AMERICA @ 50

 

December 29th marks the 50th anniversary of the release of the debut, eponymous album by America, which was issued on this day in 1971.

The band was formed in the UK, just outside London in 1970, by American students: Dewey Bunnell, Dan Peek and Gerry Beckley. All three of their career military fathers were stationed at the United States Air Force base at RAF South Ruislip. The group took the breezy folk-rock sounds of CSNY and made them even more airy, creating the template that would define ‘70s soft rock for the entire decade. The group’s name was inspired by the Americana jukebox in their local mess hall, but also its primary purpose was to ensure they were not mistaken for Brits attempting to sound American. Right out of the gate, the trio’s mix of seamless three part harmonies and tight musical arrangements scored them hits on both sides of the Atlantic with songs like Horse With No Name, which has become an oldies radio staple.

When I was growing up in the 1970s, particularly by the time the rancor of punk took hold in the latter years of the decade, music like that epitomized by America became anathema to me. For a long time, I looked down on it as an example of the blandness of MOR pop. But something strange happened as the 21st century has unwound and my perspective on that decade has changed. Somewhere along the way, I started to hear their music in an entirely different light and gradually started to find a place for it in my personal musical landscape. Something about its light, effortless ease became intoxicating to me, and when I compared it to what was dominating the charts in the contemporary pop world, it stood head and shoulders above the computer perfected, auto-tuned soulless “soul” ravaging the charts today. No, there’s nothing particularly challenging about any of it, but it manages to deliver a kind of nostalgia for a lost era that brings me back to summer sun and gentle breezes when being a kid was uncomplicated and nonthreatening.

DAVID BOWIE - HUNKY DORY @ 50

December 17th marks the 50th anniversary of the release of David Bowie’s fourth studio album, Hunky Dory, which was issued this day in 1971. While his previous album had not quite “Sold the World”, this would be where he’d put together the core of his “Spiders from Mars” and set the stage for the music revolution he’d lead with its follow-up.

After the somewhat lackluster reception of The Man Who Sold the World, upon returning from a US tour to promote that album, Bowie sequestered himself in his home, eschewing touring and studio time for the moment, and planted himself at his piano in order to start composing songs for his next album. Shifting his writing process off the guitar sent him veering away from the more hard-rock styling of his last album and into a more “pop”, melodic sound. When it came time to start assembling his band for the new album, he managed to bring back guitarist Mick Ronson and drummer Mick Woodmansey, despite some creative fallout after the previous album, but bassist Tony Visconti was replaced by Trevor Bolder to create the core ensemble which would become known as The Spiders from Mars.

Inspired by his trip the the US, Bowie came up with a number of songs that paid tribute to some of the personalities he’d become enamored with over there. These included Andy Warhol, Lou Reed and Bob Dylan, all of whom found themselves immortalize in song on the new album. Moreover, Bowie’s agenda for this album was freed from the influence of the demands of record companies and their executives insisting he pursue some vision of success which was outside his own agenda. For this album, he only sought to satisfy himself and it’s one of the main reasons it is looked back upon as a turning point in his career and the moment when he fully began to cut his own path through the popular music landscape. While most artists of the time were looking to revisit the past after the wild experimentation of the late ‘60s, Bowie was keen to discover new musical lands to inhabit.

While it met with immediate critical praise upon its release, commercially, it stalled and failed to chart prior to the release of the Ziggy Stardust album in 1972. Part of the problem when it came to sales for Hunky Dory was down to Bowie's new label, RCA Records, pulling back on promoting it when they got wind that he was about to change his image AGAIN for the Ziggy album, which was already being recorded. It gave them cold feet and caused them to pull their support for Hunky Dory until they saw where he was going. However, once Ziggy took off, the backlash of success ended up sweeping Hunky Dory off the scrap heap and pushed it up the charts as well where it eventually peaked at #3 in the UK.

For many Bowie aficionados, Hunky Dory is the turning point in Bowie’s career where his artistic vision and abilities finally came into complete focus at their full potential. It’s the album which put all the pieces in place to set the stage for his success on his next album. While on it’s own, it wasn’t the spark that lit the fire, it provided the additional fuel to help reinforce his trajectory once that flame was ignited. The album is loaded with songs that have become classics in Bowie’s canon of essential works. Changes, Oh! You Pretty Things, Life On Mars, Andy Warhol & Queen Bitch all attest to his ability to craft solid, inventive pop music that has stood the test of time for half a century.

KRAFTWERK - ELECTRIC CAFE @ 35

 

December 16th marks the 35th anniversary of the release of Kraftwerk’s ninth studio album, Electric Café, which was issued this day in 1986. After a five year gap since their previous LP, Computer World (1981), this album would mark the end of their “classic” period and lineup of Ralf Hütter, Florian Schneider, Wolfgang Flür and Karl Bartos, which had been consistent since 1975 following the release of their groundbreaking Autobahn LP.

Though Wolfgang was still credited as a member of the group and performed with them during their tour to support Computer World in 1981, he had not actually played on that album and would not contribute anything in the studio for Electric Café either. With the increased reliance on sequencers, his duties as percussionist became drastically reduced and, coupled with certain creative differences, he chose to make his permanent exit from the group shortly after the release of Electric Café.

Work on the album began in 1982 and one of the first songs to emerge from these sessions was Tour De France, which was originally intended to be part of the new album. After completing their last tour, Ralph had become obsessed with the idea of finding a form of exercise which fit in with the philosophies and aesthetics of the group and become an avid cyclist, even encouraging the rest of the group to take up the activity as well as become vegetarian. He was so enthusiastic about it that he campaigned to make cycling the central theme of the new album, but was ultimately unsuccessful in that effort. Instead the original concept for the album was to call it “Technicolor”, but this idea had to be abandoned because of the branding of that name, so it became “Techno Pop” for a while before being renamed to Electric Café for its initial release. However, it ended up being renamed again for its remastered CD reissue back to “Techno Pop”.

Though the album’s production began in 1982, Ralph’s obsession with cycling kept him out of the studio more and more, delaying production. This was greatly exacerbated when he was involved in a serious cycling accident, which left him in a coma for several days. A long recovery kept him out of the studio for some time. As a stop-gap, the group released Tour De France as a single and decided to keep it as a stand-alone release and not include it on the new album.

As Ralph recovered and production gradually got back on track, the group sought to develop their sound in order to keep pushing the envelope of the technology. This involved moving to progressively more digital based sound production and processing gear. Tour De France had set the stage for this with its extensive use of sampled sound effects of bicycle gears, breathing patterns and other associated noises. Even so, when it came to trying to put together the finished mixes, Ralph was not confident that they were reaching the level he had envisioned in terms of keeping the group on the cutting edge of their genre. To help them with this, they brought in the help of New York DJ/producer, François Kevorkian, who had helped with the mix on Tour De France. Aside from the move towards a more digital sound, the album also features the first and only lead vocal from Karl Bartos on The Telephone Call.

Upon the album’s initial release, it was rather limply received. The gap between Computer World and Electric Café had seriously lost the group the momentum it has gained from that previous release and Ralph was right to worry about the group not seeming cutting edge anymore as the album, despite their best efforts, still managed to feel more “of the times” than ahead of it. Critics called it dull and sales were disappointing. I remember buying it when it came out and my own initial reaction to it was a feeling that the group weren’t anticipating the future like they’d done on previous albums. I loved the opening track, Boing Boom Tschak, with its syncopated voice samples and had hoped to hear more of that throughout the album, but it all seemed like familiar territory after that and even a bit like a self-parody in some cases. Ultimately, it would be the groups last full album of new material until the release of Tour De France Soundtracks in 2003. The only other releases before then were the 1991 “best of” rebuilds for The Mix and the 1999 single, Expo 2000.

