Why, it seems like only yesterday [cue harp and wavy, out-of-focus visuals] when you could pore over an album's liner notes and not have to squint to garner an embarrassment of riches and a treasure trove of tidbits...
There’s no all-out fury in some of the minor-key moodiness of the Zombies, perhaps, but the sound of organ-laced hyperventilating intensity emanating from the lower-profile British Invaders in their swan song psychedelic-tinged Odessey And Oracle from 1969 at least signifies something Bardic: “Sound, and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not./ Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments/ Will hum about mine ears; and sometimes voices.”
Due attribution and acknowledgment is extended in the mixed-use liner notes to an accommodating and blurb-worthy “Will" Shakespeare — the “not flatmate of [bass player] Chris [White] — for his contribution to the sleeve note.” One Terry Quirk, it may as well be noted — who actually is the flat mate of Chris and not, say, of the long-dead playwright — created the paisley-esque flashback happening of an album cover for the fondly remembered hit-makers of “She’s Not There,” “Tell Her No" - and, after a lull in the Billboard action (despite never-wavering productivity), one other unexpected big-time late-breaker single that was definitely not too little, though certainly too late.
But who had time for Top 10 trivialities, rife with lowest common proclivities? This was the time of Rock Music As Art, and Beatles songs displayed, according to one Deadly Profound New York Times critic, such Mahler-ian features as "major tonic sevenths and ninths built into their tunes, and the flat submediant key switches, so natural in the Aeolian cadence.”
Who knew? The Zombies acknowledge with chagrin such high seriousness to an extent, then sexy-sadie it out the studio door. Some A&R guy stuck a pen and paper under head Zombie Rod Argent’s nose and he came up with this Mission Statement of sorts:
- Really music is a very personal thing; it’s the product of a person’s experiences. Since no two people have been exactly alike, each writer has something unique to say. That makes anything which is not just a copy of something else worth listening to.
But then, going for broke as the Zombies go for a baroque-pop masterwork, he makes such high-falutin’ pronouncements palatable with a bit of drollery in briefly recounting how the group, “laden with gifts of fruits and nuts from the Orient,” confronted the CBS suits and “with smarm and charm extracted, astonished, the finance necessary to, compose, arrange, perform, produce and cover an LP ourselves, with no outside help or interference.”
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