Dust Off Those Grooves (Chapter Eleven) The 5th Dimension and Jimmy Webb's Magic Garden

After supplying The 5th Dimension with some of the biggest hits early in their career Jimmy Webb joined creative forces with the band; writing, producing and arranging this fantastic and inventive album from 1968.
A commercial failure upon initial release THE MAGIC GARDEN is now rightly considered to be The 5th's Dimension's greatest moment. The album features the best examples of the sublime vocal work and harmonies the band were known for as well as some of the most potent examples of Webb's early lyrics and production.
The album opens fittingly with PROLOGUE which features the group harmonizing with the line, "Have you tried Love?" before quickly moving into the majestic title track that promises a magic garden that, "will make you feel free". Typical sixties stuff but Webb's production and odd arrangements raise this way above the typical and lyrically he soon begins to subvert the listener's expectations.
SUMMER'S DAUGHTER features an incredible vocal performance by Billy Davis Jr. and it introduces us to the mysterious muse like character Susan, who at least in this track appears to be heaven sent. The oddly titled DREAMS/PAX/NEPENTHE introduces the first signs of darkness that will overtake the album with it's weird sitar refrains and creepy Marilyn McCoo and Florence LaRue harmonies. The flower child Susan suddenly has, "Cobweb shadows all over her face like lacquered lace".
The strength of THE MAGIC GARDEN is in its willingness to not deliver what the listener expects which is perhaps why it failed so miserably upon its initial release. The opening tracks flowery sixties vibe is totally destroyed by the bizarre and quite astonishing CARPET MAN.
CARPET MAN sounds more like a shoegazer track from the nineties than a piece of typical sixties pop. It would have been right at home on album like SPLIT by Lush. The song chronicles the Muse's Susan control and downright cruelty to her lover. When Webb throws out a line, "She'll say come to the wedding and of course you do and then the groom and her will have a dance on you. She walks all over you, you know she can, you're the carpet man", we realize that this magic garden isn't the place of peace and love we thought it was.
The next track is the sound of the record company freaking out. The cover of TICKET TO RIDE is jarring but also not all together inappropriate. It does remain the band's one concession to the nervous executives who were going to have to try to see this album to 1968 audiences. It also features each vocalist absolutely belting the Lennon and McCartney classic in impressively vicious over the top way.
The album's masterpiece and one of Webb's most tortured compositions starts out side Two. REQUIEM: 820 LATHAM is The 5th Dimension's greatest moment and one of the most stirring and soulful songs I have ever heard. It's near suicidal lyrics are given one of Webb's most startling arrangements with a potent bass line that is just underneath one of the most beautiful string arrangements the man ever came up with. Billy Davis Jr. delivers one of the most extraordinary vocal performances of the decade on this track and the startling, "I'm still alive", line is chill inducing. Richard Harris would record a typically over the top version of this track on his great MY BOY album but this remains the definitive reading of one of Webb's most complex and moving compositions.
REQUIEM gives side two a lot to live up to but Marilyn McCoo's sweet vocal delivery on THE GIRL'S SONG is a perfect follow up. It is fitting though that we aren't sure at this point if we are listening to the mysterious Susan's plea or just someone else that she has run over.
THE WORST THAT COULD HAPPEN is the album's most famous cut, as The Brooklyn Bridge would deliver a soaring version of it in 1969 and have a major hit. It's debatable as to what the definitive reading is but the deep soul Dimension original is lovely stuff and it's hard to believe that it wasn't one of their major hits.
ORANGE AIR is, along with CARPET MAN, the most vicious and progressive cut on the album. The back and forth male/female vocals add an apprioately schizophrenic feel to it and Webb's strange horn arrangement makes it even more chaotic sounding.
The off kilter PAPER CUP was the biggest single off the record even though it has lines like, "Everyone says I'm quite insane and my life is going down the drain and I don't care". The song's celebration of not-feeling foreshadows the shoe-gazing movement that I mentioned earlier and it's not hard to imagine Kevin Shield's My Bloody Valentine covering it.
EPILOGUE closes the album with the same, "Have You tried love", line that opened the record but it's no longer a question. The magic garden of the sixties was getting ready to turn into something as isolated and cold as Webb's destroyed lead character.

THE MAGIC GARDEN failed to even crack the top 100 and it sidetracked one of the sixties most unique groups. They would recover with more hits but they would never reach the majestic heights of this album again. It would slip in and out of print and has become one of the sixties great lost classics. It stands as a reminder to a time in popular music when risk was a top priority, it is hard to imagine a writer or a band today going as far out as this album does.

