Sergio Mendes & Brasil ‘66 – Stillness, Righteous Life and the Mystery of Paula Stone
Sergio Mendes & Brasil ‘66 – Stillness, Righteous Life and the Mystery of Paula Stone
The death of Sergio Mendes aged 83 in September this year made me go back to Stillness, the Sergio Mendes & Brasil ’66 album released in 1970. It’s a record I go back to a lot, having bought a second-hand vinyl copy on spec at Affleck’s Palace (now just Afflecks), the alternative indoor market in Manchester, some time ago in the autumn of 1983.
My awareness of Mendes came largely through music press interviews with the Pale Fountains, the Liverpool group whose namedropping of Mendes alongside Love’s Forever Changes (1967) album and Burt Bacharach chimed with a move towards absorbing sophisticated sixties latin tinged pop into post punk sensibilities. While other acts wigged out wildly, the Pale Fountains and other acts such as Weekend sourced a pop-lite palette that saw a revolt into a very retro style.
In their early days, at least, the Pale Fountains’ penchant for acoustic adventures saw them integrate assorted percussionists into the band to give them texture during live shows. Some of the players apparently came from the Everyman Youth Theatre. One of them, Ian Davies, who was pictured in Merseysound magazine playing a mean looking maracas with the group, went on to have a successful acting career as Ian Hart. Continuing in a musical theme, one early role saw Hart play a surly John Lennon in Backbeat (1994), Iain Softley’s film about the Beatles’ Hamburg years.
While Love’s lushly orchestrated masterpiece would become the defining influence on Pale Fountains vocalist and songwriter Michael Head, Bacharach and Mendes’ pop classicism would be familiar from film soundtracks and prime time light entertainment shows. Mendes and co had also a hit with a version of Bacharach’s ‘The Look of Love’. In the 1990s, both Bacharach and Mendes would become favourites of the retro-styled loungecore scene at clubs such as Going Places in Edinburgh.
You can hear Bacharach and Mendes’ influences on the Pale Fountains’ debut single, ‘Just a Girl’ / ‘(There’s Always Something) On My Mind’ (1982), released on the Operation Twilight label. It’s there as well as their John Peel session featuring songs from the same era. Early live shows featured covers of the Bacharach and David classic, ‘Walk on By’, Love’s ‘Between Clark and Hilldale’, and a version of ‘Scarborough Fair’, the English folk ballad first brought into mass public consciousness by Simon and Garfunkel on their 1966 album, Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme.
Simon and Garfunkel likely drew from Martin Carthy’s version of ‘Scarborough Fair’ that appeared a year earlier, which in turn probably looked to a version by Ewan MacColl, recorded in 1960. Anything resembling folk purism was dispelled by Mendes, who gave it the same laidback samba grooviness they infused into their Beatles covers. Mendes & Brasil ’66’s version became a 1968 hit in the American charts. It was probably a mix of Simon and Garfunkel and Mendes that inspired the Pale Fountains to play ‘Scarborough Fair’ when they opened for Aztec Camera in Liverpool in late 1981.
Incidentally, the death of genius bass player Herbie Flowers a few days after Mendes revealed a connection I never knew about. While the rest of us were hailing Flowers’ work with Lou Reed on ‘Walk on the Wild Side’ and ‘Rock On’ by David Essex, and others pointed out that Flowers had penned novelty hit, ‘Grandad’, performed by Dad’s Army actor Clive Dunn, my mate Graham topped us all by pointing out that Flowers had played on the Pale Fountains’ major label single, ‘Palm of My Hand’ / ‘Love’s a Beautiful Place’ (1983).
Given that the PFs had the very MOR Geoff Love Orchestra score the string led rush of their major label debut, ‘Thank You’ (1982), such ambitions for their Alan Rankine produced follow up probably shouldn’t come as a surprise, but is a top factoid nevertheless.
When I spotted the Sergio Mendes & Brasil ‘66 albums in Affleck’s Palace, what little I knew of all this will have barely mattered. There were two records laid out side by side on a shelf, as if bookending what looked like very different eras. One was Fool on the Hill (1968). The other was Stillness.
