If you have seen the current expensive looking advert for Cunard’s expensive looking cruises (‘I wonder, I wonder…’) you have heard the voice of British philosopher Alan Watts (1915-1973). This reminded me of a favourite Van Morrison song, ‘Alan Watts Blues’ from 1987, tucked away in the middle of side two of perhaps the smoothest of his albums, Poetic Champions Compose. Watts and Morrison were both living in Marin County, California in the early 70’s and I’d like to think they crossed paths. So when I heard the album at a friend’s house last week I was reminded that I had written about the record for my book on Morrison Hymns To The Silence (Bloomsbury 2010). Buy the book here, folks:

https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/hymns-to-the-silence-9780826429766/

Most of the section on PCC fell onto the cutting room floor – the original manuscript was over twice the length of the published version – so I thought I’d post it here. It was part of a section on how Morrison worked in the studio so is particularly attentive to that aspect of the record. It’s a great album, so please take this as a recommendation to check it out.

Recorded over summer 1987 at the Wool Hall Studio Beckington and London’s Townhouse, Poetic Champions Compose offers an interesting case study in how Morrison constructs and fashions an album in the studio, pulling together aspects cherished from live performances and placing them into the very different environment of the large, comfortable multitrack studio. The risks taken in live performance can be attempted in the studio, for sure, but there is the safety net of the retake or the overdub to make good any fluffs or over-reaching. How much use of this advantage does Morrison make?

Wool Hall was a studio in Beckington in Somerset, originally owned by Bath-based British pop duo Tears For Fears, and built with the substantial earnings from their hit singles and albums in the period 1982-86, when they were among the biggest sellers with both pop and rock audiences, their appeal  spreading from Smash Hits readers to the rock critics of the then-new glossy rock monthly magazines. The studio was appropriately well-upholstered and , as they say, state of the art in its provision. For Morrison it also had the advantage of being close to his then-home also near Bath, and being ‘down by Avalon’.  Another Bath boy, Peter Gabriel, had set up a studio in the area in Box village and  Box Studios became synonymous with Gabriel’s RealWorld Records; it was local, but Morrison’s only musically productive visit to was to record a version of Bobby Womack’s  ‘That’s Where It’s At’ with The Neville Brothers for a RealWorld compilation.

The studio  was initially as one might expect set up purely for the use of its owners and designers but in the wake of the global success of Songs From The Big Chair (and their struggles with the very expensive and commercially damp follow-up The Seeds Of Love) Tears For Fears opened the studio for commercial use. Van Morrison was one of their first customers, using the studio for to arrange, plan and record  Poetic Champions Compose over a few weeks in  the summer of 1987. He was preceded in the studio, as it happened, by The Smiths who recorded their last album Strangeways Here We Come at the studio in Spring 1987, and the etching on their single from that album  ‘Stop Me If You Think You’ve Heard This One Before’ was ‘Murder at the Wool Hall (x) Starring Sheridan Whiteside’. So it was certainly the studio de jour.

Initially, Morrison intended the album to be the instrumental disc he had been planning for some time and the environment helped him relax into such non-mainstream ideas – remember that  it was both at and behalf of  Moles Club in Bath that Morrison participated in the recording of Cuchulainn in 1982. Indeed the album features three substantial instrumentals very much developing the mood and model set down by ‘Scandinavia’ and ‘Evening Meditation’, among others, in the preceding five years. As he noted to Martin Lynch the following April in Coleraine, when asked about using ‘different forms’ :

Lynch: Are you looking to develop different forms for your work…like instrumentals?

Morrison: Oh, yeah, I’m still developing instrumentals…I cut three on my most recent album’ [meaning PCC]

The album begins and closes with sax and piano instrumental pieces (as did the second vinyl side), very clearly shaped from the same raw material in the room at Wool Hall, but in the end though these pieces placed at key positions in the sequence guide the tone of the album, they don’t dominate it.  This is in no small part down to the quality of the songs and the vocal performances that occupy the other eight  berths on the record. In Clinton Heylin’s book, trumpet player Martin Drover remembered that

…it was a jam, that album…we went to the Wool House [Hall] and we sat there, looked at one another.’What do you fancy, Van?’ Sod it, let’s just have a play. You don’t usually do that – you’ve usually got some dots in front of you. The first couple of days Van was just playing alto, we were just busking, playing over things…stuff evolved out of that, and that’s how that album was made…he was fairly relaxed.

The professional session musician’s fear of the empty page seeps through here (“we sat there and looked at one another…you don’t usually do that- you’ve usually got some dots in front of you”) , but clearly Drover soon relaxed into the process. Enjoy these ‘Spanish Steps’, the album’s opener.

Drummer on the sessions Roy Jones recalled that once the songs had evolved in the way the Drover  describes  “it was mostly only one take, perhaps two takes, no more, then repairs”.  This methodology is familiar in its adhering  to the ‘one take’ philosophy Morrison used and also aspired to – think of the eulogy to Sinatra’s technique in ‘Hard Nose The Highway’, described by Morrison:  “The first verse is an image of Frank Sinatra going into the studio and saying ‘Let’s do it’. he makes an album then takes a vacation. It’s an image of professionalism”. It is interesting that this idea has such a strong appeal to Morrison in terms of how he views the art and/or labour of making records , by their very nature definitive to an extent that a live show is not. As he told Uncut magazine in 2005, “I didn’t get into this to put records out” , and so we can see the appeal for him of treating the recording studio as an extension of the live stage, recording as a kind of snapshot of a starting point for a song rather than being the end of the road for its growth. Yet the most casual listen will tell us that the songs on Poetic Champions Compose are not rough and ready, but sophisticated and carefully constructed pieces of work, functioning at a highly refined level. The trick, if we may call it that, is for the song to be both subject to such processing while retaining the kick of the new. It takes an expert touch both in composition and arrangement.

Fiachra Trench told me how the arrangement which graces one of the albums key songs, ‘Queen Of the Slipstream’ came together:

‘Queen of the Slipstream’ is one of the tracks on Poetic Champions Compose, the first album on which I collaborated with Van. It was a first for Van also: his previous string sessions in the USA had been for a smaller section than I used; I think we had about 26 players. The string session went very smoothly. Van very content. On ‘Queen…’ I reduced the strings to a chamber group for Van’s harmonica solo and the second bridge which follows. Otherwise it’s the full section. (These days Van favours smaller string sections — from string quartet up to, say, 10 or 12. More organic. Less orchestral.) There’s an epic feel to this track and the strings seem to enhance that feel.

Some of the string lines are derived from Neil Drinkwater’s piano lines. I often use that technique when writing string arrangements; it helps to make the strings sound more part of the track, less like an overdub, less pop.

The sheer beauty of ‘Queen Of the Slipstream’, in my view his greatest lovesong,  is  musically analogous to the album of which it is an integral part, and  a form of meditation in itself: rather like Veedon Fleece  it was somewhat lost, and where the former  was directly after the 1973 live album, Poetic Champions Compose  was overtaken  very quickly by The Chieftains project. Indeed the only performances of these songs by the band who recorded them was at the ‘Secret Heart Of Music ‘ conference held at Loughborough University over the weekend of 18-20 September 1987, where Morrison played sets on both evenings and also contributed to panels and discussions over the weekend. The album is little sound world, sounding very studio based, even though it does of course have a ‘live ‘ feel to it. It’s this conundrum that must interest us.  Tracks like ‘Celtic Excavation’ evoke the ‘mystery’  of the Celtic without making any musical reference at all to ‘celtic music’ as widely understood. The album’s mode is conducive to, if not dominated by the instrumental, and this is something less easy to do onstage. 

‘Queen Of The Slipstream’  is the album’s key song,  the lyric of which contains the album title, as well as references to ‘Astral Weeks’  in its title via a distinctive Morrison term – the slipstream – and ‘Come Running’ : ‘ I see you slipping and sliding in the snow…you come running to me, you’ll come running to me’. This song represents perhaps his best example of the blend between the ‘mystic’ song  and the love song for which he would subsequently be well-rewarded (‘Someone Like You’ on the same album, ‘Have I Told You Lately’  later), in its fusion of the mystic and the material, the spiritual and the corporeal. The  ‘innocence/experience ‘ motif which frames the lyric exemplifies this. It also employs some of his key motifs beyond this sensual  bi-polarity, with the two apparently contradictory or antagonistic  states being yoked together and experienced simultaneously . How does the sound of the song help achieve this tricky balance and help the feeling of perceived wholeness to be realised so sweetly and effectively?

                A synth harp opens picking an escalating scale of 7 steps  up to entry to the ‘scene’ of the song; we need to climb to reach this place, to start the journey.  It is as if a casket or treasure box is being opened slowly to us,  the brightness within revealed. This is the ‘Queen’ motif which continues under the verses, rising and falling in proximity and consciousness, slipping in and out of conscious hearing but always present as an underpinning and essential element of both the composition and the sense of connection, identity, a kind of ‘leitmotif’ within the life spirit of the song. It is certainly used this way in the Moondance movie, where ‘Queen Of the Slipstream’ is Anya’s theme, cleaving as closely to her as ‘Moon River’ does to Holly Golightly in Breakfast At Tiffany’s. It keeps the rhythm on track and is  appropriate to the impact, both revelatory and stabilising, of the object of the song,  both precipitated by this idea and also the subject of it. Morrison’s guitar picking starts to drift in , introducing a grittier level of perception and element within the music itself. The strings arrive at 13 seconds, moving like a slow comet across the rhythm track, traced by Morrison’s unity hums twice (at 13 and 20 seconds: two more divisions of seven). 

The vocal enters, seven seconds later,  at 27 seconds and the strings reach a periodic crisis to usher in the lyric, and the Queen leitmotif surfaces again alongside. At the one minute mark, at the lyric ‘there’s a dream where the contents are visible’, the string line illustrates this revelation, as it follows the synth line for the next time round at 1:08, an octave down. Four pulses of the strings arrive,  drawing sensuously , not clipped or stark, up to modulation at ‘Going away’.   June Boyce ‘s vocals join Morrison  here, and at  1:49 the tambourine enters,  bringing a new slightly accelerated pulse as a feature of the larger movement; a kind of internal swiftness at one with the steadier movement, adding to this harmony achieved beyond the apparently contradictory or agitant constituent elements.  We get a  sense of both earthly movement, in  solid (Spanish) steps and also sense of floating, lightness, an escape from ‘This Weight’ the thing that keeps us tied to the earth or our movements prescribed: on ‘Motherless Child’  he wishes he could “fly like a bird up in the sky…a little closer  to home” . This image serves to  convey the sense of both exile from a place of refreshment and harmony but also an awareness of the physical pleasures and limitations of the body;  so  images from Buddhist karmic reincarnation, Christian scripture and  pre-Christian Greek mythologies  (Icarus, for example) are melded via a blues progression in a line or two. Lightness and heaviness, corporeality and spirit come together. An alchemic motif, seen already on The Mystery ‘(all your dirt will turn into gold’), is introduced here:  “Gold and Silver they place at your feet my dear…but I know you chose me instead”.   Love is greater than material wealth and  spiritual well being  better than material comforts.

Fiachra Trench told me of the song’s mid section that  “I reduced the strings to a chamber group for Van’s harmonica solo and the second bridge which follows”. With the strings thus reduced to a quartet behind this section, the harmonica adds some r’n’b grit to the sweetness, and here again the two disparate elements combine to create  a brand new texture;  the harmonica and string quartet  together give this sense of wholeness of  body/soul, weight/ lightness, corporeal/spiritual, spiritual wealth/material wealth. All of these are co-present and almost because of their differences achieve a new harmoniousness and  spiritual agreement.

The strings  at  2:50 become  much denser, building to an emotional climax. The sense of  lightness and  freedom for the last ‘Queen’  riff re-emerges and consolidates whilst pushing the song, and the idea on unto it’s proper resolution, represented by the strings vaulting up like the rhythms of a poem or a head upturned to the open sky, return to in the last section  to the lyrical innocence/experience theme. From  3:35 on the song builds to the sustained climax: it is still building in a way as it fades finally at 4:50, suggesting that it extends way beyond its own modest temporal span.  Lyrically it return to the initial imagery,  in a movement cyclical yet linear and progressive: we are in a different place from where we were at the beginning . This is demonstrable evidence of a kind of wholeness both sequential and evolving,  ever-present and unchanging: we return to the source , changed by the journey, moving freely between  innocence and experience. This apparent paradox is in some ways a possible interpretation of the ‘meaning’ of the term ‘slipstream’ in Morrison’s work.

Morrison’s voicing of the word  ‘snow’ at 3.55 and his extrapolated ‘Queen’ at 4.12-4.14 provide the vocal peak of the song, and this goes close in hand with the musical climax, with the strings at their most abundant and free between  4:15-23. These details  link with the beginning too in that Morrison’s  voice shadows the guitar line in his union singing style down to the fade, two distinct elements moving in agreement, creating an entirely fresh and ‘ other’ element which still maintains and establishes an  new wholeness within itself. This mix of smooth surfaces and complex emotional memory – exemplified perhaps by the blend of harmonica and strings – is indicative of the album’s whole sonic mood . The album has a very definite sound but not necessarily that which we have identified as through composition, being  more to do with who was in the room at the time, the mood and the environment – recall that Martin Drover remembered  the album initially being  ‘busked’ up from the ground; Morrison clearly liked the ambience of the studio and the way his music felt when recorded there. Wool Hall suddenly seemed to fit the bill in regard of what he was looking for at the time, and  in 1994 he bought the studio, reverting  to more or less private use.  Ben Sidran recalled to me how the recording the Mose Allison covers album Tell Me Something took place there, and the impact  of the atmosphere of such a familiar environment:

“It took two afternoons.  It was just a groove.  I had prepared charts of all the songs based on the charts we had used in the original Mose sessions.  We just passed them around and ran the songs down.  The spirit was very loose and relaxed.  All music…. We were set up “live” in the studio – that is without baffels so we could hear without ear phones if we wanted to.  I think we spent an hour or so running over songs before Van arrived.  When he got there, he went to his microphone, pulled out some harps, and off we went.  They were all performances, no overdubs, mostly first takes”.

Neil Drinkwater’s piano and Van’s sax along with Fiachra Trench’s string arrangements are the dominant elements of the instrumentals on Poetic Champions Compose , and provide a draped soundscape for the vocal cuts on the album too. The sound is mellow contemplation made musical – it facilitates the thing that it also embodies, and in this is remarkable in itself. The strings on these pieces both dress and release them from their moorings – listen to how the strings on ‘Spanish Steps’  (above) keep the weightlessness of the piece right up to the concluding instant 4.40-5.20, a superb example of how less can be more, the cinematic focus showing why Trench is in such demand for his film and TV scores.

The album’s supposed ‘ground-up’  improvised nature also attests to the special corner the composer found for his music here in his first trip to Wool Hall. The use of harmonica is illuminating too : ‘The Mystery’,  the first vocal track of the album, opens with some short, trumpety,  blasts of annunciation on the harmonica, all the more effective for its juxtaposed combination with the blue shades of the band’s sound and the pearl-drape sumptuousness of the strings.  The album’s first vocal, opening ‘The Mystery’ some six minutes into its playing time, is like a landmark, a point of guidance from which to move forward – indeed it concerns itself with a movement into the mystic:  “Let go into the mystery, let yourself go”. The strings which coil themselves around the melody are as smoke rings, highly visible but as insubstantial as air. It is didactic, “trust what I say and do what you’re told…there is no other place to be,  baby this I know”, but Morrison seems to be cast as both master and pupil.  The listener is drawn into a process and  a state of mind but can be misled –  as Morrison said during a lengthy meditation section of  a performance of  ‘In The Afternoon’  in Amsterdam  in 1999  “we don’t want you falling asleep”, getting a laugh from the crowd  – but  this process  of letting yourself go is preparing the listener: “I saw the light of Ancient Greece/Towards the one/ I saw us standing within reach/Of the sun” .

