V02-T05 [lightbulb joke]

.....Before making this series of compilation cassettes that drew across the board from my collection of recordings, I had made numerous compilations that each focused on individual bands or of various bands on a unifying theme. One of the themed tapes was entirely spoken word performances. At the time I made that, my collection was perhaps one tenth or less of what it is now and I'm certain that I would program it differently if I had the time or patience to redo it. This bit of stage patter was added to the playlist in order to buffer two unlike musical tracks.

Volume 2: "WE'RE ALL GOING TO JAIL FOR THIS, AREN'T WE?", track 5

• 00:43 [untitled spoken word piece]
• performed by Mr. T Experience
• original source: mini-LP MTX COMES ALIVE (recorded Dec., 1989; unreleased?)
• and my source: CD MAKING THINGS WITH LIGHT Lookout Records 37CD (US) 1990

.....In 1989, Mr. T Experience (which, for the record, has no official affiliation with the 1980's television personality) released an EP with a song entitled "AT GILMAN STREET". By the end of the year they had recorded a live set at the actual Gilman Street venue in Berkeley, CA but had left the UK-based Rough Trade label, which would soon after spiral into bankruptcy. They signed onto the relatively new Lookout! Records, who released their next vinyl studio album, MAKING THINGS WITH LIGHT. The CD packaging for that album adds the live recording from the previous December as bonus tracks, going so far as to explicitly refer to the set as a mini-LP entitled MTX COMES ALIVE. I've never actually found a vinyl version of the mini-LP, but when I went looking around to find a catalogue number for reference here I couldn't find any evidence that it had ever existed. It wasn't mentioned in Martin C. Strong's discography entry for the band, although the same songs were listed as tracks on MAKING THINGS WITH LIGHT. The more exhaustive fan sites also didn't mention it. Lookout!'s Facebook page describes the live songs as bonus tracks on the CD but does not acknowledge them having a separate collective identity. It could be that the title was a joke (more on that below) or that they were expecting it to come out from Rough Trade or some other label at the time the CD was going to press.

.....The title MTX COMES ALIVE refers to the live Peter Frampton double-LP FRAMPTON COMES ALIVE, famous for setting sales records in the 70's. The year before Mr. T Experience recorded their live set the band Alice Donut recorded their debut album, DONUT COMES ALIVE, using the same allusion to Frampton in the title. Alice Donut's label, Alternative Tentacles, would not reissue that LP in the CD format until 1992, but the Mr. T Experience was probably reluctant to be perceived as stealing another band's ideas. Simply giving the project another title would have solved that problem, so it can't be the real reason that there was no vinyl counterpart.

.....The title MAKING THINGS WITH LIGHT was the slogan for the late-1960's toy Lite Brite, an example of which was on the album's cover artwork. It was also an allusion to the fact that recorded music was drifting inexorably towards compact discs, even if punk labels were tenaciously trying to make the audience's choice of format available as long as economically possible. Compact discs, after all, are played using lasers. They literally make sound with light.

V02-T04 "Pythagoras' Trousers"

.....I recently read that this group had its first fixed-venue performance opening for Kraftwerk. I don't know if that's true, but it's not as strange as it might sound at first. Both can fall into an almost hypnotic, ululating groove.

Volume 2: "WE'RE ALL GOING TO JAIL FOR THIS, AREN'T WE?", track 4

• 03:22 "PYTHAGORAS' TROUSERS" (Simon Jeffes)
• performed by The Penguin Cafe Orchestra
• original source: LP PENGUIN CAFE ORCHESTRA Editions EG EEG11 (UK) 1981
• and my source: CD PENGUIN CAFE ORCHESTRA Editons EG EEGCD11 (US/Cananda) [no date- JEM Distribution]

.....You may have heard this used in television or radio commercials or as background music in movies or on NPR. In fact, I may have intended to use " MUSIC FOR A FOUND HARMONIUM" and opted against that when it was used in an IBM advertisement running on television at about that time. The PCO is definitely genre-defying. The best explanation I've come up with for them is that they sound like the folk music of a culture nobody's ever heard of, that never existed. Jeffes formed the PCO at about the same time that the Kronos Quartet convened, in the early 1970's. Their missions were very different however, with the KQ championing modern classical composers, giving many classical works their first recordings and in many cases their first performances ever. Although Jeffes was classically trained he didn't see a future for himself in the classical music world, or even much of a future for classical music itself as it was forty years ago. If his peers sought to circumvent the stagnation with Keith Emerson doodlings and bombast in the pop music world, and KQ tried to reinvigorate the academy by shining brighter lights on its own more innovative corners, Jeffes turned inward. By his own account the Cafe was a fictional location that came to him literally in a dream, music and all. He spent the next quarter century trying to recreate the ambience of the Cafe from that dream. In the years that followed pundits and career pontificants seemed obsessed with coining term after term for the new mixtures of rhythms and textures that sprouted in the wake of the PCO's early experiments. None of them covered all the bases, and attempts to do so resulted in the frustratingly vague "world music" and similar useless undescriptions.

