"Without Her"

Last week, I was thinking about some Harry Nilsson songs, and I realized a couple things about "Without Her" (I think I'm actually more familiar with the Neil MacArthur version than Nilsson's). 

First, just a simple thing: "And I rise" in the first verse is sung to an ascending melody (D E F), musically representing that "ris[ing]."

More significant is the vocal melody during this section:

We burst a pretty balloon, took us to the moon
Such a beautiful thing, but it's ended now
And it sounds like a lie
I said I'd rather die than be without her

The melody rises (almost a full octave: from F# to F) from the beginning up until "but it's ended" and then falls from "ended now" onwards.  The descent skips around a bit (the lowest note is a B), but generally it goes from F to C.  The ascending melody musically portrays the happiness of going "to the moon" and the "beautiful thing," and the descending melody the sadness of "it's ended now" and the singer/speaker's change in mood.

"Butcher's Tale"

I've been reading a book about World War I (The Somme by Martin Gilbert), and this morning I read about some German ammunition dumps that were destroyed in a British shell barrage on 25 June 1916.  One of the places listed was Mametz Wood, which - of course - got me thinking about "Butcher's Tale" and the lines "And the flies come down in Gommecourt, Thiepval / Mametz Wood, and French Verdun."  I realized a couple things about these lines.

Listing places (or people) like this is a rhetorical technique called cataloguing.  Here, because of the number of places listed, there's a sense of the multitude of flies that are "com[ing] down."

The other thing I realized is that this cataloguing connects (albeit loosely) to the title Odessey and Oracle.  Cataloguing is a convention of epic poetry, and a prime example of epic poetry is The Odyssey, which is referenced in the album title.

"Time of the Season" b/w "I'll Call You Mine"

According to Russo's Collector's Guide, fifty years ago to-day (6 May 1968), the Zombies' "Time of the Season" b/w "I'll Call You Mine" (Date 2-1604) was released in the US and Canada.

"Celebration"

The other thing I noticed when I listened to Argent's Greatest: The Singles Collection recently is in "Celebration."  There's a "rise" sung to successively higher notes (B G# B' E', I think), which musically represents that "ris[ing]."  I should note that I might have the lyrics wrong here.  When I lookt at my transcription, I had "In the sound of the night we can ride."  Really, I think Argent sings just "ri..." with the rest of the word left unpronounced, but I feel "rise" is more likely than "ride."  (Transcribing the lyrics of "Celebration" has given me a lot of difficulty, more than most Argent songs.)

When I drafted this post Sunday night, I also noticed that the "forever" at the end of the second verse ("A ring of hands forever") is sung with a melisma (A G# G# F# E), giving a musical sense of that long length of time.

"Schoolgirl"

A couple days ago I listened to a compilation album of Argent (Greatest: The Singles Collection) and noticed a couple small things.  In the line "And in some games I used to pull your hair" in "Schoolgirl," "hair" is sung with a melisma (D A G F, I think).  Since it's spread across a number of notes, the word itself is "pull[ed]," just as it's described in the line itself.

"Going to a Go Go"

The last thing I noticed when I listened to Into the Afterlife recently is in "Going to a Go Go" (which I've actually never written about in the six years I've been doing this project).  In the first verse, there's the line "They come from everywhere," and "everywhere" is sung with four syllables rather than just three.  This extra syllable emphasizes the "every-" part of the word, as if encompassing the entire range.

When I first drafted this post on Friday night, I realized something else: the "drop in there" in the next line is sung to a descending melody (F# E B, I think), giving a somewhat more literal representation of that expression.

"Telescope (Mr. Galileo)"

An-other thing I noticed when I listened to Into the Afterlife recently is that the "long" in the recurring line "And we will watch her all day long, my telescope and me" in "Telescope (Mr. Galileo)" is sung with a melisma, giving a sense of that length of time.  There are two versions of "Telescope" on Into the Afterlife, and each has a slightly different articulation.  In track #5, "long" is sung to just two B notes, but in track #18, there's a trill (B A B).

After comparing the two, I think they feature different singers, although I can't find anything in the liner notes to confirm this.  I'm certain track #5 is sung by Rod Argent, and I think track #18 is sung by Chris White.

"It's Not Easy"

The second thing I noticed when I listened to Into the Afterlife recently was some melisma'd "so"s in "It's Not Easy."  Both "so"s in the lines "Is it asking so much" and "I've put up with so much" are sung to the phrase F# E, and the "so"s in the chorus ("It's not easy / Wanting you so") are sung to the phrase C# B.  For all of these, the articulation emphasizes that adverb and gives the impression of a greater degree than if the "so" were sung to a single note.

"Never My Love"

I listened to Into the Afterlife on Sunday and noticed some things about which I'll have posts for the next couple days.  First is the bridge in "Never My Love."  In the first iteration, it's:

What makes you think love will end
When you know that my whole life depends
On you

(I should note that I'm not sure if I have the line breaks in the right places.  I went more by where the breaths are taken in the Association's version, but "Neil MacArthur" doesn't pause between the first two lines.)

Structurally, that second line completes the first ("depends" rhymes with "end"), but the meaning is left incomplete.  The "On you" is necessary for the those two lines to make sense, and, likewise, the sentiment here is that the speaker/singer's life hinges "On you."  The structure illustrates the meaning.

"Mary, Won't You Warm My Bed"

I listened to One Year last week and noticed something about "Mary, Won't You Warm My Bed."  Throughout the song, the speaker/singer explains that he's looking for Mary ("One day I will find that girl").  After the first chorus, the song changes keys, which almost represents the speaker/singer's search in a musical way.  It's as if he's lookt in A major without finding her, so now he's moving on to Bb major.

