There has long been confusion about who actually participated in the band's recordings once they were signed to Reprise. According to Shaun: "We recorded the first Reprise album some time in 1966, although it wasn't released until the following year. I was playing bass, Danny was playing acoustic guitar and either Hal Blaine or Jimmy Gordon played drums. I'm trying to remember who played guitar - I think it was Ron Morgan. Ron was friends with some of the Standells. He was a great guitar player but he had no sense of responsibility or being on time. Sometimes he wouldn't turn up at all - he wouldn't even get out of bed to catch a flight! The last I heard of Ron he was driving a cab in Denver."
The involvement of Morgan, whose distinctive lead guitar playing can be heard on this and all their subsequent albums, has long been overlooked. A clue to his involvement can to be found on the labels of the records themselves, where he is credited (alongside Markley) with writing some of the most significant songs: '1906', 'Smell Of Incense', 'Eighteen Is Over The Hill', 'As The World Rises And Falls' and 'A Child Of A Few Hours Is Burning To Death'. Despite this, he appears in only a single album photo - as the mysterious mustachioed figure in the round glasses and cowboy hat on the back of 'A Child's Guide To Good And Evil'. He would look much the same a year or so later when he turned up as a member of the 'new improved' Electric Prunes on their dismal Reprise swan song 'Just Good Old Rock And Roll'.

The involvement of Ron Morgan also had another significance, because it seems that his arrival coincided with the departure of Michael Lloyd, an early casualty of the internal conflicts which would eventually destroy the band completely. According to Shaun: "Morgan got involved to replace Michael which was a thing between him and Markley - that was the time when Michael was starting his other projects." Danny recalls: "I was never involved in that. It wasn't Michael's fault. It was a personality conflict because people liked Michael and they didn't like Markley. The people who liked Markley were the sort of people who wanted to hang out at his house and meet starlets. I remember we were recording an album and there was an argument between Michael and Markley about who was going to walk out of the studio with the master tapes. It developed into a fistfight and Michael broke a guitar over Markley's back. He just decided 'Who needs this when I can do this by myself?' So the studio was shut down over at Burton Way and he had a custom-made 16 track put in his own home. At that time another guy was hired just to play the guitar - that was Ron Morgan. He was a very good lead guitar player and when the band dissolved he went on to play with Three Dog Night. Unfortunately he died last year in a car accident."

John Ware and Michael Lloyd

Lloyd himself has difficulty recalling exactly which of the group's recordings he participated in, but in view of the vast number of other projects in which he was involved this is hardly surprising. During 1966 and '67, as well as doing production work for Kim Fowley and Mike Curb, he also produced, played and sang on LPs by October Country and his own band the Smoke. He even found time to score Steven Spielberg's first short film 'Amblin''. Lloyd only shared one song-writing credit on 'Part One' - the beautifully understated 'I Won't Hurt You' - and although he had sung lead on the Fifo version of the track, the Reprise recording was sung by Shaun, who also took lead vocals on most of the other songs on the album. Michael's name or voice would not reappear on any of the band's records until the 'Where's My Daddy?' LP. According to Lloyd: "The problem was that, after a little while, it became more and more difficult for the three of us to be in a group with Markley. I don't want to make it sound like we hated him or that it got into a huge scene, but he started to believe that he was like, you know, the real deal, as opposed to the guy who doesn't sing and doesn't really have any musical thoughts and stuff like that. He wasn't content anymore just being the guy who ended up with the girls that he could get from it. Now he wanted to be respected or something - he wanted more out of it. Well, we had a lot of problems with that, because that wasn't the deal and yet we were in this kind of symbiotic relationship. So I ended up getting a deal with Tower and Shaun and Danny and I did some stuff over there as the Laughing Wind, but nothing really happened with that."
On the question of who sang on the records, Lloyd says: "Sometimes all three of us would sing at the same time, like on 'Sassafras' for instance. We recorded that as the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band, but never used it and put it out later as the California Spectrum. Occasionally we did stuff like that, because Shaun and Danny were kind of folk based - acoustic guitar, finger-picking stuff, you know - and they were used to singing kind of group stuff together. Not like lead singer / backing singer, which I was used to, but people singing harmony all at once. That was something a little different for me and it was a good influence. We did a lot of stuff like that - I don't remember now on a song by song basis - but a lot of them were Shaun alone. Who sang kind of depended on who was fighting with Bob at the moment and who wasn't, you know. Before, on the first recordings, it was almost always me and then later, when I had a falling out with Bob, it was mostly Shaun. It was like 'Well see, he's my favourite now', you know."

