This was a double album presented in a plush red flocked cover with the text embossed in gold lettering. As you can see by the photo, that's clearly not the copy I have.
Mine is a single disc sampler with commentary, no separators and a continuous mix. The cover clearly states "Promotional LP for record department in-store-play". There are five songs on each side giving 10 selections from a total of 17 tracks on the full commercial release. To add to the unusual quality of this album, there is a hand-written notation on the cover which reads
"To Pete, from the Gibb Brothers Thanx for all your help". So far, the identities of 'Pete' and the writer of the message are unknown. Through a series of connections, in fact 3 degrees of separation, I managed to get a photo of the cover and inscription to Dick Ashby, 1960s road manager and then decades as personal manager to the Bee Gees. His comment in part was "The hand written message does not appear to be that of either Barry, Robin or Maurice. Having said all that if this is indeed a genuine Atco Records sampler I imagine it would be very rare indeed".
The sixties promoted the idea of 'concept' albums, either albums with a common musical or narrative theme running through them. Think of stuff like The Small Faces 'Ogdens Nut Gone Flake', or Moody Blues 'Days of Future Passed' and of course 'Tommy' by The Who, the rock opera phase.
Starting life under the name 'An American Opera', which was later changed to 'Masterpeace', the double set of 'Odessa' was meant to be a concept album about a fictional ship, The Veronica, set in 1899. It didn't end up that way, but it did scuttle the group for a while. The whole concept thing got a bit disjointed, too many points of view, too many cooks spoiling the broth. Even though the inside of the gatefold album featured an illustration of a sea tragedy with a child being thrown down to a lifeboat, the album as a whole was no longer built around the storyline. There were also disputes about the actual songs, particularly which one would be released as a single from the album. Robin wanted his vocal on 'Lamplight' to be the one, but it was relegated to a b-side on the back of Barry's vocal on 'First of May'. Passions were so high that Robin left the group for a couple of years and recorded a solo album.
To be honest, back in the day I always leaned towards Robins vocals anyway. Things like 'I Can't See Nobody', 'Massachusetts' and - from my favourite album "Idea" (Vinyl Vault 2 July 2020) 'Indian Gin and Whisky Dry' and 'I Started a Joke'.
After an album is released it's pretty common for a re-release to include extra tracks, demos, alternate mixes etc. That did happen to Odessa in 2009 when a 3-CD set was released. Oddly though, in 1976, 7 years after the 1969 double album, RSO Records issued a single-disc version which cut 7 tracks from the original, the contentious 'Lamplight' was one of them.
The title track 'Odessa (City on the Black Sea)' is a 7+ minute loose story of a man adrift on an iceberg after a shipwreck, which holds to the original idea. After that the rest of the album travels (IMHO) into various disparate directions and styles. There's the countryfied 'Marley Purt Drive' and the strange homage to Thomas Edison on 'Edison' telling us about electric lights and cylinder music players. There are 3 instrumentals, reminiscent of the aforementioned Moody Blues stuff, although 2 of them were amongst the tracks dropped for the 1976 single-disc release.
Waiting until the penultimate track on the 4th side of the original double album here's Barry with the lush ballad 'First of May', pulling at heart strings and spreading a thick layer of nostalgia. The album ends with one of the subsequently cut instrumentals 'The British Opera', full of orchestration and ethereal 'ooh's and aah's'.
Although I don't have the vinyl of the original album I do have the digital version. I find it a bit confusing, a bit hit and miss, particularly coming after 'Idea', but the saving grace is that it also came before disco !!
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