‘The Mystery’ is that of life and with a  promised or at least posited alchemic consequence: ‘and surely all your dirt will turn into gold’:  we see again how comfortably the idea of the Philosopher’s Stone fits as a motif for his work and the process upon which he himself is engaged. The idea of ‘letting go’ into the mystery finds a parallel in Morrison’s work  not only in the theme of the mystic as a space into which one may come and go, but also in wider contexts: Alan Watts wrote that

“When you try to stay on the surface of the water, you sink; but when you try to sink you float. When you hold your breath you lose it –which immediately calls to mind an ancient and much neglected saying, ‘Whosoever would save his soul shall lose it”

and the idea of letting go into ‘the mystery’ is connected to this – it has to simply happen as opposed to being a concentrated physical effort – a letting go rather than a claiming of insight. The sound is typical of the album – spacious, each instrument heard in the round, matched with airiness,  giving a dual sense of fullness and lightness. This matching of the heavy and the light matches the metaphysical mood of the material, grounded in material and earthly concerns (or should we say blues concerns) – love, loneliness, unhappiness – while having its gaze also turned upward to spiritual matters and sources. A song like ‘Did Ye Get Healed?’ is in all its simplicity directly metaphysical as it addresses the impact of the spiritual upon the physical. The sound of the track as laid down at the Wool Hall by this band is fully expressive of and in harmony with this kind of ambition for the music.

‘I Forgot That Love Existed’ is one of Morrison’s finest songs;  a metaphysical tale of redemption through love which extends right back to the roots of Western civilisation to make the point that love is a universal presence and we need to tune into it and furthermore that it is a leveller as well as astep up from the ordinary life, with no-one particularly privileged or favoured– so that Socrates and Plato are brought to the table  but directly on their heels comes  “everyone who’s ever loved or ever tried” (67). It is almost a perfect late period 80’s Van Morrison song, especially in how the clean studio lines of the music  illuminate the lyrical point; that is, it seems like a summation of what his thinking and writing had been aiming for over the preceding 5 years or so. Yet what stuns is its simplicity and directness – it is , like the rest of the record, a ‘small’ and compact sound, full yet full also of space. It flowers from a tight little knot of bass notes which are quickly joined by tentative shots of piano, their refusal of the major and the chord communicating a wise and cautious optimism.  The beat is picked up by a light hi-hat at 20 seconds, and is awarded an affirmative ‘yeah’ by the singer at 23 and 29 seconds as he locks into the moment. It is not that love does not exist, but that he forgot that it did: we feel a parallel here with Hamm’s challenge to the sky in Beckett’s Endgame :  “God, the bastard! He doesn’t exist!”. That memory is experienced emotionally – memory is such a theme in Morrison, particularly so in his work from the 80’s on,  that it is worth noting that here he is working from a position of having forgotten (“I forgot that love existed”) and then the present  being redeemed (“but now it’s alright”) by the act of remembering.

It is concise, spacious and presents a whole emotional landscape in which we are free to move. The switch to a stronger and more assertive beat, signalled by the entry of Neil Drinkwater’s synth at 0.52, beneath a far firmer repetition of the title phrase, makes the song step up a gear, and into the light – as the lyric says “…but then I saw the light”. This phrase is of course a commonplace, but one which  Morrison would certainly know from the Hank Williams song of the same name ( if not the equally bounteous  Todd Rundgren song), and it has connotations both religious and secular in its usages, a la ‘the writing on the wall’,  which he used in ‘Full Force Gale’ a decade earlier. The lyric is unusual in that there is a flow to and from the singer and the world around him – often his meditative material is very intimate in its scope, involving the self and perhaps another  (as in ‘Cyprus Avenue’ and ‘In The Garden’) but rarely far beyond these little cells of comfort. Here he makes a gesture which is  almost Joycean ( ‘Here Comes Everybody’ , from Finnegan’s Wake) in its bold and extended inclusivity ‘everyone around me made everything alright’. Thus the intimate becomes the shared experience via the newly awakened perception of inter-connection :  ‘everyone…everything…’.

He develops this theme in his references to the ideas and the thinkers that have endured down the ages “O, Socrates and Plato, they praised it to the skies/Everyone who’s ever loved, everyone who’s ever tried”. In this couplet he matches the enduring ideas of the immortals to the everyday experience of ordinary life, illustrating that there is no distinction between the experiences, only the perceptions of them: the first line picks out two ‘special’ points of view (Socrates and his pupil Plato) and connects them to the whole of humanity that preceded and also followed them ‘everyone who’s ever loved, everyone who’s ever tried’.

The song has at its centre a metaphysical conundrum worthy of John Donne himself “If my heart could do the thinking/And my heart begin to feel”. An inversion of traditional models of understanding human perception –  head for ideas, heart for emotion –  is posited  (to use the philosophical term, as seems appropriate here somehow) and the song imagines what difference that would make “would I look upon the world anew and see what’s truly real? “ The element and admission of doubt is a properly philosophical mood, and the musical hue of robust caution matches this. It’s a wise song which is prepared to countenance the dissipation of that wisdom , if that proves necessary .

The sound of this album and its correspondence to its emotional and philosophical content takes another turn in ‘Alan Watts Blues’.  Watts was a beat  philosopher who ended up harmonising, without ever quite intending to,  with the Hippie ethos of free love and alternative social programming. Dick Hebdige wrote about Watts in his essay  ‘Even Unto Death: Improvisation, Edging and Enframement’(69), pointing out how Watts had understood the difference between the “genuine  expansion of the frame of any art form and its conscious, stagey demolition in ‘experimental’ work”. Watts identified one incursion of Zen into creativity as the allowing of the accidental detail, in his essay ‘Zen and the art of the Controlled Accident’, a title which on its own clearly has some connection to Morrison’s own willingness to allow music to flow and develop according to its own energies and principles, rather than to force it here or there. Yet Watts also argues for the importance of what he calls ‘the frame’:

“A frame of some kind is precisely what distinguishes a painting, a poem, a musical composition, a play, a dance, or a piece of sculpture from the rest of the world. Some artists may argue that they do not want their works to be distinguishable from the total universe, but if this be so they should not frame them in galleries or concert halls. Above all they should not sign or sell them”.

Morrison’s whole career has been poised on this very fine line of division between the making of music  and the framing of it – that is, the signing and the selling of it. Morrison has never been less than upfront about the nature of the music industry, in the aphorism that stands at the front of this book or in conversation (“Let’s not kid ourselves, the music industry is all about money” as he told Jeremy Marre in 2006) and his unflinching facing down of this fact has been his salvation as well the source of much trouble for him. Watts found fault with John Cage’s “silent piano recitals where the performer has a score consisting of nothing but rests…” (he is most likely referring to Cage’s infamous ‘4.33’) , which he considered  “a group session in audiotherapy…not yet art”(71). The work of Morrison’s early favourite, Jack Kerouac, is indirectly critiqued here too , for its deliberate (as Watts saw it) placing of what Hebdige calls “his verbal clatter” against or outside the frame offered by verse or the novel. The puzzle is how to reconcile the organic internal logic of improvisation with the apparent paradox of deliberate spontaneity: ‘I am now going to make something happen without my stir’. Watts related this to what he called ‘the law of reversed effort’, as Hebdige points out, not unconnected to the saying ‘Whosoever would save his soul shall lose it’. In nature, according to Watts, the accidental is always recognised in relation to what is ordered and controlled. This serves as a decent  annotation to  Morrison’s working methodology, and as such draws together his techniques on the live stage and in the studio – the accidental moment is a function of arrangement and controlled structure. It is fitting then that one of his most ‘controlled’ and formally gorgeous albums has its roots in a moment where, as Martin Drover remembered, “we sat there and looked at each other..and said..What do you fancy, Van?”, and that this is the album which contains ‘Alan Watts Blues’, a song which doesn’t mention the man by name beyond its title, but whose influence is felt on almost everything else about it. Remarkably, it’s also the only Van Morrison original to include the word Blues in the title.

As a studio production it is a gorgeous sound, bright and crisp, and the zen-funk  overdubs of Mick Cox add curlicues of lightness to its dizzy heels. It opens with thoughtful and tentative picking on a semi-acoustic guitar, before the beat ticks in at 0.19, beaten in by the vocal a second earlier. It clicks in on the space which opens between ‘I’m’ and’ taking’, anticipating  the tap of the ‘ t’ in  ‘taking’. The song draws in this busy but unobtrusive guitar, bright patches of  piano and a determinedly metronomic rhythm into what, against the odds, is a very catchy pop song.

The chorus line is the title of one of Watts’ best known books, Cloud Hidden, Whereabouts Unknown, itself borrowed from an aphorism from the Chia Tao(73). In this the title flags up and acknowledges the influence of Watts; the song takes it from there, building upon that set of connections and inspirations. The melody is almost jaunty, the piano solo at the centre of the song sounding remarkably like Bob Andrews’ deliberately fragmented solo in Nick Lowe’s ‘I Love The Sound Of Breaking Glass’ reassembled and restored like a brightly hued stained glass window. There is a gorgeous and significant lift toward the song’s close at 3.59, when the chorus spills over into the verse and bridge structure in a manner which not only suggests an underlying unity of its constituent parts but actually delivers and reveals that unity, down to the eventual fade twenty seconds later. The mystery is retained and respected, but it also has a frame put around it, as Watts argued that it should. The ‘frame’ that the smooth, beautiful, studio-even  surfaces of Poetic Champions Compose places around the complex music and lyrics within its eleven tracks illustrates how well Morrison can employ those textures when it serves his greater purposes. This is his smoothest album, while also being amongst his most experimental.

So at the Wool Hall on Poetic Champions Compose  he achieved a kind of perfect fit between his ambition for the sound of a record and the lyrical, even philosophical ambition of the same songs; a delicate , responsive balance between smooth and rough textures, word and music, planning and improvisation,  and between body and soul. Given his career-long habit of reaching a kind of perfected endpoint and then flying off in a wholly unpredictable direction, we should recall that his next record was not a further refinement of this sound, but a dive into the traditional songbook in his collaborations with the Chieftains. This tells us something of how he viewed the sonic fidelities of Poetic Champions Compose.

Having uploaded a piece on ‘Someday Man’ and ‘A Man Without A Dream’ to this blog recently, people were kind enough to say they liked it, and asked about other song analyses that were cut for reasons of space from my book The Monkees, Head and the 60s. There are lots, enough for another book almost. I’ve chosen one which shines a light on another Davy Jones tune, ‘Hard To Believe’, recorded for Pisces Aquarius Capricorn and Jones Ltd in late summer 1967 and which proved the opener for side two of the vinyl LP. It’s the least famous of the three ‘Believe’ songs of the original Monkees era (Peter said ‘I Believe You’ on Justus, of course) but it also seems unjustly obscure in their catalogue overall. So here are some thoughts on it. By my standards it’s a short piece (that may very well be a good thing) but I hope it is interesting and that it sends you back to the song.

Who were the musicians in The Monkees again? Oh yes, that’s right, Michael and Peter. The curious fact is that Peter is seriously under-represented in numbers of tunes he had on their albums; Micky and Davy equal him in the number of credits for ‘real’ songs. ‘Hard To Believe’ was a co-write between Jones, Eddie Brick and Kim Capli, vocalist and drummer respectively of The Sundowners, who had provided back-up for The Monkees on the summer ’67 US tour. Capli certainly took charge of the process, effectively recording and performing the entire track himself, a la primetime Prince or Stevie Wonder, being credited with  bass, claves, cowbell, drums, guitar, percussion, piano, and shaker. In fact everything but the lead vocal, strings and the sublime, summertime brass. In this it was the first Monkees track to be built up in this modern-feeling way – part by part, slowly assembled instead of striving for take after take as an ensemble. In this it signalled that once again the methodology was changing, this time aided and abetted by the new 8 Track recording technology at RCA that Capli was clearly delighted to get his hands on. Chip Douglas told me that he had mixed feelings about this but, as effectively an employee of the Monkee project he was not really in a position to object – ‘I really wanted them to build on the way we had done Headquarters and consolidate the group identity, not relying on outside input, so everything you heard was Davy, Mike, Micky and Peter. And me sometimes of course! But they seemed to lose interest in that idea, and wanted to reach out, which I also understood. But I felt they missed a chance there, and I wished they’d gone that way a bit more.’ (Chip Douglas to Peter Mills, July 2015)

The album is certainly different from the garage band sound of Headquarters, but is still in my view a real highlight, it has a flow and sophistication which speaks of the collaborations as well as their own fluent, buoyant confidence as world best sellers. Capli and Brick didn’t splash too much on their Monkee connection though, that was left to bass player and notional head Sundowner Bobby Dick who contributed a number of articles to teen magazines in the aftermath of the tour – instead Capli in particular enjoyed the access to top of the line studio time it gave him, and with this song crafted a superior slice of lounge lizard soul. Chip Douglas has a point though – it was this kind of connection with other musicians who may actually have been closer musically to the individual members than they were to each other, therein being the difficulty. It was the first song Davy had written that did not involve the other four and was not a one-off- in the period following Pisces, up to The Birds The Bees and The Monkees he wrote a bundle of tunes, some good, some shaky, but all the products of verve and hard work – ‘Dream World’, ‘The Poster’, ‘I’m Gonna Try’ and notably ‘Changes’ (a possible try-out to pen the theme song for their movie under its working title) and – look – a protest song of sorts, ‘War Games’. This represents quite a run of work, and indicative of the ‘Broadway Rock’ that he wanted to pursue under the auspices of the Monkee brand, that he detailed on the Hy Lyt interview in support of Head. Indeed perhaps the best ‘Broadway Rock’ number he sang as a Monkee was Harry Nilsson’s ‘Daddy’s Song’ for that movie. Anyway let’s hear ‘Hard To Believe’ and its smooth Latin-Soul shuffle.

Back in the summer of ’67, where all things must have seemed possible, this neat and precisely constructed little musical parfait was smooth and shimmery, concealing a nutty kernel in the form of the lyric, telling a story of possible betrayal – ‘I try not to hear the things you say about me’ – in balance with the chance of redemption for a love – ‘And if you feel what I feel, you won’t go away’. It’s a perfectly executed little match of melody and lyric, and benefits from a tidy brass and string part dubbed on at a session on September 15th – the lounge quality connects the song to the atmospheres that the mock -intro/outro of ‘Don’t Call On Me’  tries to create. In the wheels within wheels that often surround the many people associated with The Monkees, the arranger for the strings and brass was George Tipton, later celebrated for his work with Monkee songwriter and buddy Harry Nilsson.

