Happy Ending | Interview | ‘Have A Nice Day!’
Inspired by garage rock, psychedelia and folk rock, Happy Ending formed in 1983 in New Haven, Connecticut.
Their debut album, ‘Have A Nice Day!’ was recorded in the spring of 1983 in two day-long Sunday sessions. Jay Mundy and Hank Hoffman both sang and played guitar, backed up by drummer John Columbus and alto saxophonist Richard “Doc Equis” Brown, with Radio Reptiles guitarist Jeff Fisher on bass. Wedding dark lyrics reflecting Reagan-era fears over nuclear war, environmental degradation and unemployment. ‘Have A Nice Day!’ was released as a vinyl LP with an accompanying 7-inch 45 and lyric/collage booklet.
Hank Hoffman remixed the multi-track master tapes for CD in the 1990’s. The original band performed a reunion show at the Hungarian Hall in Wallingford, Connecticut on May 27, 2006, playing all the songs from this record. Thirty years after original release, the current lineup features original members Hank Hoffman and Richard Brown—now playing guitar and flute as well as sax—along with drummer Tom Smith and bassist Randy Stone. Pop meets psych freakout.
‘Armageddon Dread’ was the lead-off cut on the original vinyl album of ‘Have A Nice Day!,’ released in 1983. ‘Have A Nice Day!’ was remastered and reissued as a 40th Anniversary Remastered Edition in 2023. This music video was created for the new 40th anniversary remastered version of ‘Armageddon Dread’ by Hoff Matthews.
“We were children of the 1960s facing the dystopian trajectory of the 1980s”
Where and when did you grow up? Was music a big part of your family life? Did the local music scene influence you or inspire you to play music?
Hank Hoffman: I grew up in Fairfield County in Connecticut, about an hour’s drive from New York City. My parents played music in the house but it was mostly the grown-up pop of the 1950s and early 1960s, things like Acker Bilk. For me—like for millions of others around the world—music became a passion with the American breakthrough of The Beatles in February, 1964. I was only eight years old but I started listening to AM Top 40 radio and in 1965, a cousin from California got me a subscription to the first rock newspaper, the KRLA Beat (about which I’ve written a song). Top 40 radio at the time had very diverse playlists, encompassing British Invasion, northern and southern soul, folk, garage rock, proto-psychedelia, Bacharach-David pop, novelty tunes and more, almost all of it in compact 2:57 bursts. It was a very exciting time to be getting excited about music although, unfortunately, I was too young to go out and see the bands live.
When did you begin playing music? What was your first instrument? Who were your major influences?
I tried taking guitar lessons when I was in 7th grade but my hands were too small and the classical guitar I was using, which had been my father’s and probably had inch-high action, was not what I was interested in playing. My mother wasn’t going to shell out for an electric guitar if I wasn’t committed—but I “might” have been committed had I gotten a cool electric guitar!
But when punk and The Ramones came around—I went to their first New Haven show in July, 1976—friends of mine (Randy Stone and Jeff Reilly) said, “You could play this!” so I got a cheap guitar. It was a lightweight, Japanese-made Les Paul knockoff under the brand name “Castilla.” Punk was my primary influence but The Beatles were still a major influence. So while I started writing punk songs and playing in a punk style, I also got the “Beatles Complete” songbook and started learning more chords than just the power chords and major and minor triads. I’d say the first Stooges album, which we could only get as an import record then, was also a big influence on my guitar playing. The first time I played through my friend Warren McGuire’s Roland AD-50 Double Beat fuzz-wah, it sounded to me like Ron Asheton’s playing and honestly, that gave me a lot of (possibly unjustified) confidence! And though I didn’t yet have a genre name for it, garage rock of the 1960s was a big influence. But, really, I was listening to lots of different music besides punk and raw rock ‘n’ roll—jazz, reggae, free improvisation.
What bands were you a member of prior to the formation of Happy Ending?
I was just in one band prior to Happy Ending. With my friend Randy Stone, a bass player who had encouraged me to get a guitar, we had a basement punk band we called The Suburban Posers. Which we most definitely were. Under the more arty name of Dada Banks, we put out a 45 (‘Microwave’/’Communism’) in 1980 on Suburban Poser Records. It got a couple of reviews and was included in the book ‘Volume: International Discography of the New Wave’. Copies go for $100-500 on Ebay.
