The Standells still kick up their singular sound

If you happened to pass longtime Burbank resident John Fleckenstein on the street, it’s unlikely he’d rate a second glance. A veteran cinematographer, Fleckenstein also ineradicably altered American culture through his alliances with two of Los Angeles’ most critically important rock ‘n’ roll bands: Love and the Standells.

While his stint with the former was brief, the latter, with whom the bassist-composer has performed since 1967, is still firing up listeners with the roaring, proto-punk garage sound introduced via their sneering classic 45 “Dirty Water.” As captured on “The Standells: The 60’s,” a brand-new Sony-released live album, the group’s gritty, kicking big-beat power burns as hot as ever.

A recent conversation with Fleckenstein and Standells founder Larry Tamblyn provided a dizzying safari through the frantic go-go-go of the 1960s Hollywood music scene. “Back when the Standells started, things were very different,” Tamblyn said. “There were few groups, very few self-contained units. We had long hair in ’63, before the Beatles became big, but when we got the job at PJ’s” — the prestigious West Hollywood jazz club where they were house band for 18 months — “which was very conservative, they made us cut it off.”

“And we signed with Liberty Records, but always seemed to end up with the wrong producer. When we did ‘The Shake,’ it was supposed to be a really wild, raunchy rock song but it came out sounding like a polka — they had a clavinet on the record! So we went to VeeJay and Sonny Bono produced a couple of things, but he was a protégé of Phil Spector and so it was that whole ‘Wall of Sound’ thing and not raunchy rock ‘n’ roll at all.”

After meeting writer-producer Ed Cobb in 1965, things finally came into focus. When they rearranged Cobb’s “Dirty Water,” (inspired by a Boston mugging Cobb suffered), the Standells not only had a hit, but they’d pioneered an entire new genre: “We did that with Armin Steiner, a really great recording engineer at his own studio, which he had built in his garage at home,” Tamblyn said. “So, yes, it really was genuine ‘garage rock!’”

Up on the Strip at the Sea Witch, Fleckenstein was also making rock ‘n’ roll history. “I had just graduated from Hollywood High and saw an ad in Variety saying the Chuck Edwards Band needed a bassist. I got the job and Johnny Echols was their lead guitarist,” Fleckenstein said. “One day, he brought Arthur Lee up on stage. He was a kind of a strange guy, but we became friends, started our own band, the American Four, playing clubs around town. Then we changed the name to Love.”

Arthur Lee, the black, Memphis-born psychedelic visionary, quickly exerted a resonant influence over the entire rock ‘n’ roll idiom, beginning with a sensational engagement at Bito Lidos, just off Hollywood Boulevard in a tiny Cosmo alley. “It was Love and the Doors, and the place so small, and so many people were coming, that they just put a bunch of Bixby speakers outside, blocked off the street with barricades and charged admission.”

“Arthur was great, and we had started recording the first album. I wrote some of ‘7 & 7 Is’ — the bass licks I played formed a lot of the song, and I had written ‘Can’t Explain,’ but at the time I really wanted to get into the movie business, so I left to join the Cinematographer’s Guild, which was a whole involved process.”

Fleckenstein successfully joined the guild and became a working cameraman but, by 1967, realized that rock ‘n’ roll was in his blood. Following the success of “Dirty Water” and a six-week national tour with the Rolling Stones, the Standells were a nationally known force, one that also coincidentally found themselves in need of a bassist.

“They had an open audition, and I got in,” Fleckestein said. “Five days after I joined the band, we had a big show at the Santa Monica Civic — with Love opening. And Arthur was still so mad at me that he had his road manager go around and unplug all of our amps and microphones. When we went on and started playing, there was nothing, no juice!’’

Tamblyn and Fleckenstein roared with laughter recounting the incident, but there was a bittersweet postscript. “One of the most important things to me about the guild was the health insurance, it was comprehensive,” Fleckenstein said. “And years later, I had leukemia and with the insurance, I was able to get the [bone marrow] transplant and survive.” A pause. “Arthur also had leukemia and he had no insurance. And that’s how he died.”

With the Standells, Fleckenstein was riding high: “I was an instant rock star! We were on the cover of Tigerbeat and 16 magazines. We played all the biggest places, it was a great experience.”

Fleckenstein also wrote the classic “Riot on the Sunset Strip” for the Standells, but later that year, the gravy began to curdle. Their song “Try it” was deemed indecent and denied airplay, initiating a cloud of controversy that didn’t help matters.

“When they shut down ‘Try It,’ it destroyed us, literally,” Tamblyn said. “Ed Cobb was great at first, but he became more and more dictatorial. We were being excluded from decisions, and he had us doing more and more R&B stuff, not the wild garage rock we were known for.” By 1970, the band was splitsville.

“There was nothing else like it,” Tamblyn said. “Everyone from Iggy Pop to Guns ‘N Roses talks about the Standells. We are considered the progenitors of punk rock and garage rock.”

But the Standells never really went away, he added. “We just put out a new record, we did an 18-city tour last year, played a big festival in Italy, and we’re getting great reviews ... The Standells are still going strong and having a great time doing it.”

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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.”