PUBLIC IMAGE LTD - DEATH DISCO @ 45

 

Released 45 years ago today, it's that harbinger of mutant disco and Public Image Ltd's second single, Death Disco, which was released on June 29th, 1979. It was a glimpse into the striking new direction the band were heading for their soon to be unleashed Metal Box album. The single fused the otherworldly sound of dub with a furious disco 4x4 rhythm, underpinned by Jah Wobble's sonorous bass and over-arched with Keith Levene's Tchaikovsky cribbed furious guitar scraping. Weaving about within the maelstrom was John Lydon wailing away, exercising the demons of having recently witnessed his mother's demise from cancer.

The single was released in two forms, a 7" backed with No Birds Do Sing on the B-side, and a 12" extended "1/2 mix" of the title track on the A-side, and an instrumental revamp of Fodderstompf from their debut LP, titled "Mega Mix" on the flip. This B-side is the only recording to ever emerge from a planned re-recorded version of their debut album that US label Warner Bros had demanded after refusing to release the original version due to its uneven production values. The re-recorded "First Issue" never materialized, however, and the LP remained unreleased in the US for decades, with only this alternate version of Fodderstompf ever surfacing.

Drums were played by David Humphrey, who was the first to replace original drummer, Jim Walker, after his early 1979 departure. Humphrey was gone by the time No Birds was recorded, which features former 101er, Richard Dudanski, on the kit. He lasted through some of the Metal Box sessions and one live gig before departing, eventually being replaced by Martin Atkins.

The sleeve design for the single was taken from an original drawing by John Lydon. The 12" mixes remained unique to that release for many years until they were finally reissued in a couple of CD box sets, Plastic Box (1999) and The Public Image Is Rotten (Songs From The Heart) (2018). There is also a super-extended "1/2 Mix" variant on John Lydon's The Best Of British £1♫'s DVD (2005).

CAPTAIN BEEFHEART & HIS MAGIC BAND - TROUT MASK REPLICA @ 55

 

Released on June 16th, 1969, Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band's third album, Trout Mask Replica, turns 55 years old today. Whether you truly love the album, name drop it for coolness brownie points, or consider it an unlistenable monstrosity, its mere mention is bound to stir up controversy and everything from profound admiration to disdainful outrage.

Beefheart and Band had a historically rocky relationship with record labels, resulting in a tremendous amount of confusion and disappointment for their first releases. First they were dropped by A&M after their first couple of singles failed to chart, then their label for their debut LP took a hard turn into bubblegum pop, leaving Beefheart on the outskirts again. Then sessions for what would eventually materialize as Strictly Personal and Mirror Man resulted in a backlog of recordings the band weren't sure would ever even see the light of day. Enter friend of Beefheart, Frank Zappa (who gave Beefheart his name), with an offer to release an album on his newly established imprint, Straight Records, and the promise of complete creative autonomy.

With that offer in hand, Beefheart and Band set up shop in a small, somewhat rundown rented house in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles. There, they set about the task of interpreting band leader Don Van Vliet's vision, with drummer, John "Drumbo" French, acting as principal translator of his compositions, which were often communicated through piano and vocal recitations. Van Vliet had never played piano before as his main composition tool, so given he had no experience with the instrument and no conventional musical knowledge at all, he was able to experiment with few preconceived ideas of musical form or structure. Van Vliet sat at the piano until he found a rhythmic or melodic pattern that he liked. John French then transcribed this pattern, typically only a measure or two long, into musical notation. After Van Vliet was finished, French would piece these fragments together into compositions, reminiscent of the splicing together of disparate source material on Marker's tape.

During the band's residency in the house, Van Vliet became a musical and emotional tyrant, creating something akin to a small cult, restricting the activities of the musicians and demanding adherence to his instructions to the letter. At various times, one or another of the band members were put "in the barrel", with Van Vliet berating him continually, sometimes for days, until the musician collapsed in tears or in total submission to Van Vliet. According to John French and Bill Harkleroad, these sessions often included physical violence. Their material circumstances also were dire. With no income other than welfare and contributions from relatives, the band survived on a bare subsistence diet. French recounted living on no more than a small cup of soybeans a day for a month, and at one point, band members were arrested for shoplifting food (whereupon Zappa bailed them out). A visitor described their appearance as "cadaverous" and said that "they all looked in poor health". Band members were restricted from leaving the house and practised for fourteen or more hours a day. This went on for eight long months before Van Vliet deemed that they were ready to go into a recording studio.

