For years, I thought it was in the spring of 1979, and I thought I had actually been in the studio watching the LP on which the song appeared spinning on the turntable, and the LP had a blue label. The third one I heard on my college radio station in 1979. But I was in high school and there was only so much money I had to spend on this stuff. Had I gone even deeper and bought Nico's solo stuff, I'd have discovered my elusive German-horror-movie tune way earlier. 1966) and buying the "What Goes On" fanzine. The irony: In the summer of 1981 I'd gotten heavily into the Velvet Underground, digging up their old then-out-of-print records and bootlegs ( The Velvet Underground, Etc. As soon as I read the description it hit me that THIS was the song I'd heard.Īnd so, three decades later, I discovered that elusive tune I'd heard while half-asleep. I found Nico had written a song about trying to call him before he died but not being able to reach him. No dice.įinally in the summer of 2011 - 30 years later - I was doing some reading about Jim Morrison. When the Internet came about in the '90s, I started searching for this song in earnest. Sounded like it was from the '40s and it was a German man with a thick accent singing. This song haunted me and I couldn't figure out who it was. It had some lyric along the lines of "I remember you" and "you didn't answer." Even though "On a Beautiful Day" made the Bubbling Under chart on Billboard, the compilers omitted it in favor of some non-charted songs.)īack in April of 1981, just as I was dozing off to sleep to the local college radio station, WTMZ, I heard this weird, macabre song that sounded like it was from a German horror movie. (As a side note, several years later, Collector's Choice Music put together a CD of the best of the Sunshine Company. I'm not sure how I heard of the Sunshine Company, but I looked at the album of theirs that I owned - and the first song on side 1 was called "On a Beautiful Day." I played it, and lo and behold, I was taken back to 1969 and a song I thought I'd never hear again. Then, as my knowledge of "sunshine pop" of the late 1960s increased, on a hunch I decided to look at an LP I got as part of a box lot in the 1980s (I think I got the whole box for $5 it was mostly filled with FM rock of the late 1960s and early 1970s like Ten Years After and the Moody Blues). I even remembered some of the words, most prominently "(something) I love you - it's a beautiful day." Again, I never heard it on the radio after 1969. It was poppy and sounded like a hit, with a female lead and male backing vocals that sounded like either the Mamas and the Papas or Spanky and Our Gang. The second song is one that, once again, I first heard around 1968-69. But this thing was definitely on one of those clone-hit albums. Of course, what I described is the bedrock for a trillion songs over the eons. Over the top of the fade is a syrupy solo violin(s) line playing a high B to high A single note against bars 2 and 4. using a bar of Dmaj7 and then a bar of Gmaj7 as a reference (over and over), the sax line is basically-īar 1. the song is typical plain vanilla piano, alto sax, strings, bass (maybe upright bass)ģ. Here's the gist of the fadeout which also contains the main sax riff of the instrumental verses.ġ. I vividly remember the fadeout and have considered blowing a few minutes in the studio someday to recreate what I remember. The song that rankles me SORT of sounds like a Cast your fate to the wind thing but isn't. I'll browse through that album's selections that you suggested. That cover looks like several of the album covers my family had back then.
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