♫OK, we’ll stop now, thisa
rhyming thing’s getting out of hand, so here’s this week’s top five: the
weirdest things to do when somebody leaves your band!
5) Replace the group member whose left
with another one who left the year before and who leaves again just weeks later
(The Byrds 1967): Yep, when David Crosby was kicked out of the Byrds for a
variety of reasons in late 1967 who do you think they got to replace him? Gene
Clark, the tambourinist and chief songwriter who left in 1966 after coming up
with the lyrics to ‘8 Miles High’. How did the band think that would work? If
Crosby couldn’t keep up with the ‘in team’ of McGuinn and Hillman then there’s
no way Gene could the second time round – this is, after all, the same band
who’d come up with the sniping ‘Psychodrama City’, a legendary 1967 outtake
poking fun at their former mainstay with the lines ‘I don’t know why he got on
at all if he really didn’t want to fly!’ And so, after just a few weeks back
with his old group and before any live shows or ‘proper’ recordings had taken place,
Gene was out. Again.
4) Record all of the songs the group
member has been trying so hard to place on an album – months after firing him
(Jefferson Airplane, 1967): Very few collectors of the cult group Moby Grape
remember that guitarist Skip Spence had actually been the drummer in the first
line up of the Jefferson Airplane (a multi-instrumentalist, Skip became the
drummer because band leader Marty Balin thought he ‘looked like one’, a weird
musical decision in itself!) Even fewer know that the band recorded two of
Skip’s songs, although only the teeth-grindingly awful ‘My Best Friend’ ever
made it to record in their life-span (on 1967’s ‘Surrealistic Pillow’ – the
originally unreleased ‘JPP McStep B Blues’ is its superior in every way and one
of the best Jefferson outtakes). Both recordings were made with Skip’s
successor Spencer Dryden on drums, by the way, and neither song was taken with
Skip to Moby Grape when he left. Truly weird.
3) Replace a band member with a horse!
(The Byrds, 1968): Sometime after the Gene Clark thing failed the band decided
to rub David Crosby’s nose in it further by replacing Crosby’s face with...a
horse! (For those who don’t know it, the cover of 1968’s Notorious Byrd
Brothers – the album that is filled up with a good third of Crosby co-writes
and features his playing on about half the album – features drummer Michael
Clarke holding the reigns of a horse who is peeping out of the 4th
window of a house where Crosby’s face should be). The band giggled that the
horse would be a suitable replacement as he was just as talented and made less
fuss or something to the same words – Crosby was furious. It’s a wonder he
didn’t name his next group ‘Crosby, Stills, Nash and Mcguinn/Hillman The
Horse’.
2) Record a single entitled ‘Brian is
Back’ – when your main member is doing his best to quite the group (Beach Boys
1976). I’m so glad I don’t have a cousin like Mike Love. The mid-70s
incarnation of Brian Wilson was at his lowest ebb – his group hadn’t released
an album for 3 years, he had little money coming in hardly met with the band at
all except for taking drugs with younger brother Dennis and spent approximately
99% of his time in bed, with the duvet over his eyes. So what does Brian’s
cousin Mike do next? He gets a new record deal by promising that Brian will be
more active in the band’s music-making from now on – and records a thankfully
unreleased single ‘Brian Is Back’ to celebrate the moment (on which Brian is
too ill to appear and which features the terrible tag line ‘but in my heart
he’s always been around’). Ah, family love.
1) Replace your two talented
keyboardists with two cocktail waitresses who have no prior experience of the
music business whatsoever (Human League, circa 1980). The all-new all-singing
all-dancing Human League are quite a different kettle of fish to the original
serious, electronic, all-out pioneers that the original trio line-up were. But
when Ian Craig Marsh and Martin Ware fell out with Phil Oakey and decided to
set up Heaven 17, the singer saw it as a great opportunity to re-brand his
group. Recognising that the ‘old’ League audience were overwhelmingly male, and
wanting to make them more ‘mainstream’, he decided to bring in a female singer
– upping the number to two when he realised how rotten it would be for a single
female member travelling in a road bus with five males. So the lines in ‘Don’t
You Want Me?’ about a cocktail waitress are true – that’s where he found his
latest members working.
