This morning I listened to Argent's eponymous and debut album, and I noticed something about "Lonely Hard Road." During the first half of the song, the backing vocals are panned to the right, but after the tempo change at about 2:39, when they appear again, they're panned to the left. If those backing vocals are assumed to be static; their apparent shift from right to left is actually the movement of everything else to the right. So between those shifting backing vocals and that tempo change, the singer/speaker seems to have made some progress in his walk.
When I listened to the second disc of the 30th anniversary of George Harrison's All Things Must Pass this afternoon, the first vocal phrase in "The Art of Dying" sounded vaguely familiar to me. In my head, I could hear an-other part that wasn't in Harrison's song, so I figured that I was remembering an-other song that it sounded like. I eventually placed it as Colin Blunstone's "A Sign from Me to You," and I just lookt into the similarities.
The similarity is between only the first vocal phrase of each verse. I didn't figure out the exact melody for either, but they're both (roughly) a rising and falling phrase (something like A, B, C, D, C, B, A). They both have eleven syllables too. The first line of "The Art of Dying" is "There'll come a time when all of us must leave here" (in the liner notes, the lyrics are rendered with a line break ["There'll come a time / When all of us must leave here"], but there isn't really a break there as they're sung. The first line of "A Sign from Me to You" is "You say all you wanted was a sign, my love." The first lines of all the other verses in both songs also have eleven syllables.
In some interviews and things I've read, Blunstone has mentioned that he's a fan of the Beatles, but I don't know if that extends to their solo material. This similarity with Harrison's "The Art of Dying" would seem to suggest so.
I'm listening to a compilation album of the Drifters. I figured I'd better transcribe their "Some Kind of Wonderful" because I noticed something about it last time I did this Collection Audit project, and in doing so, I noticed something else.
In the bridge, there are the lines "There's so much I wanna say / But the right words don't come my way." It reminded me of "I love you / Yes I do, but the words won't come" and "My words should explain / But my words won't come" in the Zombies' "I Love You" (written by Chris White, their bass player). I'll cite the same source I cited two years ago: in the Zombie Heaven liner notes, Paul Atkinson (their guitarist) says, "We hung out in Ben E King and the Drifters' dressing room, and we'd play poker and sing and play guitar." "Some Kind of Wonderful" is from 1961; that Atkinson quote refers to 1964; and "I Love You" is from 1965, so the chronology would allow for that influence.
This also calls into question something I noticed a few years ago. There's a similar line in "Now I Know I'll Never Get over You" from Colin Blunstone's The Ghost of You and Me album. It's "It's alright if the words won't come." Since Blunstone is the leader singer for the Zombies and wrote "Now I Know I'll Never Get over You," I thought that it was likely that he took that line from "I Love You," even if just subconsciously. But now that I found a similar line in a Drifters' song, I'm not so sure. Two years ago, I postulated that this same Drifters' song influenced Blunstone's "Wonderful" from his Journey album.
I feel it worth noting that the Zombies recorded a version of Blunstone's "Now I Know I'll Never Get over You" (titled just "Never Get over You") on their new album Still Got That Hunger, so that Drifters' influence - if it's viable - has caught up with them again.
I am the beat of angerAnd
The temple of your hate
Horseman in the night
Hell-bound in the night
I am the body powerThat "I am the body power" section appears twice, but only the second time has that vocal double-tracking.
The rhythm of your joy
Spiral in the air
A line inside a prayer
Because a vision softly creepingThe second verse starts with dreams too, but they seem to be different: "In restless dreams I walked alone."
Left its seeds while I was sleeping
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains, within the sound of silence
Yester-day I listened to Ben E. King's "Stand by Me" on a compilation album. The bass part sounded suspiciously familiar to me, but because the version on that compilation was a re-recording instead of the original, I had to go and listen to the thirty-second sample on Amazon to make sure what I heard was in the original recording too. And it was!
My favorite band is the Zombies, and over the past four years or so, I've been trying to learn every part to every song they recorded. Over the last few months, I noticed the same recurring phrase in the bass parts in three of Rod Argent's songs. It's the 5th, 7th, and octave notes of the scale of whatever key the song is in, and it's in a rhythm of two eighth notes (the 5th and 7th) then two dotted quarter notes (the octave, twice).
I had to learn the bass part to King's "Stand by Me" to be sure, but it follows this same pattern (or, rather, since "Stand by Me" is older, those Rod Argent songs follow the same pattern). In interviews, Argent frequently mentions the Zombies' Christmas show at the Brooklyn Fox in 1964 and how Ben E. King and the Drifters were an-other act on the same bill, so I'm assuming he was familiar with "Stand by Me."
In King's "Stand by Me," that 5th, 7th, octave phrase is in A major (so, E, G#, A, A). In the Zombies' songs, it's in E major in "Tell Her No" (B, D#, E, E), in C major in "Whenever You're Ready" (G, B, C, C), and in E minor in "Time of the Season" (B, D, E, E). After I realized that connection, I kept playing that part, just because I was so excited I found a precedent for this motif I'd found in these Zombies' songs, and I discovered that there's a further similarity between the bass parts of "Stand by Me" and "Time of the Season." After that 5th, 7th, octave phrase, there's a diatonic descent in the same two-eighth-notes-then-two-dotted-quarter-notes rhythm (A, G#, F#, F# in "Stand by Me" and E, D, C, C in "Time of the Season"):
(click the image to enlarge it)
Via my Collection Audit project, I found a precedent for that 5th, 7th, octave phrase in a few of Argent's bass parts.So for the first four bars of the verses, the bass part in "Time of the Season" is the same as the bass part in "Stand by Me," just in E minor rather than A major.
