DAVID SYLVIAN - SECRETS OF THE BEEHIVE @35

 

Released on November 7th, 1987, David Sylvian’s fourth solo album, Secrets of the Beehive, is marking its 35th anniversary today. Written in a flush of inspiration in a mere two week period, it’s an album that explores the subtleties of jazz, folk and orchestral music, avoiding obvious excess and focusing on lyrical content.

Though the album received high praise from critics, it was ultimately felt to be a failure by Sylvian because of the fact he was not able to complete it to his satisfaction. Budgetary constraints meant that he was not able to complete the album’s planned centerpiece, Ride. That track would end up having to wait for the Everything and Nothing collection in 2000 to see completion. Because of this, Sylvian was heartbroken that he couldn’t finalize Beehive the way he’d envisioned. Given that the compositions came together so quickly and clearly, he went into the production with a definite vision of what he wanted it to be and, not reaching that goal, it left him burdened with a sense of incompleteness. Yet this is only something that the artist himself will notice as we, the listener, can only appreciate the beauty and elegance of what he did manage to present for this most sublime of albums.

For the album’s recording, Sylvian was joined by frequent collaborators, Ryuichi Sakamoto, brother Steve Jansen and producer Steve Nye. Sakamoto handled most of the orchestral arrangements. Formal production of the album was completed in just two and a half months with basic tracks begun in Chateau Miraval in the South of France because of its exotic location. Tracks were built up layer by layer, with musicians contributing in turns for recording. Overdubs and orchestral sections were added in London and then it was off to Wisseloord at Hilversum in the Netherlands to finish the overdubs and record the vocals.

Since its initial release, the album has seen a couple of reissues with bonus tracks appearing in later editions.

THE MONKEES - PISCES, AQUARIUS, CAPRICORN & JONES LTD @ 55

Released 55 years ago today, on November 6th, 1967, The Monkees fourth studio album, Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd, would be their forth consecutive number one charting LP in less than two years, though it would also be the last album from the group to hit that height. Both commercially and creatively, it was the high water mark for the band.

After their successful corporate revolution, where they broke free of the iron grip of music director Don Kirshner, their third LP, Headquarters, was a triumphant statement of independence. The band deliberately set about to create the album with no one else in the studio with them save for producer Chip Douglas, who also assisted on bass so that Peter could focus on keyboards and other instruments. Because the group were between seasons of their TV series, they had the luxury of time to dedicate to that album, but the pressure of producing a weekly series came to bare on the next.

It wasn’t so much the mechanics of the first two LPs which were the problem. It was the complete lack of input and creative control that drove the revolt within the group’s ranks. So, when it came time to start work on a fourth LP, struggling against the time constraints of filming, the group recognized the value of the songwriting team they had at their disposal, as well as the expert session musicians who made up the so-called “Wrecking Crew” of loosely affiliated LA players. They’d managed to get some great results on Headquarters, at least insofar as offering up themselves as a credible garage band, and were still going to do a lot of playing themselves, but it would be foolish not to leverage these resources and to be able to produce more sophisticated music for the next album, and that’s exactly what they did.

In fact, they'd never return to the self-contained approach again until their 1996 reunion LP, Justus. Given the individual group member's wildly divergent musical ambitions, it actually made more sense to work somewhat separately and then stitch each member's contributions together for the final product. It was a double edged sword which could offer diversity, but also inconsistency, but for this particular effort, it all came together into a very coherent whole.

Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd would turn out to be one of the group’s most mature and ambitious albums, both musically and thematically. The subject matter covered by the songs includes: allusions to drug trafficking (Salesman), materialism at the expense of happiness (The Door Into Summer), the superficial affections of groupies (Cuddly Toy, Star Collector), the malaise of suburban banality (Pleasant Valley Sunday) and the LA riots (Daily Nightly). Beneath the bubblegum pop sheen, they were subverting their audience with a variety of more critical and cynical messages, a tactic which would belie their image as a squeaky clean boy band for children.

Technically, the album was one of the first to feature the use of the MOOG modular synthesizer, played on Daily Nightly by Micky and on Star Collector by Paul Beaver. The instrument had been acquired by Micky from the first lot of 20 ever sold. Only The Doors’ Strange Days LP, released in September, predates the use of the synth within the pop/rock domain. The Monkees would soon be followed by The Rolling Stones (Their Satanic Majesties Request in December) and The Byrds (The Notorious Byrd Brothers in January - 1968).

