Genuine Imitation: Waldo de los Rios: "Mozart Symphony No. 40 in G Minor"

When I was growing up, still a little girl in Los Angeles, there were three kinds of music I’d hear on a regular basis.  One was rock; one was jazz; and one was classical.  I would say that of all three classical has the deepest influence on what I hear and how I hear it; and the composers I heard formed my idea of what music should be like.  They weren’t the big names like Bach, Beethoven and Brahms; they were Prokofiev, Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky, Mussorgsky for the Russian side (big music, fearless and emotional) and Satie, Saint-Saens, Debussy and especially Ravel on the French one (more delicate, playful, elegant and yet also emotional).  Add Aaron Copland and Iannis Xenakis to all that and it's what I grew up on; fairly mainstream stuff, but overwhelmingly Romantic/Modern (as opposed to the really old school composers whose work is more genuinely 'classical' as such).  I did not hear opera as my parents just didn’t care for it; only in the 90s did I really become aware of any other classical composers, past or present*. This music went to places the other two kinds of music couldn’t quite reach, sublime places where out and out awe was the only response, beauty and life were celebrated in stirring ways.  Classical music has gotten me through more than one terrible time, in part because of its power and in part because I associate this large swathe of it with my parents; I respond to these composers as I would to early sights and smells, with instant familiarity.

And so I come to Waldo de los Rios’ “Mozart 40” with some ambivalence.  I have no deep attachments to Mozart, as such; but I imagine that he means as much as Satie or Mussorgsky do to me, and I can only wonder what those people would make of this.  A symphony reduced to a nice melody in a light pop format?  This must smack them as a kind of Muzakization of Mozart, a simplified version for those who like him well enough but don’t have the time to actually listen to the real thing.  Well, I can hear them say, maybe this might lead them to the real thing, or maybe it will just become background music on sports shows on tv.  The patisserie delicateness of the melody – it floats like a feather in the breeze – gets an acoustic guitar and drums added on, just to make foot tapping easier, I suppose. 

De los Rios wanted to bring this (perceived) old music up to date, which I guess is admirable enough, but something about it makes me uneasy.  Something as inherently pleasant and undemanding as the Mozart’s 40 lends itself to pop treatment, but apart from hapless visions of canapé hell at dinner parties where de los Rios’ album Symphonies for the 70s was most surely played, I don’t really know anyone who would actually want to hear this on anything like a daily basis.  Mozart doesn’t really need to be updated; the surge of popularity he got with Amadeus (an admirable movie, if not really that accurate) didn’t suddenly see people running off to buy this; they wanted the real thing, because they had an emotional attachment to it – understood what Mozart’s life was like – and responded.  Walter Murphy’s “A Fifth of Beethoven” (1976) was also a one-off hit, a novelty, the sort of thing that was done because it could be done, as much as anything else; and I’m afraid that is where “Mozart 40” also belongs.  It’s modern, it’s ingenious, it brings Mozart into the same chart as (amongst others) Frank Sinatra, the Delfonics, Deep Purple and T.Rex; what he would have made of this I will leave to your imagination. 

For a moment in the spring of ’71 a song based on a symphony made it to #2 in the NME; de los Rios gained fame outside of his native Argentina**, and continued on for a few more years before succumbing to depression in ’77.  He was a composer of original works as well, it should be noted; but this was his biggest hit.  Like so many things in the 70s, it’s an update that must have sounded hip at the time, but the novelty and hipness wore off as the decades have progressed.  Like the previous song it was far more successful in the UK than in the US, which points to something – I’m not sure what- in the differences between the two nations***.  In the US I imagine folks would have prided themselves on liking the original version, thank you very much; in the UK it was a pleasant change, a nice arrangement to listen to while driving or cooking, adding a touch of class to the proceedings. 

