to show for it but pride,” Landon said. “I was still driving old cars and living in cheap hotels. The only thing I had a lot of was pretty girls. That kind of came with the territory.”
An album featuring “Talk Talk” did OK as did a quick follow-up single. But the group broke up soon after that and the members went on to other projects. They had been limited by their manager’s incompetence. He turned down a slot at the landmark 1967 Monterey International Pop Festival, an event that helped establish the reputations of many performers. He sent them instead to a juke joint in Texas.
Ladies and gentlemen, the Music Machine.
