John's Children - In The Perfumed Garden - 1967

It looks like Debbie was not as popular as I hoped, that seems to be her fate unfortunately. If you skipped that post you are missing out on a fine performance. Anyway, here is something a little more "hip".

John's Children were active for only two tears. During that short time they had several line up changes, released or nearly released three albums and numerous singles. In The Perfumed Garden could have been their third and final album and the only album to feature future glam pioneer Marc Bolan. Marc was only in the band for a fiery brief four months but during that time the band managed to record several singles and one album's worth of songs and was thrown off a tour for upstaging the headliners The Who who complained they were too loud and violent. Known as much for their outrageous stage performances as they were for their loud and raw musical style they foreshadowed both glam and punk long before either one was realized.

Marc Bolan was installed in the band by manager Simon Napier-Bell as a Pete Townsend type in-house writer and brooding intellectual figure. At the time Marc was a struggling unknown who modeled himself as a Dylan type folkie artist who had released several unsuccessful singles, the first under the name Toby Tyler before settling on the name Marc Bolan but he would not develop his distinctive vocal style until just before joining John's Children.

After leaving the band Marc would go on to form the underground hippie folk duo Tyrannosaurus Rex that would morph into T.Rex where Marc would hit it big everywhere but the United States. After replacing Marc John's Children continued on briefly before breaking up. Ellison and Townson would go on to form Jet and then Radio Stars during the punk/new wave era of the late 70s.

Side One
01 Desdemona (Bolan)
02 Come & Play With Me In The Garden (Ellison/Hewlett)
03 Sally Was an Angel (Bolan)
04 Perfumed Garden Of Gulliver Smith (Bolan)
05 Hippy Gumbo (Bolan)
06 Mustang Ford (Bolan)

Side Two
01 Midsummer Night's Scene (Bolan)
02 Dan The Sniff (The Lilac Hand Of Menthol Dan) (Bolan)
03 Remember Thomas A'Becket (Ellison/Hewlett)
04 Sarah Crazy Child (Bolan)
05 Jagged Time Lapse (Hewlett/McClelland)
06 Hot Rod Mama (Bolan)

Andy Ellison: vocals
Marc Bolan: guitar
John Hewlett: bass guitar
Chris Townson: drums/guitar

Reality Notes

This is the next installment in my debut albums that never happened series. While this would have been John's Children's second or third album (with such a jumbled discography of reissues and compilations it's hard to be sure what's what) it would have been Marc's LP debut. Up to this point Marc had released two solo singles and two singles with the band. There was one solo single that was not released and one John's Children single that made it no further than the acetate stage, coincidentally they were the same song, Hippy Gumbo.

I discovered Marc Bolan and T.Rex in 1977 when I was 14. Here in the states Marc was not as popular as he was overseas. In his home country of England he was the next Beatles causing the equivalent of Beatlemania that was labeled TRexstasy. It took me a year to hear of his passing. He was killed in an auto accident in 1977, the same year we lost Elvis and Bing Crosby.

I was Rex obsessed and purchased everything I could find. Not everything was easy to find. It took until the CD era before I was able to find the Zinc Alloy and Zip Gun albums though I did have the bastardized American release Light of Love. While I had all the Tyrannosaurus Rex albums (Unicorn is still one of the most gorgeously recorded albums in my opinion) Marc's prehistory was mostly unknown to me. It took a trip out of the mid-west to Los Angeles where things were hipper where I came across a pile of CDs in a used music/comic book store that filled a lot of holes in my collection as well as not one but two books on Marc. I finally was able to learn the whole story. Still the only John's Children tracks I owned were the clean version of Desdemona and the half of the vocal version of Sally Was An Angel on the Beginning of Doves LP.

Once the internet happened and I found all of the nice people who share rare bootlegs and unreleased/out of print music I was able to finally fill my John's Children void. There was a lot to download but unfortunately it just confused things even more. Between six collections I had at least two copies of everything and several different versions of many of the songs. All of these songs covered the band's entire time of activity which meant that not everything was Marc related. I wanted to sort all of this out once an for all and see if it was possible to construct an album's worth of material that featured Marc's time with the band.