Notes on the Decade's Greatest Albums: A Girl Called Eddy

Recorded at Sheffield’s Yellow Arch Studios in the early part of 2004, the self titled album from a A Girl Called Eddy is one of the great under the radar LPs of the decade, and stands as one of the best debut records in recent memory. The brainchild of New Jersey born singer-songwriter Erin Moran, the achingly triumphant A Girl Called Eddy recalls the best of Bacharach and David while successfully alluding to everyone from The Carpenters to My Bloody Valentine.

Released on the independent label Anti Records, an offshoot of Epitaph, in August of 2004, the meticulously moody and at times miraculous A Girl Called Eddy is made up of eleven masterful compositions all from the pen of Moran. Essaying heartbreak, loneliness, frustration and finally redemption, Moran and producers Richard Hawley (Pulp’s brilliant guitarist) and Colin Elliot’s collaboration is simply put the Dusty in Memphis for this decade but for some reason the album, despite no small amount of acclaim, failed to catch on in the fall of 2004, and Moran’s project remains sadly unknown by the majority of modern music fans.

Armed with kudos from everyone from Robert Smith of The Cure to Nina Persson of The Cardigans (not to mention Burt Bacharach himself), as well as four and five star reviews from nearly every British music publication that reviewed it in 2004, A Girl Called Eddy should have fit nicely among the big selling sixties pop revivalists who have carved such a niche for themselves this decade, but Erin Moran’s charms perhaps proved a bit too subtle for most modern music fans.



Opening with the gorgeous and heartbreaking “Tears All Over Town”, a song worthy of the best Brill Building classics you care to name, A Girl Called Eddy never makes a wrong move in it’s classic L.P. running time. “Tears All Over Town” sets the tone for the rest of the album perfectly, with Moran’s unforgettable vocals being balanced perfectly with Hawley and Elliot’s wonderfully effective production and side playing. The song, climaxing with the slyly bruising, “I know that I loved you, but I loved you in vain.”, is a classic opening and the perfect introduction to Moran’s musical landscape. It is no coincidence that it was this song that introduced A Girl Called Eddy to the music community (Moran had previously only played and sang background briefly for Francis Dunnery) when it was released as the title track on a 2001 E.P.



“Kathleen”, the first of half a dozen tracks offering up an exquisite string backing, reminds me a bit of one of Francoise Hardy’s startling creations from her early seventies period. Thoughtfully morose and slyly provocative, “Kathleen” is a masterfully moody track punctuated by a distant horn in the background and Hawley and Elliot’s wonderfully skilled and inventive production chops.



The lyrically striking “Girls Can Really Tear You Up Inside” recalls the savageness of Costello’s Imperial Bedroom period, and it’s relatively relaxed musical backing gives it an added layer of subtext and emotion…like a Sunday walk in the park with your lover just before you break their heart. The strings are again used incredibly well and Colin Elliot’s late use of the mellotron is just lovely.



The title of “The Long Goodbye” will no doubt bring a smile to both literature and film fans, but instead of a moody film noir sound, the track proves to be one of the noisiest on the album, recalling the shoegaze glory of both My Bloody Valentine and Lush. The Beach Boys like harmonizing offers up a perfect counterpoint to Hawley’s tough and at times savage electric guitar fills. The song also includes one of Moran’s best lyrical moments on the album with the great, “Take your records, leave me mine. You’re the one who said we lived it all on borrowed time.”



After the quiet and at times chilling “Somebody Hurt You”, the album’s longest and perhaps most stunning moment follows with the jaw dropping “People Used to Dream About the Future”, one of the great songs of the decade. Here Moran’s voice shows surprising explosiveness, with the stunning mid song question of “Where did it all go?” offering up the kind of go for broke moment young artists rarely have the skills to achieve. Recalling Karen Carpenter in her prime (with a nice nod to vintage Streisand as well) Moran’s vocal work on “People Used to Dream About the Future” is simply stunning, and the soaring string section is wonderfully orchestrated. It’s the kind of perfectly crafted pop song that artists sadly just don’t attempt anymore.



Opening with a snippet of Bacharach’s “Close to You” on Moran’s piano, “Heartache” is one of the most minimal tracks on the record, with Elliot particularly shining on vibes. “Heartache” is lovely stuff and probably could have been some sort of torch song standard had it been written forty or fifty years ago.



Sounding like a German Cabaret number played by The Bee-Gees circa Odessa, the eerie and oddly majestic “Life Thru The Same Lens” is the album’s strangest creation. It’s also one of the best, with Andy Cook’s drums providing a solid backing to one of Moran’s most off-kilter compositions. Moran’s own backing vocal flourishes are particularly well placed, and Simon Stafford’s closing horn playing is perfectly fitting for such a strangely moving off the wall song.



