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.