Though it is mostly considered one of Kraftwerk’s weaker albums, lacking the focused conceptual framework of classic period masterpieces like, Radio Activity, Trans Europe Express, The Man Machine and Computer World, several of its songs have become mainstays of their live performances and have proven themselves to be durable and just as melodically infectious as anything else in the upper echelons of their catalogue. The title song, Electric Café, in a slightly sped-up form, became something of a cultural meme thanks to its use by Mike Myers on SNL in the 1990s for his recurring "Sprockets” German television spoof. My own appraisal of the album has changed for the better over the years as I have grown to find more and more to love about it now that it no longer seems to feel diminished by its relationship to their earlier works. I’m more able to appreciate it on its own merits. These days, I think it has earned its place as an essential piece of the Kraftwerk puzzle among the sacred 8 of their official “Catalogue”.

MICHAEL NESMITH - 'AT-A BOY, MIKE...

 

I was 3 years old when The Monkees TV show debuted on NBC in September of 1966. I probably wasn’t watching TV that night and most likely don’t remember the show from its initial run, but when it went into syndication and became a Saturday morning staple of the late 1960s and early 1970s, it became essential viewing for this kid. I never missed the show for as long as it held that slot along with Batman and Star Trek. Those were my “holy trinity” of childhood TV and I’m sure there’s something in that to explain why I became the fucked up adult that I am now.

Hearing about Michael Nesmith passing today, the third member of the group to leave the material realm, is somehow unreal in some ways. It has been said that certain aboriginal peoples believe that photography steals your soul, so I can only imagine what being on a hit TV show that’s been in syndication for five decades does to it. Somewhere in my psyche, they’re still all in their early 20s, romping around their LA beach house under the watchful gaze of Mr. Schneider, the stoic mannequin who occasionally offered up sage advice. They’ve become immortal in that sense, their images and antics forever cycling in the minds of successions of generations who keep rediscovering their magic.

Mike was an exceptional component of what turned out to be an extraordinary cast. Four guys who were brought together in order to cash-in on the popularity of a British group of mop-tops while simultaneously offering the show’s producers a chance to subvert primetime TV with some Beat generation counter-culture. Co-creator, Bob Rafelson, was a hip dude who was turned on to the underground and wanted to inject those influences into the mainstream and he succeeded by hiring four similarly hip kids to be his proxies. But he and his co-conspirator, industry insider Bert Schneider, also played Frankenstein and cobbled together a monster when they hired those boys to play the parts of a struggling rock band who could never catch a break. In the case of The Monkees, the errant brain that caused the monster to develop a mind of its own, or as Micky would put it, “turned Pinocchio into a real boy”, was Nesmith.

He was a true artist and bristled at the idea of being nothing more than a tool and a puppet for his masters. He fought tooth-and-nail to get the band control over their music, both as writers and performers. It was a well placed fist through a wall next to a network executive’s head that was the catalyst that got music director Don Kirshner fired and put the boys in the driver’s seat. After that, Mike was responsible for contributing some of the most memorable of their original songs. Even if their record sales never again reached the peak that Kirshner’s productions achieved, what they may have missed commercially, they more than made up for in terms of artistic integrity.

After leaving the band to go solo, Mike spent the better part of the ‘70s pioneering the genre of country rock, a thankless, unrecognized contribution that was lost behind the backlash of post-Monkees infamy, where they were individually dismissed as has-beens. While I recall songs like Joanne and Silver Moon from my mom’s stack of 45s as a kid, it wasn’t until the early 2000s that I started to collect his solo albums and discovered how truly magnificent they are. It’s a stunning catalogue of sophisticated, thoughtful and fully original music that remains utterly timeless. But Mike was just getting started and his next move would light the match that would change the music industry, for better or worse, for the rest of the 20th century and beyond.

In 1978, he made a promotional video for his song, Rio, not even really comprehending that all the label wanted from him was a clip of him singing the song. His mind went somewhere else entirely and he came up with the idea of making a little “movie” of the song with a fully developed narrative thread and structure, complete with sets and extras and props. Oddly enough, this idea hadn’t really been done before. A lot of people give Queen credit for “inventing” the music video with their promo for Bohemian Rhapsody, but it was Nesmith who truly hit on the structure which would become the modern music video. Shortly after producing this clip, he created the first full video album, Elephant Parts, and started to develop the idea of a TV program that was composed entirely of little music stories. This lead to the idea of putting to use a failed shopping channel satellite feed and, BAM!, MTV was born!

But Mike didn’t want to run a music TV channel, so he sold the rights to it and, with additional funding from his inheritance after his mother, the inventor of liquid paper, had passed, he formed Pacific Arts, a film production company. He then began to work on producing films, eventually succeeding in helping to create cult favorites like Tape Heads and Repo Man. He’d spend most of the ‘80s focused on this phase of his career and wouldn’t return to music until 1992 when he released his critically acclaimed Tropical Campfires album. Since then, he’s been a pioneer in the realm of internet VR tech, starting one of the first portals for subscribers to experience interactive virtual concerts and performances.

For a long time, people assumed he kept his distance from The Monkees out of some sense of shame, but the truth was simply that he was too wrapped up in other business to be able to participate in reunions with the group, though he did make a guest appearance for a show in LA in 1986 following the group’s revival after a marathon of their series aired on MTV. It’s somehow fitting that the channel he birthed would become instrumental in giving the group new life for a new generation 20 years after their debut. Ten years later, he was instrumental in spearheading a return to the studio by all four members for the recording of a brand new album, 1996’s Justus, where the band returned to their Headquarters roots and did it all themselves, even more so than in their early days. Flawed as that album may have been, it at least showed that he wasn’t averse to stepping back into the fray again and he even produced a TV special to coincide with the album’s release.

After the death of Davy Jones, the first member of the band to pass in 2012, Mike started intermittently touring with the group in the ensuing years, at least when he wasn’t busy performing solo concerts or working on his memoir, Infinite Tuesday, a book that’s well work checking out if you want a marvelous insight into his amazing and complex life. After Peter Tork passed in 2019, Mike & Micky set about putting together what would become their farewell tour. I was actually going to see them when they came to Vancouver, but that show was scheduled for March of 2020, right when the first wave of the pandemic shut the world down. The show was then postponed twice before being cancelled, though US dates were eventually pulled off this year and their final show in LA happened only a couple of weeks ago. I was heartbroken when I knew I wouldn’t get to see them on this tour because I had a sense that this was it and the last chance I’d get to see him live. I did get to see Micky and Peter when they came to Vancouver’s PNE on their 50th anniversary tour in support of their magnificent Good Times album in 2016, but Mike wasn't on that tour, except for the LA gig.

Michael Nesmith was a true artist, from the tips of his toes to the top of the ball on that wool hat he made famous 55 years ago. He may have started out as merely a character on a TV show about a made-up band, but the sheer strength of his creativity and character almost singlehandedly transformed it into a credible creative force, one which ultimately produced some of the most memorable and timeless pop music of the 20th century. Without him, all we’d have had was some sticky sweet bubblegum that would have lost its taste after a few chews and ended up in a forgotten wad under the desk of history. Instead, he helped ensure The Monkees left behind a sprawling landscape of incredibly well crafted musical gems and then he went and did the same with his solo career. He leaves behind a magnificent legacy and an indelible impact on the cultural landscape in ways that are both profound and sublime.

