DAY 386.
Suicide...............................................Suicide   (1977)











Arriving in a sleeve full of slash-and-blood imagery, and sounding like a nightmarish netherworld. Suicides technical and musical innovations make it sound almost contemporary today.

DAY 383
Fleetwood Mac....................................................Rumours   (1977)












Haven't listened to this for years and can't believe how good it sounds even after all this time, one great track following another giving you round about 40 minutes of audio bliss. This is one of these albums that every household had a copy, and I mean literally every house, this was an album that disregarded age groups, genres and pretensions, it really did have something for everyone.



I remember New Year aboot this time, when you used to go "first futtin" from hoose to hoose (pertys on the move), and I can guarantee you would hear a bit of "Rumours" in most of the hooses, it was an album that never really got the call " can you no' stick something else on ffs" it was harmless, safe, and pretty much had a free pass back in the day, and album sales seems to back this up.



I can't say I have a favourite track, as with this album, it really depends on the mood I'm in, this ticks all the boxes for getting included into my collection, and will be going in.





Bits & Bobs;

Upon its release in 1977, Rumours,  became the fastest selling LP of all time, moving 800,000 copies per week at its height. Its success made Fleetwood Mac a cultural phenomenon and also set a template for pop with a gleaming surface that has something complicated, desperate, and dark resonating underneath.


 Fleetwood Mac's Rumours would never be just an album. Upon its release in 1977, it became the fastest-selling LP of all time, moving 800,000 copies per week at its height, and its success made Fleetwood Mac a cultural phenomenon. The million-dollar record that took a year and untold grams to complete became a totem of 1970s excess, rock'n'roll at its most gloriously indulgent. It was also a bellwether of glimmering Californian possibility, the permissiveness and entitlement of the 70s done up in heavy harmonies. By the time it was made, the personal freedoms endowed by the social upheaval of the 60s had unspooled into unfettered hedonism. As such, it plays like a reaping: a finely polished post-hippie fallout, unaware that the twilight hour of the free love era was fixing and there would be no going back. In 1976, there was no knowledge of AIDS, Reagan had just left the governor's manse, and people still thought of cocaine as non-addictive and strictly recreational. Rumours is a product of that moment and it serves as a yardstick by which we measure just how 70s the 70s were.


 And then there's the album's influence. Though it was seen as punk's very inverse, Rumours has enjoyed a long trickle-down of influence starting from the alt-rock-era embrace via Billy Corgan and Courtney Love to the harmonies and choogling of Bonnie "Prince" Billy and the earthier end of Beach House. Rumours set a template for pop with a gleaming surface that has something complicated, desperate, and dark resonating underneath.


 Setting aside the weight of history, listening to Rumours is an easy pleasure. Records with singles that never go away tend to evoke nostalgia for the time when the music soundtracked your life; in this case, you could've never owned a copy of it and still know almost every song. When you make an album this big, your craft is, by default, accessibility. But this wasn't generic pabulum. It was personal. Anyone could find a piece of themselves within these songs of love and loss.
 Two years prior to recording Rumours, though, Fleetwood Mac was approximately nowhere. In order to re-establish the group's flagging stateside reputation, in early 1974 Fleetwood Mac's drummer and band patriarch, Mick Fleetwood, keyboardist/singer Christine McVie, and her husband, bassist John McVie, moved from England to Los Angeles. The quartet was then helmed by their fifth and least-dazzling guitarist, the American Bob Welch. Not long after the band's British faction had relocated, Welch quit the band. Around the same time Mick Fleetwood was introduced to the work of local duo, Buckingham Nicks, who'd just been dropped by Polydor. The drummer was enchanted by Lindsey Buckingham's guitar work and Nicks' complete package, and when Welch quit, he offered them a spot in the band outright.


 The group, essentially a new band under an old name, quickly cut 1975's self-titled Fleetwood Mac, an assemblage of Christine McVie's songs and tracks Buckingham and Nicks had intended for their second album, including the eventual smash "Rhiannon". It was a huge seller in its own right and they were now a priority act given considerable resources. But by the time they booked two months at Record Plant in Sausalito to record the follow-up, the band's personal bonds were frayed, there was serious resentment and constant drama. Nicks had just broken up with Buckingham after six years of domestic and creative partnership. Fleetwood's wife was divorcing him, and the McVies were separated and no longer speaking.


 While Fleetwood Mac was a bit of a mash-up of existing work, Lindsey Buckingham effectively commandeered the band for Rumours, giving their sound a radio-ready facelift. He redirected John McVie and Fleetwood's playing from blues past towards the pop now. Fleetwood Mac wanted hits and gave the wheel to Buckingham, a deft craftsman with a vision for what the album had to become.


 He opens the record with the libidinous "Second Hand News", inspired by the redemption Buckingham was finding in new women, post-Stevie. It was the album's first single and also perhaps the most euphoric ode to rebound chicks ever written. Buckingham's "bow-bow-bow-doot-doo-diddley-doot" is corny, but it works along with the percussion track (Buckingham played the seat of an office chair after Fleetwood was unable to properly replicate a beat a la the Bee Gees' "Jive Talkin'"). Like "Second Hand News", Buckingham's "Go Your Own Way" is upbeat but totally fuck-you. He croons "shackin' up is all you wanna do,"-- accusing an ex-lover of being a wanton slut on a song where his ex-lover harmonizes on the hook. Save for "Never Going Back Again," (a vintage Buckingham Nicks composition brought in to replace Stevie's too-long "Silver Springs") Buckingham's songs are turnabout as fairplay with lithe guitar glissando on top.


 "Second Hand News" is followed by a twist-of-the-knife Stevie-showpiece, "Dreams", a gauzy ballad about what she'd had and what she'd lost with Buckingham. It was written during one of the days where Nicks wasn't needed for tracking. She wrote the song in a few minutes, recorded it onto a cassette, and returned to the studio and demanded the band listen to it. It was a simple ballad that would be finessed into the album's jewel; the quiet vamp laced with laconic Leslie-speaker vibrato and spooky warmth allow Nicks to draw an exquisite sketch of loneliness. "Dreams" would become Fleetwood Mac's only #1 hit.


 Though Fleetwood Mac was always the sum of its parts, Nicks was something special both in terms of the band and in rock history. She helped establish a feminine vernacular that was (still) in league with the cock rock of the 70s but didn't present as a diametric vulnerability; it was not innocent. While Janis Joplin and Grace Slick had been rock's most iconic heroines at the tail-end of the 60s, they were very much trying to keep up with boys in their world; Nicks was creating a new space. And Fleetwood Mac was still very much an anomaly, unique in being a rock band fronted by two women who were writing their own material, with Nicks presenting as the girliest bad girl rock'n'roll had seen since Ronnie Spector. She took the stage baring a tambourine festooned with lengths of lavender ribbon; people said she was a witch.



 Like her male rock'n'roll peers, Nicks sang songs about the intractable power of a woman (her first hit, "Rhiannon") and used women as a metaphor ("Gold Dust Woman"), but her approach was different. At the time of Rumours' release, she maintained that the latter song was about groupies who would scowl at her and Christine but light up when the guys appeared. She later confessed that it was about cocaine getting the best of her. In 1976, coke was the mise of the scene-- to admit you were growing weary would have been gauche. Nicks' husky voice made it sound like she'd lived and her lyrics-- of pathos, independence, and getting played-- certainly backed it up. She seemed like a real woman-- easy to identify with, but with mystery and a natural glamour worth aspiring to.


 It's almost easy to miss Christine McVie for all of Nicks' mystique. McVie had been in the band for years, but never at the helm. Her songs "You Make Lovin' Fun" and "Don't Stop" are pure pep. "Songbird" starts as a plaintive ode of fealty and how total her devotion-- until the sad tell of "And I wish you all the love in the world/ But most of all I wish it from myself," (an especially heart-wrenching line given that McVie's not quite ex-husband was dragging a rebound model chick to the sessions and Christine was sneaking around with a member of the crew). She didn't hate her husband, she adored him, she wished it could work but after years of being in the Mac together, she knew better. Throughout, McVie's songwriting is pure and direct, irrepressibly sweet. "Oh Daddy", a song she wrote about Mick Fleetwood's pending divorce is melancholy but ultimately maintains its dignity. McVie, with typical British reserve, confessed she preferred to leave the bleakness and poesy to her dear friend Stevie.


