Wednesday, April 02, 2008

"She Got Soul" from '...that's how THE BEATLES were born'


It must have been around 1980 that I bought in our local record store ('Bullit' in Venlo closed a long time ago) a Beatles album for 1 guilder.
The sleeve reads "Once upon a time a farout sound echoed 'round a cavern where four boys sang: that's how THE BEATLES were born." It is 'Recorded Live', sure the A Side is. It is published by 'Napoleon', has some Italian text on the disc label, and certainly is a bootleg.





A side

The A side contains a noisy live recording, which is not worth listening to.


B side

The B side has a somewhat enigmatic content:

1. Did He Want (N.N.)
2. Moonshine (N.N.)
3. She Got Soul (N.N.)
4. Call You Love (N.N.)
5. Lover Melody (N.N.)
6. The Dorty Old City M.G. Driver (N.N.)
7. Soon Be Home (N.N.)
8. Tchao (N.N.)

According to A Bootleg Made in Brazil the B side songs are from Tony Sheridan and performed by The Who. This is certainly not true. The songs on the B side intrigued me a lot and I listened to them very often. Around 1990 this puzzle became almost solved. Thanks to a friend I became a fan of Captain Beefheart and acquired almost all of his work as a musician (of his work as a visual artist, I only keep a book and a video by Anton Corbijn). Some of his early recordings were republished as 'The Legendary A&M Sessions':

1. Diddy Wah Diddy
2. Who Do You Think You're Fooling
3. Moonchild
4. Frying Pan
5. Here I Am I Always Am

This covers most of the B side. What remains to be solved, is who is performing this intriguing song with its psychedelic long guitar solo, called She Got Soul , which does not sound like a Captain Beefheart.

[1 Oct 2010] The riddle of 'She Got Soul' is solved! A colleague uploaded the mp3 I posted and one of these applications could find the original directly: the original is called 'Bluebird' (1967) by Buffalo Springfield. This group was a predecessor of the infamous Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. 'Bluebird' was released on 'Buffalo Springfield Again', but several versions occur. Basically its structure is:

[intro] [corpus] [addendum]
The [addendum] is rather hard/rough compared to the rest of the song.

The 'She Got Soul' version has only:
[intro] [corpus]

There seems to be no decent release of the 'She Got Soul' version available; my LP version is the best, much better than the version on 'Sell Out' (containing rare recordings of Buffalo Springfield); this version does have the [addendum].

What makes the 'She Got Soul' version so special is Neil Young's guitar overdub.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the info on She Got Soul, I had been looking for it for many years. Just curious: do you know the names of the songs and who sings the other songs on the B side? Like Lover Melody for exemple.