Vanilla Fudge is among the last intact 60’s rock bands, according to founder Mark Stein. All four original members are alive and performing this month in New Hampshire. Sure there’s also the re-united Cream – Eric Clapton, Ginger Baker and Jack Bruce -- but they didn’t perform together for 37 years. And the Stones are touring again at $1,500 per ticket. But if you want to get technical, Ron Wood didn’t join that geriatric foursome until 1975, replacing Brian Jones and Mick Taylor. The Fudge is all Fudge.

Okay, so Vanilla Fudge only had one real hit – You Keep Me Hangin’ On – and that hit was a remake of a tune by the Supremes. But as rock footnotes go, the Fudge deserve credit. For one, their hit tune returned to the Top 10 three separate times. Who else did that?

Ultimately, Vanilla Fudge had one good idea. In an era of danceable pop tunes, these guys dared to take big hits and slow them down, stretch them out and transform them into psychedelic symphonies.

"People Get Ready", my favorite Fudge rendition, runs a full three minutes before the first haunting gospel verse kicks in. Their eight-minute "Eleanor Rigby" is a melodramatic amalgam of Dave Brubeck, Pagliacci, John Cage, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and the Who. Fudge is credited today as a proto-heavy metal band, and indeed, they helped foster the young Led Zeppelin during that bands nascent years.

Personally, I hate heavy metal, never owned a metal record, and wouldn’t walk across the street to interview the whole Led Zeppelin band if they were buying the drinks. But I snapped up the chance this week to chat with Mark Stein when a local publicist called. You see, while Stein and the fudge were covering the Supremes back in 1967, my little garage band was covering them. Vanilla Fudge lasted from 67 to 69, the same years my high school band survived.

I remember spending hours in Vinnie Pelletier’s parent’s garage in Manchester struggling to master the keyboard riffs on the first Fudge album, the one with the naked woman on the cover. It was complex stuff compared to the usual three or four chords that made up most Top 40 hits. The Fudge made you sweat and think and practice hard.

"So how did you come up with the idea to turn a Motown tune into a psychedelic rock symphony?" I asked Stein by phone in his Florida home.

"This is the deal," Stein said. "I was sitting with Tim Bogart, our bass player. It had to be the winter of 1967 when "Keep Me Hanging On" was a hit by the Supremes. We were parked on Broadway in New York City in front of a discotheque called the Cheetah. I remember this vividly. We were sittin’ there smokin’, doing whatever, and we had the radio on. At the time we were playing at another discotheque on the West Side. Anyway, the song comes on and we just looked at each other, and I said – Man this song sounds awful fast. What would it be like if we just slowed this song down? It would be so much more soulful. We just went to the club and started hashing all this stuff out."

And a new pop genre was born. Well, not exactly. In order to have a genre, you need other bands. The Vanilla Fudge were the only soulful, white, proto-metal symphonic psychedelic group on the radio. Stein credits another "Long Island Sound" band, The Vagrants, as his inspiration. But that band never released an album. The Vanilla Fudge, originally named The Pigeons, released five.

"I used to love movie scores," Stein told me. "I went to a James Bond movie, I think it was like Thunderball. The big orchestra was going (he sings a James Bond movie riff) and it stuck in my mind. So I remember sitting down at the organ and that’s how I came up with (sings again) the opening off "Eleanor Rigby".

And what an opening it is. And weird. I still have the Thunderball sound track 33 rpm on my bookshelf. Tom Jones sang the theme song.

Other bands, The Young Rascals especially, were using a Hammond B3 organ that became Mark Stein’s signature instrument. Top bands like the Beatles and Moody Blues and Beach Boys were creating symphonic sounds – but the Vanilla Fudge could do their music onstage with just four guys.

For anyone not living in the Sixties, I should mention that being a "cover" band was then considered pretty cool. You could make money while most bands with original tunes starved. You could get a girlfriend. Kids wanted to dance to the tunes on the Hit Parade. A good cover band was required to imitate whatever was on the Top 40. That meant covering The Byrds, one moment, then the Kingsmen, Dionne Warwick, Tommy James and the Shondells, Herman’s Hermitts, then Cream, Donovan and Iron Butterfly – all in one set. We were human jukeboxes. As the Pigeons, Stein’s band was doing well in the New York club scene. Our little New Hampshire band was making hundreds of dollars a weekend hitting high schools, roller rinks, frat houses and block parties.

For the Fudge, it was a short wild ride. In just three years, from 1967 to 1969, the innovative Vanilla Fudge produced five albums, toured their brains out and split. During that "golden" era of creative rock artistry the Fudge appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show (with Duke Ellington and Flip Wilson) and lip-synched their one real hit on American Bandstand. They posed in Central Park for photographs by Linda Eastman McCartney. They appeared on every daytime variety show going from Dick Cavette, Merv Griffin and Joey Bishop to Steve Allen, Mike Douglas and David Frost. The groups they performed alongside – from Jimmy Hendrix to Led Zeppelin – comprise a virtual rock encyclopedia of the Sixties.

"We just got burned out," Stein says of their psychedelic heyday. "At the time, we weren’t really developed as song writers. We didn’t progress creatively any more and everybody went their separate ways."

Mark Stein has a vague memory of New Hampshire. He thinks he remembers playing at the Hampton Casino.

"Ya, I think I do, " Stein says. He returned to Hampton Beach years later as a member of Dave Mason’s band. He toured with Alice Cooper and Tommy Bolin. All of the original Fudge fraternity – Tim Bogert, Vince Martell, Carmine Appice --have continued to stay active and perform. There have been a couple of Vanilla Fudge reunions, even an album, but no return to the Hit Parade.

Now 58, Stein is candid about the motivation behind his tour with The Yardbirds, Steppehwolf and "The Doors of the 21^st Century". The latter band includes two original Doors members and a young singer who imitates the late Jim Morrison in a socially acceptable performance.

"Classic rock is a hell of a big business," Stein says. "There are over 80 million of us out there. They want to spend money and they want to see some good music. There’s a lot of money to be made, and that was the catalyst that brought the band together."

But once together, Stein says, there are additional rewards.

"We’ve been practicing the last couple of days and I am absolutely excited out of my gourd. The band sounds incredible….the energy…we’re like kids again."

And isn’t that the whole point, after all – to get thousands of Baby Boomers feeling like kids again? Move over, Viagra, the Vanilla Fudge are back. It’s your choice, grampa. Wouldn’t you rather go deaf than blind?

OUTSIDE LINK: The official Vanilla Fudge web site

Copyright (c) 2005 by J. Dennis Robinson / SeacoastNH.com. All rights reserved. Images courtesy Mark Stein and Vanilla Fudge.

BONUS: A sample of the bands that shared the stage with Vanilla Fudge during the late Sixties: -- JimiHendrix, Jeff Beck, Frank Zappa, Eagles, Led Zeppelin, Fifth Dimension, Spanky & Our Gang, Blue Cheer, Steve Miller, Grateful Dead, Youngbllods, the Who, Moody Blues, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Canned Heat, Creedence Clearwater, Iron Butterfly, Doors, Janis Joplin, Temptations, Joe Cocker, Jethro Tull