ELECTRIC LIGHT ORCHESTRA @ 50

 

December 3rd marks the half century anniversary of the release of the eponymous debut album by the Electric Light Orchestra (ELO), which landed in UK record shops on this day in 1971.

The group was founded as an offshoot project by members of The Move: Jeff Lynne, Roy Wood & Bev Bevan. They instigated the project with the conception of fusing sophisticated Beatles inspired pop music with classical overtones by incorporating instruments like violins, cellos, brass and woodwinds to augment the standard drums and guitars of the typical rock band. The band came about when Wood added some of these instruments to one of Lynne’s songs which had been intended as a Move track, but which ended up becoming the debut ELO song. The members had intended to retire The Move as a band and shift their focus entirely to ELO before releasing their debut, but financial necessities pushed the two projects to exist concurrently in the studio in order to complete a final pair of Move LPs to secure sufficient record label funding for ELO. This ended up pushing the ELO debut album off until December of 1971.

Re-titled to "No Answer" for its US release in March of 1972, that title came about purely by accident when a US record label executive tried ringing the UK offices to get the name of the album, but there was literally NO ANSWER, so he simply put that note on the tape, which was misconstrued as the title by the US offices and the error stuck. The album delivered a UK top ten hit with the opening song, 10528 Overture. It offers a glimpse into the hit making powerhouse that would come to dominate the charts throughout the coming decade. The basic elements were in place for the signature sound of the band, though the core lineup would quickly lose Roy Wood and the band would become fronted by Jeff Lynne throughout the remainder of its existence and future revivals. Though the debut album was performed almost entirely by Lynne, Wood and Bevan, later albums would eventually incorporate a regular roster of musicians to form the string section and Richard Tandy would come in on keyboards to replace Wood and solidify the classic lineup of the band.

Though the group had all the key elements falling into place on their debut, it wasn’t until their iconic 1974 Eldorado album that they would realize their fully formed manifestation into the ensemble that would become unstoppable chart toppers throughout the remainder of the decade and beyond.

ALICE COOPER - KILLER @ 50

 

November 27th marks the half century anniversary for the fourth album by the Alice Cooper band, Killer, which was released 50 years ago on this day in 1971. Produced by Bob Ezrin, the album would succeed in solidifying Alice Cooper as one of the premier hard rock bands of the era.

After spending the latter half of the 1960s floundering around, mostly in LA, confusing the hell out of the hippies and generally being misunderstood and ignored, the group relocated back to the mid-west, near Detroit, where they found themselves with a much more sympathetic audience. While they faltered on their first two albums, by the time they came out with their surprise hit single, I’m Eighteen, and its accompanying album, Love it To Death, they’d secured a solid relationship with young-gun producer Ezrin and the financial support of Warner Bros. Records. Ezrin weened them off their meandering psychedelic tendencies and pushed them into a much more concise, sharper hard rock sound and worked their asses off until their songwriting was tightened up enough to make them reliable chart contenders.

Killer is a fully realized representation of Alice Cooper as a band and features some of their most memorable songs. Both the album and its two singles charted respectfully, though not quite as high as I’m Eighteen or the hits that would come after like School’s Out from their follow-up album, but that doesn’t take away from the vitality of Killer nor its ability to deliver a blistering, catchy riff. In the arena of ’70s hard rock and proto-metal, it sits in the top range of classic albums. It certainly belongs on the list of “must have” records by the band or even Alice Cooper as a solo artist after their 1975 breakup. It even has one of the band’s more controversial songs in Dead Babies, though that controversy is entirely misplaced as any cursory examination of the lyrics will show it’s clearly AGAINST child abuse, but that didn’t stop desperate fretting parents from wringing their hands in dismay!

The album would garner predominantly strong critical reactions and many of its songs became live concert staples for both the band and throughout Alice’s solo career and also feature heavily in many of the his/their career retrospective compilations that have been released over the years. It’s classic rock in all the best ways. Even Johnny Rotten considered it one of the best rock albums ever released!

FREDDIE MERCURY - GONE FOR 30 YEARS

 

November 24th marks the 30th anniversary of the passing of Freddie Mercury at the age of 45 on this day in 1991.

After having been a rabid Queen fan in the late 1970s, by 1991, Queen were pretty well off my musical radar and had been for some time. I hadn’t bought one of their albums since The Game in 1980 and had since gone on a musical journey which had taken me into the far flung outer reaches of the most challenging and experimental music. Actually, by 1991, my attention was coming off the tail end of the Acid House movement, which had sprung up in 1988. In 1991, my interest was moving towards things like Aphex Twin and the latest in UK electronica. It all seemed miles away from Freddie, Brian, Roger and John.

I wasn’t completely unaware of Queen during the ‘80s. Occasionally I’d see a video and even find them amusing from time to time, especially the drag video for I Want to Break Free, but I wasn’t following their career at all and was oblivious to any of the rumors circulating about Freddie’s health. I had no idea he’d been diagnosed with HIV, but neither did anyone else until shortly before his death. There were only suspicious stories in the media to stoke speculation, but I didn’t encounter any of that.

The day the news broke, I remember I was hanging out at a friend’s place, having a few beers and getting a bit wasted. We had the TV on just as a news report showed the announcement that he’d died. I remember seeing shots of Brian May being ushered to a car and I think Roger Taylor was there too. It didn’t seem real to me, at first. Not having any inkling anything was wrong, it all seemed to come out of the blue. I remember feeling a weight in my stomach as I realized it was actually happening and one of the icons of my youth had just been snuffed out. It didn’t seem possible or real.

Soon enough, the news was out as to what had taken him and the true tragedy and sadness of it all came into focus. How could someone so vibrant, so brazen with LIFE not exist anymore? Since then, I’ve watched as the mythology and legend has continued to grow around him in ways that are reserved for a precious few. He’s in the ranks of the “Godstar” now, a term coined by Genesis P-Orridge for Brian Jones. It’s that echelon where celebrity meets mythology and the dead become iconography for the masses. They become something beyond human as their fame continues to grow beyond their mortality. It’s the realm of Elvis, Marilyn, James Dean, John Lennon… etc. It’s surprising to me in the sense that he died from a disease that was so stigmatized at the time, the punishment for a life of sin, according to some. It’s an end that would have buried the reputation of most along with their corpse, but the impact of Mercury was too significant to be snuffed out by the ignorance of prejudice and bigotry. Now, his fabulousness is revered rather than scorned and I’m happy for that.

Eventually, my musical tastes evolved to a point where I could rediscover my love of Freddie’s music and embrace it again, wholeheartedly. As that has unfolded, I’ve found myself reevaluating things that I’d previously dismissed. Albums like Hot Space, which I once considered the bottom of the Queen barrel, I now experience with the intent that Freddie had hoped for. As he’d say, it’s only music and a bit of fun, so why not try something new? He was always up for that, and it’s what attracted me to Queen in the first place. Of course, that appreciation only makes me feel melancholy thinking about all that he didn’t get to do. He certainly put the effort into leaving as much behind as he could. His final years were filled with him recording any time he could, banking up material for the band to finish off as much as he could, even as he struggled with the ravages of his illness. I just wish he’d been able to go further. But I do think he’d be so utterly tickled to see what his legacy has become and I know he’d be wallowing in it with both feet, darling!

THE KINKS - MUSWELL HILLBILLIES @ 50

 

November 24th marks the 50th anniversary of the release of The Kinks’ 10th studio album, Muswell Hillbillies, which was issued on this day in 1971.

Coming in with the first wave of the British Invasion of the early 1960s and following on the success of their blistering proto-metal hits like You Really Got Me, The Kinks had built a career refining their songwriting sophistication through a series of albums which brought out Ray Davies’ talents as a storyteller to a degree that was quite unequaled in the realm of pop music. Yet, while they’d had success in the UK charts throughout the latter half of the decade, the US was pretty much a lost territory after their 1965 tour resulted in the American Federation of Musicians refusing to grant them performance permits until 1969, likely due to their rowdy reputation on the road. The result was that the US mostly forgot about them for the back half of the ’60s.

That began to change in 1970 with the release of the album, Lola Versus Powerman and the Moneygoround, Part One. The album’s title track, Lola, an account of a confused romantic encounter with a transvestite, became an unlikely top 10 hit on both sides of the Atlantic and brought the band back into the spotlight in the US. That album also signaled the ended of their contracts with Pye and Reprise Records as they signed a five album deal with RCA. That got them enough of an advance to set up their own recording studio, where they recorded Muswell Hillbillies.

Muswell Hill is the area where the Davies brothers grew up and the themes of the album delved into working class subjects reflective of their background. Critically, the album was a success and garnered glowing reviews right out of the gate and the success of its predecessor had seemingly set them on course to continue that trend as they began their tenure with their new label. Yet neither critical acclaim nor momentum from the previous album managed to secure significant sales for Muswell Hillbillies, even though it had all the earmarks to succeed. The songs are top-notch, the styles reflect both British sensibilities, when it leaned into music hall influences, while also bringing in American influences of bluegrass and country. For many, it is considered the band’s last truly “great” album! Yet it flagged in the stores and ended up signalling the band entering into a downward trend until they rebounded in 1977, reinvigorated by the “new wave” vibrancy of the times.

While the band would go on to have more hits in the late ‘70s and beyond, Muswell Hillbillies, in retrospect, seems to be a marker of the end of their “golden age” that began with Face to Face in 1966. It caps a run of music that remains peerless in terms of its visceral connection to its subjects and Ray Davies’ ability to deftly concoct his narratives around the framework of meticulously crafted, unforgettable pop music. It’s music that defined the gold standard for its genre of narrative driven, folksy realism.

JAH WOBBLE - METAL BOX - REBUILT IN DUB

 

Released today! Jah Wobble's newest is a walloping great rethink of his magnum opus, Metal Box (plus a couple of First Issue bonus tracks thrown in for good measure). For anyone wondering what the point of this set is, why he'd tackle a reboot of such a classic monolithic slab of post-punk angular alienation, it feels like a perfect time to assess a journey of some 40+ years as an artist by taking his most iconic work and reinterpreting it through the lens of four decades of personal exploration and artistic growth.

At the time it was originally produced, Wobble was barely beyond being a novice as a musician. Yet his latent talents came to fruition with remarkable rapidity and his presence on the original Metal Box is essential to defining its distinctions. The album belongs to him just as much as to Levene and Lydon, but his bass is, unquestionably, the rock solid foundation upon which everything else rests. So he's perfectly justified in wanting to use those songs as a way to examine his past and juxtapose it against his present by "rebuilding" the songs that made it possible for "The Legend" to live on!

To be clear, it's not an attempt to replace or supersede the original in anyway. That's simply an impossible task and it's clear that's not what's happening here. What IS happening is Wobble taking the liberties he's well earned to present these songs in a fresh, updated context that fully integrates all he has to offer as an artist today. There are times when it stick fairly close to the bone, but then it'll freely fly off the handle in some unexpected way that makes you hear the songs with virgin ears. It's both familiar and alien, which is kinda what made the original special in the first place. It's a bit more "rock" than I was expecting, but not in a bad way. It has a toughness that cuts appropriately for the times where it finds itself manifesting.

I'm sure there will be some purists who will not see the point, but Wobble doesn't need anyone's permission to mess with his own legacy. His brazenness is part of why this ultimately succeeds as an exercise in using the past to remake the future.

NEW ORDER - MOVEMENT @ 40

 

November 19th marks the 40th anniversary of the release of the debut album by New Order, Movement, which hit the shelves this day in 1981. After the tragedy of Ian Curtis’ suicide, which put an end to the meteoric rise of Joy Division as one of the UK’s most respected post-punk bands, Movement faced the impossible task of overcoming the infamy of that sorrow while attempting to convince fans that there was still a reason for this band to continue under it’s new banner.

In a sense, it was always a no-win proposition to have to go up against the mythology of Joy Division and, in many regards, Movement wasn’t up to the task, at least for some minds of the time. It’s not that the band didn’t have it in them, as was decisively proven with their next album, Power Corruption & Lies and the mammoth companion single, Blue Monday. They most definitely had the ability to crawl out from under that shadow, but there had to be an inevitable transitional period to make that rebirth fully possible. And while the impossible expectations for New Order coming out of the gate doomed their debut to unfair comparisons, retrospectively, people have been able to go back and give the album a fairer shake and reassess its attributes without the weight of what had gone before.

The fact is that it’s a troubled album as it tries to come to grips with recent history, but it’s also true that it does so with a sense of steely determination. While there’s a lot of gloom to cope with, there’s light peeking out all over the place as the desire to move forward and survive burns determinedly from the very first song to the last. There’s sadness here, but it’s not hopelessness. That feeling died with Ian Curtis. This is an exercise in coming to terms with grief and finding out how to move past it and forge an optimistic future.

Even with that determination, there’s still a bit of hesitation going on here. The vocals are often buried in the mix and they weren’t sure who should take the lead, so the guys all take their turn giving it a go. It’s the only place where the album feels hesitant. It’s the first thing I noticed about it when I first played it when it was originally released. When you’ve got shoes like Ian’s to fill, it’s gonna be imposing for anyone to try them on. In the end, by the time the second album came along, they’d wisely set those shoes aside. But the vocal duties were not the only thing that needed sorting out.

The production chair was, by the this album, still held by Martin Hannett, but his relationship with the band was on the outs with Movement and it would turn out to be the last album he’d do with them. By this time, Hannett was embroiled in legal disputes with Factory and was crumbling in the grips of substance abuse. It’s been noted by the band that he was mostly uncooperative when working with them and the production may have suffered somewhat because of this. It’s not terrible or noticeable, for me anyway, but the band members have commented on being less than fully satisfied with the end product. There was even talk of re-recording the whole album at one point, but scheduling left that option in the dust.

Though it has a somewhat troubled genesis, it was essentially an unavoidable stepping stone the group had to take in order to find their footing again. I still find it a good listen and, these days, I can easily overlook any hesitancy in its execution. I tend to hear more of its positive attributes and the sense of survival that radiates from it. You can’t say they weren’t trying their best to deal with a shit situation and it still stacks up better than most other albums of the era.

JAPAN - TIN DRUM @ 40

 

November 13th marks the 40th anniversary of the release of Japan’s fifth and final studio album, Tin Drum, which was issued on this date in 1981. It would become the band’s most commercially and critically successful album, decisively pulling them out of the shadows of any previous comparisons to bands like Roxy Music and into a sound that was entirely their own.

