Transforming Trans: Neil Young's electronic adventures revisited...

Maybe thinking about that whole misshapen Chris Gaines debacle made me think of other albums where the concept and the things surrounding its creation are more interesting than the music itself. Inevitably, I ended up with one of the most infamous albums that was a mix of weird ambitions, selfindulgence and a genuine sense of discovery: Uncle Neil and Trans. Now, to be fair, it's not that the music isn't interesting (it is) or downright bad (it isn't) , but that it didn't sound like anything Young did before (and would after). Infamously, it was of course also the album that had Young's new record label Geffen shaking their head in disbelief, the first step leading to the label suing Young for making 'uncommercial and uncharacteristic music' later on, when he added the ridiculous rockabilly exercise Everybody's Rockin' six months later as a fuck you to Geffen, when they had rejected country album Old Ways. Now, Everybody's Rockin' really is Young's worst album, a joke that finally was on the listener, in a 'the food was terrible, and such small portions, too' way. Customers paid full price for 25 minutes of awful ersatz rockabilly. In order to annoy Geffen further, Uncle Neil agreed to a promotional video for the better-than-the-rest original "Wonderin'" (a repurposed country number from around 1970), but mugged for the video to ridicule the whole exercise and also looked like a deranged serial killer:

But I digress. Trans, baby! Most of you will probably know the backstory to this album (and there's always Wikipedia), so I'll keep it brief for the few that don't: Young was heavily occupied in the early 8às with caring for his handicapped son Ben, who - like Young's first son, Zeke - was born with cerebral palsy, and was thus unable to communicate verbally. Long, repetitive routines to try to communicate with Ben were part of Neil's daily life, and this repetitiveness crept into Neil's music: in his awful last album for Reprise, Reactor, and obviously Trans. But the latter was a rather pointed way to analyze and put into metaphor Young's family situation. As he said, Trans was a fantasy about robot nurses in a hospital getting a young boy to push a button to communicate, parallelling Young's attempt to rewire one of his electric train systems in his house to communicate with the non-verbal Ben, who could imitate his father's movements via a self-constructed headset. 

While his family situation gave the album its thematic background, the sound was equally appropriate. The robotic, relentless beats from the sequencer mimicked the long, arduous therapy sessions, and Young's new love for synclavier and vocoder led him even further down the rabbit hole of how people are able to communicate. The vocoder makes the lyrics often difficult to grasp, and sometimes impossible to make out (as on parts of "Transformer Man"), but maybe therein lay a message as well: Human connection can transcend words, and maybe electric connection can as well. The idea of communicating with his son via robots and their sounds are at the core of Trans and at the core of "Transformer Man" - but at its heart lies a very human realizaton: The words don't matter, if the sound of them comes out right. And you can hear Young's love and encouragement for Ben in "Transformer Man", despite the lyrics being grabled, maybe especially because their garbled, when he moves into his falsetto and the vocoder turns his words almost indistinguishable. As Young himself said: "On that record, you know I'm saying something, but you can't understand what it is. Well, that was the feeling I was getting from my son."

Old school Young fans were of course recoiling in horror, when the vocoder first comes in roughly a third into "Computer Age". But here's the thing: I'm not like most Young fans. I felt like the inclusion of three tracks that have nothing to do with the concept, thrown in more or less to fill up the album, was a huge misstep that undermined the fascinating and - in its own weird way - quite wonderful record. One thing that was almost always missing, even from some of Neil's most popular albums, was cohesion. Uncle Neil simply never had much use for it. Need to fill an album up to album running time? Just throw in a couple of refurnished (or not) outtakes, or a live track or two, or whatever else was lying around. Even Harvest, the Young classic that even people who don't know much about Young have at home, was hardly a paragon of cohesion: In between the two heavily orchestrated numbers, the live track, and the one rock workout coming at the end of a predominantly acoustic album, cohesion wasn't the name of the game - one reason why I reworked it as Harvest Time, still the most popular album in One Buck Records history. 

So while most Neil Young fans would probably clamor for less vocoders and sequencers, not more of them, but our One Buck Record of the day is going the opposite way, bullheaded like Uncle Neil himself.  This version of Trans is not for folks who didn't like its sound in the first place, instead it doubles down on it and presents an album that stays with Young's concept from beginning to end, thus it's nicknamed the fully automated version. The three conventional tracks sung in Young's normal voice stick out like a sore thumb on the original Trans, especially "Litte Thing Called Love" and "Hold On To Your Love", both taken from another planned album completely (for years thought to be called Islands In The Sun, though on Archives III Young names it as Johnny's Island). And the concluding epic "Like An Inca" seems to be an entirely different thing together, unfortuately a deathly dull ramble stuck to a relentless synth beat, and thus never able to break out into hidden Young classic territory. So those three had to go (or almost). There are no Trans outtakes of any kind on Volume Three of his Archives, so it stands to reason that the six electro-and-vocoder tracks (counting the mix'n'match remake of "Mr. Soul") are all that exists of electronic Trans music. Which of course made building an entire electronic Trans retroactively somewhat challenging.

