While looking for Ring Out Solstice Bells on You Tube I came across this.

Not having bought nor even listened to Stand Up beyond any singles it spawned, I had no idea this similarity existed.

Ian Anderson is very magnanimous about it all, isn’t he?

But then again, who owns E flat?

We Used To Know:-

Almax* recently featured this song on his blog – which for legal reasons (he’s a lawyer) is sadly restricted to only a few readers.

I was moved to comment that Tin Soldier surely has the single best musical intro to a pop song ever.

It deserves wider hearing. This version has the added benefit of P P Arnold on backing vocals, as did the recording.

As a result of his posting another of Alastair’s readers recommended this, Song Of A Baker, for which embedding is disabled. But you can follow the link.

*Almax’s The Defibrillator blog – on my sidebar – is open to all but he tends not to post new stuff there.

This is the real Nirvana’s track, Rainbow Chaser, their third single, which is said to be the first to utilise throughout what became almost a trademark of musical psychedelia, phasing.

I must confess that, to me, the verses seem to be without phasing.

This alternative version (not the one I remember) does seem more phased but otherwise its arrangement is more conventional.

It’s been hard to escape Michael Jackson over the past couple of days. The coverage has been almost wall to wall. The press and media just love something like this – but they take it too far.

I must confess I wasn’t much of a fan of Jackson’s music though I’ve heard lots of it of course.

I don’t know what he saw when he looked at his reflection (I suppose very few of us do like what we see in the mirror) but he was clearly a troubled soul.

Life in the showbiz spotlight can’t be fun; plus he had no childhood to speak of. With all that fame and money it must be difficult to find true friends. It’s no wonder he began to act out his hype.

It would be interesting to find out if Jarvis Cocker had mellowed towards him any. I suspect not.

Michael Jackson 1958-2009. So it goes.

Apart from calling his band Nirvana I once thought that Cobain’s use of the song title Smells Like Teen Spirit was pretty cool, a nice metaphorical touch. Then I found out Teen Spirit is actually some sort of American deodorant.

Not so cool at all, then. (Except under the arms of course.)

Here is the real Nirvana’s track, Pentecost Hotel, their second single.

The trouble with Kurt Cobain was that he named his band Nirvana.

This means that whenever I mention the original Nirvana, the true Nirvana, I have to explain I don’t mean a grungy bunch from Seattle.

The earlier (1960s) Nirvana’s mainstays were Patrick Campbell-Lyons and Alex Spyropoulos. Together with producer Chris Blackwell they produced a series of idiosyncratic singles with classical/orchestral influences and also released what was probably the first concept album, The Story Of Simon Simopath, which had a quintessentially 60s psychedelic cover – complete with blocky unequal sized lettering.

This is their first single, Tiny Goddess, which has more than a hint of Pachelbel.

This is one of my favourite relative obscurities from the sixties. It is by a group called Rupert’s People. The band was actually cobbled together from various elements to make the single.

I think one of the reasons I like this is because of the classical influence. As the above links note, the song itself was adapted from an earlier version (which I would love to hear sometime) to fit the tune of Air On A G String.

It had the great misfortune to be released just after the similarly inspired A Whiter Shade Of Pale began sweeping all before it.

Unlike Whiter Shade Of Pale, though, the lyrics of Charles Brown are not laden with obscurity even if they do perhaps constitute a bit too much of a downer to have become a big hit.

I also like the “cracked” quality of the singing voice. I believe it was the song’s composer, Rod Lynton.

I’m not quite sure why whoever posted this on You Tube used pictures of a construction site.

The B-side, Hold On, was more or less a straight forward rocker but it’s a storming track in its own right.

What was it with sixties/seventies song writers and murderers?
“The Green, Green Grass Of Home” and the Bee Gees’ “Gotta Get A Message To You” both feature convicts on Death Row and R Dean Taylor’s “Indiana Wants Me,” someone on the run. Another song occupying this territory is Elton John’s “Have Mercy On The Criminal” from the Don’t Shoot Me I’m Only The Piano Player album but in that one it’s not clear whether the convict is a murderer or not.
(There are bound to be more examples of this sort of thing but I can’t bring them to mind at the moment.)

Is it just a cheap shot at sentimentality like the use of motor cycle accidents in Twinkle’s “Terry” and the Shangri-Las’ “Leader Of The Pack?”

“Indiana Wants Me” in particular has a shocking first line; by which I do not mean it’s a bad line – on the contrary, it’s a very good first line** – but that the sentiment it expresses is reprehensible; one which no-one ought to think, still less act on.

R Dean Taylor did go in for sound effects, though, didn’t he? There were the tyres in Gotta See Jane, and listen to the howl of the sirens in this one.

**It was the best of lines, it was the worst of lines.

Since the nice Mr David O’List has commented on one of my previous posts about his early ground-breaking band I thought I’d link to the You Tube rendering of America (2nd Amendment) performed by the Nice – credited on the label to Sondheim, Bernstein, Emerlist Davjack – so you could hear what we were both rabbitting on about.

The embedding is of the long version as on the single. There is no video with the clip; just a picture of a US flag. I avoided the shorter four minute cut (which was given a play on Radio 2’s Sounds Of The Sixties a couple of months back) as it has, to my ears, a clumsy edit about ¾ of the way through.

The single is sub-titled 2nd Amendment. The second amendment to the US constitution is of course the famous one about the right to bear arms.
I was at school at the time of the single’s release and my music teacher expressed interest in the “rock version of the New World symphony” that he’d heard about – as I said in my previous post about it the track quotes from Dvorak – so I brought America in and he played it to the class. All went well until the spoken bit at the end where he went ballistic about “ruining a perfectly good piece of music with political rubbish.” So much for social comment.

Not only was this single over twice as long as was then common, the track was also, except for the spoken outro, an instrumental. By that time in the sixties, unlike earlier in the decade, instrumental releases had become unusual and hits extremely rare. A doubly brave decision, then.

This, it seems, is where prog rock started.

I mentioned Australian band Python Lee Jackson in a recent post about the Nice.
Despite the band’s origins the voice doing the singing here is unmistakable – and not Australian. There are varying accounts of how Rod Stewart came to do the vocal on this track.

In A Broken Dream was, I believe, the first single – as opposed to EP (ask your Mum or Dad; or even your Grandad) – in the UK to have a picture sleeve. Prior to that each label had its own generic sleeve with a circular cut out so that you could see the label, song title, artist, composer, lyricist and copyright info printed on the label. These would have a lower unit cost as they were used for every single the label put out.

You Tube has this listed under Rod Stewart, despite the fact it wasn’t released under his name. I had heard Rod no longer wished to be associated with this track and hounded unmercifully those who referred to it.

Blame You Tube, Rod, not me.