Things get quiet again on “Did You See The Moon Tonight”, one of the album’s most mysterious sounding tracks. With a wide-awake narcotic feel punctuated by Hawley's wonderfully dreamy Hawaiian Steel guitar playing and Moran's drenched in echo vocals, "Did You See The Moon Tonight" is simply mesmerizing.



“Little Bird” seemingly offers up a hope of escape from the heartbreak and isolation Moran has been essaying on the album’s first ten tracks, but lines like “I am trapped under the sea trying to understand what life wants me to be” shows that Moran will probably never run in any kind of top forty crowd. The song also contains one of the album’s most outward tributes, with the Brian Wilson nod, “Heroes and villains and old lovers walk by, they tip their hats but they never answer why.”



A Girl Called Eddy’s final track is its most hopeful. Clocking in at a near epic six minutes, “Golden” finds Moran reminding herself that she doesn’t “need to die just to see” that life is already quiet wonderful. Alternating between near silence and the band playing at full force with Hawley’s shimmering electric guitar out front, the song is an ambitious and masterful closing to an equally ambitious and masterful debut LP.

The album would be greeted by universal acclaim when it was released in Britain in 2004. Mojo’s four star review called Moran a remarkable songwriter and noted that the entire album was “steeped in 60s classicism.” Q applauded Moran’s “sweetly painful love songs” in their four-star review and Uncut noted that Moran exhibited “gorgeously gauged soul and shrewdness” in her singing and writing. The album was mostly ignored in its stateside release though and was unfairly lost in the shuffle, the fate of many great albums from the past by uncompromising and individualistic artists.

A Girl Called Eddy is still thankfully in print and Moran is reportedly at work on the follow-up. Whether she can top her debut remains to be seen but I can’t wait to listen to what she delivers next. In the meantime, search out the sublime and moving A Girl Called Eddy. Once heard, its best moments will rarely leave your waking thoughts and Moran’s voice will haunt your dreams.

An Anniversary Worth Celebrating

Since we past the fifty year mark last year of Elvis' appearance on the Ed Sullivan show it seems like there will be an endless number popular culture anniversaries that can be celebrated. One that I didn't want to let pass was the fortieth anniversary of what I consider to be the most important album released in that watershed year of 1967.
The number of influential and mind bending albums released during 67 is staggering with just a few of the most notable being The Beatles SGT. PEPPER'S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND, Pink Floyd's PIPER AT THE GATES OF DAWN, Jefferson Airplane's SURREALISTIC PILLOW, The Kinks SOMETHING ELSE and I could go on and on. None of these, admittedly brilliant albums, compare though to my ears to one poor selling album that would have been gathering dust in the V section of your favorite local record store 40 years ago.
Released in March 1967, THE VELVET UNDERGROUND AND NICO was an album unlike anything ever heard before. Although it barely scraped the bottom half of the top 200 in the spring of 67, for the people who bought it became a watershed moment. It is ground zero for modern music and I would argue the most influential album ever made.
With the financial and artistic support of Andy Warhol (credited as producer although Dylan producer Tom Wilson actually handled it) The Velvet Underground at this point was made up of Lou Reed, John Cale, Sterling Morrison, Maureen Tucker and a tall German model and actress named Nico.
New Yorker Reed had met Welshman Cale a few years before while they were both employed at a knockoff songwriting and recording company. Reed's astonishing street wise poetry and feedback drenched guitar stylings and Cale's classical avant-garde training would soon collide into the most searing sounds rock had ever heard.
The story of how The Velvets formed and met up with Warhol has been repeated so many times that I won't go into it here so I will flash forward to the album itself and my thoughts on it.
The thing that continues to give THE VELVET UNDERGROUND AND NICO so much power after 40 years is that it simply sounds like nothing else in popular music. No matter how many thousands of bands that have attempted to copy it's sound or Reed's words, the album is still its own separate universe. It is also one of the few recordings that doesn't have a clear starting point. With Elvis you could hear many of the blues artists and pop singers that he had heard growing up and with pretty much everyone after him you can hear Elvis, but songs like VENUS IN FURS or THE BLACK ANGELS DEATH SONG don't seem to have any starting point. They still sound like a clear beginning, some sort of musical big bang that hadn't been dealt with in rock before.
I would never slight the contributions of Maureen Tucker's primal revolutionary drumming style, the crystal purity of Sterling Morrison on guitar or the haunting vocals of Nico but it is hard to deny that THE VELVET UNDERGROUND AND NICO's main elements are Lou Reed and John Cale.

