Biography
Psychosomatic: For singer-guitarist John Salton, the curse of rock ’n’ roll isn’t all in his head. by Bill Murphy photo: Josh Prezant
It’s a Thursday night at Broadway Billiards in Aventura, and few customers are in attendance as singer-guitarist John Salton and his band, The Psycho Daisies, begin to play. Salton’s voice creaks like the rusty gates of hell when he asks the assorted pool players and beer drinkers, “How do you feel?” He might as well be talking to himself. Chances are, he’s asking himself the same question.
He tries to answer in several ways, first, by singing the Velvet Underground’s “Waiting for the Man,” with its line, “I’m feeling good, I’m feeling fine/Until tomorrow, but that’s another time.” It’s a song about scoring some heroin, and it inspires Salton to joke. He holds up his arm, showing off his own fresh tracks.
As it turns out, he has just been released from the hospital after developing pneumonia. He’s still on antibiotics, has a sharp pain in his chest and may need a lung transplant if his health doesn’t improve. “I can’t breathe,” he croaks to his bandmates. “Let’s do an instrumental.”
It’s hard to tell that Salton isn’t feeling well; his voice sounds just as it does on record — breathing is not the key ingredient in his vocal technique. His guitar-playing doesn’t seem to be suffering, either. Equally delicate and raucous, disciplined and frantic, Salton’s guitar doesn’t demand attention, it commands it. Its sound makes the modest stage seem large and the club itself enormous.
Through medical intervention and behavior modification, Salton’s health may return to normal. Once known for keeping three lit cigarettes at a time on-stage (one stuck in his guitar, one on his amp and the third in his mouth), Salton claims to have given up smoking. “I swore to God when I was in the emergency room and they were giving me oxygen that I’d never smoke again,” he says.
But no doctor is going to touch the disease behind the disease, the one that led him to be one of the holy terrors of South Florida’s music scene, the one he name-checks in the lead song of The Psycho Daisies’ latest CD: the “Curse of Rock ’n’ Roll.” In it, he sings, “It’s the curse that never gets you down, baby.”
It’s a paradoxical curse, one that has brought him both into and through snares and strife in his life. As a teenager, he was sent to a state school for kids with so-called “incorrigible” behavior. A janitor named Sampson provided him with guitar tablature to learn chords, licks and songs, and the young misfit, already a fan of the likes of Jimi Hendrix, Johnny Winter and Jeff Beck, was on his way. Sampson, who said he’d played with blues greats Albert King and Honeyboy Edwards, gave the young student the musical push he needed. When he left the school, Salton says, he had earned a medal for good behavior and an insatiable need to play music. “Without Sampson, I would have been dead,” he recalls.
Over the years, though, Salton had more than a few other brushes with death and left a trail of bodies in his wake, including former bandmates John “Sticks” Galway and Marco Pettit. The curse of rock ’n’ roll led to some near brushes with fame, most notably with Charlie Pickett and the Eggs, a band that spent some time with the famed Minneapolis indie label Twin/Tone. It’s a time that Salton does not think back on pleasantly. “Those Twin/Tone people were scared of us,” he says. “I felt a lot of bad vibes in Minneapolis.”
He recalls the heyday of the Miami rock scene much more fondly. “Back then, there was a huge scene,” he says, happily remembering the names of clubs that have since disappeared from the map: Blue Waters, the Tight Squeeze, the Balkan Rock Club. He’s also something of a historian of rock music in general and draws his influences from a wide spectrum of music, but especially garage-rock, the blues and art rock. He took the name of The Psycho Daisies from the title of a Yardbirds song. The title of his group’s latest CD, Snowflakes Falling on the International Dateline, derives from a line in a Lester Bangs essay about the influence of The Yardbirds, particularly on one-hit wonders The Count Five.
Salton doesn’t let his influences dictate his sound, however. “I never could play what someone else did note for note. The stuff that I’m listening to, it goes through me, and it doesn’t come out the way I want exactly,” he explains. “But it still sounds killer. … Sometimes, I think about how someone would play a song and approach it like he would, but I never could play it just like somebody else.”
