MICHAEL NESMITH - THE PRISON @ 50

 

Marking its golden jubilee this month is the seventh solo album from Michael Nesmith, The Prison, which was released 50 years ago, in November of 1974. After a half dozen LPs mostly focused on the laid back country-rock sound he'd helped pioneer after leaving The Monkees in 1969, Nesmith was looking to do something different as he kicked off the first release for his very own label imprint, Pacific Arts.

Nesmith spent the previous few years creating incredibly sophisticated music that was mostly ignored by the public, and barely acknowledged by critics. With his obligation to a record label now moot, given that he was his own boss, Nesmith undertook an entirely different kind of conception for this record. The idea was to present a box set with an LP and a book containing stories intended to be read along with the songs on the album. The combination of the music, lyrics and narrative of the texts were meant to offer a philosophical musing on the nature of life, delving into existential conceptions that were a kind of mix of Buddhism and Christian Science, which was the faith he was raised in by his single mother.

Musically, while the album still lingers in a kind of country/folk landscape, the use of electronics, like the Arp Odyssey synth and Roland Rhythm 77 drum machine, take the music into a surreal sort of progressive tangent, almost akin to a countrified version of Pink Floyd, to some extent. The album's seven, often lengthy songs, took on the air of dream-like meditations, in some cases with mantra like vocal repetitions extending off into infinity. It was all meant to function as a contemplation on the nature of existence and, especially, the meaning of mortality.

Upon its release, it met with mixed critical responses. Robert Christgau called it a "ghastly boxed audio-allegory-with-book." It sold poorly and was largely overlooked by even fans of Nesmith, though it remained a favourite of the artist, who reissued the album on CD a couple of times over the years, first in 1994 and again in 2007. Each reissue, however, did not release the original 1974 mix. Subsequent editions drastically altered the recordings, adding keyboards and even updating some of the lead vocals, while some of the original elements, like the drum machine, were obscured completely.

I first encountered the 2007 version, which I initially really loved, but then discovered I could order an original sealed copy of the 1974 LP box set, directly from Nesmith, even getting it signed! Once I got the original LP and got a chance to hear it in its original mix, I was immediately sold on that version, finding the cheesy drum machine and primitive synth sounds far more charming than the updated keyboards from the "enhanced" reissued version. Though the original mix was never reissued on CD, Nesmith did finally take one of the sealed LPs and made a digital transfer of the album, which he then sold from his website as a high resolution MP3 set.

Personally, it's one of my all-time favourite solo releases from Nesmith, both because of the sophistication of the music and its themes, and the ambition of the project. In the use of printed stories with music, it's surprisingly similar to The Residents' Eskimo LP. The Prison would also turn out to be the first entry in a triptych of releases that would appear throughout Nesmith's career. The second part, The Garden, would be released in 1994, while the third instalment, The Ocean, would come in 2015 as a web only release.

THE STRANGLERS - AURAL SCULPTURE @ 40

 

Released on November 5th, 1984, The Stranglers' eighth studio album, Aural Sculpture, turns 40 years old today. It's an album that saw the group reassessing their approach after going for an icy Euro-techno sound on their previous album, Feline (1983). For Aural Sculpture, the group opted to bring back a bit of warmth to their sound, though the emphasis on the beat was still prominent, albeit augmented with horn sections, female backing vocals, and an increased use of acoustic guitar.

Initial recordings for the album were self produced by the band, but the results from those sessions were somehow lacking, with the band feeling unconvinced by the results, and the record label insisting they bring in a producer to help them get their house in order. They'd originally considered hiring Marvin Gaye, but that couldn't happen when he was killed on April 1st. Eddie Grant was also in the running, but it was ultimately Laurie Latham who got the job. It was Latham who suggested the horn section and backup singers to flesh out the arrangements. The result was that a lot of material from the initial sessions was scrapped and a bunch more new songs were added during the second round of recording. The album was mostly a passion project between Cornwell and Latham, with J.J. Burnel being somewhat distracted by his ailing father requiring care before he finally passed while the album was being produced.

The album's release was a commercial success for the group, with three singles coming from it, including Skin Deep, No Mercy and Let Me Down Easy. Critically, the album was also well received, with most finding the album's nuances more welcoming than the detached austerity of Feline.

