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Archive for March, 2019

Fifty Year Friday: Overcast, With a Chance of Showers

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Overcast: With A Chance of Showers

Trevor Stuart arrived in the United States at the age of fifteen in 1965 when his mother,  accepted a teaching post at Pierce College — Dr. Catherine Stuart becoming only the third female mathematics professor at a California college.  Trevor’s father, an electrical engineer and sometimes studio pianist, stayed in London, for several months, eventually joining Trevor and Catherine after getting landing a job as production engineer at Capitol records.

Like his mother and father, Trevor had received classical piano lessons starting at an early age, and around the middle of 1968, started getting uncredited work on an occasional rock or pop album as well as providing piano and electric organ for small ensembles recorded by Jazzco, a Muzak-like provider of  commercial background music. It was late 1968 when Trevor Stuart and Overcast singer and guitarist Bill Fortney first met while standing in line at the Troubadour club, when Fortney bemoaned the lack of success in finding a suitable replacement for guitarist Greg Paulson, who, convinced that Overcast best days were behind them, had taken a full time position at the Orange County Kimberly-Clark paper products plant.

Stuart asked a few questions about this band he had never heard of and then gave it no more thought until January 1969 when he noticed an entry for Overcast in the recording schedule at the La Brea Recording Studios immediately after a session he was sitting in on.  He stayed around to say hello to Fortney; the Overcast leader had arrived with Douglas Brandt and David Amato and it was clear that Fortney was a bit distracted.  It turned out that David Amato had broken up with Claire Stanston who, along with tenor saxophonist Rick Stephenson, would help fill in the void for guitarist Greg Paulson.  It was bad enough that Stanston didn’t want any thing whatsoever to do with Amato, but this was compounded with Rick Stephenson immediately taking an interest in Claire and determining that time spent with Overcast could hardly compare to any anticipated time spent with Claire.

It was at this point that Stuart allegedly said he would have a go at it, informing a surprised Overcast that he could play keyboards and could quickly pick up tunes, particularly if Overcast would call out the chords if the music got tricky.

Fortunately, there wasn’t anything particularly tricky in Overcast’s current set of tunes and within the next three sessions,  Overcast had laid down their second album, recorded on January 11, 17 and 18, 1969 and released on the first of April of that year.

David Amato, once again suggested the title for the album, and this time Elektra acquiesced.  However, they weren’t too keen on Amato’s suggestion for the cover of “With a Chance of Showers” — a photo of a bikini-clad model in the shower.  Neither did they go for Amato’s suggestion of a photo shoot of the band in bathing suits in the Fullerton Junior College Locker Room showers — with or without accompanying bikini-clad models.  Brandt suggested reusing the same album cover used for the first album, but with the new title added, and though this was also rejected by Elektra, a similarly looking cover, but of a somewhat lower quality, was quickly created at the last moment.

Also occurring at the last moment was Elektra’s decision to not include the song, “Better Yet”, later released on their third album, due to its lyrics which included lines like “Is there anything you’d rather get than your sugar daddy’s red corvette’ and “Am I better, better, better yet, am I better than a cigarette?” causing the band to quickly come up with “Huntington Beach Baby Blues.”  Notably, also added in that January 18th recording session, was Stuart’s psychedelic-rock version of the chord progression of Irving Berlin’s Blue Skies, with title based on Thelonious Monk’s own version of that same tune titled “In Walked Bud.”  Not censored, were any of the lyrics in “The Hallway Episode”, which included in the chorus,  “I can see, you and me, doing what we want in the hallway.”  The ideas of photo shoots with scantily clad models, as well as the lyrics in “Better Yet” and “The Hallway Episode”, all same quite tame by today’s standards,  would soon become commonplace starting in the 1970s — but for now, Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention excepted, this was still 1969 and Overcast was just another local band trying to make the big time by any means available, quietly giving in to the judgment of a randomly assigned Elektra representative regarding what was appropriate and what was not.  That would soon change with the poor sales of this second album and Elektra’s lack of interest in funding a third album.

all tracks written by Bill Fortney and Douglas Brandt except where noted.

Side A

No.

Title

Length

1.

 “Sand, Wind, Water and You”

5:10

2.

 “Chemistry with Kimberly”

3:22

3.

 “Choice Decisions Left Alone”

3:50

4.

 “Huntington Beach Baby Blues” (Fortney, Brandt, Amato, Stuart)

3:43

5.

 “Pancake Breakfast”

4:47

Side B

No.

Title

Length

6.

 “Another message for the masses”

7:02

7.

 “The Hallway Episode”

3:15

8.

 “Sheila Said”

4:50

9.

 “Twentieth Century Overload”

3:43

10.