 As much feminine energy as Rumours wields, the album's magic is in its balance: male and female, British blues versus American rock'n'roll, lightness and dark, love and disgust, sorrow and elation, ballads and anthems, McVie's sweetness against Nicks' grit. They were a democratic band where each player raised the stakes of the whole. The addition of Buckingham and Nicks and McVie's new prominence kicked John McVie's bass playing loose from its blues mooring and forced him towards simpler, more buoyant pop. Fleetwood's playing itself is just godhead, with effortless little fills, light but thunderous, and his placement impeccable throughout. The ominous, insistent kick on the first half on "The Chain", for example, colors the song as much as the quiver of disgust in Buckingham's voice when he spits "never."


 In the liner notes to the deluxe Rumours , Buckingham describes the album-making process as "organic." Rumours is anything but, and that is part of its genius-- it's so flawless it feels far from nature. It is more like a peak human feat of Olympic-level studio craft. It was made better by its myopia and brutal circumstances: the wounded pride of a recently dumped Buckingham, the new hit of "Rhiannon", goading Nicks to fight for inclusion of her own songs, Christine McVie attempting to salve her heart with "Songbird." That Fleetwood Mac had become the biggest record Warner Bros. had ever released while the band was making Rumours allowed for an impossibly long tether for them to dick around and correct the next album until it was immaculate.


 Given the standalone nature of Rumours, it's difficult to argue that any other part of the box set is necessary. The live recordings of the Rumours tour are fine, lively even (perhaps owing to Fleetwood rationing a Heineken cap of coke to each band member to power performances). Only a handful of tracks on the two discs of the sessions outtakes lend any greater understanding of the process behind it. One is "Dreams (Take 2)", which is just Nicks voice, some burbling organ, and rough rhythm guitar gives an appreciation of her fundamental talent as well as Buckingham's ability to transform it; it makes the case for how much they needed each other. Another is "Second Hand News (Early Take)", which features Buckingham mumbling lyrics so as not to incense Nicks. The alternate mixes and takes (more phaser! Less Dobro! Take 22!), by the time you make it to disc four, just underscore the fact that Rumours did not hatch as a pristine whole. One does not need three variously funky articulations of Christine's burning "Keep Me There" to comprehend this.


 Nevertheless, it is difficult not to buy into the mythology of Rumours both as an album and pop culture artifact: a flawless record pulled from the wreckage of real lives. As one of classic rock's foundational albums, it holds up better than any other commercial smash of that ilk (Hotel California, certainly). We can now use it as a kind of nostalgic benchmark-- that they don't make groups like that anymore, that there is no rock band so palatable that it could be the best-selling album in the U.S. for 31 weeks. Things work differently now. Examined from that angle, Rumours was not exactly a game changer, it was merely perfect.


 
They formed as a blues band, reliably selling about 250,000 copies of every album until their 1975 self-titled effort, which was the first to include Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks. That album sold over 5 million copies and introduced the group configuration that made them one of the most popular bands in the world, selling well over 100 million albums.


 
Peter Green named the band after Mick Fleetwood and John McVie, but McVie didn't join the band until four months after they formed, as he was playing with The Bluesbreakers at the time. Green wanted to stay out of the spotlight, which is why he named the band after the rhythm section.


 
Fleetwood, Green, and McVie were all disciples of blues guitarist John Mayall.


 
Their debut performance was at the British Jazz and Blues Festival in August 1967.


 
On their first American tour, Fleetwood Mac was billed third behind Jethro Tull and Joe Cocker.


 
When Green left the group, he declared money to be evil and gave it all away, and then got a job as a gravedigger. A bad LSD trip may have been a factor in his erratic behavior.


 
Fleetwood was originally in a band called Shotgun Express, which had Rod Stewart as their vocalist.


 
Spencer disappeared and joined a religious cult called the Children of God (later the name of his 1973 solo album) in 1971. When he was found, his head had been completely shaved.


 
Christine Perfect had sung with Spencer Davis and was a member of the blues band Chicken Shack when she started working with Fleetwood Mac. She had been named "Top Female Vocalist by Melody Maker."


 
Manager Clifford Davis sent out a fake version of Fleetwood Mac on tour in 1973. It was centered around Weston and Walker. The real band got an injunction and stopped them from playing as Fleetwood Mac. They changed their name to Stretch. Mick Fleetwood took over most managing responsibilities for Fleetwood Mac.


 
Buckingham and Nicks played together in a 5-piece band called Fritz for five years, until Buckingham contracted mononucleosis, which effectively ended the group. He and Nicks, who was by then his girlfriend, formed Buckingham Nicks, which released one acclaimed but poor-selling album before joining Fleetwood Mac.


 
When Bob Welch left the group to form Paris in 1974, it put them in a bind. Mick Fleetwood found his replacement when he scouted Sound City Studios in Van Nuys, California; when studio owner Keith Olsen played him a Buckingham-Nicks song to demonstrate the studio's acoustics, Fleetwood asked about the guitarist. Olsen told him that Lindsey Buckingham was the axeman, but he came as a package deal with his girlfriend Stevie Nicks and also with Olsen, who had signed them to a production deal and produced their first album. Fleetwood took that deal, making Olsen a co-producer of the Fleetwood Mac album and recording it at Sound City. Nicks ended up giving the group a distinctive voice and an additional songwriter that helped define their new sound. Olsen was jettisoned after that album and later sued the band for withholding royalties.


 
Nicks was always prone to throat nodes, which made touring a little difficult.


 
In 1981, Mick Fleetwood released a solo album called The Visitor that was recorded in Ghana with African musicians.


 
The Rumours-era lineup briefly reunited to perform Bill Clinton's theme song "Don't Stop" at his inaugural celebration  in 1993, but didn't officially get back together until 1996.


 
Bramlett is the daughter of Delaney and Bonnie, whose sidemen performed in Derek & the Dominos with Eric Clapton, who played John Mayall before Peter Green joined him. Five degrees of separation.


 
Mason enjoyed a healthy solo career and has been in Traffic, Blind Faith, and Delaney and Bonnie (before Bekka was born).


 
Christine Perfect married John McVie shortly after joining the band, becoming Christine McVie. They divorced in 1976.


 
Fleetwood, who is 6'6," is one of the most distinctive drummers in rock. Many of his stories sound like they could be from the pages of Spinal Tap, and indeed, he has played with that band.


 
Fleetwood was at least partial inspiration for the Muppet character Animal. You'll see the resemblance.


 
Mick Fleetwood's signature is that on the third verse of a song, he extends his drum fill over the bar to the second beat of the next phrase. He does this in several songs, including "Everywhere," "Gypsy" and "Go Your Own Way." Fleetwood didn't have any formal training on drums.



 
In their early years, Fleetwood Mac was known for raucous stage behavior, and were even banned from the Marquee club in London. One of their tricks was squirting milk-filled condoms at the crowd.


 
When you hear the names Lindsey and Stevie, you're not sure of the gender, are you? Their record company didn't know either, and mixed up the names in a 1975 ad for the band in Billboard magazine.


 
Christine McVie dated Dennis Wilson of The Beach Boys in the late '70s. He had a heart-shaped garden installed at her home as a surprise.


 
Christine McVie retired from the band and moved back to England following Fleetwood Mac's reunion tour in 1997. She refused to rejoin them for any of their subsequent concert treks until she made a couple of guest appearances during their September 2013 concerts in London. It was announced in January 2014 that McVie had rejoined the band.


 
In a 2013 interview with BBC Radio 4, Stevie Nicks painted a picture of her relationship with McVie. "Both of us in a man's world, from the very beginning, we made a pact that we would be a force of nature together. And we were," Nicks said. "We had a lot of power when there were two of us. That wasn't really so noticeable to us because we just had it until she left. And then when she left I realized how much power we had when she was there, and how when she left she took 50% of the power with her… I felt powerless in many ways."


 
Lindsay Buckingham's brother, Greg, was a competition swimmer. He won a silver medal in the men's 200-meter individual medley at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City.


 
Mick Fleetwood and John McVie kept the group going throughout the decades and across the myriad changes. Fleetwood says they stuck it out through "abject fear." "That's the nature of being in a rhythm section. You need someone to play with," he told Rolling Stone in 2017. "What the hell would we do if there was no band?"


 
Peter Green originally let Mick Fleetwood join his band in order to cheer him up, after he split from first wife. Fleetwood recalled to 6 Music's Georgie Rodgers:


"I asked Peter on the phone, 'why did you ask me to play drums?,' and I was probably fishing for, 'Well I thought you were a pretty good drummer,' or something."


"And Peter said, 'You were unhappy... you were devastated," he continued. "The reason I asked you to play drums is you are my friend and I wanted you to put yourself back together and you needed something to do.' I thought that was extraordinary and very moving."




Annie Leibovitz’s Rolling Stone cover shoot sowed the seeds of Nicks’ affair with Fleetwood.




