Just then he got acetates from Andrew Loog Oldham of the Rolling Stones, doing two songs, including Lennon & McCartney’s “Stand By Your Man.” The other was “Not Fade Away.” Crazy P.F. Sloan – there’s that crazy thing again – he told Adler that the Stones would be as huge as The Beatles! And he got fired.
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Of course, as you might know, both The Beatles and The Rolling Stones did quite well in America. In the whole world actually. And like P.F. Sloan, they changed the world.
But for this love of British bands such as Beatles and Stones, he was called – yeah, you knew it – crazy.
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There was the sense with Phil at times that he was uninvited. Certainly the industry treated him terribly repeatedly for years, though that treatment was not exclusive to him, of course. He was castigated for wanting to take himself more seriously – and by doing so, to take songwriting itself more seriously – and to cross the bridge from pop craftsman to artist. To embrace the existential promise of the original song as sung by its songwriter as delivered so directly by a man named Dylan.
The industry was only starting then to welcome songwriters – such as Carole King and Neil Sedaka – into the fold of performers. Dylan led the way, and Phil Sloan was forever in Dylan’s thrall. “Eve of Destruction,” which became a giant hit for Barry McGuire, was Phillip, forever in Dylan’s shadow, dying to step into the light.
“I wasn’t taken seriously as a talent,” he said. “Except by Dylan. Dylan told me that the word was out and they were out to destroy me.”
Yet unlike Dylan, who started in folk music playing old songs before writing his own, Sloan already proved himself as a tremendously savvy pop songwriter. He was a hit maker when he was still a kid – whether writing classic beach anthems for the Fantastic Baggys or yearning romantic pop for the Grass Roots or trippy folk rock for The Turtles – this was a guy who could write a classic pop tune in under three minutes that you are going to remember.
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As we, his friends, and his fans, and his family know – Phil was plugged in. And not only to the current from which infectious pop flowed and early rock and roll – but the electric source from which the expansive anthems of Bob Dylan came.
“The juice of the original rock and roll is forever,” he told me. “It was an electrical charge that will go on as long as anybody will go on. The charge is still there. It’s not over.”
He had deep oceanic eyes. The very first time we met, I felt like I was with a gypsy fortune-teller – someone who could peer deeply into the future or past – or the world beyond. And not a phony one, but the real deal. His eyes had that quality. They contained vast oceans of sorrow, but also great joy.
“It’s living art captured for all time,” he said. “And all the writers of the ’60s, we were all flowing with that juice; all of us who were subjected to that cosmic rock and roll current that came through, we were all juiced from it. We literally changed the world. We modeled it in the image of rock and roll. Next to the ancient practice of religion, the juice from rock and roll of the ’50s and the ’60s seemed to be the only things in the world that were worth having of any consequence.”
I know in my life that was truth. Having to go to Sunday school every Sunday at our temple in Chicago, no prayers in ancient Hebrew – or even my rabbi’s sermons – meant as much as one of his songs. And my rabbi gave some great sermons.
I’ll admit I’ve had a hard time these past weeks imaging a world without P.F. Sloan. Since 1988, when I was lucky enough to first meet him, though I never spent a lot of time with him, I rejoiced in a world shared with this man – this artist who saw the world so keenly, who had so much joy in him – though perhaps more famous for the sorrow. And just as I felt during those dark days just past the darkest December day of all, when John Lennon was shot and killed in New York City, I didn’t want this tragedy to pass. I didn’t want the loss of Phil to become accepted the way we ultimately accept everything good and bad. He mattered too much. I didn’t want his absence to be trivialized by nothing more than passing time.
Because as Yoko wrote after John’s death:
Spring passes and one remembers one’s innocence
Summer passes and one remembers one’s exuberance
Autumn passes and one remembers one’s reverence
Winter passes and one remembers one’s perseverance
There is a season that will not pass
And that is the season of glass
On this season of glass, the night of farewells to our friend, the rain is actually falling in Los Angeles. For the first time in years, it seems. Thanks Phil.
The night P.F. Sloan was born, as he wrote in his book, was the night he wrote Eve. He called it “the emergence of a higher form of consciousness.”
