JOHN & YOKO - UNFINISHED MUSIC NO. 1. TWO VIRGINS @ 55

 

Marking its 55th anniversary today is the debut album from John Lennon & Yoko Ono, Unfinished Music No. 1. Two Virgins, which was released on November 11th, 1968. A record like this can only exist if one of the people making it is a Beatle who doesn't have to worry about whether anyone buys it and has access to a record label owned by his band. That's not to say this shouldn't exist. The fact it does is a wonderful thing because it's such an incredibly bizarre, self-indulgent mess of chaotic fun. It's the sound of two people rediscovering their inner children and sparking a whirlwind romance in the process.

John Lennon first encountered Yoko Ono in November of 1966 when he was invited to attend one of her exhibitions in London. She was an obscure Japanese underground artist and John found her work possessed a decidedly positive world view, something he found exceedingly appealing given the general pessimism of most alternative artists. After the exhibit, he kept in contact with her and, two years later, while wife Cynthia Lennon was away from their home on vacation, he invited Yoko over to spend the evening in order to show her his home studio and play her some of his sound experiments. These were totally avant-garde improvisations he knew the Beatles would NEVER have any interest in, but Yoko was fascinated by them and the two began to work on making some noises together that night. The next morning, Cynthia came home unexpectedly and discovered the pair dressed in matching white robes and sitting cross legged on the floor, staring into each other's eyes.

What they created for this album was essentially a lot of random incidental noises and vocalizations layered over-top of a series of tape loops and snippets of pre-recoded bits and pieces. They had no arrangements in mind or plans for any of it. Lennon described Unfinished Music as "...saying whatever you want it to say. It is just us expressing ourselves like a child does, you know, however he feels like then. What we're saying is make your own music. This is Unfinished Music."

After it was recorded, Lennon had to spend the next six months trying to persuade the rest of the Beatles to release it on Apple Records. Their hesitance was somewhat justified, given it was generally reviled by both fans of the band and music critics. Actress Sissy Spacek, using the pseudonym Rainbo, even recorded the song "John, You Went Too Far This Time" in response to the album's cover! Despite its bizarre nature, John & Yoko still ended up working with George Harrison to construct the similarly inspired sound collage, Revolution 9, for the "White" album.

The album ended up becoming the first of a trilogy created by the couple, all working within the same strange cacophony of experimentation. Not exactly the kind of "music" most Beatles fans were looking for. As a result, these albums have become rather obscure artifacts within the canon of both The Beatles and John Lennon. The cover for the album featured the couple stark naked in their birthday suits. The distributors for the record were none too pleased with such an image and the LP ended up shipping tucked inside a brown paper bag for retail sales, which were unsurprisingly minimal.

QUEEN - JAZZ @ 45

 

Celebrating its 45th anniversary today is the seventh studio LP from Queen, Jazz, which was released on November 10th, 1978. While it was a commercial success at the time, it followed a pattern of ups and downs for the group throughout the decade, being viciously ridiculed by critics at the time of its release, though radically reassessed in later years in the wake of Freddie Mercury's passing.

Though Queen's rise to superstardom was initially a continuous trajectory upward, after the breakout success of Bohemian Rhapsody and A Night at the Opera in 1975, the band began to suffer through an oscillation of expectations. They continued so sell millions of records, but the persistent expectation to exceed past successes meant they were constantly unfairly dismissed if a record didn't, in some tangible way, seem to surpass what had come before. It's an impossible position to be in as a band. After Rhapsody, A Day at the Races, was met with mixed reviews and suspicion, until News of the World came along the following year and blasted away all the doubts that critics had been pelting the band with, but then Jazz came along and the press seized at the opportunity to feast on the band's flesh anew. Of course, The Game followed next and knocked everyone sideways before the band fell afoul AGAIN with Hot Space. And on it went...

When it came time to record Jazz, the band were staring down the barrel of massive tax bills in the UK, which meant that recording at home simply wasn't economically feasible. They had to scramble to avoid being crushed by the taxman and initially opted to record in France as an alternative. It was while they were attending the nearby Montreux Jazz Festival, likely the inspiration for the album's title, that fate would have them run into David Bowie, who was recording Lodger at Mountain Studios. Bowie recommended the band relocate to that studio and they were impressed enough with the facility that they moved operations there in July, the day after the jazz festival's completion. In fact, they liked it enough that the band would eventually buy the studio and make it their permanent base of operations going forward. On July 19, Brian May's birthday, the band attended the 18th stage of the 1978 Tour de France, which inspired Freddie Mercury to write the lead single, "Bicycle Race". They spent a total of about three weeks in Mountain Studios, only taking a few days off for Roger's birthday on the 26th, when they allegedly trashed a Montreux hotel. Mercury was reportedly seen swinging on a cut-glass chandelier in the hotel during the party! After wrapping up in Montreux, they returned to France to finish off overdubs before sending the mixes to New York for mastering.

For the packaging of the album, Roger suggested the minimalist disc graphic he'd spotted as graffiti on the Berlin Wall. The internal gate-fold photo showed a wide angle shot of the band's gear displayed in Mountain Studio. With Bicycle Race and Fat Bottom Girls picked as the premier double A single for the album, the band concocted a promotional event held at Wembley Stadium in the UK. They staged a nude female bicycle race that would provide images for the poster, included with early pressings of the LP, and the single's sleeve, although they had to paint on bikini bottoms to avoid protests for the single cover. There are also reports that Halford's, who supplied the bicycles on loan, hit Queen with a bill to replace all the seats due to "improper" use. Though the band saw it all as a bit of "cheeky" fun, they came under fire for their objectifying of women. Critic Dave Marsh wrote in his review in Rolling Stone, "Fat Bottomed Girls" treated women "not as sex objects but as objects, period (the way the band regards people in general)", and finished by famously tagging Queen "the first truly fascist rock band".

Most other contemporary reviews of the album were similarly disparaging. Mitchell Cohen of CREEM called Jazz "absurdly dull" and filled with "dumb ideas and imitative posturing". Village Voice critic Robert Christgau said the album was not wholly bad, even finding "Bicycle Race" humorous, although he said Queen sounded like the band 10cc "with a spoke, or a pump, up their ass". Sales of the album and its singles were certainly respectable, but the tactic of releasing another double A-side single didn't pay off as well as it did with We Will Rock You b/w We Are the Champions from the previous album. With critics of the era behaving like a tank of hungry sharks, any signs of weakness were a clarion calls to start the feeding frenzy. Queen were CLEARLY on their way OUT, so you'd better get your bite in before they sank into the abyss.

In the years since its release, Jazz has most certainly been given a repeal of such undeserved harsh judgments, with both critics and fans coming to recognized the album's strengths. Within its baker's dozen songs, the band took fans on a breakneck, whiplash inducing thrill ride of styles and techniques. Rather than a chaotic hodgepodge, it's a roller-coaster ride, from the bizarre mania of Mustapha, to the menacing funk-rock of More of That Jazz, the band keep listeners on the edge of their seat through every turn. Numerous songs became live staples and Don't Stop Me Now, in particular, became Freddie Mercury's most quintessential composition, embodying the singer's philosophy and attitude in a way that has even been scientifically recognized as one of the most catchy songs ever written!

Personally, while I loved the album at the time it came out, and still do, back at the end of 1978, I was beginning a journey into a different realm. Though I started that year by joining the official Queen fan club, and stocked up my wardrobe with Queen T-shirts, badges and belt buckles (and I DID go to high school with ALL of it on!), by the end of 1978, I'd discovered music by RAMONES, The Clash, Sex Pistols, DEVO & Elvis Costello, so Jazz was kind-of the "beginning of the end" of my obsession with Queen. 1979 would not see them issue a new studio LP, only the uneven, poorly received Live Killers, and while I bought The Game in 1980, it was the last Queen LP I'd spend my money on for at least two decades. But nostalgia brought me back to the boys eventually and I still appreciate giving this record a spin now and then.

THE MONKEES - HEAD (FILM) @ 55

 

It was 55 years ago today when the one and only feature film by The Monkees, HEAD, officially hit theatre screens with its New York City premier on November 6th, 1968. While the film systematically dismantled the band's carefully cultivated pre-teen "manufactured image" in the hopes of appealing to a more mature, progressive counterculture audience, it ended up only alienating existing fans while the hipsters never even gave it a chance due to the band's reputation. And while it was initially a staggering commercial flop, ravaged by critics of the time, something strange happened in the decades following its release. Since then, it has become a deeply treasured cult film, inspiring in-depth analysis and speculation and, in retrospect, is seen as one of the very few films of the psychedelic era to actually capture the true experience of the trip, rather than portray it within the context of a "cautionary tale".

At the time the idea began floating about for doing a Monkees movie, the TV series was wrapping up its second and final season. Both the band and the show's producers were looking to break out of the format of the TV show. While it had been an innovation in TV structures at the time, it still had its own very rigid internal formula, one designed to mostly appeal to a younger audience and was only mildly concerned with making any kind of philosophical or political statements. Everyone essentially knew they simply weren't interested in creating a feature length version of a Monkees TV show episode. In order to help redefine their position and plot a course forward, Bob Rafelson, the show's creator and producer, hired friend and then an unknown young actor by the name of Jack Nicholson to help with the script. As his first foray into the world of feature films, Rafelson was entirely expecting that this might be his only chance to make a movie, so he set the basic premise that he wanted HEAD to be a collection of vignettes, each with a different reference to a Hollywood trope or style. If this was the only movie he'd ever get the chance to make, he wanted to make every kind of movie he's ever loved.

In order to flesh out the details of this conception, Bob, Jack and the band ensconced themselves at an Ojai, California, resort, where, with tape recorder constantly rolling, they got high and brainstormed their little hearts out, spewing forth a barrage of disparate ideas and scenarios, allowing nothing to limit their imagination. At one point, someone asked Bob what the blackest thing in the universe could be and, thinking for a moment, he concluded it was Victor Mature's hair, thus concocting the premise that the entire movie takes place in his hair. After the weekend brainstorming session was completed, Jack took the tapes and began the impossible task of trying to stitch all these crazy notions together into a script that could make some sort of thematic sense. He had to craft ways to get from one scene to another with no apparent connection between them. In the end, he came up with an approach that took the viewer on a journey as if they were watching the TV, flipping through channels and landing on random programs, with a continuity of themes that would keep surfacing again and again with each change of the channel. Ideas of media control, packaging, pandering to expectations, confinement, interpretation and escape all wove themselves together through this madcap journey, dissecting the band's image and intent, and rebuilding it into a commentary on popular culture and the nature of reality itself. Ambitious stuff for something that looked like a hodgepodge mess from the outside.

The music for the film was obviously still an integral component and the band made every effort to ensure that its maturity and sophistication went well beyond anything they'd done before. With two original songs from Peter, one from Mike, one from Harry Nilsson and two more from Carole King, they had a half dozen solid compositions to work with. As well as the band's own performances, session musicians included such luminaries as Neil Young, Leon Russell, Ry Cooder and Stephen Stills. For Mike's Circle Sky, the band were filmed performing the song live, with absolutely zero augmentation or post production overdubs. It's a roaring proto-punk raver that shows the group off as the tight, intense garage band they had become in the real world. Carole King's Porpoise Song became the visual highlight of the film as they utilized the then unknown technique of solarization, a process which was expensive and difficult to achieve and which ultimately caused delays in the post production phase, pushing back the release date. For the accompanying soundtrack album, Jack Nicholson was put in charge of editing the LP together, taking the half dozen songs and interspersing them with a cut-up assemblage of audio and score music cues from the film. The end result is something akin to the likes of Nurse With Wound or Negativland, with bizarre juxtapositions of dialogue and sound effects creating bridges between the album's core musical elements.

Production on the film got off to a rocky start, with the band discovering that only Jack would get scripting credits, something that was necessitated by industry union rules at the time requiring a single name to be associated with the screenplay. There were also disputes over the wages being paid to the band, which resulted in the group going on strike the first day of shooting, with only Peter showing up to the set. It was pretty tense and the friction between Rafelson and the band afterwards never really resolved itself, leaving a permanent rift between the producer and the band.

Promotion of the film was approached with the same sense of experimentation which had driven the creation of the movie. Inspired by Andy Warhol's film, Blowjob, which shows nothing but a man's head and expressions as he receives oral copulation, the poster for the film and the TV ad showed the head of John Brockman, who did the PR for the film. As a gag, the title, HEAD, was chosen because the producers were looking forward to their next film project, where their promotions could proudly proclaim, "from the people who gave you HEAD". The ad taglines summarized it as a "most extraordinary adventure, western, comedy, love story, mystery, drama, musical, documentary satire ever made (And that's putting it mildly)." The band themselves were conspicuously absent.

The evening of the NYC premier, Rafelson commented that he and Nicholson were arrested "for trying to put a sticker on a police officer's helmet as he mounted his horse." With the film deliberately destroying the mythology of the band, young Monkees fans were completely turned off by the product and the critics took it as an opportunity to destroy the band in print. With nearly nonexistent box-office receipts, the film vanished from theatres with little notice and it began its journey through the cultural underworld, waiting to be reappraised by the public.

My first exposure to the movie came on December 30, 1974, when CBS aired it as their Late Movie after the 11 o'clock news. I happened to be out with my parents at their friends place, where I stumbled on the film on TV and got a chance to see roughly half of it before I was yanked away from the screen so we could go home. I desperately tried to find it when we did get home, but it seemed to have vanished from the airwaves. I was a fan of the TV series and had no idea what this was, but I knew I LOVED IT! I was only 11 years old at the time, but something about it mesmerized me. Yet I had no opportunity to see the complete film again until about 1989, when I was loaned a VHS tape with a dub of the film on it, accompanied by John Water's Desperate Living. I watched the two movies while out of my mind on mescaline and had a religious experience with both of them. At that point, I became an evangelist for HEAD, insisting on showing it to everyone and anyone who I could get to sit down in front of my TV for 90 minutes, preferably under the influence of a suitably potent psychedelic substance. There wasn't a single case where the film didn't make an impact, and there are a number of converts who were created by my efforts. I eventually got VHS, then DVD editions of the movie and, once the internet came into common use, discovered that there were many others out there who had come to appreciate the movie the way I do. I still consider it in my top three favourite films of all time, which includes the aforementioned Desperate Living, and The Holy Mountain by Alejandro Jodorowsky.

In recent years, there have been many people who have done in-depth explorations of the film's themes and structure. It has spawned actual university courses! The book The Monkees, Head, and the 60s, written by Peter Mills, who taught the university course, offers an excruciatingly detailed exploration of every element of the film, including the threads that lead to its creation and the aftermath of its release. For many, myself included, it is a critical document of 1960s counterculture. Director, Bob Rafelson, went on to produce groundbreaking films like Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces. For fans of the band, who have long since embraced the film in all its eccentric glory, it has become an indispensable chapter in the band's legacy, one which proves beyond any doubt that they were artistically and creatively valid beyond any criticism for their "manufactured" origin.

BLACK SABBATH -SABBATH BLOODY SABBATH @ 50

 

Marking its golden anniversary this month is the fifth studio LP from Black Sabbath, Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, which was released 50 years ago in November of 1973. As the band struggled to regroup after an exhausting tour and expand their musical pallet, their eventual success created perhaps the album defining the pinnacle of their career.

On the back of the release of their previous LP, VOL. 4, the band had burned themselves out on a tour which ended up being cut short when guitarist Tony Iommi collapsed during their LA gig from a combination of overwork and overindulgence, blazing out on the tail of a massive cocaine binge which had been going on for days. The situation for the guitarist was nearly life-threatening and precipitated the band taking their first actual vacation period since the group was founded. After spending some time apart to rest and recuperate, the initial plan was to take the same approach to their next album as had been so successful on their previous, so they booked into the same LA studios and began their first attempts at buckling down and getting to work. The problem was that Tony was bone dry in the inspiration department and the rest of the band were entirely dependant on him to get the ball rolling when it came to songwriting. Other factors, like their continued substance abuse, also conspired to diffuse their focus and make it impossible to recreate the atmosphere of the previous album. Even their favourite room in the studio wasn't available as it had been overtaken by a massive synthesizer system installed by Stevie Wonder.

After floundering in frustration in LA for a month, the group decided a change of venue was in order and opted to head back to the UK where they rented Clearwell Castle in the Forest of Dean, Gloucestershire, England, in which the likes of Led Zeppelin, Mott the Hoople and Deep Purple wrote and recorded. The castle provided a suitably ominous creepiness for them to work, with the armoury and dungeon offering particularly spooky settings. Band members even reported sightings of ghostly apparitions while wandering the castle's dimly lit hallways, though given their penchant for chemical indulgence, who knows what they actually saw. The group were also prone to pranking each other in the most vicious manner, which significantly amped up the sense of fear and paranoia, resulting in some members refusing to sleep there and, in the case of drummer Bill Ward, who often seemed to get the worst of it, he insisted on sleeping with a dagger at hand.

