Anyone Interested in a Pentangle Album by Album Thread?

Me, too. What is astonishing is how easy it is for nearly every person who likes Rock music to dig Pentangle. I thought it was an acquired taste when I found that Debut album in 1974 or 1975 only to find out that the majority of my buddies loved that album a lot and asked me to play it over and over again like The Doors or Pink Floyd etc.!

 

the tune ends to soon for us all...

I knew when you wrote that LITP had come out 'post Aqualung', that you were thinking of the LITP double long-player... and not the earlier UK single, later collected on it...

I too have that Life's A Long Song UK Ep (all five tracks of which are on LITP, side 4,) its a keeper, and I managed to get Ian to sign it at the 1992 Jethro Tull Convention in lovely, ahistorical Milton Keynes, Albion... Love that Ep and its cover...

But best of all is the UK LITP double LP, sweet sonics, best vinyl versions of many of these tracks, and a nice companion to the MFSL CD set...


But, I fear we art getting too afar away from The Pentangle...

Must pull out Basket of Light and spin it to~morrow!

cheers,

 

How did I miss this thread? Now I have to go back and read everything!

Be back soon...

 

Glorius stuff, Henry. Your posts are clearly liner-note worthy - wonderfully detailed and musically literate.

Can't wait for this thread to proceed, and, upon conclusion, for a similar Henry-penned Jansch thread to appear!

 

And thus another fan is born, or reborn, or renbourn, or discovered wandering in the night...


cheers,

 

I've been a Pentangle (and Jansch) fan for a long time (I've posted a few threads here on SH on both of them). But it's terrific to see such in-depth attention to these artists!

 

And at 1:04 in the morning you were discovered wandering in the night, reborn into the basket of light flight...

 

It wasn't 1:04 am here in Australia, Kind Sir!

 

Light at the end of the kennel...

One man's darkness is another man's light...

 

Not to drag us away from discussing Basket of Light, but I was wondering if anyone else has seen the two films Pentangle scored, Tam Lin and Christian the Lion. No soundtrack albums were released, but the songs eventually appeared on the boxed set, and I'm thinking that I will include both within the chronology of albums, so my next post will deal with the Tam Lin songs, which were recorded between Basket of Light and Cruel Sister.

I find both films almost unwatchable - I bought VHS copies at the height of my Pentangle-obsession/collecting mania; I'm curious if anyone else has sought them out and what you think . . .

 

I personally did not even know these existed!


And I look forward to hearing about them both...


In my parlance, you tripped far into the witchwood...


Well played...


cheers,

 

Nothing of any great importance to add to this thread, as Henry is doing a superb job. I just wanted to say thanks for all your efforts in this discussion. I first saw the band in 1970 at Carnegie Hall and Sweet Child was the first of their LPs I bought. I got them all going forward, and oddly, the first was the last one I acquired. The deconstruction aspect never occured to me as that presentation was the first I'd experienced.

I haven't been listening to them much of late, but this may motivate me to go through the whole catalogue and follow along. They've been one of my favorite bands for years and I'm a big fan of their solo endeavors as well. Great thread!

 

Any recollections of the show? Those who weren't alive at that point (!) would love to hear anything and everything about a 1970 Pentangle live show (when they were effectively still at their peak).

 

I'll second that; MoonPool: I'd love to hear your recollections of that show . . .

 

Give me some time to collect my thoughts - I'm taking a course at night (in addition to the day job and the band) and have a final coming up early next week, so it may be a few days before I get to it. The main recollection was the sound of Jacqui's voice, cutting through everything so clearly. I remember Bert hunched over his guitar and the mixture of jazz elements and improv blended with the traditional folk material, and then discussing all that with my music theiory professor at the time. More details in the fullness of time...

 

The Pentangle - Tam Lin
Film soundtrack (unreleased)
recorded: early 1970

The Devil's Widow

Released: December 1970 (UK), Commonwealth United Entertainment
September 1973 (US), American International Pictures

Songs:

"The Best Part of You" (Cox-Jansch-McShee-Renbourn-Thompson)
"Tam Lin" (Traditional, arranged Cox-Jansch-McShee-Renbourn-Thompson)
"The Name of the Game" (Cox-Jansch-McShee-Renbourn-Thompson)

Jo Lustig's plan of exposing the Pentangle in any way possible expanded in the early 1970s from television to film, with two soundtrack projects for the band. Unlike the band's earlier television work on the theme from Take Three Girls, their soundtrack work failed to result in any record releases (at least, prior to the 2007 boxed set) and did little to further the band's profile as the films involved were poorly distributed and critically and commercially unsuccessful.

