The Pretty Things - S.F. Sorrow | Vinyl Monday

[00:00:00]Hi.

[00:00:01]I'm Abby. I have a lot of records, and this is Vinyl Monday.

[00:00:09]>> [music] [music] >> Welcome everyone to what may end up being the hottest filming day of the year, and welcome back or welcome if this is your first time here. Vinyl Monday is the who, what, when, where, why, and how do I feel about classic albums in my collection. If TV show length episodes aren't your thing, don't worry. I also do Vinyl Monday in 60 seconds here on my channel, over on my Instagram, as well as TikTok. I know you just saw an episode from me, but I filmed that weeks ago. Everyone stay cool this holiday weekend. You listened to last week's podcast episode about Ginger Gilmore. Did any of you lucky bastards snag a piece from Tom Verlaine's record collection? And I hope you're all surviving the Mercury retrograde all right, because I >> [laughter] >> I don't know.

[00:01:11]This week's album has been in the Vinyl Monday queue for a hot minute now. Every time I cover something remotely psychedelic, UK psych especially, or a rock opera, this record inevitably comes up. Is it psychedelic? Yes. Is it from the year 1968? Yes. Is it on the show?

[00:01:33]Now it is. This week's album is The Pretty Things S.F. Sorrow. Congrats if you guessed this one. Remember, if you want to play along, all you got to do is check out my post tab. That's where I post the hints to what the next album is going to be. I make announcements. Got a real exciting one coming up soon. I host polls. You can find all of that on my channel. And if you so choose, you can always read the written versions of my reviews on my website. That's linked in the description. All right, we've got some ice water, my fan. Did I mention today's the only day I have to film this all this week? I got work, man.

[00:02:17]Now, let's take the plastic off.

[00:02:21]So, my copy is a repress, obviously.

[00:02:24]Original copies of S.F. Sorrow are rare as hen's teeth to begin with, let alone in the States. This is the 2016 repress from Madfish Records, and this is in stereo. I know there is hot debate over whether S.F. Sorrow is better in mono or stereo. This is the copy I happen to have. Now, let's talk about this cover art. Thanks to the band having complete creative control over the project, the S.F. Sorrow cover art was illustrated by The Pretty Things lead singer, Phil May.

[00:02:59]I appreciate this cover because we only have vague hints of what's going to happen in the S.F. Sorrow story. We have multiplying figures and ominous face hanging overhead, a blimp, a tombstone, the end. What could this mean? The back cover was photographed by The Pretty Things guitarist, Dick Taylor. We have a dark, moody shot of the guys from overhead, augmented by some more illustrations by Phil. Now, the band wanted a gatefold sleeve to print all of their lyrics and the S.F. Sorrow story in between. But, since this was their first album on a new label, they were taking a chance with The Pretty Things to begin with, the label said no. A gatefold was not in the budget. We'll find out why later. So, the band ended up having to foot the 500 to 700 lb bill for a gatefold cover themselves. I'm glad they did. It communicates the story where the music maybe doesn't at times.

[00:04:01]On On [clears throat] S.F. Sorrow, we have maybe the third major lineup of The Pretty Things. I say major lineup because there were a lot of changes in the beginning. This album's got Phil May on lead vocals, Dick Taylor on guitar and backing vocals, Jon Povey on Mellotron, organ, sitar, and various percussion, Wally Waller on bass, backing vocals, wind instruments, and the piano, and Jon Adler, aka Twink.

[00:04:34]>> [laughter] >> I don't know. It's Britain in the '60s.

[00:04:37]On drums and backing vocals. S.F. Sorrow was produced by Norman Smith.

[00:04:44]Roll transition.

[00:04:53]If you know anything about this band, my king god, is it all so difficult. The World Radio History Archive, dead end. The biography, out of print and prohibitively expensive because me, that's why. The book that Phil talked about later in his life, still not out.

[00:05:13]Documentary, stuck in production hell.

[00:05:16]Due to the scarcity of publicly available information on The Pretty Things, especially [music] in the S.F. Sorrow era, this episode genuinely would not have happened without Mike Stax over at Ugly Things Magazine. He sent me issue 54 like 2 years ago now for the Gabor Szabo episode I wrote, and he sent me the liners that he wrote for the Bouquets from a Cloudy Sky box set from a while back. They were the two most important sources that I had and made this episode's narrative possible. The Pretty Things started as art school dropouts turned blues revivalists, like their peers The Rolling Stones. They were a support act for The Animals and Graham Bond, but The Pretty had other plans.

