Yesteryear Sounds

The Lilac Time – Astronauts (1991)

2009-11-23T16:40:00.001-08:00

Stephen Duffy looks back at a long, foggy winter and the temporary collapse of the Lilac Time.

By Robin Platts

As 2009 drew to a close, Stephen Duffy once again shared his gifts with an unsuspecting and generally unappreciative record-buying public on the compilation Memory and Desire — 30 Years in the Wilderness with Stephen Duffy and the Lilac Time. The “wilderness” reference is apt. For most of his 30 years in the music biz, Duffy has managed to evade the mainstream, while winning over a cultish legion of devoted fans with his wistful folk-pop. A perfect example is the 1991 album Astronauts, one of Duffy’s many overlooked gems.

In the late ‘70s, Duffy teamed with Nick Rhodes and John Taylor to form a group called Duran Duran, but quit before they landed a record deal.

After abandoning his post as Duran Duran’s lead singer, Duffy picked up a guitar, then ditched it in favour of synth-pop for a brief foray into the early ‘80s mainstream, peaking with the hit single Kiss Me.

The synth-pop sound, like the “Tin Tin” stage name he adopted for a time, was an awkward fit. So he picked up his guitar again, and the third Stephen Duffy solo album morphed into the self-titled debut by the Lilac Time, a folk-pop trio that featured Duffy, his brother Nick, and friend Michael Weston.

The first Lilac Time album came out on indie label Swordfish in 1987, before being picked up by Fontana/Polygram, and was a moderate success.

The gentle, tuneful, folky sound of the Lilac Time was well-received, but the group never cracked the mainstream. After two further albums, Nick Duffy quit the Lilac Time, and the group teetered on the brink of collapse.

“After my brother stopped touring, it wasn't the Lilac Time,” Stephen Duffy remembers. “Without my brother, it completely changed the direction. Especially live, and the live gigs were so awful that I just knew that it was best to stop.”

On their last legs, the band signed to Alan McGee's Creation Records in 1991. Coming off a disastrous tour, the Lilac Time set to work on the album that essentially finished the band off.

"Alan McGee was managing us and so we swapped over from Polygram to Creation," recalls Duffy. "And we came straight off that tour and started making this record in my spare room in Malvern, in a room that we couldn't even get all of the band in at the same time. Everything was so badly thought-out.

“It was a very long and dark winter, and it was very foggy. We were just sort of sitting on the side of this hill in the fog, and it seemed to get into the music. And then, when we'd finished, I just didn't have the desire to carry on."

Despite the line-up and label changes, Astronauts turned out to be one of the Lilac Time's strongest efforts, a sparse, beautiful album, bookended by the yearning In Iverna Gardens and the snowscape snapshot Madresfield.

There’s something perfect about it – a sad, simple acoustic vibe that encapsulates Duffy’s romanticism. It is, in some respects, the Duffiest of all Stephen Duffy albums. Nevertheless, he maintains the album wasn't really finished, in part because he wanted to make a different kind of record.

"When you're making a little record, you always want to be making the big record,” he explains. “I was reading yesterday about Martin Scorcese making The Last Temptation Of Christ. He only had a little crane, but he really wanted a big crane. Which is why he made Cape Fear, or The Color of Money, because he wanted to use a big crane. And the same thing applied with Astronauts, because I thought, 'I can't make this record with such a small crane - I need to be on Parlophone.' So that's why the next record (a Duffy solo album called Music in Colours) was just so incredibly extravagant. I thought, if I let myself make these little records, I'm just going to wither… So I didn't even finish Astronauts. Alan just put it out as it was. If I'd have finished it, I would've destroyed it.”

Although it wasn't released in North America, Astronauts was moderately successful in Britain, making the Top 20 Indie album charts in both the NME and Melody Maker. (A Japanese reissue several years later expanded the original album with seven extra tracks.)

Shortly after Astronauts was released in Britain, the Lilac Time called it a day, and Stephen Duffy went looking for a bigger crane. He continued to chart his way through the music biz, more or less managing to avoid commercial success at every turn, collaborating with violinist Nigel Kennedy, and then riding the Britpop wave as a solo act before reviving the Lilac Time in 1999 with the excellent Looking For a Day in the Night.

Stephen Duffy is keeping the Lilac Time going with the Memory & Desire compilation and documentary film of the same name, working his own niche in whatever is left of the music industry.

“Our pledge to stay unheard and unsullied by commerce remains eternal,” he quips in a recent blog entry.

Van Dyke Parks – Donovan’s Colours (1967)

2009-11-23T16:10:00.000-08:00

Post-Smile, Van Dyke Parks makes his Warner Bros debut under an assumed name.

By Robin Platts

By the time his debut album, Song Cycle, appeared in 1968, Van Dyke Parks was already something of a musical Zelig. In the mid-to-late 1950s, he was a choirboy, while maintaining a successful career a child actor in TV and movies (his acting work included a recurring role on The Honeymooners). As the ‘60s began, Parks studied piano at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, then moved to Los Angeles in 1963 to play in a folk group with his brother Carson (who later wrote the Frank and Nancy Sinatra hit Something Stupid).

By 1964, Van Dyke had landed a record deal with MGM, for whom he cut a couple of singles, Come to the Sunshine and Number Nine.

Both singles flopped, but Come to the Sunshine was later revived by Harper’s Bizarre and made the charts.

Parks kept busy as a session musician and songwriter over the next couple of years, before being chosen by Brian Wilson to write the lyrics for the Beach Boys’ ill-fated Smile LP.

