Reimagining the Classics: 3. Holst’s Jupiter
by David Barker

Gustav Holst’s Jupiter from The Planets has proved a popular source of music. Most famously, the majestic theme from the trio was used by Holst himself in the hymn I Vow to Thee, My Country. But of relevance to this series of articles is the use of the quicksilver opening theme by 1960s and 70s pop/rock musicians.

I am going to start at the end, as it were. The best-known adaptation came from English band Manfred Mann’s Earth Band (named after its keyboardist) whose 1973 song Joybringer reached number 9 on the UK charts (their biggest chart success was Blinded by the Light, a Bruce Springsteen cover, which reached number 1 in the US in 1976). The title Joybringer is, of course, a recognition of its origins, given that Holst subtitled the Jupiter movement Bringer of Jollity. Approval to use music from Jupiter was given by Imogen Holst, but when permission was requested to create an album based on the entire Planets suite, that was denied. As a consequence, the resulting 1973 album Solar Fire featured original compositions based around the planets (and didn’t even include Joybringer).

However, it turns out that Joybringer itself borrows from another song Make Your Stash, written by Ross Wilson, best known as the lead singer of iconic Australian bands Daddy Cool and Mondo Rock. He wrote it in 1969 while living in London and playing with a prog rock band Procession. When Procession broke up, guitarist Mick Rogers joined Manfred Mann and formed the Earth Band, and took Ross Wilson’s Holst adaptation (which to the best of my knowledge didn’t have Imogen’s approval), reworked the scoring, gave it new words and Joybringer was the result.

I’d never heard of Make Your Stash, so I listened to the Daddy Cool version. Certainly, the Holst theme is there, though a little hard to detect due to the style. However, the song was so dire, especially the non-Holst introduction (my wife asked what the strange noise was), I couldn’t make it all the way through the six minutes plus, and I’m not suggesting you do either (but if you really must, then you have been warned). However, a 1971 version by Australian prog rockers Spectrum is better (i.e. listenable); the introduction is not as strange but definitely “very 70s”.

But wait there’s more! Diving further down the rabbit hole, we find that Ross Wilson wasn’t even the original borrower. At the time that he wrote Make Your Stash, he was influenced by the American avant-garde musician Frank Zappa, who used the Holst theme in the opening to his 1967 instrumental Invocation & Ritual Dance of the Young Pumpkin (again I suspect Imogen Holst wasn’t consulted). We are pretty “far out” here, and I will leave you to decide whether you want to experience 1960s San Francisco acid rock. I assume that in the title of the work, Zappa was paying homage to Stravinsky, though I don’t hear any direct musical references to Rite of Spring.

So what started off as a fairly simple piece on Manfred Mann’s Joybringer evolved into a much more complex story. We shall return to Manfred Mann later in this series, as the band made a habit of borrowing from classical music.

Listening
You may have seen that we are no longer providing links to YouTube and similar sites because of new online safety legislation enacted in the UK. For the four songs mentioned here, it is my suggestion that you find them on Spotify (or a similar streaming platform) as the studio versions are definitely preferable to the live versions I found on YouTube.