[00:06:03]These guys courted controversy pretty much from day one. They looked like this, pretty normal for a rock and roll band from the '60s, right? Let's put The Pretty side by side with some other long hairs from 1964.

[00:06:24]Yeah.

[00:06:26]If parents across the globe were up in arms over The Beatles and Brian Jones' hair, you can imagine the hullabaloo in the press over The Pretty Things. They gained this reputation as the feral children of rock and roll, but hey, any press is good press, right?

[00:06:46]Right? You'll find that this band hit bad luck just as soon as they hit success. Their peers did really well in the States. The Stones, The Kinks pre-punch gate. Thanks to incompetent management, The Pretty Things couldn't get to the United States. They couldn't capitalize on that massive audience that surely would have loved them. I mean, we already had a pretty serious garage rock scene. That brand of greedy, rough and rowdy R&B would have fared really well here. You know, if they didn't get banned from the radio first. So, they focused on Europe instead. European audiences turned out to be more tolerant of Dick Taylor's out there influences.

[00:07:28]Ornette Coleman, Sun Ra, free jazz train. By 1965, The Yardbirds are starting to stretch out their numbers.

[00:07:36]Into '66, The Stones put a 10-minute romp on their latest LP, but the Pretty's improvisations are {quote} platforms for whatever kind of musical anarchy they happen to be caught up in at that moment in time. A chaotic run of shows in New Zealand got them banned from the country. Mike Stax has a whole book in Yesterday's Papers has a whole video about that saga. The PR nightmare forced them to sack the hardiest Yeah, >> [gasps] >> the hardest partier of the group, drummer Viv Prince. New drummer Skip Alan lied about his age since he was only 17, touring internationally just got a lot harder. But he ran off to marry some French woman, so Twink joins.

[00:08:20]In early 1967, when the Pretty's were about halfway through recording their last album for Fontana Records, Emotions, Phil May reconnects with his childhood friend, Wally Waller. As the story goes, they wrote three songs in one day, one of them being the sun.

[00:08:40]>> [music] >> Wally brought something that the Pretty Things had been lacking in their previous efforts. Harmonies that sound kind of like the Beach Boys from his previous group. That year, the band finds themselves in the London underground music scene purely by accident because no other spaces were tolerant of their weirdness. They were too harsh for British R&B, but it seems they were just weird enough for psych.

[00:09:08]They even played the 14-hour Technicolor Dream with Pink Floyd and their little brother band, the Soft Machine. Now, Like a Quick One was The Who's trial run before The Who Sell Out and Tommy. The Pretty Things had a few trial runs before SF Sorrow. Thanks to Brian Morrison at their booking agency bankrolling some demo sessions, The Pretty Things were able to put Defecting Grey, It's Beside Mr. Evasion, and Talking About the Good Times to tape.

[00:09:37]Defecting Grey was a quote small maquette, as Phil phrased it, of what was to come. A maquette, of course, is a sculptor's scale model of a piece before making the whole thing. Defecting Grey's got crossfades. It's got different time sigs. It's got four different narratives, one of which is the story of a straight man who discovers he's not straight. The Pretty's are sick of Fontana Records. Fontana Records are sick of them. They were dropped after emotions. Phil said, quote, "Once we got off the 45 hit single roundabout, for us it was incredible freedom, and we just made music, and we were actually real."

[00:10:16]Meanwhile, the Pretty's are under a truly ludicrous amount of sham contract.

[00:10:22]Desperate for money, they record soundtrack or library music, as they called it, under the name The Electric Banana. Talking About the Good Times was the first song they recorded at EMI Studios. In September of 1967, the down-and-out Pretty Things managed to land a contract with EMI Records. Their 3,500 pound advance, while pretty good, immediately went to paying off their debts. So, the album was over budget from day zero, but the guys take advantage of their fresh start, their creative control, and their unlimited studio time. That contract was pretty sweet to do something totally new. Phil said, quote, "I could never understand why an album had to be five A-sides and five B-sides with no connection. Pieces of music had been written for at least a 40-minute listen, and I thought the best way to do that was to overlay a storyline and create music for the various characters and instances. It was the oldest concept in the world, but at the time, nobody had done it before." To Richie Unterberger, he said, "We had to find another way of making records or we would have stopped with boredom. We'd had enough of being a pop band and we wanted to find something which we could get ourselves into and would just be a different way of recording." With a short story Phil wrote called Cutting Up Sergeant Time, S.F. Sorrow, and the rock opera was born. Pause. Okay, none of the Pretty's had the term rock opera in mind, although to Phil was influenced by the structure of a classical opera. No, they were not influenced by UK Nirvana.

