LED ZEPPELIN - PRESENCE @ 45

 

March 31st marks the 45th anniversary of the release of Led Zeppelin’s seventh and penultimate studio album, Presence, issued on this day in 1976.  It was the product of yet another tragedy, one of several, which would haunt the band’s career up until it was felled completely by the death of drummer John Bonham in 1980.  In this instance it was a tragic car crash that set the stage for the creation of this album.

In August of 1975, Robert Plant was taking a break after their spring tour to promote Physical Graffiti, traveling around the Greek island of Rhodes.  It was here that he suffered major injuries in a car crash that left him wheelchair bound for much of the next year.  The band had planned to tour the US during the latter half of 1975, but the accident meant that plan had to be scrapped.  Plant returned to his tax-exile home in Malibu, California to recuperate and ruminate on his and the band’s future.  While there, he began to put some thoughts down into lyric form and, after being joined by Jimmy Page, the duo began to work out the basic sketches for what would become the Presence album.

Eventually, Page & Plant arranged to book some time in Musicland Studios in Munich, Germany.  Page favored this studio due to its state of the art facilities, but they were up against a time crunch because they had to be done within a couple of weeks so the Rolling Stones could take over the studio and begin work on their Black & Blue LP.  With Bonham and John Paul Jones joining them in Munich, rehearsals began and the band fleshed out the arrangements for the songs to be included.  Because Page and Plant had already worked out most of the songs in Malibu, the writing credits for the album would feature only one track written by the entire band with the rest credited to Page and Plant. 

Stylistically, the urgency of the time-crunch and the sense of intensity created by the tight schedule helped to solidify the band’s, and particularly Page’s, desire to make this album more hard rock focused.  There are no keyboards used on the album at all and only one track which uses some minimal acoustic guitar.  The emphasis was squarely on heavy riffs.  With Robert being physically limited in what he could do, the bulk of the work on the album ended up falling into the lap of Page and co-producer, Keith Harwood.  Page and Harwood would often tag-team in the studio to maximize their time, with one grabbing a couple of hours shuteye while the other kept the fires burning in the studio.  With a total production time of two and a half weeks, it wasn’t uncommon for them to pull 18-20 hour days.  That production schedule would have the album in the can faster than anything they’d done since the group’s debut LP.  The result of that sort of schedule was an album high in energy and sharp with edge and with no room for the more pastoral, acoustic side-roads common on previous albums. 

While it received massive advance orders and landed on the top of the charts in the UK and US upon its initial release, due to Plant’s ongoing recovery, the lack of a support tour to help sustain sales meant that it ended up being one of their lowest selling albums to date.  The release later that same year of their concert film and its accompanying soundtrack, The Song Remains the Same, didn’t help with sales either.  The critical reception of the album was similarly weak.  Many critics found it lacking in terms of adding anything fresh or relevant to the Zeppelin catalog, though some of those harsh criticisms have been reevaluated as the record has aged.  The fans were also somewhat ambivalent as it was not as varied as previous albums.  

Though the music may not stand as Zeppelin at their “best”, according to some, the album cover certainly managed to make a mark and even won them a Grammy for best LP design.  Created by the legendary Hipgnosis design house, who dominated the LP cover market in the 1970s, the cover is an ingenious bit of subversion, utilizing the seemingly simple device of an enigmatic “object” which is inserted into a variety of mundane domestic settings, rendering them somehow extraordinary merely by its “presence”.  It was intended as a metaphor for the group’s power and influence at the time.  The obelisk like “object” was designed and built by Peter Christopherson of Throbbing Gristle.  Peter had been a design partner in Hipgnosis for a couple of years at this time while he was just starting out in TG.  I recall seeing this in the shops and being constantly drawn to it. I'd stare at the photos and try to imagine what could be going on. Why was this thing in all these pictures? What was it? What did it do? Its blackness and confounding shape implied something mysterious and possibly sinister!

Personally, it’s not my favorite LP by the group, but I find it a solid listen nonetheless. This was the second Zeppelin LP I ever purchased, which I picked up sometime in 1977.  Led Zeppelin III was my first and is still my favorite.  Once punk and new wave came around in 1978, I kinda tuned away from the band, though their last album, In Through the Out Door (1979), had a few tracks I liked.  It wouldn’t be until a couple of decades later that I’d start to be drawn back to them again after a friend blasted their first album at a party one night and I remembered how brilliantly they could rock out.  Once I did take that second look, I’d spend time to explore albums I’d never given any attention to previously.  Within that process, I found myself coming back to Presence with much more enthusiasm than I was expecting.  I like its focus and clarity and sense of purpose.  There’s an immediacy and urgency to it that is, in retrospect, more distinctive in their catalog than people gave it credit for when it was released.  Indeed, its stripped down simplification is quite sympathetic to the zeitgeist of the “Punk” scene, which was just starting to take root in the world at the time.