(The drummer on the record was Harris Gleen. Our friend Warren McGuire played some great guitar on both songs but was never an “official” member of the group, whatever that means in this situation.) We didn’t play out in our original incarnation but did finally play a gig under that name—with the original Happy Ending drummer John Columbus sitting in for Harris—in 2008 as part of a multi-band lineup for a CD release show for ‘It Happened But Nobody Noticed,’ a compilation of New Haven-related punk/new wave recordings from the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Can you elaborate the formation of Happy Ending? Who are members of the band?
I found out through a serendipitous conversation (friend of a friend) that a guy working at the same environmental activist organization as me, Jay Mundy, was a musician and songwriter. I called him in the organization’s Hartford office and he sent me a tape of some jams he and friends of mine from the New Haven music scene had made. And I loved it! There was a freakout jam on Van Morrison’s ‘Gloria’ plus a bunch of other tunes that incorporated elements of psychedelia, garage rock, Captain Beefheart influences, and free jazz.
Jay and I started getting together at his place and playing each other’s songs, cover songs, and free improvisations. We’d record them, then enjoy some herb, and listen back to them. Fun times! When I came into some money after my mother passed away, I got the idea to record an album that would be half Jay’s songs and half mine. To fill out the group for the record, we recruited mutual friends—John Columbus on drums, Jeff Fisher on bass, and Richard Brown on alto sax.
What influenced the band’s sound?
Well, one influence on the band’s sound was Jay’s and my limitations on guitar. While the rest of the band were good players, Jay and I were more primitive guitarists, although frankly I think that worked as a good thing, keeping the record from being anywhere close to slick.
But the key influences musically were garage rock, Byrds-ian folk rock, 1960s psychedelia, punk (particularly me in that case), and, perhaps oddly, free jazz. We weren’t afraid to play wacked-out jams that sounded like a collision of Sun Ra, Ron Asheton, and Lou Reed with the Velvet Underground at The Matrix (see ‘I Can’t Stand It’) or jams that cribbed from what Roger McGuinn was doing on The Byrds’ ‘Eight Miles High’.
We grew up on 1960s pop and psychedelic music. Richard Brown saw The Jimi Hendrix Experience and Janis Joplin with Big Brother & the Holding Company live in 1968. Richard was also very influenced by Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart and the jazz musicians Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, and Miles Davis. Jay Mundy and John Columbus, who went to college together, saw many shows at the Fillmore East and other venues; they were at the Fillmore East Frank Zappa show where the band was joined by special guests John and Yoko.
Your only album was self-released on your own label called Suburban Poser Records. How many copies were pressed?
This was the only vinyl record we’ve put out so far; we’ve had two other CD releases. If memory serves me right, we pressed either 300 or 500 copies.
What’s the story behind ‘Have A Nice Day!’? What’s the story behind your debut album? Where did you record it? What kind of equipment did you use and who was the producer? How many hours did you spend in the studio?
Richard Brown was in another band, Looking for Jobs, whose keyboard player Ray Shaffer had a project studio in an office building in Hamden, just outside of New Haven. Ray had a reel-to-reel 8-track recorder. His control room was set up in one office and a couple of doors down was another room for recording drums and other instruments. This record came together quickly. We recorded it—basic tracks and all overdubs—in two sessions of about 12 hours each in April and May, 1983; we did the mixing pretty quickly because Ray was moving out of the state. We recorded basic tracks—drums, bass, and rhythm guitar—first and then overdubs of lead guitar, lead and background vocals, and percussion.
We had about three or four rehearsals before each session; we hadn’t played out live yet at that point.
The record got some decent reviews. Claudia Bell, in the Hartford Advocate alternative weekly wrote that, “Every aspect of this record reflects the incongruity of its pull-no-punches word images and upbeat, melodic rock accompaniment… The overall effect is like riding a plummeting 747 and seeing your airline oxygen mask drop down in a Fun Meal box.” John Foster, in Op magazine called it “a future cult item for the collectors… if there is a future.”