As an American I have to side with the former opinion – yes it is earnest and “classicist” but as nice and at-the-time cool as this is, I can’t like it as much as I like the original, and if de los Rios ever did anything based on works I know and love well, I don’t want to hear them.  This may sound harsh, but when Rush Limbaugh is the only one to champion your work in the US (he featured this on his show in 2010 and it had a brief surge in popularity) it makes me wonder if this version – or any of his other works -  was ever necessary at all.  A cover of a previous hit song is one thing, but trying to update something that doesn’t need to be updated is bound to be a folly; pleasant enough to some, but not to others.

Next up:  the roots of rock, explained.      

*Mainly due to the excellent movie Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould, and its equally great soundtrack, which I would heartily encourage you to listen to if you haven’t already.  As for early 70s composers, this is when Steve Reich and Philip Glass begin to get some attention.

**I should add that fellow Argentinian Gato Barbieri was finishing up his contribution to Escalator Over The Hill at this time and was about to start composing the music to Last Tango In Paris.  De los Rios also did scores for movies, but mostly did this neo-classical work.

***The two singles charts are growing further and further apart; by the time glam truly hits it big, they will have almost nothing in common at all.

A Lover's Discourse: The Four Tops: "Walk Away Renee"

Or, The Summer of Love With A Vengeance


"My language trembles with desire." Roland Barthes, "Talking" A Lover's Discourse


There are certain voices that can sing anything - and then there are grander voices that are best suited to whatever their voices most suggest. Holland-Dozier-Holland knew what Levi Stubbs' voice was capable of, what it could bear, and wrote songs for him and The Four Tops that only they could really sing. Stubbs' voice is big, pained, noble; it needed a setting and lyrics that could match it.

When H-D-H left Motown The Four Tops were (like everyone else H-D-H had worked with) at something of a loss for songs, when someone - I'm not sure who - found this and knew it would work. (I am writing about this, by the way, as a #2 hit on the NME chart.) I can well imagine them hearing to the original in '66 song by The Left Banke and being impressed by it; the singer is paralyzed with hopeless love. He is stationary, empty, and the world floods around him, the sky cries the tears he can't, the symbol of love - a heart on a wall with her & his names - haunts him. Because she can never be his, she may as well leave; he cannot follow her or even be near her. It is too much for him, he literally cannot stand it. The singer Steve Martin (and here we come to feeling The Four Tops understood) cannot help himself; he sounds as if he is singing from a fugue state, just conscious enough to sing, to say what little there is he can say, that can be expressed in words. The rest is taken up by strings, harpsichord, flute; the elegant and comforting touches around a terrible loss.

He is noble in recognizing what the situation is (she's not to blame; there's no blame here at all) and being able to sing it. (Renee was an actual person, a muse for the harpsichordist/lyricist Michael Brown, and she was present when the song was being recorded, but not during his playing; he was trembling and in no fit state to record when she was around, and he did his part later when she'd gone.)

So this is not mere infatuation or a crush; this is closer to the scary, sweaty but inspirational Robert Graves' The White Goddess situation, where the writer is almost driven to write out his profound and worshipful experiences*. That is the kind of urgency and agony that suited Stubbs' voice very very well, and the grief and baroque pop of the original also suited the Motown's continuing aim of being 'The Sound of Young America' - they had started recording in Los Angeles as well as Detroit in 1967 and the baroque/psychedelic sounds were starting to filter into the songs and production. (Think of "Reflections" by The Supremes or "More Love" by Smokey Robinson & The Miracles.)

The version by The Four Tops sounds large and perhaps a bit rough compared to the original (there's no harpsichord or flute on it, that I can tell - horns and piano are dominant here). Stubbs dominates the song with his pauses, his soaring exclamations, as he is supported by his group and other backing singers. He isn't so much paralyzed as proclamatory; he is past the agony of the situation, sure, but not so much that every thing - the one way sign, the heart - are just reminders of what he can never have, and he sings about them as if (almost) he is wounded by them, like arrows. He can live without her, but he can never escape her, and the emptiness and literal signs of love will outlive him.

That might sound a bit hyperbolic, but this is a song about one man vs. the world, the awfulness of every particular thing as symbols of what he wants and cannot have. They are noble because they are his; no one will ever feel about them the way he does. For Brown they are actual, for Stubbs they are dramatic (that the song starts with 'And' implies there is something that could come before the lyric, but doesn't - the listener is thrown right into the thick of things). With each high "AWAY" she is willed further and further out of his life**; the song resolves on a downward graceful landing, a note of peace that points back to the beginning - starting with "And" means he will go on, it's not the end of the world, just the end of his possibility of requited love (which can seem like the end of the world, admittedly).

The crushing feeling here is the aftermath of love; the Summer of Love left many heartbroken and in '68 - a time of turmoil and trouble almost as soon as it started - is full of songs where emotion, not reason, come to the fore. From hope comes desire, and from thwarted or doomed desires come drama; an awful lot of drama is to come on this blog. But few of these songs are as cathartic as this one, which leaps immediately in to fill in the once empty air with a near-operatic song. Like I said, The Four Tops understood this, and by extension give the listener a compassionate hug, as well.



"How does love end? - Then it does end?" Roland Barthes, "The Ghost Ship" A Lover's Discourse


*Brown referred to his love for Renee as "mythological."

** The Four Tops did an Italian version of this called "L'Arcobaleno" ("Rainbow") - something else that can be admired but never reached.

Psychedelia Has A Right To Children: Keith West: " Excerpt From 'A Teenage Opera'"

Throughout the late summer a song has been steadily climbing up the charts, to rest at #2; it had the advantage of being played a lot (esp. on pirate radio) and being a narrative that could be understood by anyone - the sad passage of time, as experienced by not just one or two people, but a whole community. The sob stories that have just passed are merely personal - this is about a whole village losing its grocer.

How on earth could this have happened? Well, this is 1967 and we find ourselves at none other than Abbey Road with one Mark Wirtz, who had been hired by - remember him? - Norrie Paramor to work as an in-house producer for EMI. Wirtz was hip; he was responsible for Pink Floyd being signed by EMI and dug another underground group he saw playing at the same time - The In Crowd (soon to change its name to the even more underground Tomorrow), featuring guitarist Steve Howe and singer Keith West. He had had the musical idea of a teenage opera for some time and mentioned the Grocer Jack character to West, who promptly wrote the lyrics; the group recorded the song and it was a hit - (such a hit that for a while Keith West was a pin-up, much to his & Tomorrow's discomfort).

The song is as lush and orchestral and Beatles/Kinks inspired as you'd expect; West sings with compassion about an 82-year-old grocer who dies, the village's lack of food and the funeral, where the folks realize they should have been nicer to the old man. The most poignant and influential part of the song is the children's chorus - little girls who wonder where Grocer Jack is and want him back, even though their moms tell them he won't be back. I can't help it, their voices tug at me - the children are the voice of the village, missing Jack, helpless to change the way the whole village is going to have to operate. (The premise of the opera is that the songs are all sung to a young woman who must stay awake after a motorcycle accident; they are almost all songs about people in a village who are antiquated, about to disappear, if not gone already.)

That a song such as this did so well shows that the public maybe wasn't so scared of psychedelia as previously reported, if it's focused on an understandable narrative and has little kids singing on it. There was also the tantalizing idea of it being an 'excerpt' - that there was a lot to come and that a teenage opera was indeed possible. Wirtz found out, however, that the audience was maybe more fickle than expected (and he lost West's involvement, as he wanted to focus on Tomorrow), and while other singles appeared, none of them did that well and he soon stopped working on it in '68 to work on other things.

This is a pity, because had it been released (as it was in '96) it would have been the first real rock opera, complete with a whole cast of characters ("Auntie Mary's Dress Shop," "The Paranoiac Woodcutter," "[He's Our Dear Old] Weatherman," "Shy Boy*" to name a few). This year pretty much saw the flowering of the concept album - not to mention the album market in general, as the kids so happy to buy 45s in '63 had grown up and wanted something a bit more substantial. This - for all I know - would have done really well, but as Brian Wilson could have told Wirtz, doing something so concentrated and thematic is not easy. (The other lost album of 1967, The Beach Boys' SMiLE, surfaced first as bootlegs, then as a Brian Wilson album in 2004, and just now as an actual Beach Boys album.) A Teenage Opera was for some just as legendary - who knows what the talented Wirtz & Co. were getting up to at Abbey Road? (One Pete Townsend was certainly curious, and this in part inspired Tommy.)

What this song also cements is psychedelia's interest in and sympathy with children. This might seem a bit odd, but at heart it is the siding with the young instead of the old, the naive and hopeful as opposed to the tired and traditional. Children were to a point romanticized, but their spirit of adventurousness and tendency to blunt speech - then as now - meant they could at least be trusted, unlike the older generation who were - not to make a big point of it - square and didn't approve of anything the counterculture believed in, from pirate radio on down**.

There is also nostalgia; a whole world is disappearing and the spirit of the times is to reflect on this, to bring the old and new together in a mish-mash (think of the military-style jackets worn by The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix) that somehow liberates the culture from the past, even as it's being remembered (anti-vintagizing). The village is changing, old customs and ways are going, ones that may be going for good, for all anyone knows.

Rock 'n' roll has now split between pop and rock; avant-MOR as pioneered by Scott Walker is appearing, alongside a new station the BBC is putting together to play what the pirates did - sort of. Its name is Radio 1, and with it the chances of Wirtz' concept album took a dive, as its listeners weren't as adventurous as the pirate ones. What did they want? The answer is next.



*Done by Kippington Lodge, with the lead singer, one Nick Lowe, making his debut.

**A personal anecdote: When I was two-and-a-half I 'ran away' (the gate was open and I left to walk down the sidewalk). My mother predictably was concerned and called the cops, who found me not that far away being guarded as I walked by...some counterculture guy who was looking after me on my little escapade. No one famous, though this was in Hollywood, so you never know.

Only Everything: The Beatles: "Penny Lane"

"I was thinking," he said (it was not an answer, but then what answers had he got this morning?) "that I've been here before."
"Lots of people get that feeling. Here."
"In front of the church?"
"In the Village, generally. It seems to do that. You know what I think it is?"
"What?"
"I think it represents something." He stroked his small, square chin, savouring the plum of represents. "People come here from other places. Like you. And they see our Village, and they get the feeling that something has always been missing from their lives."

The Prisoner, Thomas M. Disch



Part I:

If there is any one reason the 60s - once they had passed - proved so hard to shake off, we have now reached it. If you have ever - for whatever reason - had to leave behind something you did not want to leave behind, some place or some person...well, imagine that place or person as a time. Not just days on a calendar or ticks from a clock but an actual, near tangible time when things in general held promise, dignity, style, substance, color and humor. Once experienced, this time will be missed; indeed I think many still miss it, as disorienting and Utopian as it could be, by turns.

That this period lasted for only about a year or so just adds to the mystique; it also adds, I know, to the annoyance of others. It is easy to say "What is so different/special about 1967?" and be right. It wasn't a perfect year (as well shall see) and a great divide opens up during it - in fact that divide starts right here, in early March. It is the divide, simply, between those who buy singles and those who don't.

Or between those who "got it" and those who didn't. (There are still those who don't.)

**********************************************


It was not really supposed to be like this.

The custom was common - release a single, then soon after an album with all-new songs on it. They had finished their last tour in the summer and thus had time off to think of what to do next; an album about their Liverpool childhood was agreed on and two songs had been written and recorded for the album...but the label, nervous that they hadn't had a single out since August, insisted they release another one...and so they reluctantly released what wasn't supposed to be a single as a single. They may not have expected it to do very well, all things considered. That it got to #2 did not seem to bother them at all.


Part II

The man was dead; dead, by his own hand. It was not a mystery, in the end. He died, nearly penniless and yet well-known, his paranoia and depression and anger spent in a moment, killing his landlady and then himself. He had no sense of community, in being part of something much bigger, including history itself. He did not want or need others and this was perhaps a death sentence as well. The other world that called to him, which he longed to explore, was always there, and he ran headlong for it, as he had worked so hard to achieve things while he was alive. If only he could have waited; so much would be his in just a few months, in the spring, in the summer. But he wasn't much for waiting.

He knew music was the one sustainer, that long after death the music was still there, a gateway to another world, an eerie gift that was there for the taking. Put the needle on the record and sit and listen; try and tape ghosts in a graveyard and then maybe the same thing will happen. To hunt is one thing, but to be captured while hunting is something else.

By now his ghost haunted the streets, the old ones he knew, the ones he had gotten away from. This is where I once lived?



PART III


The town is a still-life; the area itself is alive, with characters that seem cartoonish, though they are real enough. This is Peter and the Wolf gone to Liverpool, for all I know. The song shifts as it goes, sounding like a simple depiction of what happens of a morning...

...if only it was like that. As cheery and life-affirming as this sounds, there is something...wrong...lurking in it that makes it tougher than it might seem at first. The barber is friendly, sure, but just why does the fireman rush in? (Yes, it is raining...but then aren't the skies supposed to be blue, the air sunny?) The banker doesn't wear a 'mac' (raincoat) even in the rain...is this why the children laugh at him? How is it that it's summer and yet Remembrance Day poppies are being sold by the pretty nurse behind the bus shelter? This is the mystery, and one that is in the 'ears and eyes' of the singer, who is not in Penny Lane beyond his own mind. We seem to be in a place, but we aren't. The nurse feels as if she is in a play (ie acting something out in the 'real' world) and yet she is, anyway. So says the singer, but can we trust him?

And what is that burst towards the end, the thunder in the clear blue sky? It approaches in the song, halting the ineffable swing of the song, as it returns again and again to the increasingly strange world where everything seems fine, though the singer comments plainly that it's "very strange." No kidding, Paul.

But then: the end.

Let me digress and say that the one thing that annoys me more about radio in general is that DJs talk over the end of songs; indeed sometimes they play a minute or so and then start babbling and the whole point of playing the thing in the first place is lost. They forget that a song is a story, and the story is told not just with words but music, with sounds. Cut off the ending and something is definitely lost, and here it is vital; the song starts briskly enough, the lyrics just a note behind the music.

But the end!

The singer says the name of the place one more time, as if wrapping a bow; and then the scene fades, the piano and cymbal squeak into feedback, as if the place is suddenly full of light or dimming beyond focus. It evaporates. What once was is gone, is gone again, nothing is as it seemed. Is this a happy song? For all intents and purposes, yes. The sprightly beat and hints of brass bands; the smile in Paul's voice; the Motown roots and warmth; the way you can close your eyes and be there with the singer, maybe even remembering your own childhood neighborhood - all these are joys.

But there is something lurking - that burst and then unnerving feedback at the end - that make this more than just another happy McCartney song. It's not like the memories are being made fun of, or the people. It's that even as they existed, the scenes were surreal, unreal, "very strange." This all seems familiar, too familiar...and the solution? Turn the record over and see what is on the other side.


It was now as if he had never left. This was intolerable. He had to escape. But how?

Brian Wilson, Western Recorders, Los Angeles, California...the solar system, the universe, the mind of God: The Beach Boys: "God Only Knows"

"Listen to 'God Only Knows' - as beautiful as anything ever recorded, and Brian Wilson starts a love song with "I may not always love you" - that's nerve."

