"He's a Dynamo"

I just wrote about "He's a Dynamo," but I was thinking about the song again the day after I wrote that post and realized something else.  The phrase "from his head to toe" descends ("head to toe" is sung to the phrase G F# E), so in the phrase itself and in the music it's sung to, there's a top-to-bottom movement.

"New York"

The only thing I have to say about "New York" so far is that a section of the bass part has the same rhythm as some other Zombie bass parts.  In "New York," it's:

I should note that I guessed on the key and that the first dotted half note in each measure might need a staccato mark.

I've found this same rhythm (two dotted half notes followed by two eighth notes) in the bass parts in "I Can't Make up My Mind," "Tell Her No," "Whenever You're Ready," "She Does Everything for Me," and "Time of the Season."  Since "New York" is Rod Argent's looking back at where the Zombies' career started, I'm wondering if this is an intentional nod to this rhythm's presence in those original Zombie songs.  It seems relevant to note that of the five tracks with this feature listed above, four were written by Argent ("I Can't Make up My Mind" is a Chris White song).

All Together Now

I recently listened to Argent's All Together Now a couple times and found some things to write about.

"Hold Your Head Up"

After the organ solo, starting at about 4:24, the titular "Hold your head up" is sung to this melody:

(I'm still not sure whether "Hold Your Head Up" is in D major or D minor, but this part fits more readily into D minor since there's an F natural.)

First of all, the melody here ascends, so there's a musical portrayal of "up."  More interesting though, this is something of an inversion of the famous phrase that opens Beethoven's Symphony No. 5.  Here are the first few measures of the string section:

(notation found here)

Like Beethoven's phrase, the phrase in "Hold Your Head Up" consists of three notes of one pitch followed by a single note of an-other pitch.  Although the phrases are going in opposite directions, the phrase in "Hold Your Head Up" even uses the same notes as the second phrase in Beethoven's opening:  D and F.

Musically, it's flipped, and the mood is flipped too.  The opening of this Beethoven symphony is often used in television and films to convey foreboding.  In contrast, "Hold Your Head Up" is a song about encouragement: "And if it's bad, don't let it get you down / You can take it."

"He's a Dynamo"

I still can't make out many of the lyrics in this, but I noticed that the line "Smoke risin' high from his strings" ascends (I think it's F# G# A A# C# D# F#), so there's a musical representation of the "risin'."

"Pure Love"

"Rest your head / Waiting you lie / For tomorrow you die" resembles part of Isaiah 22:13: "'Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.'"  "For tomorrow you/we die" is the same at least.

"Edge of the Rainbow"

I'm not sure if it's meant to be self-referential, but the first verse of "Edge of the Rainbow" has some of the same images as Argent's "Lonely Hard Road."

As printed on the record sleeve, the first verse is:

Sometimes,
When you're walking that long lonely road
Feels like nothing
Is able to lighten the load
From the edge of the rainbow
You see the light coming through

The chorus of "Lonely Hard Road" also mentions a lonely road and a load:

Walking on a lonely hard road
I'm walking on a lonely hard road
Haven't got much money
With some luck I'll hit your lorry
Or keep carrying this heavy load

In a number of interviews, Rod Argent explains that he wrote "Edge of the Rainbow" in the style of a Ray Charles song, so maybe these similarities have less to do with referencing "Lonely Hard Road" (which was actually written by Russ Ballard) and more to do with conventions of blues songs.

In this interview (beginning shortly after the 49 minute mark), Argent reveals that the lines "'Cause into each life / Some rain must fall" in the bridge come from Ray Charles' "Drown in My Own Tears."  In the studio version of "Drown in My Own Tears" that I have, the lines Argent quotes are "I know it's true / Mm, into each life / Oh, some rain / Rain must pour."  However, earlier in the interview, Argent mentions a specific live version (on Ray Charles In Person), which is played in its entirety and where the lines are slightly different (and closer to those in "Edge of the Rainbow"): "Let me tell you that into each life / Oh, I know some rain / That I know some rain must fall."

That "fall" in "Edge of the Rainbow" is sung to two notes, with the second lower than the first (I think it's Db to Bb), so the word itself is falling, pitchwise.  Immediately after that, there's an-other fall in an "ooh" in the backing vocals (F to Eb).

Also in the bridge, there's the line "Keep moving on," which seems to recall the album opener "Moving On."  Additionally, both songs mention rainbows.  It's in the title line of "Edge of the Rainbow," and in "Moving On," there's the line "Who can say where the rainbow may be found."

Finally, the song ends with a ritardando rolled piano chord, which is the same way that "This Will Be Our Year" ends.  Like the similarity with "Lonely Hard Road" though, this might just be coincidental.

"Friends of Mine" b/w "Beechwood Park"

According to the Zombie Heaven liner notes and Russo's Collector's Guide, fifty years ago to-day (23 October 1967), the Zombies' "Friends of Mine" b/w "Beechwood Park" (CBS 2690) was released.  It was the first single from the yet-to-be-released Odessey and Oracle.

The Zombie Heaven liner notes actually list two contradicting dates.  23 October is the date given in the discography, but the chronology lists 22 September.  I think part of the confusion here is that these two dates are also when Paul Atkinson was engaged (22 September) and married (23 October) to Molly Molloy.