The album is loaded with some of the band’s most significant songs and offers up one of the most consistent listening experiences of their catalogue. It leaps from strength to strength with songs like Love Is Only Sleeping & Pleasant Valley Sunday. Michael Nesmith gets a surprising number of lead vocals in the set as well, which works to add diversity to the songs. Also of note is the group’s last number one single, Daydream Believer, which was recorded during these sessions and intended for the LP, but not issued on LP until The Birds, The Bees & The Monkees (1968). Love Is Only Sleeping was originally going to be the first single, but it got swapped with Daydream Believer, so the LP track listings were changed to remove the latter and insert the former.

In recent years, it has been reissued in a number of vastly expanded deluxe editions featuring numerous alternate mixes, outtakes and demos. Next to the HEAD soundtrack and film, it is unsurpassed in terms of its artistic merits within the group’s canon of work. A remarkably “adult” work from a “fake” band for kids.

GEORGE CLINTON - COMPUTER GAMES @ 40

 

Marking its 40th anniversary today is the debut solo album from Funkadelic/Parliament founder, George Clinton, with Computer Games being released on November 5th, 1982. After dominating the R&B scene throughout the previous decade with the monster P-Funk collective in all its variations and manifestations, Things were starting to get dicey for Clinton in the 1980s. Computer Games was a brief commercial rally for Clinton before he’d be beset by grinding legal battles, personal struggles and lack of label support through the remainder of the decade. The album was conceived of as a response to the burgeoning electronic music scene which was rapidly infiltrating the funk/R&B/soul/disco dance music scenes. Rather than reject the insurgence, Clinton chose to embrace it and integrate it into his own methods of production. Though the album was listed as a solo work, the personnel for the project was largely the same musicians he’d been working with on the most recent Parliament and Fundadelic albums.

The centerpiece of the album is the epic Atomic Dog. Released as a single, it was created almost by accident by virtue of an inadvertently backwards drum machine recording in something of a drug addled miasma when Clinton stumbled into the studio one day in the middle of a blizzard. He could barely stand, but mumbled some incoherent instructions and then improvised his vocals, leaving the folks in the studio with the task of making some sense of it all. Miraculously, not only did they make sense of it, they turned it into pure dance floor gold. More than that, the song has become a template for countless grooves in the ensuing decades, which repeatedly sampled to the track’s riff to build upon as a foundation. It has become part of the DNA of hip-hop on the deepest possible level.

SIOUXSIE AND THE BANSHEES - A KISS IN THE DREAMHOUSE @ 40

 

Turning 40 years old today is the fifth studio LP from Siouxsie and The Banshees, A Kiss in the Dreamhouse, which was released on November 5th, 1982. It was their most experimental and ambitious production to date and garnered universal praise from both fans and the music press.

After the success of their previous album, Juju, the group took some time to reassess their work and felt that, for the next release, they wanted to up the production values, particularly by introducing the use of real strings rather than synthesizers. Working on the non-album single, Fireworks, set the template for where they wanted to go. While John McGeoch was okay with the use of synths, Siouxsie and Steve Severin were adamant about going acoustic, with the former stating, “They give a real, earthy, rich sound. You could hear the strings spitting and breathing and wheezing.” Beyond that, producer Mike Hedges strongly encouraged the group to experiment with radical effects setups, tape loops, vocal layering and different instruments like recorder, tubular bells and chimes. The end result was a post-punk neo-psychedelic hybrid born of extensive drug use while working on the album. That tactic, while perhaps inspirational at the time, would sadly lead to a darkness which would prove fatal to more than one person in the long run.

The title of the album was conceived by Severin after watching a documentary about Hollywood prostitution. the “Dreamhouse” was an actual brothel in Hollywood which featured a number of prostitutes who had undergone cosmetic surgical alterations in order to make them appear more similar to the famous stars of the times. A good lookalike would be able to command a significantly higher price than the other girls.

A Kiss in the Dreamhouse was the final release in a triptych of albums, begun with Kaleidoscope and followed by Juju, which featured John McGeoch as a member of the band. His alcoholism would result in him leaving after Dreamhouse, replaced by Robert Smith of The Cure for a time. It’s a period for the band which saw them transform into sophisticated, adventurous trendsetters, moving well ahead of the pack when it came to pushing the boundaries after the initial wave of punk had subsided. With this album, they made it clear to everybody that they were a creative force to be reckoned with.

NEGATIVLAND - ESCAPE FROM NOISE @ 35

 

Marking it’s 35th anniversary today is the fourth studio album from Bay area sonic collage masters, Negativland, with Escape From Noise being issued on November 4th, 1987. For this album, the group took their penchant for cutups and assemblage and applied it to slightly more conventional song structures, utilizing shorter song lengths and occasionally recognizable musical arrangements. The results were still wildly surreal and bizarre, but also engaging in a way which hadn’t been achieved on earlier works. It was the first album I ever heard by the group and it left an immediate impact. It was certainly the funniest album I’d heard since I had encountered Nurse With Wound’s Sylvie and Babs a couple of years prior.

