The End - Introspection - Alternate Version (1968)

Sorry I haven't posted anything for a while. Sometimes I get a bit burned out and need a break. I didn't expect it to go this long. Hopefully I'll get back into the spirit starting with this post.

Have you ever heard of the British band The End? Probably not, I'm guessing. They're best known for their connection to Bill Wyman, bassist for the Rolling Stones. He took them under his wing in the late 1960s, co-writing two of their better known songs, and he producing the one album that got released while the band was still together, which is this one. I'm posting it even though it's an officially released album because I've made some changes to make it better and because I think it's a really excellent album that needs more exposure.

Unfortunately, the band's connection to Wyman ended up being more of a curse than a blessing, as I will explain shortly. They languished in obscurity when they had the talent and songs to be much more. Wyman felt the same way. Here's a quote from him decades after the band broke up:

"I think they could have achieved a lot more, especially as the songwriting was so strong. That's usually the failing of most bands. They've got good players, good singers, but they don't have good material. The End had the material, they could sing pretty good, and they could play pretty good. We just had no organization to send it further."

I agree wholeheartedly. There's a big market in finding "lost classics" from the late 1960s, because there truly are some great obscure gems from that time period. This is definitely one of them, in my book.

Here's the band's Wikipedia entry:

The End (UK band) - Wikipedia

But it says very little, at least as I write this in 2023, a sign of how obscure the band still is. So let me give you a better summary of the band's history. They started in the early 1960s like most British bands of the time, heavily influenced by American blues and soul music, then also the Beatles. (At the time, they went by the name the Innocents.) They got to be friends with Wyman after going on tour with the Rolling Stones in 1964, and he was impressed with their talent. But they were only doing covers at the time, and didn't have any commercial success.

However, around 1965, they began writing their own songs, and they slowly developed a real talent for that. They toured a lot in Spain, and became minor stars there for a while. In 1967, they had a Top Five hit in Spain with their original song "Why" (which is included here). Their music changed with the times from soul to psychedelic influenced rock, and they had a knack for that. 

They hooked up again with Wyman, who was impressed with their original material. Wyman was writing songs at the time, but he wasn't having much success getting them on Rolling Stones albums. (However, "In Another Land," a good song, made it onto "Their Satanic Majesty's Request" in 1968.) Wyman didn't have a great singing voice, so he came up with the idea of having the End perform two songs he'd co-written, "Loving, Sacred Loving" and "Shades of Orange." These two songs were released as a single, with "Shades of Orange" as the A-side. They were good songs, and got good reviews at the time, but the single didn't make the charts.

And that brings us to the main problem the band had: their record company. Wyman helped them get signed to Decca, which was also the record company for the Rolling Stones. And Wyman and the End didn't realize it at the time, but Decca didn't want any of the members of the Stones to get distracted with side projects like helping the End. So they slow-walked releasing their material, and then gave them no promotion. The "Shades of Orange" single was actually recorded in 1967 but held back months before being released in March 1968. But worse was their debut album, "Introspection." It was recorded in the middle of 1968, but not released until December 1969! A year and a half in that era was a deadly delay. The psychedelic sound of the album was already getting a bit long in the tooth by mid-1968, but it was way out of fashion by the end of 1969. So, not surprisingly, the album made no impact, especially since the record company did absolutely nothing to help it.

Wyman later said of the album: "I funded it myself. I wasn't a businessman; I was the bloody bass player. Charlie [Watts of the Stones] had the same problem [producing an album by the band the People Band] and so did Brian [Jones of the Stones]. If it wasn't Mick [Jagger] or Keith [Richards], the record company didn't want to know. By sitting on it, they didn't give us a chance to do anything else with it. They never said, 'We hate it, we're never going to release it.' It was always, 'We're working on it, give us a couple of weeks.' It was always a couple of weeks."

It's pretty bizarre in retrospect to realize that Decca had a very excellent band under contract, yet they basically did everything they could to sabotage their career. But that's exactly what happened. 

(It seems the main person behind this was Allen Klein, a manager in Decca Records at the time. He was such an evil and ruthless guy that both the Rolling Stones and the Beatles would grow to hate him due to their business dealings with him. In the movie "All You Need Is Cash," a parody of the Beatles' career featuring the Rutles, Klein was played by John Belushi, and the joke in the movie was that he was so feared that people would kill themselves rather than be in the same room as him.)

Not surprisingly, the band grew frustrated by the exceedingly long delay of the album's release. By the time it came out, a couple of band members left, and their sound changed to more of a hard rock style that was in keeping with music trends. They recorded a second album, but they couldn't get that released at all. Finally, in 1970, they changed their name to Tucky Buzzard. They had some success, releasing five albums from 1971 to 1973. However, in my opinion, most of their magic was gone by then, due to key songwriting band members leaving.

Luckily, the End managed to record more than just this one album before they broke up. There actually have been three albums of outtakes released decades later, including that unreleased second album. I'll be posting more of that stuff later. One of the albums is called "From Beginning to End." In my opinion, it's not that memorable. It consists of early material, generally from the time the band was still called the Innocents. Unfortunately, most of it is from before the band found their own style and hit their stride with songwriting. But there are a few good songs on it, so I've put those at the start of this album. "You Better Believe It Baby" is a soul cover, but done here in more of a rock style. That's from 1966. "Why" and "Yo-Yo" are originals from 1967, with "Why" being that hit they had in Spain. "We've Got It Made" is a B-side that was released in 1968.

The rest of this consists of the "Introspection" album. I consider that a 1968 album, even though it wasn't released until the end of 1969. I actually removed a few "songs" here, and I think made the album stronger by doing so. They're not really songs. What happened was that Wyman had a gardener named George Kenset. Wyman thought he was an interesting person to talk to, so he had him come into a recording studio and then took about an hour to record his life story. Snippets of that were made into tracks between songs. I've cut all those out. It was one of those wacky ideas typical of the times, but it had nothing to do with the band the End, and it only detracted from the flow of the rest of the album. With the four songs at the beginning of the album instead, I think this makes for an even stronger album.

This album is 44 minutes long.

01 You Better Believe It Baby (End)
02 Why (End)
03 Yo-Yo (End)
04 We've Got It Made (End)
05 Dreamworld (End)
06 Under the Rainbow (End)
07 Shades of Orange (End)
08 Cardboard Watch (End)
09 Introspection [Part 1] (End)
10 What Does It Feel Like (End)
11 Don't Take Me (End)
12 Loving, Sacred Loving (End)
13 She Said Yeah (End)
14 Introspection [Part 2] (End)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15820498/TEnd_1968_IntrspctionAltrnateVrsion_atse.zip.html

The cover is the official cover of the "Introspection" album without any changes.