I suspect that The Sweet Ride didn’t attract my attention back when I was researching Hoodlum Movies because it is not one thing or another even though it does have scenes with outlaw bikers. Malibu’s m’cyclists take second place to the surfing sequences, which in turn are somewhat overwhelmed by the tennis set and the sexual manoeuvrings of club members. In the end it is only the pulchritudinous attraction of Jacqueline Bisset . . . and the blast of Moby Grape playing house band at the psycho-delightful discotheque that remains in the memory.

Having bought the rights to William Murray’s 1967 paperback original, The Sweet Ride, 20th-Century Fox produced a hybrid drama that studio head, Darryl F. Zanuck, described as ‘tailored especially for youth. About the dropouts who live on the fringes of society, it may serve as an inspiration for those seeking to drop back in’ – sensationalism sold as a cautionary tale. Advertising copy for the film put a little more spice into the mix:

This is a wild trip into the world of the Now Generation. . . from the neon haunts of Vegas, the velvet traps of Hollywood to the Malibu beach parties.
Here are the people trying to make the Sweet Ride, that one moment when you know you're on top and you're the best there is at sex, surfing, or cycling. Add half a dozen beautiful girls to the scene and you get explosive right-now action-packed drama.
The exciting young cast of ‘THE SWEET RIDE’ includes Michael Sarrazin, sensational star of "The Flim-Flam Man," and Bob Denver, a TV favorite from ‘GILLIGAN'S ISLAND’. Gorgeous Jacqueline Bisset, who emerges topless from the California surf only to plunge her co-stars into mystery, violence and romance, joins Michele Carey, Lara Lindsay, Stacy King, and Corina Tsopei - The ‘Psychedelights’ - to give ‘THE SWEET RIDE’ all the sex appeal it can hold!

While in production, The Sweet Ride was described by the trade press as a ‘modern beach-scene drama’ and as a story about the ‘beach life of today’s go-go youth’. Its premise was an update on the out-of-date beach party film – the sweet ride to the darker side of that milieu. Sex, drugs and psychedelic music used to despoil the image of innocence portrayed in the Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon bikini beach blanket surf romps.

In 1965, William Murray had reported back to suburbia on the horrors of the Hells Angels for the Saturday Evening Post and had now worked these folk devils into his novel that exposed the bohemian lifestyles of a tennis pro, a jazz pianist and a surfer who live together in a Malibu seafront house. Their everyday world is turned upside down when Vickie ( Jacqueline Bisset) appears topless from the surf breaking on the beach beneath their pad.

The novel and film open with a young woman being thrown out of a car and left for dead at the side of the road. While the film is coy about what has happened, the novel is more explicit in detailing the sexual assault she had to endure. The story proceeds from this attention grabbing opening via a set of flashbacks featuring those who have had a role in the events that led up to the opening.

The victim, Vickie, is a movie starlet living a double-life; in love with a young surfer, Denny (Michael Sarrazin), but also hopelessly caught up in the sexual games played her producer. Hollywood glitz and glamour is set alongside the contumacy of Denny and his two housemates who avoid all forms of responsibility. Not one of them is invested in earning a living, Choo Choo Burns (Bob Denver) is a jobbing jazz man who hates rock ’n’ roll, Collie Ransom (Anthony Franciosa) is a tennis bum speeding into middle-age. Ciphers for the bohemian lifestyle of non-conformists. The contemporary sign of the times is the effort they and their peers put into avoiding the draft at all costs; the war in Vietnam is not their concern, and the police, like Vickie’s censorious parents and Denny’s drunken mother, are not to be trusted or held in any form of esteem.

Anthony Franciosa and Bob Denver create a frame for a Moby Grape poster

Their social world includes tennis clubs and dive bars, Beverly Hills mansions and beach-side crash pads, Las Vegas gambling rooms and Sunset Strip discotheques where Moby Grape perform in a swirl of a psychedelic light show with silent Keystone cop movies projected on the walls. In this detonating pop-art inevitable the young dance to the heavy beat sound of Skip Spence and his band mates and have their senses fried in that goofy cartoonish way that Hollywood of the time represented lysergic emanations.

Variety’s reviewer was unimpressed: ‘Flat, but briefly exploitable programmer about young people. Needs strong support on grind duals . . . The Sweet Ride could sum up as Hell’s Angels’ Bikini Beach Party in Valley of the Dolls near Peyton Place.’ The film was all of those things and none of them, its hoodlum bikers, led by two familiar faces from previous roles in the outlaw cycle, Charles Dierkop and Lou Procopio, act and dress as if they were an Ed Roth caricature bought to life. Their club is called ‘Freaks’ (‘69’ in the novel) and its members are laden-down with swastikas, Iron Crosses and German helmets and exude not much more menace than Eric Von Zipper (Harvey Lembeck) the biker figure in Beach Blanket Bingo.

Similarly the surf scenes are less than spectacular and not enlivened one bit by the appearance of a surf Nazi, Rick the Stuka, who tries to give our hero a hard time. The Stuka is an obvious caricature of Mickie ‘da Cat’ Dora – the hippest of the hip among the real surfing fraternity – but Stuka’s role didn’t add up to much beyond reinforcing the idea that youth subcultures wantonly adopted Third Reich symbolism to make themselves as obnoxious as possible.