Only a few years earlier, the band had emerged as a bunch of out-of-step glam-rock, lipstick and dyed-hair pretty boys. This was right in the middle of the punk explosion! How they ended up in the lofty artistic position they found themselves in with this last album is something of a marvel of improbability. Where their first two albums, when they garnered any attention at all, tended to attract mostly scorn and ridicule, Quiet Life and Gentlemen Take Polaroids were committed to the Herculean task of rehabilitating their credibility and the pieces came into their sharpest arrangement on Tin Drum.

Given the Eastern inclination of their name, which they bore as a burden in some ways, the idea of diving headlong into Asian influences may have been inevitable, but I don’t think anyone was prepared for what they’d do with them. As musicians, they’d been grossly underestimated and Tin Drum put to bed any lingering doubts about their capabilities. The album is complex, intricate and dazzling in its array of textures and tones. As far as mastering the tools of the modern day, they found ways to put synthesizers and sequencers to work for them in tandem with more tradition percussion instruments in ways that became completely idiosyncratic to them. Nothing else on the airwaves came close to this sound and it was entirely their own creation.

By the time recording began on the album, guitarist Rob Dean had departed thanks to the reduced reliance on guitar as a central component of their sound. With the emphasis on keyboards, David Sylvian was more than able to handling what little guitar duties were called for. This allowed the rhythm section of Steve Jansen on drums and Mick Karn on fretless bass to push forward even more and create a framework of rich complexity, though never so indulgent as to work against the integrity of the music. Nothing sounds cluttered or overwrought on the album. There’s a lot going on at any given point, save for the minimal hit single, Ghosts, but it’s all meticulously balanced. Richard Barbieri shines on the keyboards as he augments Karn and Jansen with an expansive sound palette that seem to come from an entirely exclusive reservoir. And David Sylvian, of course, brings it all together with his inventive, evocative lyrics and sultry croon.

It seemed like they were just hitting their stride with this album, so it’s all the more confounding that it would be their swan song. They’d put out a live album in 1983 recorded on the tour that supported Tin Drum, but that was it. A brief reunion would happen ten years after Tin Drum for the Rain Tree Crow project, though that didn’t garner significant attention, despite being a very satisfying album. Perhaps it was best for their legacy for them to have gone out on such a stunning high note. It ultimately worked to reinforce their legend and highlight the trajectory they traveled, from dismissed objects of scorn to the peak of critical respectability, all in less than a half decade. I came on board the Japan wagon with Quiet Life in 1979, so that album, Gentlemen Take Polaroids (1980) and Tin Drum form a fabulous trifecta of musical distinction. They all continue to find themselves creeping into rotation at regular intervals. In fact, I find myself listening to them in recent years even more than I did when these albums originally came out. Time has only highlighted their assets and deepened my appreciation for them.

THE STRANGLERS - LA FOLIE @ 40

 

Celebrating its 40th anniversary today is the sixth studio album by The Stranglers, La Folie, which was released on November 9th, 1981. Directly translated as “madness”, the French title was elaborated on by the band as a reference to the madness of romance and love, a theme which is carried through the album’s lyrical content.

At the time this album came along, The Stranglers’ career trajectory was decidedly waning, commercially. Their previous album, The Gospel According to the Meninblack, had not performed as well as their earlier albums, which had positioned them as one of the most commercially successful UK bands to come from the “punk” movement of the late ’70s. To try to boost their appeal, their record label recruited acclaimed producer Tony Visconti to help craft each song on the album with an ear towards it potentially being a single. The effort, initially, seemed to be in vain as the first single from the album failed to make any impact and album sales dragged as a result. Then came the second single, Golden Brown, which ignited on the airwaves and ended up propelling the album into the upper reaches of the charts and steadily climbing sales. Despite its controversial musings on the pleasures of heroine, It ended up putting the band back on the map as far as being hit makers and was one of the labels biggest selling singles for several years.

The album, as a whole, represents some of the most polished and intricate music the group had produced to that point. Personally, it’s one of my favorite Stranglers albums along with The Raven. It has a progressive edge to it while maintaining a professional sheen to the production and the songwriting hooks are insistent and unforgettable. It also has a sophistication that showed off the group’s true prowess as musicians while never quite betraying the more cynical, dark humored undercurrent that had always been at their core. The theme may have been the emotional turmoil of romance, but the intellectualism of the lyrics retains a constant counterpoint. It’s almost a baroque sense of ornateness in some areas, especially with things like the harpsichord on Golden Brown, courtesy of the late, great Dave Greenfield. It’s a richly layered and textured album of complex, multidimensional themes delivered with precision and panache!

LED ZEPPELIN IV @ 50

 

November 8th marks the 50th anniversary of the release of Led Zeppelin’s eponymous fourth album, alternately known as Led Zeppelin IV or sometimes “ZOSO” in reference to the mysterious symbol used by Jimmy Page for the album graphics. It remains the group’s most critically and commercially successful album, being home to what has become their “signature” song, Stairway to Heaven.

With the somewhat lukewarm & dismissive critical response to Led Zeppelin III, which is MY personal favorite of their canon, Jimmy Page determined to stick it to the critics a bit by making it deliberately difficult to reference the new album by virtue of the fact it technically has no title. Even down to the album graphics on the cover, there’s virtually no information present anywhere. This was a decision the band’s record company resisted as much as they could, considering it commercial suicide, but the band, by this point, had enough clout that they stubbornly hung onto the master tapes until the label agreed to release the album precisely according to the group's instructions. It’s a decision vindicated by the successful mystique that ended up enveloping them and the album in the wake of its release.

Musically, the group found a relaxed retreat to record the bulk of the album when they located production to the Headley Grange country house in Hampshire, England. For recording, they rented the Rolling Stones mobile studio facility. This setup allowed them to work out ideas in a loose, improvisational manner where some compositions could arise out of impromptu jam sessions. The result is an album that manifests organically from the band members, who were able to contribute a wide range of elements to the finished product beyond their established roles. The album also features the extremely rare presence of guest performers in the form of Fairport Convention vocalist Sandy Denny’s contribution to The Battle Of Evermore and Rolling Stones pianist Ian Stewart on "Rock and Roll".

The album has gone on to achieve legendary status in the realm of classic rock, no doubt propelled to astronomical heights thanks to Stairway to Heaven and its near ubiquitous presence on FM radio over the past half century. Personally, I find the song suffers from over exposure and overshadows a lot of other great material that is contained on the album, but you can’t really fault the band for their success. In a sense, this could be considered the peak of their perfection as subsequent releases struggled to live up to this level of achievement.

ORCHESTRAL MANEUVERS IN THE DARK - ARCHITECTURE & MORALITY @ 40

 

November 5th marks the 40th anniversary of the release of the third album by OMD (Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark), Architecture & Morality, which was issued on this day in 1981. It’s an album that redefined electronic music’s potential, though it was clearly a shot over the heads of some critics of the day.

At the time work began on the A&M album, OMD were looking to infuse a fresh sense of warmth and humanity into the often cold, mechanical landscape of the growing electronic music scene. This was a trend that was working its way through the ranks of other synth driven artists like John Foxx, who’d done an about-face from his debut solo album, with all it’s grey metallic machinations, to the green of forgotten gardens with his follow-up. For OMD, their inspiration for where to find warmth and humanity in their music came from religious choral music, thanks to some experiments from former OMD member, David Hughes, who was using the group’s studio to tinker with some processed choral recordings he’d made. Though the group were themselves not religiously inclined, they appreciated the power and emotive capacity of the music. With this in hand, they focused on historical themes and characters to provide a conceptual framework for the album.