                Starting out with a neat little rhythm – a kind of near-Latin swing, mainly rimshots on the snare – a couple of strokes of guitar, some feathery touches of Bacharachian brass and we’re in. Davy’s vocal finds a perfect slot in this mix, steering clear of the harsh edges the power of his delivery could sometimes bring – the echoes of the Northern English music hall – and instead moving from gentle to pleading to philosophical to soulful across the verses. The mood of the song itself is his; and as such represents the first stages of the third phase of Monkee music, that is, effectively four different inputs onto one album. Remember this tune is followed by the band’s first ‘full-on’ country-rock track ‘What Am I Doin’ Hangin’ Round’ and shares a side with the pop perfection of ‘Pleasant Valley Sunday’ and the moogy-future overload of ‘Star Collector’ and the sound action painting effects on ‘Daily Nightly’. To drop the needle at the start of side two and catch the nifty little rimshots which lead into this track and follow it through to Micky’s fading ‘bye bye, bye bye, bye bye’ at the side’s end is quite the trip, musically speaking. So a nice stretch in the sun, which this tune feels like to me, is a good way to begin.

It’s the story of a love affair gone wrong  – so far, so teenage’d – but it also has some darker more adult shadows flitting across it and as such the breeziness of the music and the ambiguities of the lyric are an intriguing match. They move from hurtful gossip –  ‘I try not to hear the things you say about me’ – to a final declaration, ‘I love you, I need you, I do love…you…’. Jones’ voice traverses the melody very pleasingly  – listen to how he sings the opening lines of the  third verse ‘Now you must believe that when I saw you today, Oh, I just couldn’t say…you held his hand the same way’ (1.36-1.50). There’s some of the teen idol business in the first part but this has grown into something truer on the pivotal point of that ‘Oh’ and the expressive tenderness implicit in  ‘I just couldn’t say’ and the emotional realisation of ‘you held his hand the same way’ – she’s gone. So – the loss is acknowledged in the tone and intensity of the voice here, even as the lyric provides the possibility, at least, of a happy ending ‘ But as I turn my heart still wants to say…’ and the final lines add a heartfelt quality to what could have sounded stagey but escapes that by virtue of the sophistication of the arrangement matched with the emotional range of the vocal. Jones is sometimes thought of as what my Father used to call a ‘belter’, that brassy overdriven showbiz delivery – and indeed sometimes he strayed into this territory feeling quite at home with its theatricality – but he was also an highly adept singer, sensitive to the meanings as well as the shapes of words and melodies. ‘Hard To Believe’ gives us one of his best vocal performances, in my view, to be placed alongside ‘Early Morning Blues and Green’s and the first ‘You and I’ as examples of where his voice could explore when the song suited him. And I haven’t forgotten the thrill when I heard its little Latin tempo kick in at the 2011 show in Sheffield, England. Here’s a clip from the US leg of that tour, with Micky very capably supplying those all important Latin touches. What a team they were.

The last lines on the studio original are doubled by a second vocal, and the final ‘You’ is rewarded with a high harmony of the sort favoured by Chip Douglas, and the track drops away slowly and deliberately thereafter, leaving the bass and drums to the fade and a little vocal lick ‘shoop-shoop-ahh!’ I’d always heard this voice as being Nesmith’s for some reason but Sandoval does not list him as being involved in this track in any way so perhaps not. Indeed the track did not feature any Monkee other than Davy and as such is indicative of the way things were panning out for the group. Chip Douglas told me that the circumstances under which Headquarters had been recorded six months earlier were the exception, where they were able to devote all their time to the studio, to the music, and they were between the making of the two TV series. By the summer of ’67 they were busy again, gigging, filming, planning a movie…so it was even harder to get all four of them together and work in the manner they had employed on Headquarters, even if they had wanted to. They may have felt a bit of ‘been there done that’ with the ‘four of us’ mode of working and, as anyone who has made an album will tell you, it’s hard work and there are often long periods where little seems to be happening – it can be boring.

So they didn’t have the time, nor the collective will to make another album like that, although Pisces does have all four of them on plenty of the tracks. This was something Chip Douglas wanted to ensure happened, to guard against what eventually came to pass, that they would just work separately and then pitch their tunes for inclusion on a Monkee album. So the centre, eventually, could not hold – but while it did, the albums yielded a rich mix of musical styles and forceful , familiar personalities. The sleeve of Pisces showed it best – a front image by Bernard Yezsin of the four Monkees, their facial features blank, standing in a field of flowers with the group’s guitar logo half-buried. The drawing was based on a photo of the group Yezsin had taken. The back cover shots were by Henry Diltz, friend and musical collaborator of Chip Douglas; Diltz became the default chronicler of the Californian rock scene of the late 60’s and early 70’s. His black and white shots for Pisces show the Monkees together, but separate.

And who is playing guitar? Peter, of course, but look – Davy. Hard to believe? Maybe. But true.

Another in the occasional series of pieces which didn’t make it to my book The Monkees, ‘Head’ and the 60s, a volume which Michael Nesmith, Bob Rafelson and Jack Nicholson all praised to my face. Did I mention that before, somewhere? Might have done. This close look at ‘Someday Man’ and its unjust obscurity was originally part of the chapter ‘Listen To The Band: the Music of The Monkees’, in the section focussing on Davy Jones’ contributions to the songbook.

I’ve also included a bonus doodle, on ‘Someday Man”s session-mate, Goffin and King’s ‘A Man Without A Dream’. The other absentee from the Davy section is ‘Hard To Believe’, which I might post if folk are interested. Anyway, I hope there is something of interest in here for you.

By the time ‘Someday Man’ was issued as a stand-alone single in 1969 – April for the US, June for the UK –  the vertiginous drop in the band’s popularity was there for all to see. Peter Tork had quit after the dismal TV special and the commercial belly flop of Head – not because of these failures, but just because it was time. Unlike similar walk-outs on comparable successes,  where the bands were still maintaining sales and popularity – Brian Jones, Paul McCartney – Tork’s departure coincided with decline, but was coincidental with rather than a response to the band’s falling stock. The remaining three, bound together by both a loyalty forged in their unprecedented shared experience and contractual obligation, ploughed on. Looking at it from here we see the writing scrawled unmistakably on all four walls but back then a positive spin was put on the situation, especially by Nesmith. In some ways Tork’s departure  tipped the balance of power within the group,  and Nesmith  was now the undisputed musical  ‘boss’; determinedly viewing the role of a Monkee as what it was – something he’d signed up for, rather than something with deep roots of the sort engendered when a band starts from nothing and achieves success – he saw the chance to develop his own musical interests and span it as the three of them following their own musical paths under the ‘umbrella’ of The Monkees, with all the access to resources and promotion that the brand name brought. In fairness, this would probably have happened anyway as the quartet grew into themselves and the project that  became The Monkees Present had originally been mooted as a double album, with each Monkee having a side to themselves. Four aspects of the same thing, or a recipe for a break-up?  It depends.  Pink Floyd did something similar with Ummagumma  which emerged in the same month as The Monkees Present  (October 1969) so clearly the idea of the many-in-one was in harmony with the zeitgeist, even if it spoke of some internal disharmony.

In 1968, while still a quartet, Nesmith had told the venerable English music weekly the Melody Maker that

“We are going to try and abandon our collective identity. We are not represented by one idea. By a pattern of record releases and exposure, we will be able to make the transition from the collective identity. Each of us will be able to spring out to do what we want within the context of the group” (‘The New Monkees’  Alan Walsh, Melody Maker, 1 June 1968)

In this we see a grand design, an order of planning that is not untypical of him – sometimes he has been able to make the plan come to fruition, sometimes not, but the ideas are always there, expressed in this free-flowing, professorial manner and they are usually Big.

Around the same time, Micky had also spoken to the same paper, telling Alan Walsh that:

“The Monkees are four individuals. We’ve never socialised too much together, and in the future we’ll be going in our different directions — but still as the Monkees.

We’ve always been individuals and the best example of this will be seen in our next album. Each track is produced separately by one of us and, naturally, our particular musical preferences and scenes emerge strongly.”

But where are the Monkees at, musically?

Micky explained: “Well, Mike is into orchestras, big bands and things. Peter is involved in hard rock and psychedelic music. Davy is back with the Broadway show things that I like, too. Myself? I’m very interested in electronic music and electronics generally.” (MM 1/6/68)

The album he refers to may well be the projected project which became Present  over a year later, with the symmetry of the quartet reduced to a EP-sized four tracks, being a third of an album each. We never got to hear a full exposition of Peter’s ‘hard rock and psychedelic music’, the only examples we have are his two scorching tracks on the soundtrack for Head . Of the remaining trio, only Davy’s nominated style could be said to have made it onto Present or Instant Replay;  Nesmith’s contributions are effectively blueprints for his country-rock direction post-Monkees  and Micky’s are series of one-offs all of which showcase the skill, depth  and range of his voice but do not conform to a recognisable style of genre. That’s good, but doesn’t allow for a stylistic musical focus to develop in the way it did with Nesmith,  although it is equally faithful to the notion of Micky doing what he wanted ‘within the context of the group’.

Scrolling forward to February of 1969 the quick release of  Instant Replay  saw the Monkee project trying to recover  from the multiple blows landed in the last three months of 1968- the cancellation of the TV show, the failure of movie and the TV special, the decline in record sales, Peter’s exit. Part of this was addressed b y the fabulously rich-colours of the LasVegas photo shoot by Henry Diltz in which the trio look tremendously at ease with the new situation, and also shots where they pose with the evidence of their success, gold discs and all, just to remind everyone who they still were. This found a musical correspondence with an ill-advised choice of single. In a piece of pre-Rhino archival work,  a foundling from 1966 called ‘Tear Drop City’ was resurrected and issued in February 1969- it is in Monkee terms a pre-revolutionary artefact, an early  track recorded across sessions in October and November 1966 featuring the Candy Store Prophets, written and produced by Boyce and Hart.

One can see the business logic ; backpedalling furiously from the untenable commercial cul-de-sac they found themselves in, Columbia and Screen Gems will have encouraged an upfront return to the sound and style that first made them such a hit. Explicitly so in this case as ‘Tear Drop City’ is less of a kissing cousin and more of a Siamese twin of ‘Last Train To Clarksville’, right down to the Louie Shelton riff and chugging rhythm. It is certainly a good if workmanlike example of the early style and one which no amount of studio time in early ’69 could have replicated, six months on from the elegiac  chorale of ‘Porpoise Song’. When I first picked up a copy of Instant Replay in around 1977 (thank you Gerol’s Records, Merrion Centre, Leeds once more) I was amazed to hear this track and how faithfully it recreated (as I then thought) the original sound of the band – the album sleeve gave none of the historical recording information we find on the reissues so I just took it to be an effort to recapture that early style. Likewise I had no notion of where the album stood in their career, how well or not it had sold or of  anything at all. I just had the music. If the exhumation of a rejected tune or two from the golden era showed a little twinge of boat-steadying panic, the rest of the album did indeed speak more truthfully about the state of play at the time, with a mixture of Broadway Rock, Country Rock and Dolenz One-Offs.

In amongst this ball of confusion Davy Jones finally managed to persuade Screen Gems to allow him to record a song they did not own. This in itself can be read as evidence of a loosening grip on the project by the studios driven by the realisation that the heat was going out of the project, a long-ish goodbye which let ultimately to the almost unnoticed sputtering out of the early 70’s. That’s as may be but it allowed Jones to bring in a song by a young singer-songwriter Paul Williams. He already had a track record, having auditioned for The Monkees back in ’65 and been writing songs on the scene alongside writing music for TV and advertising campaigns. He wrote with Biff Rose and they came up with ‘Fill Your Heart’ which you will find at track one, side two of  your copies of David Bowie’s Hunky Dory  and later had huge success with Roger Nichols on hits for The Carpenters (‘Rainy Days and Mondays’, ‘We’ve Only Just Begun’ which started life as a song in a banking commercial) and Three Dog Night (‘Out In The Country’, ‘An Old Fashioned Love Song’). Three Dog Night are another group with a Monkee connection having been given their name in 1968 by June Fairchild, the transcendental beauty from Head who was dating the band’s Danny Hutton at the time. In some ways Williams’ songs were the soundtrack of early 70’s America, taking up the mantle of Jim Webb and  occupying the space between the death of the 60’s dream and the arrival of the Californian Cowboys.

He started out, however, as do we all, with hopes and energy which he put into circulating demos of his material, including the then unusual step of privately pressing up two albums of songs he had written with his friend Roger Nichols and distributing them as he could. The second of these contained a song called ‘Someday Man’. Davy Jones said that he loved Williams’ work from the first hearing and we can believe it – well structured songs, strong lyrics, ready-mades in effect –  but it was not until he proposed ‘Someday Man’ as a Monkee track that the connection became live. Here was a song which fitted well with Jones’ own interests and strengths, had all the components of a hit in the pop scene of 1969 – a real find. The first hurdle to clamber over was that, as Bill Martin discovered in the case of his ‘All Of Your Toys’ back in early 1967, the watertight contracts which locked in outright ownership of everything Monkee to Coilumbia and Screen Gems meant that only songs published (that is owned) by Screen Gems would be issued under the band’s name, ensuring all possible monetisation from a song or anything associated with the group would stay in-house.

As noted, perhaps the unmissable decline in the group’s commercial fortunes forced something of a rethink and permission was granted to Jones to go ahead and record the song which was published by Irving Music, associated with A&M, the hip easy listening label of the period owned by Herb Alpert and Jerry Moss, where Williams’ sound found its natural home. In 1970 however his debut ‘legit’ album Someday Man was released on the Reprise label which, despite being Frank Sinatra’s own imprint, was and remains synonymous with a tougher brand of singer-songwriter than Williams is perceived to be.

Regardless it is arguable that Jones recording Williams’ tune did him a great favour and him titling his album after the song shows it was to some extent his calling card at this time. It did The Monkees and their fans a favour too, giving us a late career highlight albeit one which drifted by almost unnoticed at the time, reaching only the lower reaches of the pop charts in the US and UK. My battered UK RCA copy of it – 15 pence, Project Records, 1977 – had clearly been well-loved though, as had its b-side, Nesmith’s ‘Listen To The Band’.  From the perspective of 2016 that is a heck of a double-header; the day I bought the single they were two tracks I’d never even heard of, let alone gone looking for.

Let’s listen to Paul Williams’ recording of the song on the above album.

Davy reminisced about how he came to record ‘Someday Man’:

“I went to Screen Gems many,many  times with Paul Williams tunes…but they felt they were too sophisticated. This one was all right. They accepted that. It was a bit complicated for the Monkees at the time. Unfortunately it never even got a showing. I thought Bones Howe was  a bit busy. I felt they were all a bit busy. Carole King telling us how to sing it. Bones busy throwing too much in there. ‘My budgets are usually this much, so I must keep them up there.’ The Monkees were a garage band and we needed the basic instruments – the rest was personality’.

Whether you could actually ‘do’ Paul Williams without the faintly smothering squabs of arrangement cuddling up to the tune is debatable – like Jimmy Webb the arrangement can sometimes seem the key component – but Jones makes a good point about everyone being ‘busy’ around the band’s music, sometimes over-arranging, over-egging the pudding. Yet this is part of the price they had to pay for drifting away from the ‘garage band’ they became on Headquarters – outside of that guitar bass and drum lie the territories of the ‘busy’ arranger. Dayton Burr “Bones” Howe, mentioned here by Jones, had come to the band off the back of great success with The Fifth Dimension where he had balanced their richly stacked vocals with a keenly soulful  edge, just avoiding over-production with flat-out groovy takes on Laura Nyro’s ‘Stoned Soul Picnic’ and ‘Wedding Bell Blues’ and Ashford and Simpson’s ‘California Soul’ which, in a version by Marlena Shaw, became a huge tune in the UK Northern Soul scene. Promising much, he could have proved as influential on a new Monkees sound as did Boyce and Hart and Chip Douglas before him. As it turned out he only produced two studio cuts  for the group, both featuring Jones as the only Monkee to make a contribution; one was ‘Someday Man’ and the other Goffin and King’s ‘A Man Without A Dream’. These tracks were originally recorded  in an afternoon on November the 7^th  1968, the day after the New York premiere of Head and is a full-on return of the Wrecking Crew to Monkee duties, featuring Tedesco, Blaine and Knechtel to name but three. No Monkees in the house as they were all in Manhattan, starting to absorb  the hail of indifference and scorn which greeted Head.

