MICHAEL NESMITH - FROM A RADIO ENGINE TO THE PHOTON WING @45

 

Released in March of 1977, Michael Nesmith’s eighth post Monkees solo album, From A Radio Engine To The Photon Wing, is celebrating its 45th anniversary this month. While his trademark country-rock fusion is still present here, this album finds Nesmith pushing the “country” side into more of a background augmentation. Being that the era was the height of the disco craze, there’s even a bit of a beat on a couple of tracks, though he never allows it to become a distraction to the song’s integrity. Despite the emphasis on being more aligned with the contemporary pop motifs of the day, lyrically, it retains the whimsical esoteric philosophizing which was at the core of its predecessor, the conceptual multimedia box set, The Prison. The songs offer meditations on life, love and loss in a way that always retains a steadfast grip on optimism, regardless of the underlying emotional strain. It’s a characteristic that underlies all of Nesmith’s work as it did his attitude towards life in general.

The most notable track on the album is the opener, Rio, which, in its edited single incarnation, became the little acorn that sprouted the oak tree of the music video industry of the 1980s and helped birth MTV. Looking to promote the single, Mike had been asked to prepare a video of the song which could be distributed to various TV markets. Nesmith misinterpreted this as a request for him to make a short story out of the song, so he set about crafting a video narrative to illustrate its lyrics. While there were other music videos on the market before it, they had all only featured the performer lip-syncing to their song, usually on a blank stage. Even Queen’s famous Bohemian Rhapsody video adhered to this basic format, albeit in its most elaborate incarnation. What Nesmith brought was nothing less than a mini-movie, complete with plot, characters, sets and settings. This was virtually unheard of in the industry at the time. Its existence eventually lead to the creation of a TV series, Pop Clips, featuring other similar productions and, ultimately, the inauguration of an entire TV network to feature this content.

This album was the second to be released on Nesmith’s own Pacific Arts label imprint, but it was his penultimate album to be released in the 1970s before he would effectively abandon the music industry for over a decade to focus on film & TV production. He would only release Infinite Rider On The Big Dogma in 1979 before packing up his guitar until 1992’s Tropical Campfires, an album which was stylistically predicted 15 years early by …Radio Engine….

KRAFTWERK - TRANS-EUROPE EXPRESS @ 45

 

45 years ago this month, Kraftwerk put their sixth LP on the tracks as the iconic Trans-Europe Express hit the shops in March of 1977. It would solidify their conceptual identity while becoming one of their most influential albums.

If there had been any trace of the band’s early free-form experimentalism typical of their first three LPs remaining on Autobahn & Radio Activity, it was thoroughly excised with the release of TEE. Everything on this album adhered to the strict, controlled compositional aesthetic which had been taking over as their trademark. Part of the reason for this was the introduction of the Synthanorma Sequenzer, a customized 32-step 16-channel analog sequencer made for the band by Matten & Wiechers. This piece of gear allowed them to finally realize the precise machine-like rhythms they’d been dreaming of while freeing them from the drudgery of having to perform these repetitive maneuvers manually. The effect on their sound was immediate and profound.

This impact was even manifest in the way the group presented themselves on the LP’s stylized cover. They were dehumanizing themselves by creating a visage that more resembled mannequins, something which would be literally implemented by the next album and further enhanced in later years with the introduction of actual robotic replicas and, finally, CGI avatars. This attitude extended beyond mere visual representation of the group. They also adopted a strict set of guidelines in terms of their public behavior and demeanor, enacting rules such as restricting themselves from indulging in intoxicants while socializing or performing.

Conceptually, the group were keen to distance themselves from any perception of being associated with Nazis. This was something which had been a bit of an issue with the Autobahn album and its controversial celebration the German Third Reich’s enduring infrastructural achievement. To accomplish this, they adopted an idea suggested by their friend, Paul Alessandrini, who encouraged them to write about the new Trans-Europe Express rail system. This was something that would emphasize the European identity, an idea which was further reinforced by the song, Europe Endless. This aligned them with the values of the emerging European union, moving them away from anything that smacked of Germanic nationalism. Parallel to their emphasis on European culture, the group also focused on the concept of personal identity and self-reflection as embodied by songs like The Hall of Mirrors and Showroom Dummies, the latter of which was key in terms of the construction of their new image.

In terms of the impact of the album, while it did respectably in terms of sales, the cultural impact it would manifest over the years and even generations is immeasurable. Most profoundly, its title track managed to find its way into the hands of emerging hip-hop pioneer Afrika Bambaataa, who sampled it for his 1982 classic Planet Rock single. It would then go on to influence the Detroit techno community, along with the groups followup LPs, Man Machine and Computer World. The ripple effect within the world of electronic dance music was only matched by the synergistic works from Giorgio Moroder, who’s epic disco hits like I Feel Love and The Chase, dovetailed elegantly with Kraftwerk’s similar emphasis on powerful electronic sequenced rhythms. But this is only the tip of the iceberg. Innumerable artists within the general world of pop and rock music were turning to Kraftwerk for inspiration at this time, including artists like Davie Bowie, who was embarking on his “Berlin” phase at the time TEE was being recorded and who, along with Iggy Pop, found themselves immortalized within the very lyrics of Kraftwerk’s titular song.

Nearly a half century after its release, the album remains a touchstone for anyone who picks up a synthesizer or plunks away on a drum machine. You simply can’t have techno without Trans-Europe Express laying the tracks for it to travel into the future. Only The Beatles can lay claim to having a bigger impact on modern popular music and there are many who could justly debate who had the larger influence.