My Top 1000 Songs #896: I Won't Hurt You

[I've been writing up my Top 1000 songs on a daily basis--you can see them all in descending order by hitting the All My Favorite Songs tag.]

Early on in the life of this blog, I spoke of my enduring love for this strange little late 60s psych band with the disturbing backstory & lyrical content. But for all their exuberant creepiness, the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band had a few legit great tracks. "I Won't Hurt You" bridges the band's strangeness and ability to occasionally craft a cool piece of psychedelic music. It's a brief, barely audible tune, an amplified heartbeat serving as the lone percussion, with whispered vocals and probably the world's worst guitar solo--just a chord strummed a couple times with reverb into the other channel. Yet it's totally captivating and authentically of-the-moment.

Contributing to the difficulty in making sense of the band, an early version of the song first appeared on the band's indie label debut, 1966's Volume One; it's a more folk-rock-sounding song, a bit of a Byrds -by-way-of-Buddy Holly jangle, but pretty raw. They remade it in its quieter, heartbeat-driven form for 1967's confusingly-titled (but better-produced) second album, Part One. (Further confusing their discography, they returned to the original naming convention for their third LP, Vol. 2.)

1967 version:

1966 original:

Modern psych-rock band Thee Oh Sees make it even stranger:

Pretty fun cover I dug up on YouTube:

Another one: