The Influence of Elvis Presley's "Hound Dog"

Last month, I got and started reading Robin Platts' Times and Seasons: The Rise and Fall and Rise of the Zombies.  I decided to listen to what musical pieces are mentioned in the book (provided I have them), and the first album I listened to was Elvis 56, specifically for "Hound Dog," whose effect on a young Rod Argent is discussed at some length on the first two pages of the book.  (Incidentally:  I got Elvis 56 a number of years ago because Rod mentioned it specifically in this video from Amoeba Music).  I think I'd previously noticed that the bass part in "Hound Dog" has a dotted rhythm, but the particular context in which I'd listened to it this time made me realize that it may have influenced the rhythm that's present in a number of Zombie bass parts, which - as Rod briefly explains in the BBC Mastertapes program (at ~20:28 in the A-Side) - he often used to write for his own songs.

The bass part in "Hound Dog" varies a little bit from verse to verse, but it's something like this:

While the tonality is different, many bass parts in Zombies songs also have this sort of dotted rhythm.  For example, here's the bass part in the verses of "I'll Keep Trying":

(There are a couple measures in the chorus that I'm a bit unsure about, but otherwise, the entire bass part in "I'll Keep Trying" exhibits this initial pair of dotted quarter notes in each measure, save for the last bar.)

The bass part in the verses of "If It Don't Work Out" also has this rhythm for all but the last two measures, but since there are nine consecutive measures of nothing but D notes, I felt an excerpt of the notation wouldn't be very helpful in illustrating my point.

More often, however, there's a slight difference in the rhythm in that this single quarter note is replaced by a pair of eighth notes, which sometimes precedes the dotted quarter notes and acts as a pick-up.

For example, the beginning of "Whenever You're Ready":

The beginning of "Time of the Season":

And the verse in "Tell Her No":

(These parts may show the influence of Ben E. King's "Stand by Me" more than Elvis's "Hound Dog," though.  As I pointed out before, albeit imperfectly, so I won't link to it, these bass parts share the same rhythm and the same tonality as "Stand by Me":  root, fifth, and seventh.)

Odessey and Oracle {Revisited}

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Collection Audit:

Over the last two days, I listened to the two discs of the Zombies' Odessey & Oracle {Revisited}: The 40th Anniversary Concert.  I noticed some things (with melismas, naturally) on two songs on the first disc. 

"Maybe after He's Gone"

The "breathe" in the line "I feel I'll never breathe again" is sung to two syllables instead of just one.  There's a deliberateness in how it's sung, almost as if the speaker/singer wants to draw out the breaths he has now because he feels there will soon be a time he can't breathe at all (the next line is "I feel life's gone from me"). 

"Tell Her No"

The "charms" in the line "And if she tempts you with her charms" has a melisma.  Instead of the one syllable it's spoken with, there are multiple syllables, as if to make the "charms" musically alluring. 

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Both of these features are on the original recordings that the Zombies did in the '60s.  However, on this live album, the melisma'd "breathe" in "Maybe after He's Gone" is more prominent, and the melisma to which the "charms" in "Tell Her No" is sung actually has more notes than the original recording.  (It's G# E F# in the original; G# F# E F# in this live version.)

I found some more things about Zombies songs while doing my Collection Audit project.  I didn'’t feel it important enough to include in that post, but I also noticed some consonance in "“Hung up on a Dream."  "I stood astounded staring hard."

I was (and I guess still am) very excited about that melisma in "Tell Her No" partially because it's an example of how songs can develop through playing them live so often (it's like the guitar part that precedes the second verse of "She's Not There;" it's not in the original, but it's been in every live version for about the last eight years, so it's become a part of the song).  I referenced every live version of "Tell Her No" I have, and the period live recordings (on the fourth disc of Zombie Heaven) have the three-note melisma, but the more recent live versions (on Live at the Bloomsbury Theatre, London; Live at Metropolis Studios; and Extended Versions) all have the four-note melisma.

"Time of the Season"

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Collection Audit:

Yester-day I listened to Ben E. King's "Stand by Me" on a compilation album.  The bass part sounded suspiciously familiar to me, but because the version on that compilation was a re-recording instead of the original, I had to go and listen to the thirty-second sample on Amazon to make sure what I heard was in the original recording too.  And it was!

My favorite band is the Zombies, and over the past four years or so, I've been trying to learn every part to every song they recorded.  Over the last few months, I noticed the same recurring phrase in the bass parts in three of Rod Argent's songs.  It's the 5th, 7th, and octave notes of the scale of whatever key the song is in, and it's in a rhythm of two eighth notes (the 5th and 7th) then two dotted quarter notes (the octave, twice).

