Remake/Remodel

I am currently in the process of giving Moon in the Gutter a much needed upgrade.  This will include changing the look of the blog, updating the links sections and ironing out a few other kinks.  This will be a work in progress but I hope to get the majority done this week and then get some new posts rolling out.  Thanks for your patience and continued support!

Keep a Look Out For...

I wanted to take a moment and share some information about some upcoming releases I am very excited about. 

First up, my friend and past Moon in the Gutter Q&A participant Jill Nelson is working on an exciting new book entitled 1976:  Tapes From California and she has just started a new blog dedicated to it.  Jill is one of my favorite writers and is a terrific person so please give a visit to her new blog and support her upcoming book. 

Next up we have the much anticipated re-release of David Hess' incredible soundtrack to Wes Craven's Last House on the Left. I have just pre-ordered the limited to 1000 CD and can't wait to hear it.  Here is the link for American readers and a different one for International followers. 

Back to the bookshelf, legendary actress Seka is getting ready to release her sure to be essential autobiography Inside Seka.  I am expecting my copy from Amazon next week and look forward to covering the book here after I read it.  Here is the Amazon link for those interested, as well as a recent New York Daily News article on it. 

On the DVD and Blu-ray front.  Severin Films has some amazing new releases coming up including a special edition of one of my favorites House on Straw Hill and a limited edition package dedicated to Jess Franco's The Hot Nights of Linda.

Kino Redemption continue their incredibly valuable Mario Bava collection with two key films just released on DVD and Blu-ray, A Bay of Blood and Five Dolls for an August Moon. Both discs look incredible and contain essential Tim Lucas commentary tracks. 

Two of my favorite bands, Goldfrapp and Mazzy Star, return this month.  Both releases are a major cause for celebration. 

Finally the great Kathleen Hanna has recently resurrected her band Julie Ruin and the new EP is a real jaw dropper.  Visit their site here and give a listen. 

A New Project and the Return of an Old Friend

After about a year of being totally burned out and exhausted I have started to feel like I am back in business as the summer is drawing to a close.  I have several writing projects I have been working on (more details soon) and I am feeling reenergized, reorganized and revitalized personally, professionally and spiritually.  To capitalize on this I recently started a new project and am restarted an older one. 
First up we have the long gestating Jean Rollin Forum, a message board I recently created to go along with my Rollin blog Fascination.  Two weeks in and we already have over a dozen members and a number of great conversations going.  If you are interested in Rollin please visit the board and send me a membership request to access all of the forums. 
Also, I have just relaunched Harry Moseby Confidential, my tribute to the figures, films, sights and sounds of the seventies!  Consider this Moseby 2.0 as I am expanding it to include not just the seventies but the fifteen year period between 1968 and 1983, probably my favorite stretch of time in popular culture. 
So, pay me a visit to both places and Let's Rock Again!

Into the Black: Jess Franco's THE AWFUL DR. ORLOF (1962)

It's one of the most brilliant and shocking openings in horror film history.  As we are greeted with the first flickering of celluloid we see a seemingly abandoned alley only visibly lit by a lantern in the foreground.  The black and white photography is immediately jolting and that, combined with the deadening silence on the soundtrack, makes us think we are perhaps watching an expressionistic film from the silent era.  As the camera begins to pan down to the street we suddenly hear a the sound of a woman singing and the first strains of the film's audacious and dissonant jazz score.  A lady of the night comes into frame as the camera pans down even more.  She is holding a purse in one hand and a wine bottle in the other and she is clearly intoxicated.  She sings, and even twirls, as she stumbles down the street to a door as the camera lingers and the music on the soundtrack gets progressively more percussive, more intense.  The credits begin to roll as she opens her door...L'Horrible Docteur Orlof or The Awful Dr. Orlof depending on which version you are watching.  What an utterly bizarre title that is and yet even before we are even a minute into the film it seems to capture the sheer oddness of everything that is beginning to play out in front of our eyes.  The woman makes her way into her flat but our eyes are left on the alley, once again seemingly abandoned, as the credits continue to roll.  After a moment the camera begins to slowly pan up the side of the building and we notice the first edit in the film and it is almost a subliminal one.  A light appears in the window and BOOM edit number 2 but this one is jolting...even harsh.  We are suddenly in the woman's apartment and the dark oppressive lighting outside has been transformed into something brighter but somehow even more menacing.  The woman continues to sing and stumbles around her room as the camera quickly pulls back, its stillness replaced by a sudden frenzy.  She takes yet another drink and is then momentarily entranced by her own reflection in a mirror.  The music takes on a brief eerie stillness as our unnamed heroine shuffles to her closet where, upon opening, she is greeted by a truly horrifying sight as the soundtrack swells into a deafening shriek.  Another jolting cut, a zoom-in on a man in the closet, his eyes bulging and lifeless.  Is he wearing a mask or is he horribly disfigured?  We only get a glance before another cut, this time a close-up of our female victim before another edit takes us back into the room where we witness a brutal attack.  A fight ensues, the man pushes the woman towards her window and then we are suddenly back to our spot on the street looking up.  The edits then take on a frenzied rapid fire approach cross-cutting rapidly between the fight, a shocked boy staring out of his apartment window and a man awakened by the sounds of his neighbor screaming.  We see the lamp in her apartment knocked over in the scuffle as the as of yet unnamed assailant renders her unconscious and carries her possibly lifeless body out of her apartment back to our abandoned alleyway.  Our attacker wanders aimlessly down the alley way until the sound of cane tapping against a nearby wall alerts him to follow.  We see a stranger in the distance waiting and then leading this mysterious monster, and our doomed lady, down another isolated alley way into the deep dark black of the night. 

