My correspondent Campbell Yule eulogised CSNY in a recent comment.

Well; this is only CSN but it is still an anthem for old hippies. One of the sounds of the Sixties.

Stephen Stills breaks into Spanish during the last section – apparently to be obscure just for the sake of it.

Suite: Judy Blue Eyes

The Band’s The Weight has famously indecipherable/obscure lyrics. Nevertheless I did buy the single way back when and also found a very good version of the Bob Dylan song I Shall Be Released on the B-side.

The first version of The Weight I remember hearing, though, and one that got a bit of airplay at the time, was by Jackie DeShannon. She wrote a good few of the familiar songs from the mid nineteen-sixties including a couple of The Searchers’ hits.

Here she is on You Tube.

For comparison purposes here also is The Band’s original version.

I’ve just had a horrible thought.

England have qualified for the World Cup. (That’s not the horrible thought even though I know I shouldn’t even whisper it. Anyway, this is not about them.)

The thing is, as a result we are no doubt due for actor Keith Allen’s usual attempt at a tie-in song. Remember World In Motion, Vindaloo and Jerusalem?

Since Allen’s daughter is now a pop star she could no doubt point him in a new direction he could rip off parody. (I gather she has a track record in what we can charitably call homage. Several records in fact.)

They might put out the thing as a double act.

I’ve even thought of an appropriate name for the pair – apart from Tossers, obviously.

Not Leith Allen – that might be a bit too Scottish sounding.

So what about Keily Allen?

It’s a few days late for the solstice but…

Oh. A very merry Christmas to everybody.

The good lady told me she caught Mike d’Abo (the former Manfred Mann frontman, successor to Paul Jones) on TV last week talking about one of the songs he wrote, Handbags And Gladrags. She got the impression it had been written for Rod Stewart but I said I was sure Chris Farlowe had recorded it first.

D’Abo apparently said he had to write a woodwind part for Stewart but since he doesn’t write music he had to have someone transcribe it.

Whatever, the song has since become more widely known as a result of The Stereophonics recording and the version which was used as the theme music for Ricky Gervais’s “The Office” TV series.

I dislike the Stewart and Stereophonics versions both. (I can’t remember “The Office” one clearly. I didn’t watch that show.)

In theirs the relevant lyric is rendered as:-
“the handbags and the gladrags that your grandad had to sweat to buy you,”
which is okay but implies a willing benevolence on the grandad’s part and is rather sweet.

However it means something completely different – and much less damning – compared to the original:-
“the handbags and the gladrags that your grandad had to sweat so you could buy,”
which is more redolent of the wastrel ways of an ungrateful grandchild.

This is Chris Farlowe’s version (from 1968):-

There is, by the way, a connection of sorts between Chris Farlowe and myself. But I don’t want to make too much of it as I have read he has become something of a right winger and BNP adherent. (If this is not the case I apologise to him.)

There are no prizes for getting the connection as it’s pretty obvious.

For a short while in the sixties The Troggs were my favourite band. (I was young, OK? My musical tastes were relatively unformed.) They have, however, left a lasting legacy – not least on REM, see Athens Andover and this video, which I have featured before – and are credited by some on You Tube as being punk ten years before it happened. To my mind that description’s a bit simplistic, though.

In retrospect they were quite a peculiar band. Their catalogue is actually a strange mixture of stripped down raunch (I Can’t Control Myself, Give It To Me) and the sentimental (Anyway That You Want Me, Love Is All Around, Little Girl.)

Usually these two strands were kept separate with different tracks falling into one category or the other but they could make the jump between them in the one song. Wild Thing has a crude, thumping but insistent beat and a more than suggestive breathiness in the “Come on. Hold Me Tight,” bits but then suddenly in the middle it breaks off into an almost delicate ocarina solo.

I remember a film of the single below from the time of its release with the group walking about in a forest or something in their trademark striped jackets but that doesn’t seem to be on You Tube any more. (I’m sure it was, the last time I looked.) Anyway, here’s the creeping menace that is Night of The Long Grass.

Coincidences and confluences. P P Arnold, who was the backing singer on The Small Faces’ Tin Soldier which I featured recently, also had a great influence on The Nice whom I mentioned several months ago now. They were formed to be her backing band. However they quickly broke off to do their own thing.

Angel Of The Morning is the object of the most spectacular mishearing of a lyric I have ever encountered. Someone I was acquainted with once asked the good lady and myself why the singer (Angel has been covered by just about everybody – I think it was the Merrilee Rush version) was asking her lover to, “just brush my teeth before you leave me.”

It is of course, “just touch my cheek.”

And yes, Jim, I did split an infinitive up there.

Just brush my teeth before you leave me..…

I heard this on the radio the other day and it took me back.

So. To all of you who, like me, never gave up anything or anyone for rock and roll but instead have spent their lives working for the man, here’s Albert Hammond.

I mentioned Procol Harum a few posts ago. When I wrote about America by The Nice I said, under the influence of a programme I’d seen on the history of the form on BBC 3 or 4, that it seemed that was where Prog Rock began. However it is arguable that Procol Harum’s A Whiter Shade Of Pale, with its debt to Air On A G String, is a truer progenitor.

Among other reasons, A Whiter Shade Of Pale is famous for the opacity of its lyric. I confess to a soft spot for the follow up single, Homburg, (based more on Sheep May Safely Graze) where the lyric is not quite so opaque. The verses are a shade apocalyptic but not the refrain.

Verse 2 runs like this:
The Town Clock in the market square stands waiting for the hour,
When its hands they both turn backwards and on meeting will devour
Both themselves and also any fool who dares to tell the time,
And the sun and moon will shatter and the signposts cease to sign.

SF/fantasy imagery or what?

But then we get a refrain dealing with (a lack of) sartorial elegance.
Your trouser cuffs are dirty and your shoes are laced up wrong,
You’d better take off your homburg cause your overcoat is too long.

Utterly bizarre.

I couldn’t find a version where the first few notes are not omitted.

I featured the real Nirvana’s Pentecost Hotel recently. After the posting I began to think about songs featuring named hotels in their titles. There aren’t all that many that came to mind. Hotel California, obviously, and Heartbreak Hotel. A quick scan of You Tube – up to page 16! – only revealed Procol Harum’s Grand Hotel as one I hadn’t heard. (I’ve listened to it now and it’s a bit overblown.)
The only other named hotel song I can remember is this from Mike Batt. From the sublime (Nirvana) to the bathetic.

Perhaps that bathetic should have been pathetic after all. Or is that too harsh?