"Happy Families (with Eddie 'Fingers' Garvey)"

In the first iteration of "Happy Families" (with Eddie "Fingers" Garvey), some of the "family"s in the repeated phrase "one big happy family," are sung with various melismas, giving a sense of size (for "big").

Mighty Garvey!

I've had Mighty Garvey! for about a year now, and since I've become fairly familiar with the album, I'm going to write some posts about things I've noticed.  I wanted to write a more general post before going song by song, however.  I noticed a couple features on the album that - whether intentionally or coincidentally - are similar to elements on the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, and I wanted to put all of these into a single post.

Like Billy Shears at the beginning of "With a Little Help from my Friends" and Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band itself, Garvey is a figure that Manfred Mann can hide behind, and through his different personas, the band can try different styles.

Mighty Garvey! and Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band also begin and end in similar manners.  At the beginning of the first song on each, there are sound effects to give the impression of a live performance, and at the end of each album, there's a loop of repeated sound.  According to Mark Lewisohn's The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions (entry for 21 April 1967, p. 109), the Beatles' "gibberish" was placed in the concentric run-out groove of the record.  Lewisohn writes that "People with automatic players would hear a quick burst of it before their pick-up arm returned to base, people without such luxurious equipment would find the noise in the concentric playing on and on ad infinitum, or at least until the arm was manually lifted off."  I don't know if the voices at the end of Mighty Garvey! are actually looped on the recording or whether - like the Beatles' gibberish - it's merely an apparent loop because of where the sound is placed on the record.  On the CD re-issues of the albums, however, the effect comes across as the same.