PSYCHIC TV - HACIENDA @ 40

 

Forty years ago today, on November 5th, 1984, Psychic TV played at the Haçienda nightclub in Manchester. Run by Factory Records main man, Tony Wilson, the club was notorious as one of the most pivotal venues in the UK during the late 1980s and early 1990s, becoming a key venue for the Acid House & techno music scenes. But before it really started to click as a place for DJs and Ecstasy fuelled dancers, it was initially opened as a financially struggling alternative music club, partially funded by the profits from New Order's Blue Monday single.

Psychic TV's appearance there in 1984 captured the band as it was undergoing the first of its major stylistic transmutations of its career. The group's live performances during its first few years were predominantly noisy, tribal-industrial happenings, often taking on the disposition of rallies, veiled in pseudo militaristic occult symbolic trappings. But by 1984, the group were starting to develop a kind of psychedelic rock that Genesis P-Orridge dubbed "Hyperdelic" music. The group on stage became more conventional, incorporating a regular drummer and bass guitar along with Alex Fergusson's guitar, in order to perform more conventional rock music. This particular performance is notable for being the gig where Godstar was first performed. This song would become the group's most successful single once it was fully developed in the studio and released in 1985.

The group membership for this gig included founding members, Genesis P-Orridge & Alex Fergusson, Paula P-Orridge (uncredited on the reissues of the recording), John Gosling and Paul A Reeson. In addition to Godstar, the set included versions of Roman P., Southern Comfort, Thee Starlit Mire, Unclean and I Like You. The performance was recorded and initially released on cassette in an unofficial Temple Ov Psychick Youth edition in 1984. It would be remastered and reissued on CD for the first time in 2013 by Cold Spring Records. A double LP red vinyl edition was also issued by Let Them Eat Vinyl in 2014.

CAPTAIN BEEFHEART AND THE MAGIC BAND - BLUEJEANS & MOONBEAMS @ 50

 

Marking its golden jubilee this month is the ninth studio LP from Captain Beefheart & the Magic Band, Bluejeans & Moonbeams, which was released in November of 1974. It's an album that, arguably, could be considered Beefheart's career low point. After the recording of his previous LP, Unconditionally Guaranteed (1973), the entire Magic Band quit in disgust with the results of the album. That left Beefheart dangling on his own for his next album.

Don Van Vliet never had any formal musical training, so he always relied on having a musical director in the band who could interpret his abstract musings into musical notation. This role had been successively filled, in turn, by Alex St. Clair, John French, and Bill Harkleroad on his previous albums, but now with no band, he was working with an unfamiliar set of musicians and was pretty much lost in the studio. One of the musicians, Micheal Smotherman, said "Don was just as confused as he could be throughout the whole process. I would push his face up to the microphone and he would start singing. And when it was time to stop I would pull him back gently."

As a result, the album is generally considered the nadir of Van Vliet's musical career. Don's only concession to the album was that he liked the cover painting by his cousin, Victor Hayden. Yet there are still some folk who managed to find value in the record. An early White Stripes EP contains three Beefheart covers, including this album's opening track. Kate Bush, in a Smash Hits interview, considered this one of her top ten albums. Personally, while I mostly dismiss it myself, I did eventually come to recognize a sublime beauty in Observatory Crest, so maybe it's not the utter failure that everyone often considers it. I actually think it's a bit better than its predecessor.

The album marked a turning point for Beefheart, or perhaps a "rock bottom". He subsequently spent the remainder of the decade regrouping and refocusing his music away from attempts at mainstream accessibility, moving back into more angular experimentation. While his progress was initially confounded by contractual issues on Bat Chain Puller (1976), which eventually became reworked into the Shiny Beast LP (1978), his efforts to get back to his essence eventually resulted in two outstanding albums, Doc at the Radar Station (1980) and Ice Cream for Crow (1982), his final musical foray before retiring to the desert to focus on painting, which he did for the remainder of his life until his death in 2010.

CAN - SOON OVER BABALUMA @ 50

 

Released in November of 1974, CAN's fifth official studio album (excluding the aborted "Delay 1968" and "Soundtracks" compilation), Soon Over Babaluma, turns half a century old this month. In many ways, the album marks the end of the band's "classic" era, being the first to be recorded without vocalist, Damo Suzuki, and the last to be recorded using a 2 track recorder at their Inner Space studio. Subsequent albums would be created on a 16 channel system, which would drastically impact their compositional process, as they were afforded the luxury of overdubbing. It's something that would move them away from the immediacy of live improvisation, a key component of their early sound.

