Illustration from an advertisement for White Horse Whiskey, 1958
So, I'm still waiting for the new 2011 releases to start coming out - in the meantime, I'll review a couple more of these weird records from the '70s that I got for Christmas. And, going by titles alone, the probably don't get much weirder than For Girls Who Grow Plump in the Night. I've been a fan of Canterbury/prog outfit Caravan since I picked up In the Land of Grey and Pink (1971) a while back, in spite of that album's very "jammy" tendencies. Caravan were a "jam band" in the truest sense of the word - they are interested in pop and jazz, and they felt that the best way to incorporate these two interests was to create pop songs that work as jumping-off points for extended instrumental jams. I tend to tire of "jams" quickly - they just don't hold my attention - but I can hang with a long instrumental interlude if it has two halves of a pop song for bookends.
Caravan also gets a pass from me because their pop instincts are quite good, and they do a good job of compartmentalizing their jamming. For Girls Who Grow Plump in the Night, for example, starts with the nine-minute "Memory Lain, Hugh/Headloss", but this long track is really two pop songs pinned together. The first half is one of those jumping-off songs with a nice verse and then several minutes of instrumental vamping on that melody, but "Headloss" is a hard-rocking pop song with Pye Hastings' usual slightly-goofy melodic sense. This song also features a violin solo from Geoff Richardson, who was a new addition to Caravan's revamped lineup on this record - his flute, violin, and viola contributions are great additions to the band's sound. The tracks that follow that initial salvo, "Hoedown" and "Surprise, Surprise" are both solidly in the pop idiom, as well (and "Hoedown" is nowhere near as terrible as you might guess from its title.)
So it's not until "C'thlu Thlu" that we get our first real jam-oriented track - it's an unfortunate slog of a song, too, simultaneously evoking the boringness and headache-inducing qualities of Lovecraft's writing in song form. But this track is followed by excellent and creepy (and pedophilia-themed?) pop of "The Dog, the Dog, He's At It Again" and the rock-song-stitched-to-ballad epic "Be Alright/Chance of a Lifetime". By the time I get to the album's true jam, the ten-minute "L'Auberge Du Sanglier" suite, I'm willing to give Caravan a pass because of the album's hit-to-miss ratio up to that point. And "L'Auberge" isn't bad - it does go on a bit, but it has a few different sections to it and that makes it more palatable.
For me, Caravan is appealing because they take the pastoral psych-pop vibe of those Rubble bands I love and they stretch it into something more ambitious, with a smooth '70s production style. And, quite simply, Pye Hastings could write great pop songs - the fact that he wrote almost all the material for Girls Who Grow Plump... gives that album a great cohesiveness. Check out "Headloss" if you haven't heard this band before - I think it benefits from being separated from it's "other half", the album opener "Memory Lain, Hugh" - it's better as a self-contained pop song than half of an ersatz epic.
"Headloss" by Caravan
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