Fool on the Hill was the album with ‘Scarborough Fair’ on. The cover shows Sergio sitting on a chair on the beach, with the band artfully arranged on the ground around him. The two singers – Lani Hall and Karen Philipp – lean on either arm of the chair, with the rest of the band behind. The backdrop looks like some manufactured orange L.A. sunset, making everyone in the photograph look even cooler than they already did. This was still very much 1960s Sergio, which, like the music, was neat, chic, with muted psychedelic hues.
Stillness looked different. The photos of Sergio and the band were still pretty cool, but in a different way. The psychedelic sunsets and loungecore persona seemed to have given way to a more dressed down vibe. On the front cover, the band are pictured outside, with the lyrics to the album’s title track laid beneath the picture like poetry and credited to someone called Paula Stone. Inside the gatefold sleeve, the band are posed individually in what look like promo shots for some countercultural western. This very friendly outlaw image is ramped up on the back cover, where the group are posed together crouching behind barbed wire.
Fool on the Hill was the fourth album released as Sergio Mendes and Brasil ’66. Stillness was the seventh and final one before Mendes and everybody else moved on. There may have only been two years between the two records, but in terms of style and execution, they were worlds apart.
As I discovered much later, Fool on the Hill and Stillness featured the second edition of Brasil ’66 after Mendes decided to shake up both the band and the winning formula that had made them so successful. By the time of Fool on the Hill, only Hall remained from the previous line up. By the time Stillness was released, she was gone too. Hall had left the band midway through recording the album to join its producer and Mendes’ label boss Herb Albert, both as a solo artist under his wing, and as a romantic partner and wife. Hall was replaced in Brasil ’66 by a Brazilian singer called Gracinha Leporace, who would become Mendes’ wife.
One can’t help but wonder whether the Mendes’ and the Alberts ever double dated, hanging out together as couples who had already recorded the perfect soundtrack to their respective romances, which they might listen to in the car on hip to the minute 8-track cartridge. Groovy.
Hall, Leporace and Philipp all appear on Stillness, each singing lead on different tracks rather than utilise the jaunty duel harmonies of before. While Hall takes the title track, Leporace makes ‘Lost in Paradise’ her own, while only occasionally does one provide vocal backing for the other. The disappearance of the twin female vocals that gave the group much of its saccharine cool wasn’t the only musical change on Stillness. With Mendes enlisting musicians beyond his regular band on some tracks, this was probably as close to a straightforward rock record that he ever made.
The songs on the album were still a tried and tested mix of Brazilian numbers and louche pop covers, with the former featuring Gilberto Gil and Jose Carlos Capinam’s song, ‘Viramundo’, and Caetano Veloso’s 1969 composition, ‘Lost in Paradise’. Both Gil and Veloso were as active politically as they were musically, and its worth noting that for all its sunkissed vibe, the Tropacalia movement Gil and Veloso sprang from was a form of counter cultural rebel music. Veloso even wrote a book on the subject, Tropical Truth: A Story of Music and Revolution in Brazil (2003).
Other tracks on Stillness include ‘Celebration of the Sunrise’, co-composed by second generation Brasil ’66 member and bossa nova veteran Oscar Castro Neves. The ballad, ‘Canção Do Nosso Amor’, is credited to Adilio Silveira De Aquino and Dalto Medeiros.
For all the exotic beauty of these, it is the choices of covers that shows just how much Brasil ’66 had moved on. Where previously Mendes and co had focused on a Beatles and Bacharach friendly repertoire, Stillness sees them remagine songs by Blood, Sweat and Tears, Joni Mitchell and Buffalo Springfield. The title track of Stillness and the song that follows, ‘Righteous Life’, meanwhile, were originals credited to someone called Paula Stone, more of whom anon. Whatever, the times truly were a changing.
Back at Affleck’s Palace, I’m still weighing up which Sergio Mendes album to buy. While the good guy outlaw image of Stillness looks too hippyish compared to the cool of Fool on the Hill as I pore over both sleeves for what felt like an age, it is the choices of musical covers that is the decider. ‘Scarborough Fair’ has a familiar cosiness to it on Fool on the Hill, but Stillness has ‘For What it’s Worth’. Despite my reservations, the song seems to fit with the album’s look. I’m not sure I’d even heard Buffalo Springfield’s original by this point, but I was already fascinated by the song.