Tam Lin, aka The Devil's Widow, aka The Devil's Wife, aka The Ballad of Tam Lin was the Pentangle's first film soundtrack project as well as actor Roddy McDowell's first (and last) turn as director. A modernized (read "Swinging Sixties") re-telling of the ballad of a man taken away by an elfen queen, the film was produced as a vehicle for aging film star Ava Gardner, but was plagued by distribution problems, wooden acting, a lugubriously slow pace, and, to put it bluntly, general awfulness. The Pentangle contributed three songs to the proceedings and the film, which had been shot in late 1969, sank into obscurity, the Pentangle's contributions with it.

The film was, however, released on VHS in the 1990s, and, is apparently currently available on DVD; the Pentangle songs (the two most complete of them) appear (lifted directly from the film - the original masters are missing) on the band's box set, The Time Has Come. They provide an interesting look into the period between Basket of Light and Cruel Sister and offer, perhaps, some clue to the shift in direction / loss of momentum the band's career takes at this point.

Their version of "Tam Lin", to begin with, is extraordinarily different from the contemporary version by Fairport Convention. In the film, it is presented in segments, accompanying various scenes in roughly 30 second to 2 minute bites; on the boxed set, these are sewn together into something that doesn't really hang together as a song, punctuated with sound effects, dialogue, and bits of Stanley Myers's orchestral score. The melody given to the traditional lyric is very similar to the one that would be used for "A Maid That's Deep in Love" on their next album, and the instrumentation is similar to that used on some of the sections of "Jack Orion": acoustic guitar, sitar, faux-medieval percussion. It's impossible to really judge the track based on the cobbled-together 7 minutes we have, except to say that it would not have seemed out-of-place on Cruel Sister, but also seems to be lacking in the fire the band had thus far displayed on nearly everything they'd released.

"The Best Part of You", which plays over the film's opening credits would have seemed out of place on any Pentangle album. I encourage you, if you haven't heard the track, to watch the youtube clip below. The song sounds incredibly un-Pentangle-like, with a horn-section with prominent baritone sax, and very busy (overdubbed?) electric piano and electric bass almost certainly not played by anyone in the band. I've listened many times to the boxed set version of this and see no evidence that Jansch or Thompson appear on this track, although Renbourn's newly-found blaring electric and McShee and Cox's vocals are very much in evidence. I am very curious how much input the band members actually had in the final performance and arrangement of this song; it certainly sounds like the composition mostly belongs to Terry Cox, but it's easy to see why "The Best Part of You" doesn't appear on any of the Pentangle's original albums.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0erxwsQ5PXE


Finally, "The Name of the Game" appears only briefly in the song, in snatches heard on a radio in the background of one scene. Thus, it was probably not thought worthy of copying for the boxed set, but a BBC radio performance from December, 1969, has been issued, on The Lost Broadcasts. Like "The Best Part of You", it's a pretty uninspired song, a Terry Cox composition that seems to consciously ape "what a late 1960s pop song should sound like."

The band's next album, Cruel Sister would feature no original songs and a very simplified production compared to that of Basket of Light, and it's hard not to wonder how much the sheer emptiness of these film tracks contributed to the subdued roles of Jansch, Thompson, and Cox on the rest of the band's 1970 work.

Next up: Cruel Sister

 

Any reactions to that trippy youtube clip (and song) from Tam Lin. Will be posting on Cruel Sister today or tomorrow, but am very curious what y'all think of "The Best Part of You" . . .

 

The Pentangle: Cruel Sister

Produced by Bill Leader

Terry Cox – Drums, percussion, dulcitone, and vocals
Bert Jansch – Acoustic guitar, Appalachian dulcimer, concertina, recorder and vocals
Jacqui McShee – Vocals
John Renbourn – Acoustic and electric guitars, sitar, recorder and vocals
Danny Thompson – Double bass


Transatlantic TRA228 (27 November 1970) (UK)
Reprise RS6430. (US)

CD Reissues on Line, Transatlantic, Castle Communications

1. A Maid That’s Deep in Love (Traditional, arranged Cox-Jansch-McShee-Renbourn-Thompson) – 5:30
2. When I Was in My Prime (Traditional, arranged McShee) – 2:57
3. Lord Franklin (Traditional, arranged Jansch-McShee-Renbourn) – 3:23
4. Cruel Sister (Traditional, arranged Cox-Jansch-McShee-Renbourn-Thompson) – 7:03
5. Jack Orion (Traditional, arranged Cox-Jansch-McShee-Renbourn-Thompson) – 18:48


It took me a little bit longer than usual to write this one up: there is a lot of flawed information on this album out there, and I found while writing that I haven't necessarily thought about this album as much as I have the others.