 

 

While Gritos en la noche, or The Awful Dr. Orlof as it is more universally recognized, wasn't the first film that Jesus Franco Manera had directed it was the work that would forcefully announce him as one of the most daring and distinctive filmmakers of the sound era.  Viewed now more than fifty years after its original 1962 release date The Awful Dr. Orlof stills feels as perverse and shocking as ever.  While it is much more controlled and subtle, mostly due to the rigid censorship that was in place in the early sixties, than Franco's most personal later works it remains one of the most progressive horror films ever made.  As Cathal Tohill and Pete Tombs would write in their indispensable Immoral Tales, "there was nothing old hat about this dank masterpiece, it pulsed with a new freshness, ransacking the annals of cinema with a deviant vigor."

 

 

I must admit that I have never felt the remaining portion of The Awful Dr. Orlof ever quite matches the absolute genius that is on display during its opening few minutes.  Aspects of the film have a certain procedural quality that I don't completely respond to but there is no question that it is one of the most important films in Jess Franco's unbelievably prolific career and one of the most important films of the sixties.  While actors Howard Vernon, Diana Lorys and Richard Valle (so unforgettable as the monstrous Morpho) all give star-making turns my favorite aspects of the production remain Franco's daring direction (which transcends the film's incredibly low-budget and chaotic shooting schedule in every shot), the incredible black and white photography of Godofredo Pacheco (which manages to tip its hat to decades old classics while being totally transgressive) and the ferocious cutting of editor Alfonso Santacana (who would put many of the skills he had learned working with Franco to iconic use a couple of years down the road for Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars).  Despite its budget, and forgiving some continuity errors that were caused by the varying versions of the film prepared, The Awful Dr. Orlof is an incredibly well-made and effective film.  It remains perhaps the easiest, and most natural, entry-way into the world of Jess Franco even though ultimately I think he would perfect many of the films themes and stylistic touches in later works. 

 

 

The Awful Dr. Orlof has recently been released as a splendid special edition DVD and Blu-ray by Redemption/Kino Lorber.  Containing the more explicit French-language cut (with the English dub offered as a separate audio-track) this newly struck print of The Awful Dr. Orlof looks quite good.  Some print damage is apparent throughout the film but I have never seen a version of this work that is visually as detailed and intoxicating.  Like their other most recent Franco releases (A Virgin Among the Living Dead and Nightmares Come at Night) The Awful Dr. Orlof comes armed with some really splendid extras including a David Gregory directed and Elijah Drenner produced interview with the much-missed Franco and a terrific new near 20 minute documentary on the film from director Daniel Gouyette.  A trailer for the film, and other Franco titles, is also on hand as well as a photo gallery and the very moving Gouyette work Homage to Jess that also graces the other new Franco releases.  Last but certainly not least we have a wonderful new Tim Lucas audio-commentary, that is a wonderfully detailed and an essential listen for fans of the film, Franco and horror-cinema in general.  If I have one complaint about this new special edition release of The Awful Dr. Orlof it is that it doesn't contain the longer alternate Spanish version that is mentioned numerous times on the film's supplements.  Otherwise this is a stellar new release and a major upgrade for an undeniably important film. 

 

-Jeremy Richey, 2013-

 

 

My Look at Michel Lemoine's Seven Women for Satan at Mondo Macabro

I was recently invited to submit a piece for Mondo Macabro's great blog focused on one of their past releases.  I chose Michel Lemoine's terrific 1976 feature Seven Women for Satan and my look at the film is now available to read for those interested.  Thanks to Jared over at Mondo for asking me!

