DC Share Revival: Psychedelic Jukebox: [1967] David Hemmings

In the sweltering summer of 1967, amidst the feverish swirl of Los Angeles' burgeoning psychedelic scene, actor David Hemmings—then at the peak of his cinematic fame following Antonioni’s Blow-Up—stepped into a recording studio and did something few expected: he made a record. David Hemmings Happens, released that year by MGM Records, was not the usual vanity project by a bored actor dabbling in music. Instead, it was a surprising, spontaneous, and artistically ambitious work that stood at the crossroads of folk, psychedelic rock, jazz, and improvisational poetics. Although it was commercially overlooked at the time, the album has gained a cult reputation over the decades, due in no small part to the musicianship behind it (The Byrds) and the strange magnetism of its most idiosyncratic track, “Good King James.”

The album was produced by Jim Dickson, an essential behind-the-scenes figure in California's folk-rock revolution and known primarily as the original manager of The Byrds. His connections would prove pivotal. For the recording of Happens, Dickson assembled an unlikely band of heavy hitters. On guitar, the unmistakable chiming Rickenbacker of Roger McGuinn lent its psychedelic signature to the sessions. Chris Hillman, also of The Byrds, provided basslines that grounded the songs in a warm, folksy sensibility. Perhaps the most unexpected presence was jazz drummer Ed Thigpen, best known for his subtle and intricate work with the Oscar Peterson Trio. Thigpen’s inclusion signaled a serious intention: this was not to be a pop record shaped around Hemmings' image but a work of artistic synthesis drawn from a range of traditions.

Hemmings, though remembered primarily for his film career, was no musical dilettante. A former boy soprano who once sang under the baton of Benjamin Britten, he possessed a trained voice and a deep affinity for poetic expression. On Happens, he turned that background toward a kind of post-folk, semi-improvised vocal performance that defied categorization. “Good King James,” the album’s most adventurous track, serves as the clearest example of this. Hemmings did not arrive at the studio with lyrics in hand for the song. Instead, the words were generated spontaneously during the recording session, capturing a moment of raw poetic inspiration. The tape rolled as Hemmings essentially freestyled, his voice moving between speech and song, channeling an almost bardic mode as McGuinn’s 12-string jangled beneath him in modal, shimmering counterpoint.

The musical architecture of “Good King James” reflects the aesthetic openness of the period. It draws on folk and jazz phrasing while being infused with the psychedelic textures that McGuinn and Hillman had already begun to explore in the Byrds’ 1966–67 recordings. Though no sitar is used, the influence of raga-style improvisation is evident in the structureless structure of the piece. Thigpen’s drumming is especially worth noting—it is restrained but elastic, responding not to fixed time signatures but to the pulse of Hemmings' vocal cadences. The result is not merely a song, but a piece of sound art, one that anticipates the rise of spoken-word experimentation in music. Hemmings' vocal lines often seem to fall off the edge of a melodic phrase, only to pick themselves up in unexpected places, lending the track a disorienting but mesmerizing flow.

Though improvisation was central to “Good King James,” it was not unique to that track. The entire album was recorded quickly and spontaneously. According to later interviews with Jim Dickson and other sources close to the production, many tracks were first takes. The goal was not technical perfection but capturing a moment, a mood, a pulse. This approach owed much to Dickson’s work with The Byrds and their own transition from structured folk covers to the improvisational and modal explorations of songs like “Eight Miles High.” In this light, Happens becomes a sort of companion piece to the psychedelic expansion underway in the Byrds' own work—an offshoot rather than a sidebar, channeling similar energies through a different, stranger conduit.

Despite the pedigree of the musicians involved and the genuine musical daring of the project, David Hemmings Happens was not a commercial success. MGM Records, while intrigued enough to release it, offered little in the way of promotion. Hemmings himself, ambivalent about his musical ambitions and pulled back into his film career, did not tour or promote the album heavily. Yet its cult appeal has grown steadily over the decades, in part due to the reissue efforts by collectors and audiophile labels, and in part because of its sheer anomaly: a record that exists between worlds, made by a man who never made another like it.

The visual presentation of the album further amplified its ambiguity. The cover showed Hemmings with a distant, almost tragic stare, cloaked in shadow and costumed like a lost poet. Reviewers at the time—especially in West Coast press—compared him to a kind of psychedelic Hamlet, embodying the intersection of old-world melancholia and countercultural rebellion. This imagery, coupled with the haunting unpredictability of tracks like “War’s Mystery” and “Reason to Believe” (a Tim Hardin cover), shaped the album’s identity as something more than a musical oddity. It became a capsule of a transitional moment in the 1960s when artistic disciplines were blurring, when poetry, film, and music were melting into one another.

Saturday, July 5, 2025

Psychedelic Jukebox: [1967] David Hemmings - Good King James

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