Funny how sometimes our remembrances are not quite like how it actually happened--which is my weak ass intro for this week's tune. In the first place, I would have sworn the song was released in the mid to late seventies, but my first actual listen of it came just a few months after I started with Camelot Music. Secondly, I would have sworn the song was a top forty hit...when, in fact, it didn't even come close. One supposes the most important remembrance was that it was a song I liked very much....
Every now and again when doing my half-assed research I read about a band, whose history has heretofore been unknown to me, and discover that said history isn't all that interesting. Such was the case with Manfred Mann's Earth Band (and yes, there is actually a Manfred Mann, who is the group's leader...as one might hope since the band bears his name). That being said, I don't want to take away from the fact that they were a pretty successful band, starting in London in the mid-sixties when they were just Manfred Mann, segueing into Manfred Mann Chapter Three before settling on Manfred Mann's Earth Band in 1971 (the Earth Band moniker comes from Mann's interest in ecological issues). Other than a short hiatus in the late eighties lasting until the early nineties, the band has been together (in many different incarnations) since the early sixties and is still touring to this day, though they haven't released an album since 2006. As the Earth Band, they've released seventeen albums (with one top ten in both the U.K. and the U.S.), three live albums, and thirty-seven singles (with three top tens on the British charts and a #1 here in America). Maybe a dull history, but most certainly a financially viable one.
Fun Fact: Manfred Mann has actually had two number one singles--in their early days when they were just plain old Manfred Mann, they had a smash with a wonderful ditty called "Do Wah Diddy Diddy." Their second--like this week's featured song--was their cover of Bruce Springsteen's "Blinded by the Light" which I discussed in Vol. CDLXXI.
"For You" was the first single from their rather randomly named 1980 album Chance. The song reached #106 (with a kind of/sort of bullet!) on Billboard's Bubbling Under (the Hot 100) chart, while the album hit #87 on the Billboard 200. Their compatriots in the U.K. were not impressed--neither single nor LP cracked their charts.
Like their version of "Blinded by the Light," Manfred Mann's Earth Band does a significantly more electrified version than Springsteen's original from his debut album. Plenty of synthesizers and lots of piano solos...but it works. They capture both the protagonist's conviction and love's overall hopefulness, in a tale of a man telling a young woman who's recently tried killing herself that he's (more or less) coming to save her. All you really need to know is that Springsteen is arguably my all-time favorite artist, and I was blown away by their version of his song (when hating it would be the more likely outcome). Kudos, too, for it reminding me of just how much I loved Springsteen's version...and for being the only song I know of to use the word "undaunted" (and what a great word it is) in the lyrics...
Lyric Sheet: "Wounded deep in battle/I stand stuffed like some soldier undaunted..."
Enjoy:
Republicans = Nazis
Peace,
emaycee
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