Into the Ether with Jess Franco's A VIRGIN AMONG THE LIVING DEAD

Among the finest creations found in the lengthy filmography of late Spanish auteur Jesús Franco Manera, and one of the most startling films of the seventies, A Virgin Among the Living Dead makes its Blu-ray debut this month via a terrific special edition from Kino Lorber/Redemption. 
While I have often picked A Virgin Among the Living Dead as my absolute favorite Franco film I came to the work later than most of his others I first encountered through grey market VHS copies throughout the nineties.  For whatever reason, A Virgin Among the Living Dead wasn't among the Midnight Video or Video Search of Miami tapes, that Tim Lucas mentions on his tremendous new commentary track, that either me or my movie buddy Dave ordered back in the day.  While I had read much about this film I didn't finally get a chance to see any version of it until just over a decade ago when it first made its way to DVD as part of Image's Euroshock line. 
I fell in love with Franco's hypnotic 1973 masterpiece during that first viewing in my late twenties.  Watching it that first time I felt like I was, in a way, collapsing into the film and all these years (and viewings) later it still mesmerizes me in a way that few fantastic works of art do.  It's a remarkably meditative work that is as compelling as it is strange and as surreal as it is oddly grounded. 
Pulsing with a soothing narcotic feel punctuated at nearly every turn by Bruno Nicolai's absolutely gorgeous score, A Virgin Among the Living Dead is an incredibly singular experience.  While it was marketed both as a horror and sexploitation film during its various theatrical runs, A Virgin Among the Living Dead is very much one of the great European Art Films.  It's breathtaking in both its thematic scope and its punctuated brevity and it has a striking emotional core that is sadly missing from most modern 'genre' films.  A Virgin Among the Living Dead is among the richest and most rewarding films in Jess Franco's canon as well as being one of the most fully realized, a fact that is made all the more remarkable when one considers just how consistently tampered with the film was through the years. 
Redemption's excellent new DVD and Blu-ray offers up A Virgin Among the Living Dead under the title Christina, Princess of Eroticism, the 79 minute cut of the film which is the closest we have to Franco's preferred version of one of his greatest works.  The disc also offers the infamous 'horror' version, as an extra, featuring all of the padded out Zombie footage French filmmaker Jean Rollin shot years later, which I wrote a bit about here at my Rollin blog.  The new disc also offers up some extremely strange 'alternate erotic footage' featuring Alice Arno, that would have been just as out of place in Franco's soulful work as Rollin's undead were.  While Christina, Princess of Eroticism is extremely close to Franco's original cut, it shouldn't be forgotten that A Virgin Among the Living Dead is still a compromised work, a sad fact that points to how much Franco had to work against throughout his combative career. 
I am hesitant to write too much about A Virgin Among the Living Dead as it really is a work of art that needs to be experienced and I don't want to spoil anything for readers who might not have seen it before.  I will say that it has a number of images and moments that even if I had only seen once would have eternally stuck with me.  If I am ever asked what it is that I love so much about this particular period of esoteric European filmmaking A Virgin Among the Living Dead is one of the key works I would point to.   More importantly it is one of the pictures I would suggest to less adventurous film fans who still think of Jess Franco as a lesser, or even poor, filmmaker.  I defy anyone to watch this film and not be impressed by the amount of passion, skill and thought that can be found in each frame. 
Redemption's new discs offer up the best looking print of the film to date.  While it is noticeably more grainy and scratchy than Image's older DVD it has a much more consistently vibrant and warmer feel throughout.  Skin-tones are much more natural, the day for night shots more sinister and the new disc has finally just a more cinematic look about it.  To go along with this struck from negative print we have three audio tracks; the preferred French, the atrocious English dub and the aforementioned Lucas commentary, which is among the best he has ever done. 
Along with the alternate version and footage I mentioned earlier, Redemption's new discs have several other extremely valuable extras including trailers, a photo gallery and one of the final filmed interviews with Franco by David Gregory and Elijah Drenner.  Best of all are two featurettes from former Jean Rollin assistant Daniel Gouyette, The Three Faces of Christina (which chronicles the various different versions) and Jess! What are You Doing Now? (an incredibly moving tribute featuring friends and collaborators conjecturing on Franco's role in the great beyond).  All in all Redemption's new release of one of Jess Franco's key films is an absolute knock-out in every way and one of their best releases so far and can now be ordered from Kino, Diabolik and Amazon.

-Jeremy Richey, 2013-

More Than Just I: Lou Reed's BERLIN at Forty

"He could have made Transformer 2, Transformer 3, "Walk on the Wilder Side", Walk on the Not so Wild Side" but, instead, he elects to take one of the bravest steps I've ever seen, in pop music history anyway, and he goes out to make a seminal work that digs deeper inside the soul of the artist than any other work that had been released, certainly into the American music scene, in fifty years."
                                                                 -Bob Ezrin, Producer-

 

Before I ever heard Berlin I had read it.  It was the fall of 1989 and I had just begun my sophomore year at Castle High School in Newburgh, Indiana.  My life had been forever altered a year or so previously when I had found Lou Reed's 1980 LP Growing up in Public in my dad's record collection and since then I had totally immersed myself in every Lou related recording, book and article I could get my hands on.  These were the days before the internet made everything so readily available and, while nearby Evansville had several solid record stores, I had been unable to track down Lou's 1973 concept album Berlin.  Finally, hoping it would push my family forward into the CD generation, I picked up a copy of Berlin and Deborah Harry's Def, Dumb and Blonde on disc at Evansville's long since vanished Track Records before we even had a CD-player.  With no way to play to play the disc I only had the booklet and lyrics to obsess over.  Early in that school year I would keep a copy of that Berlin booklet in my school folder and I immersed myself in Reed's dark tale of the doomed lovers Jim and Caroline like the great literary work it was at its core.  By the time I finally heard the time the album, later that year at a friends house who had gotten a CD player before me, I already knew all the lyrics by heart. 

