THE GREATEST SONGS OF THE 1960s THAT NO ONE HAS EVER HEARD
1,818) Elmer Gantry’s Velvet Opera — “Mary Jane”
Elmer Gantry’s Velvet Opera (see #375, 688) — EGVO — it sounds like an olive oil, though I doubt any of them were extra virgin! Anyway, here is “dreamy, potfuelled Edwardianism”* (Jan Zarebski, https://recordcollectormag.com/reviews/album/elmer-gantrys-velvet-opera) with a “dreamy spaced out melody” (bodhiapurva3887, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVzewFTcRa4) from an LP that was a “minor masterpiece”. (Jan Zarebski, https://recordcollectormag.com/reviews/album/elmer-gantrys-velvet-opera) Dreamy or not, it was banned by the BBC when they realized what the name meant. It sure took them a while, though — as the three live performances on the BBC from January to July 1968 seem to indicate!
Jan Zarebski recounts:
Elmer Gantry’s Velvet Opera emerged from R&B/soul act The Five Proud Walkers after experiencing a conversion to psych following a support slot beneath Pink Floyd. Well… who wouldn’t? Their upbeat blend of the new scene with the primal beats of their earlier work got them noticed. The urgent, brilliant “Flames”, which they cut as their first single, became a cult hit, and a fledgling Led Zeppelin [see #110, 589] incorporated the song into their act. Unfortunately, that was as close as EGVO got to the big time, but their debut remains a rather superb slice of British psych-pop. . . . [Their] eclecticism and talent [was] on show, but it’s the group’s more general mastery of melody and rhythm that marks this album out. Rather like The Zombies [see #1,138] and, more obviously, The Beatles [see #422, 1,087, 1,256], EGVO found a tune wherever they looked, and the results stand up with much of the period because of that.
https://recordcollectormag.com/reviews/album/elmer-gantrys-velvet-opera
Why didn’t they make it big? Jo-Ann Greene says that:
This popular UK act, which adeptly mixed soul and psychedelic/progressive styles, evolved from Jaymes Fenda And The Vulcans, one of several bands to secure a recording contract following their appearance on the televised contest, Ready Steady Win. Former Vulcans songwriter John Ford . . . joined members of R&B band Five Proud Walkers, which included Dave Terry (vocals/guitar), Colin Forster (guitar) and Richard Hudson ( . . . drums). The new unit was named Elmer Gantry’s Velvet Opera, in honour of lead singer Terry’s stage garb modelled after the preacher in the 1960 movie Elmer Gantry. Their excellent 1967 debut album included the pulsating “Flames’, which, despite regular appearances on BBC Radio 1″s Top Gear, failed to become a hit. . . . Although labeled a psychedelic band in their day, the Opera never sat comfortably in that strawberry field, partially because of the diversity of their sound, but also due to the simple fact they were just too far ahead of their time even for the psyched-out crowd. In fact, Elmer Gantry’s Velvet Opera continued to sound thoroughly modern for decades, while their myriad musical meanderings took them down wayward byways that later became stylistic highways — at least in their native U.K. . . . Growing disagreements over musical direction led to the departure of Gantry and Forster. The remaining members truncated their name to Velvet Opera, added Paul Brett (guitar) [see #625] and John Joyce ( . . . vocals) to the line-up, and recorded Ride A Hustler’s Dream. The album lacked the purpose of its predecessor, save for the excellent “Anna Dance Square”. The quartet fell apart when Hudson and Ford joined the Strawbs, with whom they remained until 1973. Having written several of the band’s most commercial offerings, the duo then left to pursue their own career as Hudson-Ford. By 1974, Gantry was fronting a band which, until checked by litigation, accepted illicit bookings as “Fleetwood Mac” while the genuine article were off the road. A year later, Gantry emerged once more as singer on Stretch’s solitary UK chart entry, “Why Did You Do It?”, before going on work with the Alan Parsons Project and Cozy Powell. Former member Colin Forster briefly worked with a new line-up of Velvet Opera in the early 70s.
https://www.allmusic.com/artist/elmer-gantrys-velvet-opera-mn0000131151/biography, https://www.allmusic.com/album/elmer-gantrys-velvet-opera-mw0000263215
Iván Melgar Morey agrees:
[T]hey were one of the most advanced bands from their era, blended with great respect R&B, Jazz Psychedelia a la early Pink Floyd [see #13,38, 260] and a touch of The Nice style, hard to say if they were inspired in Keith Emerson’s sound because they are coetaneous, but you can find many similarities. . . . Despite being a very good and incredibly advanced album for their era, never reached the popularity deserved, because it was too hard and eclectic for the average listener, but still remains as one of the most powerful and elaborate albums from the pre King Crimson Progressive Rock era.
Marmalade Skies adds:
The band began to get quite a following and played clubs and university gigs all over the country and at London venues like the Marquee and 100 club and Electric garden. . . . The band had been recorded independently for a while by Southern Music Publishing . . . and it wasn’t long before they had secured a record deal with CBS’s “Direction” label. The problem was that Southern Music had originally signed them as a bluesy/jazzy band and they were not very keen on trying to get new, more riotous stage act on disc. The group were persuaded to do more “regular” material. The first recording was the song, written by Elmer, that the band were best known for, “Flames”. The record was on jukeboxes all over the country and was covered live by bands as diverse as “The Joe Loss Orchestra” and “Led Zeppelin”, in fact Jimmy Page recently told Elmer that Flames was the only non-Zep number that they included in their early stage-act . . . . However, for the average radio listener the song was too far ahead of its time and despite live popularity and numerous radio plays the song only managed to achieve number 30 in the charts. Direction did however, take faith in the band to record second and third singles and more importantly a self-titled album. The group’s second single, “Mary Jane” was taken off the BBC playlist after they realised that the song was the slang term for Marijuana. . . . After three singles and the album, major success had still not been achieved. . . . Colin Forster was . . . replaced by Paul Brett but this still didn’t acheive the desired result. Disagreements erupted within the band, which lead to a split from Elmer and so the Velvet Opera was formed.
* John Jacob Woolf:
[I]t was the period when Edward VII, the eldest son of Queen Victoria, ruled as king of Great Britain and Ireland, from January 1901 to May 1910. Most historians, however, talk of the Edwardian era as extending to the years until World War I broke out in 1914. That is because once the nation had entered the war, the whole tenor of British life fundamentally changed and a new country, both domestically and internationally, emerged. . . . Coming as it does after Victoria’s long and epochal reign and before the destruction and horror of the world war, it was a liminal time for Britain, commonly imagined to this day as a ‘gilded age’ all about tea on the lawns and lazy, sunlit afternoons.
https://www.historyextra.com/period/edwardian/edwardian-era-what-when-guide-timeline/
Is this the 45 version? I love the piano:
Live on the BBC — January 27, 1968:
Live on the BBC — May 19, 1968:
Live on the BBC — July 5, 1968:
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