Flo & Eddie & Me

When I am hip-deep in the History of Rock & Roll, I always say that the Seventies – specifically, around ’71 to ’76 – is my favorite period, for two major reasons. The first is the depth and expanse of creative expression in any number of subgenres, from country-rock to psychedelic funk to the beginning thrusts of disco, that surpassed nearly any other epoch you’d care to examine. The second is that the aforementioned creative expression, at many points, was just fucking weird. Like, “could only happen in that time” weird. Capes. Crocheted shorts. Yeti-like facial hair. Singer-songwriter suicide notes that received saturation airplay. Did I mention capes?

So it makes perfect sense that, during this brief window of WTF, that two figures from a Sixties pop band would rebrand themselves, recalibrate their musical and artistic attack, and renew the askew in an otherwise earnest and anguished rock and roll landscape. Flo & Eddie are Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan, originally from The Turtles; however, due to a contractual issue, they could not use their real names at the beginning of their post-Turtles career, so the duo of Flo (a.k.a. Phlorescent Leech) & Eddie were born. Over their peripatetic career, they performed with and enriched the work of artists such as Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, T. Rex (most notably on Electric Warrior and The Slider), Bruce Springsteen, The Psychedelic Furs, Alice Cooper, Blondie, and many more.

As Flo & Eddie, they made five albums: The Phlorescent Leech & Eddie (1972), Flo & Eddie (1974), Illegal, Immoral and Fattening (1975), Moving Targets (1976), and the full-on reggae album Rock Steady With Flo & Eddie (1981). Once they were able to obtain the rights to the material from The Turtles, they retreated from the Flo & Eddie personas to fully embrace their old work, with the odd Flo & Eddie song thrown into the mix at each stop on reunion tour after reunion tour. Sadly, the charm and insouciance and shit-hot playing of their Seventies work is largely forgotten under the Boomerification of their catalog, but if you can find those first four platters, you will be treated to some singular talents at the top of their game.

It's all there. If you’re looking for L.A. psychedelic rock a la Love, then “Feel Older Now” from The Phlorescent Leech & Eddie (which also has the goofy island ditty “Nikki Hoi”) will do the trick. Want the best cover versions of “Days” by The Kinks or “Afterglow” by Small Faces? Dig into their self-titled effort. Care to sample the delightfully goofy and supple talents of a Flo & Eddie live gig? Illegal, Immoral and Fattening is a mostly live document that manages to capture superb musicianship and scatological humor in equal measure. And Moving Targets has their best economical pop and rock moments, as well as some social commentary about life on the road and cultural division. (Rock Steady, while a bit of an outlier due to the wall-to-wall authentic Jamaican sound, is a mellow and charming delight, like a surprise child long after you’d stopped trying to have kids.)

When you survey the work in total, you get to see something unique in Flo & Eddie – an act that can authentically toggle between the mainstream and the counterculture, often in the same song, offering serious fun without always being so, y’now, serious. And not to diminish Flo (a jester and dynamo on stage), but in Eddie, you get to hear a once-in-a-generation vocal talent able to offer choirboy purity and gutter grit, harmony and melody and all points in between. They were so likable that David Bowie took them on one of his Seventies tours just to hang out. In an interview with Lou Reed on The Midnight Special, they made Lou look like an actual human rather than a malignant asshole. They made “Metal Guru” and “Hungry Heart” and “Love My Way” soar into the heavens, to the jukebox of the angels. Flo & Eddie deserve to be remembered and heard and enjoyed, for we will never see their likes again. Please watch and enjoy.