 

 

Berlin isn't my favorite Lou Reed album, that distinction belongs to 1979's The Bells, but to deny that it is among the most important works in his collection would be extremely misguided.  Released forty years ago this month, Berlin remains one of bravest, most inspired, most influential and most daring recordings of the seventies.  It is an album that has inspired a countless number of artists from David Bowie to Bat for Lashes and it foreshadowed the post-punk movement by nearly a decade.  As popular music becomes more and shallow, plastic and unnecessary Lou Reed's epic tale of abuse, addiction, redemption and romance becomes more resonate and more mythic with each passing year.  I can't imagine my world without it and when I listen to it today it still infuses me with the same kind of passion and intensity it inspired in me more than twenty years ago when I first heard it. 

Critic Michael Hill pointed out in the liner notes that graced the 1998 remaster of Berlin that even though while rock listeners in 1973 were, "primed for a masterwork", Reed's album was, "met with confusion, revulsion and anger" upon its initial release.  Reed had scored an worldwide smash a year before with the David Bowie and Mick Ronson produced Transformer and, despite that fact that Rolling Stone predicted that Berlin would be "the Sgt.Pepper of the Seventies", the collection was indeed mostly greeted with indifference or outright hostility.  It was the most grown-up album rock music had ever seen and most were simply not prepared for it. 

Before the days of downloads and streaming, the first thing a listener would have taken in upon getting an album would be the sleeve.  The original LP of Berlin just feels HEAVY.  A gatefold with a pull-out booklet, Berlin was graced with a beguiling and mysterious design by Pacific Eye and Ear and featured a number of haunting Saint-Jivago Desanges photos.  Reed himself appears on the cover of this incredibly cinematic collection armed with a guitar and a look that could cut through steel.  As David Fricke of Rolling Stone would point out in the 1998 documentary Rock and Roll Heart, while other popular artists of the day were making records of the time Reed was making records, "of his time" and you can just feel the absolute audacity of Berlin before the needle even drops. 

Despite the fact that Berlin is one of the most cohesive concept albums ever made a number of its tracks had been recorded previously by Lou as far back as the mid-sixties.  Early versions of "Men of Good Fortune", "Caroline Says", "Oh Jim" and "Sad Song" had all been worked on by The Velvet Underground and an extended version of the haunting title-track had appeared on Lou's self-titled debut lp a couple of years previously. 

Certainly Lou's personal and professional relationship with Nico had informed the album as well.  Nico would later claim that Lou, "wrote me letters saying Berlin was me."  The album would really be a tribute to Lou Reed's literary background and his dedication to writers like Delmore Schwartz, Hubert Selby and Raymond Chandler.  Berlin would represent Lou's goal of presenting characters as sharply-drawn and well-rounded as those artistic mentors in the medium he was working with in 1973.  Reed would state that, "the real important thing is the relationship between the two major characters" and, "the narrator is filling you in from his point of view, and his point of view is not particularly pleasant." 

The behind the scenes tales of Berlin are as legendary as the album itself.  Berlin's brilliant producer Bob Ezrin discovered heroin while recording the lp and suffered a, "chemical breakdown", upon completing it.  He recalled that, "we were all seriously ill" and that Berlin, "put me out of commission for quite a while."  Reed recalled that, "we killed ourselves psychologically on that album", and that they had, "went so far into it that it was kind of hard to get out."

Berlin is indeed one of the most damaging listens in all of popular music.  From the mysterious distant echoes of the riotous birthday celebration that opens the album to the remarkable string section that closes it (a string section Ezrin would later revisit on Pink Floyd's The Wall) Berlin is an unbelievably intense work that never lets up its incredibly tight grip.  Lester Bangs would famously call it, "a gargantuan slab of maggoty rancor that may well be the most depressed album ever made" in the pages of Creem a couple of years after Berlin originally shocked listeners who dared to take its ominous journey. 

Reed and Ezrin created Berlin utilizing the largest cast of supporting players that Reed would ever work with.  Everyone from famed jazz musician Michael Brecker to Cream co-founder Jack Bruce to legendary Traffic leader Steve Winwood makes a contribution.  It's ironic that a recording that sounds as unbelievably out of step and isolated as Berlin had so many well-known hands in the mix.  Reed was thrilled with the results and he would state in early 1976 that Ezrin, "did a great job" and in fact, "everybody on that album did a great job."  While all the supporting players are indeed fine Berlin's shining stars are ultimately Reed (whose nearly always underrated vocal stylings have never been quite as effective and sinister as they are here), Ezrin (nobody produces with this kind of passion anymore) Dick Wagner and Steve Hunter (whose ferocious dueling electric guitar playing remains an absolute highlight). 

While Reed's lyrics for Berlin have been rightly celebrated time and time again one of the great things about it, that isn't stated enough, is just how well-played and produced it is.  It's a record that influenced generations of musicians and yet there still isn't anything that sounds quite like it. 

