As the leader of the 1960s American proto-punk band the Seeds, Sky Saxon exerted a cultish influence on several generations of rock musicians. Pioneers of raw, fuzz-drenched

“garage rock”, the Seeds enjoyed hits in the mid-1960s with songs such as Can’t Seem to Make You Mine and Pushin’ Too Hard.

The group disintegrated in the early 1970s when Saxon disappeared to join a bizarre religious cult. But by then they had already made their noisy mark, leaving behind a legacy that would grow in reputation over the years and which fed into the birth of punk rock.

In recent years Saxon reformed the Seeds, touring America and Europe as the only surviving member of the original line-up.

Richard Marsh was born in Salt Lake City, Utah. At different times in his career his date of birth was given as 1937, 1945 or 1946. The earlier date is now the most widely accepted and the confusion was probably due to an attempt to sell him as a teen idol when he began his singing career in the early 1960s under the name Little Richie Marsh.

He formed his first band, the Electra-Fires, in Los Angeles in 1962, which later metamorphosed into Sky Saxon & the Soul Rockers. At the time American popular music was in the doldrums and reeling from the onslaught of “the British invasion”. The Beatles, of course, were its vanguard, but Saxon was more influences by the grittier, more R&B-influenced sounds of those who followed in their wake, such as the Rolling Stones, the Kinks and the Yardbirds.

In 1965 he recruited the guitarist Jan Savage, the keyboard player Rick Andridge and the drummer Darryl Hooper to form the Seeds with the intention of trying to replicate the sound of the British bands.

Many of the most significant developments in the history of pop music have come from failed attempts to imitate other artists. The Rolling Stones began their career trying to sound like Chuck Berry. They could not get it right but in the process created their own uniquely brilliant sound. If Saxon and the Seeds were trying to sound like Mick Jagger and the Stones, they, too, got it hopelessly but gloriously wrong. On their debut 1965 single Can’t Seem To Make You Mine and its even better follow-up, Pushin’ Too Hard, Saxon’s nasal snarl undeniably owed something to Jagger. But at the same time he sounded like a quintessential American brat and the scuzzy, noisy minimalism of the band’s simple, driving riffs sounded as if they had been recorded in a garage — and a genre was born.

Although both songs only dented the lower echelons of the American charts, the Seeds’ subsequent reputation was built largely on these two singles. Can’t Seem to Make You Mine was later covered by Alex Chilton, Johnny Thunders, the Ramones, Garbage and Yo La Tengo and received a new lease of life when it turned up in a television commercial for deodorant this year, while no compilation of 1960s American rock is complete without Pushin’ Too Hard.

Along with the other emerging LA bands Love and the Doors, Saxon and his group honed their stage skills in the West Hollywood clubs up and down Sunset Strip, such as the Whisky A Go Go. The Seeds’ first self-titled album appeared in 1966 and captured the spirit of its times with a proto-psychedelic punk roar, heard to best effect on the track Evil Hoodoo. Their second album, A Web of Sound, followed the same year and included Saxon’s 14-minute composition Up In Her Room and the tighter Mr Farmer, which turned up almost 40 years later in the soundtrack to the film Almost Famous (2000).

Under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs, by 1967 Saxon had been born again as a child of flower power, and the Seeds’ third album, Future, contained songs with titles such as Flower Lady and Her Assistant and The March of the Flower Children. But he had not lost his interest in grittier roots music and under the name the Sky Saxon Blues Band that same year released the album A Full Spoon of Seedy Blues, for which Muddy Waters was somehow corralled to write a sleeve note.

Major commercial success seemed to be in their grasp, particularly when the Seeds made a cameo appearance in Jack Nicholson’s 1968 film Psych Out. But it was the beginning of the end. As the Doors and Love rose to international prominence, the popularity of Saxon and the Seeds waned and a 1968 live album sank almost without trace.

Saxon struggled on with new back-up musicians as the Seeds into the early 1970s, finally dissolving the group when he joined the Source Family, a religious sect based in the Hollywood Hills and led by Father Yod (aka Yahowha), who claimed divine direction and gave Saxon the names Sunlight and Arelich. Under his new designation, he played and recorded with Yod’s band, the Ya Ho Wha 13, playing improvisational “psychedelic tribal music”.

Saxon reformed the Seeds in 1989 for The Summer of Love Tour, along with fellow 1960s Californian veterans Big Brother and the Holding Company and Love. He resurrected the Seeds’ name again in 2003 and toured sporadically for the next five years.

Earlier this year he moved to Austin, Texas, and gave his final performance in the city with the band Shapes Have Fangs less than a week before his death.

Although the Source Family dissolved in 1974 on Father Yod’s death, Saxon remained a believer in Yod’s teachings. On Saxon’s death his second wife, Sabrina, announced: “Sky has passed over and YaHoWha is waiting for him at the gate.”

Sky Saxon, musician, was born on August 20, 1937. He died on June 25, 2009, aged 71