Parks bailed out of the Smile project in early 1967 and ended up at Warner Bros Records with his own record deal, a huge recording budget and a huge amount of artistic freedom.

Typically, Parks began his tenure at Warner Bros with a decidedly uncommercial venture: His first release for the label was a charming but barely recognizable instrumental version of the Donovan hit Colours, credited to George Washington Brown.

“It was a pseudonym,” Parks explained to me in a 1995 interview. “This was right after the Kennedy assassination and, in the turmoil of that period, I had no interest in fame or name recognition. To me, that suggested a series of complicated developments. Fame wasn’t something that I desired. It still isn’t of any great consequence to me. And I thought it should be avoided at any cost. And so I put that first single I did at Warner Bros out under an assumed name. And I wanted to keep things that way, but I was persuaded not to by my attorney. But I enjoyed doing that single – that was a happy time.”

The single flopped and Parks reverted to his own name for the Song Cycle album; however, ditching the pseudonym didn’t help get the album in the charts.

Song Cycle was a costly flop, but Warners kept Parks on their roster and he recorded a handful of albums for the label over the next three decades.

B.J. Thomas - Raindrops Keep Fallin’ On My Head (1969)

2009-11-12T15:49:00.001-08:00

B.J. Thomas remembers his first #1 hit, with a little help from Burt Bacharach, Hal David, Phil Ramone and Ray Stevens.

By Robin Platts

Dionne Warwick and Burt Bacharach were in the 54th Street offices of Scepter Records in New York City, when a delivery arrived from the RIAA. Noticing the two gold record plaques being carried in, Warwick had walked into the room where Bacharach was.

“B.J.’s got two million sellers,” she told him. “You’d better write this guy something!”

“B.J.” was Scepter artist B.J. Thomas who had, by that point, racked up a total of four gold discs for the label. Being on the same label as Burt Bacharach/Hal David mainstay Dionne Warwick certainly made him a logical candidate for a song from the duo.

“I was kind of in the back of [Burt’s] mind,” Thomas recalls. “He was possibly going to write me something. We had kind of been politicking him and trying to get him to do a session with me, really, ever since I got with the record label. A guy named Steve Tyrell had been working on it and so had Paul Cantor - he was Dionne’s personal manager and he was my personal manager at the time, too.”

An offer eventually came while Thomas was on the road, doing a three-week tour of the Midwest. “I got word from Paul Cantor that, when I finished that string of dates, I was going to California and that I was going to get a session with Burt Bacharach. He said, ‘We’ve got this song in this Paul Newman movie’.” As soon as the tour was over, Thomas was on a plane to Los Angeles.

Arriving late at night, the singer caught a taxi at the airport and was soon heading up Mulholland Drive to Bacharach’s house. Although a celebrity in his own right, the Texan found himself a little out of his element.

“It was dark and it was late at night and I couldn’t find the doorbell. I pushed this button and the garage door went up. And then, out of the kitchen door, came Angie Dickinson, just looking every inch a movie star. She brought me in the back and I went down to the basement music room that he had and rehearsed with him. I’ll never forget that.”

Seated at the piano in his music room, Bacharach played Thomas a new song called Raindrops Keep Fallin’ On My Head.

Bacharach and lyricist Hal David had written the tune for the new Paul Newman film, a lighthearted Western entitled Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid. (Co-starring with Newman was a young actor called Robert Redford, whom the picture would transform into one of the biggest stars of the ‘70s.)

Thomas had a distinctive singing style, which had brought him plenty of success, but he found that Bacharach was not much interested in any reinterpretation of his and Hal David’s work.

“I have some vocal tricks that I do, running around the notes and doing those things,” says Thomas.

“And he just told me straight out. He said, ‘B.J., after you do this song and all the notes exactly like I’ve written them, if you have any space to do that, well, feel free.’ So really the only place where I could kinda play with the melody was at the end, where I did the (sings) ‘me-e-e-e-e-ee...’ And when I did that in the studio, he was conducting the orchestra and he kind of looked over his shoulder at me, and kind of looked and he said, ‘Oh, okay, that works.’ So, he didn’t allow me to use much of my style. Basically, I just sang his notes.”

Raindrops was recorded twice. The first version was recorded in L.A., to meet the film’s production deadline. “I was a little under the weather when I did the soundtrack,” Thomas recalls. “You know, back in those days I kind of burned the candle at both ends. By the time I finished that tour, my voice was really shot.”

This somewhat hoarse version appeared in the movie, underscoring the famous bicycle riding sequence. (It also appears on the soundtrack album, as On A Bicycle Built For Joy.)

A few weeks later, a new version of the song was cut in New York. This version was not included in the movie but was released as a single and is the familiar hit version.

“Burt had written the tag on the end, so we went into Columbia studios on Broadway in Manhattan and recut it,” Thomas explains. “And that’s the single version. However, the kind of scratchy version is the one in the movie.”

On his first session with Bacharach and David, Thomas was acutely aware that he was now in the big leagues. Thomas sang the song and the musicians played live, as the famous bicycle sequence rolled in front of them.

“There was a lot of tension in it and, really, self-imposed pressure for me. Just a few years previous to that I was just singing with basically a garage band in Texas. It was really an exciting session. We did the song against the bicycle scene where Paul has Katherine Ross on the handlebars. It was a big band, a huge orchestra; back in those days you used all live musicians. So it was a real exciting thing.”