On the other hand, you can’t please everybody. The verdict of the hardcore punk ideologues at Maximum Rock ’n’ Roll was that Have a Nice Day! was “a generally unlistenable pop-rock album. The lyrical sentiments are admirable, but only fans of cleanly-produced, commercially-oriented “modern” music will be able to sit through it all. The exceptions are a trio of nifty psych blasts (‘World of Hate,’ ‘Microwave,’ and ‘High Noon 75’).
There was a special 40th anniversary edition released.
The original ‘Have a Nice Day!’ came out as an LP with bonus 7-inch 45 with two additional songs. There was probably more music per side on the LP that’s advisable for getting the maximum volume and bass response. It sounded okay but in the 1990s I went back to the original multitrack master tapes and remixed the songs for CD in order to get more thunder in the drums and a stronger bottom in the bass. I put that out around 1995 or so as a CD-R but it was never properly mastered. With this year being the 40th anniversary of the release, I took those mixes to a really skillful local audio engineer, Greg DiCrosta, and had him master them. Greg really brought out all the best in the recordings and made them sparkle. Given how quickly the whole project came together, I’m quite proud of how it sounds.
What kind of gear did you have in the studio? What was the production side of recording like?
As I said, it was a project studio. I think Ray Shaffer did an excellent job of cleanly capturing what we were playing. We didn’t have a ton of equipment. I don’t honestly remember what kind of amps—although one of them was a Polytone amp—we used but as for guitars, we had a Gibson SG, Fender Stratocaster, an Ovation acoustic, and, in between the first and second sessions, I got a Rickenbacker 620 12-string electric, which I used on ‘Sleepwaltzing,’ ‘Since Then,’ and ‘Never Time Enough,’ and Jay used on ‘Gonna Be Some Sufferin”. Probably the only pedal used in the sessions was a fuzz pedal and I’m pretty sure it was a Mosrite Fuzzrite. I used that on ‘Forms and Structures’ and ‘Microwave’. Richard Brown played a Martin Committee alto saxophone.
“There very much was a concept behind the album”
Would you say there’s a certain concept behind the album?
There very much was a concept behind the album. We were children of the 1960s facing the dystopian trajectory of the 1980s. Much (although not all) of the music was influenced by the 1960s psychedelic and folk rock. But most of the song lyrics were heavily influenced by the political atmosphere of the then-present 1980s—the rise of Ronald Reagan as US president and his attacks on unions and economic equality and also the scary Cold War tensions. It was the era of the TV movie “The Day After” and Reagan making an off-the-cuff hot mic comment that “My fellow Americans, I’m pleased to tell you today that I’ve signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.” (That comment came the year after we recorded the record but there was real concern in the air about possible nuclear war between the US and the USSR.)
There was a lot of irony involved. The band name, Happy Ending, was an ironic comment on the possible end of human life from a nuclear war (not a climactic finish to a massage, as a lot of people assume). We used the smiley face symbol on our record cover and, when we played live, had the stage decorated with smiley faces. The lyrics were very dark and fatalistic but the music was upbeat, melodic, and almost pop, fitting with the concept of enjoying life and not taking things too seriously even in the face of an existential threat.
Speaking of irony, we didn’t know it at the time but our fears of possible nuclear war almost came true in between when we recorded the record and when it got released in December, 1983. Many years later, it was revealed that on September 26, 1983, Soviet Lt. Col. Stanislav Petrov—who was the duty officer at a command center for a nuclear early warning system—had to react when the system reported that first one then five missiles had been launched toward the Soviet Union from the USA. With barely minutes to act, he judged it (correctly) a false alarm. Against Soviet military protocol, he didn’t report the supposed attack. If he had, it could well have resulted in a massive Soviet retaliatory strike and World War III. Real nuclear war almost prevented our album warning of nuclear war from coming out!
Is the band still playing today?