Fleetwood Mac’s incestuous reputation was played for laughs on their first Rolling Stone cover, which depicted the entire band in bed with one another. “The intention was a spoof on the rumors about our private lives, and yet, symbolically, the picture showed us exactly as we were – all married to each other,” wrote Fleetwood in Play On.
Annie Leibovitz, already a bona fide rock-photography icon, played the role of the conscientious host when the quintet arrived at her studio for the shoot. “I thought I’d be nice and polite, and I brought a bunch of cocaine for everyone,” she remembered. “In those days, for photo shoots, you just brought cocaine. I took it out, and they looked a little freaked out at first, but then consumed it in, like, 30 seconds. Then I learned they’d all recently been to rehab. So they were all a little jittery and tense.”


 Nicks doesn’t remember the hard stuff (“I thought it was a case of champagne!”) but does recall the jitters. “When Annie said she wanted us to lie down together on a big bed, it was like, ‘Hmm, hope you have a backup idea.’ But she said, ‘No, you’re going to look great, this will be fun, have a glass of champagne.'” The original concept called for the two ex couples to embrace in flagrante, but this cut a little too close to the bone. “For Stevie and me, the wounds and animosities were still very fresh,” says Buckingham. “So the idea for the photo wasn’t all that funny.”


 Nicks ended up putting her foot down. “I said, ‘OK, but I can’t be in bed next to Lindsey.’ So I curl up next to Mick for the next three hours while Annie is suspended over us on a platform. And Christine really didn’t want to be next to John, because they were just divorced.” Instead, the bassist sits by himself, engrossed in a copy of Playboy.


 Although they attempted to keep a respectful distance, the session sparked a brief romantic reunion between Nicks and Buckingham. “Afterwards, Lindsey and I got to talking about how amazing it was that not so long ago I was a waitress and he didn’t have a job, and now we were on the cover of Rolling Stone with this huge record. And we lay there for about two hours talking and making out. Finally, Annie had to tell us to leave, because she had rented the room for only so long.”  Perhaps more surprising, the hours Nicks spent snuggling with Fleetwood made a deep impression on them both. Fleetwood later wrote that the shoot caused him to realize that he and Nicks had “definitely known each other in previous lives.” Nicks herself admits that the session “planted the seed for Mick and me, which happened a year later.” The affair began in earnest during a late summer break in the band’s seemingly endless tour that year, just before they traveled to the South Pacific. “Stevie and I used to slip away and go on adventures after gigs, which was an easy way to get away.” Romantic trips to Maui, New Zealand and extended drives through the Hollywood Hills brought them closer together.


 The relationship was not to last, but Fleetwood carries something of a torch for his bandmate. “We just love each other in the true sense of the word, which transcends passion. I will take my love for her as a person to my grave, because Stevie Nicks is the kind of woman who inspires that devotion. I have no regrets and nether does she, but we do giggle together sometimes and wonder what might have transpired if we’d given that passion the space and time to blossom into something more.”



The band considered thanking their coke dealer on the album credits.



When studying the recording of Rumours, it’s impossible to avoid the topic of rampant cocaine use. Fleetwood famously worked out that if he laid all of the cocaine he had ever snorted into a single line, it was stretch for seven miles. “The tales of excess are true, but we’d all be dead already if we weren’t made of stronger stuff,” he wrote in Play On.

 Coke was less of a pleasure and more of a necessity, helping combat fatigue during the grueling multi-hour sessions – and tortuous emotions. “You felt so bad about what was happening that you did a line to cheer yourself up,” Nicks told Mojo in 2012.

 Cocaine played such a major role in the production of Rumours that the band seriously considered thanking their drug dealer in the album credits, until gangland violence apparently put a premature end to the idea. “Unfortunately, he got snuffed – executed! – before the thing came out,” Fleetwood wrote in his first memoir, 1990’s Fleetwood: My Life and Adventures in Fleetwood Mac.


"Dreams"


During the sessions for Rumours, everyone in the band was going through a breakup (Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham with each other, John and Christine McVie with each other, Mick Fleetwood with his wife Jenny Boyd) and doing a lot of drugs. They were able to work together, but most of the songwriting was on an individual basis. Stevie Nicks wrote this in the studio next door, where Sly Stone was recording. He had a big, semicircular bed and red velvet all over the walls - a great vibe for a song about dreams.



 
The line, "Players only love you when they're playing," was directed at Lindsey Buckingham. Stevie Nicks was not pleased when he brought "Go Your Own Way" to the sessions, which was clearly about her. Stevie told Q magazine June 2009: "It was the fairy and the gnome. I was trying to be all philosophical. And he was just mad."


 
This was Fleetwood Mac's only #1 hit in the US.


 
Stevie Nicks recalled to The Daily Mail October 16, 2009: "I remember the night I wrote 'Dreams.' I walked in and handed a cassette of the song to Lindsey. It was a rough take, just me singing solo and playing piano. Even though he was mad with me at the time, Lindsey played it and then looked up at me and smiled. What was going on between us was sad. We were couples who couldn't make it through. But, as musicians, we still respected each other - and we got some brilliant songs out of it."


  
Christine McVie said in a 1997 interview with Q: "'Dreams' developed in a bizarre way. When Stevie first played it for me on the piano, it was just three chords and one note in the left hand. I thought, This is really boring, but the Lindsey genius came into play and he fashioned three sections out of identical chords, making each section sound completely different. He created the impression that there's a thread running through the whole thing."


 
Christine McVie played both a Hammond organ and a Fender Rhodes electric piano on this track.




"Go Your Own Way"


Lindsey Buckingham wrote this as a message to Stevie Nicks. It describes their breakup, with the most obvious line being, "Packing up, shacking up is all you want to do." Stevie insisted she never shacked up with anyone when they were going out, and wanted Lindsey to take out the line, but he refused.



Stevie Nicks told Q magazine June 2009: "It was certainly a message within a song. And not a very nice one at that."



 
While the Rumours album was being recorded, the marriage of John and Christine McVie (both of them Mac members) was also coming to an end. With two couples breaking up during the sessions, recording could be quite tense. They were also doing lots of drugs at the sessions, making sure there was plenty of Behind The Music material.


 
This was the first single from the Rumours album, which became one of the best-selling of all time. Describing the recording process for this song in Q magazine, drummer Mick Fleetwood said: "'Go Your Own Way's' rhythm was a tom-tom structure that Lindsey demoed by hitting Kleenex boxes or something. I never quite got to grips with what he wanted, so the end result was my mutated interpretation. It became a major part of the song, a completely back-to-front approach that came, I'm ashamed to say, from capitalizing on my own ineptness.Fleetwood believes that his so-called “ineptness” was actually the result of his ongoing struggle with a learning disorder. “Dyslexia has absolutely tempered the way I think about rhythm and the way I’ve played my instrument,” he wrote in his memoir, Play On. “By nature, what we drummers do is manage a series of spinning plates … [but] my methods of keeping my plates spinning are entirely my own. I really had no idea, nor the ability to explain in musical terms, what I was ever doing in a particular song.”

 His style baffled other stickmen as well. When Boz Scaggs served as openers on a Fleetwood Mac tour, drummer Jeff Porcaro spent many nights in the wings, attempting to dissect the rhythms on “Go Your Own Way.” Flustered, Porcaro finally approached Fleetwood one night after a show and asked him to reveal his secret. Unfortunately, Fleetwood himself didn’t know exactly how he did it. “It was only after we continued to talk that Jeff realized I wasn’t kidding around,” he said later. “We eventually had a tremendous laugh about it, and when I later told him that I was dyslexic, it finally made sense.”  There was some conflict about the 'crackin' up, shackin' up' line, which Stevie felt was unfair, but Lindsey felt strongly about. It was basically, On your bike, girl!"

 
Fleetwood Mac is not known for their guitar solos, but Lindsey Buckingham's solo on this is one of his most notable. The live version on The Dance contains a much longer solo.


 
Nicks told Mojo magazine (January 2013): "'Dreams' and 'Go Your Own Way' are what I call the 'twin songs.' They're the same song written by two people about the same relationship."




"Second Hand News"


"Second Hand News" was written by Fleetwood Mac frontman Lindsey Buckingham. It is the first track on the Rumours album - the most successful album of Fleetwood Mac's career with sales of over 40 million worldwide, going 19x platinum in the US and 10x platinum in the UK. The band's original drummer Mick Fleetwood calls it the most important album they ever made.


 
This song was originally an acoustic demo titled "Strummer." But when Buckingham heard the Bee Gees' "Jive Talkin'," he rearranged it with more audio tracks and the rhythmic effect from "playing" the faux-leather seat of a studio chair to make it evoke a slightly Celtic feel.