BRIAN BRAIN @ 40

 

March 28th marks the 40th anniversary of the release of the debut single from Brian Brain, They've Got Me In A Bottle, released on this day in 1981.

Brian Brain was the creation of PiL drummer, Martin Atkins. Given his on-again / off-again relationship with that band, Atkins took up Brian Brain as essentially a solo outlet he could pursue when not working on PiL. Brian Brain's lineup also included bassist Pete Jones, who'd actually end up joining him in PiL during their Commercial Zone days in the US (1982/1983). Atkins was originally recruited by PiL during the tail end of the Metal Box sessions, with his performance on Bad Baby being his audition, and played live with them during the first half of 1980. He was dismissed after they got back from their US tour and then hired as a session player for Flowers of Romance. He was than pulled back into the band full-time in 1982 after they'd relocated to NYC and hung on through the "Las Vegas show band" days until @ 1985. His last LP with the group was 1984's This is What You Want, This Is What You Get. He also plays on the 1984 Commercial Zone unofficial LP Keith Levene put out after his exit.

Brian Brain tended towards comedic post punk and mutant funk styles which were taking root during the post-disco days of the early 1980s. After leaving PiL, Atkins would set aside the Brian Brain moniker and move into more heavy Industrial-dub influenced alternative rock with bands like Pigface, Killing Joke and The Damage Manual. He also founded his own record label and production company, fundamentally fulfilling the "we're a company, not a band" ambitions PiL purported, but never quite achieved. Today he's an acknowledged expert on indie band touring and has authored books on the subject and engaged in speaking tours, all the while maintaining his prolific musical output through his numerous guises and pseudonyms.

PUBLIC IMAGE LTD. - THE FLOWERS OF ROMANCE (SINGLE) @40

 

March 27th marks the 40th anniversary of the release of Public Image Ltd’s fourth single, The Flowers of Romance. The song title is a reference to the near mythical short lived 1976 punk band that Sid Vicious was a member of before joining the Sex Pistols. The group’s fluctuating lineup also included such luminaries as Palmolive, Viv Albertine & Keith Levene; among others. They never recorded or performed, but left enough of an impression on John Lydon that he immortalized them in the title of this song and the subsequent LP which followed.

After well over a year’s wait for new material, Metal Box being released in November of 1979, the song itself was the world’s first peek at a post Jah Wobble PiL. With his acrimonious departure after their US tour the prior year, the remaining members had decided that the best way to cope with losing their bassist was to simply drop the instrument from their arsenal. Instead, the focus became percussion and Flowers highlights this with its tribal tom-toms and Spanish Flamenco style hand-claps. The rest of the track is built from droning cello, aberrant violin and a sax solo that sounds like the instrument got caught in a tornado. The rest is Lydon’s wailing vocals with lyrics bringing to mind fragmented images of disillusioned romanticism, worn out nostalgia and abandonment.

For all practical purposes, this could easily be seen as a solo song for Johnny as he played just about everything except the percussion, which was apparently done by an uncredited Martin Atkins. When the band mimed the song on Top of the Pops, Jeannette Lee took on the cello while Keith played the drums. Of course, Jeannette never played anything, but she was responsible for the lovely Polaroid photo of John adorning the front cover of the single.

The non-album B-side, Home Is Where the Heart Is, is a heavily dub-mixed reworking of a previously unfinished song that originated during the 1979 Metal Box sessions and which can be heard on a few live bootlegs from the band’s short US tour in the spring/summer of 1980. Wobble’s bass part was rerecorded by Keith, who created a tape loop of it for the finished version and Martin Atkins, again, plays drums and, AGAIN, misses a credit as the single mistakenly lists original PiL drummer, Jim Walker, in the writing credits.

The single peaked at #24 in the UK charts and was listed as the single of the week by NME upon its release with the reviewer calling it a “sheer delight” and “One of the starkest, most single-minded pieces they've ever done.” It would certainly do the job in terms of setting the stage for the outrageously uncompromising album that they were about to unleash upon an unsuspecting fan base.