So, armed with a few meager resources that included the band's own website I loaded everything I had into my sequencer and chopped away. I compared multiple versions of each song choosing those I felt had the energy and best quality. Then I eliminated any song not from Marc's tenure. From the final song pool I ended up with twelve songs that I felt made a cohesive whole. I shuffled, rearranged and edited until I was happy. While not a long album. clocking in at just over 32 minutes, it does finally present what could have been a great album had the band been given a bit more time to mature.

Track by Track

Desdemona - The A side to the band's third single and their first to feature Marc there are two versions of the song. The original which appears here and a cleaned up version. The original version was banned by the BBC due to the lyric "lift up your skirt and fly". A new vocal was recorded replacing the line with "why do you have to lie". For our purposes we will call these the album version and the single version.

Come And Play With Me In The Garden - This song was released as a single. It uses the same backing track as the song Remember Thomas à Beckett with only slightly different lyrics and some additional overdubs. That backing track without vocals circulates as well.

Sally Was An Angel - This song exists in two different mixes. One with vocals and one without. Unfortunately only half of the vocal version circulates and that is tacked on to the end of Marc's solo demo version that is found on the Beginning of Doves LP. What I've done here is to edit the two versions into one by taking the first half of the instrumental mix and edited what we have of the vocal version (after removing the solo demo) onto the end to create one full version.

Perfumed Garden Of Gulliver Smith - This is the first of several songs that exist only as performances from the BBC. While a non-vocal mix of a studio version circulates of this and a few other songs I tried to avoid using them as my goal here was to present as complete as an album as I could.

Hippy Gumbo - An earlier recording of this song by Marc was intended to be his third solo single. That single was never released. John's children rerecorded the song with Marc on lead vocal. Again this was intended to be Marc's third single with the band but it never made it passed the acetate stage. Luckily the band passed out copies to various DJs in advance of it's anticipated release.

Mustang Ford - One of two songs here that Marc would later rerecord for the debut LP by Tyrannosaurus Rex. This John's Children version was later reused after Marc's departure with new lyrics (not by Marc) titled Go Go Girl.

Midsummer Night's Scene - This was intended to be the band's second single with Marc and fourth single overall but never made it passed the pressing of 20-40 or more (no one is quite sure how many) test copies which the band distributed at their shows. The test copies have become prized collector's items with one copy selling for an astounding £3,700.

Dan The Sniff (The Lilac Hand Of Menthol Dan) - One of many songs Marc brought with him into the band. Originally titled The Lilac Hand Of Menthol Dan but rechristened Dan The Sniff by the band. They played it live but never had the chance to record it. After Marc left the group he recorded this version using John's Children as his backing band which is why we can use it here. The song was not released until the 80s and he never returned to the song after forming Tyrannosaurus Rex.

Remember Thomas à Beckett - Released as the B side to the Desdemona single it was slightly rewritten and released as Come and Play with me in the Garden. Neither this song nor Come and Play feature Marc but they were released on singles that featured Marc on the flipside of the disc so we can include them here.

Sara Crazy Child - The B-side of Come And Play With Me In The Garden. Marc would continue to play this song on occasion with Tyrannosaurus Rex but never recorded it for any albums proper. A BBC version by Tyrannosaurus Rex appears on the Across the Airwaves LP and other BBC collections.

Jagged Time Lapse - There are several different versions of this song that appear on many different compilations The final version appeared as the B side for the Go Go Girl single that was released after Marc's departure. Go Go Girl was Marc's Mustang Ford with different lyrics.

Hot Rod Mama - The final song in the set shows how much potential this group had. If Marc had stayed and taken the time to get to know his instrument more they could have been a tight knit group as this BBC recording shows. The original BBC recording has an announcer talking over some of the intro forcing me to rely on some creative editing to restore the intro to its full potential.

The cover uses a band promo pic and a logo found on a promo poster and an attempt at an homage to the pop art of the day that the Mod's seemed so fond of.