I have heard the studio take of HEROIN probably over a thousand time and I have dozens upon dozens of live recordings of it but there is still a moment in its original VELVET UNDERGROUND AND NICO take that still gives me chills and causes me to stop whatever other thought processes I might be having. It's the section that features Reed singing one of the most brilliant and chilling passages in rock history,
"When the smack begins to flow
Then I really don't care anymore
About all the jim-jims in this town
And everybody putting everybody else down
And all of the politicians makin' crazy sounds
All the dead bodies piled up in mounds"
and then Cale's Viola literally sounds like it is taking off into a completely uncharted splintered universe. The sound of Cale's viola along with Tucker's rapid heartbeat like drumming has still been unmatched for all out intensity in rock. You'd have to pull out an Ornette Coleman-Don Cherry collaboration or one of Albert Ayler's wilder moments to sonically come even close to what The Velvet's are doing on this album, and it all falls into place that moment when it feels like Lou Reed and John Cale come face to face with the most impending of all darkness and the darkness retreats screaming.

Much has been made of Lou's lyrics on this album and it is all justified. No one before or since has managed to capture urban angst or the frustrations of addiction, depression and ultimately redemption better than Lou Reed. The journey that he began in these grooves with tracks like HEROIN continues to this day. Much more than being rock's dark prince Lou Reed has reminded us for forty years now that there is indeed light at the end of the longest and blackest tunnel.

Equally compelling is John Cale. Like Reed, Cale has had one of the most ferocious and compelling careers of the past four decades, consistently releasing as many masterpieces as any of his peers, including Lou. The sound captured on THE VELVET UNDERGROUND AND NICO is these two warriors stepping into the ring for the first time battling off every conceived notion that a serious music fan might have of rock music, and the final bell still hasn't sounded on them.
THE VELVET UNDERGROUND AND NICO is perfect in every respect beyond the most obviously brilliant tracks like HEROIN, WAITING FOR THE MAN and VENUS IN FURS. It contains some of the most startling ballads in Reed's catalogue like SUNDAY MORNING, FEMME FATALE and I'll BE YOUR MIRROR. These songs, with all of their doubt and vulnerability, still rank among the finest songs of lost love and yearning ever written. The album is also filled with a handful of perfect rock songs like THERE SHE GOES AGAIN, RUN RUN RUN and EUROPEAN SON that chronicle both Reed's and Cale's love for rock at it's purest. It was no coincidence when Cale turned Elvis Preseley's HEARTBREAK HOTEL into one of his greatest tracks as a solo artist or that Reed would cite Presley's THAT'S ALL RIGHT as the creation of rock music. For all of their avant-garde leanings, these guys really loved the basic foundation of rock and roll and that comes through clearly on this album, it just so happened that no one had ever played it quite like them before.
THE VELVET UNDERGROUND AND NICO was of course a major failure upon release and it is hard to cite the exact moment of when it began to become the legend it is. You can hear the rumblings of it when David Bowie began to cover I'M WAITING FOR THE MAN in the late sixties but the exact moment is near impossible to place. It just feels like the album wasn't there and then it was...the moment of its release is rock music's point of B.C and A.D.
Brian Eno has that famous quote about how only a few hundred people bought the first Velvet Underground album but they all started bands. That's one of the most accurate thoughts in rock history and starting with the first Roxy Music album you can began to see the creative string that THE VELVET UNDERGROUND AND NICO album had dangled for other artists to grab onto. After Roxy Music, a virtual catalogue of the greatest albums of the last thirties years sprang directly from the bruising sonic masterpiece of The Velvet's first lp. Album's like Pere Ubu's DUB HOUSING, PiL's METAL BOX, Jesus and Mary Chain's PSYCHOCANDY and My Bloody Valentine's LOVELESS all the way up to the upcoming White Stripes record would be unthinkable without the Velvets. Thousands of others ranging far and wide between Joy Division to Vanessa Paradis or Television to The Birthday Party have continually paid tribute to The Velvet's and the extraordinary legacy they left.
Nico would never record with the full unit again although she would work with Lou and Cale at different points in her audacious and always brilliant solo career. My favorite Velvet Underground album remains the follow up to THE VELVET UNDERGROUND AND NICO, the chaotic and pulverising WHITE LIGHT WHITE HEAT. That would be the only record with just the four core group members and to me it is their ultimate work. The third album and LOADED are also masterpieces and it is hard to think of another group that has such a perfect, if small, studio catalogue. Start at track one on THE VELVET UNDERGROUND AND NICO and go to the final track on LOADED and you have one of the most seamless and extraordinary bodies of artistic expression in music history.

