Review: Manfred Mann - Mann Made (1965)

Tracks: 1) Since I Don’t Have You; 2) You’re For Me; 3) Look Away; 4) The Abominable Snowmann; 5) Watch Your Step; 6) Stormy Monday Blues; 7) I Really Do Believe; 8) Hi Lili, Hi Lo; 9) The Way You Do The Things You Do; 10) Bare Hugg; 11) You Don’t Know Me; 12) L.S.D.; 13) I’ll Make It Up To You.

REVIEW

The Manfred Mann discography all through their Sixties’ career is one seriously hot mess, even when compared to the usual misalignments between the UK and US discographies of British Invasion artists. In addition to the classic principle of «two US LPs for each one UK LP, and let God sort them out», their labels also put out multiple compilations that could combine previously available material with various rarities — so if you want to own everything these guys recorded from 1963 to 1968, prepare yourself for lots of overlap, or just build custom-made playlists. Case in point: Mann Made, amazingly enough, released under the same name and with the same track listing across both sides of the Atlantic, was only the band’s second LP in the UK, but already the fourth over in the States, preceded by The Manfred Mann Album (= UK The Five Faces Of Manfred Mann with some tweaking), The Five Faces Of Manfred Mann (= NOT UK The Five Faces Of Manfred Mann, but rather a mixed bag of older singles and newer recordings), and My Little Red Book Of Winners (mostly new recordings specially for the American market, but filled out with oldies like ‘Brother Jack’).

I am not going to bother jumping between British and American albums; given the moderate amount of love I am able to squeeze out for the Manfreds, wasting time on sorting out this mess and commenting on every single recording they made in an era so richly abundant in superior music is not my idea of how time should be properly wasted. So let me do it this way: I shall briefly list the most important of the band’s singles for 1965, then talk about the album and then say what are, in my opinion, any additional highlights from 1965 off the US-only records. Spoiler alert: in 1965, Manfred Mann did not have any truly important singles, any genuinely consistent albums, or any tracks at all that a Sixties’ lover’s collection could not do without. So this is going to be a little difficult.

Starting off with the first single: ‘Come Tomorrow’, a cover of the 1961 recording by Marie Knight, originally a fairly important performer on the gospel circuit (she even used to sing duets with Sister Rosetta Tharpe herself) but today largely forgotten. British music lovers were aware of her because she toured the UK in the late Fifties, and Paul Jones had some of the records, off which the band nicked ‘Come Tomorrow’ and made it into a UK Top 5 hit — in stark contrast to the original, which flopped. Ironic, because the original, powered by Marie’s gospel-fueled voice, is so much better than the cover: Jones remains faithful to the original style, which automatically means he is bound to lose the competition, while the musical arrangement simply replaces the typical string-laden R&B sound of the early 1960s with a soft, rhythmic folk-pop beat à la Searchers. The good news? I’d never heard of Marie Knight until I poked around the origins of the Manfred Mann hit, so it helped me gain a little knowledge and discover a solid gospel performer. The bad news? Few things were sadder on the musical circuit in 1965 than Paul Jones building up his confidence as a soul singer.

Or maybe the real bad news is that it charted so high in the UK, which provided the band with a stimulus to record even more of those American pop hits — starting off with Goffin and King’s ‘Oh No Not My Baby’ and following it up with Burt Bacharach’s ‘My Little Red Book’. All I can say about the former is that if you really want to have a good British version of it, there’s always Dusty Springfield (the song always sounds a little weird when sung by a man, anyway). As for the latter, well, it’s a classic pop song and it’s the original recording, specially commissioned by Bacharach and David for inclusion into the soundtrack of What’s New Pussycat? — AND I suppose that you could easily classify most of the aging music lovers according to whether they associate the song, first and foremost, with Manfred Mann (the refined pop version) or with Love (the roughed-up garage version).

It would be pointless to deny that the slower, keyboard-layered, romantically-scented, heartrbrokenly-belted Mann original is closer to the original intentions of the writers than the faster, crunchier, pissed-off cavemanishly-grunted cover by Arthur Lee and his friends — but if, like in my case, your big problem with Bacharach/David happens to be that the complexity of their songwriting rarely matches the emotional shallowness of their melodies, you shall likely feel that Lee at least brings a fresh and soulfully genuine twist to the song, which Paul Jones is unable to do because Paul Jones is a classic case of a «phonebook singer», if you get my drift. I do like how the three different keyboard parts combine to fill out the sound, but give me Love’s «Supremes-say-hello-to-Chuck-Berry» bass-guitar opening over the Manfreds any time of day.

