Hazy, homegrown ballads to celebrate 4/20

Since this issue is dedicated to Greater Lansing’s still booming marijuana market, this week’s Turn it Down! offers up two locally-made 4/20-friendly tracks from our city’s folk-rock past. While both songs are beyond obscure, these “private press” records are highly collectible and fetch a pretty penny on eBay — when a rare copy occasionally pops up. Of course, both 1970s-era tracks are streamed for free on YouTube, for those not wanting to fork over hundreds of dollars for the tangible goods. Read on to learn the backstory of these hazy, homegrown ballads … recorded back when you’d be handcuffed for holding.     

Timmothy — “Maybe I’m High” (1972) 

“Maybe I’m High,” a 1972 45rpm single, stamped with a bright yellow label with a green Pear Records logo at the top, indicates it was produced in Lansing. That’s about all that’s known about the trippy track and its performer, Tim Ward, aka Timmothy. 

Ward, a Bay City native, first appeared in the Michigan music scene as a member of The Ides of March, an Essexville, Michigan-based teen garage-rock group. It was the height of Beatlemania, and Ward — then attending Garber High School — was just getting started. The band would play the teen circuit across the state, Ohio and Indiana.  

Later, Ward became the front man for The Blues Company. In its heyday, the group issued typical ’60s pop singles like “She’s Gone” (1968), but soon stretched out and dropped scorching progressive rock tracks like the epically heavy “I’m Comin.” 

However, by the early ’70s, it seems Ward found a new passion for writing loner-folk songs that seamlessly blended Neil Young-inspired rock with earthy, coffee-house folk vibes. In 1972, under the “Timmothy” moniker, he self-issued his underground classic, the “Strange But True” LP. It’s a bizarre trip of an album and is now considered an obscenely obscure psych-folk gem.  

 On the ethereal “Maybe I’m High,” a long, strange trip that extends beyond the five-minute mark, Ward sings, “Oh, I love/at least I think I do. Oh, I know you/At least I think I do.” So why is Ward doubting himself so much? He bluntly tells you in his earworm chorus: 

Oh, in the morning
Maybe the afternoon 
Oh, in the morning 
Oh, I get high 
Maybe I’m high 

Pete Wittig “Michigan  Gardens” (1975) 

In 1970, Lansing musician Pete Wittig was a local rock star. His band, Ormandy, scored a single on Decca Records, the “Good Day”/“Sparrow’s Corner” 45, while the band filled venues and outdoor festivals across the state. Wittig, a conscientious objector of the Vietnam War, said the flipside was a reference to Sparrow Hospital, where he worked at the time. It’s likely the only reference to the local landmark on a major label record. 

“I could not travel with Ormandy because I had to work 40 hours a week,” Wittig recalled. “I’d been working there part time, but bumping up to full time kept me from going to the war. There’s all this paperwork you had to fill out. You do two years of full time and then they give you a card (giving you) conscientious objector status. There were about 25 of us at Sparrow, mostly janitors. That was right at the time Ormandy was getting big and traveling, so I was caught in ‘Sparrow’s Corner.’” 

With the Vietnam War still lingering, Wittig and the rest of Ormandy, which also comprised a young Alto Reed (of Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band fame), were quick to protest. Ormandy played many of the East Lansing rallies. “I really did not like that war at all, and I’m an Army brat,” Wittig said. “I’m not going over there to kill people. If you come to my country, I’ll defend my country with my life, but I will not go overseas and kill. I had to go to my draft board and confront them, which was very fun. Looking each of those old farts in the eye and saying, ‘I will not kill for you.’ I told them, ‘I’ll go work full time at the hospital’ … and they approved it.” 

By 1975, Wittig went solo and toned down his sound, too. The result? A rustic 1975 loner-folk LP issued on Lark Records. Of course, his anti-establishment views still crept into his art. One of the 12 country-tinged tracks, “Michigan Gardens,” pays homage to the state as a whole, including the (then-illegal) homegrown weed operations. Over dynamic Americana fingerpicking, and a fiery Dylanesque harp, Wittig happily sings: 

Michigan, seems I’ve planted something 
It’s growing in the field, right out behind the barn  
Oh, Michigan, I’ve got to get on home and pick it 
And dry it, and try it 
It won’t do you any harm.