The original band of me, Jay, Richard, Jeff, and John played gigs at the New Haven club The Grotto in December, 1983 and May, 1984 before Jay decided to pack it in and be—as he describes it—a “hermit” and Jeff Fisher moved a few states away for a job opportunity. With John Columbus and Richard Brown—now playing guitar as well as saxophone—I reformed the band in 1985 with Randy Stone of Dada Banks on bass. The next year, Tom Smith—who had been in a great New Haven band called Radio Reptiles with Jeff Fisher—took over on drums from John Columbus, who had other time commitments that took him away from the group. That version of the group recorded most of ‘Smile For the Camera,’ which came out on CD in 1996. Between 1990 and 2012, life, jobs, and family intervened. Different versions of Happy Ending occasionally played out during that time, including one in 1999 with Mr. Ray Neal of the band Miracle Legion on guitar. Other excellent lead guitarists who played with the group when Richard Brown was out of the state were Warren McGuire (1991) and Jim Montez (1991-93) and both feature on some songs on ‘Smile For the Camera.’ The original band reunited for a concert in 2006 to celebrate my 50th birthday and we played everything from a ‘Have a Nice Day!,’ some of the songs being played live for the very first time. The band with me, Richard Brown, Tom Smith, and Randy Stone have been playing out again ever since 2012.
The band is a lot tighter these days. Richard Brown and I spend a lot of time working out our guitar parts so we’re not stepping on each other’s toes. Randy Stone and Tom Smith are a superb rhythm section. We work on varying the guitar sounds in the songs with pedals a lot more than in the past. Currently, my pedal chain is a Catalinbread Wiio>Catalinbread Manx Loaghtan>Keeley Fuzz Bender>ZVex Super Hard On>Fulltone Clyde Wah>Catalinbread Bicycle Delay>Catalinbread Belle Epoch delay>Catalinbread Echorec. I should get a sponsorship deal with Catalinbread! Most of our sets are 3-4 minute songs but there’s always two or three songs that offer space for different kinds of psych jams, and we usually find those go over really well.
It’s funny how lyrics are as relevant as they ever were.
I credit the continued (unfortunate) relevance of our lyrics to my fellow songwriter Jay Mundy. He was the person who really took a cold-eyed, non-sentimental look at the world and particularly the way rich and powerful people manipulate life in their own interest, even to the extent of threatening all human life. There was a brief period at the end of the Cold War when some of the lyrics seemed to lose relevancy; unfortunately that’s recently changed.
Tell us about ‘Smile For The Camera’ (1996) and the live ‘Electricity For The Youth Of Today’ (2014) releases.
Unlike ‘Have A Nice Day!,’ which was completed quickly in two sessions, the recording for ‘Smile For the Camera’ started in 1987 and was completed around 1994. The primary group on that record is the current incarnation of Happy Ending—me, Richard Brown, Tom Smith, and Randy Stone. But there are a few songs featuring other musicians—guitarists James Montez and Warren McGuire, saxophonist and keyboard player John Smayda—who joined up when Randy wasn’t available because he was concentrating on his work and Richard had temporarily moved out of state. With this record, we started moving a bit more into psychedelic textures but still predominantly within the three-and-a-half minute pop song structure. But we did have a completely free improvised track on there (”59 Black Cadillac Cruises An Oasis d’Neon’) and put our very different spins on two very different 1960s rock chestnuts, ‘Louie Louie’ and ‘A Day In the Life’.
When the current incarnation of the band had been playing out for about a year, we had a friend do a Pro Tools multi-track recording of us performing live at an independent video store just outside New Haven, a place that I had turned into a music venue as well as a video store. Along with all our originals on ‘Electricity For the Youth of Today’ (including three songs from ‘Have A Nice Day!’), there are about six covers—much more than we would play these days. I’m particularly happy with our versions of ‘Heroin’ by the Velvet Underground and a fuzzy psychedelic run-through of The Beatles’ ‘Helter Skelter’ that includes a recitation of Beat poet Allen Ginsberg’s “Footnote to Howl.”
I believe we have tightened up quite a bit since ‘Electricity For the Youth of Today’ was recorded at the end of 2013, but it does capture well our blend of tight, compact psychedelic pop songs along with extended garage psych jams.
Would you like to discuss the Scott Amore (of early 2000s dream pop band The Butterflies of Love) collaboration?
I got to know the members of the Butterflies of Love when they were playing regularly in the New Haven area in the 1990s. I loved what they were doing and continue to be a big fan of Dan Greene in his post-Butterflies group Mountain Movers. At some point around 1998 or ’99, Scott Amore, the keyboard player for The Butterflies of Love, mentioned he’d be interested in doing some playing with Happy Ending. It didn’t happen then but when I started working on The Alex Butter Field project, I knew Scott was one of the musicians I wanted to be involved with. He played keyboards on that project and we also recorded a lot of the overdubs at his studio InnerSpaceSoundLabs. We hope to start recording a new record with Scott in the coming months. Scott is a great, easy-going guy with a ton of talent and a love for music. He’s currently playing with another New Haven-based group, Drifting North, in which Happy Ending guitarist Richard Brown also plays.
