"Music from the Spheres"

I recently recorded a version of "God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen" using the Hohner Pianet and Vox Continental sounds on my keyboard.  As I was editing a video for it, I was thinking about the lyrics, and I realized that they may have had an influence on Argent's "Music from the Spheres."  The first verse of "God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen" (as I know it, at least) is:

God rest you merry, gentlemen; let nothing you dismay

For Jesus Christ our Savior was born on Christmas day

To save us all from Satan's pow'r while we were gone astray

Oh, tidings of comfort and joy, comfort and joy

Oh, tidings of comfort and joy

The phrase "To save us all from Satan's pow'r" has the same basic idea and even some of the same vocabulary as the line "'God save us from the devil' was their prayer" in "Music from the Spheres."  Later in the song, "God save us from the devil" appears by itself, too.

I vaguely remembered some link between "God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen" and "Indication," but I had to do some research to find where I'd learned this.  It's in Claes Johansen's Hung up on a Dream.  On page 149, Argent says, "We used to do a Jimmy Reed song on stage, a blues thing called 'Baby What You Want Me To Do'.  At the end of that I used to go into this long improvisation based around 'God Rest You Merry Gentlemen'!  It was quite bizarre.  I even used to start singing along with the improvisation.  It got quite wild.  We wanted to use that on a record.  So that's what we did on 'Indication', with a guitar sound that was supposed to be really out in the background.  It was supposed to be this thing we used to do on stage and which went down a storm."  Argent quotes "God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen" in the version of "Indication" on Live at the Bloomsbury Theatre, London (starting at ~2:13) and in the live recording of "I Am the Dance of Ages" from the Paris Theatre on 14 December 1972* (at ~23:39 in the audio file).

While there is a lyrical similarity between "God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen" and "Music from the Spheres" and Argent was obviously familiar with it, it's only speculation that it was an influence here.

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*I found this concert in June 2022.  The link I posted then doesn't work anymore, but the link above leads to the same recording.  As I explained two years ago, I think the date given (6 January 1973) is wrong.  In researching for this post, I also discovered that I had the title wrong there; it's "God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen," not "God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen."

"A Man for All Reasons" b/w "Music from the Spheres"

According to Russo's Collector's Guide, fifty years ago to-day (3 June 1974), Argent's "A Man for All Reasons" (edited) b/w "Music from the Spheres" (Epic 5-11137) was released in the U.S. and Canada.  The U.K. release (Epic S EPC 2448) was on 14 June, coincidentally Rod Argent's birthday.

"Music from the Spheres"

Unique to the live version of "Music from the Spheres" on Encore, "tremble" in the line "All around the world the people tremble" is sung with a melisma (G# G# A G# F#), musically giving a sense of the word's meaning.  In the studio version, it's simply sung to two G#s.

Previously, I'd noticed (but apparently hadn't fully realized) that there's a brief quote of "Dies Irae," which is featured so prominently in "The Coming of Kohoutek."  In the studio version, it occurs at ~4:10; in the live version on Encore, it's at ~5:27.  It lasts only two measures (because it's so brief, I'm uncertain of the key for that section, but there's at least one sharp):

On both Nexus and Encore, "Music from the Spheres" is a few songs after "The Coming of Kohoutek," but this quotation links them in a small way and - along with the cosmic theme of each - provides a bit of cohesion.

"Music from the Spheres"

For years now, I've had a digital sticky note on my computer desktop reminding me that the phrase "across the universe" in "Music from the Spheres" might be a little nod to the Beatles song "Across the Universe."  I happened to look at this yester-day, and I realized something about that line in the Argent song:  the "universe" is sung with a melisma (B C# D# E), musically giving a sense of the breadth of "across the universe."  At the same time, there's a string glissando*, which gives the same impression of breadth in two different ways: the glissando itself encompasses a large span of notes, and because it's recorded in stereo, it seems to travel from left to right, giving a sense of spatial range.

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*I'd always thought it was a harp glissando, but after listening more closely, I'm not so sure now.  The timbre seems too different.  I think it might actually be piano, played by striking the strings directly, not using the keyboard.  Keith Emerson of Emerson, Lake, and Palmer did this on "Take a Pebble," and Rod Argent's mentioned him a few times (for instance, in this interview originally published in March 1975 and - more recently - in this interview from 2017 [in response to a question asked at ~17:33]), so it might even be a bit of his influence.

Nexus

Backdated, archival post

[link to original on tumblr]

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I just listened to Argent's Nexus as the first album in my new listening schedule, and I noticed two things:

There's extensive alliteration in the second chorus of "Music from the Spheres":

Music from the spheres assails my ears 
It stills a season's song

I mention this only because that effect seems to provide extra emphasis to a song that's about music itself.

In "Thunder and Lightning," there are bass parts that mirror the lyrics that they follow.  After "There are times when you feel so good / That the only way to move is down" in the first verse, there's a downward phrase, and after "You play the game, and you just can't lose / And you're walking with your feet off the ground" in the second and third verses, there are upward phrases.