Manfred Mann - Cubist Town - Non-Album Tracks (1968)

In 2018, a person named Joe Wiltshire wrote a blog post about a supposed lost classic 1968 album by Manfred Mann called "Cubist Town." He gave a short history about the album and provided a song list for it. You can read that here:

http://www.fuzzdandy.co.uk/blog/2018/07/13/manfred-mann-cubist-town-1968-lost-album/

As it so happens, none of that is true. It was just a clever idea to highlight some of the more creative and lesser known songs Manfred Mann did at the time.  However, I read that blog post, and it helped inspire me to take Manfred Mann more seriously. I realized there very easily could have been an excellent 1968 album by the band if they'd done a better job of song selection. This album is not the same as Wiltshire's version. About half of the songs I've included are different. But I liked the album title, so I've used that.

In my opinion, the band was hitting a creative peak around this time. Most of the band members were writing songs, and they were generally very good ones, and very much in keeping with the musical zeitgeist of the era, which is probably my favorite musical era. So they should have knocked their main 1968 studio album out of the park. (They'd released a movie soundtrack earlier in the year that was mostly composed of instrumentals.)

However, the album they did release - "Mighty Garvey!" - was very problematic. It had a bad title, bad artwork, and most importantly, bad song selection. Nearly every song the band did in the 1960s was at least decent, in my opinion. But this album had some clunkers. One was the song "Happy Families." It wasn't much of a song to begin with, but for some inexplicable reason the album included THREE different versions of it. All three were jokey (but not actually funny) piss takes on different musical genres. The tone of these songs clashed drastically with most everything else on the album, and ruined the overall mood. 

I've chosen to only include one of the three. That one is a kind of jazz lounge parody. In my opinion, it is strikingly similar to "You Know the Name (Look Up the Number)" by the Beatles, but a lot shorter (thank God). The Beatles recorded their version in 1967 but didn't release it until it came out as a B-side in 1970, so the similarities are almost certainly coincidental.

I didn't include another song, "Big Betty." This "original" in fact is a rip-off of the famous Leadbelly song "Black Betty." I find it an embarrassment. Furthermore, it's musically out of step with the rest of the album. I also didn't include "Ha Ha Said the Clown," because it was an old single by the time the album came out, and it fit better on a stray tracks compilation I've already posted. It also was out of step with the rest of the album. So, by removing those two songs by the two other versions of "Happy Families," the album got a lot better.

After I removed those songs, the album was only 28 minutes long, which is too short for an album. So I added four non-album tracks at the end. Two of those, "You've Got It Made" and "The Letter," were only ever recorded for the BBC, so I've used the BBC versions. For "The Letter," which is a cover of the famous Box Tops hit, I edited out a BBC DJ talking over the intro. The other two songs I added are the A- and B-sides to the "My Name Is Jack" single.

So, after all that, what do we have left? Once again, like the last album by the band that I posted ("Up the Junction") it's an album that's strikingly similar to what the Hollies were doing at the time. Both bands were mainly pop bands at the time, but they were influenced by psychedelic music, so there are some touches of that, but nothing that was full-blown psychedelia. 

I think it's a strong album. It contains two big hits that were written by others, "The Mighty Quinn (Quinn the Eskimo)" by Bob Dylan, and "My Name Is Jack." "The Mighty Quinn" was a number one hit in Britain and many other countries, and a top ten hit in the US, while "My Name Is Jack" was a top ten hit in Britain. I'm pretty sure those two songs, plus "The Letter," were the only covers.

Manfred Mann didn't release much more than two singles in late 1968 and early 1969 before they broke up and then reformed as almost a totally different band later in 1969. However, it turns out they recorded enough songs for another album. So I have one last album to go before my Manfred Mann series is over.

01 No Better No Worse (Manfred Mann)
02 Every Day Another Hair Turns Grey (Manfred Mann)
03 Country Dancing (Manfred Mann)
04 It's So Easy Falling (Manfred Mann)
05 Happy Families [with Ed Garvey and the Trio] (Manfred Mann)
06 The Mighty Quinn [Quinn the Eskimo] (Manfred Mann)
07 The Vicar's Daughter (Manfred Mann)
08 Each and Every Day [Day Time, Night Time] (Manfred Mann)
09 Cubist Town (Manfred Mann)
10 Harry the One-Man-Band (Manfred Mann)
11 You've Got It Made (Manfred Mann)
12 The Letter [Edit] (Manfred Mann)
13 My Name Is Jack (Manfred Mann)
14 There Is a Man (Manfred Mann)

https://www.upload.ee/files/16696646/MANFRDMNN1968b_CubstTwn_atse.zip.html

I'm very happy with how this album cover art turned out. If you don't know, "cubist" is the name for a style of abstract painting in the early 1900s. So I thought the ideal cover would be of a maze-like town done in the cubist style. I Googled the phrase "cubist town," and discovered the painting that I used here. You can see where I got it here:

http://epiclone.blogspot.com/2013/03/gazebo-updates.html

I think that was done by someone by the name of Treble who hasn't posted since 2013. In any case, that painting is rectangular, so I had to crop it to make it fit into a square album cover space. I actually like it even better cropped. It's pretty much exactly what I had in my mind's eye, so thank you Treble! It's about a million times better than the cover for "Mighty Garvey!" Google that if you want to see some bad album art, and one that was especially out of touch with 1968 trends.