Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young’s Ohio wasn’t the only song to mention the Kent State shootings. Student Demonstration Time, from the Beach Boys excellent Surf’s Up album, does so too.
A (restricted access) blog which I frequent aired complaints that this is a rip off of Riot In Cell Block Nine which, according to Wiki, the Beach Boys used to play in their concerts around that time. Some might, instead, call it a homage.
The lyric does contain what I think is rather a good pair of lines in:-
“The pen is mightier than the sword
But no match for a gun (when there’s a riot going on.)” The parentheses are mine.
The blurb on this You Tube item says it’s a different version from the one on Surf’s Up.
This is the more familiar (to me) track from the album.
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.
When I was a Chemistry student at Glasgow University, way back when, the student Chemical Society was known as The Alchemists’ Club. Among its many functions was providing the team for an annual University Challenge with Strathclyde Chemistry students. (The year I was in the team we creamed them. Another of our team members loved quizzes so much he went on to the full University team and later appeared on Mastermind. Hello, Tam.)
However the most popular of the Alchemists’ Club’s endeavours was running a football league for students. The participants were allowed to choose their team names. With typical undergraduate, or indeed post-graduate, humour a fair few tended towards the rude but there were also word plays on the names of well known European teams of the time.
To get it out of the way first, there was the fairly obvious Arselona. A team of students whose studies straddled various disciplines called themselves Inter Course. Unless my memory serves me incorrectly there was also a bunch called Surreal Madrid. Another good one was Us Pissed Dossers, in homage to the Hungarians of Ujpest Dosza. But my personal favourite was No Time Toulouse. (I’ve always been partial to a pun; especially one that straddles two languages.)
No doubt inspiration for these creations was derived from the wonderful chutzpah of the works team of a firm of Glasgow bread bakers who adopted the magnificent moniker of A C Milanda. They even took up the red and black striped shirts of the more famous Italian team which has a similar name.
I can only imagine what such jokesters would have made of CFR Cluj.
*Edited to add:- Old age must be creeping up on me. I’d forgotten I’d posted the bulk of this already. I’ve only just seen it again on looking for something else. Serves me right for composing posts elsewhere and not scrubbing them from that file immediately. That earlier post has now been deleted.
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.”
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.
On a bank holiday (in nineteen hundred and long time ago.) My English-born and raised cousin, who was no stranger to Scotland, came up for the do and when my father mentioned getting the signatures to the registrar afterwards, said, “I thought you said it was a Bank Holiday.”
We said, “It is. A bank holiday. The banks are shut, everything else is open.”
He was one of the last of the links with a time when football was the people’s game rather than the plaything of media moguls and moneyed oligarchs.
I don’t remember him as a player but his career as a manager surely marks him as one of the best.
What he did with Ipswich Town – though failing to match the League Championship that Alf Ramsey managed there, he surpassed Ramsey’s achievements with an FA Cup win and the Uefa Cup and sustained Ipswich in the top division for a goodly length of time – was a measure of how great a manager he was, given that, even then, a provincial club was at a huge financial disadvantage compared to those from big cities.
He also had success in foreign parts (winning championships in Holland and Portugal and cups in Portugal and Spain) not a common claim for British managers.
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.
