Overlooked Pop/Rock Masterpieces

I hope I’m wording this right and what I’m trying to get across are songs that are not just regular pop/rock songs. Some of these have sections instead of 3 or 4 chords and it’s over with. Intricate songs to duplicate and fit together like a jigsaw puzzle. I’ll give you an example…Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody or The Beach Boys Good Vibrations. Those are not songs you just run into a studio and record in one take. Many of these songs took days, weeks, or months to get right recording different sections. 

I usually like down-to-earth and rootsy kind of songs but sometimes I do like listening to these great songs. These are overlooked by the masses with people often connecting with a big hit by the band instead. I’ve picked 3 songs to present here. Being a musician…I can sure appreciate what it took to record these. 

Overnight Sensation (Hit Record) – The Raspberries

I posted a Raspberries song this weekend but this one remains my number 1 song even over Go All The Way because it’s so epic. 

Overnight Sensation (Hit Record) is an epic, ambitious, grand, lofty, extravagant, and brilliant song from the Raspberries. They were swinging for the fences when they made this song and they hit it out of the park. It’s on the album Starting Over released in 1974.

Put some headphones on and listen to this completely to the very end… When I hear it, I think this is what it would sound like if The Who, Beach Boys and Beatles made a song together…this would be it. Musically you have a little of everything. Sliding bass lines, tasteful guitar licks, great vocals, a sax solo that gives way to more lyrics as the song morphs into an AM radio sound… and then comes a solo piano.

Stay until the very end because they dupe you into a fake ending and the drums will come in as if the world is going to end. Then… a Beach Boys final huge crescendo wave will wash over you like a warm summer moonlit night. It’s a wall of sound of ecstasy that you wish would go on forever.

Bruce Springsteen: “Overnight Sensation (Hit Record) should go down as one of the great mini-rock-opera masterpieces of all time”

 

Broken Arrow – Buffalo Springfield

The song Broken Arrow is a song that was made in sections and it’s hard to explain it with words… Something is haunting and beautiful about it. I listen to it now and it’s like Buffalo Springfield’s own A Day In The Life. It was produced in 1967 during the psychedelic era. One of my favorite songs of all time…any song with the lyric “He hung up his eyelids and ran down the hall” grabs my attention. Neil Young wrote this beautiful song. Gregg Allman cornered Neil backstage somewhere in the 2000s and pleaded with him to start playing this song again. He did when Buffalo Springfield reformed. 

Care Of Cell 44 – The Zombies

This is one of my favorite pop songs of the 1960s. The vocals are reminiscent of the Beach Boys. It’s a sunny and bright song musically about a guy writing to his girl…in prison. The song doesn’t express or explain why she is in prison just that he will be with her when her stay is over.

The song is arranged beautifully. with the vocal-only arrangements, You can hear Brian Wilson and Paul McCartney’s influence on this recording. Chris White’s (Zombies bass player) bass playing is phenomenal in this song.

It is on the album Odessey and Oracle, one of the best albums of the sixties. The hit song on the album is Time of the Season but it is full of great songs. It charted a year after it was released at #95 in the Billboard 200 album charts in 1969. The song/album would be on my desert island list.

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Author: Badfinger (Max)

Power Pop fan, Baseball, Beatles, Alternative music, old movies, and tv show fan. Also anything to do with pop culture in the 60s and 70s... I'm also a songwriter, bass and guitar player. Not the slightest bit interested in politics at all.

44 thoughts on “Overlooked Pop/Rock Masterpieces”

  3. Pingback: Overlooked Pop/Rock Masterpieces – MobsterTiger

  4. An interesting group of songs. They tend toward heavy production.

    Some masterpieces are simpler. I consider the whole of Los Lobos’ “By the Light of the Moon” to be a masterpiece. Not a pretentious “concept album”, just a grouping of phenomenal songs. “Is This All There Is?” somehow manages to combine existential angst (“Climbing high to the mountain top/
    Reaching up to the sky above/Asking to myself/Is this all there is?”) and the immigrant experience (“Fifteen years on a sewing machine/Twisted hands don’t mean a thing”) into one beautiful song you’ll want to hear again and again.

