PUBLIC IMAGE LTD - COMMERCIAL ZONE @ 40

 

Released on January 30th, 1984, what was supposed to be Public Image Ltd's fourth studio album, Commercial Zone, turns 40 years old today. I use that qualifier as a way to indicate that, while this album was released, it has never been considered an official entry in the PiL canon of albums, at least not by John Lydon. Its existence is purely the result of the actions of former guitarist, Keith Levene, trying to salvage the wreckage of a project he was exiled from before it could be completed.

After the release of Flowers of Romance in April of 1981 and following the disastrous Ritz NYC multimedia performance-turned-riot in May of that year, PiL were fed up with their situation in the UK. London didn't feel like home anymore and John Lydon was exasperated with the constant harassment of the police, who regularly executed unjustified raids on his Gunter Grove townhouse, usually in the middle of the night while acting on spurious reports of illegal activities. It was a campaign of persecution being pursued by officials to try to silence someone who'd made too much of the wrong kind of noises. Fortuitously, while in NYC to do the Ritz show, they had established some contacts in the city, so John, Keith & Jeanette Lee packed up and headed to the Big Apple shortly after the Ritz debacle.

Not long after moving, John and Jeanette headed off to Italy so Lydon could shoot his parts for the film, Cop Killer (aka, Corrupt, Order of Death, etc). For some unpublished reasons, when John returned from the shoot, Jeanette was no longer in tow, having returned to the UK, with Lydon announcing she'd left the band, a situation that ultimately inspired the song, Where Are You? (Lou Reed pt2). While Lydon and Lee were abroad, Keith had started sketching ideas for the next PiL album. As John was shooting, he'd supposedly negotiated a deal for PiL to provide soundtrack music for the film, with he and Keith working out ideas by humming them over the phone on long distance calls, but the soundtrack never materialized, though the song, The Slab/Order of Death did result from their long distance brainstorming.

Once they'd set up a loft to live in and contracted Park South Studios for recording, John and Keith set about trying to reconstitute the band. Rumours of their splitting had circulated in the press early in 1982, likely partially triggered by Jeanette Lee mysteriously bailing from the PiL camp. Their contract with Warner Bros in the US had also expired, so they no longer had any US label support, though Virgin were still onboard in the UK. Getting a band together to play gigs became a necessity as a way to generate some income and finance recording.

Initially, Ken Lockie from Cowboys International was working with Lydon and Levene, contributing to a number of early recordings, but he quickly left the project and none of his contributions were ultimately used. Former PiL drummer, Martin Atkins, who had worked on Metal Box and Flowers of Romance, as well as touring with the band throughout 1980, was in NYC at the time, performing with his own band, Brian Brain. John and Keith went down to one of his gigs and proposed he rejoin the group. To fill in on bass, Martin brought in Pete Jones, also from Brian Brain, thus completing a functional lineup. Throughout the latter half of 1982, they alternated between playing a series of gigs across the US and returning to NYC to record at Park South. The engineer for the studio, Bob Miller, became heavily involved in the production of the recordings to the point of becoming a de facto fifth member, and the makings of a new LP began coming together, with announcements of releases being made to the press.

On stage, the band had redeemed themselves from the chaotic fiasco of the Ritz riot, offering up a rejuvenated, tight, aggressive and potent version of PiL, sprinkling their sets with some of the new songs that were coming together during their studio time. I got to see them in Seattle, and it was one of the most memorable live gigs I've ever been privileged to attend. There was a palpable tension in the atmosphere that gave the show a distinct edge, like everything could fly apart at any second, but somehow they managed to keep a lid on it all. They even kicked off some of their shows with a recording of a new song, Blue Water, which was initially planned to be the first single released before the end of the year.

