Sonny Bono | Psychedelic Skeletons

The back is even scarier-it prints the lyrics!

Sonny
"I Just Sit There" and "Pammie's On a Bummer"
(Sonny Bono)
both selections from the album Inner Views
(Atco Records)
released 1967

"I never thought I'd cut a record by myself. But I got something to say, I wanna say it for Cher and I hope I say it for a lot of you."

"Laugh at Me" by Sonny Bono,1965

As teenyboppers' newborn king and queen, Sonny and Cher were red hot in 1965. So hot that the pair's success even afforded Sonny, who had a voice like the horn on a Hundai, the chance to bleat on a solo hit of his own--the lovable "why-pick-on-li'l-ol'- long-haired-me" anthem "Laugh At Me." When an insecure and equally unsure voiced Ian Hunter auditioned for Mott the Hoople, he sang both "Like a Rolling Stone" AND "Laugh At Me"--high praise indeed!

For some unexplained reason, Sonny cut an entire album by himself in 1967, two years after "Laugh at Me" hit and its follow-up "The Revolution Kind" flopped. Its cover is this hideous etching of Sonny, with a drawing of Cher as a smoky genie touching her heart and his to assure the remaining fans this is no declaration of independence. The back is even scarier-it prints the lyrics! This belies the notion that at the time of issue, this album was every bit the important statement to Sonny that "Laugh at Me" had been earlier.

"You say you kinda wanna revolution?"

WHEN SONNY GETS BLUE...AND PSYCHEDLIC TOO!
In Sonny's 1993 autobiography, The Beat Still Goes On, he admits "I tried chasing the newer sound for awhile but could never get a handle on it. The LP Inner Views was my attempt at psychedelic music." Without a musical role model since Phil Spector stopped making records the previous year, Sonny was left scratching his head and wondering where all these sitars were gonna fit into his leaning Tower of Pisa of Sound. The answer: nowhere, but it wasn't for lack of trying. There aren't two grooves pressed together on the whole first side that escape contamination from squiggly sitar runs. Like the dull droning buzz of a dying bee or the huma faulty air conditioner, it runs constant through side one's two songs. Yes, you read right. TWO SONGS! Because Sonny understands the requirements of this new music (to take drugs) but stubbornly refuses to follow through with those requirements, Inner Views is a most fascinating psychedelic skeleton in the closet.

Inner Views' opener is a studio jam entitled "I Just Sit There," which does just that, for about twelve interminable minutes. Try imagining a sitar riddled rewrite of "The Beat Goes On" then imagine Sonny and the band tackling it alone while Cher goes to the grocery stores and supermarts, uh-huh! Sonny is rightfully pissed that everyone around him is stoned and not buying Sonny and Cher records anymore. "Smell the air -it's real uptight" he warns. About six minutes into this ditty, after Sonny's quoted "Ring Around the Rosey" and rhymed "sturgeon" with "virgin", he favors us with a snatch of "Glory Glory Halleluia" and leaves us this elevated observation:

"I wonder why we want to fly
The closer we get to the sky
The less we see with the naked eye
The world looks like a little ball
And people don't exist at all
Oh wow!"

THE BONO MAN'S NO DONOVAN!!
You think you're out of the woods once the printed lyrics for "I Just Sit There" run out but then there's a painful harmonica solo after which he starts right at the top of the song again, only this time he's suddenly emotionally committed to this tripe, barking out the lyrics and instructions to the band like he's whipping a team of Alaskan Huskies. And yes, even the harmonica solo isn't exempt from Sonny's deja-voodoo. "Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord" How 'bout that, they harmonize With a car that's doing fifty five Isn't that wild machines can sing The driver's digging everything And he joins in while four cats sing I read the news today oh boy I just sit there I just sit there" Give Sonny credit for some progressive thought--he quotes "A Day In the Life" seven years before Bowie does the same thing in "Young Americans". But Sonny's not through pilfering Pepper just yet. If you skip over to track two, the verses of "I Told My Girl To Go Away" are the exact same melody as "I read the news today oh boy." At a dirge-like speed no less!