“He has the capacity to always surprise,” says Pickett, who occasionally performs with The Psycho Daisies, of Salton. He runs you into a forest, and you have a melodious, harmonic riffing experience that you’ve never had before. He can almost levitate a crowd.”
Of course, Salton’s history of self-destructive behavior also inspires many of his lyrics, which document his heavy involvement in drugs. His songs bear the grit of personal experience and possess a down-to-earth nastiness. But they also have a spark of desire that more-idealized songs don’t. Salton recognizes this as an important part of his ability. “Everybody says I have a dark side and a light side. I like that. That’s because there are good things to life and bad things to life,” he says. “Sometimes, someone listens to a song of mine and says it’s a dark song, and someone else hears it and says it’s a happy song. I like that.”
Pickett acknowledges that drugs have had an influence on Salton but doubts that they’ve held him back much. “I don’t really know that if he hadn’t done drugs, he’d be a better player,” Pickett says. “As for what he’d have done without drugs, that’s just rank speculation. It’s like wondering what he would have been like if he grew up in L.A. or Chicago. Who knows?”
The current incarnation of The Psycho Daisies, what Salton calls the Mach 4 version, features keyboardist Bill Ritchie, bassist Jill Kahn and drummer Scotty Upton. The lineup signals a definite evolution of Salton’s sound and vision. “This is the first time I’ve worked with a keyboard,” Salton remarks. “It’s always been me and another guitar.” Ritchie’s Alesis synthesizer provides the frosting on a gaggle of classic-rock sounds, but the heart of the group’s new CD is Salton talking to himself in his favorite language (music), weaving tight riffs and searing leads, drenched in reverb and precisely emotive feedback, in carefully formed song structures that start sparely but burgeon into elegant and dramatic electric-guitar symphonies.
Outside Broadway Billiards, Salton sits in the passenger seat of a friend’s car, his feet planted on the pavement, his elbows dug into his knees. He struggles to breathe; his eyes open wide as if they too are attempting to draw in air. Nearby, Kahn is upbeat in a dark sort of way. “I’ve been telling people to come to the show; it might be his last,” she says with a wicked smile.
Kahn is entitled to some bleak humor; she and Salton go way back. The first time she saw him play, she said to herself, “That’s my ticket to ride!” They haven’t exactly been inseparable ever since. The two were a couple, but she grew weary of his lifestyle and took up with the Daisies’ bass player, Marco Pettit. After Pettit’s death from an overdose, Kahn then began learning bass under Salton’s tutelage. While Salton is clearly in charge of the band, it’s Kahn who seems to crack the whip on him. “He needs it,” she says. “When he’s hurt, he just wants to crawl into a little ball.”
Despite his health problems, Salton is intent on keeping busy. Live gigs with the Daisies and Charlie Pickett are in the works, as is the release of a Charlie Pickett and the Eggs greatest-hits CD on Chicago’s Bloodshot Records. Promising to follow the doctor’s orders to a T, Salton is tired of discussing his health. “I feel good,” he claims. “What’s to talk about?” at citylink@citylinkmagazine.com
contact: 305/891-7833 or jillkahn@ix.netcom.com
Psycho Daisies
Rumors of retirement are greatly exaggerated
New Times Article Published Jul 10, 2003
Common courtesy dictates that you should never telephone anyone even peripherally involved with the music business until noon -- at the earliest. Yet it's coming up on 4:30 p.m., and Psycho Daisies leader Johnny Salton is still struggling to pull it together to talk about his band's new album, Snowflakes Falling on the International Dateline.
"Just hang on," stalls bassist Jill Kahn. "He's comin'. He needs to open the other eye. We have practice tonight, so he was gettin' his, uh, rest in before we play."