With the location of the studio in a heavily industrialized section of the city, there was a sign nearby that read, "YOU ARE NOW ENTERING A COMMERCIAL ZONE". The group felt this was a perfect title for the band's planned new album. The irony of it made sense given how Flowers of Romance was so decidedly NONE commercial, and the new material was striving towards a level of accessibility that was relatively new territory for the band. Having painted themselves into a corner with their avant-garde leanings, the only thing left to do was make some unapologetic pop music, of course with PiL's own idiosyncratic twists.

Along with the touring and recording, a couple of new corporate entities were created to help manage various aspects of the band's activities, ostensibly to finally bring to fruition the promise that PiL were not just a "band", but a "corporation". Public Enterprise Productions (PEP) and Multi Image Corporation (MIC) were two of the entities that were announced at press conferences during 1982, and a deal was struck with Stiff Records in the US to licence their recordings released under the "PEP" umbrella. Things were going along so well that the group had managed to secure a contract to tour in Japan, which would be the first market where the new recordings would be released. A 12" single, This Is Not a Love Song, was planned for release in June of 1983. But just as things seemed to be coming together, simmering tensions between John Lydon and Keith Levene erupted into full blown conflict.

The breakdown came to pass in March of 1983 when a disagreement about mixes for the single set the spark. Keith recounted the events as follows:

“I went to the studio to remix 'Love Song', I told them 'I've got to remix it, it's embarrassing.' Martin called John in L.A. and told him I was in the studio. John called up screaming that I should get out of the studio immediately, right? I said 'John, I can't put out a tune that sounds like that!' Martin was just pacing the studio all night until he could call John in L.A. John just said 'Get out of my studio!' I said 'Your studio? Fuck off and die!' When these Japanese guys came that morning to pick up the tapes, I said to Martin 'Fuck it – I'll give them both mixes and I'll let them decide. When the Japanese guys arrived John got on the phone from L.A. at 5 am yelling 'Get out of my fucking studio!' And me replying 'It's not your fucking studio!' and so on. A load of shit went wrong literally in the space of 18 hours that made it that I just said 'Fuck it!'”

After returning from LA, Lydon regrouped with Martin Atkins after Pete Jones decided the situation was untenable and also quit the band. Lydon and Atkins recruited a trio of musicians from a local lounge band to play guitar, bass and keyboards, and took them to Japan to fulfill their touring obligations. The result of those shows eventually ended up as the Live In Tokyo album, which was one of the first digitally recorded live albums ever released.

While they were touring Japan, Keith managed to sneak into Park South and clandestinely mixed a bunch of songs, absconding with the resulting masters with no one the wiser from the PiL camp. Keith then took his rough mix of the Commercial Zone LP to London and attempted to present it as a finished PiL album to Virgin's Richard Branson. Virgin rejected the recordings with Lydon insisting that this was NOT his album. Virgin instead releasing the This Is Not A Love Song single in the UK in September. The record proceeded to become the biggest selling PiL single to date, reaching number 5 in the UK charts. Despite that success, Lydon and Atkins abandoned the remainder of the Commercial Zone recordings and headed to a London studio with some session musicians to start the project from scratch, rerecording five of the Commercial Zone tracks and filling out the rest of the album with a few new compositions and a remix of a leftover from Flowers of Romance (1981).

Returning to NYC, Levene decided to release his mix of the Commercial Zone album himself on his own label and, on January 30th, 1983, registered PIL Records Inc. For the first run of the album, he had 10,000 copies pressed at a cost of $8,500, packaged in a plain white slip cover with a modified PiL logo on one label of the record and the track listings and publishing credits on the reverse. Levene distributed the album himself, literally loading up boxes of records on his skateboard and humping them around the city to various record shops. Copies were then sent from these retailers to importers in the UK and Europe. A few copies managed to find their way to Vancouver, which is how I was able to acquire mine, with it appearing unceremoniously in the record bin, taking me entirely by surprise. A second run, with a slightly different track order, a few modified song titles and a black slip cover, was pressed in a run of 30,000 copies in August of 1984, timed to coincide with the release of Lydon's version of the album, This Is What You Want, This Is What You Get.

Put side by side, the comparison is a fascinating exercise in fragmentation. I have always felt it apt to think of the old episode of the original Star Trek series, where Captain Kirk is split into two people, with mutually exclusive personality traits, by a transporter malfunction. If there was a way to combine these two records into one, you'd have a brilliant album. Taken individually, there are similarly mutually exclusive positives and negatives to each. In the case of the Commercial Zone album, the raw energy and passion of the recordings is far more apparent, while the album suffers from lacklustre production values that make it sound like incomplete demos, lacking the spit and polish of proper mastering, as is obvious when comparing it to the Love Song single. In the case of the Lydon album, while it has all the lustre of professional production values, many of its songs, especially those that overlap with the Levene album, feel hollow and perfunctory, missing a sense of authenticity. The Live In Tokyo album didn't help the situation either as it presented a version of PiL that sounded like a cheap cover band attempting to pretend to be the real thing, a situation further exacerbated by the crystal clear digital recording quality. It was like a K-Tel copy, missing all sense of menace or immediacy.

After those two runs, Commercial Zone would never be reissued again by Levene or anyone else, nor was it ever acknowledge by Lydon, though original versions of This Is Not a Love Song, Blue Water and Bad Night would appear on a number of official PiL anthology releases. But in 2014, Levene crowd-funded a project to do a revamped version of the album from scratch. However, rather than re-record the original songs, Levene went to Prague and recorded a jumble of brand new songs, flirting with innumerable musical styles, and initially releasing it to subscribers as raw audio files with no track order or graphics. As much of a hodgepodge as it was, it was a wonderful burst of creativity after a long period of inactivity from Levene, and it was rather fun putting together the album like a puzzle. Eventually, a sequenced and packaged edition was released, but this project would ultimately turn out to be the capstone of Levene's solo career before his death in 2022. After the Prague sessions, he fell out with his principal backer and the resulting legal embattlement ensnared him in a creative limbo, effectively making it impossible for him to release anything under his own name while court cases dragged on.

For many hardcore PiL fans, myself included, Commercial Zone represents the last true PiL album, with Lydon's post Levene version of the band never again reaching the creative heights it had achieved with Keith present, not to mention the loss of the likes of Jah Wobble. Though PiL continues to this day under Lydon's leadership, that sense of adventure, experimentation, risk taking and trouble making would never return to make the band feel like it presented a challenge the way it had been for the first five years of its existence. Keith may have been an agent of chaos in some regards, but that edginess was what made the band such a vital force in the first place.

THE BEATLES - YELLOW SUBMARINE OST @ 55

Released on January 13th, 1969, and celebrating its 55th anniversary today, is the Beatles' original soundtrack for their animated feature film, Yellow Submarine, which premiered in London in July of 1968. It was the tenth studio album by the band, though it does not, in fact, offer a full LP's worth of original Beatles music. The B-side of the LP is entirely taken up with incidental music created for the film by George Martin, the Beatles' producer. It was essentially a contractual obligation release due to the band having singed a deal for the film stipulating that they would create four original songs for the soundtrack and include Martin's score on the release.

The first side of the record features six songs from The Beatles, two of which had been released previously. These included the title track and All You Need Is Love. Of the 4 songs unique to the album, Only A Northern Song, a gripe-song about George's publishing contract, and It's All Too Much, an ode to LSD, were both Harrison compositions, with the former being a rejected leftover from Sgt. Pepper. The latter was originally over 8 minutes in length, but was edited down for the final version. All Together Now is a McCartney composition that was inspired by British music hall singalongs and was considered by its author to be a "throwaway", while Hey Bulldog was contributed by John Lennon, who described it as, "a good-sounding record that means nothing."

