"Music from the Spheres"

I recently recorded a version of "God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen" using the Hohner Pianet and Vox Continental sounds on my keyboard.  As I was editing a video for it, I was thinking about the lyrics, and I realized that they may have had an influence on Argent's "Music from the Spheres."  The first verse of "God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen" (as I know it, at least) is:

God rest you merry, gentlemen; let nothing you dismay

For Jesus Christ our Savior was born on Christmas day

To save us all from Satan's pow'r while we were gone astray

Oh, tidings of comfort and joy, comfort and joy

Oh, tidings of comfort and joy

The phrase "To save us all from Satan's pow'r" has the same basic idea and even some of the same vocabulary as the line "'God save us from the devil' was their prayer" in "Music from the Spheres."  Later in the song, "God save us from the devil" appears by itself, too.

I vaguely remembered some link between "God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen" and "Indication," but I had to do some research to find where I'd learned this.  It's in Claes Johansen's Hung up on a Dream.  On page 149, Argent says, "We used to do a Jimmy Reed song on stage, a blues thing called 'Baby What You Want Me To Do'.  At the end of that I used to go into this long improvisation based around 'God Rest You Merry Gentlemen'!  It was quite bizarre.  I even used to start singing along with the improvisation.  It got quite wild.  We wanted to use that on a record.  So that's what we did on 'Indication', with a guitar sound that was supposed to be really out in the background.  It was supposed to be this thing we used to do on stage and which went down a storm."  Argent quotes "God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen" in the version of "Indication" on Live at the Bloomsbury Theatre, London (starting at ~2:13) and in the live recording of "I Am the Dance of Ages" from the Paris Theatre on 14 December 1972* (at ~23:39 in the audio file).

While there is a lyrical similarity between "God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen" and "Music from the Spheres" and Argent was obviously familiar with it, it's only speculation that it was an influence here.

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*I found this concert in June 2022.  The link I posted then doesn't work anymore, but the link above leads to the same recording.  As I explained two years ago, I think the date given (6 January 1973) is wrong.  In researching for this post, I also discovered that I had the title wrong there; it's "God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen," not "God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen."

"Will You Love Me Tomorrow"

I had some old notes on "Will You Love Me Tomorrow," and in looking at the song again, I found a few more features to write about.  The Zombies recorded two versions of the song for the BBC.  I'm more familiar with the first (recorded for Saturday Club on 20 September 1965) because it appears on both Zombie Heaven and The BBC Radio Sessions.  The second version (recorded for The Beat Show on 8 November 1965) appears only on The BBC Radio Sessions.  My comments below are based on the first version, with a couple footnotes on significant differences in the second.

In the line "You give your love so sweetly," the phrase "so sweetly" is sung with melismas (F# E | F# E E), giving a sense of degree, and in the line "Is this a lasting treasure," the phrase "lasting treasure" is sung with melismas (B A C# B | C# B B, I think*), lending something of a sense of the durative nature of "lasting."

In the line "When I can feel the magic of your sighs"**, "sighs" is sung with a descending melisma (A G# F#), providing the impression of a sigh.

Of these features, the Shirelles' version (in C major rather than the Zombies' A major) has just a melisma'd "treasure" (E D D) and "sighs" (C A).

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*The second version has a melisma here, too, but it's more complex.

**In the second version, this line is "Well, I recall the magic of your sighs," although in the Shirelles' version, it's "Can I believe the magic of your sighs?"

"Sitting in the Park"

"Sitting in the Park" doesn't resolve, and this matches the theme of the lyrics.  In the same way that the narrator is left "waiting for you," the listener is left waiting for a musical resolution.

"She's Coming Home"

I listened to The BBC Radio Sessions at the end of August and noticed some features that I'm finally getting around to writing about.

The second verse of "She's Coming Home" ("Oh, baby, baby, baby, I'll be good to you...") has softer dynamics than the first verse ("I saw her walking out the other day..."), and this matches the description "gentle" in the line "Our love was such a sweet and gentle thing."

This is also true of the studio version, but the BBC version actually has a greater change in the dynamics.

"Never Get over You"

I listened to Still Got That Hunger to-day (because it was released to-day in 2015), and I noticed a small feature in "Never Get over You."  In the line "Not after all this time," the phrase "all this time" is sung to notes of all different pitches (C D F), giving a sense of that entirety.

I referenced Colin Blunstone's solo version ("Now I Know I'll Never Get over You" on The Ghost of You and Me) and discovered that this feature is there, too, but because that version is in a different key, the specific pitches are different (E F# A).

"Indication"

Recently, I heard a clip of the beginning of Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor, BWV 565 (quoted in Garth Hudson's improvisation "The Genetic Method"), and I realized that the final phrase in "Indication" has the same sort of musical vocabulary.

The bass register is something like this (played with a ritardando):

And here's the beginning of Bach's toccata:

[source]

In both, there's a diatonic descent followed by an accidental on the seventh degree of the scale (G# in the A minor of "Indication" and C# in the D minor of Bach's toccata).  This accidental is also at or near the end of the phrase and played with a longer note value than the preceding notes.

There's a definite similarity here, and Rod Argent sometimes mentions Bach (in the liner notes for Classically Speaking, he wrote, "And I've always loved Bach!" and in a 2009 BBC radio segment, he called Bach "without any question, the greatest musician who ever lived"), but of course, it's just speculation on my part that this is an instance of Bach's influence.

