J P SUNSHINE SUPER-ZAP THEM ALL WITH LOVE (That's still the hippie slogan. And they mean you) 

This is the story of J.P. Sunshine, from the heady days when every day was a trip in itself, when barriers were dissolving through the long summer of 1967. This is a story, hidden till now, that played almost unnoticed amongst all the hip scenes that were going down; The Roundhouse, Middle Earth, protests against the war in Vietnam. Psychedelia in the form of The Jimi Hendrix Experience, The Beatles at Apple.. Who'll ever know just how many good groups there have heen, who never -played any gigs, hut just had their own groovy self contained scenes going on; or, like Rod and Andy in J.P. Sunshine, played in the group as a hobby away from playing in professional groups.
J.P.Sunshine were J.P. aka Georgie Porgie, aka Jorj, aka George Duffell, poet, lyricist, bongo and xylophone player; Rod Goodway, tunesmith, arranger, rhythm guitarist and singer; Andy Rickell on backing vocals and lead guitar; Adrian Shaw on acoustic guitar and bass; Pat Morphin on percussion and Pete Biles on second bongos.
This was a band who really should have been on Elektra (the hippest label of the ‘60s). Theirs was a sound tied in directly with flower power, with recurring images of sunshine, sun and moon, tripping, eyes and skies; all syrup and sweet sugar, but that merely conceals a much sharper edge. Seen from a distance of twenty years, you can see as the songs progress from flower power, slowly turning sour.
The tape which was lost for years turned up under strange circumstances two years ago and is available on Acid Tapes. Here you can hear a very English distillation of the sounds that were coming across from the west coast of America. You find echoes of Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit", the Spanishy feel of that and chords that ring like the chords on Love's "Da Capo" album and Andy Rickell's lead guitar is at times beautifully reminiscent of Lee Underwood's playing with Tim Buckley with the added similarity of the bongos, and "Dark Star" brings to mind Jolliver Arkansaw's "Hatred Sun". But it's not a music of plundered influences, because all the elements pull together as J.P. Sunshine music. 
In the next couple of issues of Unhinged there'll be a lot more of Rod Goodway's 26 years making rock music, but to my mind the songs with J.P. Sunshine have the best vocal performances that he ever recorded; when his voice was at its strongest and he sang with a simple uncluttered full voice. Since then his technical ability has been as much of a barrier as it has been an advantage. Stranger still is the way that here Rod was singing George's words (like Doug Yule in the Velvet Underground), being George's voice singing without realising at the time how exactly the words were describing the activities that were going on under the surface in the group. The story is best told from now on in Rod's words.
"Before and up to September 1967, I'd always had dreams of stardom, wealth, etc. at some stage in my musical career and every piece of music that I'd ever performed, apart from the very early days, had been done on a professional basis. I hadn't spent much time sitting round in bedrooms playing just for the fun of it. But, in 1967, the times they were a changing, the whole attitude was different. Before I ever took LSD, I dropped out of my formal education and straight career that my parents had wanted for me. In '67 you just wanted to be with people who felt the same as you did; just sit in a park with them and sing for free. There were drugs, sure; but that was nothing new. Back in Calne there'd be plenty of dope smoking and Purple Hearts, as well as opiates in the form of Dr. Collis Brown's Chlorodine cough linctus, which was very strong in those days, legal, but equivalent to heroin if you took enough of it. Whereas now you buy what purports to be the same stuff (if you're foolish enough) and take a couple of tablespoons as the stated dose. In ‘65 or '66,the stated dose was one or two DROPS, so today's stated dose is a volume that could have killed someone with the potency it had back then. No, in '67 there was something very, very different, it felt like something special was going to happen. Certainly people, anyone prepared to drop out of the rat race and just come together was going to behold the most amazing things, like the second coming of Christ or like meeting up with extra-terrestrials, something I just felt it in my bones and so did a lot of people."
