"Pleasure"

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I recently listened to Argent's Ring of Hands for my Collection Audit project, and I noticed something interesting about "Pleasure."

After the first part of the solo (the part that's mostly arpeggios doubled on electric piano and organ), the guitar rhythm (starting at about 2:06) has exponentially diminishing note values, the same feature that's also in the bass part of the alternate version of the Zombies' "I Want You Back Again" and the version of "Just a Little Bit" that they performed on The Beat Show in November 1965.  (I wrote about this in two posts last year.)

Here's my hand-written notation for the bass part of the alternate version of "I Want You Back Again":

Here's the notation I made for the bass part in the live version of "Just a Little Bit":

And here's the rhythm of the guitar chords in the second half of the solo in "Pleasure."  They're E major chords, but I'm not sure of the exact phrasing (I think it's the standard E B E G# B E, but I don't think every note in that fingering is played), so I just notated E notes.

The note values are both larger and shorter here, starting with four measures of tied whole notes (sixteen beats) and ending with sixteenth notes, but it's the same feature.

Like I've mentioned before, Rod Argent and Chris White shared the writing credits during this period although they continued to write separately.  Because this feature is present in both "I Want You Back Again" and "Pleasure" and because "I Want You Back Again" was written by Argent, it seems to suggest that he wrote "Pleasure" too.

Back in January 2015, I discovered that a phrase in the bass register of the piano part at the beginning of "Pleasure" (B C# D# E F# G#) is also in the Argent-written "Hung up on a Dream," a similarity that also seems to suggest that he wrote "Pleasure."

"Pleasure"

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Collection Audit:

I just listened to a compilation album of Argent (Greatest: The Singles Collection).  I'd previously noticed the melisma'd "rain" in the line "Falling rain to cool my aching face" in "Pleasure," but I'd failed to realize that - because the notes are descending (F# E D# C# B, I think) - the melisma helps to convey that the rain is falling.

"Pleasure"

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I listened to Argent's Ring of Hands this morning, and I think I figured out the arpeggiated keyboard part of "Pleasure."  I knew there was organ panned right, but I couldn't really tell what was going on in the left channel.  When I listened to it this morning, I thought it was electric piano doubling the arpeggios but with a guitar part of just the bottom note, but I split the stereo track, and - hearing it slightly more isolated - I think it's the electric piano playing both the arpeggios and the bottom note (an octave lower).  I'm fairly sure I figured out the specific notes for that whole section, but it goes too fast for my current ability, so I'll have to practice that before I attempt to record a version.

Rain Imagery

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I was still thinking about the rain images in Zombies songs, and - in a supreme coincidence - I was playing "Maybe after He's Gone" on electric piano while it was raining outside, which reminded me of "She told me she loved me / With words as soft as morning rain."

I sort of remembered a rain image in Argent's "Pleasure," but I had to look that up to confirm it ("My love is full of pleasure / Falling rain to cool my aching face").  Since I've been transcribing the lyrics, I can just do a search for "rain."  There are some more references on the later albums (like Out of the Shadows and As Far as I Can See), but the only other one I'll mention is from "Keep on Rollin'" - "Move just like a river / Fall like the morning rain."  Like "Maybe after He's Gone," that's even morning rain, specifically.

"Pleasure"

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I listened to Argent's Ring of Hands on 2 January, and a few days later, I got thinking about a part of "Pleasure."  At first, I'd thought that it contains a phrase in the piano part that's similar to phrases in "Hung up on a Dream" and "Keeper of the Flame."  I've written about the connection between those two before.  I didn't really want to say anything about it until I could figure it out though, which took awhile.  And actually, I figured out only that phrase, so I'm just writing about it instead of posting an audio example.

I'd thought that it was similar to "Hung up on a Dream" in that it was part of a rising scale followed by a descending half-step (the same sort of thing that "Keeper of the Flame" has), but it's actually just the rising scale part that's similar.  That part of "Hung up on a Dream" is in B major (or at least the bass part is; the guitar part is in G major, except for an E major chord [before writing this post, I hadn't noticed that the bass and guitar were in different keys]).  There's a key change after the solo, but that's not important as far as the similarity between these two.  From what I've figured out so far, "Pleasure" is in E major.  But the rising diatonic phrases in both use (most of) the same notes, which isn't too surprising as B major has only one more sharp than E major.  The phrase in "Hung up on a Dream" is B C# D# E F# G# G.  In "Pleasure," it's B C# D# E F# G# A and then back to E.

I'd thought it sounded similar because of a descending half-step (which isn't even in there), but actually they sound similar because they're mostly the same notes.