The Bellamy Brother’s hit “Let Your Love Flow” (I’ll just call it Love) was produced in LA with members of Neil Diamond’s band in 1975 or 1976. The credited musicians on both “Love” and Diamond’s “Beautiful Noise” are similar. The story goes that Diamond’s roadie, Larry (L.E.) Williams, wrote the song and Diamond didn’t like its vibe with his own music, passed it to the Bellamys who were getting started in the business, and the rest is history. Legend has it that he’s the richest roadie ever, lol.
The more truthful legend is that the Diamond musicians helped a bunch with the song’s studio excellence. When you listen to the studio album and you try to imitate it, even if you are THE Bellamys, you’re going to find it hard to match it. Its rhythm on the studio version is tight, the “flow” is just impeccable, and the musical qualities are unreproducible by most due to the stacking of this mix. So let’s look at who did it and get to our mystery, shall we?!
First is the Drummer, Dennis St. John. Information about him says that he was also Diamond’s music director at one point in addition to being the drummer for most songs. Listen to Love and you can hear that this guy was at the top of his game and the mixer placed his beat in the right places through the course of the song. The studio version of Love would be unremarkable without the rhythm, the details of which I cover below. The drums are so far back in the mix toward the end that hearing a crash cymbal is like finding a spare headphone in my studio. That’s because a number of other guys were laying down the rhythm that we hear.
Second is the Moog Keyboardist, Alan Lindgren. Alan is quite the talent, the kind of guy who you know could grab another instrument and fill in without skipping a beat. Lindgren would also be Neil Diamond’s musical director, and worked with St. John for a long time. What makes Love’s studio mix unique is its very early use of strings from the venerable Moog: people of today ignore this string interlude as if it’s just a random fill-in like it is on countless other songs. But the more I think about it, Let Your Love Flow was actually on the cutting edge of this synthesized string accompaniment in a rock song. People couldn’t resist imitating Alan’s riff in so many other songs and genres that the rest is history.
Third, we know that this song included some decent “session” music from the Bellamys on guitar, but also Emory Gordy on Bass, and both Doug Rhone and Richard Bennett on guitar. I’ll let others chime in on how relevant these musicians are on their particular parts, but I don’t hear anything notable for my purposes here. Bennet was a Neil Diamond guitarist, both acoustic and electric, who also played other instruments.
Fourth: But now we come to a bit of mystery I’d like your help solving. There is a credit for Percussionist: King Errisson. Errisson would later go on to play in Diamond’s group, but at the time appears to be connected to Gordy and session drumming in LA. King is, notably, from the Bahamas. In this role, something strange (to my ears anyway) is happening in Let Your Love Flow: we’ve got a drum beat backed up by an instrument that seems to play 16th notes, slightly syncopated, throughout most of the song. It’s the sound that you might try to imitate by sliding your lower jaw teeth rapidly.
I know what you’re thinking, and you may be right, and that is that we are just hearing the fast beat of the rhythm guitar. Well, yes, it is there, too, and of course it changes pitches and has musical chords to go along with its beat. But my theory is that there could be two rhythm guitars, or some mixing trickery, or there is some other instrument in use that is mixed in to support it that is being struck somewhat like how a washboard is played, rapid fire. I’ve listened to the second and third verses repeatedly to hear if I can figure it out. I did a little snooping around the Internet and came to a possible Latin percussion instrument or two or three, but I didn’t come up with the right sound. Help me out, please!
Now just some notes about the song (you’ll need to hear it to help me out) and the videos over on YouTube. First off, many of the “live” performances are appearance only: the studio mix is played while the Bellamys show off. There’s one with 21 and another with 2 million views on YT, both with the same audio. Other than that, the Bellamys of course did some actual live performances (thousands of them), but the Neil Diamond performers were, um, not available. So the sound is much different on those versions, and not applicable to my situation here. I noticed that the brothers seem to actually struggle to get all of those parts covered, with only an orchestra of about 8 or 10 folks being able to pull it off live.
The mystery sound begins immediately after the first crash cymbal, around 0:08. Around 0:45 and another crash cymbal, it picks up the pace a bit and if you didn’t hear it before, it’s there and forcing your teeth to mercilessly play along until the ending fade-out … and beyond.
If you hear it, “you’ll know what I mean … that’s the reason.”