Martin Skidmore, March 6, 2002, ILM



Part One: Five Men in a Room

There are five men in one room; they are all sitting down, perhaps some more comfortably than others. They are about to listen to an album, an advanced copy of it no less, and there is a certain tension in the air, of excitement and uncertainty. The album title is odd, for starters. The eldest of the five puts the album on the turntable and the needle on the starting groove...

They look at each other with some nods and smiles at first; yes, this is exactly what we expected, but, but...it is as if there are new colors and textures emerging at any given moment and the effect is of strangeness, more than anything else. This is like a flower opening, a bird flying; amazing and fragile and utterly natural, all at the same time. The eldest listens very carefully; one of the others is cool to the sounds, the words, but the effect is building up, until it hits a plateau they have already heard, of course...

...and then the most affected of the five gets up and turns it over, beside himself to hear what comes next. The first song glides into the air, serene as a swan. He covers his face with his hands, knowing that this is it. IT. They all know this is what they will have to equal on their next record or they will have fallen behind, and they cannot possibly do that. Even what they are doing now - which is pretty amazing - is not nearly enough. The room is quiet when the album ends; the eldest takes the record off the turntable and says: "That is our next goal, boys. To equal that."



Part Two: Pray


"The sheer emotion that comes out of the speakers is TERRIFYING. It is the pause between your declaration of love and her response."

Joseph Cowart, July 9, 2005 ILM


"Carl and I were into prayer. We'd pray together, and we prayed for light and guidance through the album. We kind of made it a religious ceremony."

Brian Wilson on recording Pet Sounds

And so the brothers prayed before recording this song. When you pray you hope, you try to bring something into being, to manifest it in some way. To say what that is precisely or to be too demanding is not needed; just to have that right energy and feel is the thing. Like anything ecstatic, there is no real explanation for what happens. There is almost no describing it. There is a melody, a beat, musicians, instruments. The song unfolds as it should and yet does not settle down. It is pointing towards it (the root chord) without ever saying directly what it is. That is probably because it - what the song is about - is unnameable, impossible to describe...it exists, but can only be felt, not heard...

...to digress to the 90s, this is one of my favorite songs, one that wouldn't exist without this one. What is it about? Here are the lyrics; but beyond those is the music, which reminds me at one point of something I don't talk about very much, because music is the only part of it that I can relate to others, and that is my own mystical experience. The chorus of the song (in particular the solo organ, at 1:29 or so) is about the only equivalent I have for the experience*.

"God Only Knows" works the same way for me but on a far more essential basis than even that; it came out when my mom was pregnant with me and as a native Angeleno I cannot help associate it with that important time. Objectivity for me is nearly impossible, therefore, but from what I sense this song either hits people right where they live - uncomfortably, as Cowart and Skidmore remind us - and they either reject it or accept it. There is no dodging the difference in this song - not even Mike Love's part in the break (the low bah-bah-bah-bomp-BAHs) can give much of a connection to anything they have done before.

The Beatles' "Eleanor Rigby/Yellow Submarine" was number one at the time: two songs about either being isolated from the rest of humanity or joyously attached; and as an unwitting riposte here were the Beach Boys writing one of the ultimate songs to the Other, with sublime music which circles around the point - the indescribable point - as opposed to the rather blunt Beatles ones. The lovin' vibes that Wilson wanted here are more than apparent, the psychedelic swirl of instruments (accordion, french horn, sleigh bells, string quartet) are homely** and clip-clop delicately, the front room piano is the ground out of which all of this - voices, instruments - rises...and there is the word God, the word which had never been used in a pop song (jazz or patriotic anthems at this point only) before, right there in the title and chorus. The song was easy enough to write, compared to others on Pet Sounds, but it was the one most worried about.

Prayer was not only needed for the singing, but perhaps to get God's OK for the song. If the song took a short time to write, then doing so might count as a mystical experience, one that Wilson and Asher may have been too busy to notice. Brian Wilson was going to sing it but then decided his brother Carl would sound better; and they prayed before singing it. And so it went into the world as a prayer of its own.



