|
OBSCURE In the meantime, Sean Bonniwell's work seems to have continued uninterrupted. "Double Yellow Line", the third Music Machine single, was a straightforward progression from the "Turn On" period, which also maintained his love for obscure melodies. The flipside was a fabulous song, crammed with hook- lines and a real inventiveness. Naggingly insistent, it deserved to be a smash, but the days of such success were now over for the Music Machine. " Double Yellow Line" was followed by "The Eagle Never Hunts The Fly", a fuzz-blocked piece of brilliance with a mesmerising instrumental break and some impassioned singing. Magnificently complex, even by Sean's standards, it stood little chance of success. The Music Machine's spell with Original Sound was fast drawing to a close, although the company did pull "Hey Joe" off that debut album, in the hope of equalling Jimi Hendrix success with the song. There was one last tie-up between label and group however, when Sean - together with engineer Paul Buff - put out a single under the name of the Friendly Torpedos. " "Nothing's Too Good For My Car"/"so Long Ago" was actually released in 1968, sometime after Sean had severed his ties with the company, and this pressing is now one of the rarest Music Machine spin-offs. Bonniwell soon found himself in a new deal with Warner Brothers. In hopes of winning himself some independence, he altered the group's name to the Bonniwell Music Machine. The exact line up of this group was never clear, and the group's WB album provided few answers. Titled after the name of the group, the album was originally to have been called "Odds And Ends", which would have been a better summary of it's contents. "Double Yellow Line" and "The Eagle Never Hunts The Fly" were included, along with their respective flipsides, but more peculiarly, so were "Bottom Of The Soul" and "Talk Me Down", two songs which had been recorded by the "Talk Talk" line-up of the band, and were presumably rejects from their first LP. Other tracks were recorded in New Mexico, while the remainder were done at Muscle Shoals. The result was an album which was at best rather messy, made up of a curious hotchpotch of styles, from deep flowery ballads ("The Day Today") to frantic rockers ("Soul Love"). The album wasn't a commercial success, and the Music Machine had been all but forgotten by the general public. They ploughed on however, with an ever-changing line-up, which took in such musicians as Holly McKinley, Joe Broely, Alan Wisdom, Fred Thomas and Jerry Harris. Two singles had come from the album sessions: "Bottom Of The Soul" and "Me Myself And I", which appeared a month after the LP. They met with an equally sluggish reaction; but, undeterred, Bonniwell spent the rest of 1968 masterminding a series of superb singles, most of which would not appear on any album, at least until the recent Rhino collection. The first of these singles were issued in April, and coupled "You'll Love Me Again" with "In My Neighborhood". This pressing seems to have been quickly withdrawn, and the flipside was changed in favor of another song, "To The Light". Both versions, in fact are very scarce: it may be that the first issue only appeared on promo copies, while copies with "To The Light" on the flipside were definitely issued to the public.
|
