82: VANILLA FUDGE
You Keep Me Hangin' On/ Come By Day, Come By Night (Atco, 1967)

BLESS them. The mighty Fudge made their presence felt in a big way on the US rock scene in the late 60s - by a variety of means, if the rumours are to be believed.

The stories are hilarious, actually, whether or not they are palpably untrue. Legend has it that on the 67/68 Jimi Hendrix Experience/Soft Machine American tour, Hendrix's roadies turned up at a venue to find a wall of Marshall amps already erected on the stage and a number of forbiddingly stern-looking individuals in long coats malingering threateningly.

In response to the not unreasonable query of "whose bloody amps are these?", the sternest gent said: "These belong to the support band, The Vanilla Fudge."

"They're not the support band - Soft Machine are," replied Hendrix's roadies, at which point the stern gent's coat was allegedly whisked aside to reveal the fact that he was "packing heat". "There seems to be some misunderstanding: The Vanilla Fudge are in fact the support band." Ah.

We'll never know whether concrete overcoats were ever constructed for anyone who stood in the Fudge's way, but what is undeniable is that the band were heavyweight enough in their own right to steamroller everybody with their patented approach - which was, essentially, building concrete overcoats around pop/soul hits.

By halving the tempo, doubling the decibels and wringing every last drop of suppressed heaviosity out of their unwitting prey, the Fudge hit upon an approach which, while not overtly tasteful, nevertheless made for some tremendously exciting music.

Their spirited bludgeoning of the Supremes hit You Keep Me Hangin' On is a magnificent case in point: sprawling, over-reaching, hair-tearingly dramatic, utterly wonderful.

Check out the stupendous clip of this, live in a psychedelic intestinal tract on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1967, at www.youtube.com/ watch?v=iew6IdKUZt8