What can you say about The Alex Butter Field.
In the early 2000s, I found myself with about an album’s worth of songs that I was really happy with. But at the time I didn’t have a version of Happy Ending active. The only band member available was drummer Tom Smith. So I decided to record the songs as a studio project with Tom and recruit other musicians as needed. I had started listening to some great psychedelic pop around that time—Billy Nicholls’ ‘Would you Believe,’ Love’s ‘Forever Changes,’ Margo Guryan’s ‘Take A Picture’—and knew I wanted to go with something that was more textured and layered than the previous Happy Ending records.
Musician friends—Dean Falcone and Shellye Valauskas of the Shellye Valauskas Experience, Dan Greene and Scott Amore of the Butterflies of Love—recommended a producer and recording engineer in Connecticut with whom they’d worked, Michael Deming of Studio 45. I checked out Mike’s records with The Pernice Brothers (‘Overcome By Happiness’), The Apples In Stereo, and The Lilys (‘Better Can’t Make Your Life Better,’ ‘The 3-Way’) and loved them. These records sound good and the attention to detail in the arrangements was exactly what I was interested in exploring. I got in touch with him and sent him my demos. He liked the songs so I decided to make the record with him even though it was going to cost a lot of money (at least by my standards).
We started recording on Sept. 23, 2002 and the records were finally released as two mini-albums in 2020. So it’s an understatement that it didn’t go smoothly or quickly! Not long after we started the project with Mike, he moved his studio to a new location. Then he was spending a lot of time getting a boutique microphone and pro audio equipment business off the ground. But when I got studio time with Mike, it was a real education working with him. He was a stickler for playing in time and in tune and he had a great ear and had a lot of creative suggestions. He’s a mad genius when it comes to music. He was working on projects with others at the same time—the ‘Live a Little’ record by The Pernice Brothers (which is great), the late Neal Casal’s ‘No Wish To Reminisce’ (Neal played my electric sitar on one track on that record).
The project was started on 24-track, 2-inch analog tape. All the drums, bass, rhythm guitars, and vocals were recorded to tape. Some overdubs, too, with my electric sitar and Mike playing a Baldwin electric harpsichord that belonged to David Sandholm and was in the studio for David’s Rollo Treadway project. But eventually, Mike’s responsibilities with his pro audio business meant that we had to transfer everything to Pro Tools and I finished the rest of the project recording with Scott Amore at InnerSpaceSoundLabs.
Besides Tom Smith on drums, I had a lot of other great local musicians play on The Alex Butter Field recordings. Andy Karlok played bass on all the songs. Dean Falcone played sitar, acoustic guitar, electric guitar (great guitar solos on ‘Snowflakes,’ ‘Winter Light,’ and ‘I Followed A Shadow’), keys (including a real mellotron on ‘Winter Light’), and wrote the string arrangements for two of the songs. Scott Amore played a lot of the keyboards on the record. We had Erik Elligers (saxophone and flute) and Yannis Panos (trumpet) on horns and Netta Hadari (violin), Aimee Kanzler (cello), and Colin Benn (viola) on strings.
I played most of the remaining rhythm guitars and lead guitar not played by Dean. Guitars used were Fender Telecaster, Fender Strat, Jerry Jones Coral Sitar, Dearmond Guild Starfire Special, Danelectro 12-string, Danelectro Hodad Baritone guitar, plus some guitars in the studio that were either Mike’s or left for other clients’ projects—Fender XII, Gibson SG, Rickenbacker 360/6, and Rickenbacker 325/12. Mike Deming had some great amps at his studio, including a vintage Vox Cambridge Reverb, an old Fender Super Reverb, a Hi-Watt head that he used with a Marshall cabinet, and a Marshall amp that, when I played through it, had so much power that I felt like I was trying to ride a bucking bronco.
It was a real adventure to be able to work on a professional project with that attention to detail, trying to find a balance between pop songcraft and enough weirdness to the arrangements to entertain fans of psychedelia.