"My fiancée, Julia, had been left behind in Wiltshire to join me in say six months when I'd become rich and famous, in get rich quick swinging London. When she didn't hear from me, I guess she feared the worst and one night she turned up with suitcases. She couldn't stay with us, our landlady was sub-letting anyway. Within a couple of days, she found a bedsit in Swiss Cottage, where there was a nice friendly girl called Pat Morphin on the ground floor, who soon introduced me to her boyfriend, George Duffell. He asked me if I could put music to his poetry and it wasn't long before he came over to Hyde Park Mansions with some of his ramblings. I put some chords to them and they were songs on the spot. Simple, but it flowed and George was really chuffed."
"The visits to George and Pat's place became more and more regular and this was when I met Adrian and Maureen Shaw. He was a corona salesman with no musical experience, but he loved music and he started to play along with the songs on a battered 6 string guitar. Each time I visited, we'd have a few smokes and listen to George's latest records, mainly American imports from Captain Beefheart, Country Joe & The Fish, to more obscure groups like H.P.Lovecraft and The Thirteenth Floor Elevators. Always the coolest stuff, though they all seemed pretty obscure at the time; but Love, Jefferson Airplane, The Doors, you can hear all their influences in J.P. Sunshine. After turning on to these songs we'd play our own with Ade and I on guitars, George would play bongos and xylophone with a permanent grin on his face, Pat would play knitting needles on a tin lid and Pete Biles would play second bongos."
"Around this time Pete Biles and I set about finding Andy Rickell, who had been missing since the break up of the Pack. Nobody had heard from him for months. We eventually tracked him down to a hovel near Clapham Common and after hearing a load of wild tales about screwy landlords, black magic and other babblings, we kidnapped him and gained another lodger (four of us living in one tiny attic in Bayswater after we'd been chucked out of Hyde Park Mansions)."
"It was recorded on an ordinary 2 track. It had a sound on sound facility, but very little was put on top because you could only do two extra tracks before the sound went, so we were basically recording live rather than bouncing tracks. It was all acoustic at first; Ade and I would be playing 6 strings and the others played the o1d bongos or tapped knitting needles for ages until Andy came along and that was when it started to go electric."
"J.P.Sunshine" was one of the first songs, if not the first, September 1967, though the actual recordings weren't done till a year later, when we laid down the final session. There were lots of takes through the year leading up to that one main session. The lyrics of this were George's little ego trip. He was riding high then, "J.P.Sunshine is mine and thine", like he was J.P. and he was saying like you can have part of me as well if you're lucky. "J.P. Sunshine shine on me and thee I From light are we spun". Yeah, we were all little rays of sunshine, but definitely around him and he definitely held court. As a group of people he had the nicest possible power over us. On this track Andy's guitar really jumps out because it was one of the first ones that he put down and he wanted to show how flash he could be to get accepted by everybody else. We were eager for him to like Electric Music for the Mind and Body, we thought that was great, but he was probably a little shy of overdoing it, as he did (ha, ha) in later years.
"Hey Girl", that was the second one we did, it's mainly just me and Ade banging away, Andy's hardly there, a few "moo Moo's", harmony and a couple of bits you'd hardly know were electric. This one was about getting high, his first trips with Pat and declaring his love for her. "Hey girl! We're getting high , in the sky , so am I  look at me flying high when I try."
"Hand in Hand" was definitely a trippy song as well. About a good trip they had, but he had this dream afterwards where they were in the countryside, even though they'd had the trip in the flat. And they were walking and walking forever through these fields and looking at each other and noticing wrinkles appearing. There were years going past, but they were always walking through the same fields forever; on a beautiful summer's day; birds singing in the trees; forever summer, but with this fear of getting older. This thing of "More like a year than half a day", which sums up tripping really. Everything you've thought on that trip and experiences and the amount of time that's elapsed in your brain IS more like a year than half a day.
