Backdated, archival post
[link to original on tumblr]
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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.