Last spring, the Florida Music Awards presented the Psycho Daisies with a first-place honor for Best Pop/Rock Band. In this column, I noted that the group "emerged from retirement" (May 30, 2002) to accept the award. A couple of weeks later, Kahn mailed me a flyer for an upcoming show with the message, "Rumors of our retirement are greatly exaggerated. Still alive and well."
The award -- actually a six-inch trophy -- now rests in Kahn's living room. "Some plastic piece of shit," Salton growls when he finally gets to the phone, recalling the "embarrassing" night. Then he's apologizing for the delay.
"Hey," he says in a voice sounding like it's buried beneath a rusty coffee can full of old grounds and bird suet. "I was just takin' a nap, man."
Beginning when he was the ferocious guitarist for Dania Beach-based Charlie Picket, Salton has been active since the early 1980s and remains the exemplar of South Floridian psychedelic garage rock. Allmusic.com terms Pickett a "fine performer" and documents his backing bands, from the Eggs to the Magic City Three (MC3), also noting Salton's "fireworks" all the way up to the Psycho Daisies. Particularly impressed with the Daisies' 2001 effort It's No Fun to Be Paranoid, writer Kurt Morris praises the "mix of Britishy psychedelic rock and Detroit '70s rock. While Johnny Salton's vocals weren't spectacular, it really didn't matter because the guitar work made up for them."
At the end of the '80s, Pickett quit music to go to law school (he's now a practicing Palm Beach County attorney) after a string of albums under his name. That's when Miamian Salton and Fort Lauderdalian keyboardist Bill Ritchie formed a partnership that would ultimately become the Psycho Daisies. A revolving-door membership has plagued the band, most recently when drummer Bobby "Boom Boom" Gold left last summer. He was replaced by Scotty Upton, "a younger guy," Kahn explains, "with kind of a punk aesthetic goin'." Salton's still worn and torn from too much instant euphoria; his band has fallen victim to its most base inclinations, stumbling through drug-addled decades. A few didn't emerge on the other side: original drummer John Galway (ex-Eggs) died of AIDS in the early '90s, and original bassist Marco Pettit perished of a drug overdose in 1998, to be replaced by his fiancée, Kahn. And in some local circles, Salton, fond of taking long sabbaticals punctuated by brief returns to activity, has a ways to go to prove he's not a washed-up junkie.
Now, with Snowflakes in the can -- and available at Blue Note Records in North Miami Beach -- the band's higher profile of late has included three shows in as many weeks at Alligator Alley on Oakland Park Boulevard, where owner Carl "Kilmo" Pacillo counts himself an ardent supporter. "He likes us," Kahn says. "It's nice to play there and nice to work for him. Unlike Churchill's, he treats musicians nice, and you get a little money." And every once in a while, the Daisies report, Pickett will join the band on-stage.
Snowflakes, while energetic enough to suggest batteries recharging, clearly indicates Salton's oil-stained antecedents: the Dream Syndicate, Velvet Underground, MC5. The presence of five songs over the six-and-a-half minute mark makes it hard to pinpoint an exact centerpiece, but the nearly nine-minute "Losing Touch with My Mind" includes a minimal stuttering riff and a rambling Salton rant; his voice is as gruff as Tom Waits after drinking a ground-glass smoothie: "You know I'm sick/I'm fucking sick and tired/When I can't find my dealer/So I have to take that long walk/That long walk up to the methadone clinic/Well, I gotta go up a hill and then down another hill/And I'm way down at the bottom..."
At 7:44 in length, the raspy detox recount "Just Because" reaches a midway instrumental crescendo that's as beautiful and classic-rock destined as "Layla." A few rows over in the covers department, check out the ghostly choir backing the shambly chorus of the Bevis Frond's "Lights Are Changing" and the vicious bite of the Gun Club's "She's Like Heroin to Me."
Sensing a thematic thread about the dark side of the spoon running through Snowflakes? Ritchie reports that Salton's hard living has smoothed out some. "He's had his trials and tribulations," he explains, "but now he's as healthy as he's ever been."
PSYCHO DAISIES 
