ALICE COOPER - BILLION DOLLAR BABIES @ 50

 

Marking its 50th anniversary today is the sixth studio album from the Alice Cooper band, Billion Dollar Babies, which was released on February 25th, 1973. It was the most popular LP from the band up to that point, hitting the number one slot in both the US and UK. It was also the penultimate album by the band before its lead singer, one Vincent Furnier, would strike out on a solo career, taking the band name with him.

The first recording sessions for the album took place in Greenwich, Connecticut, in a mansion called the Galesi Estate. While at the estate, to achieve certain vocal sounds and echoes, microphones were run through rooms of various sizes, including a greenhouse. After beginning recording there in August of 1972, sessions were then held at Morgan Studios in London, wrapping up by January, 1973. While in London, Donovan contributed to the album by singing on its title track. The album was produced by Bob Ezrin, who had been behind the desk for their albums since Love It To Death in 1971. A quadraphonic mix of the LP was released on vinyl and reel to reel which featured radically different mixes, including alternate vocal takes.

The tour to support the album broke box office records in the US previously set by The Rolling Stones, with ticket sails pushed by the popularity of the album and the four hit singles that were taken from it. It represents the high water mark for the band. The album rocks consistently from end to end with buckets of memorable hooks littering virtually every song.

THE THE - PERFECT 12” @ 40

 

Released on February 11th, 1983, The The’s single, Perfect, turns 40 years old today. It’s my favorite song ever released by Matt Johnson and completely summed up my feelings about the the times, as well as being the best dance floor fodder in a year with some dead-on all-time classics in the clubs.

In 1982, Matt Johnson was working closely with Stevo from Some Bizarre Records and jockeying with a number of major record labels for a contract. He’d released a debut solo album under his own name, but was now working on a debut under what would become his more popular moniker, The The. Johnson and Stevo had gone to NYC to work with producer Mike Thorne, who had been at the console for the recent success of Soft Cell. They initially worked on the Uncertain Smile single, which was released in October of 1982. Work on that song proceeded very effectively, though there was some issues in terms of Stevo and his verbal agreement with London Records to release the singles. He’d reneged on that agreement and, instead, had Johnson sign a deal with CBS/Epic, despite London Records footing the bill for their trip to NYC.

At the time of the NYC sessions, the new album was tentatively titled The Pornography of Despair. After the release of Uncertain Smile, Johnson and Stevo returned to NYC to record a second single in advance of the LP. The song they chose to work on was written for the new album and called, Screw Up Your Feelings, but would become re-titled as "Perfect". By the time Johnson had returned to NYC, he’d gone from penniless to having an £80,000 advance from CBS, so he took advantage of his financial situation to partake in some of the pleasures of the city, disappearing from the studio to explore the Lower East Side and take drugs. He and Stevo also took a side trip to Detroit where Johnson felt he could spend some time really getting into the headspace he needed to sing the lyrics for his new song, which were about being “down-and-out”, so he wanted a taste of that lifestyle so he could bring some authenticity to his performance.

Eventually, the pair managed to get back into the studio to record, but by this time, their indulgences were wearing thin on Mike Thorne’s patience and further disagreements on the song’s production didn’t help. Thorne had wanted to use his fancy new Synclavier sampler/synth on the track, but Johnson was insistent on using his “cheap & cheerful” Omnichord electronic auto-harp instead. With all this conflict, Thorne bailed from the project after completing the single and Johnson headed back to London to start from scratch, where he’d record the entirety of what would become the Soul Mining LP, recording new versions of both Uncertain Smile and Perfect.

The single for Perfect, especially it’s 12” extended mix, clocking in at nearly 10 minutes, became an immediate sensation on the dance floors of the underground and alternative clubs. I had just started going out to them at exactly the time this song was released and I remember being immediately enthralled by it from the very first listen. I have to agree with Matt about that Omnichord because the bass sound it created is completely essential to the song’s groove, backed up by that insistent, hypnotic Linn Drum machine back-beat. And that high-lonesome harmonica on it was played by none other than New York Dolls front-man, David Johansen. Lyrically, Matt tapped into the quintessential mood of youthful despondence and malaise that was essential for the emerging Goth/Industrial dance scene of the day. His lyrics were so poetic and I had so many days like that where his words echoed in my head as my post-teen angst over the sadness of the world loomed in my mind. Yet it was all done with this killer fucking groove.

Every time this song came on in a club, I HAD to get on the dance floor, and I was NOT at all into dancing in clubs before this, being painfully shy and self-conscious. This song, along with Blue Monday by New Order and All Lined UP from Shriekback, were irresistible when they came on. Heaven forbid some DJ should play all three in sequence, which I distinctly remember happening at least once, necessitating nearly a 30 minute continuous stint of high energy boogieing until I was a sweaty rag doll. It remains one of my all time favorite songs, EVER!!!

THE JAMS - WHO KILLED THE JAMS? @ 35

Released 35 years ago today, on February 8th, 1988, it’s The JAMs (Justified Ancients of Mu Mu) and their sophomore and final LP, Who Killed the JAMs?. Not that Jimmy Cauty and Bill Drummond stopped recording, but they’d go forward predominantly as The KLF after a short stint as The Timelords for their Doctorin' The Tardis hit single.

After forming The JAMs to kick off 1987, their debut LP, 1987 (What the Fuck Is Going On?) literally went up in flames, with all unsold copies roasted in a bonfire after losing a copyright complaint from ABBA and the Mechanical-Copyright Protection Society, who ordered all remaining copies of the album destroyed. After toying with the media by musing about their second album being a heavy metal cover of Deep Purple songs, in the end, the real album followed many of the same paths as the first one, taking samples from popular hits and reworking them into new pieces with drum machines, synths and vocal choruses added. This time around, however, the samples were a bit more stealthily handled in order to avoid legal issues. The cover of the LP shows photos of the burning of the first album with the front long shot showing Jimmy & Bill with the car that would become known as Ford Timelord, who would be credited with composing Doctrorin’ the Tardis. The back cover image is a closeup of the pile of burning LPs.

Though it was not formally announced at the time, the music press, based on the album title and some cryptic comments from the group, assumed this was the swansong for the JAMs and, in a sense, they were correct, though the group would issue the album Shag Times to collect together a number of singles from the era. Upon its release, Who Killed the JAMs? was met with generally favorable critical responses. Melody Maker declared it to be "divine nihilism", "an outward show of self-deception, irrationality and bankruptcy that worries and rejoices itself to death". Sounds thought the album "a masterpiece of pathos", referring to its "hopeless bravado in the face of massed corporate opposition", and awarded the maximum five stars. While the duo were still refining their methodologies and mythologies, the album definitely contains seeds of what they were trying to grow, with themes and hooks that would continue to resurface throughout the KLF's career in the early 1990s. Since its initial release, however, it has never been reissued except in a very limited CDr unofficial edition of a couple of hundred copies.

 

IGGY AND THE STOOGES - RAW POWER @ 50

 

Released on February 7th, 1973, Raw Power by Iggy and the Stooges is celebrating half a century on the shelves today. Despite struggles to get a proper mix of the album, it continues to stand as one of the most ferocious proto-punk albums of all time. It’s fierceness and savage intensity have made it a high water mark for aggressive rock & roll and kept it as a template for bands who aspire to ascend to its brutal heights.

By 1972, The Stooges were in a shambles. With their first two LPs failing to garner any serious record sales, the group had fallen into despair and substance abuse, with Iggy slipping deeper and deeper into his heroine addiction. The group had functionally ceased to exist and Iggy had gone off to London to try to dry out under the wing of David Bowie. Bowie had long been a fan of Iggy’s and was appreciative of the Stooges’ song writing abilities, far more than most of Pop’s peers of the time. While in London, Iggy was planning on working with guitarist James Williamson, who had handled second guitar duties on the last Stooges tour, and Pop had even negotiated a solo record deal with CBS. As he and Williamson began to try to get the ball rolling in the UK, they soon found themselves struggling to put together an acceptable rhythm section from the local talent available to them. It was at this point that Williamson suggested recruiting original Stooges, the Asheton brothers, Ron and Scott, with Ron reluctantly agreeing to move over to bass so that Williamson could handle all the guitar duties. This effectively reconstituted the Stooges, albeit in a modified configuration, but the solo contract with CBS would still necessitate the band being identified as “Iggy and the Stooges”.

With Williamson on guitar, the songwriting took on a different feel than the first two albums, moving away from their funkier grooves into a more anthemic hard rock kind of sound, though the label insisted on including two “ballads” on the new album to act as counterpoints on each side of the record. Recording took place at CBS’ London studio, occurring from September 10 to October 6, 1972, with Iggy acting as producer. After this, an initial mix of the album was done by Pop, but the results of that were rather botched as he mixed most of the instruments into one stereo channel with the vocals mixed into the other, with little regard for balance or tone quality. Because of budgetary constraints, they had little to work with to remedy that situation, but they were able to hire David Bowie to come in for a day and do a mix of the album. Bowie recalled:

“(It was) the most absurd situation I encountered … the first time I worked with Iggy Pop. He wanted me to mix Raw Power, so he brought the 24-track tape in, and he put it up. He had the band on one track, lead guitar on another and him on a third. Out of 24 tracks there were just three tracks that were used. He said 'see what you can do with this'. I said, 'Jim, there's nothing to mix'. So we just pushed the vocal up and down a lot. On at least four or five songs that was the situation.”

However when Morgan Neville's documentary film on Raw Power was released in 2010, they demonstrated that each individual instrument was indeed recorded on its own track on the original multi-track tapes, suggesting that Bowie was either mistaken or working with a copy that had mixed down the instruments on to the same track, likely the rejected mix Iggy had done before Bowie’s arrival.

What Bowie achieved with those limited resources has always been debatable, with some liking it while most found it murky and lacking in low end. Thus began the long, sordid story of alternate mixes of the LP. The original rejected Iggy mix was eventually released as “Rough Power”, and then, in 1997, Iggy himself created a brand new mix from scratch using the original multi-track tapes. This version, while addressing some of the issues with the Bowie mix in terms of lack of bottom end and buried drums, ended up creating its own issues as Iggy brought back in a lot of bits Bowie had cut out and pinned the levels on everything to such an extent that it introduced a layer of digital distortion which unsettled many purists and fans of the original LP’s mix. Personally, I find the Iggy mix more listenable overall, though the saturation caused by the excessive loudness does obliterate any sense of dynamics in the recordings. Therefore, it remains a flawed album no matter how you slice it, but a landmark, nonetheless.

Upon its release, the LP received a lot of critical high praise, but commercially, it was simply too extreme for any radio play and barely grazed the bottom of the top 200 LP charts in the US. That failure was a final nail in the coffin for the Stooges and, though Iggy and Williamson did attempt what would become another aborted project together, subsequently released as Kill City (1975), Pop would end up returning to Bowie’s care for a far more successful solo career with his back to back albums, The Idiot and Lust for Life (1977). The legacy of Raw Power, however, like the previous two Stooges LPs, would grow over the decades to enshrine all three of these albums as precursors to, and fundamental foundation stones for, the punk revolution to come.

NURSE WITH WOUND - SALT MARIE CELESTE @ 20

 

Marking its 20th anniversary this month is Nurse With Wound’s Salt Marie Celeste, which was released in February of 2003. An early, minimal mix of the album was issued as “Salt” in 2002, in a split limited edition release with Current 93 called “Music From the Horse Hospital”. That version featured an hour long mix of only the swelling, wave like drone which forms the foundation of the composition. The full version adds various sounds of groaning and creaking wood, creating an audio environment meant to evoke the ambiance of a ghost ship - lost, forgotten and adrift in the void of an endless ocean.

The reference in the title is to the infamous Marie Celeste brigantine ship found adrift and deserted in the Atlantic Ocean off the Azores Islands on December 4, 1872. The reasons for her fate have never been resolved...

“At the salvage hearings in Gibraltar following her recovery, the court's officers considered various possibilities of foul play, including mutiny by Mary Celeste's crew, piracy by the Dei Gratia crew or others, and conspiracy to carry out insurance or salvage fraud. No convincing evidence supported these theories.”
- Wikipedia

In 2022, to mark the 20th anniversary of its original recording by Steven Stapleton and Colin Potter, a double CD edition was released containing both variations of the recording.

23 SKIDOO - THE CULLING IS COMING @ 40

 

Released on February 4th, 1983, the sophomore LP from 23 Skidoo, The Culling Is Coming, is marking its 40th anniversary today. It’s an album of deeply ritualistic significance and one of the strangest releases in the group’s catalogue.

Side one of the album, A Summer Rite, was recorded live at 11.23 AM on July 17, 1982, during the very first WOMAD (World of Music, Arts and Dance) festival, organized by Peter Gabriel in Shepton Mallet, UK. The performance featured David Tibet of Current 93 on Tibetan Trumpet. The original side B material, A Winter Ritual, was recorded at Dartington Music College, on October 23, 1982. The original pressing of the LP has a lock groove between the 4th and 5th tracks on side A, with "Command as fuck" inscribed in the vinyl. The A side duration is therefore listed as “infinite” (∞). The B-side has a precise duration of 23 minutes. The later CD edition swapped the order of the LP sides and added a third section, An Autumn Journey, to fill out the additional CD capacity.

The music on the album is heavily influenced by eastern Gamelan percussion & gongs, combining that sound with more experimental Industrial ambience and sonic manipulations. With that influence, it is the group’s least rhythmic release, focusing as it does on ritual ambiences and occult themes.

FUN BOY THREE - WAITING @ 40

 

Marking it’s 40th anniversary this month is the second and final album from Fun Boy Three, Waiting, which was released in February of 1983. Produced by Talking Heads main man, David Byrne, The album upped the ante in terms of production values and song writing sophistication while sharpening the group’s ability to make pointed sociopolitical commentary within the context of accessible pop music.

The first FB3 album, which is still my personal favorite, was nonetheless something of a rushed affair and the group didn’t have the luxury of fully developing their ideas. Despite this, they still created an album loaded with innovative and challenging music, all the while keeping the proceedings “fun” and playful and tuneful enough to make a mark on the singles charts. But their second album gave them a chance to catch their breath and indulge in a more evolved and advanced state of song-craft. Whereas their debut focused on tribal African inspired percussion, the focus for this album seemed to move back to the UK and delve into an almost “music hall” retro feel reminiscent of 1930s pop music. The instrumentation on the album was also expanded to include a broader palette of sounds, from strings to horns to keyboards. The sparseness of the debut was replaced by a more layered sound, though never so dense as to lose the cleanliness of the mix. Lyrically, songs like The More I See drive home the disillusionment hiding behind the happy melodies, though on the other hand, Our Lips Are Sealed brings things back to something less confrontational, becoming a major hit for the group. In an interview with Terry Hall, he commented on how, when he first met David Byrne, the two literally just stared at each other in silence for ages, sizing each other up, but once the ice was broken, the collaboration turned out to be perfect for the album.

With the recent, untimely passing of Terry Hall, the beauty of this album has become far more poignant. I must confess that it took me a long, long time to finally appreciate this record. I LOVED the experimentation and spontaneity of the debut, so when this was released, if felt too “conventional” for me and too mainstream. As I’ve reevaluated it in recent years, I’ve come to appreciate its more subtle qualities. It conceals its teeth behind its sealed lips, but it’ll take a bite out of you when you least expect it.

BE BOP DELUXE - DRASTIC PLASTIC @ 45

 

Released in February of 1978, Be Bop Deluxe’s fifth and final studio LP, Drastic Plastic, turns 45 years old this month. It’s an album which would mark a pronounced shift in the group’s style, radically aligning them with the minimalist zeitgeist of the era, which had become the driving thrust for alternative music by the end of the ‘70s.

Recording for the album began in 1977, though not until Bill Nelson’s management had convinced him to stick with Be Bop Deluxe for one more go-round. He was ready to pack the band in at that point and head into a vastly different direction from the lush progressive rock the band had made their stock-in-trade over the course of their previous four albums. The stripped down, lean and angular sounds of the “new wave” and “punk” scenes were seducing Nelson towards a tougher, tighter approach, just as Bowie had been pursuing on his “Berlin” albums with Brian Eno. Nelson had a dystopian futurist vision in his head and was determined to realize it.

The band decamped to the south of France for recording, mostly inspired by Nelson’s love of French surrealist film maker Jean Cocteau. They booked into Chateau Saint Georges studio, which offered a picturesque, romantic backdrop for recording. It’s a setting which seems at odds with Nelson’s brittle visions of tomorrow, yet it suited the work in the end. The band were intending to record a double LP for this release, but the label ended up curtailing that ambition and insisted on keeping it down to a single album’s worth of material. That meant that a number of songs recorded for the album ended up shelved until after the band had broken up, eventually appearing on the posthumous, “Best of and the Rest Of Be Bop Deluxe” double album a couple of years later.

The material that did make the album showed off the band’s new sound with a collection of romanticized modern visions of life truly in the “air age”, with robots cleaning the home while doubling as personal attendants/jailers (Superenigmatix), collapsing civilizations (Panic In the World), fascist governments (New Precision) and science fiction telepathy (Electrical Language). Repetitive tape-looped drums and sharp, economical guitar and keyboard arrangements kept the album feeling steely and precise. The softer side of the band wasn’t completely eradicated, however. Visions of Endless Hopes is a languid instrumental built around fluttering mandolins, while the album’s closer, Islands of the Dead, is a loving memorial to Nelson’s recently deceased father, with the vocal recording performed on an exterior balcony of the chateau at sunset.

The cover graphics for the album were created by legendary ‘70s design house, Hipgnosis, who were responsible for some of the most striking LP imagery of the decade. While it’s not their most notable work on the front, showing a room of primary colored surfaces with an enigmatic plastic “apparatus” superimposed, the rear band photo is far more intriguing. The band are shown in a bare room with TV sets for heads, each showing the performer’s real head on the screen. Nelson’s screen, however, is glitching while another set on the floor shows his head in focus. It’s one of my all-time favorite band photos and perfectly captures the mood of the LP within.

At the time of its release, it received middling reviews and modest record sales. After a bit of live touring to support the LP, Nelson had his fill and was ready to move on to realizing his vision more fully with his next project, Bill Nelson’s Red Noise, and their only album, Sound on Sound. Nelson has commented that he was ready to move on to Red Noise for Drastic Plastic and he felt that the end results for that album were a compromise of what he’d really wanted to do because he was convinced to stick with BBD. You can hear the difference with Red Noise as it is singularly uncompromising in its vision and never lets up its assault on the senses. While it may not have been the record he wanted, Drastic Plastic has always been one of my favorite BBD LPs, right from the first time I heard it. There’s a lot about it that has retained its relevance to the world at large, with its themes of alienation, automation and exploitation all serving as prophetic of the times to come. The recent deluxe edition’s 2021 remix offers a fresh interpretation of the music, allowing listeners to hear details which were previously obscured, bringing fresh life to an album which has never had the recognition it truly deserves.

FANNY - MOTHER’S PRIDE @ 50

 

Celebrating it’s 50th anniversary this month is the fourth and penultimate album from rock’s premier major label all girl group, Fanny, with Mother’s Pride, which was released in February of 1973. It was also the last album to feature original members June Millington (guitar) & Alice DeBuhr (drums), With the help of producer Todd Rundgren, it was arguably their most sophisticated album, though perhaps not their hardest rocking effort.

After their stint in London to record their their third album, Fanny Hill, at the illustrious Abbey Road Studios, they were back on American soil and ensconced in Todd Rundgren’s Secret Sound Studio in New York City for their next LP. When it came time to pick a producer, Todd was the only name all the band members could agree on, at least as far as people who were available. Todd’s approach with the band was to move them away from the hard rock sound of the previous records and into a more pop friendly feel. Ultimately, this ended up being at odds with some members of the group, who were hoping for a more raw, rockin' sound. Both June and Jean Millington felt the end result was overproduced and they were also resentful that he was so guarded about the production process, shutting the band out of the mixing process entirely. While this resulted in disappointment for some in the band, critically, the response was mostly very favorable, with many finding the combination of Fanny’s music with Rundgren’s production sophistication a perfect marriage. Personally, I find it hard to argue with Todd’s results as he managed to bring out a layered and varied complexity to their performances and songwriting that weren’t as apparent on their previous records. The exception to that being the off key vocals from Alice DeBuhr on Solid Gold, which were reportedly recorded when she was off-her-face drunk. Even there, however, Rundgren’s production prowess manages to make it seem deliberate enough to work in the finished mix.

As richly loaded with quality music and performances as the album is, it didn’t help break the group in any meaningful way. The tensions of the recording process and the industry in general ultimately proved too much for June and Alice and the group fractured with them jumping ship to leave bassist/sister Jean Millington and keyboardist Nickey Barclay holding the bag to reconstitute the band. They’d pull it together to record one final album with original drummer, Brie Howard, and new guitarist, Patti Quatro. As Fanny faded into obscurity by the back half of the ’70s, the beauty of this album was lost for a long time until the past few years, when a revival of interest in the group brought a new wave of appreciation for their pioneering efforts.