Remembering Songwriting and Session Great P.F. Sloan, 1945-2015

By the time I caught up with P.F. Sloan in Nashville in 2006, the great ‘60s folk-rocker and songwriter had gone all the way through pop music and come out on the other side with a view looking out over the scattered wreckage of abandoned projects and thwarted potential.

Sloan, who died in L.A. on Nov. 15 at age 70, helped create modern rock ‘n’ roll, both as a slick guitarist who played on sessions by Jan and Dean and The Mamas and the Papas and as a songwriter who sang his own songs with blithe assurance. Often in tandem with songwriting partner Steve Barri, Sloan penned marvelous hits for such California acts as the aforementioned Mamas and the Papas, Johnny Rivers, The Turtles and The Grass Roots. But Sloan had ambitions to do much more.

Sloan came to Nashville to record with producer Jon Tiven, who had met the Queens-born singer in 1990. The resulting full-length, 2006's Sailover, may not have totally represented Sloan’s charisma, vocal chops and guitar moves — in fact, I perhaps unjustly slammed the record in the Scene upon its release — but his full-band show at The Bluebird Cafe that June demonstrated his grit, passion and genuine angst. Guitarist Tiven and keyboardist Fran Kowalski joined a rhythm section that included Sally Tiven and drummer Craig Krampf. Sloan reminded me of Box Tops and Big Star auteur Alex Chilton — he exuded a subtly dessicated, boyish charm that only partly disguised the angst, and he sang soulfully and played excellent guitar. But unlike Chilton, who re-invented himself in the '70s as a cooled-out rocker after a stint in mainstream pop with The Box Tops, Sloan essentially disappeared after 1968, and chalked up his stalled career to a combination of industry machinations and his own mental and emotional instability. Talking to Sloan, I got the sense that pop songwriting had been a minor detour in a journey toward musical transcendence, just as it seems to have been for Chilton and many other ambitious, disaffected American pop musicians. “Brian Wilson is considered a genius," he said at the time, "but I’m looking way in advance, when we’re gonna be looking at these things and saying, ‘That was teenage fluff, and it was well done. But it’s not [George] Gershwin, and they all want to be Gershwin. Gershwin isn’t relevant, because his world is vanished. I’m not a tunesmith.”

Sloan’s theories of a post-Gershwin, post-pop world were borne out on his superb 2014 full-length, My Beethoven, on which he combined biting string arrangements with his full-bodied piano parts, which are based on the work of the well-known German composer. It’s rich music that takes up where The Beach Boys’ SMiLE and Randy Newman’s Sail Away leaves off, and its eccentricity reminds me of Scott Walker's later work. But Sloan is a far less mannered singer than Walker, and the result is a record of strange, gnomic beauty and hard-won insights about the rigors of artistic endeavor: “There’s magic in piano keys / But in between these notes I’m playing / Is all the music that’s yet to be,” he sings on the record’s title track. Sloan played New Orleans music festival The Ponderosa Stomp in early October, and Tiven says the singer was gratified by the resurgence of interest in his work. “He was very focused on this gig for the Ponderosa Stomp,” Tiven tells the Scene. “He was sort of amused by the fact they were asking him to do a lot of his really early songs and focusing on the beginnings of his career. He was enjoying it and going with it.” Sloan also published a memoir, 2014‘s What’s Exactly the Matter With Me?, written with Steve Feinberg.

I was awed when I met Sloan — here was the man who had both co-written and played the central guitar part on the amazing 1964 single “Kick That Little Foot Sally Ann” with singer Round Robin and arranger Jack Nitzsche and played the guitar introduction to The Mamas and the Papas’ epochal 1966 track “California Dreaming.” He’d co-written Lloyd Thaxton’s obscure 1964 single “Pied Piper Man”—one of the craziest and best dance songs ever recorded. He’d done all this and more, but he had looked into the future of pop music and had found it wanting. The idealism and arrogance of it all was, quite frankly, breathtaking. P. F. Sloan is why I love pop music.