The exploding 'p's' of "Octopus" will haunt me forever. There was no way we could record that without the microphone picking up a pop on the 'p's'. George is all over that on bongos, Pat on tambourine and Andy does a very Jefferson Airplane solo like "Spayre Change". It was one of the earliest songs again, not a specific trip, just a freaky idea. He realised that an octopus wasn't a crustacean, but "crustaceous cutie" sounded too good to cut it out. It was just about a girl with her hands all over you.
"Love Scene" is just a blues in Am and Em; it's very effective and you wouldn't think that it's just a 12 bar in the minor. The long fadeout with Pat playing knitting needles on a biscuit tin was supposed to be a ticking away, a nice timey sound. It was more about the flower power kind of love to start with, but Pat kind of got wrote into it. He started "Love scene could've been for real" about flower power, the "All you Need is Love" thing, that feeling that really WAS genuinely around, but he began to think "Christ! This is ironic and adapted it. The whole scene round at his flat could've been for real, but it was getting physical in another quarter. I'm not sure that it was when he wrote it, but it certainly was by the time it was recorded. I love that line, "I die / you sigh / big deal". It sums up both really. It was one of the earlier ones musically, I'd tried out the tune with some of his other words, but it ended up here. The original intro was a bit boring, just a conventional piece of lead guitar. So I literally cut it off and turned the tape around and stuck it back on, so it's a miracle that it comes in right.
"This Side Up", that's one of the very first that I wrote with George, and not changed at all, except for Andy's sped up blues on the end. That was physically cut off and sped up and recorded onto another tape. You couldn't just turn a knob to alter the speed like you can today. There's a lot of symbolism there, but it's basically, 'How to Fuck on Acid' by Georgie Porgie. The shuddering stop was done by slamming my hand on the tape ~ and then off and on till it stopped.
At the time, we thought that "Nothing There But Your Hair" was a nice song, but a little scbmucky. There are some pretty trippy things in it like "Come to me, colour wonder," "Come down / the rainbow / to me," and the line about "slipping under", but it shows his insecurity with Pat. He'd got to that point in his life where everything was coming together, like the flat was paid for, but then he says "Now everything's there / you don't care." Pat was unhappy with George. There wasn't anything happening yet, it was just his feeling of insecurity, you know, suspicions and he was taking a lot of methedrine at the time. In the end Andy was actually staying there, like spending nights there, weird stuff, very weird. We tended to take the first line of the song as the title, so this could also get called "Watch Out! We're Drifting Apart".
The order the songs were written in was "J.P.Sunshine", "Hey Girl!", "This Side Up", "Hand in Hand", and then "Octopus" and, if it had then gone "Nothing There But Your Hair" and gone on getting gloomier and gloomier, it would  have been too honest for George, and too damn obvious. So, he started to juggle the order of the songs and tracks like "This Side Up" were shoved later on, so you'd have some bouncy, happy stuff there, "Post my thoughts off any place / This side up",
This one sounded really morbid and corny to me at the time, I mean, "My Eyes Are Raining", but he was getting really desperate when he wrote it, which was in April 1968. It wasn't out of a trip, though he had a pretty trippy state of mind anyway, the guy was on a permanent trip, he was never completely straight. Lines like "My mind dissolves / It's falling apart" could've been from a trip, but "I feel nothing / but this pain in my heart" is about something a little more normal. I said to Andy at the time, 'It's OK, but I’d prefer a bit more uptempo stuff.  I'm going to start writing it faster whatever he writes and whatever the words are.' And Andy tells me for the first time that things 1ook like they're going to start happening between him and Pat, apart from all the other chemicals that were around and George was getting on a bit of a downer. Also Andy was having a lot more to do with the music. He'd come along in February 1968, and we were playing together in White Rabbit and so it was getting that I'd go on to the next poem, setting it to music and Andy would take them and arrange them.
