Changin’ Times

The Zoo Crew just dropped the needle on "Changin' Times," and if you have been riding with the Freaks over at THE ZOO you already know we do not skip the deep cuts just because the radio stations next door wore out the hit. This one sits on side one of Nazareth's 1975 album Hair of the Dog, track four, a little over six minutes of Scottish hard rock that never got the jukebox treatment Love Hurts did. Written by the whole band, Dan McCafferty, Manny Charlton, Pete Agnew, and Darrell Sweet, it is the sound of four Dunfermline lads who had finally stopped asking permission.

Hair of the Dog was the record that put them over. They cut it at Escape Studios down in Kent, with extra work and the mix at AIR Studios in London, and for the first time guitarist Manny Charlton sat in the producer's chair. Deep Purple's Roger Glover had produced the three albums before it. This time the band trusted their own ears. The long-player came out in April 1975 on Mooncrest at home and A&M in the States, climbed to 17 on the Billboard album chart, went platinum in America, gold in Canada, and eventually moved more than two million copies. That is a lot of denim jackets and Camaro tape decks for a group that had been learning three new cover songs every Sunday afternoon so they could keep a residency at the Belleville Hotel in Pilmuir Street.

The album title is its own little bar story, and the Crew has told it more than once between records. They wanted to call the thing Son of a Bitch, because that is the line Dan growls in the title track. The label flipped. Pete Agnew has laughed about it for years, telling interviewers the company would not buy the argument that John Wayne said the same words in the movies. Being Scottish, the phrase did not even land that hard on them. It was an Americanism they had picked up off the screen. So they got cheeky. Heir of the dog is just a roundabout way of saying son of a bitch, and hair of the dog, the old hangover cure, sounds the same if you squint. Pete has said the chosen title had absolutely nothing to do with the song. Dan kept the words to himself through the instrumental sessions, just a grin and a promise he had something up his sleeve. When the vocals went down at AIR and the chorus came out, the rest of the band knew they had a problem the program directors would love and hate in equal measure.

"Changin' Times" is the quieter cousin on that same side, if anything Nazareth did in 1975 can be called quiet. Dan opens it like a guy on a barstool who still trusts his mother. When he was younger he understood that when you are with a girl you have got to act like a man. Mama told him that is the way it should be, and he knows his mama never lied. Then the floor drops out. Since he met this one he does not know right from wrong. He cannot get himself thinking straight. He is all shook up and in a terrible state. Every time he thinks he has it figured, she does something new and knocks him right out. The way she treats him does not make him feel too much like a man. He is trapped in a spin, running a losing race, and there ain't no way he can win. The changes she is going through are driving him half crazy. It is not a protest song about the newspaper. It is a love song from a working-class Scottish rock singer who grew up on a certain idea of how a man carries himself, then met somebody who would not sit still for the script. Mid-seventies Britain and America were full of that kind of wobble, and Nazareth put it on a riff instead of a pamphlet.

People who only know the title track and the Everly Brothers cover miss this one, and that is a shame. On the American pressing, Randy Newman's "Guilty" got bumped so Love Hurts could sit in its place, and that ballad became the calling card. International copies kept "Guilty." Either way, "Changin' Times" stayed put, a band original between the cowbell snarl of the opener and the long haul of "Please Don't Judas Me" on the other side. Charlton's guitar is thick and unhurried. Agnew's bass walks instead of stomps. Sweet keeps it moving without showing off. Dan does not scream the way he does on the hit. He sounds like a man talking himself through a bad night, which is why it still lands when the Zoo Crew lets it run the full six minutes.

The band that made it did not come out of a London fashion shop. Pete Agnew and Dan McCafferty had been mates since primary school in Dunfermline, a conservative little town in Fife, not Glasgow and not anywhere near the Tin Pan Alley crowd. In 1961 Pete put together a semi-pro outfit called the Shadettes. By the end of 1968 the lineup that mattered was in place: Dan up front, Manny Charlton on guitar, Pete on bass, Darrell Sweet on the drums. They took the new name from the first line of The Band's "The Weight," the one about pulling into Nazareth feeling about half past dead. That Nazareth was a town in Pennsylvania. These four just liked the way the word sat in the mouth.

The early years were apprenticeship, not myth. At the Belleville they were the house band, and the deal was simple. Learn three fresh chart hits on Sunday afternoon and play them that night, or do not get paid. Pete has talked about the late fifties and early sixties in Dunfermline, when the town had more semi-pro bands than Edinburgh and everybody owned a van. If yours broke down, somebody who was not working that night would come get you. They ran a little club called the Flamingo in the hotel, then graduated to the Kinema Ballroom, the main gig in town. Pubs, he has said, were for old men. They even had to knock out tongue-in-cheek versions of kid-pop fluff when the ballroom bosses wanted it. That is the part of the story the leather-and-platform-boot photos leave out. They got good by playing whatever the room would stand, week after week, until they were tired of other people's songs.

They were already married and settled when they took the jump. In the summer of 1971 they quit the day jobs and moved down to a grotty communal flat in London. Dan used to joke about coming home from the road and offering to walk his wife through the supermarket, only to be told he was not going dressed like that. Corkscrew hair, loud flares, platform boots. Dunfermline was proud and a little embarrassed at the same time. The first album, simply called Nazareth, sold in Germany and puzzled Britain. Exercises followed in 1972. Then Razamanaz and Loud 'n' Proud and Rampant started to land, with covers of Joni Mitchell and Tomorrow sitting next to their own rockers, and by Hair of the Dog they had the sound people still argue about in parking lots. Guns N' Roses later covered the title track, and Slash has said Axl Rose made him listen because Axl could sing like that McCafferty guy and really dug the voice. Axl has pointed to Dan's reading of Love Hurts as part of how he learned to holler. Not bad for four lads who once had to play the hits of the week to keep the hotel happy.

Time took its usual cut. Darrell Sweet died in 1999. Dan McCafferty, the voice on this record, died in 2022, and Manny Charlton went the same year. Pete Agnew is the last of the original four still out there, with his son Lee on drums, and the band is still booking rooms from Scotland to the far side of Europe. Pete has compared it to a football club. People ask how you can still call it Nazareth with one founder left. He figures the folks who support the team know the old stars are not on the pitch anymore, and they still show up. The Russian crowds even cooked up a tale that Agnew was really Agnev and that he was a wee Russian whose dad had slipped the family out. Pete's dad was born on Damside Street in Dunfermline. The story did not hurt the door receipts.

If you want the band in their own words and the dates they are still hauling the backline to, the official site is Nazareth. They keep a verified page on Facebook, post road shots and tour notes on Instagram, and the official account on X is under NazarethBand. Freaks who like a room full of other Freaks trade old interviews and set-list arguments in the Facebook group Nazareth The legendary rock family, where Dan's old line still gets passed around, the one about having to play Razamanaz and Hair of the Dog or the room would just go boo. "Changin' Times" never needed that kind of demand. It just needed somebody to let the side run. That is what we are here for.