I’d seen a Liverpool band called The Moderates do a version of ‘For What it’s Worth’ a couple of years earlier, when I didn’t even know it was a cover. Where Buffalo Springfield served up a calm and reasoned call to arms regarding early curfews on Sunset Strip clubs, The Moderates turned the song into a jaunty art school skank. Vocalists John Brady and Heidi Kure trade vocals on the verses before launching into a ‘Hey! Hey’-led chorus that is an infinitely poppier leap on from the Buffalo Springfield original. The Moderates recorded it for a John Peel session that’s still kicking around YouTube, and put it on the B-side of a single, both of which still sound great.
Much later, a 1990s club band called Oui 3 did a version of ‘For What it’s Worth’, and Chumbawamba used the chorus of it in their rousing 1993 single, ‘Timebomb’. Reading about the song now, I can see there are a ton of other covers of the song.
Sergio Mendes and Brasil ’66 did something different again with it. Taking the low-slung earnestness of Stephen Stills’ original, they funked it up enough to make it more dancefloor friendly. A ton of percussion drives the song, which is sung with strident showbiz bravura by Karen Philipp over badass bass, percussion and keyboards on something much meatier than previous Brasil ’66 fare.
I knew none of this back at Affleck’s Palace, but dug the record from the start once I very eventually made the choice my limited funds would allow for. I felt vindicated years later when Brasil ‘66’s version of ‘For What it’s Worth’ was played at an Edinburgh Film Festival party. It might well have been a club staple by then, I don’t know, but it sounded great loud, and people danced.
Of the other covers on Stillness, I didn’t know for years that ‘Sometimes in Winter’ was a Blood, Sweat and Tears song. To be honest, I don’t really know the group at all other than for ‘Spinning Wheel’, which seems to have left its mark somehow.
As for Stillness’s cover of ‘Chelsea Morning,’ it was a song I already knew from working my way through assorted Joni Mitchell albums, and had picked up Clouds (1969) early on. After the solo acoustic loveliness of Mitchell’s version, the piano led joyfulness of Mendes and Brasil ‘66’s take on the song came as a very pleasant shock.
Don’t get me wrong, I adore Joni and her me-generation meanderings from her folksy beginnings to her jazz-fusion song symphonies and beyond, and I listen to her pretty much every day, usually leaning towards Court and Spark (1974) and The Hissing of Summer Lawns (1975). But if I was forced to make a choice about which is the best version of ‘Chelsea Morning’, I think I’d go for Brasil ’66 every time.
And then there is ‘Righteous Life’ and ‘Stillness’, and the mystery of Paula Stone.
When I read the assorted songwriting credits for Stillness, given that Stone’s lyrics were on the cover, I presumed she was one of the female singers featured in the photograph. Not everyone who plays on the record is credited, and unless you’re already au fait with those involved, it’s not easy to work out who’s who. As it turned out, Stone is nowhere to be found in the then Brasil ’66 line-up.
‘Stillness’ the song comes in two parts, top and tailing the record with Stone’s two stanzas musing on morning and evening respectively over an airy flute-led backing. As the first part ends, the sliding bass introduction to ‘Righteous Life’ ushers in an acoustic guitar pattern and piano sprinkles that form the bedrock of the song, with Philipp taking the vocal lead.
What follows is a wide-eyed affirmation of counter cultural values. Stone’s utopian faith in an alternative society suggests a whiff of flower child naïveté, while its references to tarot cards points up a lightly mystical intent. As a more innocent near neighbour to ‘For What it’s Worth’, this is Stone, Mendes and Brasil ’66 spreading the word about the brave new world the previous decade opened up.
In keeping with the song’s idyllic call to arms, it was on ‘Righteous Life’ that Mendes drafted in musicians beyond his Brasil ’66 circle. They duly take it beyond the regular template to somewhere more grown up as befits the song’s Boomerish sentiments.
‘Righteous Life’ was picked up a couple of decades later by electronic duo, A Man Called Adam. This saw the partnership of writer/vocalist Sally Rodgers and writer/composer Steve Jones surf the dancefloor zeitgeist on their self produced debut album, The Apple (1991), with a beat laden House piano version of the song that gave it an extra layer of clubby euphoria.
One can imagine as well the song being given a fresh hippy dippy sheen by Lavender Diamond, the L.A. sired group led by Becky Stark, whose own early lyrics on songs such as ‘Open Your Heart’ could have been descended from Stone.