********************************


At times it seems that Cruel Sister is not so much the Pentangle’s fourth album as the John Renbourn Group’s first. At first this may seem a harsh judgment, but consider the subdued roles played by Bert Jansch, Terry Cox, and, particularly, Danny Thompson on Cruel Sister. Thematically and stylistically, it shares more in common with the later John Renbourn and Jacqui McShee project "The John Renbourn Group" on their albums A Maid in Bedlam (1977) and The Enchanted Garden (1980) than it does with The Pentangle or Basket of Light. Medievalism (or more accurately a certain “late Renaissance” style) crowds out the band’s other competing stylistic interests: overt jazz, rock, and pop material temporarily disappears here, resulting in a marked change to the band’s sound. Further, Thompson and Cox do not appear on two of the album’s tracks, and no track features the trademark dual acoustic guitar fireworks of Jansch and Renbourn. When two guitars do appear, they are most often one acoustic, one electric, both played by Renbourn.

John Renbourn was the Pentangle’s resident medievalist. It was he who, taking a reference from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, named the band, and it was he who introduced medieval songs and tunes into the band’s repertoire with the set of dances on Sweet Child and "Lyke-Wake Dirge" on Basket of Light. Cruel Sister expands on the direction suggested by the latter piece and by “Hunting Song” while minimizing the cross-genre polliniations that had previously defined the Pentangle sound.

From its cover depictions of Albrecht Durer woodcuts through its all-traditional, all-British-Isles repertoire, Cruel Sister is an entirely more serious proposition than any of the Pentangle’s earlier albums. Produced in a suitably austere style by Bill Leader (who had produced Jansch’s debut album and Jack Orion), the album depicts a notably lopsided Pentangle that replaces the multi-hued, multivalent approach of the earlier work to something that might be called chamber-folk or prog-folk, and, thus, this very polarizing album (among fans and the band themselves) finds its greatest supporters among folk fans.

One of the key attractions of traditional balladry is the economy with which stories are told; “Matty Groves” (as covered by Fairport Convention), to cite but one example, may have twenty-eight verses, but those twenty-eight verses contain enough plot and character for an average length novel or film, and the songs themselves tend to have an inherent forward momentum, no doubt the product of decades, sometimes centuries, of anonymous (usually a capella) singers constantly refining them in order to keep audiences interested in their stories. In a typically dismissive early review of this album, Robert Christgau argued that “Cruel Sister”’s choruses ended with “fa la la la la la la la” because in the olden days, people had nothing better to do, and, while certainly a reductive opinion, there is some validity to it. When the traditional material by the Pentangle (or, similarly, by Fairport Convention) is placed within a context of contemporary songs, jazz work-outs, rock 'n' roll covers, it is given a context that broadens and extends its appeal and sense of cultural "relevance." By focusing exclusively on traditional material, and by lengthening the already lengthy ballad “Jack Orion”, the band loses the multiple visions, the heteroglossia, of their earlier albums: without Jansch’s blues and Cox’s quirky pop songs, without the Mingus and Jaynetts and Staple Singers covers, the Pentangle seem here as if they are doing a side project, not a real band album.

“A Maid That’s Deep in Love,” one of many traditional ballads about a young girl disguising herself as a man in order to go to sea begins the proceedings, and is, with the title track, the most Pentangle-like sounding track here. It is also the only track on which Danny Thompson sounds fully-engaged, contributing a signature driving bass line and variations that underpin Jansch on Appalachian dulcimer, Renbourn on acoustic and overdriven electric guitars, and Cox on triangle (!). McShee’s vocal is glorious and impassioned.

It is from this point that the album becomes squarely Renbourn and McShee’s showpiece. “When I Was in My Prime” is a gorgeous unaccompanied ballad sung by Jacqui McShee. It echoes her earlier performance of “So Early in the Spring” on Sweet Child and proves without doubt what a passionate and technically skilled singer she is. The song's theme of resignation, delivered starkly, on an album whose remaining songs all deal with death also offers cues, subtextually, that something has changed here.