I was 15 when I got my first copy of THE VELVET UNDERGROUND AND NICO. It was on vinyl and there was a small scratch on the record that caused a rhythmic popping sound during FEMME FATALE. I often thought that little pop was my own little secret version of the album and it's that sound and the music on this remarkable album that have stuck with me now for nearly twenty years of my life. I have no doubt that it will be something that I will have with me when I take my own eventual exit into the great unknown Lou Reed, John Cale, Sterling Morrison, Maureen Tucker and Nico travelled to forty astonishing years ago.

Sunday Slasher #1: My Bloody Valentine (1981)

Sunday Slasher: A weekly celebration of the best and the worst of the Slasher genre.

George Mihalka's 1981 Canadian slasher MY BLOODY VALENTINE is mostly remembered these days for supplying one of the most important bands of the past thirty years with their name, but to many kids who came of age in the early to mid eighties it is famous for being one of the most cut up and infamous horror films of their youth.
Hungarian born Mihalka was a complete unknown and had had very little film experience when he shot MY BLOODY VALENTINE in late 1980. He had previously only directed one feature, 1980's PICK-UP SUMMER and MY BLOODY VALENTINE simultaneously shows his inexperience and youthful energy.
The film, written by HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME collaborator John Beaird, follows the adventures of a group of small town Canadian kids who are attempting to have the towns first Valentine day dance since a crazed coal miner named Harry had went on a killing rampage years before. When human hearts start showing up in Valentine's day boxes, the towns overwhelmingly inept sheriff starts to think that perhaps a dance isn't the best idea, and that maybe Harry is back in business.

MY BLOODY VALENTINE fails on so many levels that it is hard to know where to begin, and yet in the last twenty minutes or so it does become genuinely suspenseful and for all its flaws, slightly enduring.
The positive aspects of MY BLOODY VALENTINE are pretty easy to point out. The Canadian location of Sydney Mines in Nova Scotia is very memorable and gives the film a much different feel from many of the slasher films of the period. Mihalka's direction isn't exactly inspired but he handles the film's killings well and like I said he does manage to build a sense of dread and excitement in the films final scenes. Rodney Gibbon's photography is also fairly good, specifically in the films darker moments where he uses a pretty simple but still effective lighting scheme that manages to be creepy but not overly done.
The film suffers from several beloved hallmarks of the genre, namely major lapses of logic, poor characterizations, bad acting, poor decision making and a trick ending you can guess less than halfway though. Looking past these obvious faults is pretty easy though in these films and it is still fun to watch, laugh at, or perhaps more importantly laugh with, and be scared by MY BLOODY VALENTINE...friends, beer and a late night are all recommended for maximum viewing pleasure though...

Of course none of the above matters as MY BLOODY VALENTINE is still one of the most cut slasher films in existence, and of course this is what has made it so legendary. Literally every killing scene was cut heavily by the ratings board, neutering what should have been the films most visceral and memorable moments into a bloodless series of confusing and at times incomprehensible shots. Perhaps only FRIDAY THE 13TH PART TWO was more damaged by the censor's scissors, but MY BLOODY VALENTINE is at least running a close second as the board literally ripped the heart out of the film.
The footage is said to still exist but unfortunately the film is the property of Paramount, a comany notorious for hating these movies and doing as little for them as possible. So it seems that the killer's unadulterated carnage can only be seen right now by those lucky enough to have grey market copies. As I was watching this recently with my girlfriend I mentioned that watching MY BLOODY VALENTINE like this was a bit like watching a sex film without the sex or a musical with no songs...it is really unfortunate that this film remains unrestored.

MY BLOODY VALENTINE opened in early 1981 to typically savage reviews and just okay box office. Thanks to magazines like Fangoria though, the cutting of the film became known almost immediately and because of this it became one of the most talked about slasher films of the eighties.
The influential Scottish band MY BLOODY VALENTINE, led by the Brian Wilson of his age Kevin Shields, took their name from the film in the mid eighties even though they had never seen it. Shields and collaborator Belinda Butcher were said to be simultaneously annoyed and amused when they finally saw the film on one of their early American tours, when they found it less than the masterpiece that they had hoped for.
MY BLOODY VALENTINE is currently available on a bare bones DVD from Paramount that features an okay Widescreen print but nothing else. All of the gore is still missing, so MY BLOODY VALENTINE is still one of the most skinless and bloodless slasher film of the period.
The film, despite its flaws is pretty beloved by fans of the genre who still yearn to see the missing footage. There is something almost quaint about the film now and it is hard for me to not be a bit nostalgic about it even though it is about as far away from being a good film as possible...one hopes that eventually a good uncut copy of the film will appear someday and that fans can finally put old Harry to rest.