As much as Sky Saxon has been deified – and not just in the last week or so – it doesn’t sound, from his discs during that first phase of the Seeds that the band was too much more or less than any other garage act of the time. Maybe it’s because I hear Roky Erickson in Saxon’s voice as much as Mick Jagger. It might be that most of the instrumentation on each of the group’s three proper full lengths could be relatively easily duplicated by any number of groups. Or it might just be the fact that he hit on a girl I knew at a show and left her a dirty old man message at three in the morning. Admittedly, the band was good. And those singles are on par with anything from ’65-’67. Beyond that, in much of their subsequent work, it sounds as if Sky and company are desperately seeking to find another height the might equal “Pushin’ Too Hard.”

Released in ’65 as well as "Can't Seem to Make You Mine," the two singles served to make the Seeds pretty well known in Southern California. And most assuredly each of those songs made at least some small impact on other stations across the country. But as the Seeds finished that first, self titled disc, someone must have known that there wasn’t going to be a follow up that would match that clutch of songs as a whole. It’s interesting, though, to get through the rest of the Seeds catalog and hear where the band thought it was able to recreate that glimpsed glory in a four minute track.

Most egregious in this hunt for another “Pushin’ Too Hard” is “Thousand Shadows” from Future. It’s in the same key and even features some of the same sort of back up singing – all echoed and distant in the mix. Of course, some could construe this as a simple stylistic variation, but there are too many similarities for that to be the case. The Seeds and Saxon can’t be faulted for attempting to grab at the top 40 again, but the band just wasn’t able to do it. With that being said, Future is still a pretty entertaining disc despite the fact that it doesn’t meet up with each and every expectation that may have been set up by its predecessor.

Claiming just eleven tracks, Saxon does make each one count as every offering (pretty much) moves past the length that singles needed to be squeezed down to in order to fit onto a single side. The album’s closer, an admitted foray into non-commercial psych, Saxon removes most of the garage trappings of his band as he, the rhythm section and a harp work through the track. It’s been referred to as the Seeds attempting to cash in on the Sgt. Pepper’s fervor of the time, but any real listen to the disc – and that album closer, specifically – exhibits a singer and a group struggling to figure out what the next thing is. And with that organ vamp, recalling everything from the Velvet Underground to maniacal church music, it appears that the Seeds found it again, if only for seven minutes.