THROBBING GRISTLE - JOURNEY THROUGH A BODY @ 40

Forty years ago, in March of 1981, during the week beginning Monday the 16th and continuing through Friday the 20th, Throbbing Gristle occupied a residency at the prestigious Italian National Radio’s RAI Studios in Rome.  They were there as a result of Cosey Fanni Tutti being referred to the institution by Robert Wyatt when it was looking for contributors for a project based on the concept of a “Journey Through a Body”.  Once offered the commission, the opportunity quickly extended to include the entire TG ensemble.  The group then traveled to Italy and began work on what would become their final studio album before terminating the TG mission following their last live performance in San Francisco on the 29th of May that year.

The constraints conceived for this project had TG recording one completely improvised composition per day for a total of five pieces corresponding to the basic body parts, though there appears to be no documentation on how each track corresponds to which part.  Because, as Cosey recollected in her Art Sex Magic autobiography, the studio techs were essentially “useless”, being either stoned or drunk most of the time, TG were pretty much left to their own devices while recording.  Having traveled with only a few bits of their own gear, the group primarily relied upon whatever instruments, effects and production tools were available in the RAI studio.  They had made no advance preparations for any of the recordings and each day’s work was mixed to its final form at the end of that day with no further production, remixing or overdubs done after that.  Following the completion of the sessions, RAI refused to release the master tapes to the group and only provided a cassette dub of the recordings.  The album was then unofficially released in 1982 by Walter Ulbricht Schallfolien, and remained a scarce, occasionally bootlegged rarity until Mute & Industrial Records finally acquired the masters and issued an official version of the album on CD in 1993.  They wouldn’t release an official vinyl version until 2018.

As mentioned, the album consists of 5 mostly instrumental sections, each offering a distinct mood and style.  The album opens with the sprawling, harrowing medical nightmare, Medicine, clocking in at an imposing 15+ minutes.  Its layers of beeping monitors, wheezing air pumps and general hospital room discord put the listener on life support in the role of a patient in medical stasis.  From there, things get erotic as a plodding, vaguely funky drum machine accompanies sounds of sexual copulation and occasional spoken word overdubs from Genesis.  The mood gets lighter and more serene in the third movement as we get TG’s most literal homage to Martin Deny in the form of Exotic Functions, complete with bird calls and waterfalls.  The penultimate section does an abrupt about-face into brute force and aggression before the album resolves in the final section with a dreamy kaleidoscope of piano noodling which sounds very much like an ancestral precursor to a Psychic TV piece, Mirrors, which would be recorded using a strikingly similar template a few years later as a soundtrack to the short film of the same name by Derek Jarman.

Overall, the sound of Journey Through a Body is idiosyncratic, even by TG’s standards.  Being created using facilities, instruments and tools other than the usual Industrial Studios setup meant that the textures and ambiences achieved all feel and sound quite different from anything the group had created before.  While there are distinctly “TG” style performance techniques on display, the result feels alien and dissociative given the unfamiliar sound palette.  Hearing pianos and other acoustic elements integrated into the TG sound is almost jarring.  There was also something of a gap for the band in terms of being in the studio together.  Their last album, Heathen Earth, had been recorded just over a year prior to this, in February of 1980, and the only other studio work they’d dune after that was recording the double 7” releases (Adrenalin/Distant Dreams, Subhuman/Something Came Over Me), synchronously released in October of 1980.  As such, the group hadn’t been spending a lot of time in the studio together and, indeed, their personal relationships were nearing their breaking point as the conflict between Gen and Cosey & Chris became more entrenched.  One can only wonder what the mood was like in the studio for these sessions and how their personal issues may have contributed to the overall feel of the album.

As previously stated, Journey Through a Body would be the final studio recording of TG before their split.  The group would not set foot in a studio together again until March of 2004, almost exactly 23 years later, to record the TG NOW EP in preparation for their live performing return later that year.  For many years, Journey Through a Body existed in a twilight of bootlegs and mythology before being reclaimed by the band and made an official part of its canon.  It is often considered their least popular recording, though to be fair, its genesis and manifestation were unique and the results offer a distinct perspective on their approach as seen through the prism of a decidedly foreign environment and tool set.  It still managed to capture TG in all their varieties, from creeping insidiousness to seductive enchantment to brutal assault.