But who was Paula Stone, and why after ‘Stillness’ and ‘Righteous life’ has she only ever had a handful of songwriting credits since? Truth is, there is very little out there.
‘Could ‘Paula Stone’ be a pseudonym?’ muses a 2013 thread on the A&M Corner online discussion page. Someone mentions an archive article that said she had been signed up by Mendes, who would be producing an album by her. Another poster recalls meeting her in what they remember as a 1970 at a concert in Detroit accompanying Judy Collins to her dressing room, introducing herself as an aspiring songwriter possibly trying to sell some of her songs to Collins.
It turns out from another poster that, as Paula Nesselson, Stone has or had a LinkedIn page, which features the cover image of Stillness. Turns out at the time she lived in Michigan, where she was online editor of a magazine called Immortal Bliss.
There is a Class of ’63 high school reunion page on which Nesselson Stone remains active. Her profile describes her as ‘Writer-Songwriter-Editor-Tutor’, and says that she taught sewing to ‘hundreds of students’ over fifteen years at the ‘Jewish Orphans Home’ known as Vista Del Mar Residential Treatment centre in Los Angeles. There is a photograph of her from 2013 from a time when she was studying Kabbalah.
Again, a cover image of Stillness is used as her profile picture. This is accompanied by the words ‘I wrote title song & the single ‘Righteous Life’.’ She did a fair bit more besides.
According to Discogs, which is usually right about these things, a song called ‘Even Now’ features on Sergio Mendes presents Lobo, a Mendes produced showcase of Brazilian singer /guitarist Edu Lobo, released the same year as Stillness. ‘Even Now’ is credited to Stone and Lobo. This suggests that Mendes was building a roster, nurturing younger artists to success helped along by the Mendes brand.
Two years later, Stone is credited for ‘To Touch and Not Be Bound’ on the B-side of ‘Join My World (The New Mandom)’, a single by Angelo, real name Angelo Arvonio. Another Stone track, ‘It Don’t Matter’ features on Angelo’s self-titled 1976 album, with Angelo receiving a co credit.
In 1973, Richie Havens’ album, Portfolio, featured ‘I Don’t Need Nobody’ by Stone. Half a century later, a cover of ‘Even Now’ features on Ryan Keberle’s Collectiv do Brasil’s album, Considerando. The record also features a track by Brasil ’66 alumna Lani Hall, as well as a cover of the Beatles’ ‘Blackbird’ and several tracks by Edu Lobo.
Discogs also lists a Paula Stone as producer of two albums by Al Goodman and his Orchestra, but they are from 1946 and 1951. Could she be the same person? Given the time period regarding the Class of ’63 page, it seems unlikely.
Going back to her school reunion page, Esselson Stone writes how she had several poems and a short story appear in her high school magazine, and how it was this and encouragement from her teacher that made her want to become a writer.
She mentions how she sang in a school play called Danny & The Pirates, and recalls how a guy named Joe would play numbers by Martha Reeves & The Vandellas and other Motown acts as he walked past her typing class.
Esselson Stone remembers learning to love classical literature, singling out Beowulf. As the appearance of the Stillness album cover on her profile suggests, she is still hugely proud of her work on the record, and what seems to have been a brief time as a songwriter under Mendes’ wing. In keeping with the times, Stone seems to have done her own thing. One can detect a lingering influence of eastern culture, while posts refer to her tutoring school children in remedial reading, French and Spanish.
Whatever happened with Stone, and why she never went on to become a major songwriter, is a magical musical mystery still to be unearthed. But to have written ‘Stillness’ and ‘Righteous Life’ is legacy enough. As brought to life by Sergio Mendes & Brasil ’66, the songs helped shape Stillness into the grown-up turn of the decade masterpiece it became. In the meantime, whatever she did next, Paula Stone clearly had a righteous life of her own to be getting on with.
Wanted. More paid subscribers. The Noise of Art is a labour of love dependent on the kindness of strangers. To receive new posts and access the full archive of more than 160 posts, including essays on Sparks, Can, the B-52s, Bruce McLean, Georgina Hale, plus the 49-episode Pre-Post-NOW!, which joins the dots across Edinburgh’s pop/art underground from Strategy: Get Arts to Dolly the Sheep, sign up here. It’s all yours if you want it. What’s not to love?