So that’s it for another week (but we’ll
be back soon – don’t sit there and weep!) See ya Readers!
A NOW COMPLETE List Of Top Five/Top Ten/TOP TWENTY Entries 2008-2019
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Following on from last issue’s study of the American Billboard charts, here’s a look at which AAA albums spent the most weeks on the chart. The...
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223) AAA Grammy Nominees http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2014/02/aaa-grammy-nominees-top-twelve-news.html
224) Ten AAA songs that are better heard unedited and in full http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2014/02/ten-aaa-songs-that-are-better-unedited.html
225) The shortest gaps between AAA albums http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2014/01/the-shortest-gaps-between-aaa-albums.html
226) The longest gaps between AAA albums http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2014/02/the-longest-gaps-between-aaa-albums.html
227) Top ten AAA drummers http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2014/03/top-ten-aaa-drummers-news-views-and.html
228) Top Ten AAA Singles (In Terms of 'A' and 'B' Sides) http://www.alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/top-ten-aaa-singles-and-b-sides-news.html
229) The Stories Behind Six AAA Logos http://www.alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/the-stories-behind-six-aaa-logos.html
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232) AAA Granamas - Sorry, Anagrams! http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/aaa-anagrams-news-views-and-music-issue.html
233) AAA Surnames and Their Meanings http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/aaa-surnames-and-their-meanings-news.html
234) 20 Erroneous AAA Album Titles http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/twenty-erroneous-aaa-album-titles-news.html
235) The Best AAA Orchestral Arrangements http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/fifteen-great-aaa-string-parts-news.html
236) Top 30 Hilariously Misheard Album Titles/Lyrics http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/top-thirty-hilariously-misheard-aaa.html
237) Ten controversial AAA sackings - and whether they were right http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/ten-controversial-aaa-sackings-news.html
238) A Critique On Critiquing - In Response To Brian Wilson http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/a-critique-on-critiquing-in-response-to.html
239) The Ten MusicianS Who've Played On The Most AAA Albums http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/the-ten-musicians-whove-played-on-most.html
240) Thoughts on #CameronMustGo http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/thoughts-on-cameronmustgo.html
241) Random Recent Purchases (Kinks/Grateful Dead/Nils Lofgren/Rolling Stones/Hollies) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/six-random-recent-purchases-kinksg.html
242) AAA Christmas Number Ones http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/aaa-christmas-number-ones.html
243) AAA Review Of The Year 2014 (Top Releases/Re-issues/Documentaries/DVDs/Books/Songs/ Articles plus worst releases of the year) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/aaa-review-of-year-2014.html
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245) Why The Tory 2015 Victory Seems A Little...Suspicious http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/why-tory-victory-seems-deeply.html
246) A Plea For Peace and Tolerance After The Attacks on Paris - and Syria http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/a-plea-for-peace-and-toleration.html
247) AAA Review Of The Year 2015 http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2015/12/the-aaa-review-of-year-2015.html
248) The Fifty Most Read AAA Articles (as of December 31st 2015) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/the-fifty-most-read-aaa-posts-2008-2015.html
249) The Revised AAA Crossword! http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2016_07_10_archive.html
251) Half-A-Dozen Berries Plus One (An AAA Tribute To Chuck Berry) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2017/03/an-aaa-covers-tribute-to-chuck-berry.html
254) Guest Post: ‘Supertramp – Some Things Never Change’ by Kenny Brown https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2018/06/guest-review-supertramp-some-things.html
255) AAA Review Of The Year 2018 https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2018/12/the-aaa-review-of-year-2018.html
256) AAA Review Of The Year 2019 plus Review Of The Decade 2010-2019 https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2019/12/the-alans-album-archives-review-of-year.html
257) Tiermaker https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2019/06/alans-album-archives-on-tiermaker.html
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