 
Like many of the songs on the Rumours album, this one shows a darker side in the lyrics. It's asking you to move on, leave the singer alone. Fleetwood Mac was experiencing the shatter of all of their emotional ties with not one, not two, but three break-ups! That was the divorce of the McVies, Buckingham and Stevie Nicks breaking up, and Fleetwood going through a divorce from his wife.


 Stevie Nicks is quoted from a Creem interview in July 1977, explaining the acrid lyrics: "We were all trying to break up and when you break up with someone you don't want to see him. You especially don't want to eat breakfast with him the next morning, see him all day and all night, and all day the day after..."
As if that weren't enough, Seventies Rock also goes on to quote Nicks about the recording sessions on their next album: "It lasted thirteen months and it took every bit of inner strength we had. It was very hard on us, like being a hostage in Iran, and to an extent, Lindsay was the Ayatollah."


 
In Bill Martin's book, while meditating on the dichotomy between Yuppies and Yippies of the '60s/'70s, the author states: "If I had to pick the ultimate musical document of AOR [Adult-Oriented Rock]/Yuppie rock, it would probably be the 1977 album by Fleetwood Mac, Rumours." Well, take that!



"Don't Stop"

Christine McVie wrote this about leaving the past behind. She and John McVie (Fleetwood Mac's bass player) were splitting up, which inspired the lyrics. This caused some awkward moments, since John had to play a song written about him. Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks were also going through a breakup and writing songs about each other, and Mick Fleetwood was going through a divorce. All the tension in the studio didn't seem to hurt - Rumours is one of the best-selling albums of all time.


 
The album was going to be called "Yesterday's Gone," after a line in this song. John McVie suggested "Rumours" because it seemed like everyone in Southern California was talking about the personal drama Fleetwood Mac was going through.


 
Bill Clinton used this as his theme song when he successfully ran for US president in 1992. He was the first baby boomer president, and he knew Fleetwood Mac would appeal to a lot of voters in this demographic.

There was some subtext to this pairing of song and politician: Clinton was a known philanderer, and had been through some rough times with his wife, Hillary. The song finds Christine McVie offering her husband a chance to move forward despite his transgressions:

Why not think about times to come
And not about the things that you've done

The vast majority of listeners didn't pick up on this, as it was heard as a song of hope and renewal in the context of the campaign.


 
When Bill Clinton won the presidential election, Fleetwood Mac was thrust back into the spotlight because his campaign had used this song at every opportunity. At this time, the band was fractured, with Lindsey Buckingham out of the lineup since 1987 and Stevie Nicks out since 1991. And while Clinton couldn't push through universal health care, he was able to get the Rumours-era Fleetwood Mac back together, as Buckingham and Nicks joined John and Christine McVie and Mick Fleetwood to perform at his inaugural gala in 1993 (the day before he was sworn into office).




Nothing came of the one-off reunion, and the band spent the next few years punching below their weight, even opening for REO Speedwagon. In 1997, Buckingham and Nicks returned to the fold and Fleetwood Mac was once again an arena act, embarking on their wildly successful The Dance tour.


 
On September 26, 2013, the band welcomed old friend Christine McVie to the stage in London's O2 Arena. The singer-keyboardist, who quit the group in 1998, sang her own "Don't Stop," marking a rare full-band reunion.



 
John McVie didn't twig for a long time that Chrissie McVie wrote the song about him. He told Mojo magazine in 2015: "I never put that together. I've been playing it for years and it wasn't until somebody told me, 'Chris wrote that about you.' Oh really?"




"The Chain"

Stevie Nicks wrote the lyrics about Lindsey Buckingham as their relationship was falling apart. Buckingham and Nicks share lead vocals on the song.


 
Pieces of different studio takes were spliced together to form the track. The bass line that comes in at about the 3-minute mark through the song was written independently by John McVie, who was originally planning to use it in a different song.


 
This began as a Christine McVie song called "Butter Cookie (Keep Me There)," which which is available on the expanded edition of Rumours. The beginning of the track wasn't working, but the band loved Mick Fleetwood and John McVie's ending, which was now on tape. So, they counted back from the bass line, used the kick-drum as a metronome, Nicks gave them the lyrics for the verses, Buckinghan and Christine McVie wrote the music and the chorus lyrics, Lindsey added the guitar over the ending, and "The Chain" as we know it was born.



 
This is the only Fleetwood Mac song credited to all five members of their 1977 lineup. Since various pieces were assembled to make the song, they all had some contribution.


 
This song came to represent the resilience of Fleetwood Mac and the strength of their bond as they continued on for many years despite their personal and professional difficulties. It was often the first song they played in concert.


 
The low bass line in this song was used by the BBC for the Grand Prix theme tune for many years.



 
Mick Fleetwood: "'The Chain' basically came out of a jam. That song was put together as distinct from someone literally sitting down and writing a song. It was very much collectively a band composition. The riff is John McVie's contribution - a major contribution. Because that bassline is still being played on British TV in the car-racing series to this day. The Grand Prix thing. But it was really something that just came out of us playing in the studio. Originally we had no words to it. And it really only became a song when Stevie wrote some. She walked in one day and said, 'I've written some words that might be good for that thing you were doing in the studio the other day.' So it was put together. Lindsey arranged and made a song out of all the bits and pieces that we were putting down onto tape. And then once it was arranged and we knew what we were doing, we went in and recorded it. But it ultimately becomes a band thing anyway, because we all have so much of our own individual style, our own stamp that makes the sound of Fleetwood Mac. So it's not like you feel disconnected from the fact that maybe you haven't written one of the songs. Because what you do, and what you feel when we're all making music together, is what Fleetwood Mac ends up being, and that's the stuff you hear on the albums. Whether one likes it or not, this is, after all, a combined effort from different people playing music together."


 
The Rumours album was pieced together by overdubbing individual instruments, since the band was in no position to record at the same time. The only instance of two instruments being recorded together on the album occurs on this song, when the drums and guitar solo are playing together.


 
This song was used in episodes of Heroes ("Chapter Five 'Exposed'" - 2009), Glee ("Rumours" - 2011) and The Americans ("Walter Taffet" - 2015). It was also featured in the 2017 film Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, where it appears in two scenes. All five Fleetwood Mac members agreed to its use after watching the scenes.









 

DAY 387.
Iggy Pop.....................................The Idiot   (1977)











Will fill in details later, late for a meeting.



Edit; forgot to add this



In the eight years since The Stooges debut album exploded into popular consciousness, Iggy Pop had burned brighter and fallen more spectactularly than any other artist of his generation. Sobering up from a self imposed stint in a mental institution, Detroits finest was aching for a second chance, but record labels were understandably wary of taking a chance on one of rocks greatest flakes. Enter his fairy godmother, David Bowie.

Last edited by arabchanter (01/9/2018 12:36 pm)

one wrong thing the Clash always second to Sex Pistols...every single song.  Opinions eh

DAY 384.
David Bowie.............................................................Heroes   (1977)










This one for me was ok but no more than that, never been to fond of most instrumentals and the ones on here didn't really do much for me. Heroes the title track is a crackin' song but really the only one I would want to hear again, I much preferred "Low" out of the two albums I've listened to out of the "Berlin Trilogy"

This album wont be going into my collection.




Bits & Bobs;



Heroes is the second album in what we can now hope will be a series of David Bowie-Brian Eno collaborations, because this album answers the question of whether Bowie can be a real collaborator. Like his work with Lou Reed, Mott the Hoople and Iggy Pop, Low, Bowie’s first album with Eno, seemed to be just another auteurist exploitation, this time of the Eno-Kraftwerk avant-garde. Heroes, though, prompts a much more enthusiastic reading of the collaboration, which here takes the form of a union of Bowie’s dramatic instincts and Eno’s unshakable sonic serenity. Even more importantly, Bowie shows himself for the first time as a willing, even anxious, student rather than a simple cribber. As rock’s Zen master, Eno is fully prepared to show him the way.

Like Low, Heroes is divided into a cyclic instrumental side and a song-set side. “V-2 Schneider” is an ingeniously robotic recasting of Booker T. and the M.G.’s—at once typical of Bowie’s obsession with pop dance music and a spectacular instance of an Eno R&B “study” (a going concern of Eno’s own records). “Sense of Doubt” lines up an ominously deep piano figure with Eno synthesizer washes, blending them into “Moss Garden,” an exquisitely static cut featuring Bowie on koto, a Japanese string instrument. Low had no such moments of easy exchange; Bowie either submitted his voice as another instrument for Eno or he pressed Eno to play the part of art-rock keyboard player.



 The most spectacular moments on this record occur on the vocal side’s crazed rock & roll. Working inside the new style Bowie forged for Iggy Pop, “Beauty and the Beast” makes very weird but probable connections between the fairy tale, Iggy’s angel-beast identity and Jean Cocteau’s Surrealist Catholicism, a crucial source for Cocteau’s film of the tale.