The B-side of the LP consists of re-recordings of the incidental music by George Martin and many consider this material to have severely compromised the overall quality of the album. Even John Lennon dismissed the music as "...all this terrible shit" and blamed Brian Epstein, the Beatles' manager, for allowing Martin to participate in the project. Plans were even made to release an EP containing only the 6 Beatles songs, but this release, even though it got as far as mixing mono versions of the songs and mastering, was ultimately abandoned. George Martin certainly wasn't going to agree to have his contribution dropped as this was going to be a major payday for him, given the massive publishing and royalties he'd be getting by piggybacking on The Beatles popularity. This was only changed when a 30th anniversary edition of the soundtrack was released in 1999, which omitted Martin's work and added 9 Beatles songs that appeared throughout the movie, but were not included on the original soundtrack due to being previously released songs.

Though the new material for the soundtrack was recorded and completed before the group started work on their eponymous "White" album, release of Yellow Submarine was delayed until after the White album was released in order to avoid having the impact of that album undermined by the soundtrack. Upon its release, it did well in terms of sales, but the critical response to it was mostly ambivalent and many felt that it simply didn't offer the kind of value that was a consistent trait of previous releases. The Beatles themselves were simply disinterested in the project as a whole and agreed to an animated film simply because it meant the most minimal commitment from them.

Personally, this album was my introduction to the group, at least in a way that left an impression on my very young mind. I couldn't have been older than 5 or six when a babysitter brought the LP over and played it for my brother and I. I was immediately enthralled by it, and it became my touchstone for my first impressions of the band. As such, it has a certain sentimental value, even though it's likely their least significant record.
 

LED ZEPPELIN @ 55

 

Released on January 12th, 1969, the debut eponymous LP by Led Zeppelin turns 55 years old today. Rising from the ashes of The Yardbirds, Led Zeppelin would lay out some of the most important foundation stones for heavy metal & hard rock and become one of the biggest bands in the world throughout the following decade.

Jimmy Page, the man at the centre of the band, spent most of his career in the '60s working as a highly regarded session musician in the UK. In 1966 he joined The Yardbirds, then fronted by guitar legend Jeff Beck, as a bass player, but soon switched to guitar, doubling up on leads with Beck. Beck left the group the following year, putting Page at the helm for their final album, Little Games (1967). By 1968, other members of the group were burning out from touring and also wanting to go in a more acoustic folk oriented direction. Page's penchant for hard and heavy blues put him at odds with that. With contractual obligations still necessitating a number of remaining tour dates, the departing members of The Yardbirds agreed that the group could temporarily continue on stage as the "New Yardbirds", with Page assembling a fresh band.

Page's initial conception was to create a super-group with Jeff Beck, plus Keith Moon and John Entwistle from The Who, and possibly vocalist Steve Winwood or Steve Marriott. This never materialized as all his picks for vocalist turned him down. Instead, he found himself being referred by another declining first pick vocalist, Terry Reid, to a relative unknown by the name of Robert Plant, who in turn brought along drummer John Bonham. Bassist John-Paul Jones, who was someone Page knew from session work, auditioned for the group at his wife's behest, thus completing the lineup. With the four members in place, they fulfilled the touring requirements of the Yardbirds before heading to the studio to start working on some recordings of their own.

With the Yardbirds name no longer legally available for them to use as a recording entity, they began to consider alternatives. At one point, Keith Moon had commented that Page's "super-group" concept would go down like a "lead balloon", disparaging that it would be less than successful, but the irony of the concept appealed to Page. At the suggestion of manager Peter Grant, the name was modified to Led Zeppelin, dropping the "a" in "lead" so people didn't mispronounce it "Leed", and changing "balloon" to "Zeppelin", as it evoked the ideas of both lightness with heaviness as well as combustibility. That cheekiness would also express itself on the album's cover, which featured the famous shot of the Hindenburg bursting into flames. If it was going to be a colossal failure, they might as well have a sense of humour about it.