KISS - DESTROYER @ 45

 

Released on March 15th, 1976, KISS Destroyer is celebrating 45 years on the shelves. It was the first LP I bought with my own money by my own choice. Well, technically it was the second. The first was More More More by the Andrea True Connection, but I took that back to Zellers the next day for an exchange. Its booming disco kick drum couldn’t track on my shit-box of a record player and I hadn’t discovered the ol’ “tape a penny to the tone arm” trick yet, so I ended up with the KISS record instead.

After the breakout success of KISS Alive, the band were desperate to get it together to do a studio album that could properly capture the intensity of the band. Their previous three attempts had only middling sales, belying their impact as a live band. They simply sounded flat and listless and lacked the dynamics and spectacle they were getting across on stage. To help them with this objective, the band’s label, Casablanca, brought in Bob Ezrin, who’d had major success working with Alice Cooper. Ezrin brought along the same sense of discipline he’d used to whip the Cooper band into shape and applied it to KISS, pushing them with near militant determination to get their shit together as musicians. He even insisted on them taking lessons in music theory to help their song writing chops. He flat-out rejected most of the demos they originally brought to the table and even took to sporting a coach’s whistle he’d blow whenever he wanted to rally the band for recording sessions & rehearsals.

In addition to instilling a more rigid work ethic in the band, he brought a lot of color to their sound in the form of elaborate production techniques and embellishments, which included adding things like strings, choirs, sound FX and even brought his own kids into the studio to get the sounds of them playing around to use as disturbing atmosphere on God of Thunder. Initially, critics and fans were taken aback by all this excess and they felt it detracted from their raw intensity, but over the years, most people have tended to look back on Destroyer as the pinnacle of KISS’ studio output. It was a gamble that, while it may have initially alienated some, worked in the bands favor with the LP becoming their first platinum seller, mostly thanks to the unexpected success of the Peter Chris sung B-side, Beth, an acoustic ballad!

I’d be the first in line to dismiss KISS as opportunistic hucksters as far as a band willing to sell its soul for the all-mighty dollar. Gene Simmons has long been well known for his unapologetic capitalistic values and willingness to slap his brand on anything that’ll sell. I was 12 years old when I first heard them. My cousin had Alive and the whole shtick instantly appealed to my tween brain. They were the first band that seemed “dangerous” and there was a brief moment in their early career where they did carve out a unique niche for themselves that deserves some acknowledgement for its innovation. However, it didn’t take long for them to bankrupt their credibility by indulging in a long series of increasingly crass commercial gambits which only served the purpose of lining their pockets in a way that was obvious to even a naive teenager. After a couple of years, I’d moved on to far more substantial artistic territory as the late 1970s exploded with new and dynamic artists who left bands like KISS in the dust. But there’s always going to be that part of my inner child that looks back on those early days as a moment of wonder and fascination and I have to give credit where its due to a band that understood how to take spectacle to a new level. Destroyer, as an album, captures the best of that effort at its peak and still has the ability to conjure up some satisfying nostalgia for that strange era of mythological rock.

ALICE COOPER - LOVE IT TO DEATH @ 50

 

Alice Cooper used to be a band and not just the guy singing the songs. Back when this was true, 50 years ago today, on March 9th, 1971, they released their third album, Love It To Death. It’s success became the basis upon which they’d build their legend.

Alice Cooper, the band, had been around under various names since about 1966 and had managed to develop a reputation for some wild, theatrical live shows. After spending some time in LA and doing a couple of middling, commercially irrelevant psyche-rock albums for Frank Zappa’s label, the group relocated to Detroit just in time to find themselves surrounded by the likes of raw powerhouses like the MC5 and The Stooges with the furious Iggy Pop freaking out on stage. George Clinton was also firing up the stage with Funkadelic and these influences all helped to revitalize Alice Cooper. Eventually, after seeing them at Max’s Kansas City in NYC, greenhorn producer, Bob Ezrin, finally agreed to work with the band and, after rehearsing the fuck out of them for 10-12 hour days for a few months, got them to record I’m Eighteen as a single to prove to label Warner Bros. that they had commercial potential. The single was a solid hit for the group and got them into the studio to do a full album.

After all that rehearsal, Ezrin had managed to banish all the psychedelic excesses out of them, whittling 8 minute freakout jams down to concise three minute hard rock songs. The result was a tight, heavy album of rock that would come together at the perfect time to become part of the foundational cornerstones of the heavy metal music scene along with similarly influential works by the likes of Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin. And while those bands may have owned more of the credit for the music’s sound than Alice Cooper, the accompanying stage show the band put together to tour the album would be far more influential in terms of giving the burgeoning genre its style and aesthetic.

