V02-T07b Batman

.....I expected people to recognize the tune but not necessarily the band.

Volume 2: "WE'RE ALL GOING TO JAIL FOR THIS, AREN'T WE?", track 7b

• 01:27 BATMAN (Neal Hefti)
• performed by The Who
• original source: EP READY, STEADY, WHO! Reaction 592001 (UK) Nov. 11, 1966
• and my source: CD RARITIES 1966-1972 Vols. 1 and 2 Polydor 847670-2 (UK) 1991

.....Like most bands appearing on the BBC's "Ready, Steady, Go!" television series, The Who recorded their music at the network's studios a few days in advance and then lip-synched to themselves on the show. That was mid-October, 1966. Their management intended to release an EP of the studio recordings to coincide with the airing but ran into legal hassles. It would take less time and mean fewer headaches to actually rerecord everything from scratch and rush release it, which is what they did. It's not surprising that some fans came to assume that the Reaction EP was taken from the show anyway, despite switching out some of the songs for others.

.....On the show they appeared to be playing "BATMAN", "BUCKET T", "I'M A BOY" and "DISGUISES". They also goofed around to Cliff Richard's song "SUMMER HOLIDAY". There are incomplete bits of the instrumental "COBWEBS AND STRANGE". The finale was intended to be a medley of their own "MY GENERATION" in a medley with Elgar's "LAND OF HOPE AND GLORY", but for some reason the Elgar was replaced with "RULE BRITTANIA". The medley was too much of a pain to reproduce and "I'M A BOY" had just been an A-side and was likely still in stores, so those two were dropped and replaced with "BARBARA ANN" (to indulge Keith Moon's surf music fixation) and yet another version of "CIRCLES", probably to undercut the sales of earlier versions being released under different names by an ex-producer they were fighting in court.

.....In 1977 The Jam used "BATMAN" to close side one of their first album IN THE CITY. Considering their retro Mod image in the midst of height-of-punk London, this was clearly a nod to The Who and not to the Batman TV show. When The Jam broke up (really so that Paul Weller could form the even more retro Style Council) in 1982, The Who released what would be their last studio album for the foreseeable future and gave the first of many 'farewell' tours. In 1983 their old label in England released a matching pair of 'rarities' LP's to cash in on the tour. They were actually the non-album singles prior to the ODDS & SODS album, which may all have lapsed out of print at the time but were circulated in large numbers when originally released. The CD I own that combines the two albums was manufactured in 1991 and then imported to this country, which means I probably bought it shortly before making this mix tape. That would explain it being on my mind and at hand. (NOTE: The title of the previous volume of this tape series, "The Pitchfork Approach", was only half joking.) A quick trip to Amazon suggests that finding a copy might get expensive. In 1995 most of the EP (minus "CIRCLES") showed up as bonus tracks on the mono mix CD of the album A QUICK ONE. On the plus side, it includes an unused outtake of the "MY GENERATION"/"LAND OF HOPE AND GLORY" medley. That CD was supposedly rereleased a few years later in stereo but with identical packaging. Caveat Emptor.

.....Did I mention something about "height-of-punk London" just now? Hold that thought until tomorrow.

V02-T07a "And where...is the Batman?"

.....This interstitial is well known as a sample.

Volume 2: "WE'RE ALL GOING TO JAIL FOR THIS, AREN'T WE?", track 7a

• 00:10 [excerpt from "BATDANCE" (Prince)]
• performed by Jack Nicholson (via Prince)
• original source: CD BATMAN Warner Bros. 9 25936-2 (US)
• and my source: the same

.....As a long time comics fan, I had serious misgivings about the casting in that first Tim Burton Batman movie. After seeing the movie I surprised myself by remarking that Michael Keaton was so promising as the lead that they should never have hamstrung him with that idiotic costume, a solid piece of vulcanized rubber with less flexibility than a truck tire. He couldn't even turn his head without turning his entire body, he couldn't raise his arms above his head without being switched into a different version of the costume. Keaton, whose earlier career was built on bottom of the barrel comedy film roles clearly written with Bill Murray in mind but which Murray wisely turned down, wasn't someone the casual filmgoer would chose first as Batman, certainly not over actors who simply look more the way Bruce Wayne is typically drawn. (Pierce Brosnan comes to mind.) But shortly before being cast Keaton was seen in a movie about a man struggling with alcoholism. Finding that movie on cable some time later made casting him seem more reasonable.

.....What I couldn't get past, not when it was announced, not while I sat in the theater watching the movie and not in the years since, was casting Jack Nicholson as the Joker. Somebody apparently couldn't absorb the fact that more than a decade had passed since "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest". I know that Nicholson is sort of a sacred cow in Hollywood, largely on the strength of superlative films like "Five Easy Pieces", which were already pretty dusty when Burton's "Batman" was being filmed. I know that he's a baby boomer, meaning that when he looks in a mirror, he still sees himself as he was at 23 years of age. And at 23, he would have been magnificent as the Joker. But in 1989 he was WAAAAY TOOOO FAAAAT. I was prepared for a live action movie to gloss over or ignore many elements that ask for a suspension of disbelief in a comic book. For instance, the cape could never actually move the way it is often drawn for dramatic effect. But it doesn't seem unreasonable to expect that a character who, at the time, had been skinny for half a century to be played by a skinny actor. The Joker had been skinny in the comics, in the newspaper strip, in cartoons, on television, in coloring books, board games, paperbacks, trading cards, posters, month after month, year after year since 1940. And after Jack Nicholson played him in the movie he continued to be skinny in every iteration and permutation conceivable. It may not be as bad as casting blond English characters with Tom Cruise ("Interview With A Vampire") and Keanu Reeves ("Constantine"), but it still bothers me twenty years later that almost everyone pretended to not notice.

.....I decided that Jack could make himself useful introducing the next track.

V02-T06 Dad, I'm In Jail

.....Before the introduction of YouTube, short experimental pieces of animation were gathered together into feature-length festivals and tournees and shown in repertory movie theaters. Before they ever appeared on television, I saw the original version of Ren & Stimpy and Beavis & Butthead shorts in a movie theater. That's also the way I first heard the following recording:

Volume 2: "WE'RE ALL GOING TO JAIL FOR THIS, AREN'T WE?", track 6

• 01:25 "DAD, I'M IN JAIL" (David Was, Don Was)
• performed by Was (Not Was)
• original source: B-side, 7" Mercury WAS2 (UK) 1987
• and my source: CD WHAT UP, DOG? Chrysalis VK41664 (US) 1988

.....I'm not going to argue with the villainous CheckSpelling feature Blogger uses over what the appropriate plural of "Was" is, so let's just say they're each producers, not brothers. (Two days ago it wouldn't accept the word 'ambience'; I held the American Heritage Dictionary open and looked from the page to the screen and back again, half relieved that I wasn't prematurely senile and half angry that I had wasted time looking up a word I had spelled correctly the first time.)

.....The animation was shown in my area of the country at least as far back as 1991, but could have been made in conjunction with the album's release. In 1984 their work on what would have been their third album, tentatively titled "Lost In Prehistoric Detroit" according to the site WorldWideWas.com, led to chronic fights with the Geffen label and the band's contract changed hands a few times. By the time the final version of the album emerged as WHAT UP, DOG? they had released several singles it would then include, giving it the feel of a hits compilation. This 'song' was the B-side of SPY IN THE HOUSE OF LOVE.

.....The next track goes from cartoon to comic books.

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.