SAN FRANCISCO NIGHTSGene Sculatti and Davin SeaySt. Martin's Press, 1985 |
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"We were like the second San Francisco band to be signed to a record deal," Peter Kraemer told rock historian Pete Fram, " and this caused some resentment from groups who had been 'paying their dues'. It was a known fact that we were not hardened musicians; we had not played all the bars down the Peninsula, we didn't do a very convincing job on Chicago blues or do extended versions of 'In the Midnight Hour'..." On the other hand, the Sopwith Camel had a pedigree as impressive as that of any San Francisco band. After all, guitarist Terry MacNeil had come out of the Art Institute, drummer Norman Mayell had hung tight with the Pranksters, and Peter Kraemer, the mustachioed singer who looked like Ernie Kovacs with a pituitary problem. Peter was born in Virginia City, had gone to S.F. State and was living at 1090 Page with Rod Albin and John McIntyre (later manager of the Grateful Dead) way before Chet Helms jumped off the Greyhound from Texas. Boho roots? Eric Jacobsen, who produced the Camel (as well as the Lovin' Spoonful and the Charlatans), recalls that Kraemer's mother had been the center of an artists' circle in Nevada: "They lived in a 15-room brewery, and Dali visited them once and chased a bird through Peter's house." ***** What, then, was the rap against the group? Plainly and simply, that they'd gone and got themselves a hit single -- a bonafide, AM radio ditty-smash called "Hello, Hello." It was light-weight, camp, clever as all hell and it nudged itself into Billboard's Top 30 right next to "Pretty Ballerina" and "Too Much to Dream" and all those records by the Monkees, the Buckinghams and the Bob Crewe Generation. "I'd been out to California when the Spoonful played Mother's and the Longshoremen's Hall," Jacobsen explains. "And I'd already started working with the Charlatans. On one of my trips, somebody gave me a tape of these guys doing 'Hello, Hello.' I flipped out and knew I had to have it. I just knew it was a hit song. So I make arrangements to go meet the group. They're living in a little house built on stilts over this swamp. To get there, you had to walk a quarter of a mile on this rickety old one-board walkway that went out over the mud. I met them half way out there, high tide, and here are these five guys coming through the fog on this walkway, wearing tuxes and top hats and white gloves. They'd just come from playing some deb hall at a fancy girls' school. I mean, they looked pretty weird." ***** The meeting led to a Kama Sutra contract, as well as the Camels signing with Spoonful manager Bob Cavallo for representation. Then came the trip to New York to record the album. There, between the San Franciscans' first exposure to the big city (especially the seedy confines of the Albert Hotel) and Peter Kraemer's debilitating go-round with the flu, things fell apart. Rhythm guitarist Willie Sievers decided to quit, and was followed by Terry MacNeil; the cumulative effect was to postpone completion of the album that might have provided the Camel the momentum to get over the hump. While it owes much of its inspiration to the good-timey Spoonful sound, the Camel's first and only album reveals an engaging, idiosyncratic band clearly enjoying itself. "Cellophane Woman" struts '60s punk moves, while "The Great Morpheum" and the feedback-strewn "Frantic Desolation" suggest more ambitious ideas at work. "Postcard from Jamaica," the group's second single, continues the sunny approach of "Hello, Hello." But Sopwith Camel arrived too late to save the drowning band; released almost a year after its only hit single had peaked, the album's cover sticker read "Remember 'Hello, Hello?'" Five years later, the band recorded a comeback album, The Miraculous Camel Returns from the Hump (Reprise), but by then there was little magic left to believe in. |