Both albums are great. Would you like to share some further words about it?
Thanks, I’m glad you like them. We were really pleased with the way they turned out. Mike Deming actually got back involved to oversee the mixing with audio engineer Greg DiCrosta at Firehouse 12 studio in New Haven and Greg DiCrosta did a great job mastering the records.
The records got some really laudatory reviews. In Shindig! Magazine, they wrote that, “Recording began in 2002 and the record is finally seeing the light – an 18-year gap that has been worth the wait, judging by the ace jangling music within, sitar-drenched sounds reminiscent of The Paisley Underground and XTC at their poppermost.”
Christopher Arnott in the Hartford Courant wrote, “These recordings, spread over two albums, were largely made in the early 2000s, with acclaimed Hartford-based indie pop producer Mike Deming. It’s a feast of unexpected instruments and aural surprises, swirling around solid melodies and Hoffman’s pleasant vocals. The brightness of the sound is beautifully upset by some dark sentiments in some of the lyrics.”
Maybe my favorite was by Eileen Wyatt on her ‘My Emu Is Emo’ music blog: “What I want isn’t a “song of summer” (massive yet ephemeral). It’s an album of summer: one that sounds equally good in an I-95 traffic jam heading back from a distant shore and on a back road in Vermont. One that picks up shades of meaning as you listen to it, live with it, drive with it, and come back to it each year. The Alex Butter Field’s ‘Psychedelipop’ is my first pick for this new theory of summer songs… ‘Psychedelipop’ is psychedelic pop: beautiful, complex, and rich in musical allusions, with a credit list that works as a pop quiz on the regional music scene. It’s a romantic album in the architectural sense: it feels like the moment of discovering ‘Pet Sounds’ or neo-psychedelics like Echo and the Bunnymen, in the way that memories are sharply more intense than the actual experience and also in the way that memories are shaped around who we are right now.”
Because so many of the players are involved in lots of different projects, it’s unlikely the record will ever be performed live by the original crew. But Happy Ending has started adding some of the songs from The Alex Butter Field records into our sets (‘Candy’s Got It,’ ‘Jesus Never Came Back,’ ‘Snowflakes,’ ‘Gardener,’ ‘I Followed a Shadow,’ so far).
Is there any unreleased material by Happy Ending?
There are a few songs from the ‘Smile For the Camera’ sessions that haven’t come out, including an alternate take of ‘A Day In the Life’. That alternate take was used for a video I made and posted on YouTube.
We had a multi-track recording of the 2006 reunion of the original band but unfortunately the mix on that isn’t great and the engineer who recorded it didn’t save the files. But I might try getting that mastered sometime and see if it’s worth putting out.
There are also a lot of songs that we’ve been playing out over the past 10+ years that haven’t come out on studio recordings and we hope to rectify that this year.
Looking back, what was the highlight of your time in the band? Which songs are you most proud of? Where and when was your most memorable gig?
Those are all tough questions. I think the highlight of my time in the band isn’t a singular moment but rather the opportunity to make music and enjoy life with good friends over the course of several decades and be at a place where we can still deliver an intense live show and come up with exciting new songs.
We’ve had a lot of really wonderful gigs—including opening slots for the Blues Magoos, Richard Lloyd, and NYC guitar noir trio Big Lazy—but the most memorable was a May 10, 1984 show with the original band. We played a New Haven club called The Grotto and made it a multimedia event with vintage cheesecake and anti-drug films from the 1940s and 1950s before we played to a great turnout of people who danced through most of the show. We’ve played shows at New Haven clubs like The Grotto, Tune Inn, Cafe Nine, The Moon, and Bar, as well as other venues like The Outer Space, Space Ballroom, and live radio appearances for WPKN-FM and WYBC-FM.
