In today’s Peabody’s Picks – Connections with It’s A Beautiful Day’s Marrying Maiden
And we’re back, after a short (5 years!) hiatus.
Today’s question – What do these 4 albums have in common?
It’s a Beautiful Day – It’s a Beautiful Day
Deep Purple – The Book of Taliesyn
Deep Purple – In Rock
It’s a Beautiful Day – Marrying Maiden
At this point you’re probably going “huh?” Let’s dig in, shall we?
In 1969, It’s a Beautiful Day released their self-titled debut album, very well known for the classic track “White Bird”. Included on the album was a tune called “Bombay Calling”. The next year, Deep Purple’s Mk II lineup (Jon Lord, Ian Paice, Ian Gillan, Roger Glover, Ritchie Blackmore) released their first studio album In Rock, including the popular “Child in Time”. If you owned It’s a Beautiful Day, you immediately said of “Child In Time” hey wait a minute, that’s “Bombay Calling”. The story goes that Deep Purple keyboardist Jon Lord was a big fan of It’s a Beautiful Day, and was dating It’s a Beautiful Day’s vocalist, Pattie Santos (the latter according to the late, great British rock journalist Malcolm Dome). One day he was playing the “Bombay Calling” riff, the band heard it, and created Child In Time based on the riff. Gillan had never heard the original song, and created lyrics with a Cold War theme.
Nowadays this would have instigated a lawsuit, instead It’s a Beautiful Day returned the favor, putting an instrumental on their second album Marrying Maiden (1970) called “Don and Dewey”, which borrows heavily from Purple’s “Wring That Neck” (known in the US as “Hard Road”) from the Deep Purple Mk I (Lord, Paice, Blackmore, Rod Evans, Nick Simper) lineup’s second album The Book of Taliesyn (1968). “Wring That Neck” in turn is basically “Stretchin’ Out” (1962) by the aforementioned R&B duo Don and Dewey, which features violin by Don “Sugarcane” Harris (who went on to play on Zappa’s Hot Rats), so it was a natural for It’s a Beautiful Day leader/violinist David LaFlamme.
Interestingly enough, in a 1970 episode of the concert show “Doing Their Thing” on England’s Granada TV (later ITV), Deep Purple MK II perform both “Child In Time” and “Wring That Neck” (in spite of the latter being from the previous iteration of the band). But wait, there’s more – in 2000, Deep Purple released a live album recorded in 1995 in, you guessed it, Mumbai (Bombay being the Anglicized version of Mumbai), India. The name of the album? Bombay Calling, of course.
Everything is connected, friends.