Bones Howe recalled how he and the song arrived at the session:

All the Monkees were making records on their own and Screen Gems were looking fro somebody to produce Davy. So I did those two tracks with him, ‘Man Without A Dream’ and ‘Someday Man’…Paul Williams and I were friends going back for a long time…I played it for Davy and he liked it. We were able to convince Colgems that we could do an outside song…I kept saying to them ‘Find me another song that’ll knock this one out of the box’. And no-one could find a song that everybody liked better’. (Sandoval p.212)

Using the indisputable logic that a good song is a good song, and willing to allow some rule-bending in the hope of revitalising a sagging franchise, the suits at Colgems acquiesced and the session went ahead. Nearly forty takes of ‘Someday Man’ squeezed into an afternoon session resulted in a composite version, matching best take to best take via some judicious editing and dropping-in. We’ve come full circle from the debut album, but the resulting track has a warmth and brightness which adds to its inherent appeal. As Jones inferred, it is a little overdone but I’d argue that Williams is a writer whose work lends itself to this curious of mixture of directness and complexity – one only reflect upon the towering confections created by Richard Carpenter around Williams’ songs to see that –  and ‘Someday Man’ is a good example of this. It is smooth, slipping down like a Brandy Alexander, but is also indeed verging on what Jones called ‘busy’. 

The track is like a compact composite in itself – how do these parts fit together? When I first heard it I wondered how all these parts could be part of the same song.  I like this in a songwriter’s craft and it is often the sign of a cup overflowing with ideas and is exciting to listen to – keep up or you’ll miss it! – the most obvious example being Brian Wilson and his pocket symphonies like ‘Good Vibrations’ and ‘Heroes and Villains’, or Paul McCartney’s fabulous ‘Back Seat Of My Car’ or the better known ‘Band On The Run’, all of which assume several different shapes within their overall structure. Jimmy Webb did it too – think only of ‘Macarthur Park’. Pop is generally modal and structured fairly straightforwardly so songs which undertake a winding and surprising path, and do it well and with good reason are to be cherished.

Opening on a rising bassline – among the busier participants in the track overall –and a brisk proto-disco hi-hat, the song is joined by a rather airy and gorgeous brass arrangement courtesy of Bill Holman calling down French Horn, trumpet and trombone. Davy’s vocal is a little muffled, probably due to the saturation of sound on the tape and the multiple bounce-downs required to accommodate everything, but is plenty clear enough to hear that he likes the song and is responsive to its internal dynamics, from the skipping , almost staccato topline of the verse and then into the tempo-shifted,  razzamatazz’ing chorus, highkicking its way into view.  Davy’s vocal takes its cue from the Williams demo, pitched and delivered with the same speed and space – the demo was undoubtedly constructed and performed to appeal to him or someone like him. Williams’ own version , which provided the title of his major label debut in 1970, is pitched lower and produced with an emphasis on a steadier backbeat and carefully stacked background vocals – again in this we can see why his songs appealed so much to Richard Carpenter.

The early backing track take included on the Instant Replay box set uncovers the rather gorgeous piano part buried on the final single; it installs the ‘one-two- threefourfive’ rhythm  which is the secret centre of the song. This is clear on the Williams demo, leading off with the piano part but lost in the detail of Howes’ production – on the box set we hear it anew like the details suddenly visible on a restored painting.

The song has three main sections – so far, so verse, chorus, bridge – but it feels more intricate than that conventional pop structure suggests because the changes involve shifts in tempo and musical texture as well as chordal or harmonic switches. We can say the first section runs from the opening to around 0.28, where the little step up to the chorus is cued but, very cleverly, not delivered – the vocal changes and prepares the song (and the listener) for a change before it comes. It’s like a little airlock in the song’s structure, facilitating passage from one section of the piece to another. A mounting pulse on the snare allows the chorus in , beginning with the line ‘I was born a someday man’. In this chorus we have a new beat, a whole other rhythm, stepping into the ease of that high-kicking swing as opposed to the busy-bee energy of the verse and its rhythmic patterns. Just when we think that’s it, yet another section hoves into view;  the  ‘Tomorrow’s a new day’ baby’ functions as a kind of bridge back to the intro and verse part but is so much more than that – the piano steps forward giving the rhythm yet another shape, echoing and illustrating the optimistic urgency of the lyric.

A key element of Howes’ arrangement is the fuzztone guitar stroke which keeps the beat throughout which is best heard early, first every four beats and then when it breaks into double-time at 0.12 and thereafter repeating under Jones’s vocal every two seconds, marking the time musically and figuratively, for at the verse’s end the lyric asserts it ‘has all the time in the world’. A nice touch, particularly because the song’s overarching subject is time, and how much we have of it at our disposal – it is waiting for the future, waiting for tomorrow, for the ‘Someday’ on which things begin. Occupying a kind of benign purgatorio, the song is about coming into being but not quite, for  when you are waiting to begin, all is possible – ‘tomorrow’s a new day baby, anything can happen, anything can happen at all’ The on-beat handclaps in the bridge add to that urgency and forward momentum. Appropriately for a song written by  a man who would deliver great success to A & M, the horn arrangement speaks of Herb Alpert, bright and sure but also sensuously muted  and smooth. It also strikes me as the kind of song Jones could have built a solo career on had The Monkees got out earlier and not allowed their reputation to sink to the level it did by the time of  Changes and ‘Do It In the Name Of Love’, the Monkee single that dare not speak its name. As Jones often lamented , being an ex-Monkee was more of an impediment than an advantage in the early 1970’s, when precisely this kind of music was dominating the hit parade. In connection with this, ‘Jesamine’ hitmakers The Casuals had the nerve to compete with the previously invulnerable Monkees by recording and releasing their own (and not too soundalikey) version in 1969.

Lest we forget, ‘Someday Man’ was never included on a contemporary Monkees album so unlike its b-side ‘Listen To The Band’ was never caught on the (apparently) more secure format of the long-playing record, as opposed to those flashy, mercurial 45s. This is partly due to Williams’ success in the ‘hip easy listening’ era of the early 70s and also to the way the reputation of The Monkees’ music has grown in the decades since the song was recorded. The reissues programme via Rhino and the multiple box sets have appended the song to Instant Replay for the most part, or it has stood alone on the more ambitious Best Of sets. It was also included in what still seems to me the ultimate fan-pleasing setlist for the 2011 reunion tour. Davy introduces it here with a bit of classic self-deprecation, calling the diminutive Williams ‘the only guy I could look straight in the eye’. I saw this show in dear old Sheffield (the city which hosted First National Band gigs in 1970) and was ecstatic to see and hear Davy Micky and Peter doing the right thing by their back catalogue; this was one of many Songs I Never Thought I’d Hear Sung Live By The Monkees in that set. A few years ahead of Dua Lipa, I was levitating.

Speaking of musical as well as calendar time, the sheet music of this song, seen at the head of this piece, suggests  ‘Moderately’ as its tempo and so it is, but it is a restless moderation. A shot from the Henry Diltz Vegas portfolio was used as the front cover image of this song’s sheet music and the song has something of that new beginning optimism about it; it feels eager to get started and the quick shifts in tempo only add to that sense of possibility – tomorrow’s a new day baby, anything can happen, anything can happen at all.

Bonus

The hidden twin planet to ‘Someday Man’  is ‘A Man Without A Dream’, the Goffin and King composition which made it, unlike the Paul Williams song , onto Instant Replay. It follows another mid-paced Brill tune, Neil Sedaka and Carol Bayer’s ‘The Girl I Left Behind Me’. Unlike Goffin and King,  Bayer and Sedaka had not had songs of the quartet of albums intervening between More Of The Monkees and Instant Replay and, well-made as it is,  the presence of their tune here is further proof that the experiment was over. ‘A Man Without A Dream’ precedes Micky Dolenz’s own mini-opera ‘Shorty Blackwell’, about which he has seemed somewhat embarrassed when asked for his views , calling it ‘incredibly self-indulgent’. Maybe, but it is evidence of freedom, which is what they fought for and gained, it is not untypical of its time and is also  actually quite good, in my view. So the Goffin and King song sits symbolically between the well-crafted if unexciting Brill Building tune and the singular audacity of a home-grown freak-suite. It manages to link the two tolerably well in the running order, being a piece of elevated MOR, nowhere as charming as ‘Someday Man’ but using the same basic ingredients. Here is a quite different and rather soulful early take, showing a classic pop root, before the arrangement got busy.

Davy’s remark about ‘Carole King telling us how to sing it’ no doubt refers to her attempted input into the recording . Goffin and King had songs on five of the nine original Monkee albums and as such will have felt proprietorial toward them and how the songs were handled – recall Chip Douglas’s tale of King being annoyed by some perceived slight via rearrangement or lyric change on ‘Pleasant Valley Sunday’ – and this song is much more in the vein of the first two albums than those which followed it. Jones liked the song and the singing of it, commenting that Howe’s chief virtue in his eyes was that ‘The producers normally had me singing high up all the time. Finally I’m in the range I should be singing in. I’m a baritone’. (IR booklet) . Here’s a gorgeous early vocal take that suggest a different kind of song.

The low number of takes needed to get a satisfactory vocal (four) would seem to suggest Jones did indeed take naturally to this tune. I’m not sure I agree that it shows his voice at its best  though, preferring as I do his pop-soul voice to his musical theatre voice, but one can feel the ease with which he sinks into the song., and Howe’s arrangement owes something to that superior  brand of MOR soul that carried much weight in the late 60’s, not least through his own work with the 5^th Dimension. The lyric is a well-articulated explanation of emotional ruin, specifically detailing the unhappy state; in this it is the reverse of the as yet unclarified optimism which courses through ‘Someday Man’, with its eye on tomorrow rather than the bad breaks of yesterday. So here is the finished article, all tux’d up.

So the two tunes we have looked at here make quite a logical pair. Bones Howe’s arrangement of Goffin and King’s tune is stately, allowing more space for the voice to explore the tonal moments, and the brass is once again very well charted by Bill Holman doing no more and no less than the song needs from them. It’s clear why ‘Someday Man’ was preferred as a single but even in its ornamental state, ‘A Man Without A Dream’ is the former song’s reality check, the comedown after the fizzing brightness.

This is one of my occasional posts of material left on the cutting room floor of my 2016 book The Monkees, Head and the 60’s. If you like it, check out my book here http://jawbonepress.com/the-monkees-head-and-the-60s/

What’s the connection between Mose Allison, Breaking Bad and The Monkees? We’ll get to the TV show but Allison was (and remains) like The Monkees in being an exception as well as an example in his particular field. He was a white man playing jazz piano,  effectively inventing a way of singing which has proved hugely influential in jazz, a kind of adaptation of the sound of a horn put through the human voice. Georgie Fame is the UK’s most famous Allison acolyte, and demonstrates the technique as he takes half the leads on the 1995 album he made with Van Morrison of Allison’s songs, Tell Me Something. A song which isn’t on that album but which is one of his most famous is – in the jazz tradition – an adaptation of someone else’s tune.

‘Parchman Farm’ began life as a blues written and sung by Booker T. Washington (aka Bukka White) as an autobiographical sketch – from 1937 Washington had served time in a  state penitentiary in Sunflower County, Mississippi called Parchman Farm for shooting a man in the leg in 1937.  His crimes were lesser than those of Huddie Ledbetter but like Leadbelly he was recorded by John Lomax for the Library of Congress in 1939 and he was released the following year.  Lomax’s magic touch when it came to securing the early release of his favoured blues singers from jail seems also to have worked in Washington’s favour and he was freed in early 1940.  A session in Chicago directly after his emancipation modernised his Delta Blues sound, and caught ths version of the song.

However, it wasn’t until the revival of interest in the early folk-blues recordings amongst the Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan generation that his songs began to be sung and heard by a wider, whiter audience. Dylan famously recorded his ‘Fixin’ To Die Blues’ for his 1962 debut album, a good five years after Mose Allison’s adaptation of his ‘Parchman Farm Blues’ had introduced the tune to the bloodstream of  white American music. It emerged on his 1957 album Local Color,  a sophomore effort following his dazzling debut of the same year, Back Country Suite. There’s no brass on ‘Parchman Farm’ but Allison is credited with piano, trumpet and vocal for this album and that’s a clue – the easy, highly musical flow of his singing style resembles the cascade of notes from a trumpet and in this regard he’s not unlike Chet Baker who made a similar connection between his horn playing and his vocalising. This new way of singing came from and still belongs to jazz – it may well better suit scat, from which it is partly derived, but when there’s a great lyric it lends a song a fluvial impetus which is hard to resist.

Bukka White’s 1940 recording is a tight little country blues which showcases his rough-edged baritone bleat. It’s powerful and a real palate-cleanser. It’s also  quite unlike the Allison adaptation, even more so than the difference between that version and the Monkees’ work on the theme.  So ‘Goin’ Down’ is just the next stage of music being handed from player to player, from age to age. White himself has been sampled by a number of hip hop and electronica acts. The circle remains unbroken. Whoever it was who suggested that the song was sufficiently unalike its apparent source for it to exist in its own right was correct – for example, Allison’s skipping piano triplet leads his 1957 vocal take, and there is actually no keyboard at all on ‘Goin Down’ (although, prior to writing this, I’d have sworn there was a mighty Hammond organ pumping away in the mix there somewhere – strange but true). Typically for jazz the voice sits in the arrangement as another texture, another element, the formal verse structures a lyric delivers simply a structure on which to drape the music.

When the song breaks down into a half-speed blues piano lament towards the close we think it’s going to end that way, but it provides a platform for the final bleak gag of the song ironically sung brightly over a final restatement of the nimble little piano riff: that last line is  ‘I’ll be sitting here the rest of my life/ And all I did was shoot my wife’.  For some reason that final twist reminds me of the last scene of Head – it’s a similar technique- take them to the edge of a resolution and then show them that the truth is something different. In truth when heard side by side, all the songs truly share is a spirit of openness and the use of an, insistent, busy little riff that serves all around it.

Just in case we are unclear about this song’s potency, here’s a clip from a BBC documentary which focusses in on the significance of ‘Parchman Farm’ for the musical peer group of The Monkees, including Georgie Fame and Pete Townsend.

Peter Tork will likely have learned the song from Allison’s Local Color and when the liberty of the studio sessions which produced Headquarters and Pisces Aquarius arrived they could explore any musical avenue that suited them, trying them out and trying them on for size. You only have to listen to the musical variety of the latter for proof of that. Chip Douglas told me that he recalled the idea to start playing around with ‘Parchman Farm’ came from Peter at a session in June ’67, no doubt because it’s a tough sounding, infectious little riff to play with, that sits up and begs for reinterpretation, to be remade as something new. Here’s an occasion where the newborn nature of The Monkees as a music making unit definitely worked in their favour – they took an idea and ran with it – and the groove that is ‘Goin’ Down’ developed from a jam at the ‘She Hangs Out’ session. At first just a funky little instrumental thing, with Tork and Nesmith on electric guitars, and the rhythm section of buddies Eddie Hoh on drums and Chip Douglas on bass. As is often the way when a little musical phrase is borrowed it is also developed – and this is why jamming between musicians around a riff you like is always better than sampling – and by the end they had decided that it didn’t really sound so much like ‘Parchman Farm’ any more, so why not make it one of their own?

