It's interesting to listen to the also-rans of previous eras who time's passing has almost covered over from collective memory. This one goes back almost fifty years. I'd never heard of this lot until yesterday, before some random shuffling on Spotify helped me chance upon them. Here are a few tracks from their debut album, Around Grapefruit which came out in 1968.
Grapefruit exist fully and utterly in The Beatles shadow with a dollop of Beach Boys added for good measure. You can hear echoes of Beatles songs though in every chord change, drum rolls, inflections in the vocals, the lyrical stabs at profundity. Snatches of lines from the first song here, Another Game, say it all. 'A long long time's gone by since yesterday', 'a rolling stone can't gather moss they say,' to rhyme with, 'does it matter anyway?' . Grapefruit are dreaming a dream that's already been fully realised elsewhere by other people. Whole swathes of bands were doing this at this point but Grapefruit never make it very far from the source.
When it works, it's great. Third song here Elevator is just wonderful, merging a Move-like take on the basic Beatles melodic blueprint and adding rolling waves of Beach Boys harmonies. It's like chancing upon a time capsule telling a tale of how euphoric it felt to be young and riding on that whole, giddy late sixties pop culture explosion, even if you never quite made it all the way down the road to the heart of the trip which was the case with Grapefruit.They can still say they were there and you can hear them living it in all its happy, fuelled intensity in the two minutes and six seconds of Elevator.
Elsewhere they come close and often topple fully over into self-parody like some invented Fab Four clone band, mocked affectionately in things like The Rutles and Spinal Tap. The band did in fact have close Beatles associations. Lennon named them after a book of the same name that Yoko was about to publish among other connections. They might have signed to Apple but didn't.
Surely the worst thing they ever did, is Lullabye from the same album, which remarkably was actually co-produced by Lennon and McCartney. It's such a series of Beatles steals from umpteen songs of the Sgt Pepper period that it's difficult to believe that it actually exists and no-one put a stop to proceedings before it made its way to vinyl. It was also called Circus Sgt. Pepper so perhaps it was just a big joke for all concerned, probably was given the 'houses of cucumber' line, but still!
Nevertheless, the first three songs from Around Grapefruit are a diverting way to spend ten minutes of your life. Especially Elevator. Should have been a hit. You'll do well to get through the whole album. Living on a diet of Grapefruit is not really an option or recommended. It's mostly second division stuff, very neatly arranged, and there's talent involved but the band never really forge an identity of their own. Bitter sweet. Oh, and singer and bassist George Alexander was the older sibling of the Young brothers Malcolm and Angus who went on to form AC/DC. Alexander chose to stay in the UK and pursue a music career when the rest of the family emigrated to America.Well, so much for Grapefruit. Time for breakfast . Though mine is going to be cooked.
No comments:
Post a Comment