"Hung up on a Dream"

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A couple days ago, I was thinking about the backing vocals in "Hung up on a Dream," and I realized something about the phrase to which "Gentle love" is sung:

(It's sung in falsetto, so it might have been more accurate to notate it an octave higher, but then there's a mess of ledger lines.)

The first two notes have the same rhythm and pitch as the first two notes of the mellotron part at the beginning of "Changes," which just happens to be the next track on the album (after flipping the vinyl, of course):

Although the songs are in different keys, those phrases' having the same rhythm and tonality is just an-other element (albeit a small one) that gives Odessey and Oracle a kind of cohesion.

"Don't Cry for Me"

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The Decca-era song I lookt into last week was "Don't Cry for Me."  I wrote out the bass part and put the guitar chords above the staff:

The guitar part has this little lick during the first two measures:

The tildes (~) indicate glissandi.

According to what I figured out, the bass part is usually the root note of whatever chord it's beneath (with the notable exception of a D note underneath an F major, essentially making an F major 6th [although writing it out made me question my accuracy there]), which is why it's so baffling to me that in The Zombies: Hung up on a Dream (p. 138), Claes Johansen says that the song is "driven along by Grundy's excellent drumming and Chris White's increasingly innovative bass-playing."  I think Chris White's a great bass player (although I'm obviously biased), but I have to say: this isn't the most interesting bass part.

"Call of the Night"

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I'd actually forgotten about this, but two weeks ago I learned the bass part for the verses of "Call of the Night."  The bridge is still giving me some problems.

At the beginning of the year, I started looking into one of the Zombies' Decca-era tracks every week, either trying to learn an-other part or write down parts I already learned before I forget them.  For "Call of the Night," I notated as much of the bass part as I know (I'm missing only twelve measures!), and I wrote down the chords.

"It's Only Money, Pt. 2"

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A couple months ago, I learned the recurring phrase in "Money (That's What I Want)" (although I have to admit that I'm familiar with only the Beatles' version on With the Beatles).  A little over a month ago, I realized that it has some musical similarities with the opening guitar figure of Argent's "It's Only Money, Pt. 2."  I remember reading somewhere that the Argent song was based on "Money (That's What I Want)" (although I'm not sure how authoritative that claim is), so it really wasn't that surprising to discover those similarities.

The phrases are similar in two different ways.  First, there's the rhythm.  Here's (most of) the figure in "Money (That's What I Want)":

In every other measure, there're three eighth notes, a quarter note, and then three more eighth notes.  The phrase in "It's Only Money, Pt. 2" has the same rhythm in every other measure too (it begins on an up-beat, so it's not in the first measure, but it is in measures 3, 5 and 7):

The second similarity is a three-note chromatic phrase.  In "Money (That"s What I Want)," there's the phrase G, G#, A:

In "It's Only Money, Pt. 2," there are the phrases B, A#, A (followed by a G# in one instance, making a four-note chromatic phrase) and G#, G, F#:

While those aren't the same groups of notes and while they go in different directions, pitch-wise, both songs do have three-note chromatic phrases.

"Tell Me How"

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Yester-day I learned the chords and bass part for Buddy Holly's "Tell Me How," which is one of the songs that Colin Blunstone covered on Planes.  I've listened to Blunstone's version only twice, so I don't want to go straight into analysis, but I did reference it enough to say with some confidence that it's a half-step above Holly's original key (Bb major instead of Holly's A major).

"Be Glad"

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I'm not sure it's really worth posting, but here's the notation for the tubular bell part at about 6:00 in Argent's "Be Free."  I've been notating some things recently (partially to practice my notation skills and partially so that I have some record of parts if I forget them), and this one seemed easy.

This might be a bit grandiose, but I also feel that by preserving these parts in notation, I'm acting as something of an archivist for these songs.

I don't think the whole song is in G major, but this part fits into it nicely: