Many faces of Manfred Mann
By MARTIN VENGADESANTHERE is a song in my collection that I never lend out without insisting that it has to be listened to late at night with the lights off.
Father of Day, Father of Night may be a little-known Bob Dylan tune, but in the hands of Manfred Mann’s Earth Band, it becomes a cataclysmic event.
Beginning with the eerie calls of daybreak, followed by an immense crash that appears intended to signal the dawn of the world, it utilises a sparse, spacey guitar, a heavenly choir, ethereal organ and plaintive vocals to transport listeners on a seemingly eternal journey (it’s all done in nine minutes and 52 seconds, though!).
Despite the power of this particular song, I have to admit that most of my efforts to “hawk” the Earth Band usually end in a lengthy discussion that centres on the trite but undeniably infectious pop hit, Do Wah Diddy Diddy!
Manfred Mann’s history is a complex one with at least four distinct phases. The group’s story begins in London in the early 1960s when South African-born jazz pianist Manfred Lubowitz decided to form a pop group. Using the stage name Manfred Mann, Lubowitz recruited a team that included vocalist Paul Jones, guitarist Michael Vickers, bassist Tom McGuinness and drummer Mike Hugg. The fledgling group toyed with a number of names before settling on, yes, Manfred Mann, the stage name of the group’s keyboardist.
This confusing move would have interested exactly no one if it weren’t for the fact that the new group met with almost immediate success. Their third single, 5-4-3-2-1, was selected as the theme song for a British TV show and became a Top 5 hit. The group then became part of the British Invasion when a couple of cover tunes, Do Wah Diddy Diddy (which actually topped the Billboard charts in 1964) and Sha La La, scored in the United States.
Despite their instant fame, the group was determined to experiment and started loading their albums with interesting R&B jazz ravers that bore little resemblance to the chart-topping pop hits. It was at this time that they began a career-long affair with Dylan’s music when they recorded If You Gotta Go, Go Now and the amazing sardonic anti-war tune, With God On Our Side.
However, Jones (who’d announced his own talent as a songwriter with the witty The One in the Middle) and Vickers had grown wary of becoming “famous” under the name of the group’s keyboardist (ironically, the name choice had been opposed by Lubowitz at the time!).
In 1966, Manfred Mann underwent some seismic changes with Vickers leaving, McGuinness moving to guitar and the multi-talented Jack Bruce coming in on bass. Bruce was in the band for just a few months before leaving to form Cream; after that, Jones, the voice on all the band’s hits, decided to go solo. New vocalist Mike D’Abo presided over some pleasant recordings, such as Just Like A Woman (another Dylan piece) and Up The Junction, but the group began floundering as it tried to straddle the divide between the demands of pop music and its excursions into jazz.
Matters came to a head in 1969, when after three years of declining fortunes, Lubowitz pulled the plug on the pop group and formed a unique, progressive jazz-rock ensemble called Manfred Mann Chapter Three. Aside from Lubowitz on organ, this bubbly group featured Hugg (who had now moved on to lead vocals as well as the piano), flautist Bernie Living, bassist Steve York and drummer Craig Collinge.
Two exciting, albeit commercially disastrous, albums called Volume 1 and Volume 2 followed – amazingly, no one was listening. In fact, Lubowitz’s most popular recording at this time was a guest showing on Uriah Heep’s July Morning!
Another rethink was called for and it was then that Lubowitz emerged with Manfred Mann’s Earth Band, which has now been together for the last 30 years. Its initial line-up of Mike Rogers (vocals/guitar), Lubowitz, Colin Pattendon (bass) and Chris Slade (drums) managed to strike the perfect balance between commercial appeal and artistic expression – which, of course, included a return to stunning Dylan covers.
This line-up produced a masterpiece, Solar Fire, which contains Father of Day, Father of Night and The Good Earth (amazingly, the band offered a square foot of land in Wales to a limited number of buyers of the album!) before Rogers’ departure saw vocalist Chris Thompson come on board. Almost immediately, Lubowitz was back on top of the US charts with another spacey track: Blinded By The Light, from the amazing The Roaring Silence album.
Manfred Mann’s Earth Band’s last commercial success may have been as long ago as the intriguing anti-apartheid Somewhere in Afrika (1983), but Lubowitz and his band of merry men are still causing a ruckus on the road today.
RSS