Even with the group still working within the limitations of 2 track recording, Soon Over Babaluma has a more refined and nuanced sound than their earlier work. For some, it was a softening that was unwelcome, but the album still offers some edge, particularly on the extended side 2 tracks, Chain Reaction & Quantum Physics. The songs on the first side, however, had much more of an accessible pop disposition, with Dizzy Dizzy kicking off the album with a bubbly, perky lightness. With Suzuki gone, vocal duties were taken up by guitarist Michael Karoli and keyboardist Irmin Schmidt, with both offering restrained, subdued performances that tended to blend into the music, rather than stand out. The end result garnered some ambivalence from music critics, who were unsure of the group's evolutionary intentions.

Personally, Soon Over Babaluma was my gateway into the band's work. As a rabid PiL fan, beginning in 1980, I'd often heard how CAN were a key inspiration, so they were certainly on the top of my list to investigate at my earliest convenience. However, it was not until July of 1982 that I was afforded the opportunity to finally check them out, when I came across this album in a little record shop in Banff, AB, as my family made their way from Thunder Bay, ON, to relocate in Powell River, BC. As such, it's always going to have a sentimental place in my life, though I might not consider it their greatest work. It's still on the higher end of the group's spectrum, albeit it marks the beginning of the end for the band's glory days as one of the world's most innovative and influential alternative rock bands.

CABARET VOLTAIRE - MICRO-PHONIES @ 40

 

Marking its 40th anniversary today is the sixth full length studio LP from Cabaret Voltaire, Micro-Phonies, which was released on October 29th, 1984. It's the album that effectively marks the bands full transition from avant-garde industrial provocateurs to EBM dance-floor domination.

Cabaret Voltaire had started out their career in the early 1970s as an exploration of electronic music created using non-musical tools. Their early works were primarily abstract tape loop experiments and forays into hand made electronics, like custom oscillators. Gradually, however, they began to incorporate more traditional instrumentation into their sound, especially the use of percussion, drum machines and actual drum kits. A sense of rhythmic awareness soon started to indicate a penchant for making music that people could actually dance to. This latent funkiness would start to manifest from their first LP release, Mix-Up, in 1979, but by 1982's 2x45, the focus on rhythm had become explicit. The departure of co-founder, Chris Watson, during the middle of that album's production was a key point of departure for the band to shed their experimental skin and move into something entirely more dance-floor friendly.

The release of the John Robbie remixed version of Yashar as a 12" single in July of 1983 was the first proper disco salvo from the group, as their intention of invading the alternative dance-floors of the club scene became explicit. This was soon followed by the release of The Crackdown LP in August of that year. That album offered up an entirely revamped version of the group. Their "glow-up" came courtesy of some key innovations in the realm of electronic music making. A new generation of drum machines, sequencers and synthesizers, along with the introduction of digital sampling, had caused a C-change on the landscape of electronic music, supplanting the wobbly inaccuracies of voltage controlled step sequencers and synchronization architecture with the precision of digital interfaces, MIDI, that offered pin-point accuracy when it came to creating percussion and drum patterns and the attendant bass and melodic sequences that accompanied them. The Crackdown was a solid step into that arena, while Micro-Phonies was the group fully making themselves at home in their new domain.

The album features the single, Sensoria, which thanks to a particularly innovative promotional video, became an MTV staple in the mid '80s. The video incorporated some particularly impressive camera work, which involved the use of a pivoting camera mount that created some gravity defying camera movements, baffling viewers who tried to figure out how the effect was achieved. It was voted Best Video of the Year by the Los Angeles Times in 1985, and was later procured by the New York Museum of Modern Art. By this point, Cabaret Voltaire had invested a lot into video production, even launching their own company, Doublevision, for releasing their works and those by others, like Chris & Cosey, who released the live VHS, European Rendezvous, and the video art ambient compilation, Elemental 7.

The group would remain dedicated to the creation of electronic dance music for the duration of their active career, up to their final group effort, The Conversation, in 1994. With The Crackdown and Micro-Phonies, Cabaret Voltaire set the template for the underground dance music of the era, providing the foundation stones for countless artists who came in their wake.