Diane Hilderbrand, who had already contributed to their catalogue notably by the stunning small-hours impressionism of ‘Early Morning Blues and Greens’ on Headquarters was sent the tapes and invited to come up with a lyric. So the tune has a five-person credit, tying it for ‘longest list’  with ‘No Time’, with which it shares some headlong energy yet in both cases the tunes never quite tip into simple speed – there’s control there, via the arrangement and the playing, and that’s what makes the variations in pace so satisfying.

The speed and ease of Hildebrand’s contribution only emphasises that ‘Goin’ Down’ was a genuinely spontaneous creation in the studio, the kind of thing that can only happen when people are getting into playing with each other as a unit. In a wider ranging interview for my book The Monkees Head and the 60’s Chip Douglas described Lester Sill to me as ‘initially there to make sure things didn’t get too far out but ended up contributing plenty to the songs.  Bless him, he was always right!’, and it was indeed Sill who suggested they work on the jam and draw a Monkees original out of it, securing Dolenz for the vocal and suggesting horns – unlike the TV show version of ‘She Hangs Out’ there are horns on the Pisces version arranged by Shorty Rogers and it was he who sorted the brass for ‘Goin’ Down’, which was added to the basic track nearly three months later  in mid September ’67.

There are a dozen players on there, some but not all also to be heard in more restrained mood on ‘Hard To Believe’, which received its dose of horns at the same session on the 15th of the month. LA jazz notables all, they were no doubt glad of the pop money the session provided but they blast the roof offa the sucker, notably the unidentified trumpet player who soars high over the closing sections, really giving Dolenz a satellite to bounce his vocal off. It’s an amazing sound, and the last thing one would expect to find on the b-side of ‘Daydream Believer’ – it must have been a turn off for many, but a musical education for plenty more.

‘Goin’ Down’, as you can hear above on the original 45, is in every sense a blast. Musically, rhythmically, lyrically. You can hear the freedom in the way it just goes and goes – more than once you think it must be through as the horns and drums reach a great tumult but then they settle back and the funky little guitar lick surfaces once more, propelling the tune along, and back comes Micky. Unlike ‘Parchman Farm’ this song is packed with words. Diane Hilderbrand’s lyric is a corker – in its literal sense it starts off as the story of a failed suicide but I see it more as an exploration of the possibilities of matching language to rhythm – the flow of the lyric as sung by Dolenz is concomitant with the flow of the music and both are perfectly matched to the theme of being carried downstream. Not in the ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ sense though because the character in this song is wide awake and, possibly for the first time in years, his mind is switched to full on. The starting point for the idea of ‘goin’ down’ is the jump into the river by the rejected lover, and what she will feel when she finds out what has happened:

‘And I bet she will regret it
When they find me in the morning
Wet and drowned
And the word gets ’round…
Goin’ down’

Yet the first word of the verse is ‘floatin’, as aopposed to  ‘drownin’ or even ‘sinkin’ – the buoyancy of the man and his saturated liver is reflected in the flow and forward motion of the music and the endless strem of words, keeping him from sinking into the silence of the waters.  The song is upholstered with dark humour –  when he does go under, he’s back pretty quick :

Comin’ up for air
It’s pretty stuffy under there
I’d like to say I didn’t care
But I forgot to leave a note

The narrator’s mood goes from desperate to struggling to survive to relaxed and finally resolved to dive back into life and live it more fully. So in that sense it’s almost like a little morality tale. But among the drama of its musical dynamics and the hitherto undisclosed evidence of Micky’s jazz singing skills you’d be forgiven for not noticing this at first.

We could read the river almost as the river of time, and the flow of the song a sketch of how you slowly recover from a moment of crisis. The subject sobers up as the song goes on in more ways than one. ‘Now the sky is getting light and everything is gonna be alright’ and there is a supernatant quality to the track. It’s all mouth music, all that blowing all those words, struggling for breath fighting for breath to keep breathing, struggling against its own form to keep going to keep afloat. When I listened to it as a kid it made me think of  suffocating – as a mild claustrophobic it’s still an uncomfortable listen at times for that very reason.

The song is ushered in – not inappropriately –  by a swiftly descending run on the bass, played by Chip Douglas, accompanied by full-fat jazz skitter on the kit by Eddie Hoh, over which Micky intro’s his vocal with a slightly self-conscious ‘Sock it to me!’ – poised midway between the simple act of singing in a certain style and more complex awareness of what it means to be singing in that same certain style. The phrase was certainly current in the 60’s, meaning ‘let me have it’ or ‘give me your best’ in personal or business contexts but also had a sexual connotation, an invitation to, well, give someone your best effort. It was also part of pop culture, travelling from jazz-speak into the mainstream via the hip talk that stetches right back to Slim Galliard, picked up for White Americans through the growing popularity of jazz in the 50’s and early 60’s and also the writings of the Beats in general and Jack Kerouac in particular.

Around the time Dolenz was recording this track Aretha Franklin’s mighty version of Otis Redding’s ‘Respect’ was a big hit and included the phrase ‘sock it to me’ as a kind of chant – showing how far it travelled it later became a worn-’til-it-was-thin catchphrase on the big TV show of the late 60’s, Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In , which was fleetingly proposed by Davy Jones as a possible model for any third series of The Monkees. Indeed almost one of the last professional obligations the Tork-less trio fulfilled was an incongruous appearance on this show on the 6th of October 1969.

Micky’s mix of musical and actorly skills serve him well in ‘Goin’ Down’ as he takes on Hildebrand’s snaking, seemingly self-generating stream of words and turns them into one of his finest vocal performances.  he gets stuck right in, using a style which is effectively scat-singing with all the rhythmically responsive twists and turns that involves, only with actual lyrics to get his mouth around. That’s the most remarkable thing ; the song contains over 600 words delivered at a speed both excitingly rapid – something is happening here, so keep up! – but also measured enough to be heard and understood as they flash by. The studio version may well be a composite of a number of takes but live he does this song straight and, as a former singer in a former band myself, I can tell you that it’s no mean feat.

The lyric maps out moments when one’s life flashes before one’s eyes : the jump (‘Floatin’ in the river with a saturated liver’), the struggle to survive overcoming the emotional upset, with instinct overpowering reason  (‘Comin’ up for air, it’s pretty stuffy under there’) the moment of reflection after the crisis has passed (‘I should have taken time to think’)  which gives way to realisation (‘And now I see the life I led, I slept it all away in bed, I should’ve learned to swim instead’) and finally resolve to make things different (‘If I could find my way to shore I’d never, never do this any more’) and even plans an escape route (‘I’m floatin’ on down to New Orleans, and pick up on some swingin’ scenes’). That mention of New Orleans is of course the musical clincher – he’s headed for the spiritual home of jazz music – that’s where this rhythmic river has led him.

The breaks between each verse help build a dramatic sense of, well, goin’ down. The verse are busy and chug along very smartly driven by guitar bass and drum but also benefit from punches of brass on each beat which both soften and toughen the rhythmic steps of the tune. On the last two lines of the first four verses ( that is, ‘drowned/round’, ‘shoes/news’, ‘shore/more’ and ‘town/brown’) the instruments drop back leaving Dolenz’s voice – surfacing to catch its breath, perhaps – accompanied by staccato punches from the ensemble before all tumble back into the rolling waters once again. As the song’s momentum builds, rising and falling toward the climax these distinctions disappear as the song’s narrator starts to feel comfortable in this environment (‘just floatin’ and lazin’ on my back’); this new sense of freedom is expressed through a more unified rhythmic structure.

The sax solos at 0.40 and 1.25 allow some breathing space and over them Dolenz intuitively scats in a more orthodox manner ‘ Hep hep, hep hep !’, the kind of rhythmic jazz-speak you’ll hear in any performance of old-time jazz. He had the vocab to hand. He’d already proved his chops at r’n’b and soul shout singing in the little James Brown skits on and around ‘Mary Mary’ in the live shows as well as some great studio performances up to this point and this humour leaven’d approach to his craft can sometimes obscure how good he was at this. The instrumental mid-section (1.25-1.40) flows straight into the lengthy fifth verse (‘I wish I looked before I leaped…’), and I love how the band pulls back for the lines where he changes his mind about what’s best for him

The song has a curious place in the band’s catalogue – it was an incongruous marketplace partner to ‘Daydream Believer’, for one. (Daydream Believer’ would get another odd bedfellow on The Birds The Bees and The Monkees of course, being pursued by the wig-flipping ‘Writing Wrongs’)

It also pops up in odd places in the TV shows, being heard in five episodes, twice as ‘romp’ music, then as one of four in the song-heavy ‘Monkees In Paris’ episode verite,  and once, in the opening moments of ‘The Monkees Paw’,  we get a brief glimpse of them ‘finishing off’ a ‘live’ version (which is simply playback) as an audition for a club owner – Micky raking the tambourine high , Peter thrumming the bass as well he might. Here’s the whole ‘Monkees in Paris’ episode, a particular favourite of mine, for its views of Paris a la 67 as much as our favourite chaps. ‘Goin Down’ comes and goes in the musical montage.

It’s impossible to write about this song without mentioning the clip of Dolenz performing the song which appeared in two episodes. As soon as you start researching the band’s story you realise how complex it is, and how quickly things happened, which can be confusing for the cultural scholar or historian trying to make sense of it all. This clip is a good example, featuring a live vocal from Dolenz over the backing track frontloaded onto the tenth episode of the second series (and number 42 in all) ‘The Wild Monkees’ and Finally, the performance clip we can find on Youtube is the track as heard on vinyl simply matched to Dolenz’s performance as seen in ‘The Wild Monkees’. Still with me? Good.

That performance clip is interesting to us in several ways – it features Dolenz only, soft-shoeing around on a darkened stage in cream trousers and a dark, high-round-necked silk shirt we might more readily expect to see Jones or Tork wearing. There is however much to see – the camera goes to town, using reproduction to split Micky into five, and gives us an early look at the solarisation that would be more fully and spectacularly realised in the opening and closing sequences of Head the following year. An almost hidden feature of the clip – certainly hard to see on our small British TV in the early 70’s, is a sax and a bass guitar, apparently ‘playing themselves’ but on closer inspection (unavailable to viewers pre- video recorder of course) they are being held and played by black clad, black-gloved musicians, a standard technique in the theatre of course but new for pop which is supposed to be all about the visibility of the musicians, as the four Monkees knew all too well.  This visual playfulness also has a high-art gloss to it, and the ‘black on black’ method was a key part  of European theatre of the age of Aquarius. There’s no effort to reveal the musicianship, yet the vocal is live live live. It’s a beguiling mixture.

‘Goin Down’ is a song which has been a beneficiary of the reappraisal of the Monkees song catalogue, providing a showcase for Micky Dolenz in concert for many years now, allowing him to demonstrate how much of that Satchmo gravy he has in his voice for real now and as such proved a highlight of 2019’s live album.

The song’s cult reputation led to it cropping up unexpectedly (especially to Micky) in the hit TV series Breaking Bad; the show made a habit of matching music incongruously to scenes and so it was with ‘Goin’ Down’ accompanying scenes of meth ‘cooking’. It featured in ‘Say My Name’,  the seventh episode of the fifth and final series, broadcast in August 2012. Micky confessed to being a ‘little torn’ about the musical use, but was clear on what he gained from it : ‘I didn’t make a penny’.

Finally an observation about Micky’s performance on this track – he could very easily been out of his depth with material like this and his success in the task is at this distance perhaps easy to underestimate – but think, could Jones, Nesmith or Tork have done this? Not for me, no. For that matter could Jagger, McCartney? Hmmm…unlikely.  Stevie Winwood, Van Morrison? Maybe. But Micky did do it and even taking into account his own modest self-appraisals, we shouldn’t gloss over a performance of this calibre.

Now the sky is gettin’ light, and everything will be all right…

In the last year or so I’ve had the chance to do some interesting little side projects for the BBC (Time Travellers for Radio 3) and for a magazine or two – one of which was writing a few small things for Record Collector magazine, a monthly which appeals to me because, well, y’know, I collect records. A couple of the ‘Vinyl Fetish’ pieces – 300 word shorts on favourite albums that need more love – didn’t get in before lockdown (and the attendant curtailment of contributions) so here they are. With a couple of my favourites that did get in !

JOHN LE MESURIER

WHAT IS GOING TO BECOME OF US ALL?

(REPRISE  K54080/RS5360  UK  1976)

‘Do you think that’s wise, Sir?’. So said Sgt Arthur Wilson, as he bore witness to another ill-advised decision by Captain George Mainwaring (pronounced Mannering) in Dad’s Army. Wilson was played with consummate ease by John Le Mesurier who, like many of the cast, enjoyed a late bloom in his already lengthy career via the show. Dad’s Army proved so popular that a stage version arrived in 1975, playing the West End and touring the UK. Le Mesurier’s solo ‘musical’ contribution was a recitation of  Manning Sherwin and Eric Maschwitz’s ‘A Nightingale Sang In Berkeley Square’. Derek Taylor – yes, that one – was involved in the recording of the show’s cast album (originally for Taylor’s employer Warners, last in print via Rhino), loved his performance, and the pair began a lifelong friendship via a shared enthusiasm for American humourist Stephen Leacock.

This led to Taylor suggesting Le Mesurier record a whole album; et voilà, What Is Going To Become Of Us All? (1976). It’s a shared endeavour with vocalist Annie Ross and pianist Alan Clare, both doyens of the British jazz scene, of which the actor was enamoured. Taylor wrote a charming sleevenote. Le Mesurier takes nine of the thirteen tracks reciting Leacock, Laurie Lee, and (naturellement) Noel Coward and Cole Porter. That Nightingale reappears too. I was crestfallen to discover that the cover of Paul Simon’s ‘So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright’ was taken by Ross and Clare – imagine John’s voice on that! – but it’s all part of a very definite civilised mood. Gently stroked late-afternoon piano, subtle orchestrations; one can almost hear the fine china tea-cups softly rattle. Add John’s laconic tones and it’s all perfectly, perfectly lovely – and probably the oddest (and certainly the most English) record ever to emerge on Reprise. Turns out it was rather wise, Sir.

COWBOYS INTERNATIONAL

THE ORIGINAL SIN

VIRGIN V 2136

Sometimes you see a band and think, they’ll make it. That’s what I thought when I saw Dire Straits and Simple Minds at our local music pub in the late 70’s; it was obvious. I was equally sure Cowboys International, who I saw several times in 1979/80, would make the breakthrough.

Signed by Virgin in the busy post-punk era, they were effectively Newcastle-born Ken Lockie and a constantly changing line-up behind him. Illustrious names passed through the ranks, such as ex-Clash drummer Terry Chimes and future Ant Marco Pirroni while PiL guitar hero Keith Levene guested. Their first single ‘Aftermath’ caused a splash and not only because of its orange vinyl; its post-punk edge and vigour crossed with an unforgettable pop melody and distinctive vocal saw them rocket out of the blocks. Virgin put plenty of their Pistolian filthy lucre into the band and The Original Sin debuted in October 1979. It was well-received, placing at number 11 in the Melody Maker end-of-year-list.