[00:12:10]Phil denied it in interview in 2000. All right, all that out of the way, let's continue. For the story of S.F. Sorrow. Mr. and Mrs. Sorrow move from up north to a factory town. After a few years, the Mrs. gives birth to a son they name Sebastian F.

[00:12:29]Sorrow. Nobody knew what the F stood for and nobody really cared. S.F. has an innocent, if brief and lonely, childhood. He does have an especially active imagination to keep him company.

[00:12:42]When he comes of age, he starts working at the same factory of misery as his father and he experiences young love with the girl next door. Still longing for an escape from [music] this town and now out of a job since the factory has closed, the naive Sorrow goes off to fight in World War I where he experiences the realities of war. After the war, S.F. goes to America to start a new life. He's to be joined by his sweetheart, buys her a ticket there, but she dies in a fiery Hindenburg-style accident.

[00:13:16]In the balloon. Watching the love of his life die in front of him fast-tracks Sorrow's spiral. Consumed by his grief, he wanders aimlessly through the streets of New York until he bumps into one Baron Saturday. Baron Saturday asks Sorrow to lend him his eyes, but he didn't wait for a reply. He just took them. This triggers an intense vision of some kind [music] in which Sorrow thinks the Baron has taken him to the moon, something he always fantasized about as a child. Instead, it's Sorrow's own face they enter first, then a hall of mirrors, the well of destiny, and finally, the Baron shows him the most painful sight yet. Unable to accept whatever he's seen on this journey to the center of his mind, Sorrow loses his marbles. He wanders around New York, presumably homeless, and into his old age. He isolates himself for the rest of his life until he dies, the loneliest man in the world.

[00:14:19]What a wholesome, uplifting story. Phil had a gnarly, pessimistic street. Dick remembered Mark St. John saying, "Whatever happens, Phil will always see the worst of it." Like many rock operas, Sorrow's story came partly from real life. Phil's parents split when he was very young. He was raised by his aunt and uncle as one of their own until all of a sudden his birth mother and new stepfather are back in the picture to take Phil away from the only home he'd ever known. Wally said, "I still remember his haunted expression as our eyes met and we waved for the last time.

[00:14:56]I had no idea how I was going to fill the next few days till the weekend arrived and we could see each other again." He didn't see his best friend again for six whole years. Phil's mom and stepdad cut him off from everyone he'd ever known in his old life. Like Sorrow, Phil retreated into his imagination to cope. "I went into a shell. It fired my imagination because I thought life was pretty bleak. So, a lot of stuff went on in my head. I had kind of a secret life, I guess. It wasn't real. It was a virtual world to keep myself going. He also lived in house number three, growing up.

[00:15:36]For 10 weeks now, number three stood [music] empty. Quote, there was a lot of me in S.F. Sorrow, and during the making of it, I realized that I was starting to leak some deeply hidden personal truths into the grooves of that record. For the first time in my life, I was opening myself up in the writing of those lyrics, and it became for me a cathartic experience. S.F. Sorrow was written in more than a few all-nighters at Phil's Folk's place, with the guys, instruments, and strange substances.

[00:16:07]Dick was really into love, and their own cursed psychedelic masterpiece forever changes. The music evolved as the album did. Some songs were written in the studio. Fortunately, Sorrow had a guardian angel in the form of producer Norman Smith. He had a pretty damn good resume at this point. Rubber Soul and Piper at the Gates of Dawn. Wally explained, we found in Norman a kindred spirit, who allowed us to indulge our passions. Quite often, we found ourselves treading in the virgin snow, both musically and technically. We burned lots of recording time, but fortunately, most artist contracts of the day involved the recording company picking up the tab for recording costs.

[00:16:51]The bean counters at EMI did get a bit worried about the amount of money we were spending in Abbey Road recording time, but Norman took all the flak, and he had a track record through his connections with the Beatles and Pink Floyd. So, nobody bothered him too much.

