Hot City Tracks 1 and 2
SAHB's Chris Glen and Ted McKenna discuss the first two tracks, which both made it - in different forms - into the band's Impossible Dream album later in 1974.
1.Vambo
Chris: The first thing you notice is how compressed everything sounds - then Alex's voice comes in over the top. Nice to hear him again, and he's sounding really good. But it feels under-developed.
Ted: I remember not being excited enough when we did it - that's why we started adding things all over the place. We weren't generating that feeling. You can hear the whole band - and that's not always the way it works live! But some very interesting pushes in the dynamics.
Chris: What's obviously missing is the chorus. No "Vambo coming to the rescue." That'll have changed when we played the song in front of a crowd. You'd soon have realised it needed a proper chorus. And it fades out! Obviously we didn't have an ending for it.
Ted: Yeah, we were useless in the studio for things like that.
2. The Man in the Jar
Ted: The phrasing is very different. Lots of shoulder movement!
Chris: That's a very British brass section. Big Bud's Brass - we worked with them a lot. And a very crammed vocal - we gave it a lot more space next time. I think you can hear we were influenced by Shaft with this song, but the British-style brass takes that away. We got it more American-sounding next time.
Ted: The lyric and brass follow each other - "Bu-ddy" - but the vocal was more separated later.
Chris: Zal Cleminson's lovely Isley Brothers guitar sound there.
Ted: And the arrangement in the middle sounds like Spirit or another American band. So we weren't far off - but this isn't raw enough, again.
Chris: But British brass always brings it back. It was great being on tour with Big Bud's Brass, but I don't think they liked being in the studio with us any more than we liked it with them. Nothing personal, just disagreements over approach. But I like the way Zal's playing.
Ted: It does have an urgency about it...
Chris: Yeah, but the wrong kind. Someone should have said, "Stop - it's too fast!"
Ted: But it sounds like it works with the vocal. It's phrased completely differently. I think we all knew he was trying to get too many words in.
Chris: I'll tell you what it does sound like - the Alex Harvey Soul Band. Then with the chorus on the "zabba-zabbas" it becomes like a musical. I'm not knocking it, mind.
Ted: And just like with Vambo, the theme hadn't come along at that point - the main theme on the second half of the song isn't there. And another fadeout. That may have been Shel's way of telling us we needed to have more than one track per side of the album!
Chris: But the vocal sounds great. When the band were in charge of the mix Alex wouldn't let us put his vocal up that high.
Ted: And it always should have been.
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