In A Broken Dream (Featuring Rod Stewart)

You Zoo Freaks know how a record can sit in the crates for years and then walk into the room like it owns the place. That is exactly what Python Lee Jackson's "In A Broken Dream" does every time the needle drops on the album of the same name. The voice is Rod Stewart, young and already carrying that gravel, but the band on the label was an Australian outfit that never had anybody in it named Python Lee Jackson. The name itself is a piece of Sydney myth. An English barrister and part-time blues guitarist called Andre de Moller is said to have scribbled it on the chalkboard at Suzie Wong's, a Chinese restaurant that hired jazz and R&B groups, after somebody complained the crowd was thin. A big room turned up. The handle stuck, got passed along, and landed on a bunch of players who had nothing to do with the original joke.

The Sydney version started in December 1965, playing underground parties tied to Oz magazine and cutting a handful of singles for CBS before folding in January 1968. Guitarist Mick Liber, a west London man who had picked up feedback tricks from Pete Townshend before he sailed for Australia, and drummer David Montgomery hauled the name to England late that year and pulled in keyboard player and writer David Bentley. They worked the Vesuvio club on Tottenham Court Road and then settled into a run at the Arts Lab on Drury Lane, which is where DJ John Peel caught them. Peel liked what he heard enough to book a session for his Dandelion label. That is where the song we are spinning got its strange second life.

Bentley had written "In A Broken Dream" and fully intended to sing it. Then he walked past a record shop, heard Joe Cocker tear into "With a Little Help From My Friends," and decided his own voice was not the one the tune needed. The rest of the band was not thrilled. Next thing Bentley remembers, he was in Montgomery's Chelsea flat teaching the words to Rod Stewart, who was between the Jeff Beck Group and the Faces and still a long way from stadiums. A mate of Rod's who ran a sports car shop in Hampstead talked him into the date. There was no real money in it. Rod told Uncut years later that he did the vocal for a set of carpets for his car. Other tellings call them seat covers. Either way, it was upholstery, not a royalty cheque, and nobody in that room thought they were cutting a future hit.

The April 1969 session was a shaky start. Liber has said the band had not been playing much in London and everybody was tight. Peel, producing, sent out for beer, and they drank a fair amount of it in the name of loosening up. The lights got doused. Rod sang well, the way he always did, but in the dark he missed the last verse and sang the first one again, filling a gap with a hummed mmm mmm mmm. Cover versions have been copying that hum ever since, as if it had been written into the chart. Backing singers Sue and Sunny were brought in. Two other tracks from the date, "Doin' Fine" and "The Blues," sat on the shelf with it. The guitar on the record is Liber's, double-tracked in places, not the Jeff Beck or David Gilmour that bar-room rumors keep inventing.

Peel held the masters. Miki Dallon of the Young Blood label bought them, reworked the track, and put the single out in October 1970 with "Doing Fine" on the flip. Stewart's name was not on the label. The record sank. By the time Dallon tried it again in August 1972, timed to ride alongside "You Wear It Well," Rod was a star off "Maggie May" and Every Picture Tells a Story, and the old session suddenly had a face everybody recognized. It climbed to number three in Britain, number 56 on the Billboard Hot 100, and number 74 in Canada. Stewart was not pleased to find his guide vocal out in the world. He told Melody Maker that October it was not very good, though he would not try to stop it, and he laid the whole mess on Peel for roping him in years earlier. Bentley and Liber have always told a fuller version than that one-liner.

The album In A Broken Dream followed on Young Blood International in Britain and GNP Crescendo in the States, stitching the three Stewart-sung tracks from that 1969 date to later Bentley-led cuts with guitarist Gary Boyle and bassist Tony Cahill, the old Easybeats drummer who had crossed over to bass. By then the band was already coming apart. The hit was a ghost that arrived after the room had emptied. The original recording later turned up on the soundtrack of the 1996 film Breaking the Waves, and Stewart cut a fresh version in 1992 with David Gilmour and John Paul Jones that stayed in the can until The Rod Stewart Sessions 1971-1998 box in 2009. Thunder covered it in 1995. None of that rewrites the first take, beer and all.

How the whole thing got started is pure mid-sixties wanderlust. Bentley had heard the Rolling Stones do "Not Fade Away" and wanted a band that could chase that R&B bite in Sydney. Liber had already been through the Ealing scene and a stretch with Clay Alison before he immigrated in January 1965. Montgomery and the rotating singers, including Malcolm McGee and the late Frank Kennington, who had picked up the Python Lee Jackson name from de Moller, built a local reputation on three CBS singles and then watched the group dissolve. The London revival was Liber and Montgomery refusing to let the name die, Bentley flying in with songs, and a manager with a car showroom who knew a raspy singer who would work for floor mats. John Peel gave them the studio. Dallon gave them the second chance. The Zoo Freaks on THE ZOO get the record the way it was meant to be heard, deep in the album, no hurry, no commercials talking over that hum.

There is no standing official page or social camp for Python Lee Jackson these days. The players scattered, the name went back to being a chalkboard joke that accidentally cut one of the great lost-and-found vocals of the era, and the song kept traveling on its own. That is the kind of story we like around here. A writer hears another singer on the street and hands his own tune away. A future star takes the date for car carpets. A producer kills the lights. A verse gets sung twice. Three years later the world catches up, and the man who sang it shrugs and says it is not very good. Spin it again. The dream still holds.