[00:17:07]S.F. Sorrow was recorded from November of 1967 through September of 1968 in EMI Studio 2 first, then they got bumped to studio three. The Pretty's got in the studio right after the Zombies recording Odyssey and Oracle. Their illustrious neighbors included Pink Floyd recording Saucerful and The Beatles with The White Album. So, the guys got to use instruments the other bands left behind.

[00:17:35]A Tibetan drum, a Mellotron, even Ringo Starr's drum kit. They wanted a dulcimer, but EMI didn't have one, so Dick and his dad built a similar instrument themselves. S.F. Sorrow was not an easy album to record. EMI didn't have eight-track technology until well into 1968, so the initial four tracks would be filled with the basic backing track, drums, guitar, bass, maybe a second guitar part, or a guide vocal.

[00:18:05]This was mixed down to two track, leaving two more free tracks for more parts. These guys started in '67 with all the desired studio effects and necessary overdubbing, many a mix down were needed. Wally said the process could be repeated four or five times on S.F. Sorrow until the track was complete, and sometimes they'd even add things live in the final mix down. Since this is long before the days of digital technology where we have the luxury of cutting and deleting and repeating whatever we'd like at the stroke of a key, it is impossible to reverse these mix downs unless, of course, you're okay with starting from scratch. The track listing of S.F. Sorrow goes as follows.

[00:18:55]>> [music] >> Opening up side one, we have S.F. Sorrow is born, followed by Bracelets of Fingers, then She Says Good Morning, next Private Sorrow, then Balloon Burning, and side one closes with Death.

[00:19:17]Opening up side two, we have Baron Saturday, followed by The Journey, then I See You, next Well of Destiny, then Trust, Old Man Going, and the album closes with Loneliest Person. Wait.

[00:19:34]This isn't a double album? You mean to tell me it is possible for a rock and roll band to make a single act rock opera? Holy [ __ ] man, I got to sit down.

[00:19:47]Wait. S.F. Sorrow was released in December of 1968, a year and a month after production began, and it went nowhere. Why did S.F.

[00:19:57]Sorrow fail? It was virtually impossible to recreate on stage for one, and doubly difficult after Dick Taylor left. Quote, "I left at the very final note of S.F.

[00:20:07]Sorrow. In the interim, I left to see what else was out there. It was no big blob with the band, I just wanted to see what else I could do. And to be honest, I got bored." It feels like déjà vu all over again saying this, but any album released in the last few weeks of 1968 didn't stand a chance against the White Album, Beggars Banquet, and Electric Ladyland. You could draw a really interesting comparison between these three albums and the records they slaughtered on the charts. The Village Green Preservation Society, The Soft Machine's first, and S.F. Sorrow. Sorrow got only a passing mention in the December 14th, 1968 issue of the Melody Maker. The review called the group, quote, "Much improved and exciting on stage and experimental on record." Disc gave it a backhanded compliment. Quote, "Amazing album from, of all people, The Pretty Things." And EMI did very little to promote it. Phil said, quote, "It was a kick in the balls. It's one thing to let us make the bloody thing, but then all they gave us was little quarter-inch adverts saying, 'The new album by The Pretty Things.' Nothing about the story.

[00:21:21]Nothing about the narrative. The EMI contract that gave The Pretty's so many creative freedoms gave them very little in royalties. So, when this album tanked, they couldn't pay back their advance." As if that wasn't enough, this album languished on Rare Earth's shelves until well into 1969, not getting a US release until months after The Who's Tommy, the album many have considered the first rock opera. Quote, "Roger Daltrey and Kit Lambert and Pete Townshend kept saying, 'For Christ's sake, don't let us come out in America before you. It'll be a disaster. You've got to get it out.' So, I would then tell EMI, EMI would tell Xtamla, 'Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's coming out.' It came out three months after Tommy, and it was, in fact, a disaster. We got slaughtered in America for jumping on the Tommy bandwagon. I think that cast a sort of almost made history be sort of scrambled because at that point in America, the concept was that S.F.

[00:22:29]Sorrow was after Tommy. And I think in a lot of people's psyche, even though it was made 14 months before Tommy, it will never change. It's just something like a really bad fact you learn in history, turns out to be false, but you're taught early enough, and it stays. Pete Townshend's gone back and forth on whether Sorrow actually inspired Tommy or not. You have to keep in mind Pete is one of rock and roll's biggest contrarians. See that insane Rolling Stone interview from 1968. But when you listen to the journey and Old Man Going >> [music] >> next to Pinball Wizard.