Challenging isn't impossible, though. I first thought of having some sort of little overture for the album that inroduced its sound and vision. So I looped the first bars of the 12" version of "Sample And Hold" and overlaid Young repeating the album title in a robotic vocoder voice, thus creating "Trans", the track, a short intro before the familiar beat of "Computer Age" takes over. Then I had to decide which version of "Sample And Hold" to use, the five-minute original album version or the eight-minute 12" cut. And guess what, I kept both. If there can be two "My My, Hey Hey"'s and two "Rockin' In The Free World"'s, then why the hell not two "Sample And Hold"'s? Especially since the feel and sound of both versions are quite different. Interestingly, the most guitar-heavy number on the entire album, the short version of "Sample And Hold" is co-credited to The Trans Band and not Crazy Horse, who are co-credited on the thumping "We R In Control" (whose little 'woo-woo-woo sound' I love) and "Computer Cowboy", the most humorous track on the album, and also one of my favorites. The eight-minute 12" version of "Sample And Hold"is significantly different, almost entirely electronic, with the guitars pushed further back in the mix, with additional lyrics and vocoder interplay. I figured both versions were different enough from each other to merit inclusion. Needless to say, it was also a cheap way to fill out the album to reach an acceptable album running time. I'm borrowing Uncle Nel's tricks!

I still thought that that was a little thin as far as the track list goes, so I decided to rescue one of the thrown off tracks - and tried to, well, transform it. I ran "Hold On To Your Love" through the vocoder to bring it closer in sound to its Trans colleagues. Granted, it's didn't come out a hundred percent how I wanted - for that I probably would have had to separate the vocals from the rest, then put the vodocer on it, but that starts to be outside of my capabilities, especially since I never got to working well with the AV5 audio editing program and finally abandoned it. This version of the track is thus an experiment that maybe isn't perfect, but it more or less does what I wanted it to. It brings the fully automated version of Trans to a 36 minute run time and now carries nine tracks, which makes it an authentic-enough looking simile of what the album could have also looked like in late 1982 or early 1983. 

So, this is obviously a way tougher sell than Harvest Time, but hell, a challenge's a challenge, right? So, be a pal (or a girl pal), and try out the fully electronic Trans experience. It might not transform your opinion of this most misunderstood album of Young's career, but you never know...

You Are Hereby Cordially Invited To Attend The Butterfly Ball

Some of the more obscure albums to feature here on One Buck Records I stumble onto by accident - following an artist or type of music by a thread. Some I find lthe old-fashioned way ike you would find here - on blogs, in articles, in user comments. And some albums I stumble onto, well, just like that. Take The Butterfly Ball by Roger Glower & Friends. Had never heard of the thing, had never heard a thing from it. Then, one day riding in the car, "Love Is All" came on the radio - and I'm pretty sure it's only a radio song over here in France - and my wife said something like "Mais c'est le chanson de la grenouille!". The frog song? What the hell? (Cheap joke: If it's running on French radio, doesn't it automatically turn into a frog song?) It turns out when something goes wrong on live television on French national TV, they - and we're talking about the late Seventies and early Eighties here - they didn't put up a test screen or some sort of sign apologizing for the incident, no the French had something much better, they had la grenouille who sang "Love Is All". They had this: 

So, my wife knew the singing frog, but not necessarily any other critters that make up the cast of The Butterfly Ball, or indeed that very event or musical album. And so I got her The Butterfly's Ball for an upcoming birtday. This album is - very Seventies. It could probably have come out only at that time, and definitely only in Great Britain. There is this very specifically British type of whimsy that drives the project that seems impossible to imitate. I mean the idea itself sounds sufficiently daft: Making an album out of a children's book of drawings. Alan Aldridge's The Butterfly Ball And The Grasshopper's Feast had some accompanying verse by poet William Plomer (who died before publication), but Glover - free from obligations in Deep Purple and just at the start of his career as a producer - was tasked to bring the tale into a musical form. 

Glover wrote the whole album - some co-written with Eddie Hardin, as well as with Ronnie James Dio and Mickey Lee Soule - , played a varoiety of instruments on the recording, including guitar, piano, bass, and percussion. And while he contributed some backing vocals, for lead vocal duty he went through his roloscope and found a ton of help. The three aforementioned collaborators take leads, as well as new Deep Purple members David Coverdale and Glenn Hughes, and a couple of others. On the female side of things, we get his wife Judi Kuhl, Helen Chapelle and Liza Strike. And of course we're going out, fittingly, with a children's choir.

