PUBLIC IMAGE LTD - THIS IS WHAT YOU WANT... THIS IS WHAT YOU GET @ 40

 

Celebrating its 40th anniversary today is the fourth "official" Public Image Ltd. studio LP, This Is What You Want... This Is What You Get, which was released on July 6th, 1984. I use the qualifier "official" due to the fact that the unfinished and aborted Commercial Zone album was surreptitiously released by jilted former founding member, Keith Levene, in January of that year on his own independent label imprint. His version of the album contained the original recordings that had been created throughout 1982 & 1983 at Park South studio, NYC, up until his unceremonious dismissal from the band by John Lydon following a dispute over an alternate mix of the single, This Is Not A Love Song. Following his departure, Levene spirited away master tapes from the session to release on his own mix, leaving remaining members, John Lydon and Martin Atkins, holding an empty bag when it came time to produce an official version of the album for Virgin Records.

Lydon and Atkins returned to the UK after their 1983 Japanese mini tour, for which they'd hired a trio of New York lounge musicians to fill out the band's empty slots vacated by Levene and bassist Pete Jones, who departed of his own accord immediately after Keith's sacking. Once in the UK, they set up at Maison Rouge Studios and began to rebuild the album from the ground up. Five of the Commercial Zone songs got a reboot, including "Bad Life" (originally titled "Mad Max"), "This Is Not a Love Song" (originally titled "Love Song"), "Solitaire" (entitled "Young Brits" on the second pressing of Commercial Zone), "The Order of Death" (originally titled "The Slab"), and "Where Are You?" (originally titled "Lou Reed Part 2"). Two new songs were recorded from scratch: "The Pardon" and "Tie Me To the Length Of That", with the latter being improvised in the studio with Lydon and Atkins playing all the instruments. For most of the rest of the album, the NYC lounge musicians, plus a few others, worked as session players. The track, "1981", was actually an outtake from the Flowers of Romance sessions, though some minor overdubs were added to bring it up to snuff for the current LP.

Though PiL had scored a hit with the single version of This Is Not A Love Song, using the Park South recordings with Levene and Pete Jones, the album was received with a large degree of ambivalence, feeling like the soul of the band had been supplanted by the use of faceless studio musicians. Only "Tie Me To the Length of That" really offered any sense of proper PiL music, principally because it lacked the sterile presence of studio hired guns. Still, the album's version of "The Order Of Death" has popped up in numerous soundtracks over the years, including the 1990 science fiction-horror film, Hardware, and on the soundtrack to the 1999 horror film, The Blair Witch Project. It was also featured in the Miami Vice episode "Little Miss Dangerous", the Mr. Robot episode "eps2.7_init_5.fve", and the Industry episode "There Are Some Women...". It also appears in Season 2 Episode 6 of The Umbrella Academy when the Hargreeves siblings take the elevator to the Tiki Lounge to meet with their father. Finally, it appears in the 2023 remake of System Shock, as the music for the end credits.

When it came out, I was at the tail end of my obsession with the band. After the stunning artistic breakthroughs of their first three albums, Commercial Zone felt like a bastard echo of what might have been, while its troubled twin felt like a synthetic imposter version of the band. The release of the Live In Tokyo album, which sounded even more shallow and perfunctory as an imitation of the band, had driven the sense of demise further into the ground. In a sense, TIWYW...TIWYG feels like a capstone to the PiL story, at least as far as the project being a real band. After that, it seemed more like a Lydon solo project, and the sense of musical innovation felt like it had left the building. Without the presence of Keith, Wobble or Martin, who left after touring to support this album, the game had changed and the rules were all different, so I was pretty much out as far as following the band, at least to the degree that I'd been enraptured by them during their heyday.

THE B-52'S @ 45

 

Released on July 6th, 1979, the eponymous debut LP from The B-52's turns 45 years old today. At a time when "punk" had broken rock music back down to its basics and "new wave" was looking towards a more adventurous and experimental future, The B-52's offered up an anachronistic slab of nostalgia for an era of polyester beach parties and piled high hair-dos, with hyped-up teens twisting in the dunes with aliens from other worlds and creatures crawling up from the surf. Like The Cramps, who evoked a vintage, retro-kitsch obsession with B-movies and trash culture, The B-52's were a throwback to another era, with their twanging surf guitars, teeny wheezing organs and infectious back-beats. But where The Cramps offered up a soundtrack for lascivious late-night back-alley bar crawling, The B-52's were an upbeat party band, born in a beach hut and destined to make you dance.

The group came together in Athens, Georgia, in 1976, emerging at the dawn of the punk revolution, but rather than building their aesthetics from safety pins, leather jackets and spiked hair, they went to the thrift store and raided the leftovers of '60s hipster party dregs, snapping up the towering wigs that gave the band its name. They popularized the introduction into youth culture of the queer inspired "trash-couture" that had been festering in the midnight movie screenings of the films of John Waters. He and his cohorts had set the tone for the band with their pink flamingo lawn ornaments and other trailer trash accoutrements. It was all done for pure fun and was impossible to resist once you got a taste of it.

The band recorded their debut at Compass Point Studios in Nassau, Bahamas, with Island Records founder Chris Blackwell producing. His approach to recording was to capture the band as cleanly and closely as possible to their live sound, so there was very little use of studio effects or even overdubs. The result was a bright, spacious sound that captured all of the dynamics of the group with no frills or distractions, creating an immediacy that pushed the impact of their music to the fore. It was a perfect approach to take as you get to hear the band in a completely unadulterated presentation where the listener can connect as directly as possible for a studio recording.

The album became an immediate commercial and critical success, catapulting the band into the spotlight, with appearances on shows like SNL helping to secure the group's spotlight. I have a very clear recollection of spotting the album on the new release display wall of my local record shop back in 1979. I was all over anything new and weird looking, being a 16 year old on the prowl for anything odd and "out there". Seeing that bright yellow cover with the cutout photo of this wild looking, big haired band was an instant eye-catcher, and I had no hesitation about plunking my hard earned money down for a copy. And I was most definitely not disappointed when it hit my record player. The twang of those surf guitars, the cheesy organ, the whip smart drumming and the kinky vocals were all so fresh sounding, though also bizarrely nostalgic. They definitely had a sound that was all their own. It's still an album that holds up after nearly half a century of listening. It can't age because it's so perfectly preserved in its own amber.