Читать книгу The Mojo Collection - Various Mojo Magazine - Страница 127

Record label: Warner Brothers

Produced: Lenny Waronker

Recorded: Hollywood; early 1968

Released: May 1968

Chart peaks: None (UK) None (US)

Personnel: Dick Yount (b, v); John Peterson (d, v); Ted Templeman (g, t, v); Dick Scoppettone (g, v); Gloria Jones, Carolyn Willis and Sherlie Matthews (v, gospel choir)

Track listing: Look To The Rainbow; Battle Of New Orleans; When I Was A Cowboy; Interlude; Sentimental Journey; Las Manitas; Bye Bye Bye/Vine Street; Me Japanese Boy; Interlude; I’ll Build A Stairway To Paradise; Green Apple Tree; Sit Down You’re Rocking The Boat; Interlude; I Love You Mama; Funny How Love Can Be; Mad; Look To The Rainbow; The Drifter; Reprise

Running time: 33.52

Current CD: Sundazed SC6178 adds: Both Sides Now; Small Talk

Further listening: Feelin’ Groovy: The Best Of Harper’s Bizarre (1997), which includes the magical Witchi-Tai-To

Further reading: There’s next to nothing available, although the 16-page booklet enclosed with the above CD contains an informative interview with Lenny Waronker. www.sundazed.com/artists/ harp-ers. html is the site for Sundazed, the label who have reissued their back catalogue

Download: Not currently legally available

Marshmallow rock, soft and ultra-sweet. Maybe they shouldn’t have added up to anything much – they didn’t even boast a strong line in harmonies. But Harper’s Bizarre possessed an indefinable something that set them apart from most other groups of the period.

Certainly everyone worthwhile at Warners thought so. Randy Newman pitched in to help them; so too did heavy-hitters Nick De Caro, Bob Thompson, Van Dyke Parks and Leon Russell. In their easy-on-the-ear way, Harper’s Bizarre were ahead of the game, adventurous. They’d started out as The Tikis, a Santa Cruz band. Then, during 1966, they settled down as five-piece Harper’s Bizarre (guitarist Eddie James having gone AWOL). They were still a young outfit – Scoppettone was 21 and Templeman 22 when they cut their debut album Feelin’ Groovy, which gave them an immediate hit with a fizzy version of Simon & Garfunkel’s 59th Street Bridge Song.

That first album set the mould. It included new songs from Parks and Newman, plus Happy Talk (from South Pacific) and, even dottier, a less-than-two-minutes-long rendition of Prokofiev’s Peter And The Wolf. Anything Goes (1967) proved similarly diverse – Chattanooga Choo Choo, along with Van Dyke Parks’s much-heralded High Coin. The stage was set for The Secret Life. This time around, the song selection was woven into a kind of Walter Mittyish dream sequence. Set against a recurring backdrop provided by Burton Lane and Yip Harburg’s wistful Look To The Rainbow, the foursome sang of riding with cowboys, the battle of New Orleans, of building a stairway to paradise and other exploits that were hardly workaday and not exactly brimming with the radical spirit of ’68.

The ultimate in melodic escapism, the album did little for the group’s career and, in the wake of Harper’s Bizarre 4 (1970) – which featured contributions from Ry Cooder and Jack Nitzche – the group split, Templeton moving on to become an A&R mainman and significant producer at WEA. In 1976 the original line-up, minus Templeton, regrouped for a fifth album, As Time Goes By. But though some of the old idiosyncrasies remained – a theme from the New World Symphony rubbed shoulders with Back In The Saddle Again – the group’s distinctive sound had, somewhere along the way, evaporated.