Odds And Sods: George Harrison - Party Seacombe

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   I dedicate this post to George Harrison who passed away on this date ten years ago. His last words: "Love one another".

  Harrison's  Wonderwall Music , released on November 1st of 1968--three weeks before The White Album , is considered by many to be the first Beatles solo album. ( Those people would be Beatle fans and Beatle buffs. Beatle fanatics would argue that McCartney's 1967 "The Family Way" soundtrack was first).

Wonderwall Music IS actually a soundtrack to a little seen 1968 film starring Jane Birkin. At the time Harrison --like Lennon--was playing with tape loops. Most of the album was recorded with Indian musicians already on hand for the Beatles "Lady Madonna" B-side "The Inner Light", but Eric Clapton, Ringo Starr and even The Monkees' Peter Tork played on one or more cuts using pseudonyms (Ringo was "Richie Snare" - a terrific name for a cat). Harrison himself did not play on the album. ( So there's a bar bet for you: who was the only Beatle to play on George Harrison's Wonderwall Music? The answer is Ringo Starr.)

  Our track, "Party Seacombe", is a first cousin ,once-removed of the Magical Mystery Tour cut "Flying". At 4:37 it's probably twice as much melotron as you need, but there you go.

George from the liner notes of Wonderwall Music

#46 Bobby Womack - California Dreamin' (1968)

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Bobby Womack wrote The Rolling Stones' first UK number one, "Its All Over Now" and co-wrote his own #1 R&B hit "Woman's Gotta Have It". But in 1968, he recorded this sublime cover of The Mamas and The Papas "California Dreamin'" for his debut album Fly Me To The Moon. I heard it just a month or so before I saw the disturbing 2009 British film Fish Tank, where the main character, a spunky chick named Mia, dances to it for an audition. One listen and you'll wonder where the sunshine went.

Odds and Sods: James Taylor - Knocking 'Round the Zoo (1968)

James Taylor with sister Kate in October 1968

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With the weekly "Odds and Sods" posts, we look at some of rock's oddest songs.


For such a sensitive and brooding singer-songwriter whose lyrics confess to all kinds of melancholy, James Taylor--to his credit-- never sounds like he's whining. Even when it came to his most personal songs.
Known as "Moose" at Milton Academy, a prestigious boarding school, the tall, rail thin 17-year old grew despondent and became suicidal so he checked himself into the McLean Hospital, a mental home in Belmont, MA.

                                                        McLean Hospital today


The brick buildings were the same as at Milton but there were screens (not bars) on the windows and hospital personnel counted up the silverware each night to make sure nobody was concealing a potential weapon.

Just knocking around the zoo on a Thursday afternoon
There's bars on all the windows and they're counting up the spoons
And if I'm feeling edgy there's a chick who's paid to be my slave
But she'll hit me with a needle if she thinks I'm trying to misbehave

Taylor praised his McLean experience in a Time Magazine article:
    "We didn't have that jive nothingness that pushes most kids through high school, " he said. "You can't tell a whole bunch of potential suicides that they must have a high school diploma."

  Nevertheless, Taylor earned his high school diploma at McLean which would become something of a very expensive ( at $30,000/year) tradition. Both brother Livingston and sister Kate also spent some time "knocking 'round the zoo."
The song appears on Taylor's first album, James Taylor,  which was recorded at Trident Studios at the same time The Beatles were recording The White Album. In fact both Paul McCartney and George Harrison played on that album's version of "Carolina In My Mind". It was released on The Beatles' Apple Records label.

Odds And Sods: I've Decided To Join the Air Force Today

                                      The Bee Gees I've Decided to Join the Air Force

From the 1968 album that included the hit singles "I've Gotta Get a Message to You" and "I Started a Joke" comes a song that may have seemed out of place at the height of the Vietnam War... but when, thanks to the draft,  push comes to shove:

   I've seen my friends and they all agree/
   That it's better than joining the army or going to sea


To be honest I'm trying to figure out what to do with this music blog. I enjoy finding buried treasures from the 60's and 70's but The Rising Storm already does a superb job of that. I could offer a series of songs based on a theme but Star Maker Machine ( which I contribute to) and For The Sake of The Song are both brilliant blogs by people who know far more than I do.
    So , for now, I think I will take my cue from my days at my college station where we played anything and everything.
 By the way, if you like what you hear let me know. And please buy the record!!!!