The album's influence, however, wouldn’t be limited to heavy metal heads. A few years later, as punk rock began to rumble in the streets of London and New York, both it’s primary respective instigators, the Sex Pistols and the Ramones, would reference I’m Eighteen in their own songs, with the Pistols even legendarily auditioning front-man Johnny Rotten by having him lip-sync the Cooper hit on a Jukebox in Malcolm McLaren’s boutique. The immediacy and energy of the music simply worked as a touchstone for the punks in the same way that Hawkwind did for the emerging scene.

Alice Cooper, as a band, would produce several more classic albums before lead singer Vince Furnier decided to take the brand as his private, solo vehicle and leave the rest of the group behind. Love It To Death, however, is still considered the first proper Alice Cooper album and one of their best.

WANDAVISION - REVIEW

 

WandaVision finished its run yesterday so I thought I'd share a few of my thoughts now that I've seen it all.

SPOILER ALERT!!! DO NOT READ IF YOU HAVEN'T WATCHED!
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So right off the bat, I'm gonna say this is the best product to come out of the MCU thus far, hands down. It did an amazing job of offering up something fresh, original and emotionally engaging, well beyond the standard "mega-punch-up", often exhausting 3 hour explosion orgies that comprise so much of the superhero movie genre. Thankfully, there was almost none of that stuff until the finale, which I'll give a pass because they didn't spend too much screen time on it and even had the dueling Visions ultimately resolve their conflict through a brilliantly REASONED DEBATE, though after a brief obligatory energy blast exchange.

It's that defying of expectations and refusal to bend to fan service that made me the happiest. All throughout the series, I'd see various commenters and theorists trying to second guess where this was going to go and who the "big bad" was gonna be and, almost without exception, they were all WRONG! That's right, no fucking Mephisto! Even though everyone and their dog was busily trying to find someone who was gonna turn out the be the "devil in disguise", it didn't happen. There really was no "big bad" in this show. Even the characters with nefarious intents didn't fall into the niche of a power hungry super-being like Thanos. Though Agatha may have come close, she was well tempered by the sincerity of her curiosity and simply being likeable and fun. NOT having that kind of antagonist, In the end, was a bold-ass move that made me love this show all the more.

Ultimately, the series is an examination of grief, how we cope with it through escapism and how that escapism inevitably harms those around us. That's a pretty ironic conceptual framework for a show set in a cinematic universe that uses escapism as its stock-in-trade. But this show has "meta" references built into its DNA. That was one of the primary engagement engines for it; deciphering all the cultural touch-points they used as the fantasy world created by Wanda evolved through its progression of decades. The show's creators invested incredible amounts of effort into meticulously recreating each era they explored along with every detail of its stylistic nuances, right down to shooting one episode in front of an actual studio audience to get the feel of the performances just right.

As good as all that packaging was, its true success comes down to the performers and the emotional depth they brought to their performances. There isn't a single cast member who didn't deliver on all the gut-punches of feeling that came through as the reality of this fantasy unfolded. As we peeled away the facade of the "perfect world" Wanda was trying to create, the unsettling indicators of how much pain was below the surface were all brilliantly communicated by the actors through a myriad of nuanced signals. It was all a candy apple; sweet and shiny on the outside, but rotten with misery within.

How appropriate is it that this show should appear at the tail end of the nightmare that is MAGA culture? Here, we have a group of people desperately trying to cling to a vision of an idealized America that never existed, just like the fictional worlds Wanda fell in love with while trying to escape the war and pain of her childhood. And how much pain has that delusion inflicted on the rest of us as these people insist on clinging to their lies and fantasies at the expense of every reasoned plea for compassion and acknowledgement of the problems we must come to terms with.

I certainly have high hopes that we'll see more work like this from the Marvel franchise, though I do hope that they can come up with a way to make it a bit more self-contained. My only real gripe with WandaVision is that I had to do a lot of homework in order to understand the backstories and motivations of the characters. Much of this involved hours watching overlong feature films where the characters I was interested in were only minor supporting players or else trolling through YouTube breakdown videos to learn about references to comic books I'll never read. That interdependence, on one hand, is an admirable feat of coordination from a fictional writing perspective, but it makes pursuing this franchise somewhat daunting if I have to slog through too much extraneous content in order to be able to follow a particular piece of this puzzle. That said, I am looking forward to seeing what else is in store from this world.