One Year

According to Russo's Collector's Guide, fifty years ago to-day (24 January 1972), Colin Blunstone's One Year (Epic E 30974) was released in the U.S. and Canada.

This is the specific edition I have (the only Blunstone album I have as a record).  Here are some pictures:

On the paper sleeve (the sleeve the record goes into before going into the cardboard sleeve), there's a short article on Argent:

ARGENT:
A New British Sound

There's a whole new thing coming out of the English music scene these days.  It's a new approach.  A new excitement.  A new sound.  It's the music of the tightly knit quartet led by Rod Argent.  (Ken Emerson of Fusion calls him "the best organist/pianist in rock.")  They are called:  Argent.

The group made their initial impact with their first album.  it catapulted the unit into English Top Ten charts and recognition as one of the most successful working bands in the British Isles.  They are now star performers in America, too - with appearances at the Boston Tea Party, New York's Fillmore East, Chicago's Kinetic Playground and The Whiskey in Los Angeles.  The boys have gotten around in a hurry.  So has "the good word" on them.

Guthrie Bester of Penthouse Magazine describes the effects:  "There are three parts to the Argent sound.  One is the pure and tensil [sic] line of the soloists, especially on guitar and organ.  The second is the clear, polished vocal work, individually and together.  And finally there is the material, one of the best original repertoires in rock.  Argent, in fact, was one of the first groups to get into what has become the new British sound.  Low-keyed, melodic, often unamplified songmaking that promises to be the big sound after the era of non-Cream that we have been into the last year.  Watch carefully now while rock and roll gets listenable and lovely, without losing any of its punch.  If you want to know where it's all going, listen to Argent.  Because Rod and company are helping to get us there."

Ring of Hands is the second Argent album.  it is uncommonly provocative, assuredly imaginative.  It sings of love and intimacy and other strange phenomena that create mind-paintings.  Argent is pure silver and gold.

Colin Blunstone's Collected

Yester-day, I happened to see the cover of Colin Blunstone's Collected compilation album, and I realized that (to some degree and probably just coincidentally) the cover art resembles that of the Beatles' A Hard Day's Night.

The entirety of the cover of Collected and each individual Beatle's row on the cover of A Hard Day's Night both show the same person with a variety of expressions.

"The Coming of Kohoutek"

About a month ago, I got a Moog synthesizer (the Subsequent 37).  I still have a lot to learn, but the first thing I did was try to replicate a little tune that Mike Vickers played on the BBC in 1969.  (I don't think he ever gets enough credit for this, so I'll mention it:  Vickers set up the Moog synthesizers for the Beatles' Abbey Road and for Emerson, Lake, & Palmer.  In December 1968, he did some orchestral overdubs for Zombies songs, as heard on Into the Afterlife and the second disc of Zombie Heaven.)

This was my second objective:  the first bit of "The Coming of Kohoutek."

I'd noticed before that the Moog and the Mellotron violins play the same thing (a loose quotation of "Dies Irae"), but I don't think I'd noticed the lower Moog part (panned right) until I started examining the song more closely.  My audio example is just those three parts plus some guitar arpeggios.  I played to a click track, not to the original Argent recording, so the tempo might not be very accurate.

"I Must Move"

I was thinking about "I Must Move" yester-day and realized that there's some significance to the shape of the vocal melody in the chorus.  It's something like:

The lyrics here are:

I must move on, must move on; I can't stand still

I must move on, must move on, must go

(I'm still a bit unsure about my transcription though; some of those "on"s might be "I"s.)

Like I noted before (but had completely forgotten), the phrase "can't stand still" is sung entirely to A notes, so while it's negated, there's a musical sense of "stand[ing] still."  In contrast to this, the rest of the melody here rarely stays on the same pitch (there are two sequential Ds at the beginning and three sequential Cs in the next measure).  The melody itself has a sort of wandering nature that mirrors the narrator's need to "move on."

One Year

According to Russo's Collector's Guide, fifty years ago to-day (5 November 1971), Colin Blunstone's album One Year (Epic S EPC 64557) was released.  The U.S. and Canadian release (Epic E 30974) was on 24 January 1972.

Live at Abbey Road, 18 September 2021

I attended the Zombies' virtual concert from Abbey Road on 18 September (technically my first Zombies' concert), and I felt I should write a post about it.