The Harvard Crimson

The Zombies recently posted a link to this article from The Harvard Crimson that argues that "DIY music [of which Odessey and Oracle is an example] can be just as refined as high-budget, professionally produced music."  The English major in me sees this as a weak thesis, but what really bothered me about the article was the factual errors.  Over the years, I've read many articles about the Zombies that contain errors that could easily have been avoided with even a modicum of research.  I don't know if I'm going to make a habit of this, but the errors in this article bothered me enough that I'm going to fix them.

The article states that "Not a single note on 'Odessey' is played by a non-band-member.  Instead of string and horn overdubs, many of its songs feature string- and horn-simulating sounds played on a Mellotron, a forerunner of early synthesizers."  This is only partly true.  As the article goes on to state, Rod Argent did indeed use John Lennon's mellotron to play some parts on Odessey and Oracle, but as he explains in this video (at about 3:56) "I only used the basic settings that are on there, basically flutes and strings."  According to the liner notes of Zombie Heaven and of three different re-issues of Odessey and Oracle, the brass instruments on "This Will Be Our Year" are real and were arranged by the band's former producer Ken Jones (and yet the article says that the "horn parts often sound lo-fi and obviously fake"!).  The Zombie Heaven liner notes also explain that a session musician played a cello part for "A Rose for Emily," although this wasn't included in the final mix.

The article goes on to say that "there are relatively few overdubs on the album; most of the arrangements simply feature each band member on his typical vocal and instrumental parts."  This isn't elaborated on, so it's not exactly clear what "relatively few" entails, but I would say there are a fair amount of overdubs (which is why the usual five-person band was augmented with additional musicians for the Odessey and Oracle anniversary shows).  Off-hand, here are the overdubs I can think of: Rod Argent plays both piano and mellotron in "Care of Cell 44," "Hung up on a Dream," and "Changes."  In "Maybe after He's Gone," Paul Atkinson plays both acoustic and electric guitars; Argent plays acoustic and (according to Andrew Sandoval in the liner notes to the fiftieth anniversary edition of the album) electric piano; and I believe there are also additional, overdubbed vocal tracks.  The vocals in each verse in "Brief Candles" and the guitar solo in "Friends of Mine" are both double-tracked.  There are also overdubs on "Changes" (Argent added an extra vocal part) and "Time of the Season" (the well-known hand claps and exhales and an extra organ part).

There are also a few notable exceptions to "each band member on his typical vocal and instrumental parts."  Paul Atkinson and Hugh Grundy sing the bottom vocal line in "Changes," and Chris White sings lead in "Butcher's Tale" (and one verse of "Brief Candles").

The article "guess[es]" that "today's DIY musicians tend not to emulate 'Odessey and Oracle'" because "Rod Argent's many years of classical music training likely helped significantly to hone his playing, writing, and arranging."  According to the Zombie Heaven liner notes, however, Argent had only two years of piano lessons (starting when he was about nine years old), and he says that "as soon as I started to learn I got bored with the whole process, and I probably played the piano less in those two years of lessons than I have ever since."  In the liner notes to Classically Speaking, he explains that he's a "self taught player."  There's no doubt that he has a great degree of musical skill in a variety of areas, but this is not the result of classical training.

Although not exactly an error, the notion that "Someone seeking musical success today should probably write a three-chord singalong rather than imitating 'Changes' or 'Butcher's Tale'" is completely contrary to the Zombies' own outlook, which values musical honesty over immediate success.  In an interview at SXSW in 2013, Rod Argent said, "When we wrote and recorded music, we never tried to play what was the current fashion in the day.  We never thought, 'Wow, we've got to make sure we get to the hook in 30 seconds otherwise radio won't play it.'  We just took a musical idea and tried to make it work for us."

It's at this point that the article completely collapses.  Because it describes the Odessey and Oracle songs as "full of harmonic and melodic surprises" and calls the album "a Template for DIY Sophistication," it seems to praise the Zombies' striving for something original, and yet at the end, it reverses its opinion and contradicts this, saying, "Not many of the songs on 'Odessey' are commercially oriented, so it is no wonder that the album has not been a relied-upon template for subsequent bands" (which I find a dubious claim; more than a few well-known musicians have listed the Zombies [and Odessey and Oracle specifically] as an influence).  Is the article raving about the uniqueness of Odessey and Oracle or panning it for not being commercially successful?  Is the album a template to follow or isn't it?

I also think it's unfair to compare the Odessey and Oracle songs to the Beach Boys' "Girls on the Beach."  "Girls on the Beach" is from 1964, and the Odessey and Oracle songs were recorded in 1967.  While only three years apart, at the rate that music was developing and changing in the 1960s, that's a big difference (the Beach Boys themselves went through major stylistic changes in those three years).  The criticism about the key changes also strikes me as too subjective.  The article says "Girls on the Beach" "abuses the upward chromatic key change" and "hits the listener over the head with key changes," but the liner notes to my edition of All Summer Long (while hardly unbiased) praise "Girls on the Beach" as "one of Brian [Wilson]'s most astonishing compositions" and claim that "it's almost impossible to find another rock song that changes keys as often and as smoothly as 'Girls on the Beach'" (my emphasis).

"Butcher's Tale"

The last thing I noticed when I listened to Odessey and Oracle on the anniversary of its release date is that the phrase "the flies come down" in the line "Then in the heat the flies come down" in "Butcher's Tale" descends (E D A A), giving a musical impression of that "com[ing] down."