 For the finale, Heroes explodes into a trilogy of dark prophecy: “Sons of the Silent Age,” “Heroes” and “Black Out.” It’s a Diamond Dogs set that, this time, makes it into the back pages of Samuel Delaney’s post-apocalypse fiction, pushed by a brilliant cerebral nova among the players. Bowie sings in a paradoxical (or is it schizo?) style at once unhinged and wholly self-controlled. With a chill, the listener can hear clearly through Bowie’s compressed lyrics and the dense sound.



We’ll have to wait to see if Bowie has found in the austere Eno a long-term collaborator who can draw out the substantial words and music that have lurked beneath the surface of Bowie’s clever games for so long. But Eno clearly has effected a nearly miraculous change in Bowie already.


 It was the only album of the Berlin trilogy actually fully recorded in Berlin. Low was made in France but mixed in a Hansa studio in Berlin, and Lodger was recorded in Switzerland and New York.


Bowie moved to Berlin in order to “pull himself together” after his rowdier years in LA. “I nearly overdosed several times” and “It was like being in a car going towards the edge of a cliff” are just some of the recollections he shared about his time there.


'Heroes' was NME’s album of the year in 1977, beating the likes of Ian Dury’s ‘New Boots and Panties!!’, Elvis Costello’s ‘My Aim is True’ and Sex Pistols’ ‘Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols’ – despite our less than perfect rating of 8/10. In 2014 NME also named Heroes (the song) the 14th best song of all time.


According to co-producer Toni Visconti, the lyrics for Joe The Lion were written and recorded at the microphone "in less than an hour”.


The album wasn’t as commercially successful as one might think when first released, managing 3rd in the UK charts and Dutch charts. Heroes, the title track only managed 24th in the UK charts and failed to make America’s billboard 100 at all.


‘Sense of Doubt’ was made almost entirely through the use of Brian Eno’s iconic Oblique Strategy Cards. These cards are designed to encourage lateral thinking and to restrict the composer. Examples of these cards include ‘be dirty’ and ‘in total darkness, or a very large room, very quietly’.
Nearly all of Robert Fripp’s lead guitar for the album was recorded within the evening he arrived from the USA. In fact, according to Brian Eno in a 1977 interview with NMEL “everything on the album is a first take. I mean, we did the second takes but they weren’t nearly as good.”

The studio was about 500 yards from the Berlin Wall. Apparently when Visconti sat at the mixing desk in the studio, he could see straight out into a control room of The Berlin Wall occupied round-the-clock by guards and their rifles.


The title is a nod to the track "Hero" on the album Neu! '75. Guitarist Michael Rother of German band Neu! had been approached to play on the album, but it wasn't to be.

Along with vocals, backing vocals and production for the album, David Bowie plays five instruments on the record: Piano/Keyboard, Saxophone, Guitar, Tambourine and a Koto, the traditional Japanese string instrument, which can be heard in ‘Moss Garden’.

It wasn’t until Bowie saw producer Toni Visconti embracing backing signer Antonia Maaß outside that he was able to write the lyrics. The track had been an instrumental for weeks, and it was the romance between the two that Bowie saw by the Berlin Wall that inspired the words. The reference is particularly obvious in the line: “Standing by the wall/The guns shot above our heads/And we kissed as though nothing could fall”.




Hansa-by-the-Wall lives on, It's still a working studio and popular tourist destination. The Manic Street Preachers notably also recorded their eleventh and twelfth albums there: ‘Rewind The Film’ and ‘Futurology’.

According to Brian Eno, ‘Sons Of The Silent Age’ was the only song written before the recording began. All others were improvised in the studio. ‘Sons Of The Silent Age’ was also the album’s working title.

According to Eno: “Bowie gets into a very peculiar state when he’s working. He doesn’t eat”. When recording ‘Heroes’ “he’d break a raw egg into his mouth and that was his food for the day, virtually”.

On track six, 'V-2 Schneider', Bowie accidentally played an off-note at the start of his sax piece. They liked it so much that it stayed.

To record the vocals on title track ‘Heroes’ Visconti used three microphones,These microphones were placed nine inches from Bowie, twenty feet away, and the third fifty feet away from Bowie. The levels were adjusted in such a way that Bowie had to shout louder and louder again as the song progressed.

‘Heroes’ was Bowie’s twelfth album. Being thirty at the time, this meant that on average Bowie had made an album for every 2.5 years of his life.




Robert Fripp, on being requested to play on this album said "I was at home in my apartment in New York, Waterside Plaza, in July 1977, and the telephone went. It was Brian Eno, calling from Berlin. He said, “Hang on, I’m here with David Bowie. I’ll pass you over.” Then David Bowie said to me, “Do you think you can play some hairy rock ‘n’ roll guitar?” I said, “Well, I haven’t played guitar for a while, I’m not sure. But if you’re prepared to take the risk, so am I.”


Shortly afterwards, a first class ticket arrived on Lufthansa to Germany. This was the first time I’d ever flown first class. As I sat in my seat, and the stewardess poured me my champagne and leaned forward, she said, “First class. It’s the only way to fly,” and I believed her. So, in three days in Berlin, I played all my guitar parts on David Bowie’s “Heroes”. Now, keeping up – little guitarist from Dorset – keeping up with characters and artists of the quality of David Bowie and Brian Eno, you have to be quick."



"Heroes"

 

This song tells the story of a German couple who are so determined to be together that they meet every day under a gun turret on The Berlin Wall. Bowie, who was living in Berlin at the time, was inspired by an affair between his producer Tony Visconti and backup singer Antonia Maass, who would kiss "by the wall" in front of Bowie as he looked out of the Hansa Studio window. Bowie didn't mention Visconti's role in inspiring this song until 2003, when he told Performing Songwriter magazine: "I'm allowed to talk about it now. I wasn't at the time. I always said it was a couple of lovers by the Berlin Wall that prompted the idea. Actually, it was Tony Visconti and his girlfriend. Tony was married at the time. And I could never say who it was (laughs). But I can now say that the lovers were Tony and a German girl that he'd met whilst we were in Berlin. I did ask his permission if I could say that. I think possibly the marriage was in the last few months, and it was very touching because I could see that Tony was very much in love with this girl, and it was that relationship which sort of motivated the song."



 
Bowie moved to Berlin after burning out from touring and fame. He rented a cheap apartment above an auto-repair shop, which is where he wrote this album.


 


Robert Fripp, formerly of King Crimson, played guitar on this track. His band, King Crimson, performed the song at the Admiralspalast in Berlin on September 11, 2016 in celebration of Bowie. This version was released on an EP called Heroes in 2017.


 Brian Eno, formerly of Roxy Music, helped Bowie write and produce this. Eno moved to Berlin with Bowie and worked on his albums Low, Heroes, and Lodger. These albums were much more experimental and less commercial than Bowie's previous work, but they still sold well in England.


 
Co-writer Eno said of this in the April 2007 Q Magazine: "It's a beautiful song. But incredibly melancholy at the same time. We can be heroes, but actually we know that something's missing, something's lost."


 
Bowie released versions of this song in English, German, and French. The German version is called "Helden"; the French is "Héros."


 
Featured in this song are not only Brian Eno's synthesizer and Robert Fripp's guitar, but also producer Tony Visconti banging on a metal ashtray that was lying around the studio.


 
 Bowie played this at Live Aid from Wembley Stadium, England in 1985, and also at the Berlin Wall in 1987. Regarding the later performance, Bowie said in his Performing Songwriter interview: "I'll never forget that. It was one of the most emotional performances I've ever done. I was in tears. They'd backed up the stage to the wall itself so that the wall was acting as our backdrop. We kind of heard that a few of the East Berliners might actually get the chance to hear the thing, but we didn't realize in what numbers they would. And there were thousands on the other side that had come close to the wall. So it was like a double concert where the wall was the division. And we would hear them cheering and singing along from the other side. God, even now I get choked up. It was breaking my heart. I'd never done anything like that in my life, and I guess I never will again. When we did 'Heroes' it really felt anthemic, almost like a prayer. However well we do it these days, it's almost like walking through it compared to that night, because it meant so much more. That's the town where it was written, and that's the particular situation that it was written about. It was just extraordinary. We did it in Berlin last year as well – 'Heroes' – and there's no other city I can do that song in now that comes close to how it's received. This time, what was so fantastic is that the audience – it was the Max Schmeling Hall, which holds about 10-15,000 – half the audience had been in East Berlin that time way before. So now I was face-to-face with the people I had been singing it to all those years ago. And we were all singing it together. Again, it was powerful. Things like that really give you a sense of what performance can do. They happen so rarely at that kind of magnitude. Most nights I find very enjoyable. These days, I really enjoy performing. But something like that doesn't come along very often, and when it does, you kind of think, 'Well, if I never do anything again, it won't matter.'"