And so this is the context in which the band set out to create its second «proper» album: one of having more or less fully transitioned from a commercially-oriented rhythm’n’blues band to an even more commercially-oriented pop ensemble. Granted, this is not necessarily derogative: for one thing, to be «pop» around 1965-1966 was probably the best time ever to be «pop», what with all the new influences and the baroque stylizations — and, for another thing, Manfred Mann’s policy from the very outset was that singles were to be made to gain fame and fortune, whereas LPs were there to generate actual soul food for the demanding, sophisticated spirit. So even if ‘My Little Red Book’ could easily sit next to a corny Tom Jones number, one could be sure without looking that Mann Made, the band’s second LP, would have plenty of material that Tom Jones would not touch with his ten-foot pole of gold and ivory.

Admittedly, the balance has shifted somewhat. If Five Faces was about 50% rhythm’n’blues, 25% soul-pop, and 25% cautious jazz-bluesy experimentation, then Mann Made trims down all these percentages to make ample room for fairly straightforward commercial pop — this is, in fact, most telling when the LP opens not with the likes of the threatening ‘Smokestack Lightning’, but with ‘Since I Don’t Have You’, a modernized pop-rock version of the old doo-wop hit by The Skyliners from 1958. It’s certainly become catchier and livelier over those seven years, and the band found a cool way to see-saw from the high-cloudy group harmonies to Jones’ solitary lead, but still, for a musical ensemble that always emphasized sophistication, this is a slightly disappointing way to start off a brand new LP in the fall of 1965.

Other tolerable, but expendable pop ditties on the album include ‘Look Away’, which had earlier been a hit for Garnet Mimms in 1964 — a nice broken-hearted soul number that successfully combines the desperate melancholy of Del Shannon with the nonchalant melodicity of ‘Under The Boardwalk’ (from which it rather unabashedly steals the verse melody), but if you actually want a slightly more intriguing UK cover of the song, you are advised to wait until Stevie Winwood picks it up for The Spencer Davis Group’s 1966 Second Album; ‘The Way You Do The Things You Do’, which adds absolutely nothing to the Miracles’ hit version (unless you think that Paul Jones’ naturally-sneery overtones are a healthy preference over Smokey’s passionately-earnest heart-on-sleeve crooning — personally, I’m a little lost here); and ‘Hi-Li-Li Hi-Lo’, because there is an obscure law that says Manfred Mann are legally obligated to put out a song each year that either has ‘La La’ or ‘Li Li’ or any other such phonetic combination in the title, or they lose their local kindergarten sponsorship.

More commendable, on the whole, are the original contributions by various band members. Mike Vickers comes up with ‘You’re For Me’, a nagging bluesy waltz with several overdubbed sax parts that somehow remind me of Dick Heckstall-Smith’s preference for blowing two saxes at the same time; as an actual yearning love song, though, I’m not sure if the tune works — it’s really one of those instrumentals written from a jazz perspective, where any vocals always end up feeling like an afterthought. Without Paul Jones, this would have easily fit on a Graham Bond Organization album. With Paul Jones, it’s more of a matter for the National Stalking Prevention Service.

Tom McGuinness, the bass player, contributes the boldly titled ‘L.S.D.’ — although, once you listen to the lyrics, you get to understand that the abbreviation is really to be interpreted as ‘£sd’, i.e. ‘pounds, shillings and pence’, rather than the supreme musician’s muse circa 1965 (for that matter, the same goes for the song with the same title released by The Pretty Things that same year — although, come to think of it, what sort of a coincidence is that? Why would two different bands write a song about pounds, shillings and pence back-to-back in 1965? You nasty tricksters, you). It’s not much by way of writing, though: a rather standard blues groove based on an old riff nicked from Bo Diddley’s ‘She’s Fine She’s Mine’ (yes, the same one that later also crops up on Dylan’s ‘Obviously 5 Believers’) which they then try to puff up to the level of a contemporary Yardbirds rave, with aggressive and hysterical soloing from Paul on harmonica and Manfred on the organ, but since the Manfreds are incapable of legitimately going wild by definition, the whole thing is a bit... off.

