Tales Of Mystery And Imagination Re-Imagined

 

Sometimes I stumble onto One Buck Records projects under if not weird, then random circumstances. Having already so much music to go through, during my trips to the library I often don't know what, if anything, to take in the music section. So last year, I just decided to randomly flip through the 'A' section and see what I find. And I found the Alan Parsons Project, a band I was vaguely familiar with and had compiled a sort of personalized (but really rather random) 'best-of' a couple of years ago. So I stumbled onto the three Alan Parsons Project albums I Robot, The Turn Of A Friendly Card and their debut, their somewhat classic adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's poems and short stories. When I was a kid renting cassete tapes (!) from the local library, the weird, austere cover had always had a strange fascination on me, but never enough to actually take the cassette. And I doubt I would have liked it. So, listening through Tales Of Mystery And Imagination last years there were some parts I liked, some stuff that was ok, and a couple of moments that I was not a fan of. So I copied these CDs onto the computer with a very vague notion of 'maybe some time in the future I should do something with those'. 

Some time in the future then turned into a couple of weeks ago, by a weird turn of events. There is this big book/music/films/crafts store around here that often buys up remaining stock of DVDs and Blu-Rays from what I think are defunct labels and throws them out for five bucks a piece, not a bad deal to fill in holes in my film library at home. So with copies of "Death Wish" and "Smokey And The Bandit" (hooo, boy, here's a film I haven't seen in more than 35 years or so. One of my dad's favorite who had to watch it every time it came on TV) I picked up a film I had never seen, "Two Evil Eyes", a horror film in two halves made by genre vets Dario Argento and George Romero. Based on, wouldn't you know it, short stories of Edgar Allan Poe, that I subsequently read over the summer. 

The two movie adaptations really only have the slightest things in common with their literary origins - Argento's The Black Cat moreso than Romero's The Facts In The Case Of Mr. Waldemar - but the movie is pretty good. It's arguably the last of Argento's extravagant period, before the diminishing budget and bad ideas in the 90s dulled his star considerably. Romero's tale is more workmanlike - also very on brand - but still pretty good. Anyway, having watched the movie - which is okay, by the way - and the bonus material where Argento especially details his love for Edgar Allen Poe's short stories, I was like 'waitaminute, Poe stories and motifs, that rings a bell', dug out the Alan Parsons Project album and before you knew it was deeply immersed in one of my patented Alternate Albums projects. 

First of all, for all you purists out there - as much as Alan Parsons Project purists can exist, I reckon - this is based on the 1987 reworking of the album. Meaning: A 100% more Orson Welles, but also more synths, more gated drums and reverb, a church organ, and a couple of other nooks and crannies that are different from the original 1976 version. Then again, purists obviously will not want to stay because once more the One Buck Guy was cut loose in Audacity, cutting and strutting, and gluing and undoing and generally speaking really reworking this sucker. 

So, what were my problems with the 'original' (I know, I know) version? A couple of moments of musical ennuis which could be tightened up, for one thing, notably in the big "The Fall Of The House Of Usher" suite that originally eats up almost all of side b. That sneaky Alan Parsons doesn't credit De Bussy in his note-for-note recreation of the unfinished "La Chute De La Maison Usher"-segment, but more importantly, that thing is just entirely too long and its (faux) classical air doesn't necessarily jibe well with the more bombastic art/prog rock sound elsewhere, so I cut that section way down, together with other bits and bops of the suite, to turn the 15+ minute suite into a single song suite that runs a little more than nine minutes. 

One other major issue? Some of the vocals! Alan Parsons himself recited parts of Poe's poem "The Raven" for the song of the same name and then ran that through a vocoder, proudly noting it as the first instance of a vocoder used in rock music. Yeah, okay, Al, but what about the first good use of a vocoder in rock music? Because this unintelligible and frankly irritating stuff isn't it. But of course, you can always do worse, like hiring Arthur Brown to do the lead vocals on "The Tell-Tale Heart". The man might have his fans, but his theatrical, ridiculously overwrought delivery is just awful to my ears, so that definitely had to go. I started by cutting out all the bits I didn't like, but that didn't seem promising, ending up with a 28 minute 'mini album' with little flow. So back to the drawing board for ol' OBG. Next stop: checking out the outtakes, demos and other assorted extras that the band had brought out for its expanded editions of the album. And that is were I found a couple of winners for this version of the album. 

Not a winner: The wacky alternate cover of the album

Needing to replace most of "The Raven", I found the demo version of the song with Eric Woolfson lead vocals perfectly suitable, even if Parsons (or Woolfson?) play a goddamn country lick in it. There was also a "Raven" outtake with extended jam section, of which I especially liked the latter part. Parsons' little jazzy, atmospheric keyboard noodlings were thus fused to the second part of the original "The Raven" track to create "The Raven Revisited".  It's always interesting that the other non-title member of the Project, Eric Woolfson, had so little faith in his vocals that they were replaced by a ton of guest singers on the finished albums, when I find his leads perfectly acceptable. Thus, his lead vocals-version of "The Tell-Tale Heart" replaces that horrid Arthur Brown original. 

The band also worked on a song tentatively titled "Edgar", which was about the author rather than  his works, but I deleted the third verse with its slightly ridiculous allusion to "Dracula drinking you dry" which sounded a bit too much like the "Monster Mash" or its likes to me. Since that third verse also had the only reference to its title character I changed the title to the recurring line "Someone At The Window". And finally, from a rough track of "The Cask Of Amontillado" with only piano and backing vocals I extracted a track that sounds nothing so much like a lost outtake by Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys, a wonderful ray of sunshine beaming through these dark proceedings... 

And this is it, folks, Edgar Allan Poe's Tales Of Mystery And Imagination, as told by the One Buck Guy. Some mystery and quite a bit of imagination to this one, folks, which I'll now let you discover...