The contrast between Bacharach and David’s personalities was quite apparent in the studio. “Burt was more demonstrative in his production techniques,” says Thomas. “Hal is a very quiet mild-mannered person, but he had lots of input in their productions, too, but he had it in a quieter, maybe less showy, way. They worked great together.”

Although neither of them told Thomas at the time, it appears that he had not been Bacharach and David’s first choice to record Raindrops. Raindrops had first been offered to Ray Stevens, who turned it down.

“Ray Stevens came out to California to see the movie and hear the song,” Bacharach says. “And he didn't like the movie and he didn’t like the song.”

“It wasn’t that I didn’t like it,” says Stevens. “The timing was bad. I had just spent weeks in the studio, working on what I thought was a wonderful record of a wonderful song. The song was called Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down, written by Kris Kristofferson. I had so much confidence in that record that I just didn’t want to wait to put it out. And I liked the song Raindrops Keep Fallin’ On My Head. I flew to L.A., went to Burt’s house and he sang the song for me at the piano. I was very flattered to have been asked to do the song. Obviously hindsight is 20/20 and, if I had the chance again, I'd shelve Sunday Morning and do Raindrops instead!"

It’s also rumoured that Raindrops had been written with Bob Dylan in mind. (Although a folksinger may seem an unlikely candidate for a Bacharach/David tune, consider that just three years later the duo tapped Shawn Phillips to sing the theme for their ill-fated movie Lost Horizon.)

“I’m not sure that they pitched the song to Dylan,” says Thomas. “But I know that Burt wrote the melody - and he wrote a lot of his melodies - with Bob Dylan in mind. I’m not sure if it’s because of Dylan’s phrasing or whatever. Burt is a real genius in the way he phrases the melody and the way he fits the lyrics in there. There’s a possibility that they did offer the song to Bob Dylan. You know, that ‘fallin’ on my head’ kind of thing,” says Thomas, emphasizing the line’s Dylan-esque phrasing.

Indeed, there is a curious similarity between the singing styles of Dylan and Bacharach. Neither possesses a great range, but both can convey a great deal of emotion. Thomas agrees. “You know, I think that’s why Burt always liked him, because Dylan’s not really a singer, but he really makes it work. Burt really admired him for that.”

“I tended to sing it, in its original form, sort of like Dylan-esque thing,” Bacharach says. “And B.J. acquired a little of that.”

Hal David points out that ultimately, Raindrops was written not for a particular singer but for a movie character. “We wrote the song with Paul Newman in mind,” he explains. “With Butch Cassidy in mind. In writing for a film, you don’t write for the singer who’s going to sing over the scene, you should be writing it for the character. And that’s exactly why and how the song was written.”

"Raindrops" was naturally selected as a single. After the first batch of 45s was pressed and shipped, Bacharach had a last-minute idea. Listening to the record in England, he decided that the beginning of the track was too fast, and had the first pressing recalled. Twentieth Century Fox protested, but the composer insisted, immediately flying back to New York to replace the first part of the track with an earlier, more laid-back take.

“We had done Raindrops, and we’d made an edit and put the mix out,” recalls Phil Ramone, who was at that time the engineer for Bacharach and David’s sessions. “And it was climbing the charts, into the Top 40 somewhere. And Hal and Burt and I were in England, and we heard it on the radio, and he said, ‘You know, I think you were right: maybe the edit from seven to four is better if we just stick with four all the way.’ We came back and remastered it. And it’s not about ego or craziness or anything. It was just that, in the fast judgement of getting the record out, we had made an edit.”

The revamped Raindrops reached the #1 spot, where it spent four weeks. The Butch Cassidy soundtrack also garnered a few awards to add to Bacharach and David's growing collection. In addition to another Grammy (for Best Soundtrack), the soundtrack also scored big at the Oscars. After three previous nominations (for "The Look Of Love," "Alfie" and "What's New Pussycat?"), Burt and Hal finally won for Best Original Song ("Raindrops"). Butch Cassidy won a second musical Oscar, for Best Original Score.

Big Star - #1 Record (1972)

2009-10-24T08:31:00.001-07:00

Drummer Jody Stephens looks back at the first Big Star album.

By Robin Platts

The album title and the name of the band are as ironic as you can get. They weren’t stars and the album didn’t chart at all. In the early ‘70s, Big Star crafted some of the best recordings of the decade and then gradually disintegrated in the face of mass disinterest.

It’s easy to draw comparisons to bands like Badfinger and the Raspberries, whose Beatle-esque records tended to seem out of place in the early ‘70s musical landscape. And Big Star certainly had something of a Beatles complex, with Alex Chilton and Chris Bell in the Lennon and McCartney roles.

Chris Bell, surely one of the most underrated talents in the history of rock and roll, led a succession of groups in Memphis at the end of the ‘60s. As the ‘70s began, Bell was fronting a trio, variously known as Icewater and Rock City, which featured: Bell (vocals and guitar), Andy Hummel (bass) and Jody Stephens (drums and the occasional lead vocal).

If Big Star had a star, it was Alex Chilton, a Memphis native who had achieved some fame as the lead singer of the Box Tops and actually sang on a #1 record (“The Letter”). Post-Box Tops, Chilton had made some solo recordings and spent time in New York. Chilton knew Bell from his pre-Box Tops days and, when he returned to Memphis in 1971, Chilton saw Bell, Stephens and Hummel performing at a local hall.

