Just a quickie to-day as I’ve posted a couple of times about Victory Garden before:
Mp3: Victory Garden – Enough or Adolf
Friday recycling: Victory Garden
Originally by Red Krayola on their second LP “God Bless the Red Krayola and All Who Sail With It” in 1968
Galaxie 500 released it on the b-side of their Blue Thunder single, and it has more recently been on the CD reissues of On Fire.
MP3: Galaxie 500 – Victory Garden (live in The Netherlands, 1989)
Translucent Carriages was recorded for Pearls Before Swine’s second album Balaklava in 1968.
Damon & Naomi’s cover version was first released on the Magic Eye Singles Pearls Before Swine tribute album “For The Dead in Space” in 1997 and subseuqntly turned up on the following years Playback Simgers.
MP3: Damon & Naomi – Translucent Carriages
You can read a bit more about my encounters with Pearls Before Swine’s Tom Rapp here. Tom has also previously turned up in the Originals series covering Bob Dylan’s I Shall Be Released with Damon & Naomi at 1997′s first Terrastock festival.
Bonus: Here’s a track I didn’t include in the Originals series because it didn’t really fit.
MP3: Tom Rapp – After The Goldrush (originally by Neil Young, produced by Damon and with Naomi on backing vocals)
I’m taking a guess that Dean Wareham most likely came to Time by Nancy Sinatra’s version… I know I did. All my (admittedly rather slack) research has revealed that Time songwriter Michael Merchant wrote Time. And that’s about it. A few folk recorded in 1966, including…
Time – Nancy Sinatra (1966)
Time – Cher (1966)
Time – Carol Deene (1967)
Time – Glen Campbell (1969)
Dean Wareham’s side project Cagney and Lacee recorded the sonmg for a single on Terry Tolkin’s No.6 Records in 1995
MP3: Time – Cagney and Lacee (1995)
OK, quick bonus entry… just in case you thought I might not have covered this song in enough detail already!
In last week’s Originals post I pointed out that the original of This Changing World was actually the b-side of the 1968 Monaco entry in the Eurovision Song Contest, and was therefore too obscure for the internet to provide a version to listen to…
Well, not any more. Where Spotify and YouTube failed, eBay came up trumps, so here is the original of This Changing World, a song that even Damon & Naomi didn’t realise they had covered!
@grange85 hey claudine ripped that arrangement off as much as we did hers!
— Damon K (@dada_drummer) June 30, 2014
thanks to @grange85 we get to hear the original of a song we covered on More Sad Hits (we copped it from Claudine) http://t.co/jQY0YuSacR
— Damon K (@dada_drummer) June 30, 2014
OK… this one took a bit of work. Another track that was in my database with the words “information required” … since I added it I guess I stopped looking (even though the internet got so much better since the 1990s), probably to the point where I may even have forgotten that it wasn’t a Damon & Naomi original… although the French opening should have kept tipping me off.
Even now it wasn’t simply a matter of typing the title (or some lyrics) into Google or Spotify, no this took a bit of serious Google-ing to get any sort of history for This Changing World… and what I have must not be considered in any way authoritative.
The original notes on my original Shimmy Disc copy of More Sad Hits (not to hand) must have credited the track to “J. C. Oliver” as that’s how the song exists in the database. This undoubtedly contributed to my failed earlier research. J. C. Oliver is Jean-Claude Oliver (although Discogs suggests he’s sometimes credited as Olivier). The recent 20|20|20 reissue of More Sad Hits credits the song to Oliver/Spyropolus/Valade … this gave me a little more to go on.
I eventually tracked a version of the song down to Claudine Longet’s 1970 album “Run Wild, Run Free” where the song was named “This Changing World (De l’automne a l’automne)” which was very similar to Damon & Naomi’s version and was clearly the version that D&N covered.
MP3: This Changing World (De l’automne a l’automne)
Claudine Longet has had an eventful live. She was married to Andy Williams, and later was convicted of accidentally shooting her boyfriend – there’s plenty on the internet about her, I haven’t gone much beyond her Wikipedia page for now.
All sorted then?
Not for me? While this was the version that Damon & Naomi covered it clearly wasn’t really the original.
In 1968, French duo Line et Willy represented Monaco in The Eurovision Song Contest with a song called “À chacun sa chanson” which was written by… J. C. Oliver and R. Valade, two of the three names on the More Sad Hits reissue. A bit more poking around found an EP of Line et Willy’s Eurovision song, and on that EP was De l’automne a l’automne, also written by Oliver and Valade.
Jean-Claude Oliver (or Olivier) was the composer and Roger Valade wrote the lyrics to the song.
Sadly I haven’t managed to track down a version of Line et Willy’s original but if anyone has it please do let me know!
The third name was that of Diana Spyropolus who wrote the English lyrics for the second half of Claudine Longet’s cover – I haven’t managed to uncover much more about Ms Spyropolus – although I guess it could be this one … but the 20 year gap between This Changing World and those books suggests otherwise).
Damon & Naomi’s version was the closing track on their fantastic debut album More Sad Hits.
So, This Changing World was the b-side of the song that came seventh in the 1968 Eurovision song contest … that’s pretty obscure…
… although not as obscure as the b-side of the song that came fifth in a song for Norway in 1976.
Hmmm I think I may have gone a little too in-depth there!