The band began recording their debut LP in mid September, 1968, completing recording and mixing in a mere 9 days, with production costs covered by Page and Grant. The material for the album was drawn from mostly original songs worked out during their transitional touring phase fulfilling their commitments to the Yardbirds, with some traditional blues material having been percolating within the predecessor group while Page was in charge. With most of the songs well worked out during their contractual obligation tour, they were able to get them down on tape in the studio with little fuss.

Page used a "distance makes depth" approach to production. At the time, most music producers placed microphones directly in front of the amplifiers and drums. For Led Zeppelin, he developed the idea of placing additional microphones some distance from the amplifier (as far as 20 feet) and then recording the balance between the two. The technique would provide Zeppelin's signature sound and flew in the face of the dry-as-bones productions that dominated throughout the 1970s. It wouldn't be until a full decade later that this methodology would become common among the mainstream of rock and pop producers.

Peter Grant then set about nailing down a record contract for the band, and thanks to his bullish determination and a recommendation by Dusty Springfield, managed to secure a deal with Atlantic Records, which included a whopping $143,000 advance, the largest ever paid for an unknown band, sight unseen. The deal included exclusive rights for the band to have complete control over their touring and recording schedules, as well as creative control of all aspects of their products, including mixing, production and album graphics.

Their debut album was released while the band were on their first tour of the US, with the album peaking on the American Billboard charts at #10, and #6 in the UK. Throughout the year after its release, they would tour the US and UK four times and release their sophomore LP before the year's end. It was a blitzkrieg attack on the rock world that set the industry on notice that something massive was about to dominate the world of rock 'n' roll, redefining its sound for a new era.

Initial critical reception for the album, surprisingly, was often negative and harsh. The group emerged at a time when "super-groups" were all the rage, while their bloated promises of greatness mostly turned out to be over-hyped bullshit. As such, the critical tides were against them and they suffered a few slings and arrows before they could prove themselves. Retrospectively, the album has shaken off any and all of the detritus of those early critiques and reigns as one of the band's most highly regarded releases. Its raw energy and intensity have made it representative of the band at their fiercest, most primal peak.

ELVIS COSTELLO & THE ATTRACTIONS ARMED FORCES @ 45

 

Celebrating its 45th anniversary today is the third LP from Elvis Costello, Armed Forces, which was released on January 5th, 1979. It's the album where Costello firmly established himself as in control of his product and where he most fully refined his abilities to write tight, concise pop songs with biting sociopolitical commentaries. 

 

Recorded over an economic six week period beginning at the end of August of the previous year, this was Costello's second outing with his permanent backing band, The Attractions, and the first to credit the band on the album cover. By this time, thanks to an extensive touring schedule, they'd developed a close rapport, and keyboardist Steve Nieve in particular, was much more involved in working out song arrangements. Nick Lowe was back in the producer's chair and even contributed a song for the US version of the album, What's So Funny 'Bout Peace Love and Understanding. 

 

With his first two albums skewed towards a relatively "punk" aesthetic, Costello was conscious about making a move to a more accessible pop sound with this production, moving the band into a more "new-wave" friendly style of performance. The result was a collection of razor-sharp songs that were easy on the ears while still offering his acerbic trademark sense of cultural insight. The working title for the album at the time production began was "Emotional Fascism", which didn't stick, though it may have been more apt given Costello's attitude in the studio. By the time of its production, he'd established himself as the de facto "last word" when it came to any and all creative decisions, a stance which occasionally created tensions between him and Lowe. These strains were minor in comparison to the results that they achieved in the studio, however, with Lowe proving instrumental in delivering the results that Costello demanded. Overall, Lowe maintained a steady hand in the production and engendered a high standard of morale, creating a level of musical agreement within the band that some would say was never matched again.