While the album is a work that is supposed to work as a whole, but the obvious highlight here is the aforementioned "Love Is All", obviously influenced by the Beatles "All You Need Is Love", a happy singalong that was the first song finished for the project. Though credited to Glover & Friends on the single, lead vocals are by Ronnie James Dio. The track made number one in the Netherlands and Belgium and, as explained above, became very popular in France during fill-ins, the became a full-fledged smash on rerelease in 1991 after it was featured in an ad. Other highlights include the folk-ish "Sitting In A Dream", delicately sung by Dio, and the rollicking "Sir Maximus Mouse", sung by Eddie Hardin. This is the complete version of the album, including "Little Chalk Blue" with lead vocals by Urias Heep's John Lawton, which was issued ten months after the album to promote the concert of The Butterfly Ball that finally took place in December 1975. 

So, this is a true oddball little thing, with more than a touch of British music hall shining through here and there in this 'rock opera', which is not that surprising considering such song titles as "Saffron Dormouse And Lizzy Bee", "Old Blind Mole", "Dreams Of Sir Bedivere" and "Watch Out For The Bat". But then again, you're not coming here for mainstream stuff, do ya? So, get in touch with your inner child, join the animals of the forest in their preparation for the titular event and let yourself get carried away to the land of the silly and the whimsical, the land of The Butterfly Ball. 

The Year Of The Desperado

The Year Of The Desperado, at least for the purposes of the One Buck Record of the day, started in early March 1973 and ended about thirteen months later. On March 10 1973 the Eagles took the stage of the Sporthal de Vliegermolen, a local gym in Voorburg in the Netherlands for a festival called Popgala 73. At that time the release of Desperado was two weeks away, which means that the Eagles premiered a whooping five numbers from the album that evening, plus J.D. Souther's "How Long" which would only find a place on an Eagles record 34 years later. Ten days later they gave a concert for the BBC that split the difference bewteen numbers from their succesful debut album and the upcoming Desperado. And then, a little less than a year later, on April 14 1974 the Eagles were invited to Don Kirshner's Rockconcert series, bringing with them friends like Jackson Browne and Linda Ronstadt. By that time, On The Border had come out, but a nuber of Desperado tracks remained in the line-up, including a show-stopping and show-concluding extended run through "Doolin-Dalton - Desperado (Reprise)".  

So here's the breakdown: the first eight tracks are from Popgala '73, the following four from the BBC cncert and then the last four from the Kirshner show. Most of these 15 tracks present Desperado songs, plus songs that fit the vibe or sound. The Popgala tracks are interesting, because while the soundboard mix is pretty clear, it also is an unusual mix. Don Henley's instruments are much higher in the mix than usual, giving these tracks a sound that goes off the beaten Eagles path. And for a band that was notorious for playing everything exactly as in the studio, that's is something. You can hear Henley's drumming or percussion work. This might not be surprising for the opening "Take It Easy" (after the traditional a capella rendering of the first verse of "Fair And Tender Ladies") which is acoustic and has Henley do percussion on the guitar on his lap. But it gives even an old warhorse like "Peaceful Easy Feeling" a slightly different feeling, Henley's pushed to the front drumming and the rather loose steel guitar from Leadon giving it a loping feel that the pretty, shiny studio version and most of its live apperance clones don't have. And you can hear every movement of Henley's hi-hat at the beginning of "Certain Kind Of Fool". 

Speaking of that song, one of my favorites of the album, it's the only one on here that is present in two versions, because I thought the Popgala and BBC ones were sufficiently different and both worth keeping, while I picked the BBC versions of "(Whatever Happened To) Saturday Night" and "Out Of Control" because the former has a longer mandolin solo and the latter has cleaner sound. "Early Bird" from that BBC concert is an interesting case to make for the early Eagles being a band worth seeing and hearing in concert. From about mid-1974 onwards, their concerts became calcified and repetitive, no doubt responsible for the Rolling Stone infamously accusing them of "loitering on stage". But in the two years beforehand they occasionally deviated from the well-studied studio versions, such as on "Early Bird" whose running time gets more than doubled via a long jam section. 

I also kept the banter on the Popgala tracks, because it's interesting to see how the Eagles (d)evolved. Some of the interaction might be akward, especially when Glenn Frey takes the mic, but at least they try to communicate with the audience, when in later years they would pretty much leave it at "We're the Eagles from Los Angeles. It's also interesting to note who's doing the banter here. It's normal that you don't hear the terminally shy Randy Meisner, but there also is not a single peep from Henley, with Leadon and Frey - the band's two most outgoing characters, taking the mic (and sometimes sniping at each other, setting up a volatile relationship that would eventually become openly hostile). 

The Year Of The Desperado doesn't only make a case for the quality of the Desperado material but also for the quality of the early Eagles as a fine concert attraction, and it's a very fine way to spend an hour and change. So, here's the Eagles from Los Angeles with tales of outlaws and low lives or maybe low life rockstars. Let The Year Of The Desperado begin...