Years before the great Julian Schnabel finally made Berlin into a film cinematic connections were already being made.  One of the artists most effected by the album was legendary Kraftwerk co-founder Florian Schneider, who would mention in 1975 that he felt, "Berlin is projecting the situation of a spy film, the spy standing in the fog smoking his cigarette."  Lou would say of the album in 1977 that Berlin, "was a movie in sound" and by 1979 he admitted that he would, "love to see Polanski make a movie" of it. 

 

Polanski never did make that movie but when Schnabel and Reed triumphantly revisited Berlin on stage and on film in 2008 it was fitting that it was Polanski's greatest creative and real-life muse Emmanuelle Seigner who would finally so brilliantly bring tragic Caroline to life. 

 

 

Who exactly Caroline was based on has been conjectured about for years.  Was it Nico?  Was it Reed's wife at the time Bettye Kronstadt?  Author Chris Roberts likely nailed it in his mostly disappointing Walk on the Wild Side: The Stories Behind the Songs that, "Caroline is a composite", that, "manifests as a fevered brew of vulnerability, paranoia, suffering and bullying."  She is certainly one of the most unforgettable characters in rock history and she inspired some of the most penetrating a memorable lyrics of Lou Reed's career.  Reed's understanding of the importance and power of the lyrics he penned for Berlin led him to reproduce them for the first time with an album.  He would later recall that even though, "people don't deserve good lyrics because they never listen to them" he chose to have them printed with Berlin.  Like the music they took rock to that very adult level Lou had been striving for since he first played John Cale an early version of "Heroin" in the mid-sixties.  Reed would state in 1976 that, "Berlin was an album for adults", and, "the whole thing started because (he) wanted to write songs about something that was relevant." 

 

 

Berlin is indeed relevant.  It isn't a stretch to say that without it the course of popular music would have been much different.  Would we have a Low, Lust for Life, Dub Housing, Metal Box, Psychocandy, Daydream Nation or Kid A without Berlin?  Perhaps but I doubt any of those albums would have sounded quite the same without Reed's visionary recording.  Lou Reed's pulverizing portrait of a lost couple in a divided city, he had never even visited before recording, had an effect that went beyond critical acclaim or mass commercial acceptance (although time often forgets it remarkably went Top Ten in the UK).  Berlin has never been an album for all tastes but those who are touched by it are never quite the same...

 

I was two months old when Berlin was released in the summer of 1973.  It's strange for me these four decades later to picture Lou Reed and Bob Ezrin finishing up touches on this piece of work, that would come to mean so much to my life, as I was first coming into this world.  While I am one of many who discovered Berlin in isolation an odd community has formed around the album.  While it is too corrosive and dark to take its deserved place among rock music's most celebrated albums, this community that holds Berlin close to their hearts share a special bond and when we pass down the sometimes ominous and dark corners of our lives we can greet each other with a knowing nod and understand, as Reed so eloquently wrote, that we are indeed "more than just I". 

                                                                -Jeremy Richey, 2013-

The quotes for this piece were taken from the American Masters documentary Rock and Roll Heart and the books Beyond the Velvet Underground by Dave Thompson, Lou Reed Between the Line by Michael Wrenn and Walk on the Wild Side:  Lou Reed The Stories Behind the Songs by Chris Roberts.

Coming Very Soon: Directory of World Cinema: American Independent 2

The newest Intellect Volume some of my work is being featured in will be available very soon for those interested.  I am very honored to have several pieces in the John Berra edited Directory of World Cinema: American Independent 2 including a chapter on James Toback as well as reviews of Maniac, Supervixens, The Addiction, Wendy and Lucy, Hard Eight, Desperately Seeking Susan, Lulu on the Bridge, and Switchblade Sisters. I just received my copy and John has done such a splendid job with it.  Other writers featured include John, Derek Hill, Rob Dennis, Neil Mitchell and many others.  It can be ordered at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, at Intellect's website and at The University of Chicago Press Books.  More information on this series of books can be found here.  Thanks!

Dustbin Romancers and Clockwork Creeps: HOW DARE YOU! and The Unmaking of 10cc

"I don't think we perceived ourselves as anything. You know, people said, "Well, what sort of music do you do? Where do you see yourselves?" We were like, "Well... we're us! We just do what we do. You pigeonhole us if you want to – if you can – but really, it's 10cc music."
-Graham Gouldman in The Quietus-

As consistently brilliant as Pink Floyd, as bold as Queen and as conceptually innovative as Roxy Music, 10cc remain one of the unsung essential English rock groups of the seventies.  The original lineup of Eric Stewart, Graham Gouldman, Kevin Godley and Lol Creme remains one of the most dazzling and talented ensembles ever assembled and their greatest work becomes more and more invigorating, and necessary, with each passing year.  Despite the genius that oozed out of the original 10cc lineup they remain Rock's forgotten boys, but two essential box-sets from the past year are helping introduce their chaotic and joyous prankster pre-punk to many eager young ears so desperate for music that holds the corporate leash rather than travels by it. 