Zappa originally proposed to record the album as an "ethnic field recording" in the house where the band lived. Working with Zappa and engineer Dick Kunc, the band recorded some provisional backing tracks at the Woodland Hills house, with sound separation obtained simply by having different instruments in different rooms. Zappa thought these provisional recordings turned out well, but Van Vliet became suspicious that Zappa was trying to record the album on the cheap and insisted on using a professional studio. Zappa would say of Van Vliet's approach that it was "impossible to tell him why things should be such and such a way. It seemed to me that if he was going to create a unique object, that the best thing for me to do was to keep my mouth shut as much as possible and just let him do whatever he wanted to do whether I thought it was wrong or not." Van Vliet once told drummer John French that he had been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and he would see nonexistent conspiracies, which in hindsight, may have explained some of this behaviour.

Once it was time to head to the studio, the band had ingrained the arrangements and their parts so deeply through their endless rehearsals, the recording process was able to proceed extremely rapidly, with songs frequently requiring only one take. In one session, the band completed twenty instrumental tracks in a single six-hour recording marathon. Van Vliet spent the next few days overdubbing the vocals. Instead of singing while monitoring the instrumental tracks over headphones, he heard only the slight sound leakage through the studio window. As a result, the vocals are only vaguely in sync with the instrumental backing; when asked later about synchronization, he remarked, "That's what they do before a commando raid, isn't it?"

From a commercial perspective, the album stood well outside the bounds of what was considered "popular music", and though it held shards of blues, jazz and rock, those reference points were all shattered and smashed, and the pieces were glued back together in angular, disjointed collages of rhythms, notes and non-sequitur vocal phrases. It was a kind of alchemy where listeners were often repelled by the record on first listen, then agonizingly drawn into its clutches until it became impossible to disregard it. Simpson's creator, Matt Groening, has famously recounted his experience with the album in exactly such a manner, describing his total disdain upon initial exposure, followed by an infectious obsession with it after subsequent listens. Yet it doesn't actually constitute something that was ahead of its time. That time has never come and it continues to stand outside of any time or referential context. It is simply singular in its idiosyncrasies and originality. It occupies its own world and refuses to integrate with any other.

THE SHAGGS - PHILOSOPHY OF THE WORLD @ 55

 

Marking its 55th anniversary as the poster child for outsider music is the debut and only official album from the Wiggin sisters, collectively known as The Shaggs, with Philosophy of the World being released on June 15th 1969. It's an album that should have sank into obscurity, forgotten as an ill conceived indulgence by an over-ambitious and misguided father, but the fates would turn it into a signpost of inadvertent originality, pointing the way for future generations of outcasts to pioneer their own creative paths.

The story of The Shaggs is as bizarre and inexplicable as it is tragic and disturbing. In many ways, it is a tale of parental abuse by a father who was subject to obsessive, delusional compulsions, and who turned his children into unwilling vehicles for his determination to realize a reality that completely ignored his family's well being. It all started with a series of "psychic" visions by the mother of one Austin Wiggin Jr., who one day read his palm and made three pivotal predictions. First was that he would marry a strawberry-blonde woman, secondly he would have two sons after she had died, and finally, his daughters would form a popular band. With the first two predictions eventually coming to pass, Austin became obsessed with the third and began to focus on his three daughters in order to realize his mother's divination. He was so attached to her that he would hold seances with the family in order to attempt to communicate with her.

Austin worked as a low income mill hand in Exeter and was described by a local as a humourless man who rarely smiled. He was strict and did not allow his daughters to have social lives, friends or boyfriends, or attend concerts. Betty Wiggin said they "missed everything", and she fantasized about getting a car and leaving home. Some accounts indicated that the girls suffered parental abuse, and Helen said her father was once "inappropriately intimate" with her. After withdrawing his daughters from school in 1965 and purchasing a set of musical instruments, papa Wiggin kept his girls to a militarily strict regimen of practising their instruments and doing calisthenics every day for several hours each. It was a brutally strict routine and the girls were allowed almost no time for normal childhood activities, save those instances where they could sneak out of the house when they were supposed to be practising and get away for a couple of hours. But for the most part, they were dutiful and obedient to their father's relentless demands.

