Buying the albums sampled on “You Can All Join In”.
The album opens, of course, with the amazing “Rainbow Chaser” the track selected for inclusion on the sampler, and released as the band’s most successful single in the spring of 1968. It is one of the 1960s’ truly great hit singles, even though it never did spectacularly well in the UK charts. I heard it on the radio when it was first released, and took an immediate liking to it. The words, music and arrangement were gripping, and the effect of the phasing added a surreal beauty to the whole thing; I loved it. Indeed, this was the year, some two years before I got my first record player, and when I was 12 years old, that I realised that there was nothing I loved more, this side of eternity, than music. I had always taken to music, and I still have the single “Little Drummer Boy” by the Harry Simeone Chorale, which my paternal grandfather bought be because I had shown pleasure when hearing it, before my second birthday. However, 1968 was the year when I twigged just how big a part music was going to play in my life, something which has never changed since. I have about 700 LPs, some 150 vinyl 7 inch singles, and something like 7,000 CDs.
As soon as I had found out that there had been an Island sampler prior to “Nice Enough To Eat” [see above], I resolved to get it, and was delighted to find “Rainbow Chaser” on it. I was later to discover that most of the tracks on the sampler had indeed been released as singles, something which sets it apart from “Nice Enough To Eat”.
One slight problem with “Rainbow Chaser”, however, is that its style is unique in the Nirvana catalogue. As it was the only Nirvana track I had ever heard, and as it had become firmly embedded in my mind as “Nirvana”, I got a bit of a shock, in the course of buying the albums sampled on “You Can All Join In”, when I heard the rest of “All Of Us”. Of this, more next time.
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