While 1975's astonishing The Original Soundtrack (powered by the most perfect pop song ever created "I'm Not in Love") is typically held up as the great 10cc album I would like to make an argument for the audacious and jaw-dropping follow-up collection How Dare You!, the final 10cc album from the seventies featuring the merry pranksters of the band Godley and Creme. 

1976 was a pivotal year for British music.  It was the year before punk exploded.  It was the year of Bowie's Station to Station, Led Zeppelin's Presence and Queen's A Day at the Races.  The great bands of the early seventies were beginning to fall apart in a dizzying downward spiral of addiction, excess, internal squabbling and even death while Lydon and Strummer were waiting in the wings gearing up to burn the whole bloody beast to the ground. 

In hindsight 10cc were a more authentic punk band than most punk acts.  This was after all a group that labeled themselves "The Worst Band in the World" years before punks bragged about not being bothered to learn play their instruments.  If you only know 10cc through tracks like 'I'm Not in Love" and "Things We Do for Love" track down "Clockwork Creep" and "Speed Kills", songs that are both hilarious and sinister and out sneer Lydon at his nastiest.  Alongside each album's perfect pop creations, there are downright dangerous and eerie elements to 10cc...they were like court jesters with Molotov Coctails hidden behind their backs. 

10cc were riding high in 1975 after their landmark release The Original Soundtrack solidified them as both commercial and critical heavyweights, so the band should have felt on top of the world when they entered Manchester's Strawberry Studios in the late part of the year to record How Dare You! but the band was already beginning to splinter.  Kevin Godley would recall decades later to Get Ready to Rock that by the time of How Dare You! the band had "lost their innocence" and that unlike in the beginning when the band did everything on their "own terms" they were now feeling the pressure of recording a "hit single" and that the album was "the beginning of the end of the band."

Perhaps it was the fragile state of the band as they entered Strawberry Studios to record their final album together that helped add so much to the collection's central concern of dislocation.  Recalling The Pretty Things SF Sorrow and foreshadowing Pink Floyd's haunting The Wall, How Dare You! is very much a concept album only, unlike those other two classic recordings, it isn't a set cast of characters that are followed but instead it is a spirit that is channeled.  This album is a portrait of lost souls all with "daydreams resting on the back of (their) eyes" all trapped in a self-imposed isolation that becomes especially suffocating when they attempt to break out of their comfort zones.  From a wanna-be dictator, to a prank phone-caller, to a rock star who has been corrupted by cash, to a drowning man rescued by a mystical stewardess from the sky, How Dare You! is a bit like the Magnolia of seventies rock albums.  It's a haunting, intoxicating and ultimately heartbreaking collection guided by the wicked sense of humor that was a running motif through all of 10cc's original catalogue. 

It is that sinister sense of humor that can be felt in the incredible album design that Storm Thorgerson and the legendary team of Hipgnosis came up with.  Has their ever been an album design that is so simultaneously baffling and fascinating?  Thorgerson discussed the album's design in great detail in the book Walk Away Rene:

"It took a whole month before I was able to reduce 10cc´s "How dare you" to some workable bottom line. In this case it was that there were a lot of connections in the lyrics involving puns and unlikely word associations. As soon as I said that to Peter he suggested telephones (because they connect, of course) and we both immediately thought of that old film thing of split-screen phone conversations. The band rejected the filmic side of the idea, but liked the telephones because, unbeknown to us, they already had a phone song on the record (Don´t hang up). What a connection indeed! They wanted something modern and sophisticated so we did a style piece, a parody of Sanderson ads, full of tastefully furnished rooms occupied by very tasteful people, "Very Sanderson, very 10cc. We chose characters and situations from the songs and then added a sub-plot involving the couple that appear in every shot, in the desk photo or behind the blonde lady where we see them getting out of the car. This sad lady in the foreground is a gin soaked housewife, wasting away in rich suburbia, whilst her smooth businessman husband works too hard and consequently neglects her. Hipgnosis goes socially conscious. He is furious at being interrupted at work, again. How dare she! THe inner spread for the album it´s a paranoid nightmare about going to a crowded party and being totally unable to talk to anyone - better to be on the blower than face somebody directly. 10 cc themselves are in there somewhere as are the characters from the front cover".

 

A further discussion of the amazing artwork was given to Q Magazine a few years back as well:

"Of the four characters on the "How Dare you" cover, three, alas, were not to be traced. According to Aubrey Powell, co-founder of Hipgnosis, the girl getting out of the sports car was Mandy Mills, an ex-wardrobe lady in Marc Bolan´s employment who also appeared on the cover of UFO´s "Phenomenon". The guy in the same car was Bruno Geffin, who Powell says shifted from property development to running a lightning company, which supplied the lights for a Bruce Springsteen UK tour, although his management weren´t able to identify him. The office bound male was one Douglas Kent, who gave up acting and moved to Devon. "He was always playing Zappy businessmen in commercials in the late ´70s", says Powell. However, the housewife in the housecoat gripping the phone in gin-soaked misery and talking to the suit was Helen Keating, actress and self-confessed player of "Cocky, busty blondes, the tart with a heart." Keating was working for a photographic agency when her first sleeve job arrived. The 10cc guys were lovely. A smashing job. It was a lovely day, I remember. I just had to pose with lots of fake tears, like someone had just had a go at me over the phone. An unrequited love job, that was the mood. She no longer seeks album cover work - "Only if the price is right. It´s not the kind of work you go looking for."