“When Alex came to see us, we were a three-piece,” Stephens recalls. “He came to see us at the VFW Hall, close to downtown. And he liked what he saw. He was looking to move back to Memphis, to join a band.”

Chilton joined the Bell/Stephens/Hummel trio, adding a rawer edge to the group’s sound. “We went from a pretty poppy band to something with a little grit as well,” says Stephens.

Inspired by the name of a local supermarket chain, the quartet optimistically dubbed themselves Big Star.

They recorded their first LP, #1 Record, at Ardent Studios in Memphis, between April and June 1971. #1 Record remains, to these ears, Big Star’s finest work. Although some prefer the rougher-edged follow-up Radio City or the completely unhinged Third/Sister Lovers, #1 Record benefits from the short-lived dynamic between Alex Chilton and Chris Bell. Like Lennon and McCartney, Bell and Chilton shared the songwriting credit on their contributions to #1 Record and each seemed to bring out the best in the other’s work.

“Chris added a real pop aspect to the band,” recalls Jody Stephens. “Chris provided the production direction for the first album and Alex was the production direction for the second, and you can see how the two contrast.”

Beyond Bell’s significant role as a singer/songwriter, it’s probably his studio craftsmanship that sets #1 Record apart from Big Star’s subsequent work.

“Chris was pretty studio-oriented,” Stephens recalls. “To the point that I thought it really did get in the way of performing live and rehearsing.”

Bell’s studio perfectionism gives #1 Record a polish that works to great effect against the rawer stylings that Alex Chilton appeared to favour. Chilton’s Thirteen, for instance, would have been a thing of beauty under almost any circumstance, but the track’s sweet, layered backing vocals (one of Bell’s specialties) lift it to another level.

Although Bell and Chilton worked on the album in partnership, tension resulted from a subsequent focus on Chilton.

“We released the record, the reviews started coming in, and the reviews focused on Alex,” Stephens remembers. “I think they focused on Alex because it was more of a writer’s way of introducing the band via someone they’d heard of rather than them crediting Alex with the creation of what Big Star was all about.”

Whatever the writers’ motivations, the focus on Chilton seemed like a slight to Bell, who played such a pivotal role in the conception of #1 Record.

“Chris brought so much to the project that he didn’t feel he got credit for,” says Stephens. “I think Chris was pretty disappointed in the lack of attention that he was paid. That’s probably the primary reason he split. I think he thought he’d have to live under Alex’s shadow.”

Bell quit Big Star before the group got around to making a second album and the group temporarily disbanded after #1 Record failed to make an impression on the record-buying public – most likely as a result of poor distribution.

The album spawned a couple of singles – Don’t Lie to Me and When My Baby′s Beside Me – neither of which made the charts.

However, the flipside of the latter, In the Street, got some mainstream exposure 17 years later when a cover version was used as the theme to TV’s That ‘70s Show.

Some versions of the Big Star story have Chris Bell playing on some of the group’s second LP, Radio City.

What is certain is that a few Bell/Chilton compositions found their way onto Radio City but didn’t credit Bell for his contribution.

“I know that there were songs that he and Alex wrote together – probably Back of a Car was one of them – and when Chris separated from the band, it was like Chris didn’t want to have his name on those songs,” Stephens recalls. “So I think he and Alex kind of divided up the songs they had co-written – Alex took a couple and Chris took a couple – and put their own names on them.”

Beyond the band’s considerable abilities as performers and songwriters, the pairing of Alex Chilton and Chris Bell tapped Big Star into a vein of melancholy that defines their best work and sets them apart from their imitators. Chilton and Jody Stephens followed it for two more albums until Big Star finally collapsed, but the undercurrent of pure sadness was at its most perfect with Chris Bell on hand for #1 Record.

Colin Blunstone – One Year (1971)

2009-10-11T07:33:00.001-07:00

Former Zombies singer Colin Blunstone recalls his legendary 1971 solo debut.

By Robin Platts

“This album is the story of a year of mine,” Colin Blunstone explained in the sleevenote for his first solo album. “A time of searching and of beginning all over again.”

In the wake of the Zombies’ 1968 split, their lead singer sought out the security of a nine-to-five job. Having written only a couple of songs for the band, Blunstone’s earnings had been far less than those of the Zombies’ principal songwriters, keyboardist Rod Argent and bassist Chris White. Hits like She’s Not There and Tell Her No had brought Blunstone fame but no attendant fortune, so a position at a London insurance firm looked more appealing than what the music business had to offer.

Blunstone hadn’t been on the job for long when he was contacted by Cat Stevens’ producer, Mike Hurst, who wanted to cut a remake of She’s Not There. Updated with strings and fuzz guitar, the new version was released as a single under the pseudonym Neil MacArthur (though Blunstone’s breathy voice was instantly recognizable). It reached Number 34 in Britain in February 1969, the same week that a posthumous Zombies single, Time of the Season, hit Number 3 in America.

Deram Records issued two further MacArthur singles in 1969, Don’t Try to Explain and It’s Not Easy. Blunstone’s voice was as strong as ever, but the material was not up to the standard his vocals deserved. Rod Argent and Chris White knew Blunstone could do better. By 1970, they were devoting their energies to their new group, Argent.

“I met up with Chris,” Blunstone recalls. “We’d been doing something totally different – something to do with the Zombies, I think. And he was giving me a lift in his car and he said, ‘Rod and I would really like to produce you. How do you feel about doing an album?’ And I thought it would be a great idea.”