 

For the record's packaging, the original UK release featured an elaborate gate-fold design with a herd of stampeding elephants on the cover. The North American version, however, had the package simplified and featured an abstract splatter painting instead, with the inner slip utilizing the UK's front image. The US version also omitted the song, Sunday's Best, in favour of Lowe's song.

 

Critical reception and audience response were consistently positive and have remained so over the decades since its release. Many consider the album to be Costello's best work of his career. Personally, this was my introduction to Elvis Costello after having seen his controversial appearance on Saturday Night Live. At the time I picked up the album, I was just beginning my foray into the new territories of "punk" and "new wave", with this album being among the first half dozen records I'd add to my collection from those genres. Along with RAMONES, The Clash, DEVO and Sex Pistols, Elvis Costello was one of the foundational artists who started me along a path of musical exploration that would take me to so many far flung creative shores. 

 

MUSIK VON HARMONIA @ 50

 

 

Celebrating its golden jubilee this month is the debut release from the super-group formed by fusing NEU!'s Michael Rother with Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Moebius of Cluster, with Musik von Harmonia being released in January of 1974.

It was a magical musical union that began when Rother approached Cluster about the possibility of backing him up for a live version of NEU!. Once the trio began to explore their potential, via jamming at Cluster's rural studio in the German village of Forst, it quickly became apparent that a new entity had been given birth. Rother claimed that "it was sort of a musical love at first sight, really... it was just something I hadn’t experienced before." Abandoning his plans for NEU!, Rother stayed on in Forst with his new collaborators and they began recording the material that would end up on their debut LP.

Though the sound of the album clearly contains the DNA of both NEU! and Cluster, there is also a distinct sense that its totality is indeed more than the sum of those parts. It's no wonder the trio were so keen to pursue their partnership when it resulted in an album that has gone on to be considered one of the quintessential titles in the realm of so-called "Krautrock".

The album so impressed Brian Eno that he proclaimed Harmonia as "the world's most important rock band" at the time. In fact, he would end up coming to Germany to work with them, releasing a number of albums from their collaboration. That influence would extent to Eno's work with David Bowie during his acclaimed "Berlin" era, as well as set him further on the path towards developing his concepts for "ambient" music.

CHRIS & COSEY - SONGS OF LOVE & LUST @ 40

Celebrating its 40th anniversary this month is the album that turned a couple of "wreckers of civilization" into pop stars, as Chris & Cosey's Songs of Love & Lust hit the record shops in January of 1984.

As members of COUM Transmissions and Throbbing Gristle, Chris Carter and Cosey Fanni Tutti had created reputations for themselves as controversial outsiders and provocateurs, pushing the boundaries of what was acceptable as both music and art. However, after the release of their confection of a single, October Love Song, late in 1983, they set their sights on creating a kind of music that was seemingly more conventional than anything they'd done previously. Their move in this direction began with their first two albums, Heartbeat, and to a lesser extent, Trance, which had a much more experimental vibe, but Songs of Love & Lust was purposefully and unapologetically striving towards accessible pop music, with intelligible, up front lyrics and melodic hooks that could linger in one's memory of the song, long after it was finished playing. For hardcore "industrial" music fans, this may have come as something of a disappointment, but for those willing to indulge the duo, their flirtations with mainstream song-craft opened up some wondrous possibilities.

This album was my introduction to Chris & Cosey, post TG. I'd only really dabbled in TG prior to this album's release, and didn't know of the existence of Psychic TV or Coil at all. As such, it functioned as a gateway drug into that world, offering infectious hooks and grooving rhythms I could relate to quite easily, where TG had seemed mostly impenetrable. That would all change soon enough, however, as the rest of 1984 would find me backtracking through Throbbing Gristle's catalogue, as well as Chris & Cosey's earlier releases, and eventually discovering PTV and Coil, until I was immersing myself in their entire oeuvre of sonic mayhem. But this was the album that truly piqued my curiosity and stuck with me, continuing to offer up its delights all these decades later. There are still songs on this album that I consider some of their all time best works.