Recorded and released in 1967, 'Volume Two' (Reprise RS 6270) was a more ambitious work than its predecessor, with all of the tracks credited either in whole or in part to members of the band. The cover art was particularly striking, at its centre a photograph taken through a fish-eye lens showing Shaun, Bob and Danny sitting bare-chested on the floor of a silver bathroom. Inspired, apparently, by the Bond film 'Goldfinger', the interior was also highly reminiscent of Warhol's foil-covered Factory in New York. If one looks very closely, Markley appears to be grinning from ear to ear. On the back of the LP the band's name appeared beneath the slogan: 'Breaking Through' and at the bottom was the declaration: "Every song in this album has been written, arranged, sung and played by the group. No one censored us. We got to say everything we wanted to say, in the way we wanted to say it". Markley, no doubt, saw this as the perfect expression of the agenda which, like the name, he had foisted on the band, but as far as Shaun Harris is concerned, for 'we' read 'Bob Markley': "The cover was an Art Director's bathroom in a house in LA. It was probably someone who Markley knew, but if you look at the back cover you'll notice that his picture is bigger than Danny's and mine and this is a guy who is hardly on the record!" Well, in one sense that is true, for, as on the other records, Bob did not play any instrument (with the possible exception of percussion) and even though he contributed some of the vocals this was generally limited to his manic speaking, leaving the actual singing to the Harris brothers. But his ideas and, of course, his lyrics, dominated the record.

The album's startling opening was 'In The Arena', a bold, if not entirely convincing, political satire dominated by Morgan's strident guitar, Markley's megaphone-sounding voice and Shaun and Danny's cascading quasi-religious harmonies. But none of this quite prepared the listener for what followed. 'Suppose They Give A War And No One Comes?' was again dominated by Markley's extraordinary lyrics, although in this instance the missing credit should have gone to Franklin D. Roosevelt. The opening lines were borrowed from part of a famous anti-isolationist speech which he delivered at Chautauqua, NewYork State on the 14th of August 1936:

"I have seen war. I have seen war on land and sea. I have seen blood running from the wounded. I have seen men coughing out their gassed lungs. I have seen the dead in the mud. I have seen cities destroyed. I have seen two hundred limping, exhausted men come out of line - the survivors of a regiment of one thousand that went forward forty-eight hours before. I have seen children starving. I have seen the agony of mothers and wives. I hate war."

Complete with 'primitive' noises, an army of percussion and building to an impressive climax before ending with the sound of a baby's cries the composition stretches the listener's credibility to its limits.
Dan: "Here's this song with a strong rhythm behind it and we would slowly build up a wall of sound from the bottom up and the vocal was almost the least important part. The harmonies were right but the lyrics... well we thought that Markley was just an idiot who was trying to fit into a groove that he just wasn't into." Depending upon your point of view, it's either one the most pretentious things you've ever heard or a brilliant expression of anti-war sentiment.

Despite co-writing and singing on the next track, 'Buddha', Shaun was not impressed with the results: "Believe me, I'm not going to ask that they play that at my wake! Markley would give you a page of lyrics and tell you what sort of song he wanted it to be - that would be 'slow' or 'fast' - but he couldn't tell you nuances or anything like that."
The album's undoubted highlight, however, was 'Smell of Incense', which featured some wonderful interplay between Morgan's hypnotic guitar, Shaun's excellent bass playing and some extraordinary drumming from either Blaine or Gordon topped with the Harris brothers' breathy vocals. Despite the track's somewhat heady atmosphere, Danny insists that none of the band's music was drug inspired: "We lived the legend without the drugs. Shaun and I were Irish kids so we both drank a bit, but Michael had a very strict upbringing so he never even drank and Shaun never smoked." Kim Fowley adds to this: "I didn't drink, Michael Lloyd was brought up strictly and he didn't drink and Markley didn't drink either. All this madness was done without drink or drugs - not even dope. All of Babylon was raging about us but Pat Boone could have walked in and not been offended!"
On the vexed question of what category the band's music fell into, Danny has this to say: "Was our music psychedelic? I would say that it needed a moniker and all the rest of the stuff was bullshit. We were a band who considered that we could play any style of music - we had classical nuances in all of our albums. Many of these songs were created in the studio and Ron Morgan was a definite influence on the album - this was the one where Michael wasn't there. Ron's father was a jazz musician who played in pizza restaurants in Denver. Because he was a lead player I taught him how to fingerpick. This was an opening up our music into an honest statement of what it was - not when we were still searching for some common ground that people would buy. We never cared if it sold or not."