I had to learn the bass part to King's "Stand by Me" to be sure, but it follows this same pattern (or, rather, since "Stand by Me" is older, those Rod Argent songs follow the same pattern).  In interviews, Argent frequently mentions the Zombies' Christmas show at the Brooklyn Fox in 1964 and how Ben E. King and the Drifters were an-other act on the same bill, so I'm assuming he was familiar with "Stand by Me."

In King's "Stand by Me," that 5th, 7th, octave phrase is in A major (so, E, G#, A, A).  In the Zombies' songs, it's in E major in "Tell Her No" (B, D#, E, E), in C major in "Whenever You're Ready" (G, B, C, C), and in E minor in "Time of the Season" (B, D, E, E).  After I realized that connection, I kept playing that part, just because I was so excited I found a precedent for this motif I'd found in these Zombies' songs, and I discovered that there's a further similarity between the bass parts of "Stand by Me" and "Time of the Season."  After that 5th, 7th, octave phrase, there's a diatonic descent in the same two-eighth-notes-then-two-dotted-quarter-notes rhythm (A, G#, F#, F# in "Stand by Me" and E, D, C, C in "Time of the Season"):

 

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So for the first four bars of the verses, the bass part in "Time of the Season" is the same as the bass part in "Stand by Me," just in E minor rather than A major.

Via my Collection Audit project, I found a precedent for that 5th, 7th, octave phrase in a few of Argent's bass parts.

"Tell Her No"

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Originally, of the songs that were recorded at that session on 25 November, I was saving "Tell Her No" for last because I didn't know any of it (I think I knew the guitar phrase a few years ago, but I've forgotten it) and saving it until the end gave me more time to try to learn something.  But last night, I figured out the bass part, and it's really exciting, so I pushed it up to to-day.

Last month, I talked about a phrase based on the 5th, 7th, and octave scale degrees that's in both "Whenever You're Ready" and "Time of the Season."  It's in "Tell Her No" too!  It's at the beginning of each line in the verses.

"Tell Her No" is in E major, so the intervals in "Whenever You're Ready" (in G major) are the same, just lowered a sixth.  "Time of the Season" is in E minor, so two of the three notes (B and E) are the same ("Tell Her No" has D# where "Time of the Season" has D natural).

The Zombie Heaven liner notes (and I think a few other things I've read too) say that "Whenever You're Ready" was a strong contender for a hit song, so it's interesting that it shares that 5th-7th-octave phrase with two songs that were hits.

Now that I know this, I think I'm going to be bothered by interviews and articles and such where people say, "Oh, 'She's Not There' and 'Time of the Season' have the same kind of rhythm."  I mean, sure, maybe, but that section of "Tell Her No" and "Time of the Season" share the exact rhythm, and they have a very close tonality.

Additionally, the bass part for "Tell Her No" has two three-note chromatic phrases, and they're the same ones that are in the bass part for the rehearsal version of "The Way I Feel Inside" (which I also learned last night).  Both songs were recorded at the same session, too.  The phrases are B, C, C# and A, A#, B.  However, they're both ascending in "Tell Her No," where in "The Way I Feel Inside," that A, A#, B phrase is descending, so it's more like B, A#, A.

"Tell Her No"

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Yester-day, I listened to the first disc of the Beatles' On Air - Live at the BBC, Vol. 2, which I mention only because I found an-other possible influence that "P.S. I Love You" had on Rod Argent's writing.  And then to-day I listened to Please Please Me (so I could reference the recorded version of "P.S. I Love You") and found a few more things (although only one is relevant to this project).

I already mentioned that "P.S. I Love You" - along with some elements of "When I'm Sixty-Four" - is epistolic, just like "Care of Cell 44."  But "P.S. I Love You" also talks about remembering:

Remember that I'll always
Be in love with you

It's in the imperative here, and - as far as I know (which very possibly might be wrong) - the only instance of "remember" in the imperative in the Zombies' catalogue is in "Tell Her No":

And if she tells you, "I love you," whoa
Just remember she said that to me

They're kind of opposite in that "P.S. I Love You" is encouraging love where "Tell Her No" warns about professions of love.

In listening to Please Please Me, I also found some remembering in "Misery":

I'll remember all the little things we've done
She'll remember, and she'll miss her only one
Lonely one

That seems more Zombie-esque.