[00:23:25]>> [music] >> Interesting. The '69 release of S.F.

[00:23:30]Sorrow put the Pretty Things and their album in this wonky in-between period.

[00:23:36]They're after psych, but before prog, and they're right in the middle of the back-to-basics movement. The Rolling Stone review of Sorrow by this guy is always at the scene of the crime said, "One looked forward to this because The Pretty Things are a thrillingly ragged blues band with none of the usual snobbery. What a surprise then to find an ultra-pretentious concept album complete with strained story, a man's life from rural birth to prodigal's Oliver Twist freakout, like some grossly puerile cross between the Bee Gees, Tommy, and the Moody Blues, who should be shot for what they've done to English rock lyrics." A later reissue during the prog explosion of the '70s might have helped, or maybe after Pink Floyd hit it big with Dark Side and re-released their early LPs. But The Pretty Things couldn't even do that.

[00:24:31]They finally settled the legal disputes over the rights to their catalog in [ __ ] 1998, 20 years after Sorrow's release. Only then could it be reissued. For all of the above reasons, S.F. Sorrow never stood a chance. Phil concluded, "The album never really had a proper release.

[00:24:55]To some extent, it died at birth. The plan was to perform S.F. Sorrow in full at Roundhouse's 30th anniversary Summer of Love Festival, but the plans fell through. In a rare stroke of good luck for the Pretty's, they got a way better deal. Instead, S.F. Sorrow was performed in full for the very first time at Abbey Road Studios with special guest David Gilmour on guitar, Skip Alan's son Phil in on percussion, and Arthur Brown as narrator. It was live-streamed online, a pretty impressive feat for 1998. They played it again at Royal Festival Hall in 2001. But to this day, the better part of 60 years after its release, so few fans of the Pretty's peers are aware of them or Sorrow. Aside from cults of psych rock fans online, this crucial link between psychedelia and prog languishes in obscurity. So, what do I think of S.F. Sorrow?

[00:26:01]>> [music] [music] >> I believe an artist's circumstances influence the art that they make. That's like the whole point of this series. I see a lot of similarities between the Pretty's and Sorrow and The Zombies with Odyssey. The Zombies knew they were going to throw in the towel after Odyssey. That's why you get happy music with such sad lyrics. S.F. Sorrow is a rocker and it is bleak. boy dreams of going to the moon and is literally never happy ever again. This album is the Pretty's gritty, unfiltered slice of reality or the very worst of it. I truly don't think the world is as bad as S.F.

[00:26:54]Sorrow resigned himself to believing it was. This was not what the youth at the time wanted to hear, the story, not the sound. The sound absolutely was, but it was what the youth were feeling amid the slow breakdown of the counterculture collapsing under the weight of itself over the next year and a half. War and madness were also on the collective brain. It's interesting that two rock operas released in the same calendar year both involve World War I in the plot. It shows that the Vietnam generation might have seen something of themselves in their silent generation parents and their grandparents, however deep the divide between the young and old may have been at the time. The Pretty Things knew well that the odds were stacked against them at this point.

[00:27:42]Why not get into a story like this? S.F.

[00:27:44]Sorrow is only 40 minutes long, 21 minutes on one side, 19 on the other. A single LP can handle up to 24 minutes of music on each side. I believe The Pretty Things could have used their eight minutes of wiggle room for at least one of the singles. Uh with a story as loose as this, they could have absolutely shoehorned one of them in and some interludes with narration. Were it not for the liners, we would have no idea who Baron Saturday is or why he's here.

[00:28:15]One of the most difficult things about the rock opera is striking the balance between music and story. S.F. Sorrow isn't a story told in the music, really.

[00:28:26]There are no leitmotifs like The Wall's or repeated phrases like Tommy's.

[00:28:40]>> [music] [singing] >> Sorrow lives almost entirely in the lyrics. The story is concise. I will give the Pretty's that. The miserable life and death of one man. It's not like Tommy, which desperately needs a red pen or The Lamb for that matter. I also appreciate S.F. Sorrow's subtle critique of capitalism. It is the misery that underscores our main character's life from before he was born. Factories of misery. War, too, plagues him. Poor men die in rich men's wars, after all. If we had one of the Pretty's in their nice English accents or even Arthur Brown narrating the album, the story could have been just as strong as the music.

