The Tremeloes' "Hello World"

Last month, I wrote about a riff that's in both the Moody Blues' "So Deep within You" from On the Threshold of a Dream and Rod Argent and Chris White's "Telescope (Mr. Galileo)," which was recorded after the Zombies broke up.  At the time, I'd thought I knew an-other song that had a similar-sounding part, but I couldn't identify it.  Recently though, I listened to an anthology of the Tremeloes, and I discovered that I'd been thinking of the beginning of "Hello World."

The phrase in "Hello World" is longer than those in "So Deep within You" and "Telescope (Mr. Galileo)," and it repeats more frequently.  The song starts with it played four and a half times.

In "Hello World," it starts on a different pitch relative to the key than in "So Deep within You" and "Telescope (Mr. Galileo)," but the intervals are the same in all three (and the pitches of the first five notes are the same between "Hello World" and "So Deep within You").

(click the image to enlarge it)

(standard disclaimer that the notation may be wrong because I did it myself)

Unlike the other two, the notes in that phrase in "Hello World" are picked individually where the second of each pair of eighth notes are hammer-ons in "So Deep within You" and "Telescope (Mr. Galileo)."

According to the liner notes in my Tremeloes collection (Silence Is Golden: The Very Best of the Tremeloes), "Hello World" was issued as a single in 1969.  On the Threshold of a Dream - the album on which "So Deep within You" appears - was also released in 1969 (specifically, April).  Apparently "So Deep within You" was the B-side to the "Never Comes the Day" single, released the same month.  According to the liner notes for Into the Afterlife, "Telescope (Mr. Galileo)" was recorded in March 1968, although it wasn't released until Into the Afterlife in 2007.

So I have even fewer answers than I did when I wrote my original post.  Now I have three songs that were all recorded and/or released within about a year and that all share the same phrase.

The Moody Blues' "So Deep within You"

When I listened to the Moody Blues' On the Threshold of a Dream last month, the recurring guitar riff in "So Deep within You" caught my ear.  I figured out how to play it and confirmed that - save for the key - it's identical to a part in "Telescope (Mr. Galileo)," which was recorded by Chris White and Rod Argent shortly after the Zombies broke up.  (There are two versions of "Telescope (Mr. Galileo)" on Into the Afterlife, but this riff is present only in the second version [track #18], the one with fuzz guitar.)

(click the image to enlarge it)
(standard disclaimer that since I did the notation myself, it might be wrong)

I didn't know how to indicate it in the notation, but the second note in each pair of eighth notes is a hammer-on.

In the Zombie Heaven liner notes, Paul Atkinson (the Zombies' guitarist) says that the Zombies were friends with the Moody Blues and used to go to their parties (p. 31).  While that provides evidence that the Zombies and the Moody Blues knew each other, it's slightly misleading as far as guitar players, since Atkinson didn't play on "Telescope (Mr. Galileo)."  The Into the Afterlife liner notes explain that it was Mac McLeod.

The chronology is also troublesome.  The Into the Afterlife liner notes say that the session at which "Telescope (Mr. Galileo)" was recorded was in March 1968.  On the Threshold of a Dream came out in April 1969.  But "Telescope (Mr. Galileo)" wasn't released until the Into the Afterlife album in 2007.  So while it would appear that there was some mixing of influences since the songs originated only about a year apart, since the riffs are so similar (with the same accidental even), and since the bands knew each other, it doesn't seem possible that the Moody Blues could have known "Telescope (Mr. Galileo)."  Apparently, the similarity is just a coincidence.

On Lyric Transcription of Odessey and Oracle

At the end of October, I got (yet an-other) copy of the Zombies' Odessey and Oracle - the 30th anniversary edition put out by Big Beat that includes the whole album in both mono and stereo.  As I've mentioned before, Odessey and Oracle is one of my favorite albums, and I've been working on learning how to play all of the songs from it.  I've also been transcribing all of the lyrics.  However, I was actually a bit disappointed when I discovered that this edition has all of the lyrics written out in the liner notes.

Mostly, it was the lyrics for "A Rose for Emily" and "Changes" that caused this slight disappointment.  These liner notes claim that the first line of "A Rose for Emily" is "The summer is here at last," and yet - when compared to the rest of the song - it makes so much more sense if the first line is "Though summer is here at last."  I wrote a more in-depth post about that here.

I'd been trying to figure out the exact lyrics for "Changes" for a long time.  I'd seen people writing them as "I knew her when summer was her crown / And autumn sad how brown her eyes."  Yet, I often heard it as "I knew her when summer was her crown / And autumn sighed how brown her eyes."  I had been thinking about that particular line - whether it was "sad" or "sighed" - for months.  To come up with an answer, I looked at the rest of the lyrics.

  

There is more than one instance in Chris White's writing where he takes the grammatical structure of one phrase and inverts it for the next phrase.  For instance, in "Friends of Mine" - "That's something to see / That's nothing to hide."  So I took this parallelism approach and applied it to the lyrics of "Changes."  If the one line is "In spring her voice she spoke to me," it made sense to me that the complement was "And autumn sighed how brown her eyes."  Both of those lines are linked by breathing (speaking and sighing) in the same way that the other two lines are linked by the concept of seasons as wearable items (summer as crown and winter as cloak).

