Other Voices, Part 3

Then I was listening to Manfred Mann's Fox On The Run.  Manfred Mann was a popular British pop/rock band of the 1960's (for those of you who don't know.)  The bass player of the group Klaus Voormann was a friend of The Beatles.  He designed The Beatles' Revolver album cover.  His friendship with The Beatles spanned from their early days in Hamburg through the group's break-up, so obviously he had some knowledge about what was happening with them.

Fox On The Run was released on November 29, 1968 and was basically a lament about a young man brought down by a girl.  The lyrics:

     She walked through the corn leading down to the river.
     Her hair shone like gold in the hot morning sun.
     She took all the love a poor boy could give her.
     And left me to die like the fox on the run.

     Everybody knows the reason for the fall:
     When woman tempted man down in paradise's hall.
     This woman tempted me all right, then took me for a ride.
     But like the lonely fox I need a place to hide.

     Come take a glass of wine and fortify your soul.
     We'll talk about the world and friends we used to know.
     I'll illustrate, a girl put me on the floor.
     The game is nearly up, the hounds are at my door.
     Like the fox on the run.

Listening to the song in reverse, I found three runs--beginning at 0:16, 1:27, and 2:20 where Manfred Mann sings the words:  PAUL FORGOT.

The group wouldn't have been talking about Paul Jones, their former bandmate, who, from my research, was "scandal"-less.

An interesting note on the imagery in the song:  The Rolling Stones had a promotional video filmed for the 1967 song We Love You I wrote about in my last post. Take a look at the video at:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cF5sDwYSTCM .  From 2:32-3:08 in the video, there is a sequence where Marianne Faithfull presents an animal skin--a fox or wolf--to the "judge" at the "trial".  Then later--at 3:32-3:49--the animal skin is laying on a table and Mick Jagger (as the defendant) comes out from underneath it and looks at the camera.

Another interesting note on the song.  The area around Milton Keynes-Newport Pagnell, Buckinghamshire has been a rural area and was definitely one in 1966.  I found an internet listing for a 1965 sale of an estate in the area and the farm land on the estate was sown to corn: http://www.mkheritage.co.uk/hav/docs/linhistory/llsale1965.html  .  At the edge of Bury Field, Newport Pagnell, by the River Ouse, is a street called Mill Street, named after the corn mills that were once located there.  So a woman walking through cornfields in Newport Pagnell in 1966 is very much a possibility.