Austin had named the band, The Shaggs, after a popular haircut of the late '60s and as a reference to a favourite Disney film, The Shaggy Dog. By 1968, Austin felt his girls were good enough to perform in public, though they had no interest in music and were not at all confident with their musical abilities, which would prove to be virtually bereft of any conventional techniques or talents. Nevertheless, he booked shows for the girls at local school dances, where audiences would be bemused into hurtling abuse at the trio with their seeming inability to play, a situation that left the girls mortified and traumatized.

In March of 1969, Austin paid for studio time and brought the girls in to record their first album, Philosophy of the World, at Fleetwood Studios in Revere, Massachusetts. The studio was mainly used to record local rock groups and school marching bands. The sisters did not think they were ready to record, and one engineer recalled that they looked "miserable". Austin dismissed an engineer's opinion that the Shaggs were not ready, saying: "I want to get them while they're hot." One producer, Bobby Herne, recalled that the studio staff shut the control room doors and "rolled on the floor laughing" after they performed. The session for the album took only a single day to complete. The studio was tasked with mixing the album, even going so far as to hire session players to augment the recordings in an effort to salvage the session, but the musicians couldn't follow the erratic and unpredictably idiosyncratic original compositions and left without adding anything to the record.

Austin paid to have Dreyer's record company, Third World, press 1000 copies of the album. The liner notes, written by Austin, said the Shaggs "loved" making music and described them as "real, pure, unaffected by outside influences". The songs "My Pal Foot Foot" and "Things I Wonder" were released as a 45 rpm single on Fleetwood Records. According to many accounts, Dreyer delivered only 100 copies of the album and disappeared with the remaining 900. Dot said that Dreyer had stolen her father's money and could not be traced. However, according to the music executive Harry Palmer, Dreyer said Austin had refused to distribute the extra copies because he feared someone would copy the Shaggs' music. Palmer said that Dreyer kept boxes of the records in the studio and would give them to anyone who asked. The journalist Irwin Chusid argued that it was unlikely Dreyer had stolen the records, as they were valueless at the time. Philosophy of the World received no media coverage and the Shaggs resumed performing locally. At this point, the entire venture should have sunk to the bottom of the swamp of obscurity, but the fates had something else in mind, and rather than vanishing into oblivion, the album would fester into an unexpected cult curiosity, eventually gaining international recognition.

Palmer, who had been given several copies of Philosophy of the World by Dreyer, was intrigued and wondered if he could find the Shaggs an audience. In 1970 or 1971, he attended one of their Fremont performances and was amazed to see locals dancing awkwardly to the music, likening them to zombies. Palmer approached Austin about promoting the Shaggs, but stressed that people laughed at them and asked if this was a problem. Austin responded with resignation. Palmer decided he was in danger of exploiting the Shaggs as a freak show and did not pursue them. In 1973, the Shaggs' weekly town hall shows were halted by the Fremont town supervisors. The sisters were relieved, as they were now adults and had tired of their father's control. When Austin discovered that Helen, then 28, had secretly married, he chased her husband with a shotgun. After the police intervened, Helen left the family home to be with her husband, but rejoined the band later.

In 1975, Austin took the Shaggs to Fleetwood Studios for another recording session. Though they had become more proficient through hundreds of hours of practice, the engineer wrote off their poor performances and felt sorry for them. He said they did not notice their out-of-tune guitars or disjointed rhythms when he played the recordings back to them. The recordings went unreleased. Shortly after the recording session, Austin died of a heart attack at the age of 47. The Shaggs disbanded and sold most of their equipment. A few years later, Betty and Dot married and moved out, and their mother sold the family house. The new owner became convinced that the house was haunted by Austin's ghost and donated it to the Fremont fire department, who burnt it down in a firefighting exercise. The Wiggin sisters had never profited from their music and took blue-collar jobs to support their families.

The music captured on their debut album was unlike anything that had ever been created before. Despite the fact the girls hated making it and the entire process was like a forced death march for them, somehow there's an innocence and purity trapped in those grooves, like an insect in amber. Songs like It's Halloween, Sweet Thing and That Little Sports Car exude a sense of childhood wonder and naivety that completely obscures the torturous conditions which brought the album to life. It's an undeniable alchemy that would cause the album to be blown into the breeze, like dandelion seeds, and take root in the collections of influential musicians around the country.

