Word: organisms
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...took two years and AM radio before I found Argent for myself. I heard "Hold Your Head Up" on the radio and thought it was McCartney, until I heard its organ break. It's still one of the finer things on AM playlists. It's rare enough I buy an album for one cut; this is the first record I've ever bought on the basis of one song played on the radio...
Russ Ballard is not only Argent's guitarist, he also writes nearly half the band's songs. Ballard's songs emphasize guitar as much as Argent's rely on organ and piano. "Tragedy", opens with a good soul band guitar lick, that becomes the basis of the tune. Rod Argent's role on this one is to build the total sound with his full-bodied chords, and to play a smoothly-phrased duet with Ballard during the break. The transitions between chorus bridge and break are smooth--repeated listening shows this to be one of the band's strong points...
...insistence, the steadiness of the bass and drums in "Hold Your Head Up" make it perfect for AM radio. Rod achieves an overdubbing effect early in the break by playing lines with both hands. The rest of the long break is characterized by a full sound on the organ; Argent builds by level to his climax, but does no without any (Keith) Emersonian flash or frenzy. Again, there's a smooth transition, featuring an echoed, insistent "Hold Your Head Up" chant, into the final chorus and verse...
Further technical problems included the exchange of McLaughlin's entire bank of amplifiers: problems with the organ's main amp, its Leslie tone cabinet, were confronted, and solved. Then, 30 seconds of silenced. Then, thunder, the massive chords of "Meeting of the Spirits," four of them, as though to alert the heavens that the show had begun. The piece's theme is finger-picked, on the 12 string neck of McLaughlin's double-necked Gibson. From there the group's soloists explored the theme's possibilities...
...classes will be counted against youths who want to enter Czechoslovakia's overcrowded universities. The Czechoslovak press has launched an all-out attack on religion in general and the Roman Catholic Church in particular. In Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia, the most heavily Catholic region, the Communist Party organ Pravda warned readers that religion causes schizophrenia, leads to mental imbalance and encourages crime. The national army paper Obrana Lidu denounced the Vatican as the world's "greatest center of ideological subversion...