Keep your eyes behind your nose
Keep your nose upon the road
Don’t forget the things your mother told you
You know that straight and narrow ain’t so wide
If you slip you’ll start to slide
I don’t need to tell you
Oh no, I don’t need to tell you
Because you know for yourself
Straight and narrow ain’t so wide
If you slip you’ll start to slide
When you slide there ain’t no place
To run or even hide
Fingers scratching, try to find
The life you lost and left behind
Nothing doing, not this time
It’s straight on out and down the line
Short sax + guitar solo
Jim Pembroke 1968
Artist: Blues Section
Line-up:
Jim Pembroke, vocals
Hasse Walli, guitar
Eero Koivistoinen, sax
Pekka Sarmanto, bass
Ronnie Österberg, drums
Otto Donner, backing vocals
Release: First released on the compilation album ‘Some of Love’, Love Records LRLP 6, 1969. Presumably a left-out track from 1967 or 1968.
Studio: Finnvox
Producer: Otto Donner
Engineer: Erkki Hyvönen
General comment: This for a long time was one of the rarest Blues Section tracks, but it is now available on the ‘Blues Section 2’ CD. For more general comment see ‘Only Dreaming’.
The Music: First impression (the monk’s chorus) is that the Yardbird’s ‘For Your Love’ had not been made en vain. Second impression the song is already over. Not a bad little ditty, though, and for once the jazz influences seem to work better than usual, perhaps because the composition is slightly more in that vein from the start.
The lyric: An encouragement, it seems, to give up some kind of drug or alcohol abuse and try to live a cleaner life. Perhaps the Gregorian chant is meant to be self-mocking, but the personal experiences that led to this might well have be serious enough, knowing the kind of life-style that existed among some young people in the late 1960s, not least in the rock music scene. Boy, did they look silly through the eyes of a ten-year-old, but the music undeniably had some glorious moments.
-- Claes Johansen, 2008