.....After fifteen years and four studio albums, The Penguin Cafe Orchestra became a hit and in demand everywhere but in American commercial outlets, which are hardwired to believe that easy categorization is an absolutely necessary first step to selling a recording. Selling out concert venues and getting into the British album charts (in 1987) meant nothing.The PCO became the umpteenth of my favorite groups blackballed by the American music industry. No airplay on commercial radio stations, which had became strangled by narrow formatting. No presence in chain music stores (except for Strawberries in the northeast before it was acquired by Trans-World, and Tower, which had only just extended east of New York at that time). In the few years between then and my compiling this tape I remember reading an article about Nigel Kennedy's then-new recording of Vivaldi's Four Seasons. The article was really responding to much of the contemporary chatter about Kennedy's album making the pop album charts. It was seen as some kind of harbinger of the public 'discovering' the classical market. The author of the article cautioned that a casual investigation of his own into catalogues of work in print revealed that, on vinyl and CD, he found roughly 500 versions of The Four Seasons currently in print. That wasn't even counting versions that had not been reissued since the days of mono or imports that didn't make it to the US. He suggested that classical music had a brighter future with fewer superstars like Kennedy or the Three Tenors and more diversification instead. Essentially, that's what Kronos and Jeffes figured out almost twenty years earlier and had already made healthy careers out of creating their own niche. Following the publication of that article commercial advertisements began featuring increasing portions of music we had been told had no commercial potential. As it turned out, there was never a mass migration of classical music to the pop charts. But that didn't mean people weren't hearing classical music, or that they weren't hearing dispatches from the cutting edge in their computer ads. It only meant that the music industry began training people to expect to find the music that they enjoyed outside that industry. Today, finding PCO tracks and albums online takes seconds. It's no more difficult than finding the Rolling Stones. But I went to Amazon and typed in "vivaldi four seasons" (to distinguish from Frankie Valli) and what did I find under 'music'? Over 1500 selections. Sure, Amazon has more redundancies than print catalogues, but still...Amazon can only sell what the labels manufacture. And they tend to manufacture the same things over and over again.

.....While I put together this tape Simon Jeffes was launching his own label, Zopf. With a few more studio albums, plus live audio and video releases, the orchestra continued to tour the world while Jeffes stayed at home, demoing solo piano pieces. Many of us only heard after the fact that he had died of cancer in 1997, quietly closing the doors of the Cafe. Ten years later, almost to the day, the doors reopened. Arthur Jeffes, Simon's son, has reassembled regulars from the core ensemble and revived concert favorites, augmented by some compositions of his own. If I can find their website, I'll add it to the left side of the page.

.....Next up, I'll follow an all-instrumental selection with an all-verbal one.

V02-T03 The Crying Game

.....Happy Birthday, Chris Spedding!

Volume 2: "WE'RE ALL GOING TO JAIL FOR THIS, AREN'T WE?", track 3

• 02:39 "THE CRYING GAME" (Geoff Stephens)
• performed by Chris Spedding
• original source: LP I'M NOT LIKE EVERYBODY ELSE RAK Records SRAK 542 (UK) Nov./80
• and my source: LP I'M NOT LIKE EVERYBODY ELSE Fan Club FC 055 (France) 1989

.....Most people probably know this song by the remake by Boy George used in the soundtrack for the movie of the same name. This lesser known cover was made roughly halfway between the Boy George version and the original. Geoff Stephens was a songwriter aspiring to more lucrative work as a producer when Dave Berry got a number 5 hit for Decca with "THE CRYING GAME", one of Stephens' songs, in the summer of 1964 in England. At about that time Stephens and Peter Eden went to a resort town to scout musical talent. Both had a financial interest in music publisher Southern Music which had a recording facility called Iver Records. At the resort they went to see a British blues band called Cops'n'Robbers but were more impressed by a teenage friend of theirs who played during their intermission: Donovan. While Stephens and Eden went about tricking this naive Scottish runaway into contracts that it would be charitable to describe as criminal, American Brenda Lee on the US Decca label had a minor hit with "THE CRYING GAME". Although it was used as the B-side of "THANKS A LOT", which didn't crack the top 40 either, her version charted further down in its own right in January 1965.