The Sweet Ride is a Beat Generation hold-over movie with an acute case of ennui and an inept studio’s attempt to reach the audience attracted by product from independents like AIP and to those whom figureheads like Ed Roth peddled his goods, putting into play those elements of delinquent outlaw culture it understood as appealing to contemporary audiences. All of this it wrapped around the age-old melodramatic trope of the corruption of the young woman cast adrift in the big city. In its grab-bag approach to popular culture The Sweet Ride can only gesture in an enervated manner to the hip and the cool it so desperately, so very obviously, wanted to emulate. But yeah, Jacqueline Bisset, who steals the show, Moby Grape and a cameo from Lee Hazelwood, his title song sung by Dusty Springfield, might, on a good day, be enough to play out some spare time

***

Dusty’s re-recording of the title song was released as a single on Philips, it is marvellous. It was also the lead track on the soundtrack album helmed by Pete Rugolo. The Moby Grape’s contribution escaped inclusion but eventually, in edited form, was released on Vintage: The Very Best of Moby Grape (Columbia, 1993) and Sundazed’s enhanced release of their debut album (2007).

The only digital version currently available (or at least easy to attain) is a 20th Century Fox Cinema Archives release (2013), picture quality is okay but Panavision image is panned and scanned. The film and the Grape sequence are easily found on Youtube.

You’ll find few advocates for The Who’s ‘Call Me Lightning’. In fact, I’ve never read a word in its defence. Released it seems on not much more than a whim, a stop gap exercise between The Who Sell Out and Tommy or between ‘I Can See For Miles’ and ‘Magic Bus’. It touched #40 in the American charts, but was hidden beneath ‘Dogs’ on its first UK release, so doubly damned as that’s another forgotten 45. It was dismissed by Townshend at the time as ‘unrepresentative’ of the band’s current sound.

For me it is precisely its outlier status within The Who’s oeuvre that makes it a small treasure. I like their quirks, the second side of Ready Steady Who EP and things like ‘Waspman’. Their ephemera keeps the canon fresh, stops it from going stale. Anyway, Townshend was wrong. It was perfectly representative of what the band were doing in 1968, at least an aspect of what preoccupied them. It sits well alongside the Eddie Cochran covers, Johnny Kidd and the Pirates, ‘Young Man Blues’ and the like. ‘Call Me Lightning’ is part of that return they made in ’68 to teenage pop, a restatement of the ethos of rock ’n’ roll as deadly fun.

For many commentators it remains no more than a throwaway homage to Jan and Dean, but like Townshend they too are wrong. The song’s ‘dum–dum–dum–do-ays’ are more Dion and the Belmonts, New York doo-wop, than California surfing harmonies, equally loved by the band though they might be. The recording has an aggressive masculine spirit that is shared with ‘The Wanderer’ and is not there at all on ‘Little Old Lady (From Pasadena)’ or ‘Dead Man’s Curve’; it trades in a braggadocio wholly avoided by the West Coast duo.

The Who had already borrowed wholesale from Dion’s ‘Runaround Sue’ for their Talmy produced, yet at the time, unreleased novelty record ‘Instant Party Mixture’, which is a hoot; a paean to wacky cigarettes. The subject matter undoubtedly as responsible for its nixed release, coupled with ‘Circles’, as was the copyright implications of its pilfered tune.

The song had been in Townshend’s portfolio since at least 1964, the reason for its return, I like to think, was that it now had contemporary currency. In the Autumn of 1967, Nancy Sinatra released ‘Lightning’s Girl’. Lee Hazelwood’s composition would have been a perfect number for the Ronettes or the Shangri-las, which is to say it is as late to the party as the Who’s tune. ‘Lightning’s Girl’ is a warning from a girl to a boy, whose attention is unwanted, to stay away, otherwise he’ll have to answer to her boyfriend – Lightning.

Here comes Lightning down the street
While you just stand there talking
If I were you I'd start to move
And tell my story walking
About a hundred miles an hour!

If you want to know more about this cat called Lightning, well Roger can tell you:

See that girl who's smiling so brightly
Well I reckon she's cool and I reckon rightly
She's good looking and I ain't frightened
I'm gonna show you why they call me Lightning

And his ‘XKE is shining so brightly’, which if you know your Jaguars, as Pete certainly did, then he also has ‘grace . . . space . . . and pace’, which is another good reason to call him Lightning.

Maybe I’ve misheard what this is all about, but to me it sounds like a great pop conversation: ‘Call Me Lightning’ is best taken as an answer record to ‘Lightning’s Girl’. It’s the kind of exchange pop once had around Big Mama Thornton’s ‘Hound Dog’ with Rufus Thomas’ howling out ‘Bear Cat’ in return, or ‘Judy’s Turn To Cry’ as Leslie Gore’s answer to her own ‘It’s My Party’, or Neil Sedaka singing ‘Oh Carol’ and Carol King responding with ‘Oh Neil’, or, my favourite, The Satintones telling The Shirelles it’s ‘Tomorrow and Always’ in answer to ‘Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow’.

Great pop is always in conversation with itself

Light In The Attic have just released a double album of Nancy’s best. After having only ever heard these recordings on budget label releases, it is a sonic revelation. As always with LITA the packaging is to die for.