The album very nearly ended up in ashes as the band’s studio was destroyed by fire when the dry cleaning business below it on street level erupted into flames accelerated by toxic cleaning chemicals. Luckily, Don Joyce happened to notice flames licking up the bottom of the studio window and, after calling 911, grabbed all the masters to the album before evacuating. That didn’t save the band’s gear or masters from previous projects, but it did mean they were able to release Escape From Noise, which came out on SST, the most prominent label to feature the group’s work to date.

The album gained notoriety shortly after its release when the song, Christianity Is Stupid, became associated with a famous murder case where David Brom had killed his family, supposedly after listening to the song. This wasn’t actually true, but the group weren't averse to leveraging the misinformation as it did ignite a firestorm of media interest which became fodder for their next project, Helter Stupid. Since its release, the album has become perhaps the most notorious and recognized release in the group’s long history.

RAMONES - ROCKET TO RUSSIA @ 45

 

Released on November 4th, 1977, the Ramones third LP, Rocket to Russia, is celebrating its 45th anniversary today. The album continued the band’s quest for a commercial breakthrough, but despite improved production values, evolved songwriting skills and consistent critical praise, the album failed to generate significant sales and kept the group rutted in the “punk” gutter. Even though they were at the height of their powers and were knocking out songs which should have been taking the charts by storm, the "dog had a bad name" and the band squarely blamed the Sex Pistols for creating a hostile environment within the AM radio industry for anything often lazily labeled “punk”. Radio programmers tarred anyone associated with the genre with the same brush and simply weren’t willing to give the band the chance they so desperately deserved.

The album would be the last to feature original drummer Tommy (Erdelyi) on the skins, though he would return as producer for the next LP, Road To Ruin. His clashes with Johnny were enough that he felt that it was for the good of the band’s moral for him to focus on the production side. The label put up somewhere near $30K for the album and most of that was spent on production while recording was done as quickly as possible to minimize the cost of studio time. The production credits list Tony Bongiovi and Tommy Ramone as head producers, but in reality, the majority of the work landed in the lap of engineer Ed Stasium. Bongiovi, who is the cousin of Jon Bon Jovi, had a reputation for being difficult to work with and Johnny often insisted on only recording when he wasn’t in the studio. Johnny was also the main driver in pushing the production emphasis, going so far as to bring in a copy of the Sex Pistols single, God Save the Queen, at the start of production and stating that they’d ripped off the Ramones and their next album MUST exceed the production values of the Pistols.

Musically, the band went in a more surf & bubblegum pop direction, albeit with their patented buzz-saw edge. Thematically the lyrics focused on humour, often referencing mental disorders and psychiatry. The band were broadening their palette of styles as well, so it wasn’t all rapid-fire tempos all the time for this outing. Critics were enthusiastic for the variety and evolution in the band’s sound. The legacy of the album, like so much of the band’s output, particularly with the first half dozen LPs, is that they left behind an incalculably infectious canon of work which has succeeded in infiltrating popular culture over the ensuing decades, becoming touchstones for a generation and beyond. It’s only sad that they could never reach those heights while they were around to enjoy the success. As the Stranglers said, “everybody loves you when you’re dead”.

HARMONIA 76 - TRACKS & TRACES @ 25

 

Released 25 years ago today, on November 4th, 1997, the material for Harmonia & Eno’s “Tracks and Traces” album was originally recorded in 1976, but remained shelved for over 20 years before it was salvaged from oblivion and finally published.

After hearing Harmonia in the early 1970s, which was a collaboration between Cluster’s Dieter Moebius & Hans-Joachim Roedelius and NEU! guitarist Michael Rother, Brian Eno proclaimed them the “most important group in the world.” Eno promised to come work with them and finally kept that promise in 1976, though they’d already split up by then. Nonetheless, they agreed to reunite with Eno and began recording together. At the time, those recordings ended up being set aside as Eno moved on to his collaboration with David Bowie for what would become the “Berlin Trilogy” albums: Low, "Heroes" & Lodger.

In the 1990s, Roedelius retrieved the master tapes from Eno and did a bit of work on them to create the 1997 edition of the album. Further to this, Michael Rother contributed additional material from his cassette archives for the 2009 reissue. Those tracks could now be included because the digital restoration process was sophisticated enough that Rother’s tapes could be cleaned up to remove noise and enhance the sound quality. This resulted in three bonus tracks being added to the release.

Stylistically, the collaboration with Eno traded some of the flair of the previous Harmonia albums for a more muted ambience, but it was a fair trade-off and the results were a kind of music that was well ahead of its time, being produced by four creative masters who were in their prime. It's only frustrating that it took two decades for these recordings to finally find the light of day.