When The Eagles Turned Desperado...And Unveiled Their Masterpiece

"They've made a fuckin' cowboy album!" This was the less-than-enthusiastic reaction of Atlantic label boss Jerry Greenberg, whose lbel was distributing Assylum records at the time, upon hearing what the new golden boys of the Asylum label had been up to for about a month in London. He certainly didn't expect an entire album based on old West outlaws and their similarities to current rock stars. Asylum head honcho David Geffen was barely more impressed. Of course, one issue was coolness. Looking like hippies on their first album, he could sell this music to hippies and housewives alike, but now these guys were playing dress up on the cover material and singing about bank robbers in the 1880s? History almost proved Greenberg, who maintained that coboy records wouldn't sell, and Geffen right, at least at first, because Desperado didn't repeat the success of the Eagles' debut album. Both singles stiffed (more on that later) and the album took a year and a half to go gold. Was it a mistake to make that "fuckin' cowboy album"?  

I had a real 'two roads diverged in a yellow wood' moment when I picked up my first Eagles album. My record store (well, one of my record stores) had a 'cheaper and last items' section which I browsed through, as usual. This was at the beginning of my life as a student and thus at the beginning of me slowly building a classic rock collection. So I stumbled on two Eagles discs, probably thrown out to make way for the remasters that were coming up. One was The Long Run. The other one was, obviously, Desperado. I decided I could take one, but not both. On one hand we had the simple black album cover, on the other the old west outlaws. 

I'd like to think that my love for Westerns, instilled to me by my father's love for Westerns made me choose Desperado and its cowboy chic, but it's just as likely that I checked the back covers and the titles on The Long Run made me wonder. "The Greeks Don't Want No Freaks"? "Teenage Jail"? "Those Shoes"? Yeah, no, I take the cowboys there, thank you very much. Needless to say, I made the good choice. I doubt I would have become an Eagles fan based on The Long Road, as a matter of fact. It's still the worst of all Eagles albums and probably the worst of all the big, heavily awaited releases ever. Yuck. Desperado, though? Hear me out on this, folks, because it just might be the Eagles' masterpiece. 

There's a persistent myth about the Eagles, often brought up in connection with Desperado and its artwork, that the Eagles weren't really country, that they were a bunch of fakers who would do this ridiculous dress-up but were, as Michael Murphy would say, "city slicker lickers, they gotta a lot of licks slicker than you and me". But that is, as a lot of things concerning the band, a mix of self-mythologizing gone wrong and a lot of half-assed assumptions by observers. "We're the Eagles from Los Angeles" might have been their slogan, but the Eagles came from everywhere in the U.S. 

Randall Herman Meisner was born the son of a sharecropper in Scottsbluff, Nebraska. You can't get any more country than that. Donald Hugh Henley grew up in a small town in northeast Texas. Sounds pretty country to me. Bernard Michael Leadon III was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, though he was the frst to adop California as his home state. The only real faker of the crew was, of course, Glenn Frey, who was born and grew up in Detroit and idolized local hero Bob Seger. Frey, notably, went into sensitive folk-rock, then country-rock, because he saw a career opportunity there. But yeah, I'd say two and a half cowboys out of four is pretty damn enough. 

Whether you agreed with the album's premise of likening 1970s rock stars to 1880 outlaws, or thought it was silly, you can not accuse the Eagles of not committing to it. I never realized until some Glenn Frey banter in a live show, how smartly they go about it. Take "A Certain Kind Of Fool" for example. Listening to it like that, with the Wild West artwork and everything, you would of course figure it's about a young guy buying a gun, becoming a gunfighter and "a wanted man" on the poster on a store front - but it never openly says that the object, "so shiny and new in his hand", was a gun - it might just as well be a guitar, and the poster is a concert poster.

This kind of double meaning applies to a whole number of songs: When Bernie Leadon sings in "Twenty-One" that "they say a man should have a stock and trade / but me I find another way", is he talking abut turning outlaw or turning rock'n'roll singer? The guys coming into town and causing havoc while getting a little "Out Of Control" could be cowhands raising hell after their payday, or a rock'n'roll band partying, right?! The old, short (and now replaced) Allmusic review complained that "none of the songs fit the storyline", but there was no storyline per se to follow - and they did almost entirely follow the thematic concept of the record.  

Desperado was also the big coming out party for Don Henley and a harbinger for things to come, with all that implies. On the debut he was hardly noticable, as a singer or songwriter. He had half a song credit to his name, even if - another harbnger to come - it was on hit sngle "Witchy Woman" that he also sung. But for his second slated lead vocal they had to wheel out a Jackson Browne tune, as if Henley couldn't write a second quality tune. Well, that would change, quickly. Henley is credited on eight of the eleven songs on Desperado, and sings lead on four of them - most of all Eagles in both cases. And while the Henley-Frey combo might not be as renowned as Lennon-McCartney or Richards-Jagger, that writing team was born here, and there is no denying its efficacity. Unsurprisingy, the two big songs that everyone knows off this album were both Henley-Frey compositions. Tellingly, these weren't the two singles off the album, because "Desperado" was never issued as such. 