"Chasing the Past"

In this BBC interview* (the part about "Chasing the Past" starts at about 8:10) Rod Argent says of "Chasing the Past" that "at the beginning, it's almost Bach-like, the little piano thing."  I think in an-other interview (that I can't find again), he compares it specifically to a Bach keyboard invention.  In that respect, it bears a similarity to "Imagine the Swan," which starts with the same sort of chord arpeggiations as the C major prelude (BWV 846) from Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier.

One of the first times I listened to the song, I noticed a grammatical ambiguity.  There's a line that could be written as "You let the sunshine through" or - as it's printed on the record sleeve - "You let the sun shine through."  In the first rendering, "sunshine" is a noun (specifically a direct object); in the second, "sun shine" is two words, a noun and verb pair.  When heard, it could be understood either way, although the difference is admittedly negligible.  However, there's an earlier, similar line without this ambiguity: "You made the sun shine through."  Rendering this as "You made the sunshine through" doesn't make any grammatical sense.  So - even without the printed lyrics - the parallelism between "You made the sun shine through" and "You let the sun shine through" argues for "sun shine" as two words in that later iteration.

I haven't figured out any parts to any of the Still Got That Hunger songs yet, but I was curious about the ending of "Chasing the Past," so I listened to sections of the song while picking out notes on the keyboard.  I think the song's in G minor, but the final vocal note is a C, so it doesn't resolve.  This is something of a musical representation of the spirit of the song itself.  There's no contentment that a musical resolution would represent; rather, the singer/speaker has "Still got that hunger."

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*I always seem to have trouble linking to BBC clips, so for the record, this is "The Zombies in conversation with Stuart Maconie" on 29 July 2015.  Here's an-other link that might work.

"Don't Try to Explain"

I'm still slowly going through my old posts and posting them here (as backdated, archival posts).  In doing so, I came across a post in which I mentioned the organ solo in Neil MacArthur's "Don't Try to Explain" and that it bears some resemblance to the opening organ part in Procul Harum's "A Whiter Shade of Pale."

I decided to look into this more closely, so a couple months ago, I figured out the organ solo:

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

The opening organ part in "A Whiter Shade of Pale" proved more difficult to figure out, and I have only a fragment of it:

I think I might have this an octave lower than it's played, but it helps to compare it to the organ solo in "Don't Try to Explain."

There's a bit of a melodic similarity in measures three and four, but mostly the resemblance is one of rhythm.  There are sections of notes with long values (often tied to the next measure) interspersed with notes of shorter values (quarter notes and eighth notes).

In Claes Johansen's book The Zombies: Hung up on a Dream, "Neil MacArthur" (also known as Colin Blunstone) even comments on "A Whiter Shade of Pale" (on page 163):

"I went to a party with Rod when that first came out," Colin Blunstone recalled.  "It went on all night this party, and we played 'A Whiter Shade of Pale' all night!  It was only a little record player, so we put it on 'repeat'.  I just absolutely loved it.  It may have had an influence on Odessey and Oracle."

According to the Into the Afterlife liner notes, "Don't Try to Explain" was written by Billy Vera.  The liner notes also explain that "Don't Try to Explain" was arranged by Phil Dennys and recorded by session musicians (the organist was Harry Stoneham).  So while it's evident that Blunstone was familiar with "A Whiter Shade of Pale," it doesn't seem that he's responsible for the similarity in the organ parts.

The David Symonds Show

According to the Zombie Heaven liner notes, fifty years ago to-day (10 October 1967), the Zombies recorded "Friends of Mine" and "The Look of Love" for the David Symonds Show on Radio One.  It was broadcast "the week of 16-20 October."

"Moving On"

Two years ago to-day, Still Got That Hunger was released.  When it came out, I wrote a post saying that I wasn't going to write about it for a while, so I could become familiar with the album without trying to analyze it.  I'd planned to wait only a year, but that's turned into two.  In any case, I'm finally getting around to it.  For the next couple months, I'm going to write a series of posts about the songs on Still Got That Hunger (although I might not write about all of them).  Obviously, the first post is about "Moving On," the first track on the album.

It starts with a "One, two, three!" count-off (which I'm pretty sure is Steve Rodford).  In a lot of interviews, Rod Argent explained that the album was recorded more or less live in the studio, and - to some degree - this count-off evidences that, for this song and for the whole album.  It might also be a small reference to the Beatles since "I Saw Her Standing There" - the first track on Please Please Me - also starts with an exuberant count-off.

In this article (which was actually published before the album came out) and in many other interviews, Rod Argent explains that he started writing the song in 1977 after Elvis died and that the line "April moon, can you tell me where I'm bound?" was originally "August moon...."  He says that "for some reason the month has changed from August to April."  To some degree, "April moon, can you tell me where I'm bound?" gives a sense of the Zombies' history, since the band formed around Easter 1961 (which was 2 April) and Odessey and Oracle was released in April (19 April 1968).  I'm sure that - at the time - the Zombies didn't know where those things would lead them and the significance they would later have.

"Time of the Season"

According to the Zombie Heaven liner notes, fifty years ago to-day (3 October 1967), the Zombies mixed the mono version of "Time of the Season."  The entry in the chronology reads: "EMI Abbey Road Room 53 recording 'Time of the Season' (mono mixing)."