Odessey and Oracle

Last week, I found an-other small musical element that lends some cohesion to Odessey and Oracle.  I was playing the vocal melody from "Care of Cell 44" on organ and realized that a section of it contains all of the same pitches as the bass part in the coda of "I Want Her She Wants Me," which I wrote about recently.

The bass part in the coda of "I Want Her She Wants Me" has only four pitches (G D E G'), something like this:

The vocal melody in "Care of Cell 44" is beyond my notational ability, but every other line of the verses is something like D D E D E D G' E D E G A B C (sometimes with the initial D omitted).  The first eleven notes (corresponding to the words "It's gonna be good to have you back again" in one line) match the pitches in the bass part in the coda of "I Want Her She Wants Me."

"I Want Her She Wants Me"

I was thinking about the bass part in "I Want Her She Wants Me" yester-day and had a notion about one section, although it may be a bit far-fetched.

In the coda, the bass plays something like this:

This section is played in the higher register, so I notated it in the treble clef.  I also resolved it with a high G, like the Zombies do in live performances, although in the version on Odessey and Oracle, these figures just repeat until the fade-out.

Most of these notes occur on the off-beats, and in a way, this matches the relationship described in the lyrics; the bass part emphasizes what's in-between the beats in the same way that the lyrics focus on the mutual nature of the relationship ("I want her; she wants me").

"Sometimes"

I listened to Begin Here a few days ago (on 25 November because one of the recording sessions for the album was on 25 November 1964), and I noticed a small feature in "Sometimes," which is included as a bonus track on the CD.

The line "I've been hurt so many times before" is sung to a melody something like this:

(I'm not completely sure of the key, although the song does end with a D major chord.)

There's a denser concentration of notes for the word "many" (sung to a pair of sixteenth notes), and to some degree, this gives a sense of its meaning.

Encore

According to Russo's Collector's Guide, fifty years ago to-day (22 November 1974), Argent's Encore (Epic S EPC 88063) was released in the U.K. The U.S. and Canada release (Epic PEG 33079) was on 9 December.

Additionally, the single "Keep on Rollin' (#2)" b/w "I Am the Dance of Ages (live)" (Epic S EPC 2849) was released in the U.K.  Apparently, this single wasn't released in the U.S.  As far as I can tell, this second version of "Keep on Rollin'" has never been re-issued.

"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.