[00:29:28]S.F. Sorrow's birth opens side one and it sounds pretty optimistic so far. This bouncing baby boy has a clean slate and is ready to take on the world. The seize the day feeling comes from overdubbed acoustic guitars, which Tommy would also do, and a subtle sitar with a steady rhythm from Wally's [music] bass. S.F.

[00:29:49]Sorrow is born is the only celebratory moment on the whole album. With a trumpet fanfare and a little Mellotron fill. That's another similarity to Odyssey. Since both bands were on shoestring budgets, they really had to push what they had. In both bands' cases, it made for innovation with and masterful use of the Mellotron. It's got lots of different settings you can use to kind of mimic an orchestra. Norman Smith also pushed the production of Sorrow as far as it could go. This is evident on Sorrow is born and many other numbers. Notice when, after Phil sings, "Before the sun had left the streets, they were living inside." It pulls back to just the rhythm guitar track. Then, with a pan, everything rushes back in again. There are alternating acoustic and electric guitar lines in the instrumental refrain, the gentle push of those guitars back, and applying reverb to Phil's voice on the verses. With everything that's going on here, I'm pleased that Norman was able to capture The Pretty's harmonies and acquaint them in this field of sound. These guys sound like if The Who were kidnapped by The Beach Boys. With the final verse, Phil introduces that not all is right here.

[00:31:05]The sunlight of his days was spent in the gray of his mind. [music] As he stole love with a tongue of lies, the world was shrinking in size. I think we can chalk up the last line to some Baron Saturday foreshadowing or some classic '60s psychedelic gobbledygook, but Sorrow is already beginning to isolate himself in his early childhood. We slip into Sorrow's fantastical lunar dreams on bracelets of fingers. Woozy, trippy a cappella.

[00:31:36]>> Love, love, [singing and music] love, love, love, love.

[00:31:40]>> Break into rolling, booming drums and accordions that score The Pretty's stately harmonies. Fly to the moon and I'll get there quite soon if I wait a while. Cradled in branches that stretch out their arms, I must wait a while.

[00:31:55]Sounds innocent enough. Sorrow's daydreams about the moon while sitting in a tree. Bending my mind as I pick up the flowers in May. Hearing the laughter that turns into tears every day. [music] He's using what we might now call maladaptive daydreaming to cope with the negativity, poverty, and dirtiness of his factory town. The verses are sung over a jaunty, almost inebriated waltz with military drums. Effects are applied to Phil's voice to give him a faraway sound. It puts space between the narrator and us. Sorrow is physically here, but his mind is far away.

[00:32:36]Bracelets of Fingers has some of the best production on the whole record.

[00:32:40]Norman and the Pretty's use lots of phasing to make the Mellotron do forwards and backwards things. The instrumental break with sitar, Mellotron, and hand drums is wonderful already. There are lots of these littered throughout S.F. Sorrow. But then the Pretty's stick in one of the most futuristic sounding transitions of the whole decade.

[00:33:08]I was blown away when I first heard this. And we've still got half a song to go. How can I get that out of my head and just go back to the verses as normal? I can't. And I think that's what the Pretty's intended. She says good morning, introduces Sorrow's love interest, as well as some Beatles influence. The super trebly chiming riff, splashy drums, and a harsher, more nasally lead and harmony vocal. The riff during the verses and that backbeat focused drum are totally Sgt. Pepper's.

[00:33:48]>> [music] >> It's sweet that a guy who is so into the moon and space travel would meet his lady when she tells him good morning.

[00:33:59]Now he's got something to love both day and night. She is his sun, brightening his polluted days. Threading through a web of gas, the rain precedes the storm.

[00:34:11]Coughing on my way to work, her smile keeps me warm. This factory pollutes the land and his life, but not their love.

[00:34:20]It kicks into double time during Dick's guitar solo and right before the fadeout, ramping up the energy ahead of the story's first climax. Briefly under some very Lennon-ish, we hear the couple chatting.

[00:34:37]>> [music] >> Cute.

[00:34:41]This will be the last good thing that ever happens to SF Sorrow. Private Sorrow masks the horrors of war under a peppy folksy arrangement. Wally plays a recorder or maybe a flute of some kind, a pan flute, um in the style of English folk music. It conveys the youth of these boys in the trenches. It's getting harder for Sorrow to bury his head under the sand, and in his dreams seashells whistle, let your mind drift away, ships too, let yourself hide away, as his physical survival instincts kick in. His mental survival skills of hiding away in fantasy are straining under the weight of the things that he sees. Twisting metal through the air, scars and screams, so you might know his fury.