By the late 1970s, stray copies of the LP had managed to find their way into the hands of people like Frank Zappa, Bonnie Raitt, Jonathan Richman and Carla Bley. Zappa played two songs from the album when he appeared on the Dr. Demento radio show. He is often quoted as having called the Shaggs "better than the Beatles", but this may be apocryphal. This spurred on a grassroots word-of-mouth interest in the band, enough that Terry Adams and Tom Ardolino of the American punk band NRBQ spearheaded an effort to reissue the album in 1980 on their own indie label, Rounder Records. That reissue was the move that fanned the spark of their cult popularity into a full flame as a new generation of music lovers, most of whom had been brought up on the DIY eccentricities of "Punk" and "New Wave", found the album's inadvertent avant-garde strangeness a perfect fit for an era of risk taking and barrier breaking. While the sisters had no inkling of their distinctiveness at the time they created that music, as the age of musical exploration reached its crest a decade later, The Shaggs were suddenly embraced as pioneers and the most extreme outliers of "outsider music".

In the decades that followed, The Shaggs would resurface for a couple of reunions with sisters Dot and Betty, with Dot even forming a new group, Dot Wiggin Band, and releasing an album of new songs in 2013, still retaining that distinctive quirky sound. Rounder Records also cobbled together a second Shaggs album in 1982, Shaggs Own Thing, gathering together any unreleased recordings that they could find that were made after the sessions for the first album, including an unsettling ditty with vocals by father Austin and brother Robert. Pitchfork described it as "particularly disturbing" and unintentionally Oedipal, noting that Austin sings of catching another man, his son, "doin' it" with "his girl". In 1988, Philosophy of the World and Shaggs' Own Thing were remastered and re-released by Rounder Records as the CD compilation The Shaggs.

In some respects, the process of creating The Shaggs disturbingly reminds me of the ancient practice of creating human "oddities" by placing a young child in a ceramic vase, with only their head and feet sticking out, where they would then be forced to grow inside it until they were warped into stunted and grotesque curiosities and sold for exhibition. As horrifying as that sounds, it seems like a rather similar analogue to what these three sisters endured and what could have caused them to create something so entirely distant from traditional music, even with the endless hours of practice they were forced to perform. The fact it NEVER resulted in musical ability, in a traditional sense, is something that may speak to the constraints to which they were subjected. In that sense, it creates a conundrum for those who seek out the unique and distinctive in the realm of art. The Shaggs are an established part of the pantheon of outsider artists, celebrated for their distinctiveness, though I have to consider, at what cost? If you were to ask Dot, Betty and Helen if they'd do it all again, I'm certain they'd offer up a resounding and emphatic "NO"!

JOY DIVISION - UNKNOWN PLEASURES @ 45

Released on June 15th, 1979, the debut LP by Joy Division, Unknown Pleasures, is celebrating 45 years on the shelf today. It's an album that would define both the band and a genre of music, bringing to the fore the potential of studio production in a way that was as significant as The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper, elevating what could have been a mundane post-punk band to the level of visionary pioneers.

Joy Division's beginnings and career have been well documented in recent years, with both theatrical dramatizations and documentaries detailing everything from their inception following that infamous 1976 Manchester Sex Pistols gig to the tragic 1980 suicide of their lead singer, Ian Curtis. The creation of their first LP was a case of an unsuspecting young band falling into the clutches of an ambitious producer who was looking to redefine his role in the studio. Over the course of three weekends in April of 1979, Martin Hannett would impose his signature sound on the group, a move that would leave some members of the band feeling like they'd been misrepresented by the end product.

Once Joy Division got into the studio to record, Martin set about taking their raw, aggressive sound and deconstructing it, pulling the pieces apart and setting them out in a sonic landscape that emphasized distance and negative space. Akin to the approaches that defined dub music, Hannett utilized reverb, echo and abstract electronic ambience to push those pieces into a more expansive configuration where each element suddenly stood out in stark relief, accented and counterpointed in ways that were much more subtle than the "pedal to the metal" thrust the band would use on stage. The effect was to soften their sound, while also creating a menacing and brooding sense of depth and space, with its accompanying sense of isolation. It's an approach that engendered feelings of paranoia and apprehension. Of course, that tactic was greatly enabled by superlative songs and the somewhat unorthodox style of the band, which pushed the bass frequencies in to the upper register, an approach Peter Hook had developed simply out of a necessity to be able to hear himself on stage against the extreme volumes they favoured in their performances.

