"I HAVE been seeking PF Sloan, but no-one knows where he has gone," are the opening words in singer Rumer's new single, and if they sound even vaguely familiar, that's because they were written a few decades ago by Jimmy Webb.
Webb was better known for Wichita Lineman, By the Time I Get to Phoenix and MacArthur Park, but PF Sloan remains one of his most intriguing songs. It has been covered by, among others, Jackson Browne, and Webb himself performed it in Edinburgh a few years ago.
So who is PF Sloan? He was born Philip Gary Schlein, in New York in the mid-1940s, and spent most of his teens in LA. He released a single in 1959, and in a music store met Elvis Presley, who agreed there and then to teach him a few guitar chords. Together with colleague Steve Barri he penned numerous surf songs. Folk-rock was a revelation to him, and he wrote several classics, including (at the age of 19) the protest song Eve of Destruction, his best-known achievement. Barry McGuire's gruff-voiced 1965 version topped the US charts despite (or because of) a radio ban. One sociologist detected similarities in its beat to Spanish civil war songs and even Nazi hymns. The song had a faux-Dylanesque way with words, and Sloan began to be compared to Dylan.
Sloan was, to quote allmusic.com, a seminal figure in the evolution of West Coast pop; throughout the mid-60s, his partnership with McGuire was "a hitmaking force to rival the likes of Bacharach/David or Goffin/King".
Sloan fell off the radar, producing new material at extremely long intervals. There were also battles with depression and catatonia. But he's still around, and there are ghostly imprints of him on the internet if you look hard enough.
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