THE PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE @ 50

Celebrating the golden jubilee of its big screen premiere half a century ago, on October 31st, 1974, it's that wild rock 'n' roll fantasy, Phantom of the Paradise. Combining elements of the 16th century Faust legend, Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray and Gaston Leroux's The Phantom of the Opera, the film is a mind bending satire that rips into the soul destroying corruption of the music industry, pitting its protagonist against Satan himself, in the guise of Paul Williams, no less! Written and directed by Brian De Palma, the film occupies a similar cult status to The Rocky Horror Picture Show, with its exaggerated characters, wild sets and iconic musical numbers.

The production of the film involved a few notable incidents that are worth mentioning. For one, the record press in which the character Winslow Leach is disfigured was in fact a real pressing plant (it was an injection-molding press at an Ideal Toy Company plant). William Finley was worried about whether the machine would be safe, and the crew assured him it was. The press was fitted with foam pads (which resemble the casting moulds in the press) and there were chocks put in the centre to stop it from closing completely. However, the machine was powerful enough to crush the chocks so that it gradually kept closing. It is commonly believed that Finley pulled his head out of the press just in time to avoid being injured, and that his scream in that scene was genuine, but this is an exaggeration. Finley was in fact quickly pulled out by grips, and the record press scene, along with most scenes in the movie with little dialogue, was filmed without sound, and the talking and sound effects were dubbed in later, meaning any screaming that may have taken place went unrecorded.

Another investing anecdote involves the name of Swan's media conglomerate "Swan Song Enterprises", which had to be deleted from the film prior to release due to the existence of Led Zeppelin's label Swan Song Records. De Palma actually held a private screening of the film for Led Zeppelin's imposing manager, Peter Grant, so that he could ensure that all necessary references to the name were removed. During the scene where Beef is electrocuted, Grant broke down in tears. The scene reminded him of the onstage electrocution death of Les Harvey, lead singer of Stone The Crows, a band managed by Grant. The producers had to explain to the visibly distraught Grant that it was unlikely that Brian De Palma would agree to remove the death scene.

Among the crew for the film was a young set dresser by the name of Sissy Spacek. She was assisting Jack Fisk, the film's production designer. The two would later marry, and Spacek would end up staring in De Palma's next feature film, Carrie. Also, the electronic room in which Winslow composes his cantata, and where Swan restores his voice, is in fact the real-life recording studio The Record Plant. The walls covered with knobs are in reality an over-sized custom-built modular synthesizer, famously known as TONTO.

Production of the film was financed independently, but the film was then screened for various studios and sold to the highest bidder, 20th Century Fox, for $2 million plus a percentage. But during its initial theatrical release, its box office was pretty disappointing, and critical response was predominantly negative. Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune gave the film two stars out of four, writing that "what's up on the screen is childish; it has meaning only because it points to something else. To put it another way, joking about the rock music scene is treacherous, because the rock music scene itself is a joke." A notable exception to the naysayers of the time was respected film critic, Pauline Kael of The New Yorker, who wrote, "Though you may anticipate a plot turn, it's impossible to guess what the next scene will look like or what its rhythm will be. De Palma's timing is sometimes wantonly unpredictable and dampening, but mostly it has a lift to it. You practically get a kinetic charge from the breakneck wit he put into 'Phantom;' it isn't just that the picture has vitality but that one can feel the tremendous kick the director got out of making it."

The film's true impact, however, would require some time to ferment among the cult movie crowd. Strangely enough the first wave of cult fandom took root in Winnipeg, Manitoba, which remains the epicentre for the film's fandom to this day. A fan-organized festival, dubbed Phantompalooza, was held in 2005 in Winnipeg. That event featured appearances by Gerrit Graham and William Finley, in the same Winnipeg theatre where the film had its original run in 1975. A second Phantompalooza was staged on April 28, 2006, reuniting many of the surviving cast members and featuring a concert by Paul Williams. Additionally, Daft Punk have proclaimed the film an integral inspiration for their band, claiming to have watched the movie more than 20 times, and even inviting Paul Williams to guest on their album, Random Access Memories.

After 50 years, the movie has long become established as a cherished cult masterpiece, with die-hard fans remaining steadfast in their dedication to its bizarre charms.