In readying himself for the album, Blunstone blossomed as a songwriter. Caroline Goodbye was easily on par with the Zombies’ best work and should have been a big hit. Equally lovely were Blunstone’s other compositions – Though You Are Far Away, I Can’t Live Without You and Let Me Come Closer to You.

Argent and White also pitched in with the songwriting duties, offering Her Song, She Loves the Way They Love Her and Smokey Day, the latter two having already been recorded by an early Argent line-up to masquerade as Zombies recordings on the never-released R.I.P. album (they finally appeared in 1973, on the Time of the Zombies compilation).

Sessions for Blunstone’s first solo album began at Abbey Road in July 1970, the first track recorded being She Loves the Way They Love Her. The record came together at a leisurely pace, with Blunstone backed by Argent (the group) on tracks like Caroline Goodbye and Mary Won’t You Warm My Bed.

“We just sort of did one song at a time,” Blunstone recalls, “over a period of one year.”

One of the first – and last – songs recorded was a cover of Denny Laine’s post-Moody Blues single Say You Don’t Mind.

“Towards the end of the Zombies’ live career, we used to close with Say You Don’t Mind,” Blunstone reveals. “But it was sort of a rock’n’roll version of the song. So when we came to find songs for my album, that was one of the first we discussed.”

The rock arrangement was attempted, but Blunstone deemed it substandard. “We cut it with session guys and it just didn’t happen.” Then – about halfway through the album sessions – someone had the idea of pairing Blunstone’s voice with strings.

“I can’t remember who it was. I’ve had these discussions with both Rod and Chris,” laughs Blunstone. “They both claim it was their idea!”

Enter Chris Gunning, who drew up exquisite string charts for several cuts. “I though those scores were just wonderful,” enthuses Blunstone. “I sometimes wish we’d done a whole album like that. But the idea didn’t really come to fruition until halfway through. In those days, you didn’t sort of scrap half an album.”

Say You Don’t Mind was drastically altered. In Gunning’s arrangement, there were no rock instruments, just Blunstone’s voice, stately and sad, against the string section. It was the last track recorded and gave Blunstone a Number 15 UK chart hit in February 1972.

Apart from the rock version of Say You Don’t Mind, two other tracks from the One Year sessions ended up as outtakes. “We tried a Duncan Browne song, The Road With No Turning, and it just didn’t happen,” remembers Blunstone. “And Russ Ballard wrote a song called Schoolgirl. If I remember correctly, he actually wrote it for me. And we had a go at it, but that didn’t work either.” (Ballard had previously recorded the Zombies-esque Schoolgirl on Argent’s self-titled debut album.)

A Blunstone original, Hope I Didn’t Say Too Much Last Night, was recorded for the album but only appeared as a non-album B-side.

One of the finished album’s highlights was a cover of Tim Hardin’s Misty Roses, featuring Blunstone’s vocal backed only by Alan Crosthwaite’s deftly plucked acoustic guitar. “He was a very good jazz guitarist,” Blunstone recalls. “The guitar was recorded in one take – very, very quickly. We just sat down and had a beer and played it.” About six months later, Gunning wrote a string arrangement that was recorded (with Blunstone’s vocals) and edited onto the end of the original guitar-and-vocal take.

“We thought, Hold on a minute – if we put some strings in here, we can change the whole emphasis of this song,” Blunstone explains. “It’s funny how a track can have a six-month gap in the middle.”

The soulful pop of Mary Won’t You Warm My Bed kicked off the LP’s second side. Musically, the track is a departure from the melancholy feel of most of the album, but the lyrics are close to the lovelorn longing that pervades One Year. With Blunstone’s inspired vocal and Tony Visconti’s arrangement, Mary Won’t You... sounds like a lost Motown classic. (It was released as a single, but failed to chart.)

From the cover photo to the sleevenote to the gorgeous, wistful sounds inside, One Year remains the definitive representation of Colin Blunstone’s gift. It has everything going for it – even a hit single.

“So now I’ve started, by myself this time,” concluded Blunstone’s sleevenote for One Year. “And like the first word of a novel, the hardest decision is over.”

The Zombies - Odessey and Oracle (1968)

2009-10-08T06:15:00.001-07:00

Colin Blunstone, Rod Argent, Chris White and Paul Atkinson recall the making of the band’s 1967 masterpiece

By Robin Platts

As the 1967 Summer of Love approached, the Zombies were struggling, disillusioned and disappointed after three years in the music business.

“We’d been playing non-stop for three years,” recalled lead singer Colin Blunstone. “We’d had the really unfortunate situation of starting off with a huge hit and everything was a little bit less successful after that. If you start at the top, it’s very difficult to take disappointment after that. And that’s what happened to us.”

The Zombies had arrived in 1964, riding the British Invasion with two Top 10 U.S. hits, She’s Not There and Tell Her No, both of which also charted in Britain. The next few Zombies singles hit the lower reaches of the U.S. charts, but failed to register in the UK.

By 1966, despite the increasingly strong material being written by the Zombies’ chief songwriters, keyboard player Rod Argent and bassist Chris White, the band’s singles weren’t charting on either side of the Atlantic.

“Our records were selling less and less,” said White. “The only people earning money were Rod and myself, because we were writing the songs. The rot started setting in and Decca then didn’t take up our option.”

After Decca Records dropped the band, the Zombies decided to give it one last try, with a self-produced album of original material. Argent knew the band would likely have split up by the time the album came out, but he and White in particular were eager to put the Zombies to rest with a parting gesture that, for the first time, gave the band control over every aspect of a record, from the songwriting to production and cover design.