.....Chris Spedding is a prime example of a gun for hire. Like many great guitarists (Mick Ronson, Earl Slick, etc.) he has released a number of decent but often ignored solo albums over a long period while simultaneously doing prolific studio session and concert tour work as a sideman. The work they do for others usually succeeds both commercially and critically but because they don't have great singing voices and often rely on outside material to fill out albums, they can't translate the plaudits for outside work to their solo projects even when their arrangements and playing technique are impeccable.

.....After this I decided to use the covers more judiciously. Hearing something familiar from a different perspective is something that would be inevitable in any compilation that really reflected my music collection, but it loses its impact if the listener has a reason to expect it around every corner. The next track would be something truly original.

V02-T02 Purple Haze

.....I'm not certain, but this may be the only selection I've used in this series that was also performed live for a PBS fundraiser. It's definitely the only one introduced by a slightly baffled-looking Richard ('John-Boy Walton') Thomas.

Volume 2: "WE'RE ALL GOING TO JAIL FOR THIS, AREN'T WE?", track 2

• 02:52 "PURPLE HAZE" (Jimi Hendrix)
• performed by Kronos Quartet
• original source: CD KRONOS QUARTET Elektra/Nonesuch 9 79111-2 (US) 1986
• and my source: the same

.....Kronos is a string quartet devoted to 20th century composers. To many in classical music circles, they seemed to have come out of nowhere to minor superstardom when this album and its follow-up, "White Man Sleeps" came out. They had actually been recording for labels like CRI, Reference and Landmark for a few years. They were better known for working with Philip Glass, Steve Reich and Astor Piazzola but anyone from the 20th century was fair game. This got released as a vinyl promotional single for radio stations, unusual for a classical group at the time. It also became an in-concert favorite. It might even have been the impetus for putting them on the Elektra "Rubaiyat" compilation discussed in the notes to Volume 1; they did a cover of Television's "MARQUEE MOON" which I found disappointing. That was an excellent choice of material for a string quartet and had the potential to be hypnotic if arranged as a canon, but their version was actually shorter than the original. "PURPLE HAZE" is a mostly faithful arrangement, if not exactly a transcription, and it's not surprising that it translates well to live performance and that it has held up for them year to year.

V02-T01 "Good evening, record lovers..."

.....When this first compilation tape was being planned I had no idea that it would be the first of a series. Although each side of the tape was conceived as its own volume, roughly the length of an LP, I wanted to remain conscious of how it would be experienced. It would have two beginnings and two ends, and I wanted those terminal points to be flagged appropriately with listeners welcomed in and ushered out. The intro to Volume 1 was one of the most famous introductions in the world, not only to the work from which it was taken, but for many children it was their introduction to 'grown-up' music. I was hoping to capture that feeling of discovery when everything is still new and more importantly when there was no need for everything to be immediately familiar. Too many adults find it threatening to their egos when they're forced to admit that they don't know something. Children spend most of their time being lectured, being expected to not know things. Finding something unfamiliar is just another part of their day. They don't get defensive about it the way adults do. I was hoping that the first intro would put people into a state of mind where the unfamiliar was a chance for personal expansion and not a threat of personal impugn. But that was the first side. The second side was time for something completely different...

Volume 2: "WE'RE ALL GOING TO JAIL FOR THIS, AREN'T WE?" track 1

• 00:50 [excerpt from "MORE TELEVISION INTERVIEWS"]
• performed by Monty Python's Flying Circus [Graham Chapman]
• original source: LP MONTY PYTHON'S FLYING CIRCUS BBC Records REB 73M (UK) 1970
• and my source: LP THE WORST OF [~] BBC Records BBC-22073 (UK) [reissue of above, prob. c.1980]

.....This was the first album from Monty Python. It was also the only one owned by the BBC and therefore left out of subsequent campaigns of catalogue reissues. At the time I put the tape together there had only been one CD pressing, one extremely rare one in the very early days of the technology and while I've never heard it, it reportedly sounds pretty poor. Entirely in character for the BBC, they were tone deaf to the very considerable demand for this material. It remained out of print on CD until the late 1990's. (For those unfamiliar with the history of the comedy group, the only reason anyone is able to see the show today is because someone working inside the BBC warned Terry Gilliam in advance while he worked on the second season that episodes from the first season would be recorded over later that day. The reason was that the BBC wanted to save money on film/tape. Gilliam bought blank film with money out of his own pocket and switched it for the Python masters and did the same for the rest of the series. Most shows were not so lucky.)

