Creation -- "Making Time" (1966)

Telling lies

Closing your eyes

Making more excuses

Pulling the wool

Acting the fool

People have their uses

How many thousands of great songs have been recorded in the last 40 or 50 years?  How many of them have I missed?  

My WAG is 50%.  I doubt that it's much less, and it could be a lot more.  Regardless of what the number is, it's certain that I'm leaving a lot of great music on the table.  

That bothers me.  To tell the truth, it bothers me a lot.

I stumbled across this song a few years ago.  It's on the soundtrack of Wes Anderson's very odd 1998 movie, Rushmore.  My older son liked the movie and bought the soundtrack, and that's how I first discovered "Making Time."

Here's the Rushmore trailer:

I rediscovered "Making Time" on Thanksgiving Day.  We were all watching football when a new Miller Lite commercial came on.  I immediately knew I wanted to feature the song on 2 or 3 lines, but first I had to figure out what it was.

I didn't catch enough of the song's lyrics to search for them online, which is usually the way I figure out the name of an unfamiliar song.  The song sounded like early Who, so I went to my iTunes (17127 songs and counting) and scanned through the older and more obscure Who songs I have, thinking I would eventually figure it out.  But I didn't find anything that matched.

Here's the commercial:

Eventually, I found that someone had posted this question to "Yahoo! Answers" four days earlier:  "What is that song in the new Miller Lite commercial?"  One person responded that it was "Making Time" by the Creation.  Voilà!    

As I was listening to "Making Time," my son walked through the room and identified it.  I told him how much time I had just spent trying to figure that out, and this was his comment:  "You should have asked me."  I thought about explaining to him just how absurd that statement was, but decided to save my breath.

The Creation was an English band that formed in 1966.  "Making Time," which was released in June of that year, was their first single.  It cracked the UK top 50 (barely) and sank without a trace in the US.  Their next single did a little better in the UK and was a top 10 hit in Germany.

The Creation

The band's next two singles did well in Germany and Scandinavia, and they released an album in Europe in 1967, but broke up the next year.  Band members Kenny Pickett (lead singer) and Eddie Phillips (lead guitar), who wrote "Making Time," co-wrote the 1980 hit single "Teacher Teacher" for Rockpile, a wonderful British new wave band whose members included Dave Edmunds and Nick Lowe.  Ronnie Wood, who played only briefly with the Creation, found fame and fortune as a member of the Rolling Stones.  Bassist Kim Gardner put together Ashton, Gardner and Dyke, whose "Resurrection Shuffle" was a hit in 1971. 

Listen to "Making Time" and tell me that you would have known it wasn't an early Who song.  That's exactly what it sounds like -- maybe because Shel Talmy, an American who was the Creation's producer, also produced several of the Who's early hits (including "My Generation").  The story goes that Pete Townshend asked Phillips to join the Who at one point, but Phillips demurred.

Here's "Making Time":

Here's a live performance of the song.  As you'll see, lead singer Kenny Pickett was very cool.  Note how Eddie Phillips plays his guitar with a violin bow.  (Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page also did that, but Phillips did it first.)  

Here's a link you can use to buy the song on Amazon: