"Time of the Season" b/w "Friends of Mine"

According to Russo's Collector's Guide, fifty years ago to-day (30 December 1968), the Zombies' "Time of the Season" b/w "Friends of Mine" was released in the U.S. and Canada (Date 2-1628).

Odessey and Oracle

According to the Zombie Heaven liner notes, fifty years ago to-day (19 December 1967), the Zombies mixed the stereo versions of "Changes" and "Friends of Mine."

"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.

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."

Odessey and Oracle

According to the Zombie Heaven liner notes, fifty years ago to-day (12 June 1967), the Zombies did some work on Odessey and Oracle.  The entry for 12 June reads: "EMI Abbey Road Room 53 recording: 'Friends of Mine', 'A Rose for Emily', 'This Will Be Our Year' (mono mixing)."

It seems that this was the mixing session for the mono versions of these songs; however, "A Rose for Emily" is mentioned again later in the list of production dates.  10 July lists "recording... 'A Rose for Emily' (reduction master)," and an-other mono mixing session with "A Rose for Emily" was on 20 July.

According to the Zombie Heaven liner notes, the cello part "was included in some initial mixes but eventually discarded."  So it seems that this 12 June mixing session was for the version with cello.

"Hung up on a Dream" was the other song recorded at that 10 July session, and because that includes mellotron, I'm assuming that 10 July was also when the mellotron part for "A Rose for Emily" was recorded (which was also later discarded).

Recording Session

According to the liner notes of Zombie Heaven and the 50th anniversary edition of Odessey and Oracle, fifty years ago to-day (1 June 1967) the Zombies recorded "Friends of Mine" and "A Rose for Emily."  This was the first recording session for Odessey and Oracle.

"Friends of Mine"

Since 2014, I've recorded a version of Odessey and Oracle every year, but when I started doing it this year, I kept finding parts that I wasn't playing very accurately.  Rather than rush through it all and end up with a knowingly flawed version, I decided just to skip it altogether.

But, of course, because to-day's the 49th anniversary of the album's release, I listened to Odessey and Oracle (specifically, the 30th anniversary edition, which has both the stereo and mono versions of the album).  Because it sounded easy, I thought I'd figure out the vocal parts for the chant of couples in "Friends of Mine," and while writing out the notation, I discovered something interesting.

First, here's the notation:

I should note while the whole chant of couples lasts eight measures, the second four measures are musically identical to the first four.

What I noticed while writing this out is that each couple has its own complete measure.  For each couple (aside from Jean and Jim), there's a one-syllable name, "and," and a two-syllable name.  That's four syllables, one for each beat in a measure, so each couple is musically represented as complete unit.

"Friends of Mine"

Backdated, archival post

[link to original on tumblr]

---&---

Yester-day I figured out Rod Argent's (I think it's Argent, at least) counterpoint part during the second half of the second verse of "Friends of Mine."  It's the "ba ba ba..." part.  It's simple enough that I could notate it, and I noticed a couple of interesting things.  First of which is that it's in-between the beats:

Second, I noticed that it has some similarity with the mellotron part during the second verse of "Changes":

Those four bars repeat, so I didn't feel it was necessary to notate the whole thing.  Leaving it at four measures makes it a bit easier to compare with the four-measure phrase in "Friends of Mine" too.

Like I've mentioned before, I'm not quite sure what key "Changes" is in, but I've been assuming that it's A minor.  "Friends of Mine" is in C major.  Already, there's a possibility of some tonal similarities because A minor and C major are relative keys.

The note values are different, but there are some similarities between the phrases.  They each start with E and F notes, although in different orders.  Then there's a matching descent of a second (A to G) and then an-other descent starting from a higher note in which the first two notes are the same (C, B, A, G, in "Changes;" C, B, G# in "Friends of Mine").

Mostly what I noticed about the two phrases is that the intervals are very small.  They're mostly seconds or thirds.  There are two fourths in the "Friends of Mine" phrase (ascending G to C and descending A to E).  "Changes" has only one fourth interval, although it's the same ascending G to C that's in "Friends of Mine."