Perhaps it is the interior of the gorgeous gatefold that accompanied How Dare You! that says it all about the content of the collection. 10cc are presented as four figures lost at a party that they clearly weren't invited to, Godley, Creme and Gouldman are on phones talking to presumably more accidental tourists while Stewart catches a light on his fag from another lost stranger.  Nearly everyone in the crowded room is on a phone or lost in a daze of not communicating with each other.  It may well be the loneliest party ever and even though the four members of 10cc stand out they still stand apart...very much apart. 

How Dare You! opens with the title track, a thrilling travelogue instrumental that promises a great journey ahead.  A Godley and Creme composition, "How Dare You" begins with an introduction that sounds like an impossible collision between Martin Denny and Kraftwerk.  Powered by Kevin Godley's hypnotic percussion (drums, congos and bongos are featured) and Eric Stewart's stabbing guitar work, "How Dare You" is a perfect introduction to 10cc's most daring album.  Keeping with how incredibly cinematic How Dare You! is from beginning to end, the title track was later used in a British teleplay called Barmitzvah Boy.

One of How Dare You's most hypnotic tracks "Lazy Ways" was also used in a film shortly after its release, by the legendary Polish director Walerian Borowczyk in his masterpiece La Marge.  A rare track that veered from the accepted writing teams behind 10cc, this dreamy Creme and Stewart track worked so well in Borowczyk's film that it is hard to believe that it wasn't written for it.  Still, it works perfectly well here for this concept album about a lost soul on a physical as well as spiritual journey.  A lovely and yearning song, "Lazy Ways" features one of Stewart's best ever lead-vocals and has a surprisingly creepy and intense bridge dominated by the interplay between Gouldman's acoustic guitar work and Godley's drums.  Culminating in a thrilling moog driven closing section courtesy if Creme, "Lazy Ways" is one of the great 10cc tracks and was deserving of an A-Side single release. 

Penned by Godley and Creme with assistance from Gouldman, "I Wanna Rule the World" predates several of Pink Floyd's The Wall's efforts, stylistic and thematic, by several years.  One of the most overtly experimental tracks on the album, "I Wanna Rule the World" is one of two songs that both questions and pokes fun of rock's aligning with the corporate world in the seventies. 

If How Dare You! has a clear masterpiece then it is indeed "I'm Mandy Fly Me."  Inspired by a number of promotional posters National Airlines put out in the mid-seventies this shimmering jaw-dropping number is as triumphant as any single The Beatles did in the late seventies and 10cc managed it without a George Martin at the console.  Lushly orchestrated with some extraordinary Beach Boys inspired harmonies, "I'm Mandy Fly Me" is just exquisite from beginning to end and is a wonderful companion piece to "I'm Not in Love" as well as "Clockwork Creep" (a snippet of which opens the track).  Powered by Eric Stewart's beautiful lead vocals and astonishing guitar work, 'I'm Mandy Fly Me" is one of the great Stewart and Gouldman compositions (although it should be noted that Godley chipped in his considerable songwriting skills as well).  Gouldman recalled in a nineties radio interview how the song came about and how Godley's songwriting contribution came into play:

"So I brought it back, the idea back to the studio, where we were writing for the How Dare You! album, and put it to the guys: "Anybody interested in this 'I'm Mandy Fly Me'". I'd switched it to Mandy. And Graham said "yeah, that sounds like a good idea. I've got some ideas, I've got some chords. Let's slot those things in, try it, mess it around". We wrote it, and we didn't like it. We, we scrapped it. It just wasn't going anywhere.
But, enter from stage left, ha ha, the "wicked villain" Kevin Godley, twiddling his moustache, says "I know what's wrong with it. Let's sit down again." He said "I think it just gets too bland, it just goes on, on one plane, your verses and your middles and your der-der-der, they're all going on the one plane. What it needs is someone to go 'Bash' on the side of your head". So we changed the rhythm completely, and we put two whacking great guitar solos in there, in the middle of this quiet, soft, floaty song. Once we'd got that idea in, it, it just gelled into something else. Again, impossible to dance to, as a lot of 10cc tracks were, but once Kevin had put that in, he became the third writer in the song so we were quite democratic in that way. "

The main criticism over the years of How Dare You! is that the second half doesn't live up to the first.  10cc perhaps would have been better off placing "I'm Mandy Fly Me" towards the end of the second side because it really is a hard track to follow.  It doesn't help that Side A's closer, "Iceberg" is probably the weakest song on the album but it does at least give the phone creepster pictured on the back of the album an anthem.  "Iceberg" also contains strong hints of the Tin-Pan Alley and Brill Building aspects that played so heavily in the development of 10cc.  It also contains an eerie pig-grunting conclusion that foreshadows Pink Floyd's epic masterpiece Animals by nearly two years. 

