I've heard it said that coffee is supercharged and tea is time-released. A kind of sprint vs. marathon effect. Truth to tell, I'm no expert. I tend to get my caffeine from coffee. When I drink tea, it's most often herbal.
Still, I love the way this song captures those qualities of tea. The first verse is gentle and a bit sleepy, but picks up speed. With the "Hallelujah, Rosa Lea" chorus, well, the caffeine hits full force.
2 comments:
Ray was an enthusiast of the old English music hall. Muswell Hill was a great album but it's next to impossible to choose a favorite - I guess the Village Green Preservation Society might be mine but the band was so prolific between '64 and '77 there were a lot of great songs. Remember Waterloo Sunset, Lola, Sunny Afternoon, You Really Got Me, Ape Man, Low Budget, Tired of Waiting?
"Hallelujah, Rosa Lea" is indeed a great chorus. Here's another sing along one you likely remember:
Ah, Tom is young and Tom is bold
Tom is as bold as the knights of old
But whenever he gets in a bit of a jam
There's nothing he won't do to get a harry rag
Harry rag, harry rag
Do anything just to get a harry rag
And he curses himself for the life he's led
And rolls himself a harry rag and puts himself to bed
Ray seems to have brought in a lot more music hall influences when the Kinks were banned from touring in the States. There was no way to go out there and compete with the Beatles and the Stones, at least not on the level of audience size. Thus, he reframed his ambitions and started working close to home. I still listen to Village Green Preservation Society a lot. Same with Face to Face, which has lovely songs like "Too Much on My Mind." The other nice thing about their being on house arrest in Britain was that it was much easier to work his wife Rasa into the recordings.
"Harry Rag" is a classic song. I'd loved it for years before I ever found out/figured out that the title is Cockney rhyming slang for "fag" (in the cigarette sense.)
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