 

The single version, which appears on the ChangesBowie album, is shortened, leaving out a good chunk of the first verse.



 
Bowie first performed this on a television show hosted by his friend Marc Bolan, who was the lead singer for T-Rex. A week later, Bolan died when his girlfriend crashed their car into a tree.



 
Bowie played this at the "Concert For New York." Organized by Paul McCartney, it was a tribute to the police, firemen, and rescue workers involved in the 2001 World Trade Center attacks.



  David Bowie told Q magazine's 1001 Best Songs Ever: "It's a bitch to sing, 'cos I really have to give it some towards the end. I pace myself throughout the show and often place it near to a point where I can take a vocal break afterwards. As long as I'm touring I don't see a time when I won't be singing 'Heroes.' It's a good one to belt out and I get a kick out of it every time."


 
This was originally an instrumental composition, whose title was a reference to the 1975 track "Hero" by the German Krautrock band Neu!.


  
Bowie made a video for this song which aired in an unusual place: a Bing Crosby Christmas special (you can see Bowie doing some sweet mime moves in the clip). In 1977 Crosby recorded a Christmas special in London called Merrie Olde Christmas, playing the England theme to the hilt. Bowie agreed to sing a duet with Crosby, which became the famous "The Little Drummer Boy/Peace On Earth" mashup. Bowie's "Heroes" video also aired on the show with an introduction by Crosby. The show aired in November 1977, about a month after Crosby died.




What became the "official" video for the song was shot later in September 1977 and directed by Nick Ferguson, a painter who also did set design and directed various film and TV projects.


 
This song is central in the 2012 film The Perks of Being a Wallflower, starring Logan Lerman and Emma Watson. You hear it more than once throughout the movie.




The cover photo by Masayoshi Sukita was inspired by the painting Roquairol by German artist Erich Heckel, in which the subject strikes a similar pose. As was that of 'The Idiot' – one of Bowie's collaborations with Iggy Pop that was released the same year.




 
Something of an underachiever when originally released, "Heroes" peaked at a lowly #24 back in 1977 in the UK and failed to make the Hot 100. In the week after David Bowie's death, the song finally made the Top 20 in the country of his birth, leaping into the chart at #12.

 


 

DAY 388.
Peter Gabriel...................................Peter Gabriel (l)   (1977)











Two years after leaving Genesis in 1975, Peter Gabriel launched his solo career with the eclectic set of nine songs that comprise Peter Gabriel l. Free from the tensions and constraints which had restricted his creative development, he unleashed an avalanche of bottled-up ideas and flamboyant arrangements.


This album was just the beginning of Peter Gabriel's legendary success as a solo artist.......but all the signs were already in place for great things to come.

I loved This Peter Gabriel album and his next one too - Solisbury Hill being an obvious song - but its an eclectic first album anyway, just excuse me i didnt really like.  Still got this in loft somewhere!!

arabchanter wrote:

DAY 385.
Dennis Wilson...................................Ocean Pacific Blue   (1977)

On December 28, 1983, 24 days after his 39th birthday, Dennis drowned at Marina Del Rey, Los Angeles, after drinking all day and then diving in the afternoon, to recover items he had thrown overboard at the marina from his yacht three years prior. On January 4, 1984, the U.S. Coast Guard buried Dennis’ body at sea, off the California coast. The Beach Boys shortly released a statement stating: “We know Dennis would have wanted to continue in the tradition of the Beach Boys. His spirit will remain in our music.” His song “Farewell My Friend” was played at the funeral.

Such an awful tragedy and a rather cruel irony that a man famous for being a Beach Boy met his death by drowning.

Have watched a documentary about Dennis before (and though he was undoubtedly a bit of a hellraiser and a womaniser) he struck me as a really gentle soul, if a bit troubled.

Was underrated and pushed into the backround whilst a Beach Boy due to the colossal talent of his brother Brian. 

But for me Dennis really showed that he too was a fine singer/songwriter with this album.
 

DAY 389.
Television .......................................................Marquee Moon   (1977)











Television was the least commercially successful bands to come out of the punk scene they helped to create at CBGB's. However their finest hour, Marquee Moon, was as good, if not better, than contemporary seminal works such as Patti Smith's Horses (both of the albums sported a Robert Mablethorpe front cover) and Talking Heads debut.



What an album, but is it as good as the other two mentioned above?

It is Tek!!  I also havent seen the documentary on Dennis so will try and find that to watch - tragic stuff with a bit of irony at the end

DAY 390.
Meat Loaf..................................Bat Out Of Hell   (1977)









Believe it or not, Bat Out Of Hell is one of the biggest-selling albums of all time, selling over 43,000,000 copies to date, and is one of a handful credited with “saving the record industry” at a time when the anemic sales of ubiquitous and formulaic disco records were tanking.


 Even more astonishingly, this album was initially rejected by every single label, mocked for its very lack of formulaic “safety”, and even buried by its own label after it was finally made.


 The album’s creators, composer Jim Steinman and actor Meat Loaf, came up with the fundamental ingredients for this album while touring with the National Lampoon show. Three of the songs that worked best in their set were Bat Out of Hell, Heaven Can Wait, and All Revved Up With No Place To Go (at the time called “The Formation of the Pack”).


 After three years of struggle with the very blindness that was killing the record industry at that time, and having recruited musical and engineering prodigy Todd Rundgren as an enthusiastic supporter, they finally got to record it, with Rundgren as the producer.


 Rundgren considered the album a brilliant parody of Bruce Springsteen's style that needed to be made. He helped sign the project to a label, and recruited two E Street Bandmembers (Springsteen’s band) to play on it.

 While the US branch of Epic Records hated the album, its foreign arms were more receptive, and the album ended up spending the second most weeks on the UK’s charts (485 in total) of any, after Fleetwood Mac's monster hit Rumours.

DAY 391.
Elvis Costello........................................My Aim Is True   (1977)











"My Aim Is True" was recorded, before the recruitment of The Attractions, in six four-hour sessions in an eight-track demo studio in North London Costello now likens to a telephone box. It says much for the standard of songwriting that his debut stands up as a classic.


Few of Costello's songs bar "Allison" have been covered, and this No.14 album (in the UK) which retains it's quirkiness today, suggests why. A heady combination of punk and quality songcraft, it remains unique even by Costello's standards


Another crackin' album, will have to try and catch up tonight.

DAY 389.
Television .......................................................Marquee Moon   (1977)











Great to catch up with this album again, but to be honest I never got the same buzz listening to it today as I did forty years ago, is that because of changing taste or maybe it's not so novel as it was then?


The title track "Marquee Moon" is a blinding number, who would have thought I'd have the patience to listen to 10 minutes worth, but I did, and enjoyed every second to be fair, "See No Evil" is a great opener that sets you up for your Television trip, "Friction" was another favourite, but if I had to pick one track off this album it would be "Prove It" in my humbles head and shoulders above the rest.


Anyways, as much as I liked and bought this album back in the late 70s, it's not got the same magnetism that I felt back then, so a download for my shuffle is as good as this is going to get, this album wont be getting purchased.




Bits & Bobs;

The story of Television, by Richard Lloyd

In the fall of 1973, I had just come back to New York City and needed a place to stay.


 I was in my early twenties, and had been pretty much leading a vagabond life. I was doing a lot of nightclubbing at Max’s Kansas City, in the back room, where I met a fellow named Terry Ork. Terry had a very large loft in Chinatown and a spare room, so I moved in.


 Mostly what I did during the day was play my guitar, with no amplifier. I didn’t want anybody to hear me, until I was good. Terry’s day job was managing a movie memorabilia shop on 13th Street, Cinemabilia. He had this disgruntled assistant, Richard Meyers, who would later become Richard Hell.


 One day, Terry said to me, “I know this guy who does what you do.”I said, “Huh? What do I do?”

  “You play electric guitar all alone all day. That’s all this guy does.”


 This turned out to be Richard Meyers’ best friend, Tom Miller, soon to become known as Tom Verlaine.


 Terry told me Tom was going to be playing audition night at Reno Sweeney’s, and did I want to go. Reno’s was a hang-out for the Broadway set: Liza Minnelli, drag artists, gay wannabe singers. I wasn’t too interested. But Terry was going, and I didn’t have anything else to do. We got a cab up, Richard Hell came in, and we all sat waiting for Tom to arrive.


