New Acquisitions

I got the Zombies book in the mail to-day!  I haven't read very much yet (I want to go a bit slowly in order to make it last), but I've already seen two pictures I hadn't seen before!

tirsdag 30 mars 2017 I don't remember the last time I was this excited about a book... and I have an uncommonly large collection of books.

A post shared by David (@modestyandmonocles) on Mar 30, 2017 at 12:34pm PDT

I think I neglected to mention this, but when I pre-ordered the book, I also ordered Colin Blunstone's Collected set:

Earlier this month, the price of one of the flutes I've been looking at dropped something like $80, so I bought a flute too:

For this project, the primary goal is to learn Mike Vicker's parts in songs like "Smokey Day" and "I Know She Will."  I've been practicing nearly every day for a week, but I know only three notes so far (Bb, A, and G), so it'll be a while before I'm proficient enough to play those parts.

"She Does Everything for Me"

I listened to the I Love You album to-day, and I remembered something I noticed in "She Does Everything for Me" a couple months ago (more like half a year; it was in August) that I neglected to write about.

The first line is "There is nothing to say; it's all been said," and that "said" has a melisma.  It's sung to the notes E F# E D.  Because it's sung to more than one note, there's almost a musical representation of "all" having "been said."  It's as if each note to which "said" is sung represents a past conversation.

"The Way I Feel Inside" [rehearsal version]

In archiving my old recordings of "The Way I Feel Inside," I discovered that I'd never recorded an updated version after discovering a month or two ago that I had been playing a wrong chord (what I'd been playing as an E major is actually a C# minor).

I suppose to-day was an appropriate day to record this since it's Bach's birthday and - as I mentioned in this post - the BACH motif is in the melody of "The Way I Feel Inside."

"I Don't Want to Worry"

Last week, the Decca-era song I lookt into was "I Don't Want to Worry."  The Zombies recorded it only as a demo in 1966.  I know most of the chords, but I don't think what I'd been playing for the introduction (which is more involved than just chords, anyway) is accurate, so when I wrote out the bass part, I didn't include the chords at all.

As always, there's the disclaimer that I might have something wrong:

In the recording, it sounds like there's a slight flub during the second instance of the triplets (the fifth bar of the fifth line).  I smoothed that out in my notation because I think it's supposed to be the same as the bar that starts that line.

"Goin' out of My Head" b/w "She Does Everything for Me"

According to Russo's Collector's Guide and the Zombie Heaven liner notes, fifty years ago to-day (17 March 1967), the Zombies' "Goin' out of My Head" b/w "She Does Everything for Me" (Decca F. 12584) - their last single for Decca - was released in the U.K.

"Losing Hold"

About a week ago, I learned a mellotron phrase near the end of Argent's "Losing Hold."  I'd thought that after that one stand-out phrase, it just plays the same part as the electric piano, but as I was recording my own version, I discovered that that's not that case.  It plays its own phrase, doubles the electric piano, but then there's a second phrase.  While that second phrase has some similarity with the first, it's not exactly the same.  So while I thought I had the whole mellotron part, all I have is one phrase, which I guess is better than nothing:

"I Can't Make up My Mind"

This year, I'm endeavoring to look into one of the Zombies' Decca-era songs every week (although I've been a bit lax lately).  The song I lookt into two weeks ago was "I Can't Make up My Mind."  While thinking about the bass part, I realized that it has the same rhythm as "Tell Her No," "Whenever You're Ready," and "Time of the Season."  I got rather excited about this, but then I went looking into some old posts and discovered that I already knew this.  I wrote this post in December 2015 in which I acknowledged that similarity in rhythm.  However, I was wrong about where the bar lines should be drawn.  I didn't realize then that "I Can't Make up My Mind" begins on an upbeat, so the rhythm in each bar is the same as some sections of the songs listed above.  That is: two dotted quarter notes followed by two eighth notes.

While writing out notation, I usually find some subtleties that I was unaware of, and that same thing happened with "I Can't Make up My Mind."  There's a chromatic phrase (from G to F) that I'd missed before.

I wrote in the chords above the staff, but in some places, those may be simply implied rather than played out-right.  And, as always, there's the disclaimer that I might have something wrong.

"Time of the Season"

I recently read part of Ecclesiastes 3, and it occurred to me that a few verses have some resemblance to lines in "Time of the Season" (or, rather, the other way around, since Ecclesiastes is much older).

According to the Zombie Heaven liner notes (and I think he's also mentioned it in other interviews), Rod Argent came up with the phrase "the time of the season" when he misheard the line "If you look closer it's easy to trace" in Smokey Robinson & the Miracles' "Tracks of My Tears."

However, aside from that, it bears some resemblance to Ecclesiastes 3.  The first two lines of "Time of the Season" are "It's the time of the season / When love runs high," and each verse ends with "It's the time of the season for loving."  These seem to combine two verses from Ecclesiastes: "For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven" (Ecclesiastes 3:1) and "A time to love, and a time to hate" (Ecclesiastes 3:8a)(my italics in both quotations).

This section of Ecclesiastes is probably best known via the Byrds' version of Pete Seeger's "Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There Is a Season)," and because Rod Argent said, "I love those early Byrds records" in this interview, I'm assuming he was familiar with the song (which was the title track of the Byrds' second album).  Of course, since he was a chorister, he might have heard the Ecclesiastes text in church too.

I recently listened to the Mastertapes program again, and Argent mentions "Time of the Season" and "Hung up on a Dream" as the two songs on Odessey and Oracle that were most influenced by the 1967 Summer of Love.  That's probably a more immediate influence than these verses from Ecclesiastes, but Ecclesiastes still may figure into it.

The "promised lands" part of the line "To take you in the sun to promised lands" also seems to be Biblical.  I'm not sure if "promised land" occurs in the Bible (a quick look through my Bible's concordance didn't reveal anything), but the phrase describes the land that God promised to the children of Israel in Genesis and Exodus.

"Exclusively for Me"

Last week, I notated the bass part for Colin Blunstone's "Exclusively for Me" from Ennismore.  While notating it, I figured out the rhythm for the part in the middle.  I knew it was all E notes, but I hadn't figured out the rhythm.  I had a feeling it would be too difficult to remember anyway and that I'd have to write it out before I could actually play it with the right rhythm.

The section at the end is repeated only once (so that the phrase is played twice), and I would have had enough room on my paper to notate it (I cropped out a whole empty line to save space), but it was only after I'd written in the repeat signs that I realized that it's repeated only once.

When I recorded this a few years ago, I noted the falling interval of a fifth (E to A), which is the same interval that "She's Not There" starts with, but I don't think I realized then that both songs start with an upbeat too.

While notating this, I also discovered that the string part (I'm still not sure whether it's cello or bass) isn't exactly the same as the last section of the bass part.  After it reaches the low E, there's an E an octave higher before it starts the descent from the A again.

"Feels Like Rain"

While transcribing an-other Colin Blunstone song (I'm still making my way through The Ghost of You and Me), I found a lyrical connection to an earlier Zombies song.  In "Feels Like Rain," there are the lines "And it feels like rain when I think of you / No matter where I am or what I do," the second of which is fairly similar to some lines in "I Know She Will":  "No matter where you go / No matter what you do / She'll be for you."

The lines describe different things ("It feels like rain" and "She'll be for you"), but the "No matter" sections both have location ("No matter where I am" and "No matter where you go") and action ("[No matter] what I do" and "No matter what you do").

Blunstone wrote "Feels Like Rain," so it's possible that this is an intentional lyrical nod to "I Know She Will."