...a very powerful anti-war song whose lyrics you may be more familiar with from The Byrds (also from 1966) "I Come and Stand at Every Door."
The Byrds track, as some of you may be aware, is one of my favorite things ever (David Crosby's out-of-the-blue harmony line on the last verse is devastating, I think), but their version (courtesy of Pete Seeger) appropriates the melody of an old Celtic folk song called "The Silkie." The lyrics to both versions, however, are based on a translation of a poem by Turkish writer Nazim Hikmet; you can find out more about the provenance of the song at that link.
In any case, The Misunderstood's radical re-imagining of it really does suggest that these guys could have been a major band if the fates -- including the Vietnam War era draft, ironically enough -- hadn't intervened.
8 comments:
Crosby's harmony is often devastating. I try to sing harmony like him, with laughable results!
Trey
Note to self: Obscure psychedelic garage icons less interesting to readers two days in a row than hoped.
:-)
I saw that steel player with Joe Cocker in an otherwise dull concert in the mid-'70s. He stood up while playing a table-steel (no pedals, one leg) - I need a copy-editor to fix this sentence! Remember copy-editors, Steve?
Copy editors? How quaint.
:-)
I wonder if your mid-week Misunderstoods two-fer is secretly a wish to hear some previously unknown awesome Yardbird tracks of that era.
AP
The cat in the middle (and back) looks a little like Jimmy Page did back then.
heh.
Cool. 5D is the very first album I ever bought as a kid. This is the album where McGuinn first got his style together in my opinion. This song has always stayed with me. Incidentally, a "silkie" is some kind of Scottish banshee or ghost according to a dictionary of ghosts that I used to have.
The steelslide player is Glen Ross Campbell and he has a story onto his own. Probably best known for the Misunderstood & UK's Juicy Lucy, he played on a bunch of obscure yet good 70's psych lps such as Garrett Lund's Almost Grown.
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