What's your name?

Time of the Season; Odessey and Oracle; The Zombies

It's Saturday. And it's single track day.

In the spring semester of 1986 at SDSU, it was the first year that Mr. McK. was at the healm of the Symphonic Band. And naturally wanting to make a splendid first impression at the Bandmaster’s convention, he chose one of the masterpieces of the wind ensemble repertoire, Karel Husa’s “Music for Prague 1968”. Mr. Husa, Czech-born in 1921, sat on the dock of his US cottage in 1968 and listened to the BBC broadcast of the crushing of the Prague Spring reform movement. Devastated, he penned this passionate programmatic work, binding the four movements with symbolism and allusions by the use of 15^th century song and imitations of bells, sirens, birds, and Morse code. This is the only real acquaintance I’ve ever had with Mr. Husa’s music.

The only reason I bring this is up is that, deeply moving experience notwithstanding, whenever I hear Mr. Husa’s name, my first thought is to the members of the percussion section of a certain famous military band who refer to the well-known composer as Karel Husa-daddy.

I have this awesome app on my iPhone called Shazam. Whenever I hear a recording of a song, and I want to know who recorded it along with various other factoids concerning the track, I just push the button to start the program, aim the talky end of my iPhone at the speaker, it listens for thirty seconds or so, records a sample of the song, sends it up into outerspace, and then aliens from outerspace send back the information that I want to know.

There’s no way that I could tell you the number of times I had heard the song “Time of the Season” before it was used in a short segment of an episode of The Simpsons called “D’oh-in in the Wind”, episode six from season 10 that aired on November 15, 1998. Homer tries to connect with his mother’s hippie past, meets two of her old friends named Seth and Munchie, and convinces them to join him on a freak-out. “Time of the Season” is the freak-out music.

Since that time, and until a few months ago when the aliens told me who it was that actually recorded the song, I always thought it was the Beach Boys. I’m not really one to listen to the words of a song until someone tells me to. I’m usually listening to the chords, mentally learning the song so that I could play it back on the piano if anybody ever asked. When they get to that point in the song where they sing the word “loving” … The song is mostly in the key of E Minor. But when they get to “ing” in “loving” they’re in E Major. That’s precisely the trippy sound that streams out of the genius mind of Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys.

Then I listened to the words.

What’s your name? (What’s your name?) /

Who’s your daddy? (Who’s your daddy?) /

(He rich?) Is he rich like me?

Those aren’t words the Beach Boys would sing.

A British band called The Zombies recorded an album in 1967 called “Odessey and Oracle” which was released in 1968. The cover designers misspelled Odyssey. “Time of the Season” was the closing track. It was released as a single early in 1969 and became a major US hit. All of this happened, by the way, after The Zombies broke up late in 1967. “Odessey and Oracle” is considered one of the finest albums of its time and ranks 80 on Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 Greatest Albums of all Time.

When I was searching for the song on my iPod through iTunes, I was surprised to see “Time of the Season” appear twice on my list of songs called “Time of the Season”. It turns out I had another recording of this tune; this time with the voices of Kurt Elling and Cassandra Wilson which Elling included on his second album called “The Messenger” released in 1997 on the 30^th anniversary of the original recording of the song. This rendering is mind-blowing, yet the song itself is so transformed that, though I’ve casually listened to the album half a dozen times, I didn’t recognize the song as the one made famous by The Zombies.

Credits: To Karel Husa, for bringing an historical event to consuming musical life to millions of instrumentalists the world over, professional and amateur alike. Congratulations on your Pulitzer Prize.

Checkup: I lost 1 pound.