The Easybeats: Album by Album Thread (pt2)

Continued from here:

The Easybeats: Album by Album Thread

 

yay we got to part 2 ! with Good times was it ever said why Steve Marriott was hanging out with them?

 

Who'd'a thunk a humble Easybeats thread would make a second part???

 

I is truly amazed

 

And we've still got two years to go!

 

'Lay Me Down and Die'/'See Line Woman' (Australia Parlophone A-8571)

Released: November 1968 (Australia)
Recorded:'Lay Me Down and Die' - 1968, 'See Line Woman' - Early 1967 (Olympic Recording Studios, London).
Producer: The Easybeats & Mike Vaughan (uncredited), 'See Line Woman' Shel Talmy (uncredited).



With the pairing 'Good Times' with 'Land of Make Believe' in Australia, Alberts chose to release its international B-side as it's own single. Releasing the instrumental as an A-side was a strange move indeed. Not surprisingly; the single sold poorly. A vocal version would later surface in Australia in 1975 on the Drum reissue of The Best of The Easybeats Volume 2 (see post #945 in Part 1). The single's b-side was still unreleased Good Friday/Friday On My Mind track 'See Line Woman'. The version that appeared on the single was the unique U.S. mono mix. This version is without the psychedelic delays and reverbs of the well known stereo mix (see post #377 in Part 1).

 

It's claimed that it's The Small Faces playing soccer with the group in Easy Come Easy Go, if ture, then clearly they knew each around that time.

 

"The Easybeats are slowly drowning, and they are reaching for the proverbial straw, this record, a straw which can either give (a flop) or hold (a hit)."

 

Here's a tweeked close up of the review Jae just posted (Go-Set Nov 27, 1968):



Ouch!

 

Where were Alberts' heads at releasing this as a single? They could have picked an album track from Vigil (Fancy Seeing You Here, What In The World, I Can't Stand It, Bring A Little Lovin') and put 'Lay Me Down To Die' as a B-side. E.P's were still selling in Australia - they could of had a Vigil era E.P. with 'See Line Woman':

Easyfever Vol 3 (hey! why not )

Side A

'Good Times'
'Lay Me Down To Die'

Side B

'Land of Make Belive'
'See Line Woman'

 

Well done lads.
If there has been a better thread profiling a band's career/output on this forum then I would love to see it (mind you I am a relative newbie).

 

Backtracking slightly......... About the same time that Tony Bonner unleashed his vocal talents on the world, back in the UK, Scottish pop outfit Marmalade issued their own debut album "There's a Lot of It About" (CBS 63414) to build on the sales of their two 1968 hit singles.



Among the tunes included on an album largely drawn from tracks previously released as or once considered for single release was a driving arrangement of a Vanda and Young song from The Easybeats' abandoned 1967 album. "Station on Third Avenue" was thus the fifth song from those sessions to appear (after "Good Times", "My Old Man's a Groovy Old Man", "Land of Make Believe" and "We'll Make It Together"). It was a powerful rocking effort with an amusing lyric, and if Marmalade's reading lacked the guts of The Easybeats' version, it was still a creditable performance and might well have been pressed into service as the next single had they not decided to cover The Beatles' "Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da" instead. The album sold slowly but steadily into 1969 without quite reaching the top twenty albums chart, generating much needed funds for the Vanda and Young households, while The Easybeats' own version sat in the can until it appeared on the 1977 archive set "The Shame Just Drained".

Across the Channel in France, the recent hit version of "Bring a Little Lovin' " by Los Bravos was adapted into French as "Un petit peu d'amour" for the final EP by yé-yé chanteuse Katty Line (LGL 2001).



Sadly this was not a hit, despite a major media push for the singer, who was touted as a newcomer to watch, despite having had two local hits a couple of years earlier! The lead track on the EP was "Igor Natacha", an adaptation of Manfred Mann's "Country Dancing", but it was the Vanda and Young song that stood out and came closest to the danceable pop sound of her earlier records, thanks to an arrangement cribbed straight from Los Bravos. Even so, issued the wrong side of the cataclysmic events of May 1968, the record flopped and frustrated by her lack of success, Line relocated to Italy the following year.

Over the Alps in Line's future home, November saw local pop stars Equipe 84 rising into the top five with an Italian-language adaptation of The Honeybus's "I Can't Let Maggie Go". Tucked away on the flipside of the single (Ricordi SRL 10510) was a tune titled "Nella terra dei sogni", which turned out to be an adaptation of The Easybeats' recent single "Land of Make Believe". (A Youtube clip of this version was included on post # 535).




