Counting beats with Van der Graaf Generator (4) - Whatever would Robert have said?

This song starts in classic early VdGG style - ethereal organ, breathy saxophone, acoustic guitar accents. There's only one other song that starts like this - "Boat of millions of years" - that was relegated to the b-side of the single "Refugees". Both of these songs were on the "1968-1972" sampler that I had and played to death during 1973.

Most of this song is clearly in 4/4 time; in fact, the pentatonic scales played by the electric guitar make it the closest to a normal rock song, especially in the period 4:00 - 5:00. But this section is followed by a short organ break whose time signature I have never managed to figure out. This section appears at the end of every verse, but is so fast and over so quickly, making it hard to analyse.

The YouTuber played this song on his channel and table-drummed the rhythm. I fell off my chair laughing as it seemed to be the 'America' rhythm - a bar of 6/8 alternating with a bar of 3/4. Why not? After all, in a few years time, the group Yes would set the opening of one of their more famous tunes ('Yours is no disgrace') to the rhythm of 'Bonanza'!

I thought that I would check this against listening to the song a few times; I was disappointed to discover that whilst there is an influence of 'America', that's not what's being played. As far as I can determine, it's one bar of 6/4 (?) with the first half being played fast and the second half slow.

Whilst there are sites that give (more or less) chord charts for several VdGG songs, none of them give the rhythms, so I can't check what I feel.

For those who don't know, the eponymous Robert is Robert J. Van der Graaff, who gave the band its name (along with a misspelling).

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
647	16/11/2013	Song festival	MIDI, Kibbutz, Song writing
1358	16/11/2020	Vinyl log #32	Vinyl log, Heron