Because of the small intervals and the up-and-down nature of the melody, once I isolated this part from the rest of "Friends of Mine," it kept reminding me of "St. Anne," the tune to which "O God, Our Help in Ages Past" is sung.  It also has small intervals (the largest of which is a fourth) and - like the phrase in "Friends of Mine" - has only one accidental.  I'm assuming that Argent would be familiar with this because of his chorister days.  I was also thinking he might have known it through Bach's use of the tune in his Prelude and Fugue in E flat major, BWV 552.  But then I did some research, and it turns out that BWV 552 is referred to as "St. Anne" only because of its similarity to the "St. Anne" tune, which Bach wouldn't have known.

However!  I was also going to note the similarity between "St. Anne" and the hymn tune "Was mein Gott will."  Like the "Friends of Mine" phrase and "St. Anne," it's largest interval is a fourth.  It has two accidentals though.

Back in April, I found "Was mein Gott will" in Bach's Ich hab in Gottes Herz und Sinn, BWV 92, and I actually thought it was "St. Anne" at first.  So maybe that's the tune Bach used for BWV 552?  He also uses it in BWV 103, BWV 111, and BWV 144.  In any case, I think there might be something to the similarity between the "Friends of Mine" phrase and these hymn tunes.  It seems that choral singing is frequently touted as a feature on Odessey and Oracle, although usually that's in reference to things like "Maybe after He's Gone" and "Changes."  But now that I know the notes of this "Friends of Mine" phrase, I think it's an indication of Argent's chorister background too.

"Butcher's Tale" and "Friends of Mine"

Backdated, archival post

[link to original on tumblr]

---&---

I was thinking about this a few days ago, but I forgot until earlier to-day.

Part of the chord progressions for "Butcher's Tale" and "Friends of Mine" are sort of the same, which makes some sense since they're both Chris White songs.

There's a progression in "Butcher’s Tale" that's F major, Bb major, F major, A major, and there's a progression in "Friends of Mine" that's C major, F major, C major, E major.  There's a significant difference though in that "Butcher's Tale" is in D minor and "Friends of Mine" is in C major, so if you write those sections of the chord progressions in Roman numerals, it's III VI III V for "Butcher's Tale" and I IV I III for "Friends of Mine."  The relationship between each group of four chords is the same even though they start on different scale degrees and are in different keys.

I should add a disclaimer to this that while I think I'm right, I don't have any training in music theory so I could have gotten this wrong.

Odessey and Oracle

Backdated, archival post

[link to original on tumblr]

---&---

I listened to Odessey and Oracle to-day (with bonus tracks), and I discovered a lot of new things!

"Care of Cell 44"

The last three lines of the first verse all start with words that end in "-ing," but their meaning is sort of ambiguous.

Good morning to you I hope you're feeling better, baby
Thinking of me while you are far away
Counting the days until they set you free again
Writing this letter hoping you're OK

The "thinking" seems to go along with the "you're" from the previous line, so: "I hope you're feeling better [and] thinking of me...."  (Although the "thinking of me..." could also be a participial.)  The subject of "counting" could be either the "you" or the singer/speaker.  "I hope you're... counting the days..." or "[I am] counting the days."  (Again, "counting the days..." could be a participial too, modifying either the "you" or the speaker/singer.)  The subject of "writing" is clearly the speaker/singer.  Things could be divided a couple different ways there.

"A Rose for Emily"

There's an extra line in the second and third verses (which I knew), but this time I realized the significance of the music's repetition there.  The chords under the second half of "The roses in her garden fade away" (A and Bm) are also used for the next line: "Not one left for her grave."  Musically, there's a return to "the roses in her garden," as if to check if there's one for her grave.

"Maybe after He's Gone"

There's some parallelism in the lines "I feel I'll never breathe again / I feel life's gone from me."  Particularly because both start with "I feel," "I'll never breathe again" is equated to "life's gone from me."

"Brief Candles"

I got thinking about the "tight" in the first line: "There she sits her hands are held, tight around her glass."  In that rendering, it's an adjective, but it could also be parsed as a flat adverb:  "There she sits her hands are held tight[ly] around her glass."  There's no real difference in the meaning, but grammatically it's different.

I also discovered a consistency in the rhyme scheme.  Each verse has a rhyme scheme of AABB, but the B's carry over: the last two lines of the first verse end with "stay" and "way;" the those in both the second and third verses end with "say" and "way."

I think I noticed this before but forgot to write about it: the vocals are double-tracked during Blunstone's verse (as are the others'), except for the second "say" in "He does not say a single word, no word of love to say."  It draws attention to itself because that second voice is missing, and it musically portrays the lack of a "word of love."

"I Want Her She Wants Me"

The continual repetition of "I want her she wants me" at the end mirrors the cyclical nature of the statement itself.  It just keeps going around.

"Butcher's Tale"

I noticed this earlier, but I've neglected to write about it:  the repetition of the "can't/won't stop shaking" line reflects the inability to cease.

A new thing I noticed though is the rhyme scheme of the first verse, which is different from all the others.  The first verse has ABAB ("trade," "fee," "stayed," "see") where the others are ABCB.  So as the speaker/singer looks back on his past life ("A butcher, yes, that was my trade...") things have a stronger coherence than they do once he goes to war.

"Friends of Mine"

I'd previously noted the parallelism in "That's something to see; that's nothing to hide," but I noticed a new one in the chorus:  "And they've got something it's so hard to find" parallels with "And they've got something you don't often find."  It's not as strictly parallel as some other instances, but it's pretty close.

—Bonus Tracks—
"I'll Call You Mine"

I've been meaning to mention this since 19 April:  although "I'll Call You Mine" is a bonus track, it works really well sequenced after "Time of the Season" (as it is on one of the Odessey and Oracle CD re-issues I have) because they're in relative keys.  "Time of the Season" is in E minor, and "I'll Call You Mine" is (at least mostly) in G major.

I did notice a new thing too.  During this section:

I couldn't chance to break the spell we had
The happy times we had, and yet the times were sad
Just for me, baby, you understood then
I was afraid to try to call you mine

Blunstone is singing the lead vocal, and Argent is doing the harmony vocal.  But Argent's harmony vocal drops out for the third line.  So there's only one voice (Blunstone's) singing "Just for me...."  It emphasizes the exclusivity.

"Don't Cry for Me"

An-other thing I've neglected to write about:  the "down" in the lines "Don't break your heart / Thinking you have let me down" is broken into syllables (a melisma), and the later notes are lower in pitch, so the word itself is going down.

"Smokey Day"

Like the "tight" in "Brief Candles," there are words here that could be either adjectives or flat adverbs:  "Soft, serene, she dances" or "Soft[ly], serene[ly] she dances."

"She Loves the Way They Love Her"

Surely I must have noticed this before, but I don't think I've written about it:  in the first line of the third verse, there's a multitude of internally-rhyming words:  "Crying, dying, sighing, whining, shining in the microphone."

Odessey and Oracle

Backdated, archival post

[link to original on tumblr]

---&---

I listened to Odessey and Oracle (with bonus tracks!) to work on transcribing the lyrics (which I think I'm almost finished with), and I noticed a lot of things.  I'm still slightly astounded that I'm only now discovering some things about this album, but at the same time, I hope I continue to do so because it just makes me love it so much more.

In the verses of "Beechwood Park," certain words are repeated within a line, ostensibly to further the images.  There's "Do you remember summer days just after summer rain" and "Do you remember golden days and golden summer sun."

Also in "Beechwood Park," there's assonance (and internal rhyme with "dark" and "park") in the line "And we would count the evening stars as the day grew dark in Beechwood Park."

If you isolate the backing vocals for the verses of "Hung up on a Dream," you can get some (perhaps relevant, perhaps irrelevant) statements:  "Gentle love / turned me on to sounds unheard" and "Sometimes I think I'll never find / Gentle love."

I'm still not sure about the lyrics in "Changes," but what I currently have is:

I knew her when summer was her crown
And autumn sighed how brown her eyes 

I knew her when winter was her cloak
In spring her voice she spoke to me

In checking my transcription, I noticed that the poetic device here isn't line-ending rhyme, but internal rhyme:  "crown" with "brown" and "cloak" with "spoke."  I also noticed that the summer/autumn couplet appears two more times than the winter/spring couplet, which - along with "Do you remember summer days just after summer rain" from "Beechwood Park" - seems to emphasize summer on the album.

