The Mojo Collection. Various Mojo Magazine
all original Simon compositions, aside from Voices Of Old People, drawn by Garfunkel from taped interviews with OAPs, which is the only jarring note in an otherwise seamless sweep.
Save The Life Of My Child reflects the raucous paranoia of America as the Vietnam war tore the nation apart, and parents everywhere scratched their heads and asked, ‘What’s become of the children?’ It was also one of the first pop songs to use a synthesizer, and probably the first to use a sample – Simon & Garfunkel themselves can be heard singing Sounds Of Silence way down in the mix. America is timeless – a weary, disaffected odyssey – and its pristine production, blank-verse narrative and timely state-of-the-nation reflections ensure that it sounds as fresh in the twenty-first century as it did in 1968. Overs is a bleak catalogue of marital breakdown, while the concluding Old Friends finds Simon reflecting: ‘How terribly strange to be 70’ – not a sentiment shared, or cared-about, by many of his contemporaries at the time.
Never one to be rushed by a deadline, Simon didn’t have enough new songs to complete Bookends, so the second side was padded out with previously released singles. Fakin’ It was a dope-induced contemplation of an earlier life; Hazy Shade Of Winter had been a pounding, atmospheric single in 1967; while At The Zoo was an engaging if none-too-subtle parable – human society symbolised by animals – but all matched Simon & Garfunkel’s exacting standards. The two new songs were the quirky Punky’s Dilemma – which director Mike Nichols rejected for The Graduate – and the song about that film’s mature femme fatale, Mrs Robinson.
Simon & Garfunkel only had complete control of three of the five albums they recorded together, and in many ways Bookends stands as their finest moment. The duo stood in charge of the production and overall sound, and were eager to leave the formulas of pop-production and willing to experiment, which may help to explain the album’s timeless quality. It was to be two years before there was another Simon & Garfunkel album, the all-conquering but, by comparison to Bookends, a little sterile Bridge Over Troubled Water.
Harper’s Bizarre
The Secret Life Of …
A much underrated vocal group, smooth but perverse.
Record label: Warner Brothers
Produced: Lenny Waronker
Recorded: Hollywood; early 1968
Released: May 1968
Chart peaks: None (UK) None (US)
Personnel: Dick Yount (b, v); John Peterson (d, v); Ted Templeman (g, t, v); Dick Scoppettone (g, v); Gloria Jones, Carolyn Willis and Sherlie Matthews (v, gospel choir)
Track listing: Look To The Rainbow; Battle Of New Orleans; When I Was A Cowboy; Interlude; Sentimental Journey; Las Manitas; Bye Bye Bye/Vine Street; Me Japanese Boy; Interlude; I’ll Build A Stairway To Paradise; Green Apple Tree; Sit Down You’re Rocking The Boat; Interlude; I Love You Mama; Funny How Love Can Be; Mad; Look To The Rainbow; The Drifter; Reprise
Running time: 33.52
Current CD: Sundazed SC6178 adds: Both Sides Now; Small Talk
Further listening: Feelin’ Groovy: The Best Of Harper’s Bizarre (1997), which includes the magical Witchi-Tai-To
Further reading: There’s next to nothing available, although the 16-page booklet enclosed with the above CD contains an informative interview with Lenny Waronker. www.sundazed.com/artists/ harp-ers. html is the site for Sundazed, the label who have reissued their back catalogue
Download: Not currently legally available
Marshmallow rock, soft and ultra-sweet. Maybe they shouldn’t have added up to anything much – they didn’t even boast a strong line in harmonies. But Harper’s Bizarre possessed an indefinable something that set them apart from most other groups of the period.
Certainly everyone worthwhile at Warners thought so. Randy Newman pitched in to help them; so too did heavy-hitters Nick De Caro, Bob Thompson, Van Dyke Parks and Leon Russell. In their easy-on-the-ear way, Harper’s Bizarre were ahead of the game, adventurous. They’d started out as The Tikis, a Santa Cruz band. Then, during 1966, they settled down as five-piece Harper’s Bizarre (guitarist Eddie James having gone AWOL). They were still a young outfit – Scoppettone was 21 and Templeman 22 when they cut their debut album Feelin’ Groovy, which gave them an immediate hit with a fizzy version of Simon & Garfunkel’s 59th Street Bridge Song.
That first album set the mould. It included new songs from Parks and Newman, plus Happy Talk (from South Pacific) and, even dottier, a less-than-two-minutes-long rendition of Prokofiev’s Peter And The Wolf. Anything Goes (1967) proved similarly diverse – Chattanooga Choo Choo, along with Van Dyke Parks’s much-heralded High Coin. The stage was set for The Secret Life. This time around, the song selection was woven into a kind of Walter Mittyish dream sequence. Set against a recurring backdrop provided by Burton Lane and Yip Harburg’s wistful Look To The Rainbow, the foursome sang of riding with cowboys, the battle of New Orleans, of building a stairway to paradise and other exploits that were hardly workaday and not exactly brimming with the radical spirit of ’68.
The ultimate in melodic escapism, the album did little for the group’s career and, in the wake of Harper’s Bizarre 4 (1970) – which featured contributions from Ry Cooder and Jack Nitzche – the group split, Templeton moving on to become an A&R mainman and significant producer at WEA. In 1976 the original line-up, minus Templeton, regrouped for a fifth album, As Time Goes By. But though some of the old idiosyncrasies remained – a theme from the New World Symphony rubbed shoulders with Back In The Saddle Again – the group’s distinctive sound had, somewhere along the way, evaporated.
Iron Butterfly
In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida
Herein the Iliad and Odyssey of heavy metal jamming.
Record label: Atco
Produced: Jim Hilton
Recorded: Gold Star Studios, Hollywood, California and Ultra-Sonic Studios, Hempstead, Long Island; spring 1968
Released: June 14, 1968 (UK) July 25, 1968 (US)
Chart peaks: None (UK) 4 (US)
Personnel: Doug Ingle (k, v); Ron Bushy (d); Lee Dorman (b, v); Erik Brann (g, v)
Track listing: Most Anything You Want; Flowers And Beads; My Mirage; Termination; Are You Happy; In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida
Running time: 36.00
Current CD: Atlantic 8122721962
Further listening: Heavy (1968) deluxe re-issue, Iron Butterfly: In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida (1996) includes three versions of the song – the original epic, the single and a live version – plus all original album tracks
Further reading: www.ironbutterfly.com (official)
Download: Some tracks available on iTunes
Technically speaking, there was no Iron Butterfly on the night the band christened the glorified riff that would become its biggest hit and ticket to immortality. The band had already made one album, Heavy, but because of disputes between its producers and Atlantic and between members of the band, Iron Butterfly were no longer airborne. While the two remaining members, keyboardist Doug Ingle and drummer Ron Bushy, looked for new members, things grew so dire that Bushy was actually hawking pizza at a Sunset Strip nightclub. One night, upon returning to the apartment he shared with Ingle, Bushy found his roommate in a state of delirium. Not only had he been up for nearly two