Rebirth of the Yellow Payges
Few performers know rock ‘n’ roll’s maddening quicksilver nature better than Daniel Hortter. As founder and lead singer for late-’60s Los Angeles psych-rock sensation the Yellow Payges, who appear at Burbank’s Viva Cantina on Nov. 15, Hortter rose to, and plunged, from big beat’s glittering zenith within a feverish 42-month cycle.
“We started as a surf rock band in 1965, called the Driftones, but we broke up the following year,” Hortter said. “I was going to the Hullabaloo where a good friend of mine played bass in the Palace Guard, the house band. They were doing ‘I’m a Man’ but didn’t have a harmonica player, so they said ‘Well, we’ll just toss a microphone into the crowd and you can play harp.’
“Pretty soon I ended up onstage and the management there asked if I had my own band and of course I said ‘Yes,’ even though I didn’t. So the Driftones got back together, and changed the name to the Yellow Payges because we wanted something unique and easy to remember.”
They developed a particularly vibrant hybrid of frantic rock and double-barreled blues, tinged overall with a soulful, melodic psychedelic pop sensibility that made for an irresistible sound.
“We were playing hardcore rock ‘n’ roll, that’s all you can call it. That’s the way we played and that’s why we were so well received, because it was the early stages of garage rock and hard rock, which then became acid rock and heavy metal. It was hard-driving music, we were very aggressive in the way we played.”
They were packing famed Sunset Strip club the Hullabaloo and quickly expanded their creative range. “We were making records and one of them was ‘Our Time is Running Out’ by Jimmy Webb, who wrote ‘Up Up & Away’ and ‘MacArthur Park.’ No rock band had ever recorded any of his songs, none of his stuff was in the rock genre. But he felt that the Payges, because our manager had good connections and it was a song that played well in the antiwar climate of the Vietnam era, should be the one to do it.”
“Dick Clark sent us out on a national tour — just us, as headliners, and one opening act, he called it ‘Happening ’67,’ that was 45 cities in 45 days. That year we played on a huge bill at Birmingham High School in the Valley, with Jefferson Airplane, Canned Heat, Buffalo Springfield, every major band was there it seemed along with 10,000 people in the audience, out on the football field.
“But I’d say that August 16, 1968 playing at the Hollywood Bowl, that was the pinnacle of our career. We’d all gone to see the Beatles there, and I told the guys ‘We are going to play on this stage.’ They all just laughed at me, said I was crazy. But three years almost to the day, there we were along with Eric Burdon & the Animals and Tommy James & the Shondells. The Animals liked us so much they invited us to tour with them, which we did for the next year — it was awesome.”
Along the way, the Yellow Payges were making some astonishingly original records, cutting songs in occasional studio sprees in Tennessee, Texas and California. They seemingly had it all going for them: growing national fame, minor radio hits and an apparently limitless future.
“But in 1969, our manager made a financial decision, because we needed money,” Hortter said. “AT&T came and said they wanted to buy the name and make up a band, kind of like the Monkees, to prove to America’s youth that the phone company wasn’t an evil entity. So our manager said ‘Why? This band is well-established, they have had some regional hits across the country, and they’re polished, professional. And so we agreed — it was a sizable contract.”
“The next thing we know, they dressed us up in these black velvet pants and yellow satin ruffled shirts and we were playing in AT&T’s offices, conference rooms and cafeterias all across the country. We started thinking, ‘What the hell is this?’ and then in 1970 we did these TV commercials and it just completely undermined the band and destroyed our reputation. We became the enemy.”
“We were floundering, the guys all started leaving the band, I went solo with a Buddha records deal and that was it. But I was so burned out and dismayed that I left the industry entirely. It was over before 1970 came to an end.”
It was an ignominious end, and one that banished them from pop culture history, and they became an unknown quantity, a band completely forgotten for the next 40 years.
In 2001, the former band members began to talk again, and eventually regrouped. The 21st-century Yellow Payges are as aggressive, hard driving and intense as ever. Horrter and drummer Danny Gorman are both mesmerizing, high-voltage performers, and their first-rate material remains nothing less than compelling. Rarely has a second chance come with such high-intensity appeal.
“We don’t know what exactly is going to happen for the Yellow Payges, except that we just want to keep playing.” Hortter said. “I really enjoy it.”
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Who: The Yellow Payges
Where: Viva Cantina, 900 W. Riverside Dr., Burbank
When: Saturday, Nov. 15, 9 p.m.
Admission: Free
More info: (818) 845-2425, www.vivacantina.com
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JONNY WHITESIDE is a veteran music journalist based in Burbank and author of “Ramblin’ Rose: the Life & Career of Rose Maddox” and “Cry: the Johnnie Ray Story.