"Butcher's Tale" has a very obvious domestic element:

I want to go home
Please let me go home
Go home

I'm sort of embarrassed that I didn't think of that when I initially listed instances of home in the Zombies' songs.

In "Friends of Mine," the line "It feels so good to know two people so in love, so in love" sort of parallels the line "Feels so good you're coming home soon" in "Care of Cell 44."  Both are just a single line (in "Friends of Mine," I think it's technically a pre-chorus, and I believe it constitutes the entire chorus in "Care of Cell 44"), and both mention that it "feels so good."

—

I also found some things in the bonus tracks.

The line "Walk in the light of day and talk the night away" from "I'll Call You Mine" is such a perfect line.  There are two instances of internal rhyme ("walk" with "talk" [which, incidentally, is a line-ending rhyme in the bridge of "Care of Cell 44"] and "day" with "away") and a sort of parallelism with the temporal elements ("day" and "night").

From "Imagine the Swan," the line "And it's there in my room to remind me of you" seems to be an-other instance of the Zombies' remembering things in their songs.  It's "remind" instead of "remember," but it's still a similar sentiment.

I also started paying attention to the backing vocals during this section:

For the colors are gone
You've become kind of grey
And you're not like the swan
That I knew yesterday

Now the pictures are wrong
You've become kind of grey
I'll imagine the swan
That you were yesterday

During the first two lines, the backing vocals are descending (the second descent starts at a lower pitch than the first, so it's a continual descent, not just a repetition of the first descent).  During the third line, it's a single note, and during the last line, there are interruptions.  So, taken as a whole, those backing vocals indicate the decay that the lyrics themselves are talking about ("the colors are gone / You've become kind of grey").

The lyrics of "Smokey Day" are still proving to be difficult to decipher, but I did notice an instance of consonance in the line "Smokey day, hey, bring the dust of dusky evening."

And I found instances of crying and dreaming in "She Loves the Way They Love Her," although the crying seems more theatrical than emotional:

Crying, dying, sighing, whining, shining in the microphone
Dreaming dreams of future time when she and me are all alone

It's sort of obvious, but there's assonance in that first line - "crying," "dying," & "sighing" and "whining" & "shining."  That assonance is sort of present in the "time" in the second line too.

"Care of Cell 44"

Backdated, archival post

[link to original on tumblr]

---&---

Yester-day I realized a possible influence on "Care of Cell 44."  In the song, there's the line "writing this letter, hoping you're OK," which reminded me of a post I recently wrote about this same sort of epistolary writing in the Beatles' "P.S. I Love You" and "When I'm Sixty-Four."  I'm not sure if "When I'm Sixty-Four" had been released by the time "Care of Cell 44" was written (although it had certainly been released by the time "Care of Cell 44" was recorded; it was released on 1 June '67 on Sgt. Pepper, and "Care of Cell 44" was recorded on 16 & 17 August '67), but by 1967 "P.S. I Love You" had been out for five years (it was the B-side to the Beatles' first single), and it starts off with the line "as I write this letter."

Epistolary writing certainly wasn't a new concept (at least not as a literary concept; I'm not sure of the extent of its history as far as its lyrical application), but considering how often Rod Argent has mentioned the Beatles' influence, there might be some connection between "P.S. I Love You" and "Care of Cell 44."

I haven't read it for awhile, but I'm pretty sure that Claes Johansen mentions something akin to this in his book The Zombies: Hung up on a Dream.  His point is that both bands have songs that are conversations between two people and that concern a third party ("Tell Her No" and "She Loves You," for examples), which illustrates an-other similar outlook on communication.  It occurs to me that "Friends of Mine" fits into that paradigm too:

When we're all in a crowd and you catch her eye
And then you both smile, I feel so good inside
And when I'm with her, she talks about you
The things that you say, the things that you do

In some ways, "Tell Her No" and "Friends of Mine" are two sides of the same coin.