Here's the set list:

• "Moving On"
• "I Want You Back Again"
• "Edge of the Rainbow"
• "I Love You"
• "Say You Don't Mind"
• "Different Game" (with Mellotron and string quartet)
• [new song for which no title was given] (with string quartet)
• "I Want to Fly" (new arrangement by Chris Gunning, with string quintet)
• "Tell Her No"
• "Care of Cell 44"
• "This Will Be Our Year"
• "I Want Her She Wants Me"
• "Time of the Season"
• "Merry-Go-Round"
• "Run Away" (possibly to be re-titled "For All My Life")
• "Hold Your Head Up"
• "She's Not There"
• "The Way I Feel Inside"

This was the first performance by the Zombies that I'd seen for some time.  I think the last new performances I saw were from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony in 2019.  While I was familiar with all of the old songs, I noticed some ways in which they were played differently.  For example, after the organ solo in "I Love You," there are usually just a couple bars of silence before the song resumes, but in this performance, Rod Argent played an electric piano trill just before the drums came back in.  Touches like that made the songs seem fresh.

I was a bit surprised that "Say You Don't Mind" wasn't played with the string section, like it is on One Year and even Odessey and Oracle {Revisited}.  I believe this is only the second time I've heard it in the "rock and roll" version (the first was on Live at Metropolis Studios).

Before the concert, the Zombies had posted a picture of the Mellotron at Abbey Road:

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I did some research and discovered that this is an M300 model.  I'm pretty sure that the Mellotron that Argent used on Odessey and Oracle was a MKII.  This is often said to have been John Lennon's Mellotron, but over the years, I've become more and more skeptical of this claim.  (But that's a topic for a different post.)

In the concert, the Mellotron was also used on "Care of Cell 44," but it seems to have been added later since the Mellotron is clearly seen sitting in a corner while the band is playing the song.

Usually, Argent uses his Kurzweil keyboard only for acoustic piano and Hohner Pianet sounds (I think that on rare occasions, he also layers the acoustic piano with a string sound, but off-hand the only instance of this that I can think of is "Care of Cell 44" on Extended Versions), but it sounded like he was using a Rhodes sound for "Run Away."  I think this may have been done to match the still unreleased studio recording.  Back in August, Tom Toomey posted some pictures from a rehearsal at Argent's studio, and a Rhodes Mark V is in a few of them:

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During the organ solo in "Hold Your Head Up," Argent included not only a quotation from Bach's Herz und Mund und Tat und Leben, BWV 147 (which I first saw in this performance from a number of years ago) but also - if I'm not mistaken - a quotation of Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor, BWV 565.

In "She's Not There," the instrumental players each got solo features.  In one of his spots, Søren Koch played the riff from the Beatles' "Daytripper."  The main motivation was probably a nod to the fact that the concert was in one of the studios that the Beatles often used, but on Live at the Bloomsbury Theatre, London, the Zombies' former guitarist Keith Airey included the same riff in his solo in the same song.  Argent played the riff from the Spencer Davis Group's "Gimme Some Lovin'," which I think I first saw during the performance of "She's Not There" at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony.

It seems like "The Way I Feel Inside" was done on the spur of the moment.  I don't know how frequently the Zombies perform this, but it was the first time I'd heard a live version of it.

"She Loves the Way They Love Her"

I listened to One Year yester-day and noticed a small feature in the line "Dreaming dreams of future time when she and me are all alone" in "She Loves the Way They Love Her."  The words in the phrase "all alone" start with the same sound, so there's a sense of the exclusivity of being alone.

"Caroline Goodbye" b/w "Though You Are Far Away"

According to Russo's Collector's Guide, fifty years ago to-day (8 October 1971), Colin Blunstone's "Caroline Goodbye" b/w "Though You Are Far Away" (Epic S EPC 7520) was released in the U.K.

"Closer to Heaven"

Yester-day, I listened to All Together Now to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the release of "Hold Your Head Up" b/w "Closer to Heaven" and "Keep on Rollin'" ("Closer to Heaven" is also included on the CD as a bonus track).  I noticed a small feature about "Closer to Heaven":  at ~2:35, there's an upward key change (I think it's C major to D major), and this musically illustrates the title line.

"Hold Your Head Up" b/w "Closer to Heaven" and "Keep on Rollin'"

According to Russo's Collector's Guide, fifty years ago to-day (2 October 1971), Argent's "Hold Your Head Up" b/w "Closer to Heaven" and "Keep on Rollin'" (Epic S EPC 9315) was released in the U.K.

"I Want You Back Again"

Recently, I noticed a couple small features in "I Want You Back Again," both in the lines "Since you have left me / I'm all alone."  "Alone" is sung with a melisma (it's Eb F C in the single version; I think it's also Eb F C in the alternate take; and it's F G F D in the version on Still Got That Hunger), giving a sense of degree (for "all").  The words in the phrase "all alone" start with the same initial sound, and this gives a sense of that singularity.

"Together"

I was thinking about "Together" (from As Far As I Can See) yester-day, specifically this section:

And I've come to

Need you like flowers need the rain

Have to love you

As much as seasons have to change in time

The majority of this section has fairly quick note values, but each word in the phrase "change in time" is held for a full measure.  This contrast musically illustrates that "change" in the lyrics.