songs for broken hearts, no. 68

Tonight’s song is a lovely late-period Small Faces tune that feels to me like Steve Marriott working more or less as a solo artist. The youtube clip I found has some really nice grainy footage of the band. It’s not synched up with the music, but that's ok. I don’t know if the footage was part of a promotional film for the song or what. …Autumn Stone is definitely transitional. Its rootsy vibe hints at the the blooze boogie thing Marriott would embrace in Humble Pie. The one thing I don’t like about it is the harmonica. As a general rule, harmonica should never be used in music. Period. With rare exceptions, a harp always makes songs worse than they would otherwise be. It’s why I don’t care for a lot of Dylan's 60s stuff. Blonde on Blonde is a tragedy because the songs are fantastic and they're all ruined by the unrelenting honk of Dylan’s fucking harmonica. I know this is a gratuitous digression, but it’s something I needed to get off my chest. Autumn Stone is beautifully moving in spite of the harmonica and in spite of the movement away from pop that it represents. The Small Faces transition actually begins with their classic 1968 concept album, Ogdens' Nut Gone Flake, which is much heavier than most of what they’d done before. It’s easy now to bemoan this shift from the tight deftness of mid-60s Mod to the sloppy heaviness of late-60s Hippy, but rock is what was in the air in the late 60s, and it’s not fair or realistic to ask artists to step outside the flow of the cultural current. And the other thing is this: Had Marriott and the Small Faces not moved in an increasingly heavy direction, there may never have been Humble Pie. And the thought of life without Humble Pie is more than I can bear…