THE NORMAN HAINES BAND – Den Of Iniquity (LP-1971)

Label: Odeon – 2 C062 04818

Format: Vinyl, LP, Album / Country: France / Released: Aug. 1971

Style: Progressive Rock, Improvisation

Recorded at Abbey Road Studios, London, Spring 1971.

Engineer – Peter Bown

Illustration – Heinrich Kley

Producer, Liner Notes By – Tony Hall

A1 - Den Of Iniquity ..................................................................... 4:32

A2 - Finding My Way Home ......................................................... 3:23

A3 - Everything You See (Mr. Armageddon) ............................... 4:34

A4 - When I Come Down ............................................................. 3:56

A5 - Bourgeois ............................................................................. 2:59

B1 - Rabbits ............................................................................... 13:03

        including:  a) Sonata (For Singing Pig)

                          b) Joint Effort

                          c) Skidpatch

                          d)  Miracle

B2 - Life Is So Unkind .................................................................. 8:03

        including:  a) Moonlight Mazurka

                          b) Echoes Of The Future

Norman Haines – organ, piano, vocals

Andy Hughes – bass guitar, acoustic guitar

Neil Clarke – electric guitar

Jimmy Skidmore – drums, percussion

Norman pushed on with his new sound, delving deeper into the darkness while a little more pop-friendly at the same time, almost completely ditching the horns and incorporating more prominent guitar work and adding folk influences. Haines got another contract with Parlophone and returned to Abbey Road Studios to record what would become Den of Iniquity.

A couple singles were released around the release of Den Of Iniquity which only solidified Norman’s ingeniousness. Released before the album, “Daffodil,” which Haines dedicated to his wife, is an extremely catchy, Latin-tinged pop song with lovely horns and percussion. Norman’s emotional vocals couldn’t be better. The way the song takes off at 1:20 is one of the greatest moments of Norman’s career. Pure genius.

As for the album itself, the opening track to Den Of Iniquity is a hard rock classic. Forgetting the classical intros previously used, this song bursts in with an organ riff and drums pounding in the background. The guitar comes in following the organ before taking over with some thick, wah riffing. The solo kills and I love the wah bends in the background. This song is the perfect sequel to Mr. Armageddon. This hard rocker kills.

The countrified “Finding my Way Home” is the perfect jam to play on a warm summer night while pounding brews with your pals. The vocals and twangy guitar are perfect. The following track, a reworked version of Mr. Armageddon, replaces horns with guitar. This version has a slow start but guitarist Neil Clarke totally redeems himself in the second half. He pretty much solos until the end and every second is great; the last 50 are astounding. I imagine Clarke jumping out of his chair and kicking it over before jumping into this amazing chord progression.

“When I Come Down” is another wah-laden hard rocker with some distorted organ noodling. This song was used as a demo by old manager Jim Simpsons’ other band, Earth, which by that time had changed its name to Black Sabbath.

The mood takes a mellow turn with the A-side closer “Bourgeois,” performed and sung by Clarke. It proudly displays his folk roots. The flip side of the record is made up of two songs. The thirteen-minute “Rabbits” is a solid extended jam. The final track eight-minute “Life Is So Unkind” is a moody instrumental led by organ, electric piano and some guitar, that brings the album to a menacing end.

When the band presented the finished product, including the grotesque album cover to the label, they outright refused to release it and most record shops even refused to carry it. The label delayed the release of the album for almost a year before finally releasing in August 1971 under The Norman Haines Band.

The original LP is now extremely rare and goes for upwards of $700. As with his previous album, it wasn’t successful and the band disbanded. At the time of release Norman was deep in debt and hit the road as Locomotive to pay some of it off. He even included the ska singles that brought him that brief moment of success just a few years prior. Disillusioned by the music business, he declined a chance to join Black Sabbath, disappearing from the music scene all together in 1971.

The last piece of music that Norman released is a single from 1972 called “Give It To You Girl,” a killer pop tune led by his brilliant voice and electric piano. It shows Norman’s growing fondness for Latin percussion, and gives us a taste of what could have come next.

Haines got into he construction business and put together a small band that played weddings and local dances, which he still does to this day. I doubt that most people he plays for these days realize what a brilliant musician Norman really is. It took decades for only a few to finally realize the genius of Norman Haines.

(Review by David Morales)

___________________ About the artist:

Heinrich Kley was born April 15, 1863, in Karlsruhe, Germany, and studied art with Ferdinand Keller at the Karlsruhe Akademy and with C. Frithjob Smith in Munich. He started out as an illustrator and a painter of murals, focussing on portraits, still lifes, animals, and landscapes.

Heinrich Kley is best remembered today for satirical, despairing, and often obscene images which evinced a maniacal distrust of the industrial revolution and its automatized society. In 1907, a series of remarkable pen & ink drawings appeared in the Munich German Expressionist literary art magazine Die Jugend that captured the growing disillusionment of fin-de-siecle German counter-culture. Kley's scathing and deftly rendered creations resonated with audiences and Kley became a leading interpreter of the follies and vices that beset mankind. Kley's art appeared in the United States in 1937 and caught the eye of Walt Disney & Sketch Artists at the Disney studio, including Albert Hurter, Joe Grant, and James Bodrero. Hurter introduced Kley's work to the Disney Studio and Walt Disney accumulated a collection of the artist's work. The images in Kley's art inspired a number of animated sequences and characters, including Night on Bald Mountain and the dancing animals of Dance of the Hours in Fantasia.

In 1947 the "Drawings of Heinrich Kley" was published with a forward by George Grosz. Of Kley, Grosz wrote:  "I am sure that the drawings of Heinrich Kley will be remembered and enjoyed as long as human beings retain the ability to laugh at themselves."

Conflicting sources have the date of Heinrich Kley's death as either 1945 or 1952. Whatever the truth is, his popularity is bigger than ever. Two volumes of his work were published by Dover Books; Bantam Books has used Kley drawings for some of their paperback book covers, and Atlas and Motive magazines have also used his work. His art even found its way onto a poster for the Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco, which probably would have amused the artist — a man who never shied from a chance to throw his India-ink-tipped barbs at the System.



If you find it, buy this album!