In the creative-design spirit of the age, it was issued not with a conventional jacket but in a Lucozade-orange clear plastic cover, album details visible on the inner sleeve. Every song was a winner, brilliantly blending tradition and innovation: electropop vanguard meeting flat-out great pop songwriting. Dig ‘Pointy Shoes’, ‘Wish’ and a fabulous re-record of ‘Aftermath’, which you can hear below. ‘Thrash’ became a single, and was recently – somewhat unexpectedly – lauded in print by Moby, who included it in a list of his five favourite records.

Back in late ’79, radio responded with plenty of plays, and a slot on the rejuvenated Whistle Test was secured – again, as you can see (in black and white!) below. Stardom surely beckoned. Yet it didn’t happen. Bad luck?  Right place, wrong time? If I knew the answer to such questions, I’d be living in a huge house by the sea in New South Wales, right now. Regardless, Cowboys International left this album and several 45’s  for us to enjoy. Ken Lockie made a solo album, The Impossible (1981) then seemed to just…disappear. Low-key reissues and a comeback album in 2004 (The Backwards Life Of Romeo) were welcome but I’d have loved to hear more of Mr. Lockie’s uncommon musical stylings.

VIRGINIA ASTLEY

From Gardens Where We Feel Secure

(Happy Valley/Rough Trade 1983)

I first encountered  Virginia Astley as one third of The Ravishing Beauties at The Teardrop Explodes’ ‘Club Zoo’ in Liverpool, Autumn 1981 – three girls in smocks playing instruments I’d rarely seen since the school orchestra and songs like I’d never heard. I was smitten by the smocks, but also the sound, poised between pastorale and pop.  After the group split (fellow Beauties Kate St John going on to hit records with The Dream Academy and a stellar career as writer, player and arranger, Nicky Holland to Tears For Fears and Hollywood scores) I spied Virginia Astley’s name again in 1985, browsing through albums about to be discarded by a Liverpool radio station: ‘it’s just a promo, you can have it.’  So that’s how I acquired my copy of From Gardens Where We Feel Secure, two years late, virtually unplayed, complete with 10×8 of Virginia in a chunky knit jumper and photocopied bio.

Daughter of 60’s TV theme-meister Edwin Astley, sister of producer Jon, her credentials were impeccable, but her tender, bucolic music had little in common with anything they’d created. Recorded just after the demise of The Ravishing Beauties, the album takes its title from a line in a W.H.Auden poem; it shares a conceit with XTC’s later Skylarking, tracks marking the passing hours of a summer’s day, but presents an unmistakably English classical shape, being a kind of tone poem with nine piano-led pieces of slowly sensual chamber-folk, voices heard la-la-ing on one track only. Yet it also feels pioneering in its use of ambient sound – looped analogue field recordings of creaking garden gates, birdsong, braying donkeys – linking forward to Teardrops boss Bill Drummond’s Chill Out  with The KLF. For music so relaxing , it was wide awake: very delicate but very free, unafraid of the world. Nowadays she writes poetry and takes photographs in the same spirit.

So – Vaughan Williams or The KLF?  Hard to say. This is probably a good thing, for in its quietly reflective way it defies genre altogether. What I can promise is that listening to this record will make your life better.

GARY SHEARSTON

Dingo   

(Charisma CAS 1091   LP  UK 1974)

In the Autumn of 1974 a  song called  ‘I Get A Kick Out Of You’ reached the UK Top 10. I liked the ‘My Sweet Lord’ strum, folksy fiddle and steady pop beat but most of all the voice singing the song. “Aui git  noew  keeck  frorm  sham-paiiyne”.  What sort of accent was that? Turned out the voice belonged to Gary Shearston, an Australian who, via a recommendation from John Peel, had signed to the genially freaky Charisma label. While new to the UK, Shearston was already well into his career, dubbed the ‘Aussie Dylan’ in the mid 60’s; it was ironic  that his only international hit was a cover as he wrote hundreds of songs, including those on his two Charisma albums, Dingo (1974 , home of  ‘Kick’) and The Greatest Stone On Earth (1975).

Dingo, with its startling Hipgnosis-designed sleeve featuring  Shearston staring straight back atcha, is a treasure; literate lyrics , country-rock-folk-prog  (is that a thing?) melodies, head-spinning arrangements. Check the title tune: Aussie country-rock, pedal steel tracking the heels of the wild dogs and what we’d now call a sample of the high, lonesome cry of the dingo (they can’t bark) folded in to the mix. Add the warm Outback twang of  Shearston’s voice to his sleeve note that “this album rolls along something akin to the time of the ancient bushrangers” and it’s clear that this is fearlessly Australian music.

While the supporting cast has serious pedigree –  Hugh ‘Baker Street’ Murphy produces, Jim Parker (John Betjeman, Midsomer Murders theme) arranges – it’s Shearston’s show as his strong melodic sense meets equally potent lyricism. As a kid I was amazed to hear such words in a song – wasn’t it all ‘Shang-a-Lang’?  Rather wonderfully I became a pen pal of Gary Shearston in his later years, after he helped me with my book about Van Morrison, Hymns To The Silence. We would discuss music at length via email and he modestly fielded my enthusiasm for the album thus: ‘I’m glad the old Dingo still howls on for you’. It might howl for you too; try it.

‘Going, Going, Gone’ is one of Bob Dylan’s less well known tunes. It’s on Planet Waves, his one and only studio album not to appear under the bright tangerine colours of Columbia/CBS.  It came out on Chris Blackwell’s Island label in the UK and David Geffen’s Asylum in the US, a substantial coup for both men. This oddity has created a brace of collector’s items in the process – the UK edition is coveted in by American Dylan nuts, the Asylum edition by their British cousins. This idea of the collectable item associated with pop is absolutely germane to this instalment of Pete Sounds.

Here’s a question for you: what connects David Bowie, The Jam, Pink Floyd and Abba?

My answer (there may be others…) is that they’ve all been the subject of huge, commercially successful exhibitions in long established, ‘serious’ museum spaces in the past decade. In a generation pop has gone from being seen as a wearisome fad for young people that eventually had to be grown out of to being a touchstone of national identity, a key weave in the fabric of global culture in itself. Think of the role pop played in the Opening and Closing ceremonies of the 2012 Olympic Games in London, the optimism of which now seems as remote as the stars, alas.  It’s not just in the UK that this changed assessment of the value of pop music has arisen– a few years ago I saw a great exhibition about the Belter label, the de facto label of Spanish pop in the Franco era, in Cadiz and stumbled upon a dazzling digital display on the history of Japanese pop in Tokyo in the summer of 2019.

The rise of the pop heritage industry goes back a bit of course.  Probably the earliest formalised acknowledgement of pop’s enduring cultural significance was the ‘Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’ which was established in Cleveland, Ohio in 1986, funded in part by Ahmet Ertegun, indisputably an important figure in the story of post-war pop himself. Though the organisation was founded in 1986, the actual Museum was not opened to the public until 1995. Every year since ’86 a number of acts have been ‘inducted’ into this pantheon of pop: the first inductee was Elvis Presley, the most recent Marc Bolan and T.Rex. Being selected for inclusion is characterized by the RRHOF as ‘Rock’s Highest Honor’ and the choices of inductees reflect a certain range of tastes and perceptions of ‘value’, primarily reflecting those of head of the selection panel Jann Wenner, hippie entrepreneur and founder of Rolling Stone magazine in 1967.

So far, so slick. It pleases me to report , however, that not everyone is delighted by the idea of a museum for pop being a monument to the orthodoxies of business driven good taste – for example Steve Miller used his press conference at the 2016 ceremony (where he had been inducted) to attack the whole organisation as a commercial enterprise. Check it out here.

In a similar mood, anyone who knows me or has read Pete Sounds before knows that The Monkees are going to pop up sooner or later – they are everywhere –and here they come, walkin’ down the street. It turns out that there is a substantial number of pro-Monkee agitators  lobbying for their inclusion in the RRHOF.  I don’t really care either way – their work and enduring popularity is their vindication – but it bugged Peter Tork, who told the New York Post in 2007 that:

“Wenner doesn’t care what the rules are and just operates how he sees fit. It is an abuse of power. I don’t know whether The Monkees belong in the Hall of Fame, but it’s pretty clear that we’re not in there because of a personal whim.” Tork believes Wenner doesn’t like the fact that The Monkees, who were originally cast as actors for a TV sitcom, didn’t play their own instruments on their first two records. “Jann seems to have taken it harder than everyone else, and now, 40 years later, everybody says, ‘What’s the big deal? Everybody else does it.’ Nobody cares now except him. He feels his moral judgment in 1967 and 1968 is supposed to serve in 2007.”

Michael Nesmith commented on the debate in 2012 via his Videoranch Facebook page, and was more sanguine:

“I can see the HOF (Hall of Fame) is a private enterprise. It seems to operate as a business, and the inductees are there by some action of the owners of the Enterprise. The inductees appear to be chosen at the owner’s pleasure. This seems proper to me. It is their business in any case. It does not seem to me that the HOF carries a public mandate, nor should it be compelled to conform to one”.

Nesmith and Tork  were very different people, of course, and Michael was financially stable and ‘career secure’ in a way that Peter was not but both make essentially the same point – it was up to Wenner.

That notion of ‘gatekeeping’ is key to the sense of who is understood as ‘important’ to a received version of a history. Sometimes popular culture can force a change upon these accepted narratives of value – this is seen clearly in the example of Hidden Figures (2016), a film shining a light on a group of actual ‘hidden figures’, in the movie’s depiction of the black women scientists and mathematicians who contributed to the NASA programme in the USA in the 50’s and 60’s.

That ‘untold true story’ becomes a way of navigating value and significance in historical contexts. In terms of the museum, or should we say the ‘heritage sector’, this action comes dressed as curation. Who is important to the story of, say, the colonisation of Australia, or the building of the Forth Road bridge, or the roots of the New York punk scene? We might think we know the names and the stories, but if we do it’s because we’ve seen or heard them in books and documentaries. The curator, or gatekeeper,  shapes the narrative, attributes the value. In a museum, that value is an abstract notion:  to speculate upon the actual cash value of, say, Syd Barrett’s notebooks seems almost a vulgarity, somehow. Their value lies elsewhere, in a more aesthetic realm.

An attempt to instigate a similar permanent home for pop history in the UK met with less success. Part of the upsurge of cultural optimism and decentralisation of resources which accompanied the 1997 election of Tony Blair’s ‘New Labour’, the National Centre for Popular Music (slogan: ‘Where Music Lives’) opened in Sheffield in March 1999. It followed Cleveland’s example of creating a pop related tourist attraction in a northern post-industrial city short on obvious ones . Swerving London and Liverpool was commendable, but the project barely made it over the line into the new century, closing in June 2000. It fell foul of not being quite sure what it was – exhibits in cases sat alongside hands-on features where you could remix a track or attempt some choreography. Was it for musicians, fans, or kids? No-one had long to find out as it closed within 15 months and is now the student union of Sheffield Hallam University.

What seems to work better is a temporary set-up in a pre-existing space and in some ways this is closer to the troubadour spirit of music and musicians anyway: we’re here, but soon we’ll be gone. The June-November 2018 exhibition at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh, ‘Rip It Up:The Story Of Scottish Pop’, was a splendid example of this working very successfully. The visitors comments in this clip are instructive listening for anyone wondering what to include in such an exhibition.

Clearly, theming is important – a hook to catch the attention of as large an audience as possible. There’s a generational dimension here that we shouldn’t ignore, as the demographics of it all are significant – the visitors in Edinburgh are all of a certain age and talk about how ‘their life is in there’. Similarly, the 60’s pop kids are now retired, well-off if they are lucky, and still interested in the ‘mortal remains’ of their youth. So the David Bowie or Pink Floyd story and the story of one’s own life could intersect substantially. One major difference , and perhaps a key to why  pop exhibitions at  ‘serious’ museums have succeeded where the Sheffield project did not is because the skills and curatorship of the extant staff have been very carefully applied to the surviving fragments of popular music, act by act. Thus the flyer for that gig in Dunstable is treated just as carefully as if it were a piece of pottery from Pompeii.  

The Pink Floyd exhibition at the V & A had it right by calling itself ‘Their Mortal Remains’, acknowledging both the passage of time and the undiminished persistence of the music with a parallel stream of surviving ephemera. There was nothing to disturb the establishing of an authoritative narrative – proceeding from Syd’s notebooks, the gig schedules, invoices and picture sleeves from Japan, the posters for a hundred gigs out ‘on the road’, the rush and anguish of their global success in the mid-70’s, on to the evidence of their subsequent, more corporate incarnation, in the anonymous, monolithic PA stacks of the late 80’s. Behold, ‘The Pink Floyd Story’ : presence and absence in languid synergy. Check this fascinating piece via the NME on the exhibition.

Turning to indicators of monetary rather than cultural value, I recently maintained a ghostly virtual presence in  two online sales of music-related materials by an ambitious Auction House, who seem to focus strongly on material related to popular music. As they seem to do on a monthly basis, they ran one sale of memorabilia, one of actual recorded material – vinyl and CD’s. The latter resembled a massive online car boot sale, albeit with super-inflated prices, but it was the former that really caught my attention.

It comprised nearly a thousand lots,  covering  a host of musical forms – excepting classical, interestingly – across half a century, from the 1940’s to the 90’s. The star sellers were ephemera , perhaps most notably a combination of poster and ticket for a Sex Pistols show at Cromer Links Pavilion on Christmas Eve  1977. As Marty Di Bergi says of the ‘Electric Banana’ club in This Is Spinal Tap, don’t look for it, it isn’t there anymore, but the gig  proved to be their final public live show in the UK.  The survival of these items is in itself newsworthy – local papers picked the story up and ran lengthy features on the topic. Ticket price was £1.75 – not cheap for the era – and the stub and poster wore a £600-800 estimate but to no-one’s real surprise the pair went for £2,200 – not forgetting  the Buyers Premium: “23.34% + VAT (28% inclusive).” So someone has made a real investment there. This is surely above and beyond the notion of a fan’s indulgence: it’s almost pushing these items into the realm of an art object, with the provenance of it being the band’s last public UK appearance and the ephemeral nature of the objects ladelling added value to the ideas swirling around these two slips of paper.

How to bring these two types of value together? It’s hard.

To mark the 40^th anniversary of the UK punk scene the British Library mounted an exhibition, ‘Punk 1976-78’ in March 2016, based upon a mix of its own archival holdings and donated materials. This sat neatly between the two V & A examples of a growing inventory of pop’s incursions into the heritage sector: ‘David Bowie Is’ in 2013 and as we have observed Pink Floyd’s ‘Their Mortal Remains’ in 2017. It’s worth noting that the V & A have also curated a 60’s pop subculture display, ‘So You Say You Want A Revolution’ (2016-17), while ‘About The Young Idea’, an exhibition of memorabilia associated with The Jam, toured the country in 2019 like a band simultaneously promoting their debut and Greatest Hits albums. If lockdown ever ends, and if cultural life ever recovers, we might expect – and probably now tightly embrace – further examples of this kind of cultural curation of pop histories.

However, not everyone was simply thrilled, honey.  Former Slit Viv Albertine amended/defaced a list of bands in the British Library Punk exhibition as a protest against the marginalisation of female musicians in the narrative as displayed by the chosen exhibits – and she was right. One of the defining features of punk was the sudden appearance of female musicians and singers on stage and record who were not Dusty, Joni or The Supremes – all of whom I love, but who embodied the generally accepted ‘job descriptions’ for female musicians in pop up to that point. Albertine’s act of protest was a shout against the settling in of an orthodox narrative that inevitably flows from exhibitions such as this.