More proof that, despite "Witchy Woman", the Eagles were at this time seen as a band with a clear lead singer in Glenn Frey, so Asylum would ty to mirror the band's debut album and issue a Frey-sung uptempo tune à la "Take It Easy" ("Outlaw Man") and a Frey-sung ballad à la "Peaceful, Easy Feeling" ("Tequila Sunrise"). Also: check out the album cover, on which the two most prominent guys are Leadon and Meisner, with Frey half-blocked out by Meisner and Henley having half of his face hidden by the shadow of his cowboy hat. This would obviously be the last time that Henley would be obscured on something Eagles-related. Henley seemingly had the greatest affinity for the cowboy material, yet it's still quite a leap to go from a single co-credit on the debut to co-writing two-thirds of an album. Naturally, Henley profited from this, as his songwriting credits, number of lead vocals and influence on the group's fortune grew massively, almost as a direct result from Desperado. 

On the nine original tracks (not couting the two "Doolin-Dalton" reprise songs), I don't see a single duffer. The weakest is probably "Out Of Control", and even that one hints at the harder rock direction the band would soon afterwards veer into. Despite Glyn Johns' excellent work on Desperado the band - well, mainly Glenn Frey and Don Henley - were growing tired of Johns and his rules (no drugs in the studio! how dare he?) and production (deemed too soft by the two), but the switch to Bill Szymchyk halfway through follow-up On The Border didn't yield an album as satisfying as Desperado. As a matter of fact, none of them did. Sure, they got bigger and ridiculously successful, but for me they never bettered Desperado, even on Hotel California which comes closest. 

Desperado deserves a listen from those who never gave a fuck about the Eagles, or a second listen from those who have written off the Eagles due to the played-to-death-radio-hits. It will also be the first of a series of albums about America in the 19th Century that I plan to post. And be back tomorrow for a Desperado-themed bonus...

From The Spiderweb-Covered Attic: Still The Ass-Kickingest Horror Music Compilation You'll Ever Hear...

Halloween, baby, time to bring out the scary again. This time with real emphasis on the word again. Long-time followers of the blog will know Best Of Horror Vol. 1 already. But hell, a little repost from time to time hasn't hurt anybody and it has been two years since I originally posted this, when this blog was still in its infancy and fighting to slowly crawl into triple digits , so a number of you might not have this, but should get it. 

I lacked time - and, let's be honest here - motivation this year to compile another compilation of music from horror films. And, being honest, and a little full of myself, again, why would I? I recently listened to Best Of Horror Vol. 1 again, and that compilation still holds up splendidly. Those suites that I did for the Friday The 13th series, and John Carpenter's The Fog and Prince of Darkness? Still an excellent way to get the strongest moments from those scores all in one place. 

classic film, classic poster

But since we're not all in on the lazy recycling business, here's the kicker for collectors: A special, exclusive, only on this edition, unavailable elsewhere BONUS TRACK (What, too much?!). Yup, even here on One Buck Records, we go for collector's bait. Actually, this morning in the school where I work, during class breaks, we were, ahem, celebrating Halloween. Lights out, scary sound effects and music on the comm system, that kind of thing. And, completely unbeknownst to my two bosses, on one of the scary music Cds that they no doubt picked up completely at random there was...the main theme from Suspiria! Good choice, compilers of unknown Halloween-themed CD. So, that gave me an idea. 

I have never liked Goblin's soundtrack to Suspiria much. I know it is held in high esteem by both horrorfilm score and prog rock fans, but I find the whole thing a taxing experience, with the prog side of Goblin meaning that they often stretch out the music unnecessarily, which goes into the straight up annoying when they do yelling witch voices and such. The tracks on the album are reminiscent of the ones in the film, but not quite the same. So for the extra special bonus track, I mixed two tracks ("Suspiria" and "Witch") together to approximate the feel of the score that's playing in the opening minutes, during Suzie's taxi ride through the forests to the dancing academy. It has to be said, that Suspiria's opening is its pièce de résistance, and one of the most stonishing sequences ever put to film. It's an assault on the senses - sound, music, color - that Argento never did again in such concentrated form. That first reel of Suspiria is so outstanding, that unfortunately the rest of the film can never really match it, and the finale is sadly kind of a dud. But that opening, man, even as a short film, that thing is killer, literally and figuratively...

The inclusion of "Suspiria Witch" means that I'm breaking a rare principle, as I also break the 80 minute plane with that track included. If, for some crazy reason, you would want to burn this to disc, you'd have to kick something off or overburn. But then again, the tiniest percentage of you is even thinking 'CD', so I'm probably worrying for nothing. 