Once the album was mixed, some members of the band came away from the production feeling disheartened and frustrated by the way they were reshaped in the studio. Hook, in particular, had envisioned a harder, tighter and more concentrated sound from the band, and its only in recent years that he's been able to concede that there was method in Hannett's madness, and that the end results stand the test of time. Some critics were also ambivalent towards Hannett's indulgences, dismissing them as frivolous ornamentation and distractions from the band's essence. But the tides of legacy have seen the album codified as a comprehensive masterwork of innovation and originality. Nothing had sounded anything like it beforehand, with every instrument finding a distinctive new texture and tenor of expression.

The graphic design for the album has also gone on to have a life of its own as a distinctive item of iconography. It's become so ubiquitously associated with the band that one has to wonder how many of the millennial and gen-Z folks running around with the design on their T-shirts have ever actually listened to the record. Taken as a whole, they add up to an artifact that defines a generation and survives as a timeless example of musical risk taking at its best.

THE HAFLER TRIO - "BANG" - AN OPEN LETTER @ 40

Celebrating its 40th anniversary this month is the debut LP from The Halter Trio, "BANG" - An Open Letter, which was released by Cabaret Voltaire's Doublevision label in June of 1984. The album introduced both a wildly original approach to audio art while also perpetrated a remarkable prank upon the oft pretentious experimental music community.

H30 were founded by Andrew M. McKenzie and Cabaret Voltaire co-founder Christopher R. Watson in the early 1980s. Watson had left Cabaret Voltaire during the recording of their 2x45 album in 1982 as the group were evolving into a more mainstream, dance-floor friendly incarnation, and rapidly shedding the elements of experimentation and industrial/surrealistic "musique concrète" that had defined their early career. McKenzie had dabbled in music as a member of the short lived Flesh, who released a single cover of the song, My Boy Lollipop. The third member of the "Trio" was a fictional character by the name of "Dr. Edward Moolenbeek", which is where the "prank" aspect of the group comes into play, but more on that later.

The principal theory that drove the group's sonic direction was the conception that sound could be organized in a manner that had little or no relationship to traditional musical structures of melody and rhythm. Andrew McKenzie has stated in interviews that the principal guide for the creation of their early works was based on the mechanisms of film editing. Their idea was to assemble their sounds in the same way a film editor might create a narrative from images. This involved Chris' skills as a a natural sound recordist combined with Andrew's use of electronics and their mutual talents for audio processing. You'll find no verse/chorus/bridge structures in Hafler Trio productions. No time signatures, no keys or chords or notes, though frequency modulations were certainly an element of consideration. Transitions would be built in the same that way a movie is assembled, using cross dissolves, cuts and juxtapositions. It was all intended to have a cinematic essence.

The album was presented as the result of specific scientific investigations on the nature of sound and its effects on humans that were supposedly conducted by one Robert Sprudgen [?], who had conducted extensive secret research during the mid 20th century. The third member of the "Trio", Dr. Moolenbeek, was supposedly an expert on this research and a former colleague of the researcher, who worked out of a corporate entity known as "Robol Sound Labs". All of this was backed up by research papers and other documentation, much of which could be obtained by writing to The Hafler Trio PO box, whereupon they would provide various pamphlets and booklets detailing the history of this research. I've seen some of these materials thanks to a friend making the effort to contact the group. All of it gave the impression that they'd somehow managed to uncover a vein of scientific research from decades ago that had been largely forgotten or, as suggested by the documentation, buried because of the controversial nature of the materials and the potential for misuse if it should fall into the wrong hand. I must confess that myself and my friends who got into early H30 were completely suckered into believing all of this, and it was only years later, when access to the internet became common, that the truth of the hoax finally became obvious. I certainly felt gullible, but also marvelled at the depth and detail of the work that went into creating this fiction.

As for the album itself, it's a strikingly original construction, only finding any remotely close kin with the likes of Nurse With Wound and their surreal sound collages, though NWW could be positively musical in comparison to H30 and their obtuse alien soundscapes. These recordings definitely opened up some sonic possibilities in my mind as a result, indoctrinating a branch of sound art that was utterly divorced from conventional music making principals.