The title was suggested by Martha Ladly (Martha & the Muffins) after the 1977 book Morality and Architecture by David Watkin. The group felt that the duality suggested by the words perfectly meshed with their desire to take the rigid “architecture” presented by electronic instruments like drum machines, sequencers and synthesizers, and balance them with the “morality” of the human experience. The cover by acclaimed designer Peter Saville, known for his work with Factory Records and Joy Division, austerely reflected this concept and reinforced the thematic integrity of the entire project. Ladly & Saville were, incidentally, romantically involved at the time the album was produced.

Musically, the group went to great lengths to expand their sonic palette beyond the usual synths and drum machines, incorporating acoustic instruments, guitars and especially a vintage Mellotron, a rather unwieldy keyboard contraption that predated digital sampling by utilizing banks of audio tape loops of real instruments to create its sounds. Its presence often lends a haunting sense of surreal romanticism to the album’s aura. Structurally, the songs have a stately, procession type of movement to them. There’s a sense of drama and scale, though never bombastic or overblown. The results come across as heartfelt and sincere as they delve into the history and impact of their subjects.

The initial critical response to the album was baffling and mixed, however. After putting so much into this project, the group were taken aback by how harsh some critics were. Lynden Barber of Melody Maker wrote, "I don't believe the Orchs even care about this record... the style is the same, the content profoundly different, the onslaught of emptiness, frivolity disguised by furrowed brows, a new brand of meaninglessness." The response of the listening public, however, was immediately enthusiastic and the album spawned no less than three hit singles in the UK and European markets. The tide of negativism from the critics soon shifted, however, as the fog began to clear from their perception of the album and people began to comprehend the scope of what the group had accomplished. The critical standing of the record after 40 years on the shelves now puts it solidly in the “classic masterpiece” category with it frequently topping “best of the 80s” lists.

For me, it was my gateway drug for OMD and still sits as their high water mark as far as my personal estimation of their career is concerned.

NASH THE SLASH - DECOMPOSING @ 40

 

Celebrating its 40th anniversary this month is Nash the Slash's groundbreaking EP, Decomposing. Released independently on Nash's Cut-Throad imprint, it was claimed to be the first album to be playable at any speed, though I'd suggest Boyd Rice may have something to say about that with his "black" album offering similar potentials a few years earlier. Regardless, it was still an innovative approach and marketing strategy. In actuality, the recordings did lend themselves to working at the various speeds available on a standard turntable. They were all instrumental and heavily processed and electronic, so the concept proved to be entirely practical without making the music sound "wrong" (though at 78rpm, it may have felt a bit "rushed"). It likely occurred to Nash to do this after his first EP, Bedside Companion, was inadvertently played at the wrong speed on a radio show. That error eventually lead to that EP being released on CD in both its native 45rpm speed AND the 33-1/3rpm variation. The original vinyl version of Decomposing has since become a rather rare collectors item given that it was only ever independently released in Canada and not licensed to any European market like his other Cut-Throat titles. For me, it's one of my favorite releases from Nash along with the Bedside Companion EP and the Dreams and Nightmares LP.

CHRIS & COSEY - HEARTBEAT @ 40

 

40 years ago this month, in November of 1981, Chris & Cosey officially stepped out of the Throbbing Gristle shadows and began their career as the dynamic duo of electronic music.

It wasn't long after Chris Carter joined Genesis P-Orridge, Cosey Fanni Tutti & Peter Christopherson to form Throbbing Gristle that sparks began to fly between him and his future life and creative partner. By the time TG began to spiral down towards their termination, Chris & Cosey had already started working on material that would end up on their first post TG album. Heartbeat would come as a celebration of their new freedom and the beginning of their life together as they became a family with the addition of their soon to be born child, pictured in an ultrasound on the cover and commemorated by the title. It's an album about birth and new life and is bursting with a sense of liberation, enthusiasm and optimism about facing the future. While it still hints at some of the darkness that was the hallmark of TG, there's much more of a sense of beauty and wonder about it all as they were in the flush of their romance and finally being able to live openly and create freely within their own domain. Signing to Rough Trade records, the duo were able to focus on the music without having to deal with the administrative issues of running an independent label, though they'd eventually get back to doing that soon enough.

For me, Heartbeat is a critical release within the arena of electronic music as it offers clear signposts towards styles and approaches which would become foundational for the future of the genre, particularly as the 80s ran out the clock in its final years. What makes this album so important is that it was so far ahead of the curve and ended up becoming a touchstone years later as producers inspired by the first waves of the techno & acid house movements began to look for ideas as to where to take that music as they strove to innovate and evolve. Many people quickly began to realize that Chris & Cosey had already plotted out the paths of where to go, nearly a full decade beforehand. As such, the album has retained a certain vitality and timelessness as it was so effective in opening the floodgates for the potential of electronic music for generations to come.

PINK FLOYD - MEDDLE @ 50

 

Celebrating half a century on the planet today is Pink Floyd's sixth studio album, Meddle, which was released on October 31st, 1971. It's an album which represents a bridging period between the early Syd Barret era psychedelic rock band and the prog-rock super-group which would emerge with the landmark release of Dark Side of the Moon in the spring of 1973.

While the group was making definite movements towards a much more accessible sound after the challenging obscurity of the prior two albums, Ummagumma & Atom Heart Mother, they weren't quite settled on the conceptual underpinnings which would form the framework of the albums that came after Meddle. The fact is that there's no overriding theme to integrate this album and it was produced over the course of the preceding year in fits and starts between live performance commitments around the globe. As such, the recording process was often fragmented, drawn out and frequently unproductive. It's actually quite surprising how accessible this album is given that the group indulged in so many esoteric experiments in order to try to spur on their creativity. Most of those ended up yielding very little, like the idea of each member recording their part without any reference to the other member's recording, only a rough outline of what they should play.

Yet, in the end, they managed to craft a lovely and entirely listenable collection of music, one which has become one of my favorite albums in the group's canon. The hooks and structures, while offering an aura of expansiveness, remain grounded and avoid any overt experimental self-indulgences. It has a dreamy sound that's never disturbed by uncomfortable awkwardness.

While the music itself was a rousing success and garnered critical praise, though modest sales, the cover, provided by legendary '70s design house, Hipgnosis, could be considered one of their weakest efforts. Lead designer, Storm Thorgerson, initially suggested a close-up shot of a baboon's anus, but the band wisely (or not?) vetoed that suggestion and instead offered the idea of a shot of an ear underwater, which is what he went with. Storm always felt it was a lackluster effort and considered it his worst contribution to the bands album covers.

Middling cover graphics aside, it's a thoroughly enjoyable listen from start to finish and an album I return to quite frequently when I need a Floyd fix.

MICKY DOLENZ PUTS YOU TO SLEEP @ 30

 

October 22nd marks the 30th anniversary of the release of Micky Dolenz Puts You To Sleep, his debut solo album, which hit the shelves on this day in 1991.

Considering Dolenz was one of the best pop vocal talents of the the late 1960s, it’s somewhat surprising it took over two decades for him to finally get around to doing a solo album after leaving The Monkees. He’d done a few solo singles throughout the 1970s and been involved in a couple of collaborative projects like the soundtrack for Harry Nilsson’s The Point (1977) with Davy Jones & the Monkees reunion albums: Dolenz, Jones, Boyce & Hart (1976) & Pool It (1987), but a true solo effort remained off the table while his career shifted into TV production as a director, mostly in the UK.