A more grandiose rebuke came in  November 2016 when Joe Corre (multimillionaire son of Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood) caused a furore which bleakly echoed the fuss caused by the group itself in 1977 by taking to the Thames and destroying a huge archive of Sex Pistols related memorabilia. Many criticised Corre, observing that the objects could have been sold to raise money for charity or that such material ‘should be in a museum’. Corre claimed to be objecting to the commodification of punk on its 40^th anniversary, perhaps embodied by events like the British Library’s Punk exhibition, saying it had ‘become a brand, like McDonald’s’. He was of course a little late arriving at this conclusion, as the BL’s dates of 76-78 suggest, and his troubled relationship with his father may have had something to do with his attitude to the mortal remains of the Sex Pistols. This act has however  certainly enhanced the desirability to collectors of material that survives, such as the Cromer poster and ticket.

Pop is certainly culturally embedded now in a way which seems to lead directly to the archive and the curated exhibition; but was Corre a fool, a rich kid who could afford to carry out such a ‘punk’ assault on the collective memory? Probably. Yet why be so upset about a burning t-shirt, for that matter one that says ‘Destroy’ on it, almost as an instruction? Maybe it is because the shared body of knowledge, the shared set of responses and memories associated with music, and pop in particular, are more important than might have been anticipated:  pop belongs to everyone so when those posters, photographs and acetates burned it felt to some like an attack on our collective cultural past, just as surely as if Dominic Cummings decided to demolish the British Library  (and please don’t  think this isn’t on his To Do list). These are our mortal remains.

So what do we think about this? The museum or the funeral pyre? This seems a particularly acute issue for punk and its ideological burdens it has to be said; probably less so for, say, Abba or Kate Bush – both far more popular in the strictly commercial sense than any ‘punk’ act of course. Tellingly the former are market leaders in the field of keeping their ‘brand’ lively and innovative, from inescapable musicals to interactive exhibitions worldwide, and my feeling is that under normal circumstances La Bush would have been high on the shortlist for the next subject of a Bowie/Pink Floyd style exhibition.

What struck me while watching the virtual hammer falling in the online auction was that it is indeed in the ephemera that fans, collectors, investors are placing most faith: while £160 would have bought you the first dozen Neil Young albums in ‘first press vinyl’ – one of the terms which have been uneasily esperanto’d from the established lexicon of bookselling to the relatively new market of vintage records – it barely covered your costs if you wanted a poster for a Slaughter & The Dogs gig in Coventry, 1977.

I am currently researching the history of concerts at Higher Education institutions in Leeds so my attention was caught by a poster in the sale, for a show at the Leeds University Union  on Saturday 16^th of November 1968, the bill topped by Bruce Chanel (‘Hey, Baby’) and among the supports an appearance by a lowly Yes, eight months short of the release of their debut album and probably arranged with the help of their former (and future) drummer Bill Bruford who had quit the band to study in Leeds just weeks before in September ’68. So, a very early show, with that interesting local connection. But still, it’s a folded, creased black and green swirl of ink on paper. It sold for £1500 (plus the hefty Buyer’s Premium…).

Dozens of Smiths posters – albeit with the added provenance of being from the personal collection of Rough Trade founder Geoff Travis- sold for around £900 each. By God I wish I’d kept my poster from their gig at the Mountford Hall, University of Liverpool, February 8th 1984! And there’s the rub: it is precisely the unlikely nature of these artefacts surviving that puts a premium upon their perceived – make that manifestly real – commercial value.

Pop may still be at its most potent when it celebrates transience and trash, but its mortal remains are junk culture no more.

ps turns out I’ve still got my ticket stub from that Smiths gig so the next blog may well arrive from Sardinia….ciao bella!

In a recent chat on Facebook Michael Nesmith said that he was happy that the new Monkees live album The Mike and Micky Show had come out because it captured ‘something temporary’. This is true of everything, really: it’s all temporary. All things must pass. However with specific reference to The Monkees it is particularly apposite as despite their enduring and, I’d say (licks finger and sticks it in the wind), still growing popularity, the fragile infrastructure of the group has meant that no configuration has lasted for long. Yes, we have them immortalised via audio and visual media, but in reality the ground has always shifted under their feet, and those of their followers. So to have this record of events is something of a ‘stabilising’ element in the overall chain reaction that is The Monkees.

When I was a kid, live albums for pop and rock acts had a patchy reputation – jazz is another story altogether of course, where the live recording is quintessential. There was no Beatles live album where we could hear them as a performing band (the Hollywood Bowl record is a document of a phenomenon rather than a working group) and my adolescent favourites either spurned the form altogether (Elvis Costello, XTC) or treated them as archival exercises (Talking Heads, The Jam). The high water mark of the form was the 1970’s, when a successful live album could really make an act: Van Morrison’s It’s Too Late To Stop Now  (1973) proved a big breakthrough for him while albums like Frampton Comes Alive, issued in January  1976, eventually sold 16 million albums worldwide (6 million in the US alone)  and Cheap Trick’s At The Budokan (1979) similarly propelled them into another league.

Sometimes it was a souvenir of an already established act’s latest incarnation: from 1976’s Wings Over America on, Paul McCartney  released a lavishly packaged live album of virtually every tour up until  2009. Since around that date, however,  the whole market for live recordings has changed as acts try, in the digital era, to claw back their rights and revenue from bootleggers and often present whole concerts in pristine audio clarity for a knockdown price via their websites: case in point, last week I bought  what amounts to a three CD set of Bruce Springsteen’s 2013 show at my local arena for 10 dollars (about £8 sterling) from his own website.  Whatever the reason for their existence though, the arrival of a live album has never stirred the soul like a set of new songs can. 

As with much else The Monkees are a different proposition. In some ways, Monkees concerts didn’t really start to address the full richness of their back catalogue until many years after their initial success. Sure, the reunions and get-backs were brilliant and made everyone happy and a bit of money but if we are talking about the songs then what goes into a Monkees set in 2020 – represented by this new release – is remarkable in that much of it was never played live at all in the original era. In fact some of the most anticipated tunes were not even released until a decade or so after the band’s initial dissolution. As I say, in this, as in many other ways, The Monkees are a most unusual exception to the rule. Which rule? Well, maybe all of them, really.

So, as both souvenir and documentation of something temporary,  the arrival of The Mike and Micky Show is a cause for great celebration, round our way.

It is the only contemporary live album the group has ever released; Rhino got the archival ball rolling with Live 1967, issued in 1987 on vinyl, CD and tape. The groundbreaking deep-dive four CD box set Summer 1967 (2001) followed nearly fifteen years later. These recordings were taken from their tour on which, famously or infamously (I am never sure quite which it is), the support act was The Jimi Hendrix Experience – he had been chosen by the band, we should note. Producer Chip Douglas told me in an interview for my book The Monkees, Head and the 60’s that ‘We recorded for a live album but the tapes were hardly useable; they’ve cleaned them up since of course but back then there was no way we could have put them out’. http://jawbonepress.com/the-monkees-head-and-the-60s/

Looking at this album I see 25 tracks; not the full set as far as I know – opener ‘Good Clean Fun’ and some Nesmith solo material was routinely performed but are missing, as is – sobs gently – ‘Porpoise Song’ – but this is still a hefty chunk of goodness for a single compact disc. The vinyl equivalent, which I haven’t actually handled, is a luxurious looking double, another first for a new, non-compilation album by the band. Produced by Andrew Sandoval and mixed by Christian Nesmith, it is a real pleasure to behold and be heard, rich and deep in detail.

It opens very logically with what Micky has, since 1967, been calling ‘the one that started it all off’, Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart’s ‘Last Train To Clarksville’. Many years ago I remember hearing Paul Simon say that when he played  ‘The Sound Of Silence’ for the thousandth time in concert his heart didn’t necessarily leap up with joy. Perhaps he has changed his view a little since, understanding as he does how the songs that must have seemed professional obligations in the mid-70’s are now woven into the story of the age, and the lives of millions of people. If Micky is tired of singing about this last train, it doesn’t show: he approaches it with great verve and attack – listen for that jazzy ‘Last train! Last train !’  toward the close.

The album’s track listing is divided pretty much down the middle, featuring twelve Nesmith originals and a baker’s dozen by other writers, including Dolenz (‘Alternate Title’), Tork (‘For Pete’s Sake’) and Davy Jones (co-writer of ‘Goin’ Down’). The Nesmith material is drawn from all but one of the albums issued from their 1966 debut up to The Monkees Present in 1969 and, in the unheard until 1990 track ‘St.Matthew’, we have a fine example of the impact of Rhino’s guardianship of the band’s archive. That’s an impressive spread. The remaining songs are a mix of the familiar (Boyce & Hart, Carole King, John Stewart, Neil Diamond)  and, in a hard-won luxury not granted to many of their still-working peers, first class contemporary material, taken from 2016’s Good Times! .

Peter Tork, who passed between the time of this album’s recording and its release, is namechecked after a great version of his best loved Monkees tune, ‘For Pete’s Sake’, track one side two of Headquarters and closing theme of the second series of their TV show. In a beautiful touch, the album is dedicated to Tork and Jones.

This emphasis on Nesmith’s catalogue is both a guarantee of class and a truthful representation of how it was, as Micky says in his good natured intro to ‘Papa Gene’s Blues’:

“We used to sit around the campfire, as we used to call it, in between shooting scenes for the show, and invariably we would end up playing Nez tunes because he was the only one writing these songs”

The Headquarters material is fabulous to hear, and prompted me to wonder, how often did Nesmith actually sing and play these songs between 1970 and 2013? Maybe not so often. It must have been strange to go back to them, and he occasionally applies his quirky pronunication of the word ‘the’ as ‘thee’ which I associate with thee, sorry, the albums he recorded for RCA after leaving The Monkees. It’s curious to hear that sound on these songs, on ‘You Told Me’, rather than, say, ‘Roll With The Flow’ from And The Hits Just Keep On Comin’. I don’t mean I don’t like it; I just mean I noticed it.

I am a sucker for these songs, ringing as they are with what I call in my book their chimes of freedom, a kind of invincible lightness of being. Hearing Peter’s lovely banjo line on ‘You Told Me’ rising live courtesy of Probyn Gregory is a joy. Yet the hefty band caught on this  album – eleven contributors get a picture credit in the CD booklet – functions more forcefully on the Pisces era tracks than on the garage band, ev’ry stinkin’ little note leanness of Headquarters : the version of  Chip Douglas and Bill Martin’s ‘The Door Into Summer’ is so fully realised that it sounds almost as  good as the version on Pisces Aquarius, Capricorn and Jones Ltd., notably Nesmith’s lead vocal, half a century after he first sang it. This goes right down to the immaculate call and response vocals between Mike and Micky at the song’s close, aided very beautifully by Coco Dolenz and Circe Link. It’s superb.

Which isn’t to say the ensemble doesn’t prevail on some of the earlier tunes – their first freedom song ‘The Girl I Knew Somewhere’  (read my book!) is mighty, while ‘A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You’, never a big favourite of mine, also develops something approaching a sharp bite in these circumstances. The clip featuring ‘The Girl I Knew Somewhere’ from the TV show featuring THE FABULOUS Julie Newmar as Miss April Conquest is possibly my favourite bit from the whole series so by golly here it is.

‘Sweet Young Thing’ is a dead ringer for the First National Band and really brings home the fact that Nesmith was yoking pop, r’nb, folk and country dynamics long before it became a thing to do: that is, via his first two songs on The Monkees’ debut LP in 1966. ‘Who invented country rock?’ is possibly one of the more redundant questions you could ask about the changes music went though in the 1960’s but, even if it is, we know the answer. Just in case you missed it, the point is forcefully made here by ‘Sweet Young Thing’ ‘s  blend of piledriving rhythm and sinewy fiddle lines. Here’s the ’66 version.

Its twin on that debut album, ‘Papa Gene’s Blues’ ushers in what is probably my favourite part of this programme, the five song acoustic set-within-a-set. This segment of the show provides the image for the album’s back cover.

Papa Gene is joined by a jugband ‘Alternate Title’, a languid, lazy jazz’d ‘Tapioca Tundra’, which is a quiet revelation, giving way gently to an equally rapturous ‘Me & Magdalena’. The transition between the 1968 and 2016 tunes is seamless. Show me another act of this vintage who can connect work at such a distance of time and space. No, don’t bother, you can’t, there isn’t one. It’s incredible, really. I love how Mike and Micky’s voices sound together, and this version of Ben Gibbard’s song really showcases this blend. On the sleeve of the new album, Micky calls their sound ‘The Everly Monkees’ and he’s not far off – it’s demonstrated beautifully here. “Everything lost will be recovered”.

On first hearing this album, my day was made even better by the arrival of perhaps my favourite non-Head Monkees track, ‘Auntie’s Municipal Court’ from 1968’s  The Birds, The Bees and The Monkees.  When I was a kid I used to think, if I were in a band I’d want it to sound like this song. Later on I was in a band, and we did sound quite like this song, so don’t give up on your dreams, kids etc etc…but back in the late 70’s, pre-internet, pre-CD, pre fanzines, pre-EVERYTHING , I felt like I was the only living boy in the UK who knew and loved this song. I may well have been right. But now here it is, in the set. I can honestly say I never thought I would hear this song, this very deepest of deep cuts, performed live. Its inclusion  justifies the whole enterprise, if you ask me. Which you didn’t. But that’s my view. Never mind the furthermore, I had spent four decades digging on this track and never realised that in the delirious head spinning outro Micky is singing ‘Here we go again’, round and round. These songs are such deep wells. Here is the stereo 1968 version which is the one I grew up loving; there is a much rarer mono version – don’t get me started! – but this is my top pick.

Elsewhere on The Mike & Micky Show Micky’s vocal showpiece ‘Goin’ Down’ – the only Monkees song to credit all four of them as writers, based on a riff offa Mose Allison’s ‘Parchman Farm’ – shows he has some of that Satchmo gravy in his voice for real now. Monkee set ever-presents such as ‘Steppin’ Stone’, (complete with staggered finale which allows Micky to work in some of his James Brown stop-start moves as seen in Monkees On Tour)  ‘Mary Mary’ (now trailing its HipHop afterlife behind it) and Micky’s favourite ‘Pleasant Valley Sunday’ all hit the spot very sweetly indeed. The two tracks from Head, ‘Circle Sky’ and ‘As We Go Along’, provide a beautiful exercise in contrast, and the latter gets a particularly rapturous reception from the crowd, to which Micky reacts with delight. These little moments of truth, passing and temporary for the crowd at the show, become revealing and enduring records of connection once committed to tape, and I really like it that they are included here. Here’s ‘As We Go Along’ from Head.

The closing trio of songs seal the deal; Peter Tork’s unmistakable, indefatigable piano motif for ‘Daydream Believer’ starts up but instead of the cheers you might expect a hush falls, as if the audience are wondering what is going to happen in Davy’s absence. Micky would laugh at this perhaps but I swear he comes in just a beat behind where Davy always started the song, as if to acknowledge with that beat of silence that this is his song, and that this version is ‘after’ him, in every sense. As ever the song becomes a mass singalong, a celebration of  Davy, everyone’s love for the song, the communality music offers us, a testament of life itself. Cheer up, Sleepy Jean.

