Ron & Bill's "It"

Yester-day I listened to the second disc in a two-disc set of Smokey Robinson & the Miracles.  It includes their first two albums and some bonus tracks.  I noticed something about "It," one of the bonus tracks.  It's credited to Ron & Bill, whom the liner notes explain are Ronald White and Smokey Robinson.  The first verse seems to take a lot of inspiration from Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven."  It starts:

I was home last night tryin' to read a book
There was a knock on my door, so I took a look
But when I reached the door, there was no one there
Not on the porch or anywhere

The narrator of Poe's poem is also "ponder[ing]... / Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore" when "suddenly there came a tapping, / ... at my chamber door" (lines 1-4).  When he finally gets around to opening it, he finds "Darkness there, and nothing more" (line 23).

There aren't as many similarities in the rest of "It," but in the second verse the speaker/singer says that he "really wanted it for my pet," so it's clearly an animal and possibly a raven.  In the bridge, the "it" is rolled over and presumably killed by a train, yet in the third verse, it calls the speaker/singer on the telephone, and there's the same "Oh" phrase that marks its appearance in the first two verses.  There's some similarity between this and Poe's narrator's mentioning that the raven comes from "the Night's Plutonian shore" (lines 46 and 97).  Pluto is the god of the dead (in the Greek and Roman pantheons, as far as I can tell), so the raven's coming from the "Plutonian shore" seems to mean that it's come back from the dead, just like the "it" in Ron & Bill's song.

The Alan Parsons Project's Tales of Mystery and Imagination

I recently read Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado," so I decided to listen to the Alan Parsons Project's Tales of Mystery and Imagination, which contains song versions of some of Poe's works, including "The Cask of Amontillado."  The CD version I have is the updated 1987 version, but I also have the original 1976 version on record, which I listened to back in April.  So, while I didn't have to listen to this album again for this project, I did.

In any case, listening to it this time, I discovered many ways in which the music reflects what's going on in the story.

At the beginning of "The Raven," there's a simple three-note phrase in the bass part, which resembles the three syllables in nevermore.

"The Tell-Tale Heart" presents some interesting changes.  The first part includes rocking guitars and cymbal-heavy drum parts along with the raucous vocals of Arthur Brown.  It then transitions to a softer section with strings, woodwinds, and Jack Harris' vocal part, and then it returns to how it was in the beginning.  It's been awhile since I've read "The Tell-Tale Heart," but I think those changes in tempo, vocalist, and instrumentation serve to reflect the mental state of the narrator.  At first, he's paranoid, then he's placated after he's murdered the old man, and then he's frantic again because of his guilt and hearing the heart's beating.

In certain parts of "The Cask of Amontillado," there are some cymbal parts (or possibly hi-hat parts, like I mentioned in an earlier post, I'm not very familiar with drums or drum terminology) that don't follow the regular rhythm of the track.  They might just be there for extra ambiance, but Poe's story mentions that Fortunato is wearing a "conical cap and bells," so perhaps those cymbal parts are supposed to portray the bells on Fortunato's hat.

There's also a great change in the Prelude of "The Fall of the House of Usher."  After Orson Welles delivers the line "color becomes pallor," the supporting note changes from a D to a B.  I'm not sure if it's really a key change, but it is sort of a menacing modulation, which emphasizes the transformation mentioned in Welles' narration.  (I need to compare this to the 1976 version, which doesn't include Welles' narration.)

There are probably other musical reflections of the story in "The Fall of the House of Usher," but it's been awhile since I've read it, so I couldn't pick up on anything specific.  I should look into the Poe references in this album more deeply sometime.