Mayhem aside, the creative damn burst, thanks to the ominous setting, when Iommi stumbled on the riff for the album's title track. Up to that point, they were seriously starting to think that they were finished, but once they hit on that riff, they knew they were back. By this time, they were also looking to expand the diversity of their sound, so they started to incorporate more experimental elements like strings, keyboards and synthesizer. Ozzy had picked up a MOOG synth and the group even got Yes keyboardist, Rick Wakeman, to guest on Sabbra Cadabra, though he refused payment for his work and was happy to receive a few beers as compensation. The group even attempted experiments with instruments like bagpipes and sitars, but these proved unsatisfactory and were abandoned from the sessions. At one point, members of Led Zeppelin dropped in for a visit and an impromptu jam session was recorded, but never released.

Once the album was completed and released, the band were surprised to find that they actually created something the British music press were willing to acknowledge as a good album. Their previous works had notoriously been dismissed by UK critics, so it was a surprising about-face to finally receive a bit of praise from this quarter. But as Ozzy later commented, he felt like he should have called it quits from the band after this release as the writing was on the wall that their peak had been reached. Internal conflicts and tensions between the band members were about to take their tole. They were far too dependant on Iommi to get songs written and Geezer Butler was also feeling like Osborne was far too reliant on him to come up with lyrics.

The album went on to become a commercial success as well as garnering critical raves. Within the scope of the band's canon, many consider it the high water mark of their career. After this, their conflicts and personal demons would undercut their ability to work together successfully. They still had three more LPs in their pockets before the original lineup would fracture, but none of those would be considered in the same light as their first five.

FRIPP & ENO - (NO PUSSYFOOTING) @ 50

 

Released 50 years ago this month, the debut LP from Fripp & Eno, (No Pussyfooting), is marking its golden anniversary. As well as being a notable cornerstone in the evolution of ambient music, the album's technical innovations are worthy of appreciation. It's a minimalist approach which primarily used Robert Fripp's guitar as the principal sound source (although Eno does incorporate some synth into the background loops of the second track). The key innovation here is Eno's implementation of a dual reel-to-reel tape system, which linked the two decks in such a way that sounds recorded on one deck were carried over by the tape for playback on the second, which in turn would feed the sound back to the first. The effect was to create a long echo effect with a correspondingly extended decay envelop. The result was a droning sound, which multiplied a single note into near infinite overlapping layers, where subtle variations in playing could create complex harmonic interactions. The album, using this technique, includes two side-long compositions, recorded at discrete sessions nearly a year apart: "The Heavenly Music Corporation" on side one, and "Swastika Girls" on side two. The title for the latter song originated with the discovery of a porno magazine fragment on the pavement, which Eno happened upon while walking towards the studio the night of the mix. The page featured the title phrase, along with a photo of naked girls with swastika emblems on their arms. The fragment was brought to the studio and kept on the mixing desk throughout the production.

While the titles for the album and "songs" offer zero indication of any real connection to the sound of the record, the cover photo is quite a literal interpretation, showing the two artists sitting in a small mirror lined room, with infinite reflections receding off into the distance. They are separated by a small table, upon which are a series of "nudie" cards, displayed in a manner which appears to suggest some sort of perverse Tarot reading.

At the time of its release, the album was very poorly received. The record label was utterly opposed to it, given that Eno was launching his post Roxy Music solo career in parallel with the issuing of this bizarre and inexplicable album. With "Here Come the Warm Jets" featuring mostly radio friendly pop music, they were fretting over fans and critics becoming confused by the non-sequitur nature of (No Pussyfooting). The album did receive some favourable reviews, but most critics ignored it, and commercial sales were minimal enough to ensure the album stayed well away from any charts. Yet in retrospect, and with the benefit of hindsight, the visionary nature of the album has become far more apparent, and subsequent reappraisal has elevated it to a substantive level of influence and admiration. It certainly had an impact on artists like David Bowie, who would soon involve both musicians in some of his most innovative works.