#39 Alzo and Udine -C'Mon and Joins Us! 1968

Some "strum and be happy" pop from the NYC combo Alzo and  Udine captures the sunny hippy vibe of the late 60's with a dash of latin soul and a guitar riff borrowed from Archie Bell and The Drells.




     Little is known about childhood friends Alzo Fronte (born Alfred Affrunti) and Udine ( whose birth name may have been Ali Noor Uddi) except that they originally recorded together as Keepers of the Light with Brill Building songwriter Jeff Barry producing. With Udine sidetracked by drugs, Alzo continued recording as a solo artist with little commercial success.

Eventually he and his wife opened up a store selling "new furniture made in the old ways". Village Chairs and Wares is still there in Port Jefferson, NY. The couple were featured in House Beautiful in the late 90's. In 2004, just as a Japanese reissue of Alzo and  Udine led to the duo's rediscovery, Alzo died of a heart attack in a local restaurant.



I've got that Japanese reissue and all I can say is that sunny hippy vibe shines throughout the album. But it's a bit of a one trick pony. Nearly every song has the "Tighten Up" guitar riff.

We Are Normal And We Want Our Freedom

As I listened to the opening track of comedy-rockers The Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band's second album ,The Doughnut in Granny's Greenhouse, I heard a familiar refrain.
Check it out about two minutes in when the tune finally takes off.
"We are normal and we want our freedom".
It's a line you'll hear towards the very end of Love's "The Red Telephone".( About 4:11 in)

The Bonzo album came out exactly a year after Forever Changes.
Doughnut's album cover somewhat resembling the Incredible String Band's Hangman's Beautiful Daughter

Nobody at work or home would care that I made this connection so I'm laying this turd right here. Enjoy!

#10 Merrilee Rush "Angel of the Morning" 1968

It is June 1968.
An assassin guns down another Kennedy.
Police arrest Martin Luther King Jr's killer.
War rages in Vietnam.
And racing up the pop charts is a steamy million-selling love song about a one night stand, "Angel of the Morning", by Seattle singer Merrilee Rush.

"The lyric was revolutionary for its time." Merrilee says, "Because this hasn't been said this way before. It was an overnight stand but it was said beautifully."

And sung beautifully by Rush, a dazzling brunette Johnny Cash called "the prettiest, sweetest apple the state of Washington ever produced."


"I was the Marlo Thomas of Rock n Roll," She laughs.

More than 40 years after that Grammy nominated performance, Merrilee has still got it. The voice. The stage presence. The mile wide smile. But she spends most of her time, these days, with her first true loves: her English sheepdogs. She bought her first sheepdog with babysitting money.

"I don't breed a lot, " she says. " but I've been breeding for 25 years and handling in the show room for 23 years and I love it. When you have a great moving dog that's really put together
and flows with you it's just my happy place!"

Her other happy place is an old dairy farm where her grandparents once lived. The cows are gone and so is the barn.

"And the outhouse," She points out. "I used to go in the outhouse .I was a mere child and I'd have to get up in the middle of the night, go out in the dark and I'd have to go to the outhouse."

A shy girl growing up, Merrilee had to be coaxed to front the bands she played in. Those were the days of bold patterned dresses and not one but two sets of false eyelashes.

"I was groovy." she laughs.

How groovy? Check out this 1969 clip from The Johnny Cash show.



Merrilee says looking back it all seems so foreign. Of course there were supposed to be other hits but that meant playing a game Merrilee wasn't interested in.

"I hated Vegas." she said."I hated the whole 'do the same thing three times a night every night'. There's no creativity. There's no room to move."

Now , with the farm she shares with musician husband Billy Mac and all those shaggy angels by her side, Merrilee has plenty of room.

Every so often she gets up on stage and sings her old hit, written incidentally by Jon Voight's brother Chip Taylor ( who also wrote "Wild Thing" for the Troggs).

The fans she considers most special? That's easy.

"The Vietnam vets that were over there at the time," She says."There was one fellow who said 'Yeah we played that before we'd fly out in the morning and some of them would tear up just talking about that period and that song so that means a lot."

By the way Merrilee is no angel of the morning. She's more of a night owl and prefers to sleep in.