As for songs, ‘Microwave’ has a special spot in my heart because it was the first song I ever wrote. I presented it to my friend and bandmate Randy Stone and he dug it. It’s validating when you try something for the first time and it works out! Other songs from ‘Have a Nice Day!’ that I’m particularly proud of are ‘Planned Community’ and ‘Forms and Structures.’ The latter song goes over well live because we always end it with an extended fuzz-wah jam of dueling guitars by me and Richard Brown. It’s always different and it’s fun to listen to the recordings later and see how our different approaches feed and complement each other. Although Jay Mundy hasn’t played with us since 1984, we continue to include his songs (‘High Noon 75,’ ‘So Blind’) in shows—they have a great, straight-ahead, garage/folk rock energy and real take-no-prisoners lyrics. Other Happy Ending songs that come to mind are ‘KRLA Beat,’ ‘The Shortest Day,’ ‘Cityscape,’ ‘Planet Hell,’ ‘Surfing on Mars,’ ‘They Got 3 I’s’. As for The Alex Butter Field, my favorites are ‘Gardener,’ ‘Candy’s Got It,’ ‘Tear My Heart Out,’ ‘Winter Light’.
What else currently occupies you and other band members?
Tom and Randy are in big demand and play in a number of bands—cover bands, mostly, in Randy’s case, and rootsy rock and blues combos in Tom’s. Richard plays guitar in the psych folk group Drifting North and saxophone at times with the more free improv-oriented Light Upon Blight Ensemble.
Happy Ending is my main focus. With this upcoming recording project with Scott Amore, I want to take songs we play pretty electric live and approach the recording of them differently. While we plan to lay down the basic tracks as a band—The Alex Butter Field songs were built up instrument by instrument on top of click and scratch tracks—I hope to flesh out the arrangements with acoustic guitar and other timbres and textures, mostly influenced by what psych pop artists were doing in that classic 1966-69 period. Keyboards by Scott, fuzz guitar riffs, electric sitar, maybe strings on some songs. Have fun with the tonal palette, make it a treat for the ears!
Let’s end this interview with some of your favourite albums. Have you found something new lately you would like to recommend to our readers?
I find Bandcamp is an incredible resource for discovering new music. There’s a lot of groups doing exciting things in psychedelic music. Some of the records I have most enjoyed in the past few years are Levitation Room’s ‘Headspace,’ The Blank Tapes’ ‘Candy,’ Kioea s/t EP, Cool Ghouls’ ‘At George’s Zoo,’ The Vacant Smiles’ ‘Cooperation,’ lots of Triptides records, New Haven’s own Dust Hat’s ‘Come Back,’ Walrus’ ‘Cool To Who,’ Khana Bierbood’s ‘Strangers from the Far East,’ Chris Forsyth’s ‘Evolution Here We Come,’ and Goat’s ‘Headsoup’ and ‘Fuzzed In Europe.’ In recent years, I’ve gotten into listening to the improv psychedelic music by folks like the Powers/Rolin Duo, Elkhorn, and my friends in More Klementines and Spiral Wave Nomads. And of course, we have access to great world psychedelia now. I saw an amazing performance by the Mauritanian singer Noura Mint Seymali (booked at a New Haven club by Shaki Presents aka bassist Rick Omonte of Mountain Movers) and highly recommend her record ‘Arbina.’ Other world music psychedelia artists I’d recommend are Etran de L’Aïr (who I hope to see at a local club in the near future) and Mdou Moctar, both from Niger.
It isn’t recent music but the three-disc collection ‘Heroes & Villains: Sound of Los Angeles 1965-1968’ is an excellent comp. On top of that, I try to get every 7-inch release put out by Stu Pope’s Hypnotic Bridge label in California—I’d love to get a couple of Happy Ending songs on a Hypnotic Bridge 45! Stu is curating a great variety of contemporary psychedelic pop on his label.
Thank you. Last word is yours.
In the 1960s, psychedelic rock was cutting edge music. Whether I/we like it or not, psych rock isn’t as central to the culture these days as hip-hop, electronic music, and studio pop. But the fact is that there’s a ton of great psychedelic rock being made now. It’s fun to be part of that. Nothing has given me more joy in life than music—listening to it, attending shows, and making my own music with friends I love. It hardly gets better than when the band is playing together, whether at rehearsal or on stage, and we find ourselves totally locked in and touching something almost spiritual. Music is spiritual! You can hold a record in your hands or a guitar, but not music itself. That very fact is psychedelic, baby!
Klemen Breznikar
Headline photo: Happy Ending at Grotto (May 10, 1984) | Hank Hoffman and Jay Mundy | Photo by Elaine Osowski
Happy Ending Facebook / Bandcamp
