The Judge
RAVES!
Date: 05/04/11
Crosby, Stills & Nash - "Marrakesh Express" (1969)
David Crosby, Stephen Stills and Graham Nash came together in 1968 as the result of splits and dissolutions in what were already big-name outfits; The Byrds (Crosby), Buffalo Springfield (Stills) and The Hollies (Nash). They found particularly that they had a very strong vocal set-up, and signed for Atlantic Records to release their eponymous debut LP the next year.
Graham Nash (the Englishman of the group) had written Marrakesh Express when he was still with The Hollies, and there is said to exist a backing track of them attempting the song (it's interesting to speculate how such a song would have turned out had it actually been completed by the Lancastrian popsters). A tale of Nash's travels in North Africa, it was reworked for Crosby, Stills & Nash and became a moderate hit single on both sides of the Atlantic.
I do have memories of this being played at the time (I would have been seven years old), and remember it as being a very jolly song which I always associate with a warm summer evening. Of course, I wouldn't have known then where the hell Marrakesh was, although being a map and atlas freak I would have looked it up and found that it was in a country with a very interesting-looking flag.
As one might expect with a song which had been familiar to me from an early age but where the words were not entirely obvious, I have now found that a number of lines I thought I knew were either not quite right or completely out of kilter with reality. For example, the line in the first verse which I had always heard as:
"American male is five-foot tall and blue."
turns out to be:
"American ladies five-foot tall and blue."
and I made a complete cock of understanding the second verse. Where I had heard (or thought I'd heard):
"Coloured crumbs hang in the air/Joining cobwebs in the square/Stretchy leathers we can wear at home."
the reality was rather more exotic:
"Colored cottons hang in the air/Charming cobras in the square/Striped djellebas we can wear at home."
It was over ten years before I bought a copy of the single, and I remember getting the imported US copy from the long-lost but fondly-remembered Rabbit Records on Penybryn, Wrexham on my eighteenth birthday (Genesis' A Trick Of The Tail was my main purchase that day, by the way).
It's still a favourite. Take a ride...