After its release, The Hafler Trio would only continue operating under the "Robot" banner until the departure of Chris Watson in 1987. Chris would go on to an illustrious career with the BBC as one of their most renowned natural sound recordists, contributing his skills to innumerable documentary programs. He would also occasionally release solo album collections of some of his personal audio experiments, ranging from purely documentary field recordings to more composed & processed assemblages of these sounds, like his incredible 2003 album, Weather Report. Andrew McKenzie would continue on with H30 as primarily a solo alias, though, like Steven Stapleton's Nurse With Wound, he'd involve a wide variety of ever changing collaborators, including Stapleton and the likes of Genesis P-Orridge and Autechre. Without Watson's contribution, the focus of H30's sound shifted away from natural sounds into more processed electronic drones and textures, involving less editing and more extended atmospheric washes. Releases would continue to be elaborately packaged in limited editions with accompanying texts and artwork.

Unfortunately, there is currently no free streaming source for this album. While there is a Halfer Trio Bandcamp page, in 2022 all the non-spoken-word releases were removed due to certain accounting complexities which Andrew McKenzie did not go into any great detail to illuminate. I cannot even find anyplace to purchase this particular release at all, save used copies on Amazon and similar sources. Very little of the H30 catalogue can be found on YouTube as Andrew has remained ever vigilant against allowing unauthorized uploads, which are taken down as soon as he discovers and reports them. As such, if you don't already have this or have never heard it, you'll just have to take my word that it is a remarkable and unique creation that breaks barriers for what sound art can achieve. Plus it was a wicket little trick to play on unsuspecting hipsters looking to get in on the ground floor of something nobody else knew about. You NAUGHTY trio!

BE BOP DELUXE - AXE VICTIM @ 50

Celebrating its golden anniversary at 50 years old this month is the debut LP from Yorkshire progressive rock underdogs, Be Bop Deluxe, with Axe Victim being released in June of 1974. While the band did not actually play any "be bop" music, they did come out of the gate as glam-rock wannabes until leader Bill Nelson retooled his vision and managed to conceive of something rather more original on their subsequent albums.

As it was, Be Bop Deluxe came out at the height of the UK glam movement, fashioning themselves while under the looming shadow of David Bowie. Though Bill Nelson denies any overt influence, it's hard to take that stance too seriously when a song title like "Jet Silver And The Dolls Of Venus" is clearly a first cousin of "Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars". That overt similarity would undercut the band's ability to distinguish themselves at first, a situation further aggravated by their use of makeup and extravagant attire as shown on the group photo adorning the back of the album.

However, on closer inspection and with the benefit of hindsight, there is a blush of the sophistication and sincerity that would bloom on subsequent albums, as Nelson found his own voice and cast aside obvious influences. The album's title track offers up a convincing perspective on the rigours of rock stardom, Adventures in a Yorkshire Landscape glints with the essence of the band that would come, and Night Creatures offers up a sublimely beautiful ballad about denizens of the darkness. The only real fly in the ointment of this album is Rocket Cathedrals, the only song to ever appear on a BBD album that was not penned by Bill Nelson. It appears here as a concession track for bassist Robert Bryan, and sticks out like a sore thumb compared to the other songs.

The version of Be Bop Deluxe that recorded their debut would be short lived. After a brief tour of the UK to promote the LP, Nelson realized that his band, mostly mates from the Yorkshire music scene, really weren't up to snuff as far as being players capable of realizing Nelson's ambitious musical vision. As a result, the entire band would get amicably sacked and replaced for the next album by two thirds of the players who would constitute their stable lineup until their ultimate dissolution by the end of the decade.

While Axe Victim doesn't quite fulfill the promise that Nelson held in his potential, it does set the stage for what would come and still contains a few excellent tracks that make the album worth its place in the band's canon. Plus it's got an absolutely ace cover, so you can't really fault it too severely for being a tentative step towards eventual greatness.

ELVIS PRESLEY - FROM ELVIS IN MEMPHIS @ 55

 

Released on June 2nd, 1969, Elvis Presley's 9th studio album, From Elvis In Memphis, turns 55 years old today. After spending the bulk of the decade shackled to an MGM film contract that prohibited him from performing live and only allowed the release of soundtrack collections, "The King" was finally unleashed to revive his soul and record the kind of music HE wanted to do.

After the massive success of his TV special and its accompanying soundtrack in 1968, Elvis was ready to do a proper studio album, something which he hadn't really been able to do since 1960's "Elvis Is Back" album, which was recorded shortly after his return from being drafted into military service. After spending most the '60s recording soundtrack songs for his films at RCA studios in Hollywood and Tennessee, his close associates encouraged him to set up in Memphis for his next album, taking advantage of the renowned group of studio musicians who called the city home and who were collectively known as the "Memphis Boys". The decision proved advantageous and allowed Elvis to lean into his more "country" style roots, albeit with a heavy dose of Southern soul.

