The Interesting Story of Seals and Crofts... and Zou [no download]

My friend sent to me a wonderful little progressive rock album from France with the above gorgeous pencil sketch of a boat by the sea, from the wonder year of 1975.  The art is from the famous French expressionist Bernard Buffet.  Have a listen to this tour de force of prog-rock called Puzzle-Head, in five parts:





And do try to seek out this record, it's worth hearing.

Out of respect for his generosity of course there will be no availability today but notice another track in there called "Hummingbird."  Sure enough, this is the fantastic Seals & Crofts composition about God, which, hopefully, everyone here is familiar with.  If not, listen to its incredibly creative structure here on youtube.

Notice the tripartite structure, with three-quarters intro in E minor & its cascading chord progression that shockingly leads to A major, via D flat major (!), then moves up a semitone to the middle, main part of the song, which is in D minor.  Here the song pattern clearly evokes the flitting flight of the hummingbird with its minor 6th grace note or accaciatura (I'm probably using the wrong term for this).  But what's always most astonishing to me is that, in addition to a bridge part with chords revolving around D major, the song has a third section, the outroduction--  with its sustained melody repeatedly evoking either B flat or C, it takes the song out to the skies, up beyond the clouds, clearly as if flying off to heaven when it terminates at last in a gorgeous, plump and mandolin-decorated E major-- as if the rapture was upon us:  the beginning, remember, in E minor, thus resolving to its tonic major.  Is it a masterpiece of songwriting or am I crazy?

After listening to this track again I resolved to dig up the whole Seals & Crofts discography (don't ask me how), at least the first 8 albums until the late seventies when the quality seriously deteriorated.  As you can tell from the lyrics they were clearly religious; in fact they were of the Baha'i faith.  Those among us who are old enough will recall this popular faith in the seventies that attempted to unite all Gods: Islam, Christian, etc., an idea as seemingly obvious as it is impossible-- at least today.  Of course, the zeitgeist was totally different back then.

The story goes that soon after the success of 1973's Diamond Girl (which followed the monster Summer Breeze), Seals & Crofts decided to go all out with their religion with a track and album called Unborn Child.

Looking at it, we think automatically of thousands of other seventies records that look exactly the same: the monarch butterfly, the flowers, the rainbow, the cloudy blue sky (Canadian Harmonium for example).  Surprisingly to me, however, as well as everyone else at the time, it turned out the eponymous song was an anti-abortion paean.  Here it is on youtube again.  Listen closely to it.

This, remember, was shortly after the famed Roe vs. Wade case in the United States.  Inevitably perhaps, both song and record were boycotted and ostracized, derided by a very liberal artistic critical apparatus at the time: this was when women were seriously fighting for equal rights in the world, a battle which is essentially almost won today, at least in theory: in the courts, and in the developed world.  At that time it was a new effort however.  So lyrics like "Go back, Mama, think it over" and the ghastly (here I refer mostly to the bluntness of it): "you're still a-clingin' to the tree of life-- but soon you'll be cut off, before you get ripe."  Now, of course, I'm not going to get into the politics of this debate, which with the exception of the US, is mostly past history in the western world.  There's no reason for that, as you can see in a google search on the song.  The fact is that the lyrics are far too coarse, and the music not that listenable in quality-- some subtlety would definitely have gone down better with this medicine.  It's often the case, of course, that propagandistic songwriting falls flat artistically.  Was it career suicide at the time for these two?  Probably, although, objectively, from the point of view of today, it's quite clear they hit their peak 2 years back with Summer Breeze and Hummingbird.  Nothing thereafter can touch the sheer pop gorgeousness of those two hits and their blanketing album.

After listening to those 8 records and all their songs, I found one tiny overlooked masterpiece of longing called "East of the Ginger Trees" (again from the Summer Breeze album):





I love how tastefully the arrangement was done with light touches of electric piano chords, a sitar, a very quiet string section that barely intrudes on the harmony vocals in thirds.

That longing for a better world, how it just breaks my heart to think of it...  In a sense, we do have a better world here today, but there's such a long way to go still...