[00:35:31]Whose fury? God's, it seems. Phil frames the action of war as fire and brimstone.

[00:35:39]Heaven's rain falls upon faces of the children who look skyward. Divine punishment for the ugliness of man. The naive young Sorrow is only playing the part of a war hero. You see violence and destruction until you're forced to become it. Dressed in white silk of rain, you marry the pain. As you kneel in a church of bright steel, a new morning arrives. The Mellotron and flute are overtaken [music] by heavy footsteps and a disembodied voice reading barely audible names of the fallen. Who they are, we don't get to know. And it seems nobody cares. The boots mesh with the drumming that gets louder and more oppressive. The march slows down ever so slightly until it kicks right into balloon burning. I can hear the love influence on balloon burning, that harsh, hot, trebly twin guitar opening the song, and the riff both remind me of A House Is Not a Motel. It's plenty fuzzy and rocking, but bells are sprinkled in to sweeten things up. This is the best drumming on the whole record. It's varied, it's flexible, and powerful to propel the chorus. The harmonies are haunting as if suspended in air or time. The fiery hell of war has followed sorrow home. A screeching, thrilling solo is played by Dick. More fills are played way up the fretboard, and there are plenty of quickly played acoustic [music] lines to fill things out. It raises the stakes. I don't know if sorrow ever had radio or commercial potential. I lean towards no. That's the problem with most rock operas. It is really hard to get a single out of one and have it make sense. The Wall is the exception, not the rule. But, I do feel that balloon burning had film score potential. It's clearly doomed, but the lyrics are sparse and non-specific enough to feel cohesive with a non-sorrow related picture. The tense chord at the end is never resolved.

[00:37:46]Sorrow is deep in grief on death.

[00:37:50]Another one of the best arranged songs on the record. The bass slides around the fretboard, [music] what sounds like a dulcimer and bouzouki under it, but this is probably the instrument that Dick and his dad built.

[00:38:03]It's punctuated by gongs, Tibetan drums, dark chants, and moans, and plenty of reverb. [music] We're pulled deeper into the depths of sorrow's despair, as if we were wearing lead shoes sinking down. Another wonderful sitar moment with chugging electric guitar also feels untethered, like we're lost in a deep, dark sea with no land in sight. I can't tell if Phil's muffled lead vocal is an intentional choice or was simply the result of too many mix-downs, but it's a stark effect nonetheless. After assumed years, Sorrow's grief refuses to let up. As the slow pulse of sobbing dries from the sky, my grief in red circles surrounding an eye. Side one ends with either a chariot pulling away, a horseman of the apocalypse on a chariot, or even crueler to our main character, the sound of fire. Though we don't know for sure in lyric or song, it's possible that Baron Saturday is an anglicized version of the Haitian deity Baron Samedi, master of the dead and giver of life. In S.F.

[00:39:17]Sorrow, he appears as a sort of trickster god, white visions black, Mr. Malady, to visit the downtrodden and steal their eyes. There's some very why don't we do it in the road like drumming, heavy on the cowbell, silly mellotron chords, and the Baron's own goofy English Baron accent. It has no reason being as catchy as it is, and one can't help but wonder if in recording this song, the Pretty's accidentally summoned a Haitian voodoo god, and that's what cursed this record. The Journey is one of those songs that the Pretty's thought up to link the narrative together. It's supposed to represent sorrow and the Baron journeying to the core of Sorrow's psyche. There are some very speeded, heavily echoed moments from past songs popping up, Bracelets of Fingers being the most recognizable.

[00:40:11]>> [music] >> Some edits are crude. You can tell this was an experiment. Band and producer do the best they possibly can to relay the journey into Sorrow's consciousness on I See You. I actually feel we could have gone darker and maybe a bit more psychedelic in this moment, but the mellotron does a fine job at conveying the drama. There's a strange texture on the harmony vocals, big dramatic drums, and an emotive vocal from Phil. Well of Destiny though delivers on that freaky dark brand of psych. Wordless keening vocals slip into all kinds of varying speeding and phasing on plunked piano and guitar exercises. It's the musical representation of Sorrow's denial. He cannot accept whatever he sees, and it is this denial which condemns him to his fate of madness. Sorrow has shut down completely on trust. The music is intricate and lush. I think this is in a three-way tie with Bracelets of Fingers and Death as the best arrangement on the record. It's like our main character's optimism is haunting him as his world view breaks down. There's no sorrow left [music] to trust. Not even other people's ales can convince him of the world. During the Your Scene Going Away passage, there's a nicely applied piano part worked deep into the music [music] and plenty of phasing on the wonderful harmony. The way the song ends with the full arrangement disappearing into descending acoustic guitar notes, it reflects Sorrow simply running out of steam and giving up on his life. The final up-tempo number, Old Man Going, rips into Sorrow. Phil's delivery gets more imbittered and snarling as he's stuck on all the worst life has to offer. Wet faces lying in the street, they will not be saved. Black house you've built, it will soon disappear.

