THE GREATEST SONGS OF THE 1960s THAT NO ONE HAS EVER HEARD
2,162) Quincy Conserve — “Everybody Has Their Way”
This “mellow, psychy, jazzy” (happening45, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OAeJsYpLXrk) song by some of New Zealand’s best musicians “has such a great hook it should’ve been a hit”. (https://progressreview.blogspot.com/2022/09/quincy-conserve-listen-to-band-epitaph.html) Indeed. It sounds a lot like what Georgie Fame [see #103, 169, 634, 695, 721, 1,044, 1,741, 2,053] was doing so well at the time.
Gary Steel tells us of QC:
[W]hile their recorded output necessarily included a bunch of covers, their originals stand up as some of the best work by any New Zealand band of the 1960s or 1970s. On top of that, The Quincy Conserve, in all their different line-ups with Malcolm Hayman the only constant throughout their reign from 1967 to 1975, were tight, musician’s musicians, a description that’s often been used as a backhanded compliment to explain the group’s lack of commercial success. . . . Malcolm Hayman . . . arrived on the Wellington scene as a gigging musician in the mid-1950s, and it was blues, then the first rock and roll revolution, that turned his ear. . . . “Bill Haley started releasing records about two years after I started playing. Before that, it was general blues stuff . . . . [T]hen the English started getting into it in 62, 63 with all their Mersey stuff, which influenced our guitar sound a bit, along with The Shadows, that sort of thing.” . . . What laid the foundations for The Quincy Conserve . . . was Hayman’s time in Australia, where he spent 18 months studying at the New South Wales Conservatorium of Music. “I worked with horns in Aussie, worked in a couple of clubs that had resident horn sections, big bands . . . . I got into the arranging of horns, and when I came back from Australia, I had ideas of working with horns in a rock and roll sense.” Before returning, though, Hayman spent several years playing the cabaret circuit “through France, England and the New Hebrides.” . . . Hayman told me that he came home [to Wellington] because his mother was supposedly on her deathbed. . . . Hayman’s return was a stroke of good luck. He brought with him skills that had been lacking in the popular music arena: his years of experience leading bands had turned him into a rigorous professional, and his newfound skills as an arranger made him invaluable both to his own band, and as a hired hand. . . . Hayman was a one-man school, finding the best players and pushing to get the best out of them. He was also renowned for being a somewhat fractious personality, and would fine his musicians for any misdemeanors. This aspect ensured the Quincy line-up was in constant flux. By 1975 Hayman was the last original member; musicians either left in a huff or, as with Bruno Lawrence, were unceremoniously fired. “We were in a lucky situation [in the late 1960s]. We had a resident dance hall that has long since gone, and we were also the resident band for EMI for their recordings. We used to back everyone up . . . . We used to spend all day in the studio and all night at work, 12 to 14 hours a day, every day.[“] . . . [F]or many years they were the go-to band at residencies in Wellington, and were so good they were employed to back visiting international acts . . . and the supporting musicians for touring roadshows of pop stars including Allison Durbin and Craig Scott. [And] they were central in turning Wellington into the core of the NZ recording scene in the early 70s, where various permutations of the group provided the musical backing for dozens of pop records. . . . It all started in late 1967, when Hayman scoured the country for the best players he could find to play a residency at Wellington’s popular Downtown Club. . . . The group’s first single, “I’m So Proud” . . . was released . . . in June 1968, and like all subsequent singles and albums, it reviewed well but was commercially inconsequential. The first album didn’t eventuate until 1970. Listen To The Band featured the group’s best song, the Bruno Lawrence-penned “Ride The Rain” . . . . The group’s most consistent album is Epitaph (1971) . . . . Sadly, the album’s hugely enjoyable blend of jazzy funk . . . failed to prevent its quick descent into bargain bins, mainly because the band had decided to break up before its release. Hayman quickly changed his mind on the band’s demise, and reformed the group in 1972 . . . . The Quincy Conserve’s last, self-titled album, released in 1975, is their best . . . sending the sound in a very jazz-rock-fusion direction.
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