.....Because the rest of this album contains the dialogue of sketches used on the first season of the show, many people erroneously believe that it was made by lifting the soundtrack right off those episodes. It was actually recorded separately but under similar circumstances. The first season of the show was shot with a small studio audience and so was the record (hence the audience laughter you can hear on this track-- it's not canned). As the show got more ambitious and was written more as a stream of consciousness than a loose collection of collegiate-type sketches, that approach was no longer practical. But it made selecting material to rerecord for an album a relatively simple procedure. Even so, the cluelessness of the BBC prevails as ever. The famous Parrot Sketch is listed as the track "Pet Shop" and the Crunchy Frog Chocolate routine is listed as "Trade Description Act". People who would have bought the album on the strength of those bits might have passed on it not realizing that it contained them. In fact the track used here is the first minute of the second side of the album, leading into a routine better known as "It's The Arts" or "Arthur 'Two-Sheds' Jackson", but labeled simply "More Television Interviews". The final straw for the Pythons might very well have been this simple piece performed solo by Chapman with the audience. They always submitted material in advance for the BBC when doing the show; Chapman's military officer conducting a stereo test was the only truly new material for the album. That script, plus minor rewrites to the sketches to compensate for the lack of visuals, were already in the network's hands when Pythons, producer and audience entered the studio. Only during the recording process did they discover that it was being recorded in monaural. The script, as originally conceived, got its humor from the self-important officer being ultimately superfluous. As it turned out, he exposes the defective bureaucracy at the BBC. Subsequent albums were produced by the group with engineers and released by Charisma in the UK and by Buddah (and later Arista) in the US.

.....The obvious reason for wanting to use this excerpt is that it explicitly refers to the start of side two (of the record). The other less obvious reason is that it is the contrast to the opening of the first side, which sat you down and set you at ease before introducing you to the program. Having made it through that side, if the audience is still listening, if they took the initiative however minor to flip the cassette and set aside the next forty-five minutes, then they must be aware of the sentiments, the humor, the sense behind the flow or progress of the track selection. They are 'in on the joke' in a way; they know that the 'stereo' isn't working and that the powers that be don't seem to be aware of it. Now when something flies at them out of left field that surprise is something they can welcome, not something to be managed or endured.

.....Coming up, I've got a few more choice covers to get out of my system, we'll push the range back to the 1960's (my collection includes CD's with material recorded c.1900 but is mostly from the last fifty years), a few more punk singles and even some things that should be easy to recognize.

Recommendation #02

.....Volume 2 begins tomorrow, but today I'd like to recommend a fellow blog:

http://guiltfreepleasure.blogspot.com/

...who refer to themselves as "the anti-snob music blog". Normally they blog daily on the average but in the past week they've apparently experienced technical obstacles to posting. Fortunately that hasn't translated into problems reading them. The post for Friday, June 11th even has an embedded video of artist Conor O'Brien, who goes by the name "Villagers". Worked for me.

.....When I've accumulated a number of similar blog recommendations I hope to establish a page of links distinct from the existing list on the left, which is mostly artists' websites, official or otherwise.

Recommendation #01

.....Volume 2 begins Tuesday. Today and tomorrow I'll be stepping out of the past and sharing info on things that have caught my attention in the here and now.

.....As of this writing, npr.org is providing access to Laurie Anderson's as-yet unreleased new album, "HOMELAND", which I believe is out for sale June 22. At the moment you can listen to it track by track or in its entirety for free. On the left side of this page you'll find a link to npr.org. If you click on it you may want to give it a minute or so to load; their homepage is an enormous layout composed almost entirely of links. Once it's loaded, scroll down their left side about half way and click on the large word "music". You should have no trouble finding the link to "HOMELAND" once you're on the Music page.

.....This will be the first original album from Anderson since "LIFE ON A STRING" nearly ten years ago. She has been giving live performances all this time including a few that have been released. She's also made guest appearances on other people's recordings and contributed songs to tribute projects and other various artists' albums. And of course, music is only one medium of many in which she works. She's the artist in residence at NASA, the last I heard, and since one of the responsibilities of that position is determining the meaning of the position, that's got to be keeping her busy.

I do know that there were live shows in New York two years ago including one at the Rose Theater at Lincoln Center that went under the name "HOMELAND", although I don't know how much of that material overlaps the studio album. For more information, I'll be adding her official website to "Listen, Rinse, Repeat...", my list of links.