That's how I interpreted the lyrics, but then I find that in the liner notes, it's listed as "And autumn sad how brown her eyes."  Which is the very line that I had decided against based on parallelism.

I'm not sure where the lyrics in these particular liner notes came from - whether Rod Argent and Chris White were consulted or whether it's someone else's transcription, but I'm still going to hold to what I heard - "Though summer is here at last" and "And autumn sighed how brown her eyes."  Based on the other lyrics of the songs, those make more sense to me, and - ultimately - give the songs more meaning for me.

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On "The Feeling's Inside"

As previously noted, I've been listening to all of the Argent albums I have this month.  I've also been using this as an opportunity to make some progress on the Verulam Cover Project - my attempt to learn and cover all of the songs by the Zombies, Colin Blunstone, and Argent.  Mostly, this has just been lyric transcription.  And while transcribing lyrics, I noticed something, which led me to an idea.

Rod Argent and Chris White started sharing writing credits for the Argent songs, and I had the idea that it might be interesting to try to figure out whether a song is more of a Rod Argent song or a Chris White song.  It seems that people are always trying to decide whether a McCartney/Lennon song is more McCartney or Lennon, so I figured I would try the same with a Argent/White song.

I would wager that "The Feeling's Inside" from Argent's eponymous debut album is mostly a Chris White song for two reasons.

First, there's the line "there is nothing to hide," referring to someone's love.  This is extremely similar to a line in "Friends of Mine," which is undoubtedly a Chris White song.  In "Friends of Mine," there's the chiasmus "that's something to see / that's nothing to hide," again referring to love.

Second, there's a chromatic descending bass part that goes from A to G to F# (and then to lower notes which I haven't figured out yet).  This is also characteristic of White's writing; this same thing occurs in "Brief Candles" (both descending and ascending) and in "Don't Go Away" (though only ascending)

So between the lyrical and musical similarities with his earlier work, I'm almost certain that "The Feeling's Inside" is a Chris White song.

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People/Candles

I've finally started doing the idea I had back in February.  Namely, listening to all of my Argent albums every week in August (also, alliteration).  However, since I decided to do that, I bought Circus.  It had worked out perfectly:  seven albums for seven days of the week.  Now I have eight albums that I have to squeeze into seven days.  So I've decided to listen to Greatest: The Singles Collection and Encore on Sunday and then listen to the other albums on the rest of the days of the week, going chronologically:

• Monday:  Argent
• Tuesday:  Ring of Hands
• Wednesday:  All Together Now
• Thursday:  In Deep
• Friday:  Nexus
• Saturday:  Circus

So because to-day is Thursday, I listened to In Deep to-day.  And I realised a few things:

I've heard "God Gave Rock and Roll to You" dozens of times, but until to-day, I had never been able to understand what Rod Argent sings at about 3:45.  It's "To every boy he gave a song to be sung."

I'm pretty sure that Rod Argent musically quotes some classical piano piece in "Be Glad."  I'm fairly certain that it's something he later recorded for Classically Speaking, but I have yet to listen to both albums back to back and figure out which one it is.

I revisited an earlier idea I had about "Candles on the River" and figured out something interesting.  According to Bob Henrit's comments on the LP sleeve, "Candles on the River," while billed to "Argent/White," is mostly a Chris White song.  And the "candles" part reminded me of "Brief Candles" from the Zombies' Odessey and Oracle, which Chris White also wrote.  He re-uses the metaphor of people as candles.  But then I remembered that that wasn't his original idea; he took it from Aldous Huxley's collection of short stories titled Brief Candles.  And Huxley took "brief candle" from Shakespeare's Macbeth.  But I realised that Shakespeare didn't really come up with the metaphor of people as candles either.  It's in Isaiah 42:  "Behold my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen, in whom my soul delights; I have put my Spirit upon him; he will bring forth justice to the nations.  He will not cry aloud or lift up his voice, or make it heard in the street; a bruised reed he will not break, and a faintly burning wick he will not quench." (Emphasis added.)

Which has a lot of interesting connections.  Even though it doesn't appear that Chris White was familiar with the "brief candles" line in Macbeth, the Zombies did list Shakespeare as an influence.  There's a quote from The Tempest in the original liner notes to Odessey and Oracle.  Similarly, while Argent (the band) may not have recognized the Biblical reference that the people/candles metaphor has, there are religious influences in their work.  There's the musical quotation of the Latin hymn "Dies Irae" in "The Coming of Kohoutek" from Nexus.  In the version of "Hold Your Head Up" on Encore, Rod Argent includes part of "God of Grace and God of Glory" in his solo.  And there are also religious connections (or at least hints to them) in "God Gave Rock and Roll to You," "Gonna Meet My Maker," "Music from the Spheres," and "Rejoice."

So even though it doesn't appear that these bands realized where some of their references came from, the references still fit within the context of the band's past work and acknowledged influences.

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