Despite the fact that side 2 of How Dare You! has often been criticized, there is no denying that one of the albums greatest songs acts as its opener.  A kindred spirit to Pink Floyd's stunner "Have a Cigar", Stewart and Gouldman's "Art for Art's Sake" confronts the notions of how art and commerce both interact and compete with each other.  Opening with one of the most evocative segments found in any 10cc track, the six minute "Art for Art's Sake" is a triumph and was deserving of its top five British placing as a single in 1976.    The multi-track backing vocals (that 10cc had perfected with "I'm Not in Love") are particularly striking here, as it Stewart's stinging guitar solo that carries the song through its final thrilling minute. 



"Rock 'n' Roll Lullaby" return the band to the fifties roots that they had navigated so well on several of their early seventies recordings.  Godley and Stewart trade off the yearning vocals on this Gouldman and Stewart penned track that states that, "childhood dreams are gone too fast", a devastating line that sums up the concept behind much of How Dare You! perfectly. 

Godley and Creme's "Head Room" features much of the trademark lyrical double entendre that made them such an endearing musical team.   Telling the tale of a young man's discovery of the opposite sex and the idea that, "a flick of the wrist" before leaving the house just would no longer do, "Head Room" is the lightest and silliest moment on the album but Eric Stewart's surprising slide guitar towards the end of the track give it a much more layed and compex feel than it perhaps deserved. 

The original How Dare You! lp closes with one of the spookiest and otherworldly songs 10cc ever delivered.  Godley and Creme's epic "Don't Hang Up" simply put sounds like nothing else ever layed down to vinyl.  Both ambient and theatrical, "Don't Hang Up" is simultaneously nightmarish and lovely and brings How Dare You! to a wonderfully startling conclusion.  Narrated by perhaps the same lost man who set off on a journey at the beginning of the album who realizes he, "never had the style of dash of Errol Flynn", "Don't Hang Up" is a fitting and chilling conclusion to the team of Godley, Creme, Gouldman and Stewart.



The gaps between the two distinct teams behind 10cc widened upon the release of How Dare You! in 1976.  While it was another commercial and critical hit the shadow of The Original Soundtrack loomed over it.  Godley and Creme both especially felt the band needed a break and they set out to record their mammoth Consequences while Stewart and Gouldman waited.  Godley would tell Something Else that simply "too much planning" had went into How Dare You! and that he and Creme needed more of, "the element of surprise" back.  The three-lp Consequences became a bit of a monster though (Godley would call it their Heavens Gate) and Stewart and Gouldman grew more and more impatient.  Creme recalled the final days of 10cc in a 1997 Uncut interview:

"The pressure was in leaving the group to do it, not on what the finished thing would be. It was really, really hard for Eric and Graham and we knew that, but, you know, we had other things to do. We had loads of bravado and confidence in those days because we'd left a band that was so successful. We sealed ourselves completely from outside pressures of any sort. We entrenched ourselves in the studios and indulged ourselves completely, had a marvellous time. The pressure came when the record company decided it was going to be a coffee-table boxed set which had to commercially compete with the punk thing."

The original line-up of 10cc split in the fall of 1976 after some final thrilling concerts that showed that despite the internal issues they were still at the absolute height of their powers as a live unit.  A bruised but defiant Stewart and Gouldman re-entered Strawberry Studios in the winter of 1977 to record the first 10cc without Creme and Godley and much to everyone's surprise the album, appropriately entitled Deceptive Bends, became one of 1977's great masterpieces.  Fuelled by the need to prove that Godley and Creme weren't the only two geniuses in 10cc, Gouldman and Stewart's follow-up to How Dare You! was nearly its equal (but that's another article). 


Godley and Creme continued into the eighties with several incredibly distinct albums and many pioneering music videos for other acts.  Gouldman and Stewart would continue with 10cc but after Stewart was badly injured in a tragic 1979 car accident the two could never again recapture the magic they had conjured with Deceptive Bends.  A regretful Godley and Crème would later briefly reteam as side players for 10cc's 1992 Meanwhile LP but the magic was gone...the fire was out...the band was gone. 



In a 2012 interview with The Guardian celebrating the release of the box-sets Tenology and Original Album Classics Graham Gouldman emotionally stated:

"It's a tragedy that we didn't stay together. It was a flame that burned incredibly brightly, but we could have lasted so much longer."

 I suspect it is a sentiment that each member of 10cc probably shares but perhaps ultimately the timing of the band's demise was right.   This misfit band of geniuses needed a decade as open as the seventies for their impassioned and wild explorations.  It is hard to imagine them outside of the decade and I imagine them very often...
 

 

 

-Jeremy Richey, 2013-