Mr. Llime - Whatever Happened to Danny ben Israel?

   1. Introduction
   2. Brattleboro.
   3. Bus Trip.
   4. I believe in Fairytales
   5. Gibsons.
   6. Stand There & Let Me Look.
   7. The Assholes of Today
       are the Hippies of Yesterday.

   all - Ernest Samuel Llime
   except #7 - music Danny - lyrics Ernie

Lyrics

Danny Ben Israel had a couple
of hits with The Northern
Command Troupe (among the
IDF draftees, some of those with
any talent got assigned to one of
the many entertainment units.)
After attending the Festival of
the Isle of Wight and discovering
the correct usage of sex and
drugs in Europe, he came back
to Israel and (in 1970) created
one of the greatest psychedelic
masterpieces ever. That was
"Bullshit 3 1/4". It turns out that
around that time he also
recorded enough material for a
second album that was unheard
of until 2003 when a little outfit
named Merry Records got a hold
of the masters and issued for the
first time anywhere, a collection
of recordings with the title of
"Kathmandu." I only got hold of
it recently (December, 2005.) It
overwhelmed me. A definitive
masterpiece of psychedelia it is a
must for any scholar and/or pot
head. I found it at one of my
favorite web stores JAZZIS.COM
Anyway, it seems there isn't
anymore of this anywhere and so
that it doesn't end there, I will try
to create some tunes to
celebrate my find. Hope at least
some of you will enjoy.

This is a loose translation (from
the Hebrew,) of the liner notes
found in the Kathmandu booklet:

One year after The US held the
famous Woodstock festival, On
the other side of the Atlantic
Ocean, Europe held an event of
its own - The Festival of the Isle
of Wight. The time was the end of
August 1970, and opposite the
performances of Jethro Tull, The
Who, Leonard Cohen, The
Doors, and Miles Davis, were
seated tens of thousands of
singing flower children. Amongst
all of them there was one who,
with his long brown curls and the ▼

If things work out a little bit differently, I could have been this guy. When I was a teen, I used to sing some of Danny's pop songs. Eventually, I drifted into the underground, psychedelic music scene (mostly in an auditive sense.) Unlike him however, I never gave up on music even while trying to develop a career and helping feed and raise 4 children. Some of the things I put together lately, even sound like some of his stuff which is why I am working on this project. Hope it will be worth it.     Ernie

joint in his mouth, was indistinguishable from the rest. He was however quite distinguished by the fact that he was one of a handful of Israelis at this monumental event. For this youth, this was the end of a process that had begun with a successful career in The Northern Command Troupe, continued with  a stint as a local pop star and ended with the doors of the Israeli establishment slammed in his face.  In 1968 Danny ben Israel (that was his name) had returned from a trip to Europe in which he had freshly discovered the world of sex, hippies and communes, decided to apply  this newly found wonders to his music. He entered the "Eshel Studios" in Tel-Aviv, a small studio run by Meir Eshel, a liberal who enabled the group of young people under the baton of Danny ben Israel, to take their vision all the way to the edge. In this studio he recorded "Bullshit 3 1/4" the very first Hebrew psychedelic protest album, and in parallel, 6 English language pieces, known in the psych world, as "The Forbidden Kathmandu Recordings." Due to the crazy character of the sessions, and his hectic life style, Danny cannot help us with details like: performer names or actual dates. "There were rumours in Israel that in Kathmandu, you could walk into a store and buy Hashish, or you could get it off peddlers in the street," he reminisces, "So we sat in Tel-Aviv and dreamt of travelling to Kathmandu - that was our inspiration for this session. The song was recorded in one take and afterwards, Craig the tech and myself mixed it. The players were Gordon or Sheldon who was a friend of Alona Tur'el, on bass, on guitar there was some kid who played very fast, the drummer was some Brit who was a friend of Mona Zilberstein and Craig played keyboards. On the rest of the songs I played all the instruments - bass, guitar, a watch inside a darbuka, a match box whistle, some kind of electronic instrument with a board and a pencil, violin and organ. On "Bad Trip," there were about 20 people. Half the crowd of "Kasit" used to come and do bangs in the studio and on that day there was a real shitty trip." After "Bullshit" was censored by the local media due to its honesty, and it was a total commercial failure, ben Israel decided to take the "Kathmandu Recordings" to the US and look for an outlet there. On his way to the American Continent, he stopped at the Isle of Wight, which event was sealed by Jimi Hendrix's last performance about 2 1/2 weeks before his death. For Danny, and for many others, that symbolized the end of the flower era. The 70's had arrived, all the heroes had moved on to a better world, and the "Make Love Not War" slogans were replaced by Yuppie thinking. The end of the decade, gave Danny the inspiration for the last song on the album: "The Hippies of Today are the Assholes of Tomorrow" (The hippies of those days as it turns out, did indeed become the schmucks of today.) The cut was recorded in a friend's home studio just before the US trip. Ben Israel got the states and was offered a contract by a west coast record company, however, during the pressing of the LP, the company went bankrupt, and so, he abandoned the cuts, and continued his wanderings. Those vanished sessions, are being bared here for the first time and they are allowing us a peek into the most radical and fruitful period in the career of Danny ben Israel.    

Copyright © 2005 Ernest Samuel Llime. All Rights Reserved.