The Answers: “Lucifer Sam”

Dave Fleminger of the AnswersThe Answers’ sizzling cover of the mini-masterpiece “Lucifer Sam” by Syd Barrett’s Pink Floyd was a catalyst for myriad musical adventures.

Tell-Tale Heart Eric Bacher recently recounted how bandmate Dave Klowden’s urging to come watch the Answers play “Lucifer Sam” changed his musical life; it’s a tale eerily similar to my own memory of Noise 292’s David Rives insisting I run to watch a San Diego band that was actually covering Barrett! (I’ve long regretted that the Answers’ absence from the UCSD gig with the Three O’Clock prevented us from instigating a mass “Lucifer Sam-off.”) Gravedigger V and Nashville Ramblers vet Tom Ward also vividly recalls the Answers’ “Lucifer Sam” a quarter-century after the fact. It’s astounding the effects two-and-a-half minutes of music can wreak!

This viral gem was recorded in February 1983 and features Dave Fleminger (guitar, vocals); Jeff Lowe (bass); and Dave Anderson (drums). It’s spiky and wonderful, and it still holds the creative fizz of that moment of musical discovery.

Listen to it now!

18 thoughts on “The Answers: “Lucifer Sam”

  1. That’s really hot! I think it’s great… I recognize the song too. I don’t know if it’s from hearing the Answers do it back then or if I’ve heard the original.

    Dave, what kind of guitar/amp combo were you using? Sounds very Strat-like.

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  2. I remember Dave had two modern Carvins -a 6 and a 12. The Carvin 6 was something like a DC125 -- pretty state-of-the-art for 83. It had active electronics -- which was unheard of. He had a Carvin amp set-up, too.

    The combination allowed a great variety of tones and textures, that wasn’t possible with vintage equipment -- unless you wanted to separately switch between a Gibson, a Strat and a Rickenbacker, along with a Vox AC30, a Marshall and a Fender Twin Reverb!

    Flem could play all this stuff on the Carvin rigs -- and kick in to sound like Carlos Alomar on Sound and Vision if he wanted. Kinda cool. It was definitely not vintage aesthetic!

    There was a Fender Jaguar in there occasionally too. I think Flem used to use this when he wanted to beat a guitar around a bit more!

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  3. Carvin’s guitars were good, but I dont know about their amps. Their attempt at a Marshall half-stack didnt really sound like a Marshall.

    I remember Dave’s Music Man amp…it’s the one pictured in this photo. I have a Music Man myself…its been my main amp for like 20 years. Those amps are basically super-clean all the way up ( the preamp is solid state). On this song it sounds like a small Fender amp cranked up loud. To get a sound like that with a Music Man 100w like Dave’s (or was it a 200w?), you’d be blowing the roof off. Mine’s a 50w, and it has as much “clean” volume as a Twin Reverb. I think they’re some of the best amps ever made.

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  4. The guitar on this kind of reminds me of Chris Davies, who played in the Penetrators and a new wave cover band called the T Birds. Chris’ playing was great…he had the same kind of tone and crazy attack that Dave does here.

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  5. Yeah, Dave E. -- You’re right. He did have a Music Man amp, not a Carvin. It did have a solid-state pre-amp, and tube mains. Incredibly loud. You could make it harsh as anything by pushing the gain up!

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  6. I used to just be standing there in front of Chris at T-Birds shows (they played my Junior High and there was a club on Clairemont Mesa near 163 they used to play at a lot)…I’m this 14 year old roadblock with eyes, just stock-still, staring at his fingers, trying to figure out what he was doing. Probably was more than a bit unnerving to him.
    Chris is an amazing guitarist and musician. In the T-Birds he had a Strat with one of those Strat-o-blaster circuits.

    The Carvin 12 I had was a great 12, it had superlow action and in coil-tapped mode it still had a really hot chime (carvin humbackers have 2 sets of 11 pole-pieces per pickup…that’s 22 pole-pieces per!)…The neck ultimately gave out and warped after years of continual pull offa Ernie Ball’s 10-46 12-set.. but it was an awesome solid 12 that even stayed in tune! It spoiled me and raised my expectations of how easy a 12 can be to play.
    Going to the Carvin factory in Escondido (they’ve since moved) was amazing, you could even pick out the raw wood body you’d want on your custom-made guitar. I’m still not a big fan of their aesthetic (it was the 80’s, after all!) but I liked the utilitarian quality of the big pointy-horned block of clear-finished wood. Of course now I’m a total snob..
    Kevin Ring was the first player I knew with a Carvin…mysterious mini-toggle switches, 2-octave fingerboard, and a zillion tones.

    The guitar on this take of ‘Lucifer Sam” was my ’74 Les Paul Deluxe with mini-humbuckers…stolen later that year unfortunately. Makes me nostalgic everytime I see one of those in wine red. Mini-hums rule!

    The amp on this track is once again Steve Medico’s Lab Series L7 (thanks again Steve!). Those Lab’s are under-rated transistor monsters with nutty Bob Moog filtering eq’s. The Answers used that thing as both a bass and guitar amp before I scored my own gigging gear,.