The band's arrangement was clearly modelled on the original, even borrowing the unique string effects only found on The Easybeats' Italian single, and would likely have been a huge hit had it not been stuck in the shadows behind its massively popular running mate. Still, a B-side sells just as well as the A-side (which peaked at # 4), and once again, the royalties that flowed into The Easybeats' camp would not have gone amiss.

 

A rockin' version indeed!

 

According to the George Young interview in "Rolling Stone" in 1976, The Easybeats and The Small Faces were quite friendly. The Small Faces did make a guest appearance in the film "Easy Come Easy Go" (aka "Somewhere Between Heaven and Woolworths"), and as far as "Good Times" is concerned, The Small Faces were recording at Olympic about the same time as The Easybeats, so I guess one thing just led to another.

 

''





That copyright is an interesting one. The Italian single of LOMB lists just Harry and George (see below):

 

I assume Vandelli did the Italian lyric.

 

Your right. Maurizio Vandelli was the lead singer of Equipe 84

http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurizio_Vandelli_(cantante)



Here's a cool clip of them performing an Italian translation of Nancy Sinatra's 'Bang Bang'.

 

I couldn't find any clips of Equipe 84 singing LOMB, but I did find this sweet karaoke version.

 

...and finally, Italian covers act Cioccolati Riciclati Band performing it.

 

Quite well known in Italy then!

 

So, after the mixed success that greeted the "Land of Make Believe" / "Good Times" single in Australia, and after the rather mixed review in "Go-Set" in post #9 above, how did the new single fare?

Sadly, the truth is - not very well. Only two cities took to it, with Melbourne, Perth and Adelaide all giving it a miss. The record showed up first in Brisbane, where the band's last single had made the top five. "Lay Me Down and Die" was the listed side, entering the chart (according to Gavin Ryan's combined listing) on 30th November and rising steadily to a peak of just # 24. Further down the coast in Sydney, the record (listed as a double-sider, with "See Line Woman" joining "Lay Me Down and Die") popped up a week later on 6th December but failed to get any higher than # 42 in Gavin Ryan's retrospective chart (radio station 2UW - owned by Alberts - listed it for six consecutive weeks at #39; see here: http://www.las-solanas.com/arsa/charts_item.php?hsid=85278, here: http://www.las-solanas.com/arsa/charts_item.php?hsid=38999 and here: http://www.las-solanas.com/arsa/charts_item.php?hsid=85273). And that, as far as this single went, was that.

Meanwhile, over in the U.S., where "Good Times" was not released as a single until January 1969, it was almost but not completely ignored. It did make it into the top 40 in Birmingham, Alabama (see here: http://www.las-solanas.com/arsa/charts_view.php?svid=5730) but everywhere else, it died a death.

 

I can't understand the reason why Alberts didn't released the vocal version of "Lay Me Down And Die" instead of instrumental, Vocal version is one of the best Easybeats songs, in my humble opinion. The crescendo on the last verse of the song is a Vanda-Young songwriting trademark.

 

Agreed. My one-time Australian contact-on-the-inside (now sadly deceased) told me that the vocal version was submitted as a publishing demo for other artists' consideration (and probably went to Staeb in the UK for that purpose as well). For whatever reason, the group deemed it unworthy of record release at the time and it later came out only by tape mistake on the Drum "Best of Vol 2" reissue. If anybody else ever actually covered it, I never heard about it. Gareth?

 

Well that is one of the great mysteries of The Easybeats catalogue (among many). The vocal version wasn't officially released until 1975 on the Drum reissue of The Best of The Easybeats Volume 2. Given that this was 6 six years after the band officially spilt up - the original purpose of the vocal mix is unclear. We can tell that the vocal version is the same recording as the instrumental track. But it's hard to tell whether or not the vocal take was done after the backing track was mixed or was it part of the original tape and muted in the mix for the released instrumental version. We have two likely scenarios here:

1. The instrumental mix was released as the b-side to 'Good Times'. Vanda and Young thought they could repackage the song as a vocal track for other artists so they recorded a new lead vocal over the existing instrumental mix (or remixed the track, now including the original vocal). Either way, the track was not meant for public release. It was just a reference demo for other artists who wanted to cover the song.
   
   
2. The group thought they could re-use the song by recording (or adding back to the mix) a lead vocal. The mix was created but, for what ever reason, never used.