For his solo debut, Micky came up with the idea of doing a collection of songs that would be adaptable to being sung as “lullabies”, something that could have been incredibly saccharine had it been handled by a lesser talent. But Dolenz manages to pull it all together in a manner that delivers on the “sweetness” without becoming insufferable. This comes down to two key factors: song selection and arrangements.

With the first factor, Micky went with some classics by great composers like Lennon & McCartney, Harry Nilsson and even a remake of the psychedelic Monkees masterpiece, Porpoise Song by Goffin & King. It’s territory that was always successful for The Monkees and is no less so here. The arrangements on the album are gorgeously elegant and understated. Each one snuggles comfortably into the laid-back twilight vibe the album seeks to inhabit with its goal of sending the listener off to dreamland. It does so with gentle ease, while never being boring. Micky is in perfect voice for the album and delivers every song with a sincerity and softness that is as comforting as a cup of hot chocolate.

In terms of a legacy, I don’t think a lot of people really know about this album, which is a shame. I didn’t discover it until very recently and was blown away when I finally heard it. It deserves to be appreciated far more than it has been as it offers up a fully realized concept, elevated by first rate songs, tasteful performances and production which holds up three decades after its release. Nothing sounds dated or is weakened by trendy production techniques. This could easily have been created at any time in the last 50 years, so it truly deserves to be called “timeless”.

APHEX TWIN - DRUKQS @ 20

 

Released on October 22, 2001, Aphex Twin’s Drukqs turns 20 years old today. It was the fifth studio album released under the Aphex Twin name and was one of Richard D. James’ most divisive albums.

Drukqs is so controversial because it refuses to adhere to anyone’s expectations nor to conform to any particular style across it’s two CDs / four vinyl LP mammoth 30 song, 1 hour & 43 minute runtime. It runs the gamut from hyperactive break-beat overloads to gently pastoral mechanical piano interludes and all of it seems to be thrown together with little to no consideration for track sequencing. Indeed, James himself has said that most people just import music into their computers and play albums in any order they like, so he anticipated that people would reconstruct the album to suit their own tastes anyway. As such, there wasn’t much point in spending a lot of time painstakingly arranging tracks into a particular order.

With this in mind, Drukqs can be seen as both a banquet of potential goodies or a confused amalgam of stray ideas. It only seems to make sense when the listener intervenes and puts the music together in a way that works for them. I know I found it an impossible listen when I first encountered the album when it was released and it was only much later when I took the time to reorder the tracks that I was able to find a way to appreciate it for what it had to offer. Personally, I found splitting it into “ambient” vs “rhythmic” tracks created two albums that I could listen to in their entirety, though I'd say I favor the more mellow side of this collection.

Part of the reason for the inconsistency in terms of styles can be found in its genesis, which was largely spurred by the theft of a laptop computer containing a massive collection of unreleased tunes which James lost while traveling. In order to thwart potential bootlegging, James put together Druqks as a stopgap measure, which is a predominant reason for critics often citing the album as merely a collection of random unreleased tracks from the previous few years. For many, it didn’t offer any new groundbreaking material and seemed to be no more than restatements of ideas already explored on more coherent releases like I Care Because You Do & the Richard D. James album.

Ultimately, the album relies on the listener to pick up the pieces and make something listenable out of it. There are some brilliant moments on it, especially with unexpectedly subtle compositions like Avril 14th, one of the mechanical piano tracks alternating between the more furiously complex break-beat excursions. James has provided a pile of puzzle pieces and left it up to the listener to sort them out. It would also have to suffice as the last Aphex Twin album until 2014’s Syro release. Not that James was completely silent all those years, releasing the Analord EP series as “AFX”, among other scattered side projects like The Tuss, but he’d stay away from Aphex Twin for over a decade. Part of that may have had to do with a nasty divorce from his wife and an effort to keep her from benefiting from potential royalties. Whatever the case, it left the Aphex Twin legacy in something of an uncomfortable limbo while fans tried to figure out what was going on.

THE RESIDENTS - STARS AND HANK FOREVER @ 35

 

October 21st marks the 35th anniversary of The Residents most unlikely commercial success, Stars & Hank Forever!, which was issued on this day in 1986. It was Volume II in their American Composer Series, which began two years earlier with the release of the George & James album. For this second volume, the composers were Hank Williams on side one and John Philip Sousa on side two. Though the American Composer Series was intended to span as many as 10 volumes over 16 years, the project was abruptly abandoned after this second volume due to various logistical difficulties. These, in part, involved rising costs for licensing fees and the incompatibility of the project’s structure with the emerging CD format. The American Composer Series was built around two composers per release occupying separate sides of an LP. With CDs usurping vinyl at the time as the dominant release format, the split side concept didn’t work anymore.

To say the album was commercially successful does not necessarily mean that it was critically or artistically so, though it does have certain moments. While the first volume, which covered works by James Brown and George Gershwin, offered a lot of giddy interpretations for the group to indulge in, their irreverent approach maybe didn’t serve the revered nature of Hank Williams’ legacy. However, their toe tapping take on Kaw-Liga, which mounted the familiar “Indian” lament atop a rhythm section lifted straight from Michael Jackson’s hit, Billie Jean, proved to be extremely club friendly and The Residents found themselves suddenly in the unfamiliar position of being DJ faves in the underground clubs of the mid 1980s. Releasing the track in an extended 12” remixed format helped drive its popularity even more. That hit aside, however, their versions of other Williams classics like Jambalaya may have been seen by some as disrespectful, though personally, I find the Williams side pretty consistently enjoyable.

The Sousa side, on the other hand, offers up a far more challenging listening experience. The bombast of parade and marching music makes for some pretty brittle listening and the arrangements, with their accompanying sound effects intended to recreate the ambiance of a live parade, leave the whole side long mix of songs sounding jarring and alienating. A remix of this material without the sound FX was later released separately, though I’ve not bothered to check out that version.

The saddest aspect of this album is the fact it contains the last recordings done with frequent collaborator and unofficial “fifth” Resident, innovative guitar genius Snakefinger, before his untimely and tragic passing. This fatal blow was something of a culmination to a turbulent time for the band, which had gone through a lot of struggle thus far in the decade. With the Mole Trilogy faltering and failing to resolve itself into a completed project, its accompanying live tour nearly bankrupting them and then the American Composer Series going off the rails after only two volumes, the loss of Snakefinger must have dealt a serious blow to the group’s resolve. It’s no wonder they’d turn their attention to the realm of faith and religion with their next major project, God In Three Persons. Though this represented the end of the composer series, they would do a collection of Elvis Presley songs a few years later in 1989 for The King & Eye album.

COUM TRANSMISSIONS | THROBBING GRISTLE - PROSTITUTION AT THE ICA @ 45

 

45 years ago today, on October 18th, 1976, The ICA (Institute of Contemporary Arts) in London England hosted the opening night of the infamous Prostitution exhibition by COUM Transmissions. Not only was this the culmination of the efforts of this transgressive multimedia arts collective, it was the official debut of their new alter-ego, Throbbing Gristle. In addition to the performance by TG, the exhibition included a series of framed pornographic images culled from member Cosey Fanni Tutti’s work in the adult publishing world, sculptures incorporating used female hygiene products and a burlesque performer.