“We decided to produce an album ourselves,” said White. “We got a deal with CBS in England and recorded it at Abbey Road. I think we did the whole album for a thousand pounds, still using four tracks. It was like a factory. Everyone had a break at lunch time and at tea time. And then you just went on until eight o’clock at night.”

The album was recorded at EMI’s Abbey Road studio, with engineers Phil MacDonald and Geoff Emerick, who had recently worked on the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band LP.

“We went into Abbey Road No. 2 just as the Beatles were leaving,” recalled the late Paul Atkinson, the Zombies’ guitarist. “They’d just finished doing Sgt. Pepper. So we walk in and Geoff Emerick and Phil MacDonald are unplugging all these patch cables. We said, ‘Wait a minute, what are you doing? Plug those back in again.’ And they said, ‘No, no, please. We’ve had six months of this. It’s been driving us crazy. We want to unplug all this stuff and get back to recording normally.’

“I think they had six or eight four-track machines lined up against the wall of the control room, all connected by patch cords,” Atkinson remembered. “So we made them plug them back in again and we used the same technique. So we benefited directly from Sgt. Pepper.”

The band produced the album on a tight budget, with sessions taking place between June and November 1967. The recording “was done over a period of months,” White said, “but the actual time in the studio was very quick, because we couldn’t afford to waste money. We didn’t get advances in those days. It was a matter of trying to do it as cheaply as possible.”

Despite sticking to a tight schedule and budget, White and Argent ended up having to use some of their own royalty earnings to complete the album. After the recording was finished, Odessey and Oracle was mixed in mono, which was the more popular format in Britain at the time. “CBS came back to us and said, okay, great, now you’ve got to mix it in stereo but you’ve used up your budget, so you’ll have to pay for it yourselves,” Argent recalled. “So we had to spend two hundred pounds of our own money remixing the album in stereo.”

Odessey and Oracle’s closing track, Time of the Season, would eventually put the Zombies back in the Top 10; unfortunately, nobody knew it at the time, least of all Colin Blunstone:

“I didn’t like that song,” Blunstone said with a laugh, recalling his initial reaction to Time of the Season. “I really didn’t. Rod and I had a big, big row in the studio as I was singing it. He was in the control room, and the song had only just been written and we hadn’t had a chance to rehearse it that much. He was offering advice about how the song should go and I was getting a bit upset about all this advice coming down. And I asked him, in very strong terms, whether he didn’t think he ought to be singing it, rather than me. He said, “Now you stay there and you sing it!’ It was a hell of a row.

“I look back now and I’m very glad that I did sing it,” Blunstone reflected. “But I think that had a big effect on me afterwards. No way did I see that as a hit and, of course, it was a million seller. You have to keep an open mind, because you can be horrendously wrong.”

The choral harmonies on Time of the Season were just one example of the strong vocal arrangements that set Odessey and Oracle apart from most of the Zombies’ earlier efforts. The album’s opener, Care of Cell 44, was embellished with irresistible Beach Boys-style vocals, while A Rose for Emily’s vocal counterpoints are similarly indicative of the attention to detail that characterizes everything on Odessey and Oracle. Nothing on the album seems half-baked; every track feels fully realized in its arrangement and performance.

Colin Blunstone handled most of the lead vocals on Odessey and Oracle, but the album also featured Rod Argent singing lead on I Want Her, She Wants Me, while Chris White took the lead on one of his own compositions, Butcher’s Tale (Western Front 1914).

“That came about because I was always fascinated with the First World War and happened to be reading a book about the battle of the Somme,” White recalled. “I think, in retrospect, I was affected quite a bit by the Bee Gees’ New York Mining Disaster. And I had bought this old American pedal harmonium form a junk shop.

“The others said, ‘Why don’t you sing it in your shaky little voice?’ So I sang it. It was a throwaway track, really.”

Brief Candles had Argent, White and Blunstone each singing lead on a verse (with Blunstone handling the chorus), while Changes featured the whole band singing on its chorus.

“We had to do three songs in a day, so you got them down as fast as possible,” Chris White recalled. “On Changes, we tried to use the drummer and guitarist, who didn’t normally sing, to get the harmonies done. We were running overtime in Abbey Road Studio 3 and the fellows in white coats came in and removed the piano while we were doing the last minutes of harmony. That was the sort of thing you were dealing with in those days.”

Odessey and Oracle was completed towards the end of 1967 and released in England in April 1968.

The misspelling of “odyssey” in the album title first appeared in the cover painting by White’s roommate, artist Terry Quirk.

“He spelled it wrong and it was too late,” Argent recalled. “He designed the whole thing and it came out. And then we sort of made up this story that it was actually a play on words – it was a play on the word ‘ode’ and it had a sort of poetic meaning.”

The album, like the two British singles that preceded it (Friends of Mine and Care of Cell 44), failed to chart. The Zombies had already decided to call it a day, but the commercial failure of Odessey and Oracle confirmed the band’s demise.

“I was getting more and more frustrated playing one-nighters around the country, travelling around in the back of a van,” said Atkinson. “It was pretty rough. There was a lot of tension in the group. Rod certainly had his ambitions to do something new and progressive, as he ended up doing with Argent. All of us felt that the Zombies had had their best days and let’s move on.”