After the Overture, with Danny's short but beautiful coda, closed the first side, the flip was something of a contrast. For the first time - but not the last - the dominating theme of Markley's lyrics was either girls or women, although the distinction between the two seems deliberately ambiguous. 'Queen Nymphet' opened the side with the words: "You're too young / You're just a child" and continued with the refrain "When you're older". 'Unfree Child', the B-side to the group's second and last single - an edited version of 'Smell of Incense' (Reprise 0776 1968) - was also the nearest which Bob ever came to singing on record. Beyond the atmospheric beginning of slowed-down tape effects and echoing guitar and tabla the song addressed the unfree child "sitting at a dull desk in a dull school", then built slowly to a climax before Markley declared: "Let her be free. Let her sneak off on an adventure. Come tomorrow we'll watch the dawn. Delicate fawn. Let her be free."
According to Shaun the blistering guitar track 'Carte Blanche', with its repeated "Hey Trish, come on home!" and lines like "You left behind a hotel chain and a stately reputation", was based on a real person: "Carte Blanche was a credit card tied to the Hilton Hotels and Markley was friendly with Trish Hilton who was married to one of the family." One of Danny's contributions to the album was the banjo-driven 'Delicate Fawn': "That was a very polite little song about a guy who falls in love with a girl and wants to take her riding on his BSA motorbike. I said 'I don't want a bass player on this, it's too heavy.' So we used a tuba instead and we brought in a bagpipe player who was from the Black Watch - we got him through the Musicians' Union! We didn't know how to end the song so we just had him let the air out of the bag". The song ended with the line "Stay away from dirty old men." Says Shaun: "If Markley was obsessed with children it wasn't in a positive way."
Unfortunately, the inspiration behind the most obviously biographical song, the jazz-flavoured 'Tracy Had A Hard Day Sunday' - about a girl who "lit her candle at both ends and started flipping out on Monday" - remains a mystery. According to Shaun: "These were always personal glimpses, these were people Markley knew."

By 1968 the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band were poised to release their fourth album - but their last for Reprise. Thus far, in terms of record sales at least, they had conspicuously failed to set the world alight - or even the small corner they call Los Angeles. Yet in many ways 'Volume III - A Child's Guide To Good And Evil' (RS 6298) was the group's most extraordinary achievement. A newspaper piece of the time - the only contemporary record of Markley's words beyond his lyrics and sleeve pronouncements - provides us with a tantalizing insight into the creative processes at work within the group. After describing a rare live appearance by the band at a Teenage Fair in Portland, Oregon - at which six girls apparently fainted - Bob was quoted as saying this about 'A Child's Guide': "The lyrical content is so meaningful and gets in so deep that we are treading the fine line of perfect taste. Donovan did it on his 'Sunshine Superman' album, Dylan did it on 'John Wesley Harding' and I hope that we did it here. What I try and do is take as much material about a subject as I can, condense it to an exact point and hope to capture all the meaning that maybe forty pages of material would have." The article pointed to the album's closing track, 'Anniversary Of World War III', as the perfect example of Bob's economy with words - three minutes of total silence.

Whether one views the comparisons with Dylan and Donovan as justified - or merely as evidence of Markley's delusions of grandeur - the album was certainly the band's most complex offering to date. As its title suggested, the work was a fusion of innocence and malice, the subject matter perfectly reflected in John Van Hamersveld's striking cover art work. If the 'butterfly mind' represented both the transience of innocence and the psychedelic possibilities of a mind in free flight, its stark black and white setting rendered the image distinctly sinister. Hamersveld, who began working as an Art Director for Capitol Records in 1966, produced some of the most enduring images of the age, including the poster for cult surf movie 'Endless Summer' and album covers like Jefferson Airplane's 'Crown Of Creation' and the Stones' 'Exile On Main Street'. In 1967 he formed the Pinnacle partnership and promoted gigs at the Shrine Auditorium by the likes of Jimi Hendrix, Cream and the Velvet Underground. John recalls his work on 'A Child's Guide': "Bob Markley wanted a photograph of the band on the back so I took them up onto a hillside near Burbank and photographed them in colour with a Hasselblad camera and a wide angle lens. For the front cover I used the face from a photograph of Stevie, an artist friend who would pose nude for me. I combined my drawings and letterforms in black and white to create a stark contrast in the record racks. Black and white was also an issue in terms of dark and light karma. The butterfly's wings are a psychological symbol for reading in to the mind, like an ink blot test by a psychologist, but as art. In this image, the head is thinking of the butterfly image - freedom from the karma in the well of darkness." It was surely one of the most powerful and iconic cover illustrations of its era.

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