Mighty Garvey
music — UK — 1968

6.5
My acquaintance with Manfred Mann started when I was some ten years old and my dad put "Nightingales and Bombers" on a tape machine (by "tape machine" I mean the huge thing that played those large round casettes). I remember quite liking that record, but that wasn`t really recorded by "Manfred Mann" (the band) or by Manfred Mann (the fellow who gave his name to the band) but by "Manfred Mann`s Earth Band" (a later band founded by the same individual who was a real jerk by the way - as far as I know he was only the drummer in all those bands and not the singer, the songwriter, the guitar player or at least the girl that the latter three have occasional sex with. Yet how can I say - just a drummer. Is the drummer less important than the lead vocalist just because nobody cares about him and wouldn`t mind him exploding on stage? No, drummers are very important. Take Phil Collins, for example, or all those 17 drummers "Spinal Tap" used to have).
Although I`d like to discuss this matter further, I won`t do it. The next time when I met Manfred Mann (not in person, of course), when I went to Bremen for a week when I was 16. I drank a lot of beer there and went to a conference about making a web site (that wasn`t in Bremen really, but who cares) and I got a disk by Manfred Mann for my father. It was a best of record titled "The Best of the Fontana years" and had some of the hit songs the band had in the late Sixties (thus it was by the original band and not by the one on "Nightingales and Bombers", so I didn`t know a single song on that record). Anyhow, I liked some of the songs on the record - most notably "Just like a woman" and "The Vicar`s daughter". The former proved to be a composition by Bob Dylan which is much better in the original, while the latter isn`t great as well, if you ask me.
But now I finally come to "Mighty Garvery" - this is an album that has several of the fontana years songs on it - "It`s so easy falling" (a forgettable pop ditty with nice harmonies but not particulary memorable), the already mentioned "Vicar`s daughter" (a nice instrumental intro, but the vocals are so sappy that I can`t listen to stuff like this anymore), "Ha Ha Said the Clown" (the songs sounds very dated but the mood is better than on the songs mentioned before) and the big hit - "The Mighty Quinn" (another Bob Dylan cover, quite a solid composition, of course, actually that`s by far the best track on the record although I still wouldn`t call that a chef`d`ouvre). As for the rest of the songs there are three versions of a song "Happy Families" - that`s pretty interesting to hear a song done in different styles yet you surely can`t listen to stuff like this for many times. Most of the stuff is very sweet and undaring and that`s not really what I like in music at most. "Country Dancing" is better than most of the stuff, mainly because it`s heavier than the rest of the songs. I can also find some charm in "Harry the one man band" - which is as psychedelic as this band can get, but that`s not really a good song, just less generic than the most of the stuff.
2006-04-04
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