    The Music Man in the photo was a brilliant box, a compact screaming 50 watt head with excellent reverb and like Dave said a clean sound that was crisp and sharp and LOUD almost all the way up the dial. Chet Atkins was quite fond of those Music Man’s. And then you could switch in an overdrive circuit that could be nasty and full of those Robert Fripp kinda distortion wails.

    Wish I had been more hip to the vintage trip at the time, but then again I wouldn’t have gotten used to playing thru new gear that actually was set-up well and worked! As I didn’t have a clue as to what made things work or not, when I did finally score some vintage gear (I guess it was just used+, not even true vintage yet!) I got frustrated that these fine, esoteric axes wouldn’t stay in tune! I’m sure there were electronic tuners available but I never had one..nothing like listening to a guitarist tuning their instruments endlessly between every song. And intonation…what’s that??

    ‘Lucifer Sam’ is number 12 of the 14 tunes we recorded that day back in Feb 83. I remember the producer/engineer coming into the tracking room after the ‘Sam’ take and very sincerely suggesting that I should learn to turn down a bit if I want to keep my hearing intact. And then I got the Music Man with a vented 2x12 cab…Blast off! Volume for days…escape Velocity!!

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  7. Jerry’s description of the power of this recording is perfect. I hadn’t heard it in several years- it’s a bit faster than I remembered (probably all those intervening listens to the original had reset the clock), so hearing this again reminded me how bad-ass rocking these guys were And that guitar phrasing! Words fail me.

    I vividly remember leaving SD with a cassette with a little green hand-made cover that had five songs from this session, ending with this brain-searing track. This cassette was the main thing I listened to for months at school, to the point where the tape was a shredded relic. The rest of the tunes were fabulous, too!

    And then I went home for the summer, saw the band (Headquarters I think), and the set had totally changed (along with the clothes and hair). This was the first time I had heard “Nowhere”. An incredible amount of fabulous songs, just in a few months…

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  8. This was recorded at either Dave or Mike Ewing’s SoundTech Studio (not sure which first name is correct) in a house on 1st Ave (?) in Hillcrest. He was running a 10 hours for $100 deal in a Reader ad. He had a really nice setup in there….he said he was a drummer, and he certainly knew how to mic a kit, and fast!
    I currently have the 1/4″ mix tape-reel of the whole session, but I did pay to keep the 1″ 8-track master tape, which in typical fashion I left at the studio and never picked up. Dave Anderson went back some years later and SoundTech Studio wasn’t at that location anymore. It would be great fun to remix this stuff with the 1″ reel but as it is even with the time constraint of one very busy day Mike (or Dave) did a great mixing job, including that high-tech 80’s delay effect!
    I haven’t transferred the actual 1/4″ mix reel yet, currently I only have these somewhat trebly cassette transfers from a dub I made in 1984, so I’m expecting there will be more bass and lo-mid frequencies on the original tape.

    The Les Paul (sigh)…that luvly 70’s Gibson maroon, burgundy with purple flashes…
    already yellowed binding. Found the Fred Flintstone puffy sticker on the ground outside the fence the day it was stolen, somebody must have jumped over with the guitar, and if I remember right they didn’t even take the case….*sob*….yabba dabba boo hoo…
    …I’m over it.

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  9. I’m going to try embedding a film with the Pink Floyd version of the song, since I know a few haven’t heard it:

    Listening to the Answers’ version the other day, I was struck by how radically they changed the tone of the song into something much more aggressive and angular. I’d never realized what a significant rethink it was.

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  10. Syd Barrett Home Movies!

    The Floyd’s is nice and woozy

    The Answers have -- as I mentioned -- picked up on traces of surf and Whoish sounds in this, playing them for all they’re worth. I now see also the touch of a Beatles fave of both Fleminger and myself: “Hey Bulldog.”

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  11. Jerry: I should note that your initial assessment of this song was so breathtakingly accurate, both Paul Kaufman and I were a little scared to comment! 🙂

    “Hey Bulldog” — you’re right! I never even thought of that.

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  12. Matt, I wish I left more room for others!

    I know that Dave F. and I both used to play that song a lot. Like Lucifer Sam, it dates to ’67.

    I think that songs from that year are generally well-known and under-regarded.

    Ray Brandes pointed something similar out on the “Never” thread. Personally, I was drenched in Between the Buttons, Something Else, Disraeli Gears, Nashville Skyline, Who Sell Out, Strange Days, Younger than Yesterday and Notorious Byrd Brothers, the First Traffic -- and the ever fascinating Forever Changes.

    There is something smoky and off-note about the songs of that post-summer ’67, that left many of them as footnotes 15 years later. Around Pat’s big E-Street house, there was a shift from “Glad All Over” by the Dave Clarke 5 to this stuff… We played a lot of it.

    Gonna' Build Myself a Castle, Far Up in the Sky

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  13. According to CNN, “In the early days of Pink Floyd, Wright, along with Barrett, was seen as the band’s dominant musical force.” Really? I’ve never heard Richard Wright credited like that. …

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