As usual, these are just conjectured influences.  I don't think there's a way I could prove any of these.

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Incidentally, I've also written about a possible connection between "Ask Me Why" from Please Please Me and the Zombies' "Woman."

Saturday Club

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I totally forgot to include the BBC broadcasts in my posts about "fifty years ago to-day in Zombie history."

According to the liner notes for Zombie Heaven, the Zombies were on Saturday Club fifty years ago to-day (6 February 1965) although it was recorded on 26 January and 2 February.  The liner notes mention that the show wasn't broadcast on the 30th because of Winston Churchill's funeral (the procession of which inspired the rhythm in Chris White's "Remember You"), so the songs recorded on the 26th were added to those recorded on the 2nd.

In any case, they played "Tell Her No," "What More Can I Do," "I'm Going Home," "For You My Love," "Tell Her No" (acoustic piano version), and "Soulville" - tracks 5-10 on the fourth disc of Zombie Heaven.

"Tell Her No" b/w "What More Can I Do"

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According to Greg Russo's Time of the Season: The Zombies Collector's Guide, fifty years ago to-day (29 January 1965), "Tell Her No" b/w "What More Can I Do" was released in the U.K. (F.12071).

An EP titled "The Zombies" ("Kind of Girl," "Sometimes" / "It's Alright with Me," "Summertime") was also released in the U.K. (DFE 8598).

"Tell Her No" b/w "Leave Me Be"

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Fifty years ago to-day (28 December 1964), the Zombies' "Tell Her No" b/w "Leave Me Be" was released in the U.S. and Canada (PAR 9723).

Songs from 25 November 1964 Session

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I've been listening to each group of songs on the 50th anniversaries of when they were recorded, and I found some interesting lyrical things about the batch from the 25th.  (Mostly because I was either transcribing the lyrics or checking transcriptions I'd done earlier.)

In "Tell Her No," there's the line "Just remember she said that to me" - an-other instance of remembering in the Zombies' songs.  Although, unlike the others I've found, it's an imperative.

I also noticed the conjunctions in the first verse of "I Remember When I Loved Her":

She seemed so cold to me
And I remember when I loved her
She seemed so cold to me
But I remember when I loved her

The conjunctions make a huge difference here.  The first ("and") indicates simply that the speaker/singer remembers his past love.  The second ("but") seems to suggest that he still harbors some sort of feeling, whether it's remorse or nostalgia.  This could probably be taken in other ways, but that's how I understand it.  At least for now.

I'm not sure if I'd noticed this or not (apparently I haven't written anything about it), but there's also a reference to dreams (an-other common Zombie theme) in "I Remember When I Loved Her":  "My dream of love has gone."

Finally, the phrasing in the second verse of "I Want You Back Again" seems to be a precedent for the phrasing in the third verse of "If It Don't Work Out."  (I should note that I'm talking about the alternate version of "I Want You Back Again," but the single version may very well have the same phrasing.  I haven't compared the two.)  I'd format the verse from "I Want You Back Again" as:

Since you have left me
I'm all alone
I need your help, I
Can't stand on my own

That "I" is tacked on to the end of the third line even though grammatically it goes with the fourth.  The same sort of thing is in the third verse of "If It Don't Work Out":

One day I know we'll find again the love we had and I
Will know and feel the joys and pleasures that I'm dreaming of

Like I said in a previous post about "If It Don't Work Out," it's like the speaker/singer is so concerned and worried (or perhaps, in that particular verse of "If It Don't Work Out," excited) that he stumbles over his words.  Not surprisingly, considering that similarity, both were written by Rod Argent.  Actually, all of the songs I talked about in the post are by Rod Argent.  "He's our A side writer."

Begin Here Session

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Fifty years ago to-day (25 November 1964) was the second session for the Zombies' Begin Here album.  For the album, they recorded "I Don't Want to Know," "What More Can I Do," and "I Remember When I Loved Her."  They also recorded "Walking in the Sun," "Tell Her No," "I Want You Back Again" (although not the single version), and the rehearsal version of "The Way I Feel Inside" found on disc 3 of Zombie Heaven.

I think this was also the session when the band received the phone call from Al Gallico that "She's Not There" was a #1 hit.  I've read interviews where they said they got that phone call while recording "Tell Her No," which would make it the 25th, but the Zombie Heaven booklet (where I get most of these dates, cross-referenced with the liner notes of the Decca Stereo Anthology) says that the call was during the session on the 24th.

"Care of Cell 44"

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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.