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 the 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 realNirvana‘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.
Mike Batt: The Railway Hotel
Perhaps that bathetic should have been pathetic after all. Or is that too harsh?
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.
Edited to add:- the original video is no longer available. The one below is a replacement.
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.
R Dean Taylor: Indiana Wants Me
**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 the band. 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 may have 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 had 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.
Edited to add: Rod now seems to have come to terms with this as I’ve since seen him perform it on TV.
His classic Gotta See Jane starts (after the tyre screeching) with a bass line that sounds similar to Dream‘s.
There is also some Beatle-like cello after the first two “Gotta See Jane”s, and with the second pair the song gets into its stride by developing a driving beat (pun surely intended.)
The three high notes (which he seems to strain for a bit) at 1 min 38 seconds in, 10 seconds later and at 2 min 30, emphasise the desperation expressed by the lyric.
It all gets very Eleanor Rigby indeed in the instrumental middle passage.
I had a strange dream on Friday night/Saturday morning, during which I was crossing a road in Dunfermline and was honked at by a utility vehicle, a fire engine or some such. The weird bit about this was its horn sounded the musical phrase:- Daaah, da-da-da! dah, da-da-da! da-da, dah.
In my dream I recognised it was from a song and so while the dream was still running I kept on humming the tune until I got to the last line of the verse – when I knew what it was. And I felt great just to have worked it out. (Bear in mind I was still asleep.)
The song is The Diamond Hard Blue Apples Of The Moon, written and performed by The Nice, formed as P P Arnold’s backing group but now better known as the first rise to prominence of Keith Emerson of ELP notoriety fame. It was the B-side of America, their first (only?) hit.
It’s a fine piece of psychedelia with TARDIS-like sound effects and some great bits of mellotron work but features almost impenetrable lyrics which a quick search on the internet can not shed light on.
The nearest I can get for the first verse is:-
The ??? stroked circles from the heads of all the heroes
And confusions caused by echoes
That’s not ???? for us to see
The sound of magic carpets (cobblers?)
Suddenly be seeking for the
Here it is on You Tube.
Can anyone decipher them? The lyrics, that is.
Edit (24/4/10): I see the original clip has been taken down.
Here is a new link.
The Nice: Diamond Hard Blue Apples of the Moon
Edit (20/7/17): I found the new link also inoperable so replaced it with the one above.