Anyway, here's the 2025 special bonus track edition of Best Of Horror Vol. 1. Have a happy All Hallow's Eve everybody...

The Very Long And Very Strange Halloween Of Garth Brooks

 

In 1999 Garth Brooks, the biggest music star of the 90s, took one of the biggest gambles of his life. Or he lost his mind, depending on point of view. Brooks was to become Chris Gaines, an Australian-American rock star who sprang - and this is truly interesting - from the mind of Brooks himself, who seemingly made up Gaines' back story, life details and major parts of the story for the film The Lamb that was going to present the life story - succes, tragedy, sex drugs & rock'n'roll - of the enigmatic Gaines. The Lamb,backed by Paramount Pictures and scheduled to come out in 2000, would have been scripted by Jeb Stuart, screenwriter for Die Hard and the big screen version of The Fugitive. The accompanying album was going to be produced by Babyface. What could possibly go wrong on Brooks' march towards world domination via the pop charts and Hollywood? 

Well, a lot, really. Though, to be fair, you can't accuse Brooks of half-assing it. He slimmed down considerably for his new alter ego, losing about 40 pounds, and grew out a soul patch - hey, it was the 90s! - to better incorporate Chris Gaines. Alas, it was (almost) for nothing. It certainly didn't help that the wig, dark mascara and pouting faces not only didn't make Brooks look like a brooding alt rock star,  they made him look like Ben Stiller's Derek Zoolander had walked into the music business. On top of that, the whole concept and presentation - failed makeover and all - was more interesting than the music itself. Most of it is plodding adult contemporary rock with mild r&b undercurrents here and there that could have been monster hits only in Brooks' megalomaniacal imagination. 

Derek?!? The fuck you doin' here, man?

Brooks is both playing it safe with this music and taking a risk with his whole outrageous and plain weird alter ego, meaning that the Chris Gaines experiment falls in between all possible target groups, is incoherent and finally satisfied no one. It also meant that the concept of these real songs as a companion to a fake career fall apart. Whoever wrote Chris Gaines' liner notes talks about their fake boy band's song being the demo instead of the fancy big money studio version, but the song never sounds like a demo, much less a cheaply assembled one. When he talks about songs coming from "a very dark and angy album", why do none of those sound dark or angry in the slightes? Everything sounds here exactly like what it is: a middle-aged music star trying out his hand at expensively made, trussed-up AC pop-rock. If Garth Brooks had really commmitted to the concept, he could have really had something here. If he had, say, really gone for an 80s instrumentation on the tracks supposed to come from that era, or tried out his version of alternative rock or grunge on the supposedly early 90s recordings. But the Brookster couldn't bring himself to do it, which means that the fake liner notes and the music are often at odds with each other. 

Brooks' insistence that this was just an experiment, a little swerve due to the upcoming movie, and not 'the real Garth Brooks' was a bit of a cop-out, a way to protect himself from sell-out accusations. He even went so far in an interview as to suggest that it was Paramount who pushed him into the whole Chris Gaines thing, when that whole deal was 100% the brainchild of the Brookster. And what a weird, warped child it was, the packaging showing already the unwieldiness of the project. The album, identified on the label as "The Pre-Soundtrack To The Film The Lamb" had a front cover and booklet preseting it as the Greatest Hits of Chris Gaines. But since retailers and consumers would have been confused at equal measures, on the back page of the booklet was the same cover, but with the title Garth Brooks In...The Life Of Chris Gaines, which was also the title on the spine and the official title of the album, which was finally usedas the cover. Akward, dude, akward. Much as some of the content pertaining to his alter ego's fictious back story and imagined discography. Not only did they hire a young model to play young Chris Gaines but also some, uh, swimwear models for the 'sexy' artwork of Gaines' albums. No doubt Brooks approved these, so this is where in the hidden space of a booklet and a fictitious character, he let his freak flag fly. Fornucopia, anyone? 

Garth Gone Wild!

(or, all the tits, neon and weirdness he couldn't have on his real covers...)

I said up there that the music is, unfortunately, the least interesting part of the whole Chris Gaines fiasco, as it's for long stretches a snooze, but there are some good things on here: "That's The Way I Remember It" with its shuffling drum loop rhythm, warm piano and guitars is a very nice number, and beautifully sung by Brooks. The same is probably true for "Lost In You", the single from the album that crazily enough made in in the Top 5, yet is a song that nobody remembers. It is, for certain, a contender for least-remembered Top 5 song of all time. I'm not a huge fan of the song, it's too slow and falsetto singing is rarely a favorite of the house. The title of "Snow In July" sounds like a Prince song, and goes for a Prince feel (and in the fake liner notes it says that the media dubbed him 'The New Prince', yeah, sure Jan Garth), while the most Brokks ever gets to rocking on this disc is the Wallflowers-soundalike "Unsigned Letter". 