    “One Time, One Night” opens with an unforgettable guitar riff and spins a series of vignettes. Just one: “A young girl tosses a coin in the wishing well
    She hopes for a heaven while for her there’s just this hell
    She gave away her life to become somebody’s wife
    Another wish unanswered in America.”

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    1. I was going for complex with this post…I could have said studio songs. Basically songs that were pieced together.
      There are simple songs that would fit masterpiece I agree.

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  7. I like rediscovering songs like that, that I may have missed. Heart’s Keep Your Love Alive. I actually crossed paths with that tune watching a ski video on YouTube, and wow. It’s almost like Heart’s Stairway to Heaven moment.

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  9. interesting choices, each one a song not many know by a band which is famous (at least among music fans). I need to listen to the Raspberries one again, I must have shut it off before that big ending you wrote about! ‘Care of Cell 44’ is outstanding, I only found it via the Susannah Hoffs/Matthew Sweet cover, but when I heard the Zombies, I can see it was great and understand why that duo would want to cover it. Wonder if the girl in the song tied yellow ribbons around trees when he got out?

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    1. I was typing and the next thing I knew the comment was deleted lol…I had to restore it.

      LOL she had that ribbon flying! Funny it doesn’t say how she got in there in the first place. The Raspberries song is my favorite from these but not by a lot.

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  11. Very ambitious compositions and recordings. For some reason, I don’t remember the Raspberries’ song. I certainly remember “Go All The Way” and “I Wanna Be With You”, but I don’t remember this one on the radio at all, and I would have been 11 or 12 when it came out. I’ve listened to it since because it’s been so widely praised. Buffalo Springfield is great and haunting, as you say. The Zombies just had a great sound between the vocals and the music on everything they did. I think my sister left this vinyl record at my house with a bunch of others, but my turntable isn’t the greatest.

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    1. Yea I don’t know how much it was played when it was released…the Raspberries song. I heard it on a greatest hits…and it blew me away.
      I’m looking for an old turntable and reciever…I need one as well.

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    2. Great point Lisa. Prog rock can get… ponderous at times, but it is a necessary step out and away from the 2 minute 10 second ‘I love her, she loves me’ average pop song. (We know where the money is- Top Twenty is good, Top Ten is better, top of the heap- Bingo!) Still, most bands want at least a chance to stretch out and play their masterpieces.

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  18. Hah! I wound up saying too much on my ‘quick’ comment to Lisa. Oh well, maybe I dunno when to shut up? Anyway, three great picks, and as an aside, can old Mr Young write a song or what?

    The beginning of the Zombies track sounds helluva lot like Keiths ‘98.6’ to me, but that is no criticism; ‘98.6’ sounds helluva lot like Hedgehoppers Anonymous’s ‘It’s Good News Week’ to me as well! It may be a stretch but thats my tin-eared take.

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    1. No…go right ahead and start talking…as much as possible.
      Young really changed on this one. I bet this one would surprise a lot of Neil Young fans…yes I love it.
      I never put that together with that song…but you are right…it does.
      I think the song…sounds like Paul Wilson or Brian McCartney….it’s like they merged.

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  23. I love the Raspberries Overnight Sensation – hadn’t heard it before, but I came by to your blog last week or the week before, listened to it then and instantly bookmarked it – so – thanks!

    A song in this sort of category that I love is the original verson of MacArthur Park (with Richard Harris singing it, not the cover by Donna Summer, though that’s good in its own way).

    Also – though not everyone’s cup of tea (or coffee!!) and very different from the rest – In-A-Gadda-Vida by Iron Butterfly.

    And if you like The Zombies, you have to checkout Argent which was Rod Argent’s later band. Their longer tracks are particularly varied within the songs themselves.

    There were (and are) so many good songs in these many-changes styles. It was certainly a feature of the late 1960s – often with the ‘false ending’.

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    1. That Raspberries song…just floored me when I heard it and I thought…I can’t believe this wasn’t a hit!
      I do like the Richard Harris version a lot. I just heard that for the first time a little while back because someone posted it. It is epic.
      I do like some of Argent’s stuff…like God Gave Rock and Roll To You.
      I love these types of songs.

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