“Lord Franklin” is probably the strongest individual performance on the album and one of the strongest in the Pentangle’s entire canon, with Renbourn understatedly delivering the breathtakingly sad lament for Sir John Franklin and his doomed attempt to find the Northwest Passage. The song is essentially a Renbourn solo track, reminiscent of those songs on the Beatles' white album in which the other members become backing band to whichever Beatle is singing. Both guitars, the acoustic rhythm and the stunning overamped electric lead, belong to Renbourn. McShee provides backing vocals and Jansch concertina.

The side closing title track, “Cruel Sister,” is an example of song and performance building in momentum as the narrative plays out; McShee on lead, with Jansch, Renbourn, and Cox contributing the chorused “fa la las.” “Cruel Sister” is a distant cousin to Bob Dylan’s “Percy’s Song” (both are based on the same Child Ballad (Child 10), “The Two Sisters” and Pentangle’s version of “Cruel Sister” does everything a modern performance of a Child Ballad should, with a clever arrangement that adds layers of instrumentation (including wonderful bodhran-like drumming from Terry Cox) to build tension in the story: a triumphant performance.

The final track, “Jack Orion,” takes up the entirety of side two on the original vinyl, and is the song that, historically, most divides Pentangle listeners. Colin Harper, Jansch’s biographer, particularly marks it as the beginning of the end of the original incarnation of the band. Previously recorded in 1966 as the title track of Jansch’s third solo album (with Renbourn adding inventive, sinewy lead), “Jack Orion” is a lengthy narrative ballad about a fiddler betrayed by his servant. In the Jansch version, it runs close to ten minutes that come perilously close to overstaying their welcome, rescued from tedium by the always-interesting interaction of Jansch’s rhythm and Renbourn’s lead. The Pentangle version nearly doubles that track length by slowing the tempo and adding unnecessary new verses, a new counter-melody, and several instrumental excursions of varying quality. The best of these is based on Renbourn’s early instrumental “Lucky Thirteen” (done as a duet on Jansch’s 1965 album, It Don't Bother Me) and finds him playing truly blistering distorted lead guitar against Thompson bass and Cox’s dulcitone (sort of a keyboard glockenspiel). The least successful is a pseudo-medieval section for recorders and drums that sounds similar to several pieces on Renbourn’s The Lady and the Unicorn and “Morgana” from his Sir John a lot . . . Not without its charms, this “Jack Orion”, however, does overstay its welcome, and Jansch and Thompson, particularly in the opening vocal duet between Jansch and Cox, sound bored, playing lazily in a fashion most unlike anything on the earlier albums.

Cruel Sister, then, is a record of a band in transition. The incessant touring and television appearances, the less-than-inspiring Tam Lin soundtrack work, and a seriously divergent band vision result in an album that, while no means bad, seems limited in a way that neither its predessor, Basket of Light, nor its follow-up, the startling Reflection do.


As usual, the original vinyl sounds best, although there is nothing wrong with the Line or Castle reissues. Apparently, no outtakes exist in the vaults, so there are no bonus tracks appended to the Castle version. There are, however, a few odd releases of songs from this album. The 1997 Recall label John Renbourn anthology So Clear includes a truncated nine minute version of "Jack Orion" that omits the instrumental excursions, while the 2007 Pentangle box set includes only the instrumental sections, which, shorn of the song, sound almost like some lost Krautrock off-cut. Finally, half of the album (the four "short" songs) were paired with the five songs on side one of Reflection to produce the 1987 Shanachie compilation A Maid That's Deep in Love.

 

Fa la la la la la la la la...

see below...

 

Fa la la la la la la la la...

Once again HF, a brilliant piece of writing. Who knew when you got here this past April you'd be showering us with fine folk-rock lore and musings well into the summertime...

This is all your writings based on your intimate knowledge of the band's recordings and your long love affair with their music and journey, right? If so, assuming as such, I am so utterly impressed by how well you write about this band, their recordings, and their roots. True kudos to you...


Being a bit of a Folk Rock Freak myself, I can easily follow you fascinating readings of these tracks and their tangentendal frameworks, roots and branches, and I must say you have opened my eyes as to what was going on herein on their transitional fourth album--it never being so obvious before, but making total sense now. CS being one of the first Pentagle records I got, I took it on its own terms, and got the rest, and only just viewed it as one of a series, not as good as the one before or after it, but pleasant in its own ways.