Part Three: Influence


Stereolab have already been mentioned here; I should also mention the High Llamas (there are links between the groups, namely Sean O'Hagan). The more immediate influence is all over the place though, including (yes) the Velvet Underground. They may have been led by uber-rocker Lou Reed but John Cale, a Beach Boys fan, snuck in this; (ah irony in the host saying it was the most influential album).

Pet Sounds is notoriously a musician's album, which means it crossed (as thence did this song) into all kinds of ears, from Keith Jarrett to Charles Lloyd (who worked with the Beach Boys because of this), to Carla Bley, who was influenced by Wilson's way of orchestrating and arranging. (This is the full overture to Escalator Over The Hill; when I first heard it I was immediately reminded of downtown Los Angeles - now I know why). Marvin Gaye heard it and it helped to shape how What's Going On sounds - miles away from the regular Motown sound, denser and overlapping, profoundly moving in and of itself. (This may just be a way to say Pet Sounds is a soul album, come to think of it.) And it also fed into how The Carpenters would sound, from melodies to gentle melancholy; Richard Carpenter is also a Frank Zappa fan (oh yeah - us Californians stick together, you see) and some of the musicians here also appear on The Mothers of Invention's Freak Out!, which came out at around the same time and was another album to give The Beatles a pause for thought***.

Those most influenced by it were The Beach Boys themselves; it was Wilson's project to write it as the rest toured Japan, and there were initial mixed feelings about this and the other songs - no cars, no surfing, no girls, no fun; but the band came around to it in the end. At this point work began on Smile, a "teenage symphony to God" (the spiritual mood clearly continuing). No one was more ambitious or having more fun than Wilson at this time, but alas along with that came the gnawing sense that others were out there trying to surpass him, and so they were; we will see how far they got soon enough. Suddenly the stakes are much higher, and that they are centered on a beautiful song makes the attendant ironies that much keener. 1967 is just around the corner...



*That I had yet to hear any Stereolab when I had the experience just makes it all the stranger, plus this song hadn't been recorded yet...

** I mean homely as in old-fashioned but also as uncanny. The song seems familiar even if you've never heard it before, Wilson taking from the Four Freshmen, Lovin' Spoonful, Gershwin, Ravel for all I know...the roots here are deep.

*** I may as well also mention the other groundbreaking band from L.A., The Byrds, who brought everything together in the most stunning and different way - this - breaks the sound barriers, if you will, of what a pop song can be.

Hip Aristocrats: The Mindbenders: "A Groovy Kind of Love"

There are certain songs, their writers will say, that more or less write themselves; get a good melody, a song title, and the rest will flow from there. This song was written in about twenty minutes by Toni Wine and Carol Sager (making this, importantly, the first song here written solely by women), who took liberally from Clementi's Sontatina in G major and the new slang word 'groovy' and went from there. So if there is something stately and Romantic to the music, that's why - and the lyrics follow suit, the world boiling down to two people and their utter togetherness, the joy of being close. The music too circles and enshrines their love, the Mindbenders make it sound rather martial (the drums in particular) but this adds to the old-fashioned origins of the song. It wasn't written for them in particular but was recommended to them - now Wayne Fontana-less - and amidst the frenzy of the bigger groups this was a genteel pause, like a cool clear glass of water on a hot day. Oddly enough this is a rather 'square' song to use the word groovy and thus the BBC and pirates both played it, rare neutral ground in a chart that's at this point still very much pirate-dominated. For now...

The Mindbenders, despite their best efforts, weren't so successful after this as they'd hoped, and went their separate ways in '68; Eric Stewart (who was the impish one in "The Game of Love" and who sings this) and Graham Gouldman even wrote a concept album before anyone else called With Woman in Mind, but it was perhaps too much too soon. I will get to their next group in the fullness of time, but also note that the world of pop was going into its baroque phase at this time, which will become evident soon (indeed some might call this song Baroque, come to think of it).