 He came in with his guitar and an old Fender amplifier, and stood there looking irked already, like it was too much trouble to even open the door. Richard and Tom had between them what I can only describe as universal contempt


.Richard ran over and started helping him with his stuff. He said, “You don’t look right.” Tom was wearing what looked like a shirt from 1932: old, yellowing, frayed, almost disgusting. Richard put his fingers into a hole by the shoulder, and tore it. Then he enlarged another hole, so one of Tom’s nipples could be seen. I sat watching them feeling like an anthropologist watching strange animals and their social habits.


 Finally, Tom played. Three songs. The second was “Venus De Milo”.

  Now, Terry worked as assistant to Andy Warhol by night, and wanted to sponsor a band, like Andy had with the Velvets. His idea was to sponsor a band around me. But when I heard Tom playing “Venus”, just all rhythm chords, I knew. I leaned over, shouting in Terry’s ear. “Forget my band. Put me and this guy together. You’ll have the band you’ve been looking for.”


 Tom and Richard started coming down to Terry’s loft. Tom and I, our guitars meshed immediately. I had studied classic rock guitar, where you do whole-step bends, half-step bends. When I was a teenager, I had a friend who knew Jimi Hendrix. Jimi gave this guy lessons, who passed them on to me, and I met Hendrix and watched him.


 Tom played a completely different style. He used the classical vibrato. Like on a violin: you move your wrist, the finger doesn’t move. I don’t know where he got it. It was more like a sitar player. Never whole-step bends, always micro-bends. But our two styles suited each other beautifully. Between us, we had all the guitar aspects you could want.


 The next thing was convincing Hell to play bass. Tom couldn’t. Richie said, “I’m not a musician. I can’t do it.” When Tom wasn’t around, I asked him what the problem was. He said, “Listen. Playing with Tom is like going to the dentist. Except you’d rather go to the dentist.” Tom and Richard had tried doing a band before.


 I said, “But Richard, you’ve got the look. You’re like a combination of Elvis and some movie star. You can learn.” The compliments got to him. So then we had three.


 Tom and I talked about drummers. Tom was insistent the best rock’n’roll drummer he knew was his friend Billy Ficca. We called Billy, and started rehearsing. Three days in, Tom called me aside: “I’m about to pull my hair out. I can’t stand it. Billy’s turned into a jazz drummer.”


  And Billy was all over the place – but in a good way. I said to Tom, “Look. All the greatest guitarists we know – Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck, Hendrix, Townshend – they all had crazy drummers.”


 We were having a great time, although Tom was already growing frustrated with Richard Hell, because Richard never practised. But we meandered along in rehearsals in Terry’s loft, and started planning for our first gig. Thing was, there was no place to play. Literally.


 Finally, we rented a place, The Townhouse, an 88-seat theatre on 44th Street. We put up flyers Hell had designed. The four of us went around with paste and plastered the town. We’d go up to journalists and ask them to come watch us rehearse, so we could get quotes. Terry knew some film people, and asked Nicholas Ray, the director of Rebel Without A Cause, to come to the loft to see us. Nick didn’t want to. Terry offered him a gallon of wine. Nick said, “OK.”


 So, Nicholas Ray came down, and sat on the bed in his eyepatch, drinking wine, while we went through our ridiculous repertoire. We’d knock things over. If a mic fell on the floor, we’d lie down and sing into it. When the wine was almost done, Nicholas said, “Well, I’ll tell you, Terry: these are four cats with a passion.” Then he proceeded to pass out. So we used Nick’s quote.
  We took an ad in the Village Voice. The night came – March 2, 1974 – and, well: we were like the Sex Pistols that couldn’t play. We were all over the map. But we were surprised: 88 seats, and we filled most of them.



 After we had to rent our own theatre to get a gig, we started talking about where there was to play. There wasn’t anywhere.


 Tom lived on the Lower East Side, which meant, when he walked to rehearsals in Chinatown, he walked down the Bowery. Now, the Bowery had a reputation, but it was not dangerous. It was just full of drunkards. You could step over them on the street. And had to.


 One day, Tom came in and said, “I might have found a place. On the Bowery. It’s a dive.”


 That’s what we needed. A dive. Somewhere nobody else wanted to play, where we could move in and take over. Tom said he had seen a guy outside this place, working on the front. He and I went back to talk to him. We saw the owner, a man called Hilly Kristal, on a stepladder, fixing up this awning: CBGB OMFUG [Country Bluegrass Blues – Other Music For Uplifting Gormandizers]. We looked up at him: “You gonna have live music?”


 We played our first gig at CBGB the last Sunday of March. Sundays were Hilly’s worst nights. Terry convinced him to let us play by guaranteeing he’d fill the place with friends who were all alcoholics. So Hilly gave us four Sundays in a row. Pretty soon, other bands started hearing about it, and coming down asking for gigs. Hilly didn’t know anything about rock music. Basically, we steamrollered him. Terry offered to start booking the club, so long as it was understood it was Television’s place. Bands would audition, and Terry would ask me what I thought. Talking Heads, the Ramones, Blondie: that’s how they started playing CBGB. We were picking the bands and playing, and it was like hosting a three-and-a-half-year-long New Year’s Eve party. Once we got some steam, CBGB was It.


 Sure, it was a dive. It was difficult to get people in suits down there, or even the older generation from Max’s. We were like hobos to them. But there was almost a glamour to the poverty. Nobody had done that before. Up ’til then, in rock’n’roll, everybody wanted the finest shoes. Everybody was chasing this glamorous high-life.


 We weren’t. When you hear bands say they don’t care about anything? I guarantee you: they do. We were probably the closest to a band that really didn’t care.


  CBGB was taking off. Labels were showing interest. Late in 1974, Richard Williams from Island wanted us to go into the studio with him to make a demo, but said, “I don’t know much about a studio. Can I bring a guy to help? His name is Brian Eno.”


 Eno came in with all these whacked ideas. “Let’s glue the amplifiers to the ceiling.” “Let’s cut up the lyrics and throw them in the air.” We weren’t having any of it.


 We did six songs. Hell was upset because he only got one of his songs on the tape, while Tom got five. Richard got scorched. Tom was beginning to push him out.


 From the very beginning, when we played live, Tom was on at Richard to “stop moving”. He said it was distracting him, and it looked “artificial”. It used to be that I stood in the middle of Richard and Tom onstage. I was the George, with the John and the Paul either side. Then Tom suddenly decided he wanted to be in the middle.


 That was the beginning of the end of the first Television: the Television that was sloppy, punk-ass, and a mess; but also extremely exciting. That band was like being in a circus. You never knew what was going to happen. A train wreck, sure, but fun.


 It was driving Tom nuts, though. Tom was a control freak when it came to music. Without a solid bass player, especially with Billy being nuts all the time on drums, there was no grounding, no solid bottom. Tom was beginning to talk about replacing Hell, but Richard quit. I almost quit myself, because I thought, without Richard, the fun was gone. However, Tom asked Fred Smith to leave Blondie and join us, and asked me: “Come on. Just come play.”
  Within 10 minutes, I had to admit it. Fred was keeping down the tempo, which meant Billy could go crazy nuts, but we still sounded like a band. Television suddenly made sense.

 We waited to sign. We auditioned for Atlantic. Atlantic President Ahmet Ertegun said, “This is not Earth music.” Meanwhile, everybody else from CBGB signed as soon as they could, for peanuts. We waited until Elektra made a reasonable offer, and signed in the summer of 1976.



 It was time to record an album. Tom and Fred looked for a studio and finally picked this place on 48th Street, A&R, Phil Ramone’s personal studio. A small, rectangular room, with a control room that still had old tube boards, volume knobs that were curved, like the old Beatles consoles.


 We didn’t want a producer. We’d already done “Little Johnny Jewel” as an independent single in 1975. We knew how we wanted to sound. All the songs on Marquee Moon were songs we had honed for years playing live. We were ready. Tom, especially, didn’t want a producer after the Eno experience. He didn’t want someone coming in with their ideas.


 But Elektra would not allow us to produce ourselves. So, we decided to get in someone who was a great engineer – someone who knew his way around, and wanted to produce, but was just starting. We hit on Andy Johns. Andy had been engineer on a great number of great records: the Stones, Zeppelin. He was Glyn Johns’ brother. Anything that Glyn produced, Andy was engineer on.


 The first day in the studio came in November 1976. We had a 2pm start. Andy was nowhere in sight. Finally, about 4.30pm, he came traipsing in. He said, “I came in yesterday, to see what the place was like, and… I can’t work here!” He started listing all the technical tools these old studios didn’t have. We tried to calm him down. Finally, grudgingly, Andy said, “Well, I did manage to set the drums up last night. Got a good sound. Wanna hear it?”


 He put on this tape he’d made. And, by God, from the speakers came this humongous, pumped-up John Bonham drum sound. Tom started freaking out. “No! No, no, no, no, no! We don’t want that! You need to take that apart!”


