Jackie Lomax — “Sunset”: Brace for the Obscure (60s rock)! — May 3, 2024

THE GREATEST SONGS OF THE 1960s THAT NO ONE HAS EVER HEARD

1,195) Jackie Lomax — “Sunset”

This smoldering slow burner by the Beatles’ BFF (see #164, 425, 543) is a “strong psychedelic-pop song[]” (abel, https://psychedelicsight.com/9448-obit-jackie-lomax/) that “stands out for an unusual piano jazz interlude.” (Joe Marchese, https://theseconddisc.com/2010/11/18/review-the-apple-records-remasters-part-4-harrisons-soulful-trio/) Lomax he had “a fondness” for the song: “There’s a unusual jazz bit in the middle. My lyrics are about lost love: ‘The shade of our love / That I’m thinking of / Like the sun above / Is now fading.'” (liner notes to the CD reissue of Is This What You Want?)

As Steve Leggett writes:

Jackie Lomax . . . has always had a soulful voice, a bit like his contemporary Steve Winwood . . . (the two actually also look strikingly similar), but his considerable talent never translated . . . into international commercial success.

https://www.allmusic.com/album/lost-soul-lomax-alliance-solo-singles-demos-1966-1967-mw0002002690

This lack of success baffled the Beatles, who try as they may, couldn’t make Jackie Lomax a star, and it baffles me too. Brian Pendreigh writes that:

A lot of people thought Jackie Lomax should have been a big star. He had moody good looks[ and] a great bluesy voice . . . . Bill Harry, author of The Ultimate Beatles Encyclopedia, said his lack of chart success baffled The Beatles.

https://www.scotsman.com/news/obituaries/obituary-jackie-lomax-singer-1561004

Bruce Eder adds that “George Harrison and Paul McCartney both thought enough of his talent to back him variously as producers and record company executives at a critical juncture in all of their careers.” (https://www.allmusic.com/artist/jackie-lomax-mn0000130486/biography)

Richard Williams gives some history:

Lomax had known the Beatles since their early days at the Cavern club and in Hamburg, when he was the singer and bass guitarist with the Undertakers, a popular Mersey Beat band noted for their energetic stage show, in which the musicians wore the frock coats, and sometimes top hats, appropriate to funeral directors in the wild west. . . . [T]he son of a millworker, the teenaged Lomax and his friend the drummer Warren “Bugs” Pemberton left their first band, Dee and the Dynamites, to join the Undertakers in January 1962. Like the Beatles, their stage act was developed during residencies at the clubs in and around Hamburg’s Reeperbahn . . . . [A] contract with Pye Records had produced four singles . . . but no hits [so] they tried to capitalise on the British invasion of the US charts by moving across the Atlantic. Left stranded and penniless in a motel in Canada, they disbanded and in 1967 Lomax and Pemberton formed their own group, the Lomax Alliance.

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/sep/17/jackie-lomax

Andy Davis continues the story:

[Limax recalled] “I went with The Beatles to Shea Stadium in 1966, and it was then that Brian asked me to become a solo singer. I said, ‘Well, I’ve just got a new band together, do you want to hear us?’ So he came to a rehearsal and was impressed, and he brought us back to England. We were called the Lomax Alliance—two American guys, two English. We started an album, but Brian died in the middle of it, so it all ended in confusion.” It was now late 1967. Jackie continues: “The rest of tile band went back to New York, but I stayed in London. I met up with Chris Curtis, the drummer from The Searchers, and we went to NEMS to see if The Beatles would help us out.” John Lennon re-iterated Brian Epstein’s earlier advice [to go solo] and helped push Jackie’s career in another direction too. Jackie recalls: “John took me aside and said, ‘Hey Jackie, Brian told me you write songs?’ I said, ‘Well, I’m just starting out, but yeah’. He said, ‘We want songwriters, so go and see Terry Doran at Apple Publishing’. So I did, and I got signed a as writer. This was before they’d launched the Apple record label. . . . I thought I was writing songs for other artists, but then George Harrison heard them, and he said, ‘I’m going to India, but when I come back do you want to do an album, and I’ll produce it?’.” Says Jackie: “I was screaming in my head ‘YEAH!!’, but being a typical Liverpool lad, I played it down and went, ‘Oh yeah, sounds like a good idea’. . . . Sessions . . . began in June 1968, at EMI’s Abbey Road studios. George booked dates around Beatles sessions for the ‘White Album’. The recordings continued until the end of the year, moving to Trident Studios . . . before George and Jackie jetted off to the USA to complete the album . . . . Jackie’s newly written Apple Publishing songs comprise all but one of the tracks on the album.

http://albumlinernotes.com/Is_This_What_You_Want_.html

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