“We were rehearsing acoustically at Chris White’s flat in Finchley,” Blunstone recalled. “I think everyone was tired and being a bit negative. As I remember it, Paul said, ‘Well, I think it’s time for me now; I think that’s enough.’ And Rod said, ‘If Paul’s going to leave, I think we should fold the band.’ And no one argued. I think we were all just very, very tired. It was remarkably undemonstrative; probably very English. After all those years and those miles of travelling and everything.”

That would have been the end of the Zombies story if it hadn’t been for the intervention of Al Kooper, at that time working as a staff producer for CBS in America. Kooper discovered Odessey and Oracle during a visit to London and convinced CBS to put it out in the States, on the label’s Date subsidiary.

The American release, in June 1968, initially appeared to be another failure, undoubtedly compounded the selection of Butcher’s Tale – the album’s least radio-friendly track – as the first single.

“The first single off the album in America was Butcher’s Tale,” White recalled, “because to them it applied to the Vietnam conflict. Then they put out Care of Cell 44, because they thought that was the commercial one. And nothing happened and the Zombies had split up anyway. And eight months after we split up, CBS decided as a last shot they’d put out Time of the Season. One day it sold six copies in Boise, Idaho and, for that one reason, they thought maybe we’ve got a chance here, so they put it out to all their distributors. And then it started getting featured and it became Number 1.”

When Time of the Season reached the Top 10 in early 1969, the Zombies had long since split and moved on to other things. Rod Argent and Chris White were still working together, writing and producing new material for the group Argent. They briefly revived the Zombies name for the planned R.I.P. album, intended to meet the demand for new Zombies recordings after the unexpected success of Time of the Season. This LP would have featured a handful of new “Zombies” tracks, performed by an early line-up of the group Argent (with Rod singing lead), fleshed out with a selection of Zombies studio outtakes from years past. The album was scrapped, although Imagine the Swan was released as a 45 and all the other tracks have subsequently surfaced on compilations.

Over the years, Odessey and Oracle came to be something of a cult classic, acknowledged – like the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds album – as one of the lost gems of the ‘60s. Although Paul Atkinson passed away in 2004, the four surviving Zombies regrouped at London’s Shepherds Bush Empire in 2008 to perform Odessey and Oracle in its entirety on the 40^th anniversary of the album’s release.

Glen Campbell - Reunion: The Songs of Jimmy Webb (1974)

2009-09-25T07:17:00.004-07:00

Glen Campbell and Jimmy Webb talk about their classic, overlooked 1974 collaboration

by Robin Platts

"I just love Jimmy Webb's songs," says Glen Campbell. "Jimmy was like Brian Wilson. He was like McCartney and Lennon. His songs are timeless."

It should have been a glorious comeback. As the 60s came to a close, the combination of singer-guitarist Glen Campbell and songwriter Jimmy Webb had been all over the airwaves: By The Time I Get To Phoenix, Wichita Lineman, Galveston, Where's The Playground, Susie...

Campbell and Webb's first run of records were smashes, both commercially and artistically. Although Webb's tunes were memorably recorded by other artists (Art Garfunkel, the Fifth Dimension and let's not forget Richard Harris), Campbell was perhaps the perfect voice for his compositions.

But after that first chart run, Webb and Campbell had pretty much gone on their separate ways. Webb was determined to make his own mark as a recording artist, and Campbell's energies were increasingly focused on touring and his hugely successful TV program The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour. By 1974, Campbell's Top 10 days appeared to be over, and Webb's own records, although critically well received, had failed to match his success as a songwriter for other artists.

"He and I had already crested, in terms of our initial success on the charts," says Webb. "It had actually been a few years since By The Time I Get To Phoenix. There had been kind of a lull for us on the charts. And it seemed a good idea to go into the studio and make a concerted effort to try to come up with another big record, a big Webb/Campbell commercial venture. So, first of all, it was about that. And enough time had passed that you see the word 'reunion' cropping up as the album title. We went into the studio and, I think, probably made our best album ever."

"We did a lot of work at my house," Webb recalls. "In fact, that photo on the album cover was taken in my front yard in Encino. I moved my grand piano out into the front yard under the trees. The trees were so beautiful, reflected in the high gloss finish on the grand piano. It was really kind of a 'made at home' project. I had a studio in my house at the time, so a lot of the initial demos and the fooling around and woodshedding that goes into a record were done up at my place, just hanging out."

Although I Keep It Hid and Just This One Time were drawn from his back catalog, most of Webb's contributions were new compositions. "I created at least six of those tunes for that record," he recalls. "I remember writing You Might As Well Smile for that project. It was a free and easy song selection process. But I think we really did a good job. It was a real natural sounding thing - all the tunes were really Glen Campbell tunes. We weren't really trying to get out of the envelope at all. We were actually trying to recreate some of the success we'd had at the beginning."

Although none of the numbers were bound for the charts, all were up to the high standard that Campbell and Webb had previously established. Campbell cites You Might As Well Smile and The Moon's A Harsh Mistress as two of his all-time favorite Webb songs. Two and a half decades later, he enthuses about these songs as though he'd just heard them for the first time. "I just get such a joy out of singing them. The Moon's A Harsh Mistress... Oh, what a song! (Sings) See her how she flies... I still do that. It's so good!"

Although subtitled The Songs of Jimmy Webb, Reunion includes two compositions by other writers. The album opens with Lowell George's Roll Me Easy. "I don't know why that was in there," laughs Campbell, "but Jimmy played it for me and I loved it. I thought it was great."