Sonny asks Cher if she could turn back time far enough to erase Inner Views master reels!

UPTIGHT BUT NOT QUITE OUTASIGHT!
Sonny's bad trip improves little on side two. "I Would Marry You Today" accuses his bell-bottomed beloved of taunting him and jangling his nerves while the album's stiff single "My Best Friend's Girl Is Out Of Sight" finds him in a jealous rage during a double date ("I watched them kiss I watched them hug"/My stomach turned and I got bugged"). All this sets the stage for the album's downbeat final "Pammie's On a Bummer". The first two of its seven minutes are occupied with the band sounding as if they are trying to break into an instrument shop without a flashlight. The bad freaked-out guitars must be the same person who squawked mercilessly on the harmonica before, one Salvatore Bono. I mean, who'd pay a session guy to play this bad. Once that's over with, Sonny introduces you to Pammie, a street walker who apparently isn't lovin' life, either:

"She started smoking pot just to keep herself from flipping
But it wasn't strong enough so she graduated to tripping
Every day she'd take a ride to hide from the world outside
And all her tears were so cool 'cause they were so easy to hide
Pammie's on a bummer and nobody knows where she's at
Fate gave her one more vicious blow
She got hung up on an untouchable cat"

Whether Pammie's fallen for Elliot Ness, Rico, Youngblood or Phil Spector is open to debate here. By the time Inner Views was released, Sonny was well over thirty and maybe he'd already stopped trusting himself. By 1968 Sonny and Cher's hip factor was exhausted. As if to hasten that decline, the future Congressman came on like a groovy narc in a widely distributed anti-pot educational film shown in grade schools that rivaled Reefer Madness for its flimsy grasp of reality. Sonny, dressed in paisley threads and love beads, advised kids that smoking pot will make them so paranoid that they'd jump out of windows. In truth, far more kids probably took that fatal leap after listening to the Vanilla Fudge's The Beat Goes On album, easily THE worst psychedelic album of all time and one which Sonny was inadvertently responsible for, since it featured nine nauseating revisions of his song. The failure of Inner Views convinced Sonny to forget about the kids and go after their parents instead. It's a record he had to make but it's not a record you need to hear. And you probably never will unless the pro-Bono sentiments get even more militant or Rhino Records gets la-did-da-di-dee, la di- da-da-desperate. "

RECOMMENDED
The Beat Goes On:The Best of Sonny & Cher (Atco) has everything you need to hear from this pair. Because Sonny played such a convincing stooge, it led folks to credit Cher with possessing all the talent. It's a common assessment his George of the Jungle-ish death at the trunk of a missplaced tree doesn't seem to have shattered. Sonny was an underrated songwriter/producer/arranger who apprenticed as Phil Spector's flunky until he fashioned his own European version of "the Wall of Sound," a kinda leaning Tower of Pisa of Sound, if you will. There's enough accordions, oboes, zithers, clarinets and balilakis on hits like "I Got You Babe," "Bang Bang" (a solo hit for Cher) and "Little Man" to make you think the records could've been issued in a checkered tablecloth with a Menu Touristica slipped inside.

NOT RECOMMENDED
Avoid any MCA best-ofs-they contain hits from their TV years. Whenever you see an Atco hit like "I Got You Babe" listed, it's not the familiar 1965 smash but a bored exctraction from the 1971 curio Sonny and Cher Live! Most people say Shoot Out The Lights! is the definitive disintegration-of-a-marriage album, but even Richard and Linda Thompson had enough decorum to keep "your mother is so fat" jokes out of it. "We throw a sheet over your mother and show movies," Cher snickers to the tanked up Las Vegas crowd. Sonny counters by saying "Nothing goes on after the show. She doesn't move that way off stage" and "she not only has headaches, she tells me what time they're coming."

Speaking of headaches, also missing in CD wasteland is Two The Hard Way, Cher and Gregg Allman's sole collaboration besides son Elijah Blue. The only mindbending feature is the laughable cover which features a completely zonked out Greg plonked on top of a perfectly coiffed Cher, as if the photographer stashed Allman's dope behind her bustiere!