"Hold Your Head Up"

I was thinking about "Hold Your Head Up" this afternoon and realized a small thing about the second verse.  The "moving" in the line "And if they stare, just let them burn their eyes on you moving" is sung with a melisma (F# E E), musically giving a sense of that movement.

"You've Really Got a Hold on Me"

A couple days ago, I listened to the first disc of the Beatles' Live on the BBC and noticed that in their version of "You Really Got a Hold on Me" [sic], "always" in the line "Seems that I'm always thinkin' of you" is sung with a melisma, musically giving a sense of the duration of "always."  (This is also in their studio version.)

To-day I checkt Smokey Robinson & the Miracles' original and the Zombies' version and discovered that they both have this feature too.  Smokey Robinson sings "always" to the notes A A G, and while they changed the key to A major, the Beatles follow this (F# F# E).  The Zombies' version is a bit different though; like the Beatles, they changed the key to A major, but it sounds like Colin Blunstone sings "always" to the notes F# F# C#.  There might be a B in there (F# F# B C#), but I might just be hearing a bit of Rod Argent's harmony part.

"She's Not There"

One of my ill-defined, unofficial musical projects for 2019 is to make some progress sorting through a stack of incomplete pages of notation.  Last night, I notated a few more lines of the bass part in "She's Not There."  I think I started writing it out sometime in the first half of last year, even though I still don't know the whole thing.  I wanted to preserve at least as much as I knew.

In comparing what I had already written and what I remembered to the actual recording, I discovered that I had a few notes wrong.  The most significant of these are probably the first two.  For years, I'd thought that "She's Not There" starts with a falling fifth (E to A) in the bass part.  Last night, I discovered that it's not a fifth; it's an octave (A to A).

There are a handful of other songs that start with falling fifths in the bass register ("You've Really Got a Hold on Me/Bring It on Home to Me," "I Love You," "Indication," "I'll Call You Mine," "Hung up on a Dream," Argent's "Free Fall," Colin Blunstone's "Exclusively for Me"), and I've previously commented that these are "just like 'She's Not There'!"  As it turns out, that's not true (unless I'm also mistaken about those).

I'm a bit disappointed that this feature isn't a musical through-line right from the Zombies' first single, but the focus of this project is figuring out the parts note-for-note (or trying to, anyway), so having an accurate record of the part is the most important thing.  In that respect, I'm glad I discovered my error.

"She's Not There" b/w "World of Glass"

According to Russo's Collector's Guide, fifty years ago to-day (10 January 1969), Neil MacArthur's "She's Not There" b/w "World of Glass" (Deram DM 225) was released in the UK.

In the US and Canada, it was released on 20 January (Deram 45-7524).

In Italy, the A-side was replaced with the Italian version ("Ma non è giusto"), and the single was released on 24 January (Deram DM 230).

"How Could We Dare to Be Wrong"

I was going through some old notes recently and found something that I forgot to write about here.  Back in October, I noticed that the phrase "Take me up" at the beginning of Colin Blunstone's "How Could We Dare to Be Wrong" is sung to an ascending melody (F# G A), so there's a musical sense of the "tak[ing]... up."