Probably the two most salvageable numbers are the instrumentals. ‘The Abominable Snowmann’ (I think this was the spelling on the original release, though I’ve also seen variants that say ‘Abominable Showmann’, as well as humorless variants that simply trim out the final n) is not particularly abominable in terms of atmosphere, but the saxes, organs, and vibraphones do give this slow jazzy waltz a slightly winterish feel. It’s really Manfred Mann doing what they do best — adapting the contemporary UK «proto-jazz-rock» idiom as practiced by Alexis Korner and Graham Bond for the ears of the not-too-sophisticated listener to make the sound less jarring and more catchy. I think that Hugg’s solo on the vibes is the song’s high point — short, well-structured, and tasteful, though clearly not as «technical» as you’d expect from Hugg’s personal heroes such as Milt Jackson — but everybody is really doing a fine job, and it is tracks like these that give substance to McGuinness’ proto-Pythonesque liner notes about how the original three members of the band, upon Jones and McGuinness joining the band as "prophets of the cult of Aranbee", "were converted... altho’ in their heart of hearts they still cherished the light of Mingus".

Same light continues to be cherished on Hugg’s ‘Bare Hugg’ (har har har), a slightly faster piece of post-bop with a quirky flute theme, later expanded into a full-fledged flute solo that pretty much invents Jethro Tull (well, at least the Jethro Tull of 1968’s This Was) three years before Jethro Tull. It’s a bit haunting, a bit pretty, and quite a bit hummable, reflecting once again the Manfreds’ desire to infuse their jazz numbers with pop sensibility. Really good stuff that makes a lot more sense than covering Smokey Robinson or Bobby Parker, if you ask me.

But there would also be another type of music that the Manfreds would desire even more ardently to infuse with pop sensi­bility — largely because, unlike ‘The Abominable Snowmann’ or ‘Bare Hugg’, this particular infusion also brought certain lucrative benefits along. I am talking, of course, about their Bob Dylan covers, as they would become the UK’s most common and most successful interpreters of Bob’s material in a hit-single-oriented pop-rock format. Although there are no Dylan covers on Mann Made as such, ‘With God On Our Side’, transposed to piano, made it to the US-only My Little Red Book Of Winners LP — and in the UK, the band triumphantly ended 1965 by releasing ‘If You Gotta Go, Go Now’, Bob’s little humorous number that he himself played quite a bit live in an acoustic setting throughout 1964, but gave up on after trying to adapt it to his new rock’n’roll style in 1965. In the UK, the song was first picked up by The Liverpool Five, a mediocre Merseybeat gang that somehow sucked all the life and all the fun out of the song by turning it into a slow dreary waltz; fortunately, the Manfreds came along to fish the poor thing out of the gutter, put it back on the race track and give it a new electric heart — a practice they would continue right until ‘Mighty Quinn’ at the very end of their career.

All of these observations combined, I think, illustrate my love-and-hate attitude toward Manfred Mann: when they do what they were really born to do — lightweight, but atmospheric jazz-pop like ‘Bare Hugg’, or «intelligently commercialized» Dylan covers — they pretty much have no equals on the UK scene. But whenever they do what they are not supposed to do — like doing straightforward covers of blues or R&B numbers — they start acting like earnest musical school students aiming for top grades, and few things are worse than that if your research project is on Chuck Berry, Ray Charles, or The Miracles. This is something that would, unfortunately, plague Manfred Mann for all his life, throughout the Sixties and the Seventies and beyond. For sure, there are fans out there who would accuse me of talking trash, and who would always prefer Manfred Mann’s performance of ‘Down The Road Apiece’ or ‘Stormy Monday Blues’ to those of their contemporaries on the British rhythm’n’ blues scene, ranting about far superior musicianship and cleaner production — but this review is not targeted at that particular ideology. Rather, its point is that clean production is for clean music, and dirty production is for dirty music, and when you apply clean production and superior musicianship to dirty music, well... it’s a bit like wearing your best party suit to a round of mud-wrestling, you know.

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