‘Listen To The Band’ surprises us by starting out a la the Jack Good TV special, Nesmith on his own, bluesy and slow, the band coming in around 0.35, blasting through like the Nashville cats on the 1969 original. It’s a great and brave choice for this moment in the show and places the emphasis fully on the music – listen to the band!  I think at this point I should shine a spotlight on the first Monkees album I ever owned, a 70’s ‘budget’ compilation via EMI which featured ‘Listen To The Band’, tucked away on side one between the hits, educating all of us with young and open ears.

It makes perfect symmetrical sense that an album which opens with ‘Last Train To Clarksville’ closes with ‘I’m A Believer’. Which this one does, to everyone’s joy. It also reminds us that this is a show for everybody, no matter which version of The Monkees they like, whether it’s a lifetime of love or simply a fond remembrance from their youth. There are songs for the Nezheads, the Head freaks, the box set connoisseurs, sure, but plenty also for those who remember their TV show and recall the brief flash of their days as the biggest selling act in the world.

It’s that kind of duality in the minds of their audience that is so special about The Monkees, and relates back to Nesmith’s idea of this being a record of something temporary – just as the gathering of people who constitute the audience at a particular show on a particular night in a particular town is a temporary community.

To paraphrase ‘Tapioca Tundra’, it was part of them, but now it’s part of you. This album speaks to every part of that community: temporary, but also permanent.

You know that idea of ‘rabbit holes’? Often applied to Youtube watching; you start looking at one clip, next thing you know you’ve been gazing at ‘related videos’ for about three hours.  Well my current rabbit hole is (or are) translations of hit songs from English into other languages. Now, for better or for worse, English is indeed the, erm, lingua franca of popular music. This is changing somewhat with the rise of K-Pop (BTS, PSY), and the incursion of Latin American musics (Gloria Estefan – strange but true! – Shakira, ‘Desposito’) but certainly historically it’s been the case that if you want a hit, English is the loving tongue.  Hits would come out of New York and London, achieve success and then be translated into the local brogue. These recordings would then complement rather than compete with the Anglophone originals in the charts of their respective countries.

Sometimes songs would start life in other languages and an English translation would deliver the global hit: think of ‘My Way’, ‘That’s Amore’, ‘The Girl From Ipanema’. Very, very occasionally, a song would become a hit in the UK in its original form: ‘Je t’Aime’, ‘Vado Via’, ‘Ca Plan Pour Moi’, ‘Joe Le Taxi’. More usually a band would translate their own song into English in order to reach the Anglophone market: Kraftwerk were the masters of this, as of much else, and there were German and English language versions of all their albums from Autobahn (1973)  up to and including Electric Cafe (1986). ‘Pocket Calculator’ really came in for the treatment with versions in German, English, French, Spanish, Japanese, Italian and for all I know Inuit. Have I got them all? You bet I have matey! What a sucker.

Enjoy the very rare Italian version here: “Sono l’operatore del mini-calcolatore”, doncha know.

So the commercial imperative for translating and covering, to and from English, has a sound market-based rationale. But what if there were other reasons? What if a song itself had a kind of cultural power beyond its real or perceived commercial value?

If you are a former student of mine, much of what follows will seem strangely familiar, so sit back and enjoy the sentimental journey. Everyone else, eyes and ears front.

In 1987, I was in Bristol visiting a friend. Being free as birds, we spent a sunny afternoon in a pub  near the University and found a flyer for the Watershed, an arts centre by the river. It was showing Philip Kaufman’s’s film of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, an adaptation of Czech exile Milan Kundera’s novel, which had a complex publishing history. You can look that up. Anyway by ’87 it had been turned into a  quite high profile film, starring Daniel Day Lewis and Juliette Binoche, both superheiss at the time, alongside the unforgettable Lena Olin. All quite an eyeful. So yes we went to see the film and several things happened as a consequence: firstly, I went out the next day to get me a black rollneck sweater. Secondly I took careful note of the credits to find out who had been singing a version of ‘Hey Jude’ which appears at a key moment in the film. I’m not telling you the third thing.

The film, like the novel, was set during the ‘Prague Spring’ of 1968. What was that, you cry? Well, it was the brief flowering of cultural freedom under the stewardship of Alexander Dubček . He was appointed First Secretary of the Czechoslovak Communist Party on January the 5^th 1968 and was effectively removed when the Soviets invaded on the 21^st of August that same year. As it was a Leap Year, that was 229 days: the Prague Spring and his leadership of the country were effectively the same thing. He famously advocated, and briefly delivered, ‘socialism with a human face’.

During that time an extraordinary cultural and social transformation took place: music and film was ‘allowed’ before and after this period but the freedom of expression Dubček encouraged unleashed an energy and a surge of creativity which rocked the boat enough to present the possibility of real social change through artworks. Part of this was amazing cinema, via the already established likes of Miloš Forman (The Fireman’s Ball) and Jiří Menzel (Closely Observed Trains) and Věra Chytilová (the psychedelic bliss-out that is Daisies), the fine arts and, especially, music. Pop was particularly well-suited as a vehicle for self-expression as it was fast, bright and modern it was (or is) a celebration of the now, the present instant, as well as a connecting point to the past and ideas about the future. That means pleasure, sadness, reflection…singing the blues…the cry of love…do you wanna dance? It does all this without needing a supporting dialectic. It just is. That’s why it makes censors and lawmakers nervous.

Anyway that brief period saw visits to Czechoslovakia from a number of formerly verboten Western acts, most famously and Americanly The Beach Boys  who gave concerts in Prague and Bratislava; during their Prague show they dedicated ‘Breakaway’ to Mr. Dubček This fabulous picture of the band standing by the Danube in Bratislava on that visit recently came to my notice via the Beach Boys World website.

Allen Ginsberg visited too, not for the first time, but definitely to great excitement and acclaim. Not only but also there was a rapid expansion of the Czechoslovak music scene with a huge variety of singers and bands springing up; some reflected the mood of the times, like the legendary Plastic People Of The Universe (name borrowed from a line in a Frank Zappa song) and Karel Kryl, both of whom had a definite revolutionary edge. Other acts such as Olympic and Karel Gott sat more toward the middle of the road and both had successful careers well into the 1970’s on account of this, but somewhat at the cost of their subsequent reputations.

The true voice of the Prague Spring however belonged to a girl from České Budějovice (home of the original Budweiser beer –no, really!), Marta Kubišová . She was 25 years old in Spring 1968 and had come to Prague after winning provincial and national singing competitions, ending up working in various theatre companies in the city.

These two pictures of Marta nicely contrast the ‘early’ well-behaved Czech pop with the freedoms offered by the ‘Prague Spring’: the first shot is from 1965, the second from 1968.

Contrary to what we might expect there was a lot of home-made pop music in the countries behind the ‘Iron Curtain’ in the 1960’s, and in 1964 she was signed up by the state-owned label Supraphon , still one of the world’s great record companies. She recorded solo, having hits on her own and as a duo with Helena Vondráčková : ‘Oh, Baby, Baby’ is still a much loved tune.

However it was two songs she recorded toward the end of the decade that made a massive impact : ‘Modlitbu pro Martu’ (‘Prayer For Marta’) was first recorded for a TV show, Píseň pro Rudolfa III. (A Song For Rudolf III) , a somewhat Reggie Perrin-esque series about a serial daydreamer which was popular on Czech TV at the time. It was written quickly by Petr Rada who was an old hand at knocking out songs for film and shows: the show was not political, and the song wasn’t particularly meant to be taken that way either. Yet when the episode was screened in early 1969 it very quickly became adopted as a song of resistance and defiance: a protest song. Looking at the lyric, we can see how the accidental fit seemed a resonant one:

“Let peace continue with this country. 
Let wrath, envy, hate, fear and struggle vanish. 
Now, when the lost reign over your affairs will return to you, people, it will return.”

Watch the original performance from Píseň pro Rudolfa III. Marta also appeared in the episode : she was an accomplished actress.

Around the time ‘Modlitba pro Martu’ was becoming the retrospective anthem of the Prague Spring, she also recorded a version of The Beatles ‘Hey Jude’. The two songs were originally released on separate singles but have forever been associated with each other. That’s one reason why Philip Kaufman used her Czech language version of the song in The Unbearable Lightness Of Being.

We must also bear in mind that The Beatles’ 45 of the song wasn’t released until the 26^th of August 1968, less than a week after the Soviets invaded. Marta’s version followed quickly, so they had got the record, translated the lyric, worked up the arrangement, recorded and issued it very quickly. Both songs became symbolic of the spirit of the Prague Spring and the enduring resistance to the repressive regime the people were forced to live under.

Her one album, Songy a Balady (you can translate it yourself) emerged in early 1969 containing both songs and owning the album became an act of defiance. Its initial pressing was recalled as the authorities wished to remove two songs, ‘Modlitba Pro Martu’ and the anti-authoritarian ‘Ne!’ (‘No!’); it was reissued with two more conventional pop songs in their place.

So, it’s time to hear it! ‘Hej, Jude’ with a very evocative film clip from 1968/9

The song was done in a flash, yet has lasted for over 50 years. That’s to do with the social context, certainly, but also the qualities of the record itself. It’s very faithful to the instrumentation and sound of the so-familiar Beatles recording – listen to that piano, a pretty good facsimile. The vocal arrangement too – solo voice carries it for the most part, mass singalong toward the end. Duration – Beatles around 7 minutes, Marta around 5.30. But wait a moment: what about those lyrics? How do you translate ‘The movement you need is on your shoulder’ into Czech? The answer is, of course, you don’t. Instead you find a lyric that is meaningful in the individual language with its own idiomatic phrasings, rhymes and scanning. That’s what happened in the case of ‘Hej, Jude’: translator Zdeněk Rytíř (part of the Orchestr Golden Kids, her de facto backing band) quickly created a Czech version of the song which wasn’t simply a straight translation but an as we say in 2020 ‘re-imagining’ of the lyric for the local conditions.

I asked my friend Marek about the Czech lyric Marta sings and he very kindly revisited the record, telling me this:

“The Czech version is sung by woman and you can hear the man’s betrayal of her. Zdeněk Rytíř used poetry images and lots of idioms to express this. Regarding idioms – let me explain some of them: 1. “Svět je krásnej, svět je zlej! Hey Jude, věř v něj!” – the world is beautiful, the world is cruel, hey Jude, believe in it 2. “A do těch ran ti sype sůl a láme hůl” – and to these wounds the world is dropping salt and breaking stick – it’s a Czech saying to make pain worse, to put salt in the wound. Breaking sticks means – to give-up some person, to lose faith in the person. But for Czech people it was even more important because of Soviet tanks. Our “closest brothers” betrayed us and brought tanks and army to our country instead and even more – they took all freedom from us. So this song by Marta Kubišová was taken more as protest song even though Zdeněk didn’t necessarily intend the tone to be one of a protest song”

Hence what might feel like a novelty for the Anglophone ear had real meaning for the Czech speaker. Rytíř was the go-to guy in Czech pop for a strong translation of Western pop hits, having already ‘done’ plenty, Dylan, Lovin’ Spoonful and Manfred Mann among multiple other hits. And of course the famous slow-fade (which this version does not shirk) needs no translating! Soon the song became part of the songbook of resistance, and as the regime became more and more hardline singing it in public risked arrest and everything that could and would follow from that.

Here is the sequence from Kaufman’s film of The Unbearable Lightness Of Being (1987) that uses ‘Hej, Jude’. You’ll see that he skilfully mixes actual footage from August 1968 with artfully recreated sequences which feature his stars Daniel Day Lewis and Juliette Binoche, whose character, as a photographer, was well-placed to document events.

Marta went on the be one-third of Czech supergroup Golden Kids (one of my favourite band names ever) with Václav Neckář (already a singer and actor: you might have seen him in Closely Observed Trains, which won the Best Foreign Film Oscar in 1968) and old friend and established pop star Helena Vondráčková. They were very groovy: happy, bright and Eurovision cheerful making two albums of , well, bright and cheerful pop including Czech versions of Dylan’s ‘The Mighty Quinn’ and Lennon & McCartney’s ‘The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill’ on their debut, Micro Magic Circus (1970).

Golden Kids achieved great success while Marta continued to record singles under her own name. Her solo songs became more overtly socio-political: ‘Tajga Blues’ was openly critical of the USSR’s treatment of protestors. Eventually the regime of Gustav Husák (who replaced Dubček in April 1969) could no longer tolerate her popularity and the social platform that gave her. They literally couldn’t stand the sound of her voice; it was the sound of defiance, onstage and on disc. So what we’d now call a ‘smear campaign’ was launched against her, false claims were made about her to damage her reputation as a person, and her music was banned from sale or broadcast. Her last gig was a Golden Kids show in Ostrava in 1972.  Neckář and Vondráčková carried on with their careers with her blessing but she didn’t sing in public again for nearly two decades.

Instead she , like many other artists and dissidents – in fact, to be an artist was to be a dissident so the distinction is tautologous – subsisted and resisted as best she could. Alongside Vaclav Havel, she was one of the leading lights and main signatories to the famous Charta 77 (Charter 77), a document accusing the Czechoslovak government of ignoring and denying human rights to the country’s citizens in accordance to international agreements they had signed up to. The articulacy and accuracy of this document made it very powerful and distribution of Charta 77 became a crime in Czechoslovakia – which, of course, made the arguments it contained even more pertinent. Marta’s involvement cast her even further into internal exile and drew ever closer scrutiny from the security forces. She was never sent to prison – as were Havel and several others who worked on Charta 77- but life was made very difficult.

Everything changed in November 1989, when the ‘Velvet Revolution’ propelled Vaclav Havel into the role of President of Czechoslovakia. On the 22nd of that month, Marta sang in public for the first time since 1972. She sang, at Havel’s request, ‘Modlitba pro Martu’ along with the Czechoslovak national anthem ‘Kde domov můj’ (‘Where My Home Is’) alongside Havel and the returned Dubček, from a balcony in the Melantrich Palace on Wenceslas Square to an estimated 250,000 people gathered to celebrate their freedom. By that time her voice and her songs were deeply embedded as symbolic of a nation’s spirit of resistance, and she sang the country into freedom. Imagine how great that must have been for them all, for the whole country. My God. Why don’t the British go in for revolutions? We need one.

 After this Songy a Balady was the first album to be reissued by Supraphon, in March 1990, shortly followed by an album of unissued material from the late 60’s called Lampa : the sleeve showed a copy of Charta 77 prominently placed on the table next to her. I saw her sing in the free Old Town Square concert of June 1990, to celebrate the country’s first democratic elections of that month. She shared top billing with Paul Simon, one of many musicians who would pay court to President Havel in the coming years. She also began recording again releasing new albums throughout the 90’s and 00’s. Now she is in her late 70’s and, occasionally, still singing! Someone was smart enough to make a film about her; here’s the trailer.

To conclude where we began – Bristol, 1987, glass of Budweiser Budvar in hand – it’s worth remembering that in mid-80’s, Czech artists/dissidents like Havel and the Plastic People had become a cause celebre in the West – Samuel Beckett dedicated his 1984 play Catastrophe to Havel, Frank Zappa namechecked the Plastic People whose music was released in the West, Jan Svankmajer’s animations were hits on the Art House cinema circuit – and there was a definite appetite for work with a Czech connection. Consequently, although Kundera supposedly hated Kaufman’s adaptation of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, it was a very successful film in its time and (for what it’s worth) hugely influential on my peer group. So when the Berlin Wall fell in ’89, we already had our dreams and ideas of what it was like on the other side from sources such as this book, film, and song.

Maybe art really can change the world. The movement you need is on your shoulder!

Thanks to Marek Kraus for his help with this piece.