 Andy was outraged. “Well, why did you hire me? That’s what I’m famous for. Fuck this! I’m getting a flight back!”


 For the next few days, Andy would mutter, “Oh, right, so, this is some kind of New York thing. You want to sound bad like The Velvet Underground. You want to sound crap like The Stooges. I see…”


 But we were recording. I had always wanted to produce, and I was forever thinking, what can I do to prevent this from sounding like simply a live record?


 I was thinking about the chiming parts on “Venus”, and said, “Let me double that.” Tom and Andy said “Huh?” I said, “Well, let me play the part again, so you can have a stereo pair.” One ability I’ve always had is, anything I play, I can do it again, exactly the same. And again and again. Tom isn’t like that. When Tom plays a solo, he never plays the same solo twice.
  They said, “Uh… well, go ahead and try.” So I did it. Tom said, “Holy crap – that sounds great! Do that to everything!”


 So, for example, “Elevation”: that solo is me playing twice, verbatim. We wanted to rent a rotating speaker to get the sound for that, but the rental people wanted too much. So Andy took a microphone and stood in front of me in the studio, swinging it around his head like a lasso. He nearly took my fucking nose off. I was backing up while I was playing.


 Andy was hilarious. He’s a real child of rock’n’roll. Television weren’t like that. We were punctual. We were serious


.One day, Andy didn’t show up until 6pm. It seems he’d picked up two hookers the night before, who talked him into letting them handcuff him to his bed – then, of course, they took his wallet and blew kisses as they left. The hotel had to free him with a hacksaw. Another day, we came in and Andy was flat out in the producer’s chair in the control room, snoring, holding a three-quarters empty bottle of red wine, with empty bottles scattered around on the floor. We looked at him, then at the tape operator. We said, “Listen. All the mics are set up. Can we just keep the volume down in here and run a song around him?”



 So we went in and did “Prove It”. Then we came back to listen back. It sounded pretty good. So we played it back again, a little louder. And we kept increasing the volume until, finally, Andy snorted himself awake.


 He sat bolt upright, panicky, paranoid as hell. The music’s playing, and he’s looking between us all, demanding, “Did I record this?”


 We said, “Well, sure Andy.” He breathed a sigh of relief. “God, I’m good.” That was Andy. And that’s the cut of “Prove It” that’s on the record.


 We delivered the album in late 1976. Marquee Moon came out February 8, 1977. In 35 years, it has never been out of print. It’s become a permanent fixture in rock’n’roll.


 A lot of people were disappointed with Television’s second album, Adventure. I’m one of them. Sonically, Adventure has a colour Marquee Moon doesn’t. But it was already a losing prospect when we didn’t rehearse for the album first. With Marquee Moon, we drew from a repertoire we had been playing live for years. And, actually, we had a whole other album’s worth of songs from that period – “Kingdom Come”, “Double Exposure”, “Breakin’ In My Heart”. But Tom, fickle as he is, didn’t want to record them. On Adventure, only “Foxhole” and “Careful” were in our live repertoire.
  That was the demise. On Marquee Moon, everybody knew what they were going to do. On Adventure, nobody knew, including Tom. We got into the studio, and it was just Tom’s world. He would try out ideas and it would go on and on. We would talk about the other songs we could record. Tom would just say, “No.” That was the end of Television. Adventure came out in April 1978. Within three months, we had split up.


 The years went by. Then, around 1990, my manager ran into Tom’s manager and they decided to see if they could get us together again. We met up, just jammed. And it was there. It was Television.



 We started talking about a new record. One day, Tom was complaining about being short of breath when he was singing. Of course, Tom smoked like a chimney and drank coffee all day. That’s all he did. I said, “Well, maybe you could take vocal lessons, to get some breathing techniques.”


 That was it. Suddenly, Tom was screaming at me: “I need singing lessons!?! Listen: I’m not making a pop record! And I’m not making a rock record!”


 I sat thinking, “Jesus. What business does he think he’s in? Flamenco?”


 That, though, is closer to the truth. Tom is into cowboy music and old TV scores. On that third record, any time it came to record my parts, Tom would say, “I hear the amp buzzing. Could you please look into that?” Often, he would turn it down, until it was barely audible. So that nothing rustled, nothing moved. For me, that third record was Television-lite. It has a beautiful, nice sound. But it’s not rock’n’roll.


 What happened next, though, was we began playing live again. That’s where the real power came out. Songs that sounded tiny on that record really blossomed to life.


 Across Television’s final period, we rehearsed, we played – and we would write new songs. Then Tom would throw them away. For 14 years, from 1993 to 2007, when I finally quit, Tom would talk about us making a new record. But nothing ever came of it.


 We recorded nothing. Tom would always poo-poo the notion. It was like he didn’t want to give anything to Television. Tom never really wants to share credit. When we first signed with Elektra, I found out years later that Tom had tried desperately to make the contract so he would be the only one signed as “Television”. The rest of us would be hired musicians. Elektra wouldn’t have it.


 Tom had a twin, John, who died long ago. I really think Tom has a sibling rivalry thing that started in the womb. It’s the only psychological motive I can come up with for some of his behaviour.

  Tom, I think, was just done. Finished. In 2007, after I left, Jimmy Rip, Tom’s buddy, took my place, and put a message on Facebook, saying he was looking forward to being on the new Television album coming that year. Well, guess what? It’s five years later, and it still hasn’t happened.


 Look at it this way: I left Television in 2007. Within six months, I had my album The Radiant Monkey out. Since then, I’ve put out two more records of my own. Meanwhile, I joined Rocket From The Tombs, we put out the Rocket Redux album, and we made a new record just last year, Barfly.


 Tom Verlaine is wonderful to laugh with. Tom can be the funniest guy on Earth. But, often, Tom just doesn’t want to get out of bed. I’ll certainly never do business with him again.

 But there will always be Marquee Moon.



 I don’t think of that album as just a collection of songs. I think of Marquee Moon as one thing. It contains so many songs that reach you, but there’s no way to separate them. These days, people download a song or two from an album. Well, Marquee Moon is not for that.


 Marquee Moon is the whole thing. One thing. Like Mount Everest.


 By the mid 1970s, Television had become a leading act in the New York music scene. They first developed a following from their residency at the Lower Manhatten club CBGB, where they helped persuade club manager Hilly Kristal to feature more unconventional musical groups.The band had received interest from labels by late 1974, but chose to wait for an appropriate record deal. They turned down a number of major labels, including Island Records, for whom they had recorded demos with producer Brian Eno. Eno had produced demos of the songs "Prove It", "Friction", "Venus", and "Marquee Moon" in December 1974, but Television frontman Tom Verlaine did not approve of Eno's sound: "He recorded us very cold and brittle, no resonance. We're oriented towards really strong guitar music ... sort of expressionistic."


 After founding bassist Richard Hell left in 1975, Television enlisted Fred Smith, whom they found more reliable and rhythmically adept. The band quickly developed a rapport and a musical style that reflected their individual influences: Smith and guitarist Richard Lioyd had a rock and roll background, drummer Billy Ficca was a jazz enthusiast, and Verlaine's tastes varied from the rock group 13th Floor Elevators to jazz saxophonist Albert Ayler.That same year, Television shared a residency at CBGB with singer and poet Patti Smith, who had recommended the band to Arista Records president Clive Davis. Although he had seen them perform, Davis was hesitant to sign them at first. He was persuaded by Smith's boyfriend, Allen Lenier, to let them record demos, which Verlaine said resulted in "a much warmer sound than Eno got". However, Verlaine still wanted to find a label that would allow him to produce Television's debut album himself, even though he had little recording experience


As a member of U2, Irish guitarist The Edge simulated Television's guitar sound with an effects pedal. He later said he had wanted to "sound like them" and that Marquee Moon's title track had changed his "way of thinking about the guitar". Verlaine's jagged, expressive sound on the album made a great impression on American guitarist John Frusciante when he started developing as a guitarist in his early 20s, as it reminded him that "none of those things that are happening in the physical dimension mean anything, whether it's what kind of guitar you play or how your amp's set up. It's just ideas, you know, emotion."

In Rolling Stone, Rob Sheffield called Marquee Moon "one of the all-time classic guitar albums" whose tremulous guitar twang was an inspiration behind bands such as R.E.M. and  Joy Division's Stephen Morris cited it as one of his favorite albums, while R.E.M.'s Michael Stipe said his love of Marquee Moon was "second only to [Patti Smith's] Horses". English guitarist Will Sergeant said it was also one of his favourite records and that Verlaine and Lloyd's guitar playing was a major influence on his band Echo & the Bunnymen