"Gotta Get a Hold of Myself" b/w "The Way I Feel Inside"

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According to Russo's Collector's Guide and the Zombie Heaven liner notes, fifty years ago to-day (23 September 1966), the Zombies' "Gotta Get a Hold of Myself" b/w "The Way I Feel Inside" (Decca F. 12495) was released in the U.K.

Hugh Grundy's Drums

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Earlier this week, I was looking at the Rex photos again, and I noticed something.  I can't tell precisely what it is, but there's a coat or blanket or something inside Hugh Grundy's bass drum:

It's a bit more visible (but further in the background) in this one:

After I saw that, I remembered something that Geoff Emerick wrote in Here, There and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of the Beatles:

I decided to do something to dampen the bass drum... As quickly as I could, I removed the bass drum's front skin - the one with the famous "dropped-T" Beatles logo on it - and stuffed the sweater inside so that it was flush against the rear beater skin.  Then I replaced the front skin and positioned the bass drum mic directly in front of it, angled down slightly but so close that it was almost touching (pp. 12-13).

In Revolver: How the Beatles Reimagined Rock 'n' Roll, Robert Rodriguez, who's somewhat critical of Emerick's foggy memories, also writes that

Emerick had noticed Ringo's habit of dampening his snare drum's head with a cigarette pack.  The engineer wondered if applying some sort of muffling to the kick would result in a more powerful sound on tape (p. 105).

And then he goes on to describe the same process that Emerick writes about.

It seems that either Emerick himself or Peter Vince (the other Abbey Road engineer who workt on Odessey and Oracle) did the same thing here.  I went looking through Claes Johansen's The Zombies: Hung up on a Dream, and I found something Chris White says about this: "When we went to Abbey Road people like Geoff Emerick and Peter Vince engineered us.  They had been doing all the Beatles stuff and we could get great drum sounds" (p. 166).

I think I'm most excited about having noticed out because it's a demonstrable example of something that the Abbey Road engineers did to improve the sound of Odessey and Oracle.  In interviews, Rod Argent always says that because they were walking into Abbey Road as the Beatles were walking out after Sgt. Pepper, they had the technical advantages that the engineers came up with for the Beatles.  In particular, he mentions that they had eight tracks on which to record, but that's actually not correct.  Johansen writes that "all the songs had been recorded on four-track equipment with just mono in mind" (p. 175).  As a bonus feature on the 40th anniversary concert DVD, there's an excerpt from a documentary (which I can't seem to find in its entirety), and right after Rod Argent says, "We were a bit like kids in the toy shop in the sense that suddenly there were eight tracks to play with," it cuts to Chris White, who says, "We knew we had the limitation of four tracks, and Rod's wrong; it was four.  I've got them."  Presumably, he's referring to the master tapes.

After writing all of that, the chronology piqued my interest, so I did some research on that too.  I skimmed the entries in Mark Lewisohn's The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions (which I haven't gotten around to reading yet), and the last date I can find with any Sgt. Pepper song is 20 April 1967 (mixing the stereo version of "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (Reprise)").  According to the Zombie Heaven liner notes, "Friends of Mine" and part of "A Rose for Emily" were recorded on 1 June, which Lewisohn lists as the U.K. release date for Sgt. Pepper.  At some point, I'd like to cross reference the Odessey and Oracle recording dates with the dates in Lewisohn's book, just to see if the Zombies were recording at the same time the Beatles were.

In any case, this was a lot longer than I'd planned.  Here's a more trivial thing I noticed while looking through the pictures again.  On the right in the picture below, you can see a plaid suit coat on the piano:

That's Hugh's; here he is wearing it outside:

"I Don't Want to Know"

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At the end of July, I said I had only one more notation post planned, but then I never got around to posting it.  Part of that was procrastination, and part of it was just my forgetting about it.  So I finally got around to finishing off a patchwork notation (actual notation, chords, and tabs) of the guitar part in "I Don't Want to Know."

When I wrote out the riff in notation, I discovered that - while it's repeated so that it lasts a while - it's actually only two measures:

Here's the whole song written out:

|: Riff, played thrice
A major
C major / A major / B major :|

D major / A major
Solo*
A major
C major / A major / B major

Riff, played just once
A major
C major** / A major / B major

D major / F# minor / G major / A major
D major / F# minor / G major / A major
F# minor / G major / A major / D major

–
*This was the cause of most of my procrastination; I had to write out the tab for this, but I couldn't just write it out in this post because the formatting would be off, so here's a screen clipping of it written out in characters of equal width:

I used tildes (~) to indicate glissandi.  I should also note that I put a line break there, lest it get too long.

**In the transition from this C major to A major, there's an added figure:

The way I play it, all of the chords are barre chords, which makes it easier to play this figure.

"Rejoice"

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A couple days ago, I read this Rod Argent interview (which is pretty decent compared to most; part of it is Argent's standard answers to common questions, but it does branch out a bit).  He talks about a couple of the earlier Argent songs, including "Rejoice" from Ring of Hands.

This morning I was playing various Zombies things on piano, and just before I quit, I played the opening (which is also the closing) phrase from "Changes."  Because I recently read that interview (in which Argent briefly mentions the structure of "Rejoice"), I realized that both "Changes" and "Rejoice" have an introductory keyboard part that's repeated at the end as a conclusion.

"Care of Cell 44"

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I knew I'd been procrastinating on this, but I didn't know how long I've been procrastinating on this.  Back in June after I posted the chords to "Care of Cell 44" I learned the vocal melody.  There are a couple interesting things that I felt a recording illustrated better than just text, so I recorded an abbreviated piano version.  I think all I omitted was one of the initial two verses, but because I played this from memory and not along to the recording, it goes a lot faster (as is apparently my wont).

The "better, baby" in the first line ("Good morning to you, I hope you're feeling better, baby") has an ascending melody (G A B C), which reflects the meaning of that adverb.  There's an ascent to represent that optimism ("I hope") and improvement ("better").

I've written before about how - while the speaker/singer seems optimistic - there are some musical things that portend ill toward the relationship in the song (like the static bass part in the bridge [to which I can now also add the static vocal melody; it also gets stuck on a G note for a while] and the dissonant tritone [G and C#] in the a cappella sections, not to mention the lyric "Kiss and make up," which seems to indicate that the speaker/singer had some involvement in the girl's incarceration).  I found some more of those.

The "home" in the line "Feels so good you're coming home soon" is sung to an A note.  The song is (mostly) in G major though (where the musical "home" is a G note), so there's sort of a musical implication that the home to which the girl is going isn't the same one that the singer/speaker is talking (or singing) about.  It's as if she's going to A major instead.

During the bridge (particularly during the A7 chords, so roughly for the lyrics "we used to walk" and "we used to talk"), the melody is on the off-beats, which implies that the two people walked out-of-step and that there was some friction in their talking to each other.

The "and it could be so nice" is sung in either a different key or with a lot of accidentals (it's G G F Eb F D).  Because of that foreign tonality, there's a feeling of difference, which I suppose the conditional "could" also points to, but it remains that the different tonality there is because of either a different key or a lot of accidentals (implying that the girl would have to go somewhere else for it to "be so nice" or that - like the accidentals - the speaker/singer would have to change a lot).

"Lothlorien"

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Yester-day, the Zombies posted a link to this interview with Rod Argent, and he confirmed something I'd been suspicious of for years (and wrote about a couple months ago):

I did enjoy doing "Lothlorien". It obviously came from Lord of the Rings – I had just read Lord of the Rings.

Coincidentally, 43 years ago to-day (2 September 1973) J.R.R. Tolkien - the author of The Lord of the Rings - died.