For what it's worth:  in the live version of "Hold Your Head Up" from the Zombies' concert at Abbey Road, Argent even plays part of the fugue that follows this toccata. 

"It's Alright with Me"

I watched the Zombies concert from Abbey Road on its anniversary on the 18th, and at some point since then, I had the notion that there's some similarity between "It's Alright with Me" and "I Want You Back Again."  The lyrics of the two songs don't have much in common, though (both rhyme "on my own" with "alone"); maybe the similarity I was thinking of is just that both songs are in C minor.*  In any case, as I was looking at the lyrics of "It's Alright with Me," I noticed some significance in the structure.

The couplet "But if you want to stay around and love me / You know it's alright with me" recurs at the end of each verse, providing a sense of the constancy of "stay[ing] around."

The rhyme scheme of the verses is AABB (if rhyming "me" with itself counts), but in the bridge, this is replaced with ABA ("I'm sick and tired of being on my own / But you know I'll take nobody / Who's gonna leave me tired and alone").  Unlike in the verses, the sequential lines don't rhyme, so there's a sense of the isolation of "being on my own."

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*As I've noted before, though, the version of "I Want You Back Again" on Still Got That Hunger is in D minor.

"Different Game"

I haven't written about any of the songs on Different Game yet because, like I did with Still Got That Hunger, I want to enjoy simply listening to the album for a while before I start analyzing the songs.  Yester-day, though, I watched the performance of "Different Game" from the concert at Abbey Road Studios, and I noticed a small point.  In the line "Such a different game" in the choruses, "different" is sung with three syllables rather than just two, lending a sense of degree (for "such").

Earlier in the song, in the line "God knows life seemed such a different game" in the verse, "different" is sung with only two syllables, so even within the song, the articulation shifts, and this change highlights the word's meaning.

"It's Alright with Me"

I was thinking about "It's Alright with Me" yester-day and realized that the line "I got a leak in my bucket and a great big hole in my floor" contains a sort of merism.  The "leak in my bucket" implies a small hole, and this contrasts with the "great big hole."  Naming these two opposites indicates the variety or range of ways in which the narrator is "a man that's poor."

"Thunder and Lightning" b/w "The Coming of Kohoutek"

According to Russo's Collector's Guide, fifty years ago to-day (2 September 1974), Argent's "Thunder and Lightning" (edited) b/w "The Coming of Kohoutek" (Epic 8-50025) was released in the U.S. and Canada.  This seems to be the last single Argent released in these countries; Russo doesn't list any more.

"The Tracks of My Tears"

I recently listened to Colin Blunstone's Collected (for only the fourth time), specifically to hear his version of "The Tracks of My Tears" and see if it has the same features that I'd noticed in the original by Smokey Robinson & the Miracles.

At the end of the bridge, there's the line "My smile is my makeup I wear since my break up with you," sung to a melody something like this:

(Blunstone's version is even in the same key as the original, so I could re-use my notation excerpt from my post on how this line may have influenced the keyboard solo in an alternate take of the Zombies' "Nothing's Changed.")

After the initial D note, the melody repeats the same triplet until the phrase "break up with you," at which point it diverges.  These changes in the repeated sequence of pitches and in the rhythm musically illustrate that "break."

Because I've commented on Shakespeare references in other Zombies and Colin Blunstone songs, I feel I should mention that the idea of "the tracks of my tears" is basically the same as "With cadent tears fret channels in her cheeks" in King Lear (I.iv.292), although this seems to be just coincidental.  In this video (starting at ~10:16), Smokey Robinson talks about the song a bit, including how he came up with the title phrase.

For what it's worth:  these features are also in the version by the Roulettes (a band that Russ Ballard and Robert Henrit were in before Argent), although that's a whole step lower, in F major.

Encore

I watched the Beatles movie A Hard Day's Night yester-day (partially because this month marks its sixtieth anniversary), and it gave me an opportunity to write about something I'd realized last year but forgot to write about here.

The cover of Argent's Encore shows a number of film strips of various shots of the group playing live:

This is the same basic idea as one scene during the press conference in A Hard Day's Night where a photographer takes multiple pictures of George Harrison as he makes various faces and the movie shows the resulting film strips:

I don't know if this was the intent for Encore, but there's certainly a resemblance between the album cover and this shot in A Hard Day's Night.

When I was thinking about this again yester-day, I realized that the back cover of the Zombies' I Love You album uses this idea, too.  Here's a scan of the CD booklet (in which the back cover of the record sleeve has become the inside back cover), showing the group playing live on a television show in Sweden in November 1966:

According to the liner notes of the CD, this compilation album was originally released only in continental Europe and Japan since "Decca's affiliates in other countries were aware of the band's status and the need for a second long player, but the band apparently lacked the necessary profile at home to be taken seriously by the label."  Because of these circumstances, I doubt that the Zombies themselves had any input in the design of the album cover, but the similarity to the shot in A Hard Day's Night still seems to point to the Beatles' influence.

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For what it's worth, here's a post about the cover of Begin Here, which also seems to indicate a Beatle influence, and here's an-other post about the front and back covers of I Love You, where I detail some investigation I did on these pictures.