Grapefruit

Nights At The Roundtable - Grapefruit - 1968

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(Grapefruit - back by popular demand)

Back for another installment of Grapefruit - I ran another cut off their 1968 debut album back in August and I was asked by a lot of readers if I was going to run more. Well, of course - we take requests around here.

Tonight it's Ain't It Good.

And yes it is.



Nights At The Roundtable - Marcus Hook Roll Band - 1972

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(Vanda and Young - The voodoo they do so well)

Last night I mentioned one of the members of Grapefruit actually being the younger brother of George Young. When Grapefruit dissolved, Young took off for Australia to work with his brother on a new project.

The project became The Marcus Hook Roll Band. You could sort of call this the mid-point between The Easybeats and AC/DC - but definitely a link. The Vanda-Young team were on a roll.

Marcus Hook only last a little over two years (something about bands lasting two years . . ), releasing numerous singles and an album, which finally came out in the States via Capitol in 1974.

This track, issued in 1972 was "Natural Man". It did well in Australia and moderately well in Europe and the UK, but did nothing in the States, as did their album.

It was probably because of that a re-group and reinvention took place and what emerged was the winning combination.

And of course, nobody ever looked back.


Nights At The Roundtable - Grapefruit - 1968

You can view this video right here by getting the latest version of Flash Player!
DOWNLOADS: 207
WMV
PLAYS: 66

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(Grapefruit - all the right moves - all the right sounds - but . . .)

Even when you come with a name by Lennon, liner notes by Derek Taylor, publishing by Apple and production by Terry Melcher you can still fail to click with the record buying public. Such was the case with Grapefruit, a band with all the earmarks of a screaming success which, sadly came to very little.

Together for less than two years, Grapefruit formed in 1967 and recorded two albums (one released in 1968 and the second "Deep Water" released in 1969), and released a score of singles before packing it in and going their separate ways.

What they did leave is an awful lot of potential and some very good music.

Their first album "Around Grapefruit", issued in the U.S. on ABC-Dunhill, was laced with all the psychedelic hooks and twists needed to make each track memorable on its own. Great expectations were attached to it, but it failed to chart. And by the time their second album came out, issued on RCA, things had cooled considerably in the expectation department and its release went virtually unnoticed.

After splitting up, George Alexander, bass guitar, whose real name was Alexander Young, teamed up with his brother George and Harry Vanda who had just left The Easybeats to do sessions under the name Marcus Hook Roll Band. Vanda and Young, you will remember eventually morphed into AC/DC. So all was not lost.

Back to Grapefruit. This track, "Yesterday's Sunshine" is a blend of pop and psych with more emphasis on psych and it's typical of all the work on this album.

Another addition to the bulging "should've been" file. It doesn't deserve being ignored.