Gentle George - Toll The Bell For Henry Hollaway!/ Encore

 

Peculiar and somewhat sombre orchestrated psych-pop - was Scott Walker listening?

Label: RCA

Year of Release: 1967

This one has been doing the rounds on auction sites recently as "fab undiscovered popsike!!!", which apparently "won't disappoint" and if the auctioneer is particularly specific, "comes from a smoke free home" (Question: If you're an aficionado of all things sixties psych, would you trust the critical judgement of a seller more or less if the disc came from a smoke filled home?)

When a copy popped up at a reasonable price recently, of course I wasn't going to look away. The strange, explosive nature of the mundane title, the fact the artist was called Gentle George and the absolute bullseye of it being released in late 1967 intrigued me enormously. 

Normally in these situations, the record arrives and it turns out to be the noise of a bar-room entertainer doing his best to croon along to some faintly way-out lyrics backed with a very conservative arrangement. In this case, though, "Henry Hollaway" is strange disc indeed, starting off with "Twilight Zone" styled orchestral arrangements, ticking rhythms, a miserable, deathly piano chord, before the twee none-more-1967 vocals kick in, urging us, almost through gritted teeth, to celebrate the everyman in the song's title. 

Henry Hollaway, it seems, has never achieved anything unusual or done anything exciting, except actually grow a pair of wings and fly, at which point his mother yelled at him crossly to come down, which he immediately did. So fascinatingly, while this song doesn't come close to the ambition or lyrical or musical complexity of Scott Walker's "Plastic Palace People", it's occupying a strangely similar terrain, right down to the odd phased orchestral elements towards the end - except the "burlesque" elements, which are closer to "Jean The Machine". Was Scott listening? It's unlikely, I'd suggest; there's a million miles between a balloon tied to someone's underwear and a man who simply grows wings like Icarus.

The other question on everyone's lips is bound to be "Is it psychedelia?" and that really depends on how loose your definition is. It's certainly rambling and takes a variety of unexpected twists and turns, as well as toning up the tweeness while also clinging on to a dark undercurrent and containing the kind of weird contempt for plodding nine-to-fivers a lot of 1967/68 pop music had. Call it what you want - nobody is going to judge.

This was to be Gentle George's only single and his identity isn't made clear, but it's almost certainly George Goehring who co-wrote the single. Goehring had a long and successful history as a songwriter, being responsible for "Lipstick On Your Collar", "Please Don't Talk To The Lifeguard", "The Mystery Of You" and "Half Heaven, Half Heartache". "Toll The Bell" appears to have been an attempt to break away as an artist in his own right, and seems to have failed as both a career springboard and an attempt at popular songwriting; but despite that, it shows that Goehring was flexible and brave enough to face the more adventurous musical world of 1967 without so much as a flinch. Nobody could ever accuse him of being Henry Hollaway. 

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