[00:42:15]Another corporation dig this year. To him, human life is expendable at the hands of the powers that be. Streets filled with bouquets from a cloudy sky, they'll soon forget the field in which you lie. This hints at Sorrow's fate, lying in a pauper's grave somewhere in New York. The song is broken in two by Dick's thin solo over crashing cymbals and relentless acoustic guitar. Then the song quickly ends in group vocals chanting, [music] "Going, going, going, going." As if they're rooting for Sorrow's fall. And he does. On the stark Loneliest Person, after a full album of panning, phasing, layered guitar parts, interesting bass playing, and harmonies, all we have is a strummed acoustic and comped vocals as Sorrow laments, "You might be the loneliest person in the world, you'll never be as lonely as me."

[00:43:11]That's the heartbreak of this album.

[00:43:12]Sorrow truly believes he's been doomed since birth and that fighting against your fate and the powers that be is useless, that the human race has surrendered, and that there's no hope for anything better. I think that's what's [ __ ] us up so bad right now.

[00:43:30]And that's the note that we end this record on. Just a real killer. As if Sorrow has one huge plot hole. Neither song nor liners tell us exactly what most painful sight Baron shows to Sorrow. We do have a hint. "The waves break and part for me as my mind slips into sand. The water returns with the warmth of your hand." Implying this is Sorrow's girlfriend. He might feel responsible for her death. But it's not for certain. Is this vision the true identity of Mother or Father? The secret of the universe. Has he actually been dead this whole time and the events of this album were purgatory? Okay, there's actually a pretty elaborate theory online that Sorrow was killed in action and the Baron's taken him through purgatory, but we don't know for sure and we will never know. Phil's been gone for 6 years. In all the interviews and liner notes that I've read, it seems that no one thought to ask him what this site was. And that might be the great tragedy of S.F. Sorrow. Its creators can't tell us what made Sorrow a special person, why he was taken on this reverse bildungsroman. With the Pretty's having taken their McGuffin to the grave, Sorrow is an unremarkable everyman, save only for the history he saw and the tragedies it dealt him. Sorrow is a studio concoction of the 1960s, among among the finest of what British psych had to offer. Its creators were music industry outsiders with advocates who had access to the purse strings and delivered it to its greatest form. I think this outsider status was an asset for the Pretty's and in this sense, the project was blessed. But the negativity of Sorrow's story seemed to seep into Sorrow's story. This thing was totally out of step with peace and love. It can't be easily situated in any one era, contemporary or afterwards. S.F. Sorrow has no equal in the canon of rock operas or otherwise. My personal favorites off this one are S.F. Sorrow is born, Bracelets of Fingers, Balloon Burning Death, Baron Saturday and Loneliest Person. Remember, if you want to keep up with all of my favorites from all the Vinyl Mondays, I have a Spotify playlist linked in my description. I update it every week. And that's it. That's SF Sorrow. What do you think of this album?

[00:46:07]What do you think of the pretty things?

[00:46:09]Comment to let me know. I love hearing what you guys have to say about albums that I love. And remember, despite what some guy on the internet says, your opinion matters. If you like what I do here, you should like this video and subscribe to my channel. I post new episodes of Vinyl Monday Monday mornings at 11:00 a.m. A new episode of my podcast every other Friday at noon. So, that might change this week. Don't want to give anything away. And if you so choose, you can become a member of the freaking peanut gallery, my Patreon, where you get uncensored extended versions of these episodes, plus an exclusive video every month. It gives a little extra support to what I do.

[00:46:52]>> [music] >> Thank you so much for watching. I am going to go sit in an ice bath and cool down. Stay safe out there.

[00:47:01]Bye.

[00:47:07]>> [music]