The album was released to praise from both fans and critics, with many now considering it one of Elvis' most essential releases. With Presley no longer bound to Hollywood and making movies, the TV special and new album set the stage for a triumphant return to live performing, which included the conquering of Las Vegas, a city that had rejected him back in his 1950s heyday as too "raw and unrefined", but which embraced him a decade later as the town struggled to retain its relevance in the face of a youth culture that had no interest in its bright lights and games of chance. Elvis came in like a messiah, and setting up residence there would be the shot in the arm the town so desperately needed, making it a destination for fans eager to see a legendary performer at the peak of his powers.

DEVO - DUTY NOW FOR THE FUTURE @ 45

 

Marking 45 years on the shelves today is the sophomore LP from Akron Ohio mutants, DEVO, with Duty Now For the Future being released on June 1st, 1979. While it was critically disparaged at the time of its release, fans know it's an essential sequel to their debut, documenting, as the first album did, the band's early catalogue of music.

Forming in 1974 as a response to the Kent State massacre of students by police in 1970, DEVO spent their early career amassing a staggering catalogue of original songs before they ever got the chance to step into a professional recording studio to produce a major label LP. Their 1978 debut put a reasonable dent in that backlog, but they still had plenty enough for their second album, with enough to spare to, years later, fill a double CD set of early demos (Hardcore DEVO -Volumes 1 & 2, 1990/91). Only three new songs were brought in to fill out their second outing: "Red Eye", "S.I.B." and "The Day My Baby Gave Me a Surprise".

Their debut album was produced by Brian Eno, but the relationship during that effort was slightly strained and the band were eager to learn from different people, so they wanted to work with a different producer for their next album. In fact, throughout their career, they've never worked with the same producer more than once. For their second LP, they chose Ken Scott, who had previously worked with The Beatles as an engineer and produced David Bowie's Hunky Dory, Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane. While the atmosphere in the studio was professional and pleasant by all accounts, in retrospect, several members of the band didn't feel he understood the sound they were wanting to achieve. For this album, rather than perform in the studio as a band to lay down bed tracks, every instrument was layered individually, playing off a click track. That approach ended up siphoning some of the edge off the band's sound, muting the dynamics which had been so prevalent on their first album. Overall, the production simply doesn't have the same punchy heft that Eno was able to get on their debut, a situation that didn't go unnoticed by critics, who felt the album sounded lacklustre. The flat production is compensated for, however, by the strength of the songs, especially the older, more developed material.

For the album's cover design, a dummy bar-code was integral to the design. Bar-codes were just starting to come into use at the end of the '70s, so there was a kind of novelty futurism inherent in its graphic presence. The central photo of the band was stamped with perforations so that it could be popped out of the cover and used a postcard. This was something the label refused to pay for, so the cost of the processing had to be taken out of the band's advance. The photograph of the band was taken by photographer Allan Tannenbaum for the SoHo Weekly News in New York City. It was used in the album artwork by simply taking it from the front page of the newspaper in the exact same dimensions, unbeknownst to the photographer. When he discovered this, he contacted the record company and was paid for its use. The "Science Boy" logo originated from a science pamphlet the band had found in the late 1970s in Akron. After first using it on a promotional item for Virgin Records, the band were contacted by the original organization that had created the image for their logo, which resulted in them paying to acquire legal rights to it.

Upon release, the album sold well, but was met with some harsh criticism. Dave Marsh, writing in Rolling Stone, condemned the album, feeling that "inspired amateurism works only when the players aspire to something better." Robert Christgau of The Village Voice panned side one as "dire" and "arena-rock", but felt that "The Day My Baby Gave Me a Surprise" and "Secret Agent Man" were "as bright as anything on the debut, and the arrangements offer their share of surprises." Red Starr of Smash Hits described it as "unimpressive", but noted that the "change of style definitely grows on you". They went on to say that, although the album was more accessible, it was "lacking the zany magic of old".

Personally, I've always thought the band's first two albums delivered an effective "one-two punch", with enough variation in the style and approach to allow each to stand as a distinctive representation of different aspects of the band. Yes, I did find the lack of dynamics on the second album less engaging than their debut, but classic tunes, like Clockout, Blockhead, Pink Pussycat and Smart Patrol/Mr. DNA, made the album essential and unforgettable.