When the album came out and Brooks was now ready to conquer the pop world after having dominated country music for almost the entire decade beforehand - the album came and went as a huge disappointment, if not outright fiasco. That's obviously a weird thing to say about an album that went all the way to number 2 and made double Platinum. That's of course how crazy the 90s were for Brooks, this would be huge for any other artist, but Brooks was collecting Diamond certifications at the time, so the return was hugely underwhelming. Within weeks, stores were starting to sell their overstock of the album at discount prices.  

I'm a weirdo, baby, so why don't you kill me? 

In The Life Of Chris Gaines was also a huge disaster for Capitol Records, who had gone along with the plan and really put the money behind it. The album itself supposedly cost an astonishing five million dollars to produce, and to really sell the Garth-as-fictitious-rock-star thing they allocated a frankly astonishing 15 milion dollar advertising campaign budget. that included a fake VH1: Behind The Music special. Meaning they sunk more than 20 million dollar in an album that confounded the public, crept to hugely underperforming sales, killed The Lamb and any other related projects deader than Dillinger and was relatively quickly deleted from distribution. Evenmoreso, as, with a sort of Stalinist fervor, Brooks tried to eliminate any traces of poor ol' Chris Gaines: The album isn't part of his official discography on his website, it's scrubbed (or almost scrubbed) like all his music from You Tube and of course it's not available digitally. Garth Brooks would very much for you to forget that Chris Gaines ever existed. But who could foget those bangs, that pout, that eyeliner..? 

In 1999, as if karma was out to spite the most succcessful musician on earth, things went from very weird and reasonably bad to undeniably weird and undeniably worse, as Brooks' long and strange months-long Halloween of course ended in the only way it could...weirdly. He brought out a Christmas album, Garth Brooks & The Magic Of Christmas that was also a companion piece to another media adventure - in this case a TV special called Call Me Claus - and, as with the whole Chris Gaines fiasco, things didn't go as planned. The November release date had already been locked in, while Brooks was still trying to get the Gaines thing back on track, and to add insult to injury finally the special wasn't finished in time and pushed back an entire year, leaving that album stranded without the multimedia tie-in Brooks had counted on. So he went from a pre-sooundtrack to a movie that would never exist to a (pre-) soundtrack to a film that would only come out a year later. Hey, how're things goin' there, bud? Oh, also: it has one of the weirdest, most ill-fitting covers of all time. Just look at that thing:

I will capture your souls in this cursed crystal ball...and devour them while you scream in endless agony...Merry Christmas, everybody!...Not!!!

What the fuck is Brooks celebrating here? Is it Christmas or the coming of the antichrist? What's with the spooky night sky? Or with the black outfit and sucked-in cheeks? Is this Chris Gaines who has bodysnatched poor unsuspecting Brooks? Why does he look menacingly into the camera and seems to have a soul-trapping crystal ball of the damned in his hands? Which part of this cover screams 'Christmas' to you? Well, it truly is a Christmas album for the whole family...if it is the Manson family we're talking about. Sheez, Garth. What. The. Fuck. No wonder decades later someone invented the 'Garth is a serial killer' meme. 

Anyhow, you can tell that despite the music being probably the weak link of the whole enterprise, I am strangely fascinated by this whole weird-ass saga. This is what happens when a music multi-millionaire gets weird. It didn't work, but damn, if it isn't an interesting story. And so now I told this story. And you will get at least a teaser of what Brooks' weird Gaines adventure sounded like. I wouldn't want to bore you with the whole thing, so I compiled a six-track EP version, The Way I Remember It, with pretty much all the worthwhile Gaines tracks: The aforementioned "That's The Way I Remember It", "Lost In You", "Snow In July" and "Unsigned Letter", plus the singalong "Main Street" and the r'n'b-rock-ish "Diggin' For Gold". These songs will not change your life, but they show that underneath all the layers and layers of bullshit, there might have even been some salvegeable music in the Chris Gaines project, if Brooks had played it straight. 

Ain't I dark and mysterious?...oh, people will love it...

But then again, he would have deprived us of one of the strangest and most curious (and overexpesnive) footnotes in music history. He might not see it that way, now or ever, but it turns out that his biggest failure was also possibly the most interesting - not to mention deliciously wacky - thing he ever did. And for that, Troyal Garth Brooks, we salute you!