"That comes out of the fact that I was really fairly close with Lowell George, and a great fan," Webb explains. "It was my belief that Glen should start recording other writers."

The other outside contribution was About The Ocean. If it sounds like a Jimmy Webb tune, it might because its author was Jimmy's sister, Susan Webb.

"I was trying to help Susie get going as a songwriter in those days," Jimmy explains. "That song is on there because Glen wanted to do it. He heard her playing it around the house and said, 'Let me try that,' and started playing it. Next thing you know, it's part of the program."

Throughout the album, Campbell's renderings of Webb's richly melancholy songs are astounding in their sincerity. If you didn't know it, you'd swear that Glen had written them himself.

"Well, a lot of people think he did!" says Webb with a chuckle. "I basically considered that to be a compliment."

"They are (personal)," says Campbell. "They fit. That's what drew me to them. When I heard Johnny Rivers' record of Phoenix, I didn't like the record that much, but I cried because of the lyrics, because I was so homesick at the time. That took me right back to Arkansas. I almost sang, 'By the time I make Arkansas, she'll be sleeping,' but Jimmy would've probably had a hissy. I told him that, and he said, 'Don't you dare put Arkansas - I'm from Oklahoma!'"

After that first success, Campbell proved to be the perfect voice for Galveston. Webb's anti-war classic had originally been cut by Hawaiian crooner Don "Tiny Bubbles" Ho. "Don gave me his single and he did it like Jimmy had written it, as a ballad," recalls Campbell. "(Sings Ho-style) Galveston, oh Galveston... (Laughs) I said, I can understand why it wasn't a hit! It just wasn't for Don, you know? I just heard it faster when I went into the studio."

Although Webb didn't produce Reunion, his gorgeous arrangements and piano playing give the record his own mark. "Jimmy, as an arranger, is very articulate," says Campbell. "We'd play onto a track, get the track done, I'd put a vocal on, then I think he'd put strings on. And sometimes I'd go back and re-do some vocals after the strings were put on, because everything that he put on it would kind of give it a little different feeling."

The result was a beautifully executed, deeply felt collection of songs. But, despite their best efforts, Campbell and Webb's masterpiece failed to make the charts.

"I think we were both real disappointed when we didn't get the ride that we expected from the record company," says Webb. "And I think that that was the beginning of some real trouble between Glen and Capitol. I know that he eventually got so disgusted with them that he get up and literally walked out of the building, during a meeting."

"There was a lot of regret that we had, because we couldn't understand what the problem was," Webb continues. "And I think what neither one of us realized was that we were kind of at a crucial moment in history, and what was happening was that radio, Capitol radio, you know, was in the process of dropping Glen off the playlist when that record came out. And it didn't matter what was on the record, as much as it mattered that 'Well, we don't play that anymore.' They had had enough of him. They do things like that. It's almost like some sort of mental telepathy. There's no official position paper that goes out, no secret communiqué that's circulated to all these people at the same time... It just kinda works that way. Obviously we were going to be hurt, we were going to be confused, and we were going to blame the label. But it was just one of those things that was happening. There's not much you can do about it."

"I think it was too hip for 'em," Campbell says with a laugh. "I think Capitol let that album fall through the cracks. Between '72 and '75, it was the president of the label and all that stuff. "It's just who's running the show. A company can make a hit out of a mediocre half-decent record or song if they want to."

Radio's abandonment of Glen Campbell was short-lived, as it turned out. In 1975, he hit the top of the American charts with Rhinestone Cowboy, and repeated the feat two years later with Southern Nights.

"When Al Coury came back to Capitol, he worked his way up through the ranks at Capitol, we were real good friends, and that's when Rhinestone Cowboy and Southern Nights and all the other stuff came out," Glen explains. Although Webb didn't write either of those hits, he did introduce the latter number to Campbell. "I'm the guy who played Southern Nights for him. I said, 'Here's this New Orleans writer - this sounds like something you could get your teeth into.' And, boy, that was the understatement of all time. I mean, he really made a hit record out of that song."

Despite the commercial failure of Reunion, the partnership endured. Through the years, almost every Glen Campbell album has included one or two Webb compositions. There have been no further hits, although there have been tracks that deserved to be, particularly Campbell's rendering of Webb's Highwayman, which Capitol foolishly refused to release as a single.
The later Campbell/Webb collaborations have been given a fair shake Down Under, where the Reunion album has been revamped and reissued on CD. "God bless Australia!" enthuses Webb. "You know, I've been touring down there for several years, and they always show up in great numbers. They have been instrumental, as a culture, in re-focusing some attention on us. Just the very fact that they put this record out..."

"This record" is a new CD version of Reunion, entitled Reunited, with fourteen additional Webb/Campbell bonus tracks added, comprising most of their post-Reunion collaborations. And a new collaborative album is in the works, possibly to be culled from a series of live dates at Feinstein's in New York.

"I played at Glen's birthday party a couple of years ago," Webb recalls. "It sounded so beautiful. I was playing a Fender Rhodes and he played guitar. And I thought, 'God, this is the way this music should be done - we should do an album like this.' So I started trying to talk him into it immediately."

Although a chart-topper seems unlikely in the current musical climate, here's hoping that Campbell and Webb's next reunion will find an audience. Even if it doesn't, the joy that Jimmy and Glen find in working together will be enough to make it worthwhile.

"Jimmy really is a songsmith," says Glen. "He can take a raw piece of material and make a horseshoe out of it."