P.F. Sloan — went into seclusion after writing ’60s anthem
P.F. Sloan, a singer and songwriter of somewhat enigmatic repute, whose apocalyptic anthem “Eve of Destruction,” written when he was just 19, was a seminal protest song of the 1960s, not to mention a No. 1 hit for the singer Barry McGuire, died on Sunday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 70.
The cause was pancreatic cancer, said his publicist, Sangeeta Haindl.
In the 1960s, Mr. Sloan was a precocious and prominent figure in the pop music world. He and a co-writer, Steve Barri, were a team on the order of Carole King and Gerry Goffin, concocting surfer tunes like “I Found a Girl” for Jan and Dean; the jingle-like declaration of youthful independence “Let Me Be” for the Turtles; “A Must to Avoid,” a jaunty ditty complete with dating advice, recorded by Herman’s Hermits; and, perhaps most memorably, “Secret Agent Man,” a rocker of a television theme song that became a hit for Johnny Rivers.
“Eve of Destruction,” a song about the threatening ills of the world that makes reference to the
Vietnam War, civil rights and space travel, begins: The Eastern world it is explodin’, Violence flarin’, bullets loadin’, You’re old enough to kill but not for votin’, You don’t believe in war, but what’s that gun you’re totin’, And even the Jordan river has bodies floatin’.
It continues with the refrain: But you tell me Over and over and over again, my friend Ah, you don’t believe We’re on the eve of destruction.
It was clearly influenced by Bob Dylan, the articulate spokesman for the emergent genre of folk rock, and different from anything Mr. Sloan had written before. In an interview on Tuesday, Barri recalled that though he was the duo’s primary lyricist, “Eve of Destruction” was written, both words and music, almost entirely by Mr. Sloan.
(Barri said he added only two lines: “You may leave here for four days in space/But when you return it’s the same old place.”)
The song was controversial; politicians and other musicians debated whether its message, that violence and hypocrisy were a grave threat to civilization, was an accurate depiction of the state of the world, a healthy message to transmit in pop music, or a reasonable representation of the outlook of America’s youth. It also changed Mr. Sloan’s life.
Retreat from business
Increasingly interested in protest music and probingly self-conscious work, he split from Barri and made recordings of his own, including the 1968 album “Measure of Pleasure.” But, very shortly and abruptly, he then retreated from the music business and into seclusion.
By the early 1970s, the songwriter Jimmy Webb had written and published a song, “P.F. Sloan,” lionizing Mr. Sloan’s renegade musical spirit: “I have been seeking P.F. Sloan/But no one knows where he has gone.”
Mr. Sloan was something of a recluse for several decades, spending a good deal of time in India; when he performed at the Bottom Line in Greenwich Village in 1985, it was a rare public appearance.
In a 2014 book, “What’s Exactly the Matter With Me? Memoirs of a Life in Music,” written with S.E. Feinberg, Mr. Sloan was forthright about his battles with drug abuse and mental illness, which resulted in his being institutionalized for a time.
“Eve of Destruction” changed Mr. Sloan’s priorities and made him “want to be the next Bob Dylan, or whatever,” Barri recalled.
Asked if he understood what happened to his friend, Barri said:
“He was two people. We were just two Jewish kids from New York. We liked the same movies. We played Wiffle ball together. But when ‘Eve of Destruction’ became such a smash, he went with Barry McGuire to England, and he came back a different person. His girlfriend, who I later married — both of us felt he never returned from England.”
He paused and then added: “He was a major, major talent. God, he was good.”
Philip Gary Schlein was born in New York City — it’s uncertain whether it was the Bronx or Queens — and grew up there and on Long Island before his family moved to Los Angeles in the middle or late 1950s, which is when they changed the family name to Sloan. (The F in P.F. comes from the nickname Flip, given to him as a child by his sister. He later legally changed his middle name to Faith.)
Mr. Sloan’s father, Harry, was a pharmacist. His mother, the former Claire (or Claritsa) Petreanu, was from Romania. According to Mr. Sloan’s autobiography, his mother beat him daily as a child, though there are dubious factual claims elsewhere in the book, including one in which Mr. Sloan asserts that he met James Dean in 1957, two years after Dean’s death in an auto accident.
Mr. Sloan attended Fairfax High School in Los Angeles, and by his midteens he was writing promising songs, leading him to be paired, in 1963, with Barri, by the producer Lou Adler, who was then with Screen Gems’ music publishing division. Their early song “Kick That Little Foot, Sally Ann” was a hit in 1964 for the singer Round Robin.
Mr. Sloan leaves no immediate survivors.
Back in public eye
The publication of his autobiography was, in some ways, a celebration of his return to the public eye. Mr. Sloan had released albums in 1993 and 2006, and with Feinberg he created a musical based on the life of Beethoven.
In 2014, he released his last solo album, “My Beethoven.” In 2012, the singer Rumer recorded the Jimmy Webb song “P.F. Sloan,” and in 2014 she and Sloan appeared together to sing it in London.
In January, he and McGuire performed “Eve of Destruction” — 50 years after its release — at a coffee house and performance space in Altadena (Los Angeles County).