SOPWITH
CAMEL
From
One Miraculous Hump To Another
This is the second time around for Sopwith Camel regarding the CD reissue and, life being what it is, it almost got past me. The gawds are with me, though, and though I still hold my original vinyl copy and it still sounds good, I have been looking for a cleaner sound. You see, there is this one pop in the middle of Sneaky Smith and though it doesn't skip, it rankles. Extemporaneous percussion is just not what Sopwith Camel is about, if you get my drift.
The
Miraculous Hump Returns From the Moon
is
Sopwith Camel's second album and one which probably got past you,
if you are of that age. The record industry at that time was going
through unprecedented growth, labels having found that there was
gold in that there vinyl. Huge deals were made at the time,
manufacturing and distribution deals worth millions, and labels
attempted to lasso those millions with a fervor reminiscent of the
great land grabs of the Old West. The record business was breaking
into the big time and labels promised musicians the world. Most
got the shaft.
While Sopwith Camel did not exactly get the shaft, their history is hardly one of extraordinary success. One of the early Bay Area bands of the 60s, they seemingly rode the coattails of San Francisco's Psych Rebellion to fame and fortune, except that they didn't. Flower Power was in its infancy when Hello, Hello charged into Billboard's Top 100. AM radio jumped on it and the dance began. A mixture of, say, The Lovin' Spoonful and The New Vaudeville Band (whose Winchester Cathedral had recently topped the charts), Sopwith Camel was wined and dined as all were who stormed the bastions in those days. They were swept up in the carnival atmosphere, carried away by a sense of their own importance and then crushed by reality. As the single moved down the charts, so did their parade. There was no album. There was no backup. Kama Sutra, an East Coast label with few artists to offer at the time besides Sopwith Camel, negotiated feverishly to get them into a studio to record enough tunes for an album, though the band had basically disbanded. They recorded the rest of the album a number of months after Hello, Hello had jumped from hit to yesterday's news and the 'basically' in 'basically disbanded' became truth.
After a couple of years of gurus and music, a fledgling Burger King grabbed Hello, Hello as their jingle (one writer attributes it to a dog food company--- not really important), coins changed hands and Peter Kraemer and Terry MacNeil, the songwriting core of the old band, headed to Hawaii for a debauch of epic proportions. When the coins ran out, a handshake deal headed the two back to San Francisco in pursuit of a new band. They auditioned musicians while writing songs and finally settled on, surprisingly, their old bandmates, Norman Mayell and Martin Beard, who had been honing their chops with various bands. An album deal was signed with Warner Brothers and Miraculous Hump was born.
Musically, the album was more toward the edge than mainstream. Kraemer and MacNeil had learned and leaned more toward jazz than most bands of the time, incorporating third world rhythms and tones in light amounts. Kraemer by this time was playing what he called a 'synthophone', a sax played through a very early synthesizer, which gave the music an ethereal quality. This was not the old Sopwith Camel of Hello, Hello fame. This was new territory. Some people had recommended they change the band name and perhaps it was a mistake that they didn't. The new music was a far cry from the old and much more sophisticated. Most people remembered the hit and turned away. The people who found it, though, really loved it. Unfortunately, not that many found it.
Needless to say, Warner Brothers as a company had no idea what to do with the album. Few radio stations outside of the Bay Area were interested and the press was more interested in the old band with the hit than Miraculous Hump. The album soon found its way from radio stations into used bins, Warner Brothers lost interest and the band once again disbanded.
Kraemer and MacNeil knew what they had. In spite of the resounding silence regarding the album, they believed they had nailed it, musically, as did a number of critics. They went their own ways until interest in Sopwith Camel once again began to build. With the advent of CDs, they looked into a CD release. All they could track down was a safety copy made during the mastering of the original album. They digitized it and released it as “The Millennium Edition”, as it was released in 2000. A few copies of this remain and are available through the band's website.
In 2006, however, their producer Erik Jacobsen, while digging through boxes in his basement, came upon the master tapes. They took it back into the studio, remastered it, and the rest is, ahem, history. Subtitled “Remastered 2006”, the sound is clean and fresh with the warmth of the original release.
It has been a long trip for the Camel (after all, it was to the moon and back), but in retrospect, not a bad one. For the fans of this classic album, you can now replace the old vinyl, sans pops and clicks, with a shiny new CD. Cool thing is, the band will see most of the money from this release. It is doubtful they saw much from the album.
Frank O. Gutch Jr.
