If ever there was a neglected album from the sixties, it's Once Upon A Dream by The Rascals. Reasons? Why ask me? Oh, right ... well, I'm guessing the name change for one. No longer The Young Rascals, they wanted to be taken seriously for the talented musicians they were, but you have to wonder if their teen fanbase (whose tastes were so accurately catered to by the Summer of Love's Groovin') weren't falling off the band's learning curve by now. Band name changes - and there were a few similar at this time - never seem to work as well as you'd hope. Old fans feel left out, and potential new ones tend to be suspicious.
For two (please try to keep up, it's not like this is a Wall Street Journal op-ed fercrissakes, it's only a music blog piece that'll be over soon, making no measurable impact on the internet Richter scale), and secondly: there's the cover art.
It's sensationally good.
It's also deeply unsettling. Designed and created by the band's drummer, the unfeasibly talented Dino Danelli, it's the Hippie Death Mask. Take a considered hinge at the difficult-to-find high-res scan above [above - Ed.], shown here in the correct color balance, and yes, that is important. Everything is washed out, a whited sepulchre. Not monochrome (the lazy way out), nor bursting with lysergic color. Compare with the Monkees' Birds And Bees from the same year [left - Ed.], using the same technique but diametrically different in execution and effect.
The
cover, Danelli says, is "an assemblage of objects and sculptures that
represent our dreams individually and collectively as a group. For its
construction, I have, instead of carving from stone, used an opposite
method of building and adding to create many objects which altogether
form an environment. The objects exist not as separate identities, but
as symbolic carriers. The impulse and thought they transmit is its
spirit, image, and meaning."
His literate use of the term assemblage shows his familiarity with the work of fellow Noo Yawker Joseph Cornell, who pioneered Assemblage Art in the 'forties, such as like this here piece below [below- Ed.]:
So, what does Danelli include in his assemblage box?
- A barely-visible, upended Stars and Stripes.
- A broken toy machine gun.
- Artificial flowers.
- Faceless mannequin heads.
- Dead fucking birds, FFS.
- A headless child in a cage.
- A man with a suburban house for a head.
- A busted clock.
- Illegible hippie buttons.
Yikes, right? And everything is smeared with powdery, crematorial ash. There could hardly be a more literal or obvious metaphor for the times, and yet it's a safe bet that few saw how bleak it actually was. The only hopeful element, and the only human face, is the fat Chinese Buddha, managing to crack a smile in spite - or perhaps because - of it all.
Danelli made another similar assemblage [left - Ed.] for the back cover, just to drive the point home, leaving the groovy color band photographs for the gatefold. Creatively, it was an astonishingly brave statement.For three (cast your mind back, BACK! to the second paragraph! We're thinking about why the album doesn't rank as highly as, say, Sgt. Pepper), and thirdly: anything influenced by Sgt. Pepper means, by definition, it's a knock-off, an inferior and disregardable copy. In 1967, Cavaliere stated, "our new album, and I say this in a humble way, will be Sgt. Pepperish." His humility was misplaced. Just as Sgt. Pepper was the sum of its influences (there's little on it that qualifies as original), so is Once Upon A Dream. The Beatles' most important influence is not in the occasional production flourishes common in pop at the time, but the conceptual - the album as a unified work of art. When Pepper is referred to as a concept album, it is in this sense. The Young Rascals' previous albums had been mostly collections of singles, many of them already familiar hits by the time the album hit the streets. This was, from the ground up, an album conceived for the album age, and the Rascals upped the ante by producing the album and providing the sleeve art themselves.
There is none of the bleakness of the cover imagery in the music. It is as beautiful and uplifting and honest as they knew how to make it, and if that involves occasional leaps into melodic melodrama (My Hawaii, and the title track) that's something we have to get over. These are good Italian boys and sometimes they like to sing for their mothers and the old neighborhood. This is heart-on-the-sleeve stuff, nothing knowing or "ironic" here, thank god. The lyrics don't strain for cleverness or impact, and the rhymes tend to the predictable. The songs are varied, as pop albums should be, showing their roots in blue-eyed soul, street corner harmony, blues and Rn'B. The production is just jaw-dropping, absolute state of the art stereo studio mastery. Arif Mardin and Tom Dowd are on board, which is a guarantee of the finest recording quality, all organic, no computers, the magic of magnetic tape, virtuoso musicians (including several jazz luminaries) playing together, a universe or two away from the sterility of contemporary pop production.
A standalone pop masterpiece, owing nothing to anybody outside the team of consummate professionals who made it, both of its time and timeless, an album for the ages, for right now, that reveals something new and wonderful on every play.
"Fuck lawyers! Their offices and cars may look gorgeous but inside they're full of shit and bones!"- Matthew NSFW 23-27
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