Odessey and Oracle

Backdated, archival post

[link to original on tumblr]

---&---

Recently I was looking through the liner notes of the 30th anniversary edition of Odessey and Oracle - the one that includes the lyrics.  I'd been suspicious of the accuracy of these lyrics, specifically the first line of "A Rose for Emily" and part of "Changes."

These liner notes list the first line of "A Rose for Emily" as "The summer is here at last," but I'd always heard it as "Though summer is here at least."  Additionally, though acknowledges the difference in mood - summer is usually seen as a happy time, but the rest of this song is about a woman who doesn't have any love.  Though seems to signal that contrast.

The liner notes also have part of "Changes" as:

I knew her when summer was her crown
And autumn sad
How brown her eyes

The British accents are a bit difficult for me to decipher here; just by hearing it, I can't tell whether it's "sad" or "sighed."  But based on the other lyrics, I think it's "sighed."  I (mostly) agree with these other lyrics that the liner notes list:

I knew her when winter was her cloak
And spring her voice
She spoke to me

I'd always thought it was "In spring her voice she spoke to me," but that's a minor point.

Still, you have the structural parallelism between "summer was her crown" and "winter was her cloak," so it makes sense to me that that parallelism would also apply to further words and that they would relate to speech and respiration  - "Autumn sighed" and "She spoke to me."

Those were my qualms up to that point.  But just recently, in looking through the lyrics, I found that among the friends listed in "Friends of Mine" are "Jim and Christy."  But the Zombie Heaven liner notes lists them as "Jim and Christine."  The on-screen text on the 40th anniversary concert DVD also has "Christine."

With the cases of "A Rose for Emily" and "Changes," I had only my own dissent, but now I have more viable evidence.  The Christy/Christine thing for me is the final straw that sort of invalidates the lyrics as listed in the 30th anniversary edition liner notes.

—

This post is the first of five ideas/realizations I had about Odessey and Oracle.

Odessey and Oracle

Backdated, archival post

[link to original on tumblr]

---&---

I've been focusing on learning songs from Odessey and Oracle lately, so when I listened to it this morning, I was paying more attention than usual.  And I noticed some things.  (It's a bit weird to me that there are still things I'm only just now discovering about it.)

• The piano figure that occurs near the end of "Care of Cell 44" is musically foreshadowed by the a cappella parts earlier in the song.  They're the same notes; it's just that one is multi-tracked voices and the other is on piano.
• The final G in the first bass riff in "I Want Her She Wants Me" is an octave lower than the rest, which is not the way I'd been playing it.
• In "This Will Be Our Year," the chord progression goes from D minor to D major at the same time as the proclamation of love.  "And I won't forget the way you said [minor to major modulation] 'Darling, I love you.'"  It gives it more emphasis.
• I'd been suspicious of this, but I'm now pretty sure that the guitar solo on "Friends of Mine" is double-tracked.  In the stereo version, you can hear how one comes in just a little bit later than the other when it's repeated.
• "A Rose for Emily" and "Butcher's Tale" contain the same three-note phrase:  F E D.  Those sorts of musical phrases appearing in multiple songs may provide the album with some coherence.  (But I don't want to emphasize that too much - I don't know whether Rod Argent and Chris White consciously thought of that, whether it just illustrates musical sensibilities that they liked and unknowingly used frequently, or whether it's just a coincidence that these songs have similar musical features.)  Additionally, "Time of the Season" has a three-note falling phrase, but that's E D C.  And an-other similar feature is a bass part centered around two A's an octave apart, which occurs in "Care of Cell 44" (where they're separated by an E) and "Brief Candles" (where it's just an octave jump).

"Friends of Mine"

Backdated, archival post

[link to original on tumblr]

---&---

I learned a bit of the piano part from "Friends of Mine."  After recording this though, the piano chords sound wrong.  I just played the same chords that are in the guitar part.

I was mainly focusing on the descending part anyway.

"Friends of Mine"

Backdated, archival post

[link to original on tumblr]

---&---

I still have some more songs from Begin Here that I have to post rough versions of, but I decided to skip ahead to "Friends of Mine" for now.

I tried doing the vocals for this too, but they didn't turn out very well.  So either my voice changed or I'm more particular about it because I remember recording a version of this in 2010 (though - sadly - I've since deleted it).