Jan Savage

Seeds guitarist BORN 1942

Born Buck

Jan Reeder in Oklahoma, Jan Savage played with surf and folk bands before meeting frontman Sky Saxon and joining proto-punks The Seeds in Los Angeles in 1965. The group was on tour with the Buffalo Springfield when their garage rock cornerstone Pushin’ Too Hard went Top 40 in the US in February 1967, winning lifelong fans including Iggy Pop, Lenny Kaye and George Lucas. Their increasingly psychedelic third album Future reached the Billboard Top 100 later that year, but the same year’s A Full Spoon Of Seedy Blues, recorded with Muddy Waters’ sidemen and credited to the Sky Saxon Blues Band, fared less well. Savage left in 1968, but rejoined the group for a 1989 tour with Love, and then for a short-lived 2003 reunion. Of Native American descent – he wore a feather headband on the sleeve of ’66 debut The Seeds – later in life Savage lived on a reservation in Oklahoma. He took part in interviews for the 2014 documentary Pushin’ Too Hard – proud of, if a little perplexed by, The Seeds’ enduring legacy.

Clive Prior