David Bowie's Long Goodbye And The ForeverNextDays

Whether you liked the concept of my David Bowie Mixtapes/Megamixes or not, by the end I was quite 'mixed out'. I finished Babel because I had put all foreign language songs specifically aside, but yeah, the time of the mix has come and gone, at least for the time being. So instead you get a good old fashioned compilation, an One Buck recods exclusice of course, that ends up covering Bowie's autumnal period and the last roars  of the lion in winter. There wre no specific guiding principles, other than the songs going together. One principle, that the title already hints at, was to do something with the bonus tracks from The Next Day, as well as those of Lazarus. So you get a lot of old man Bowie staring age and death in the eye, and doing it with a defiant rock stance. Because while at least during the production of Lazarus, Bowie knew the end was coming for him, there is surprisingly little larmoyance and outright melanncholy on Lazarus. Instead, on the set of outtakes from The Next Day and Lazarus, Bowie regularly puts the pedal to the medal and delivers a bunch of freewheeling rock songs. David Bowie would not go gently, or quietly, into that good night. 

Personal highlights for me are the retro-rocking "Atomica", the wonderful "God Bless The Girl" (part of The Next Day's line-up until practically the last second), the inscrutable "The Informer" and the very fitting space odyssey in two parts that is "Born In A UFO" and "Like A Rocket Man", the latter a cheekily jaunty acount of Bowie's cocaine years. Speaking of cheeky: I can't deny it, sequencing these two titles back to back was at least partly for my own amusement, as was the "Plan/"No Pan" combo. And speaking of the latter: What a beautiful song and performance, Bowie for once allowing himself the sentiment of a 'last song', (with the fitting working title of "Wistful"), a man who knows he will die soon in a netherworld or limbo  appearance as a ghost from the beyond in his last months of living: "Here, am I nowhere now? / No plan / Wherever I may go / Just where / Just there / I am" and finally "All the things that are my life / my moods, my beliefs, my desires, me alone / nothing to regret / This is no place/ But here I am / This is not quite yet". Hold on there, folks, I think I got some dust speckles in my eyes there...

"Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them"

The other trigger to launch this was that I read somewhere a short mention of the Loner Mix of "Bring Me The Disco King", which has always been a favorite of mine and was actually for a good while the only version of the song I knew, so when I heard the original, I was a little disappointed, obviously going against the grain once more. For a lot of folks, "Bring Me The Disco King" was the highlight of Reality, but I largely prefer this version by Steve Lohner (geddit?) from Nine Inch Nails. Originally, the song was written and recorded for Black Tie, White Noise, where Bowie intended it as a real cheesy disco numbr, but the joke fell flat and the number was scrapped. He retried in the mi-90s to no better result, then stripped the song down to just him and a drum loop, with the idea of building gradually a full band version around it, then decided that the stark, lonely sound of just him and Mick Garson on piano was enough. Lohner completely rethought the track with a fuller (and rockier) arrangement for strings, guitar and keyboard. lead guitar wasn't done by Lohner himself, but Red Hot Chili Peppers' John Frusciante, while Lisa Germano mans (womans?) the keys. Most controversial, for sure, was Lohner's decision to have Tool vocalist Maynard James Keenan re-sing some of Bowie's lines in a sort of ghostly echo. Sue me, that's probably my favorite part of this version. 

Considering the fact that half of the line-up was made up of the last years of his life plus "Disco King", whose opening lines serve as a sort of prelude  to the compilations occupation with, and ultimate gestures of defiance towards one's own mortality: "You promised me the ending would be clear / You'd let me know when the time was now". So I picked songs that in one way or another woud fit - thematically and sonically- and since a lot of the The Next Day/Lazarus tracks took care of the more boisterous side of Bowie, I chose a number of more melancholy numbers to redress and balance the sound: His re-reading of "Quicksand", from ChangesNowBowie, the wistful "Thursday's Child" (albeit in its 'rock mix'), the stately remake of "Conversation Piece" with Bowie's young foolish writer now replaced by an old fool drowned in his unfinished work and loneliness, the acoustic reading of Tin Machine's "I Can't Read" (very similar to, but not the same as the ChangesNowBowie version I used on the Where Are We Now? Mixtape), the bright and beautiful "Strangers When We Meet" that was the Coda to 1. Outside and finally my own mash up of "Where Are We Now," and "The Mysteries", saved from that same-titled mixtape as the closing track here. 

The oldest track here is from 1995, and that is neither surprise nor coincidence. In the mid-90s Bowie was closing in on fifty, a little like the author of these lines is right now, and he was both starting to take stock of his life, his past, his possible futures. That's why the autumn songs really start around this time period, because Bowie started to realize that he - the Ziggy of yesteryear, a generation's Major Tom, a thin white duke that defied white lady - was now probably closer to the end of his life than to the beginning of it. So his thoughts turned autumnal sometimes, not often, but regularly, while the rocker in him still strolled out, raging, raging against the dying of the light. 

And that closing track, a mash-up I did to really sustain the melancholy of its lyrics? A closing prayer, really. "My prayer flies like a word on a wing" he sang in 1976, but the real Bowie prayer that counts is at the end of "Where Are We Now?":

As long as there's sun...

as long as there's rain...

as long as there's fire...

as long as there's me...

as long as there's you...

...there will be forevernextdays...