"Dark Star" now Andy wrote all of this music. He couldn't sing deep, so I sang all the low bits and he sung high. The words are pretty obvious in their meaning; "I saw a dark star passing'. That song was around when George actually put it to Pat and she said "You'll have to give me time", so he came up with "Swansong", which puts the whole situation out in the open. "Now we are two / who were one / the moon was you / I the sun / make your mind up / make it soon / cos this sun is lit by your moon / from my birth to my death soon". After a while of taking methedrine your nerves are so scrambled by lack of sleep and George was getting really morbid. It was obvious in "Swansong" that he'd sussed what was going on, "There were two of us / now there are three". George insisted that "Dark Star" and "Swansong" went down in that order and, of course, none of us had heard the Dead's song at that time.
After "Swansong" I took one of George's o1d songs so we could have something up-tempo. That was "Rising Free", from the days of good trips. . "I'm stoned rsing free / come on now catch up with me", from when George WAS J.P.Sunshine. We put that silly guitar on it, that dank a dank, kadank dsnk dank, that funky sound, which we turned psychedelic and got a sort of psychedehc funk.
Things were getting so desperate that you'd go round and Andy would be there and George wouldn't. One time we all piled into the room sat around waiting for George to get back. We started jamming and playing this bluesy thing. We were just getting into this when George came in and sat down, bongos between his knees, glasses down on his nose and he started to play. I said 'What's happening?' He said (through his nose), 'We're recording.' I asked him for some words and he just said very abruptly, 'Haven't got any!' You can imagine the vibes, very manic and electric and I just made up words as I went along and that was "Dirt Blues".
"Just prior to the whole scene blowing sky high, Pink Floyd's manager listened to the tape and thought it was very good, but suggested that nobody would take it seriously without a drum kit and a proper drum sound. But we were too far down by then; I don't know if George could have financed that kind of trip and it would have meant going right back to the beginning again, so it stayed the way it is."
I think that musically the whole scene could just about have held together had it not been for events that happened just before Christmas 1968. We had become unaware that the so- called Mansion apartments in which J.P.Sunshine got together & recorded music, had been under observation by the drugs squad. When I took a suitcase (containing certain herbal remedies) on the train down to Swindon, I was to meet a chap at the other end & shake hands with him. All went as planned until we actually shook hands, then someone yelled "Stop, police" and I was nicked. I didn't want to land any of my pals in trouble, so obviously I didn't tell the friendly 'bobbies' anything, but they already knew more about the goings- on in the town Mansions than I did. Presumably, their London counterparts were already busting the old place as they held me. Anyway, the upshot of it all was, that was the end of that scene. But there was a very strange postscript to this sorry tale: Apparently there were about six pounds of this herbal delight, which all arrived together in six separate bags. The two bags that I had were taken completely randomly from the pile. There were amazing reports about the efficacy of the contents of the other four bags, and yet, when the contents of Rod's (randomly chosen) bags were analysed ..... they turned out to contain nothing but curry powder & flour !! Too much monkey business for ME to get involved in. Or (as I'm sure was suspected by ALL concerned) did I make a switch ???    
But that was the straw that broke the camel's back and that was the end of J.P.Sunshine. I saw George only one more time after that. He got in touch and named a meet and we met again in a record store that had glassed in booths where you could listen to music and so he asked to listen to some particularly groovy sound of the times and it was all this whispered out of the corner of our mouths conversation. "What happened?"
We went down to Pye, or somewhere down in town and had them cut an acetate of the master tape and we had a box for it with a sleeve that Pat drew. We must have left it with George as a reward for all the time and money spent and he lost his lady, he lost everything. I guess all that he was left with was that acetate."
Before Rod became involved in the J.P.Sunshine scene, George had already tried a couple of other singer/guitarists to put music to his words. First, there was a guy called Ian Watts, a Geordie guy, who had been to Newcastle University with George and Pat. He was followed by a guy called Phil. But nothing they did was recorded. Strangely, the only photos of J.P.Sunshine that do exist are of these early lineups.