But your post above opened my eyes to the changing dynamics in the band and of the turbulent times, 1969-71, Colin Harper would be proud, and I, no doubt the only one, found this whole post on Cruel Sister to be a sublime, informative read and reading...

I do hope you plan on writing a book on these folks one day, these posts being an excellent basic, solid framework with which to begin...






PS: One of my fave versions of Cruel Sister was done later, by Old Blind Dogs, it has a rythymic dynamic missing from the Pentangle version...


PSS: Just got a LINE Cruel Sister CD in from Oz, so need to go spin it and enjoy, and then break out the vinyl asap....

 

I've been *obsessed* with the Pentangle's albums for many a year; they're by no means the only band I've had this kind of obsession with (one day I'll start posting my completely counter-intuitive musings on the Beatles) and Brit-folk is sort of my pet genre, one which seems to be little-examined in the world of music criticism. Colin Harper's Dazzling Stranger is a gloriously researched, exceedingly well-written Jansch bio that disappoints me only in that he spends little time discussing the Pentangle albums, especially the reunion 80s/90s ones. And that makes me want to discuss them in depth here all the more. In my other life, I've spent a considerable amount of time writing about the Irish Literary Revival and, particularly, about W.B. Yeats's American tours, and that's all grown a bit, shall we say, dry for me, so writing about the Pentangle here (especially to a receptive audience) has been pure cake, as they say.

If folks here are having half as much fun reading my Pentangle musings as I'm having writing them, then I'm quite pleased.

And, Mr. Bill, if I ever do get around to writing a book on Pentangle, I'll trade you a copy of it for a vinyl Sweet Child.

 

Have you heard the later Pentangle version, from Live 1994? It's sort of a shuffle - very different from the original.

I heard Jansch-Renbourn-McShee do this song live in a tiny club in Philadelphia in 1992 (a totally sublime experience all around) and, of the audience of maybe 150, one lone guy sang all the fa-la-la-la-las with the band. LOUD. Jansch looked a tad annoyed while Renbourn smiled like the Cheshire Cat. Wish I would have been able to take pictures at that show, but I do have a surreptiously recorded recording that always reminds me that I didn't imagine just how loud the fa-la-las were.

 

You need Sweet Child? I have an extra Two Tone Reprise, but only one Transatlantic...


Your musing on Pentangle are priceless and very fun, and inforamtive and I know quite a little bit about British Folk Rock myself having done a 50 page Senior Project paper on it back in the 1990s for my first History Degree... and having spent five years doing a 2-3 hour Folk-Rock Freakout segment on my weekly radio show, Mr. Bill's Wild Ride, 1993-1998.







{PS: The proud owner of a hardback first edition of Dazzling Stranger...

 

Cruel Fourth Album Blues Sister....

Wow, that was a shocker, playing Cruel Sister in the gym tonight (admittedly not the most folky of environs for usch music--and the endless MJ saga on the bank of tellies did not help), but man this album was much different than I remember it...This blows my whole theory "that fourth albums are where many artist come into their own" full of big holes--along with a few other fourth albums. I was shocked hearing this after Basket of Light's joyous romping down cascading falls and after reading your behind the scenes band saga post today. You can really hear the band is unispired to say the least, maybe falling apart at the seams to be more truthful, or maybe just tired, wrong studio, wrong time, solo albums on the mind, money woes etc... The title track sounded so life-less to me, and yes, Jack Orion was way too long, although I liked an interlude or three...overall though the dirge vibe was deathly... Lord Franklin was a highlight, the a cappella song ok, but not essential, and I remember even the opener leaving me mostly cold...


Gee, thanks for ruining this album for me HF!

 

It's "Jack Orion" that does that for me; I listened to the album 4 or 5 times this week while thinking about what I was going to write, and found myself just *exhausted* by the end of that song. A big problem I have with the album (and the song in particular) is how tired Danny Thompson sounds; he's one of my favorite musicians, any time period, any genre, but a lot of what he plays here sounds like he's completely on autopilot - predictable and (blasphemy) lazy. He did an interview in the 90s for Dirty Linen in which he said, roughly, that he got bored in the later Pentangle days playing traditional songs. That seems pretty clear; the band had one of the very best rhythm sections of all time and so little of this album swings: all of the joy of playing seems missing. Luckily it comes back for Reflection.

Sorry for ruining the album; hope you don't have a deep affection for the 90s post-Renbourn/Thompson/Cox albums.