Guitar Hero Mark Doyle to Release Psychedelic-Era Tribute Incense and Peppermints: Out of the Past II
Featuring legendary drummer Steve Jordan and mixed in mind-expanding surround by studio titan Bob Clearmountain, the instrumental album combines curated ’60s gems with original music and gorgeous string arrangements
The new instrumental project from musician and producer Mark Doyle, Incense and Peppermints: Out of the Past II, is many things, all of them compelling. To start, it’s guitar heaven — a Jeff Beck-ian balance of soulful, singable lead playing and rousing pyrotechnics, delivered with stunning tone through a small but mighty stable of instruments: a custom Dishaw, handbuilt in Doyle’s hometown of Syracuse, N.Y.; a ’70s Gibson ES-335; a ’54 Stratocaster that, Doyle says, “never leaves my house anymore.”
The album is also a veritable clinic in string arranging — a masterful demonstration of good taste, the artful use of space and emotional command. As Doyle says simply, “Strings make you cry.” And those strings are just one of the many layers that swirl, dip and soar around the listener in the project’s audiophile mixes — High-Resolution Stereo, 5.1 and Dolby Atmos — by the renowned producer and engineer Bob Clearmountain (the Rolling Stones, Bruce Springsteen, Roxy Music, the Who, countless others). “It was unbelievable,” Doyle says of Clearmountain’s efforts. “It was like, ‘Oh my God, he did exactly what I thought immersive audio should do.’ He would write to me and say things like, ‘I am really, really digging working on this record. Your music lends itself so much to Atmos.’”
Yet another element you’ll hear pop in these mixes: the grooving backbeats of Steve Jordan, the veteran drummer-producer who has handled kit duties for the Stones following Charlie Watts’ passing. (Doyle, an adept multi-instrumentalist, contributed the rest of what you hear, sans strings.)
More than anything, however, Out of the Past II is a love letter to the psychedelic era, and to the incredible music that transformed Doyle’s life as a young artist in Syracuse, where he continues to thrive. While the first Out of the Past — released all the way back in 2001 — homed in on the generation-defining output of a single year, 1966, this follow-up casts its net wider. For II, Doyle dug deeper into this explosive period of rock history, to find songs that are brilliant, evocative and too-often overlooked: Strawberry Alarm Clock’s “Incense and Peppermints,” Fever Tree’s “San Francisco Girls (Return of the Native),” the Zombies’ “A Rose for Emily,” Aphrodite’s Child’s “The Four Horsemen,” the First Edition’s “Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In),” Tim Buckley’s “Hallucinations,” Simon & Garfunkel’s “The Sound of Silence,” and “Rainbow Chaser” by the original Nirvana, who hailed from London. Programmed on the album alongside Doyle’s original music, which vibrantly summons up the spirit of the ’60s, these gems boast sturdy melodies that make for accessible, highly listenable arrangements. “The thing about doing an instrumental guitar record is that the melody is really important,” Doyle says, “because you’re essentially serving as the vocalist.”
Growing up near Syracuse in Auburn, N.Y., Doyle had his mind blown by these songs in real time, as they were released. “I was a great hippie,” he remembers today with a chuckle. “And I definitely partook in some of the psychedelic culture.” He reminisces fondly of hanging out around Syracuse University, where a nearby restaurant called the Gridiron had, as Doyle puts it, “the best jukebox in the world.” It was a classic joint, where a young musician low on cash could buy a cup of mint-chocolate-chip ice cream and spend the day studying the latest developments in American and British rock. Doyle estimates that 70 percent of the songs on his new album he heard loitering at the Gridiron. “I got sort of midway through the record,” he says, “and I thought, ‘I’m actually just recreating that jukebox!’”
By the time he was a Gridiron regular, Doyle had already accrued some of the skills he’d put to use on Out of the Past II. As a child, he followed the musical example of his father, a respected jazz pianist and arranger. Mark became something of a prodigy on jazz piano, and spent summers as his father’s copyist, writing out parts for big-band arrangements. “I would get to see the inside of the music — the nuts and bolts,” Doyle says.
When he saw the Beatles perform on the Ed Sullivan Show, the electric guitar astonished him, opening up a thrilling new pathway in rock ’n’ roll and the blues. But rather than derailing the learned musicianship he’d developed, Doyle decided quickly how the two contrasting sides of his musical brain could collaborate. “When I picked up guitar,” he recalls, “I told myself early on that I was going to be totally self-taught — that it was all going to be about emotion for me. And when I needed to access the intellectual areas, the theoretical areas, I’d draw on the piano side of me.”
That duality — one part blues-soaked guitar hero; one part consummate professional musician-arranger — has helped to define Doyle’s craft throughout his career. It was there 50 years ago, on rocker David Werner’s RCA LP Whizz Kid, where Doyle played Mick Ronson to Werner’s Bowie and contributed his first recorded string arrangement. And it’s been there in the ensuing half-century of achievement, a résumé as impressive as it is wide-ranging: records with Judy Collins and Daryl Hall & John Oates; arranging backing vocals and singing on Bryan Adams’ first U.S. Top 10 hit, “Straight From the Heart”; string arrangements for the legendary producer Maurice Starr; a multi-year stint as Meat Loaf’s lead guitarist; his current renaissance-man roles with the acclaimed singer-songwriter Mary Fahl and his blues-rock unit Mark Doyle & the Maniacs. As a solo artist, he has applied his arranging prowess to four previous instrumental guitar releases, including the first Out of the Past disc and the music he performs live with his 10-piece Guitar Noir ensemble.
It was over a lifetime’s worth of similar music-biz experiences and mutual contacts that Doyle bonded with Steve Jordan. They first connected in New York, when Jordan was mixing Keith Richards’ 2015 LP Crosseyed Heart. “We slowly built this friendship, and we almost never talked about music,” Doyle says. Eventually, the guitarist worked up the nerve to ask Jordan to play on his psychedelic-rock record. “He texted back in, like, 30 seconds, and goes, ‘Let’s do it,’ with about 20 exclamation points,” Doyle recalls with a laugh.
Doyle soon realized the drummer was as generous and warm a collaborator as he was a friend. Jordan scheduled his days so he could record with Doyle in the morning and rehearse with the Rolling Stones in the afternoon. For “Incense and Peppermints,” Jordan studied YouTube footage of Strawberry Alarm Clock to learn a specific break. He was also painstaking about recording his drumming in period fashion, setting up an early-’60s Rogers kit and vintage mics, including a Telefunken that once captured Ringo Starr for Abbey Road. “This is a guy who really, really cares,” Doyle says. “He goes the extra mile.”
And the performances? “He had everything,” Doyle exclaims. “He had feel; he had pocket. He’s just a master, because his time is excellent but he rocks like a madman.”
In the end, Incense and Peppermints: Out of the Past II was a chance for Doyle to revisit more timeless music he loves, using personnel and technology he couldn’t have imagined back in those days of the Gridiron jukebox. “If you want the closest thing to a psychedelic experience,” he says with a laugh, “then fire up your Dolby Atmos system and give this a spin.”
- Evan Haga