Because of the use of public arts funding and its presentation in a government funded gallery, the press quickly took note of the exhibition’s controversial contents and started spinning a media frenzy around it, the likes of which was only surpassed just over a month later when the Sex Pistols swore a blue streak on British tea time TV. The public outrage over the show resulted in it being debated in the UK parliament where Tory MP Nicholas Fairbairn famously referred to the group as “wreckers of civilization” adding, "IT'S A SICKENING OUTRAGE! Sadistic! Obscene! Evil! The Arts Council must be scrapped after this!" In true meta-media form, COUM incorporated the show’s incendiary coverage into the exhibit by creating an evolving display of all the press cuttings published during the week the show was running.

As far as the career of COUM Transmissions was concerned, Prostitution is often considered the swan song of the art troupe, though a couple of minor actions & exhibits were undertaken afterwards. But for all practical purposes, the focus of the members shifted decisively to the activities of the new Throbbing Gristle project after this event. In retrospect, the ICA show was the perfect summary of COUM’s explorations of contemporary sexuality and cultural taboos. Cosey’s work as a professional pornographic model was central to this conception as she was able to work from the inside of the industry, clandestinely examining it and how sexual representation is manipulated by the media, even as it simultaneously stands in judgment against the so-called perversions represented by these illicit materials. The contradiction of availability and prohibition formed an essential dynamic in terms of how the materials were presented. The framed images, which had been intended to be openly displayed on the wall, had to be hidden away in a back room because of censorship so that people had to request to see them privately and flip through the works because they were not allowed to be shown openly in the gallery.

TG’s “debut” was, in fact, not the group’s first public appearance. They’d done something of a “soft launch” at a couple of brief shows in July and August of that year where they tested their legs a bit before the official launch of the group on October 18th. While the earlier shows offered up a somewhat tentative version of TG, the ICA show presented them in a completely realized form, fully prepared to confront a dazed audience who were hit with a sound and substance which subverted the structure of a “rock group” into a new kind of entity. They used familiar signifiers in a way which deconstructed the essence of the music. There was no drummer, the guitarist didn’t know how to play, nor really did anyone, though Chris at least had some mastery of the electronics which gave TG its signature sound. Where early COUM’s dalliances with music had been more acoustic based and akin to “hippy” freestyle jamming, TG offered up an electrified sound that, while bereft of any traditional musical technique, seemed laser focused on some as-yet undetermined objective. Genesis began the show with a desolate noise behind him while he described the post-industrial wasteland of the modern urban world, dog barking in the distance of a bleak landscape of alienation and anxiety. This was the moment when “Industrial Music for Industrial People” was born.

The aftermath of this exhibit left a lot of questions in the minds of the public and the press and it remains one of the most infamous and controversial shows ever put on by the ICA. Though COUM and TG were questionable at the time, they’ve since been recognized as creative pioneers with archives of their work officially acquired by by the gallery in recent years. They’ve also done retrospectives of the Prostitution show, including a 2016 40th anniversary presentation featuring readings by Cosey Fanni Tutti.

It’s far more difficult these days for artists to generate controversy and outrage to the extent that was possible back then. The public and the art world are much more jaded and familiar with attempts at transgression and these efforts usually come off as desperate pleas for attention rather than efforts to change the way people think or perceive their world. COUM & TG were equipped with a serious arsenal of cultural weaponry when they instigated these works, fortified by years of exploration and experimentation and an intent to impact the way people perceive and interpret the world. It wasn’t merely “shock value” self-indulgence, like so many who came in their wake. As such, there’s still a great deal that can be learned from their works and the artifacts to be found in their aftermath.

THE MONKEES - JUSTUS @ 25

 

October 15th marks the 25th anniversary of the release of The Monkees 1996 reunion album, Justus. It was instigated as a way to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the debut of the group’s TV series, which aired for the first time on September 12th, 1966. It would be the first time all four members would record together since 1968, and the last time before Davy’s passing in 2012.

Like clockwork, The Monkees seemed to try some sort of reunion album every ten years. In 1976, the Dolenz, Jones, Boyce & Hart album came together, though not officially under The Monkees banner due to the name being in legal limbo at the time. It was an album that was, overall, quite successful artistically, but failed to make much of an impact commercially. In 1987, on the heels of a hit single, That Was Then, This Is Now, which was spurred on by a revival of the TV show thanks to an MTV marathon in 1986, Micky, Davy & Peter put together the Pool It album, which was pretty much savaged by critics and is considered the group’s all time worst album by many. The next cycle brought them together in the summer of 1996 to begin work on Justus.

This time around, it was Mike who got the ball rolling. After playing his then fiancé, Victoria Kennedy, some tracks from the Head soundtrack, her enthusiastic response got him to organize a jam session with Micky on drums, Pete on bass and himself on guitar. The session went so well that they called in Davy to complete the group and began working with label Rhino to put together a reunion album. For this project, the group wanted to go back to one of the best times of their early career, when they’d broken free from the shackles of being a “fake” TV band and got control of their music to record their third album, Headquarters. They wanted to recreate that magic of it being only the four of them at the helm and they even decided to up the ante by writing all the songs themselves and producing the album on their own. As the label says on the tin, it was to be JUST them.

It was all set about with the best of intentions and approached with the utmost sincerity, but when it came to what was delivered, something about the sum of the parts didn’t end up adding up quite to what it should have been. For one thing, the primary influence of the era was the zeitgeist of the “grunge” movement, which drove the group to attempt to update their sound to that contemporary standard and the truth was that it wasn’t the best fit when they strayed into that territory. Anger and cynicism weren’t a good disposition for a group who were so strongly associated with fun and games. Not that they hadn’t offered up some cynical songs before. Pleasant Valley Sunday was a cutting commentary on suburban conformity, but it was wrapped in bubblegum pop sweetness to make its attack one of stealth rather than a full frontal assault.

The strength of the songwriting wasn’t quite up to par either. Though they’d all been able to deliver classic songs in the past, they didn’t seem to come up to scratch this time around. It’s not that the album is necessarily “bad”, but being “middling” is always a pretty weak form of praise. Many found the lack of Nesmith’s more country-rock influence and lead vocals another disappointment. Some better songs did brighten things up to a degree, particularly Davy’s pieces as they skewed towards a softer pop sound, but even at their best, the production still sounds dated today, especially when the songs try to push into edgier hard rock. The hollow sound of the vocals is particularly jarring on tracks like Regional Girl. It’s got a thin, brittle tone to it that doesn’t hold up to contemporary listening and begs for a modern remix to try to address the gutless feel that pervades the production.

Critically and commercially, the album failed to garner a lot of success or praise and lackluster reactions put a damper on the sense of achievement that should have been present for such a momentous reunion. The group did also manage to produce an hour long TV special in February of 1997 to help promote the album, but that too suffered from the same kind of unsatisfying results. Even with Mike, who’d pioneered the fusion of music and narrative with projects like his award winning Elephant Parts video, shepherding the script and handling the directing, somehow it didn't add up to what it should have. It all, on paper, should have been a marvelous rebirth for the group, but somehow the spirit and timing simply didn’t seem to jive.

It wouldn’t be until 2016’s 50th anniversary reunion album, Good Times, 20 years later, that all the pieces would fall into place to create an album which truly reignited the group in the right way. It’s an album that manages to bring their sound into the present without losing the essence of what made them so appealing in the past. Whereas Justus tried to bring them into a contemporary landscape where they didn’t seem to comfortably fit, Good Times manifested in the present without feeling like it needed to conform to the times to let The Monkees be what they were meant to be, a rebelliously fun escape from the traumas of the modern world. Justus, in the end, was an admirable and bold effort that was, sadly, not yet ready to bring the group to where they’d eventually end up in these late years of their career, but they would get there when the time was right.