 “In Walked Mud” (Trevor Stuart)

3:03

Personnel

Overcast

  • Bill Fortney – guitar, lead vocals
  • Douglas Brandt – bass guitar, vocals
  • Trevor Stuart, hammond organ, electric piano
  • David Amato, drums
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Category:

Fifty Year Friday, Rock

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Fifty Year Friday: Genesis: From Genesis to Revelation; Colosseum: Those Who Are About to Die, Salute You

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Genesis: From Genesis to Revelation

Selling less than 700 copies, Genesis first album was recorded mostly in August 1968 and was released on March 7, 1969.  Poor sales followed, with a significant percentage of the copies hitting small town UK stores, filed incorrectly, partly due to the absence of the band’s name on the cover, in the religious music bin.  Not helping matters was the guidance from British record producer Jonathan King (once best known for his one hit, “Everyone’s Gone to the Moon”, but now known more today as the discoverer of Genesis)  for the band to simplify the arrangements.  The music, though of lesser quality than later Genesis compositions, was further compromised by removal and trimming of solos, particularly Tony Bank’s keyboard solos, and by later adding orchestral accompaniment to what the band thought was the finished takes.  Yet, with all these musical compromises, the album still is worth listening to, particularly for Gabriel’s vocals, Banks keyboard work, and the generally unconventional nature of the songs, which show harmonic, melodic, and lyrical maturity and more or less make up a concept album roughly centered around the contents of Genesis and Revelations.

There are various versions of CDs that include bonus tracks and there is also the fourth CD of the 1998 Genesis: Archives set which includes demos and tracks from this time frame including “The Mystery of the Flannan Isle Lighthouse”, “Hair on the Arms and Legs,” and the “Magic of Time” with Banks providing jazz-influenced piano.  Though overshadowed by the quality of later Gabriel-era Genesis albums, “From Genesis to Revelation” is more than a historical curiosity — it is a collection of fine pop songs that are better than most of the pop music recorded in 1968 and 1969, an era providing some of the best rock music of all time.

Genesis

Additional musicians

  • Chris Stewart – drums on “Silent Sun”
  • Arthur Greenslade – strings and horn arrangement, conducting
  • Lou Warburton – strings and horn arrangement, conducting

Wikipedia track listing

 

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Colosseum: Those Who Are About to Die, Salute You

The basic idea behind blues is rather straightforward with the most common format being the twelve bar blues, consisting of four measures of the tonic chord (triad or seventh built on thirds from the first note of the scale), two measures of the sub-dominant chord (built on the fourth note of the scale), a return of the tonic chord for two measures, followed by two measures of the dominant (build on the fifth note of the scale which pulls strongly towards the return to the tonic, particularly when including the seventh note), followed by two measures of the tonic.

There are many  variations of this, and basically if one has that I chord (tonic), followed by some flavor of that IV chord (subdominant), with a return to the I chord, followed by the V (dominant), and repeating this pattern, whether in 12 bars, 16 bars or some less-common length, whether additional chords are added such as commonly adding the IV chord prior to the V resolving to the I chord, or adding passing chords or substituting related chords, then one has some version of the blues.  The idea here is that we basically have a I-IV-I-V-I progression that repeats for the duration of the song and upon which, if desired, the are multiple avenues for variation on or divergence from the primary blues pattern.

The early American Rock & Roll was primarily blues, the early British Invasion sound included many blues-based numbers, and many bands of the late 1960s, from Cream to the Yardbirds to Ten Years After to Led Zeppelin relied heavily on blues.  It’s then natural to consider blues-based rock to be more traditional rock, with the more varied chordal progressions (chord progressions that venture beyond those notes found in the I, IV and V chords)  including modal-based chord progressions commonly found in psychedelic rock and extended and altered chords commonly found in jazz to be an indication of more adventurous, exploratory, progressive rock.

And it’s natural that many musicians and bands would first start learning blues progressions and develop from there.  And so it was that many rock bands started out as blues-based bands, later developing into psychedelic bands, hard rock bands, acid or heavy metal bands, or even progressive rock bands.

But should a blues-based album sounds like progressive rock?  Or can a progressive rock band be primarily a blues band?

Such a question may be addressed in retrospect looking back at Colosseum’s first album, recorded in late 1968 and early 1968 and released in March of 1969.  At the time, the term progressive rock had yet to be applied as a label with most listeners not even dividing rock music into genres or styles.  The music of that baby boomer generation was simply the music of the times, whether it was rock, or later became to be known as folk-rock, jazz-rock, blues rock, hard rock, acid rock, or psychedelic rock.  The label of progressive rock was yet to be in play. and so what we have with this first Colosseum album, “Those Who Are About to Die, Salute You”, is simply a well-performed rock album

But what a performance.  The songs don’t stand out: all but two are blues numbers, mostly vehicles for blues and jazz-rock-like improvisation — these two exceptions being Greenslade’s “Mandarin”, ironically based on a Japanese scale and incorporating a short blues-like section before launching into an extended Tony Reeves bass solo, and Colosseum’s version of Procol Harum’s “Whiter Shade of Pale”, titled “Beware the Ides of March” which includes a foray into Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue in D minor” with additional improvisation.   The combination of foundational keyboard work by Dave Greenslade, high quality jazz-based sax work by Dick Heckstall-Smith and outstanding guitar from James Litherland make this a very different blues-rock album than that of contemporary rock bands and qualifies this to be classified as progressive rock — though I must admit, I am never sure what that term really means….

Colosseum

Additional personnel

Wikipedia track listing

Category:

1969, Music, Progressive Rock, Rock

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