Monsters: MJ's Monsters

 

[purchase Thriller]
[purchase Monster]


You would think that for all the mind enhancement of the 60s and 70s, that someone would have come up with songs referencing something a little more out of this world than Frankenstein and Godzilla (songs of which there are many). Granted, it's not quite all that bleak, but considering the vision-altering powers of some of those enhancements, I would have expected some rather wild monsters. That said, I'll have to note that there were many other-worldly album cover graphics that verge on the monstrous and were surely "induced".

Future's <Monster> single cover for example

My favorite go-to online dictionary provides the guidance that monsters do not necessarily have to be scary: defined as large, strange, horrible, uncontrollable. Large and strange - easy enough to envision. Horrible? Well, the dictionary says horrible is: very bad; causing fear, dread or shock... (Oh dear, now I need perspective on "dread", but I guess I have the picture...)

I waited until the last minute to post something partly because I thought someone else would bring up the classic "Thriller" monster (both as visual and commercial monsters)

 

And then I ran across my first sighting of MJ's posthumous Monster track. Or are you one of them that has actually seen this before? I confess I was not - and am now enlightened (for what it's worth), thanks to Star Maker.

 

Monsters: Photos of Ghosts

PFM: Per un amico  
PFM: Photos of Ghosts
[purchase Per un amico]
[purchase Photos of Ghosts]

If I had thought of this sooner, and gotten my act together, this would have been a great transition post between “Same Artist, Different Version” and “Monsters.” I didn’t, but I’m going to write about it anyway.

If you have ever heard of an Italian prog-rock band, and you probably haven’t, the band you probably know is Premiata Forneria Marconi, which means Award Winning Marconi Bakery, and is somewhat better known as PFM. (If you have heard of 2 Italian prog-rock bands, you are probably familiar with Acqua Fragile, whose lead singer, Bernardo Lanzetti, a Peter Gabriel sound-alike, spent a couple of years in PFM).

Growing up in the Seventies in suburban New York, my prog-rock pantheon included Genesis, Yes, ELP, Pink Floyd, Renaissance, King Crimson, Jethro Tull and, yes, Kansas. It wasn’t until I got to college and prowled through the WPRB stacks that I found other prog-rockers from around the world. Including PFM. Their early albums, released in Italy and sung in Italian, were on par with the best work from the bands I knew, and had the extra charm of being sung in a language I didn’t understand. (Of course, I had no idea what Jon Anderson was singing about, but at least I could recognize the words).

All of a sudden, though, PFM started singing in English. The band came to the attention of ELP while on tour in Italy, and their common acronymic identity and the quality of the music, led to the Italians being signed to ELP’s Manticore Records. Now, PFM’s first allbum, Storia di un minuto had topped the Italian charts, and their second, Per un amico, was considered a classic of the genre and received exposure all over Europe. But the big bucks could only be made if you sang in English, so the folks at Manticore brought on Peter Sinfeld, whose complex, impressionistic lyrics for King Crimson are either brilliant or insane (or both?), to write new—not translated—English lyrics for the Per un amico songs, which, along with one new song, became the album Photos of Ghosts. It was released in Europe, North America and Japan, and achieved success in its own right. The band released another pair of similar albums L'isola di niente/The World Became the World featuring Sinfeld’s lyrics before jettisoning him and adding Lanzetti on vocals because he spoke fluent English, had a stronger voice, and yeah, sounded like Peter Gabriel. They stopped releasing two versions of albums, shot for more mainstream appeal with Chocolate Kings, failed, and moved into a more fusion sound before fading away in 1987. A decade later, they reformed and continue to record and perform, but have attracted little notice outside of Italy.

You can compare the “Same Artist, Different Versions” of the songs by listening to the two songs provided above. Musically, they are the same, but you get to choose whether you prefer the Italian lyrics (either because you find the sound of the language pleasant, or because you know that they are relatively straightforward lyrics about old friends---at least according to Google Translate), or the typically Sinfieldian English lyrics (Beside a dried up fountain/Lie five dusty tomes/With faded pasted pictures/Of love's reverie.) It is rare that you get such a choice, and you are allowed to like them both—I do. As Yogi Berra probably never said, “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”

MONSTERS: VAMPIRES (Bela Lugosi's Dead/Bauhaus)

Bit of a no-brainer*, really, and all the more surprising that the whole essence of goth has yet to be invoked this fortnight. In truth, infected (geddit!*) by the new series of The Walking Dead, I was hoping to find something more in keeping with that, but the Cranberries seem to have the monopoly, so, sourcing my inspiration from the BBC, I re-watched  some of the shows, delighting in the way that the victorians could ultimately have been responsible for Siouxsie and the Banshees. Puts a different spin on new wave, I guess, if the pedants will forgive my play on genres. Anyhow, this lot were included, with a near classic of the Goth genre, lugubrious vocals, foreboding in the bassline and a thoroughly aposite narrative, lauding the screens best Dracula, Mr Lugosi. Best, you say? Better than Christopher Lee, better than Bowie? No contest!!

At the time, 80s, I guess, I thought that goth all a bit of a joke, all the bleak blackness of hair, nails and lips, accentuated by the shocking white visages, all taken so, literally, deadly seriously by it's proponents, who hang on, like the undead, forever chilled, but not in that sense. (Before I go on to say how much the style has grown on me, like horns and a tail, in the intervening years, I can't resist but link into James Mollisons excellent photos of the tribes in music fandom, The Disciples. Here's the audience for the Cure, loving especially the 2 on the far right.

Anyway, I have, and can often be found crooning along in the car with Andrew Eldritch, possibly not his real name, or the Fields of the Nephilim. (In fact, is it not the joy of their noms de gloom that is half the pleasure?)

Do you want some further stuff about vampires? I don't know if this lot could in anyway be construed as goths, but, hellfire and damnation, the song is, even if the singer is technically singing at the wrong speed for the genre. Good, innit? Concrete Blonde.

Buy Bauhaus (and it's a different mix: the Tombraider mix, totally appropriately!)
Buy the Blonde
Buy the book

Monsters: Scary Monsters

David Bowie: Scary Monsters
[purchase]

I currently live in Tarrytown, New York, which is right next to Sleepy Hollow, and our two villages share many things—a school district, a library, sports programs and a love of Halloween. Over the past few weeks, the streets have been filled with tourists, the villages are decorated with all manner of Jack O’Lanterns, scarecrows and other ghouls. We have parades, hayrides, haunted houses, bonfires and the like. I’m glad that our local merchants are able to cash in on the craze, and people seem to enjoy it, but I think that Halloween, like so many holidays, has gotten out of control. Little kids dressed up like superheroes or princesses are cute. Drunk adults dressed up like vampires or slutty nurses, not so much. I guess it is part of our culture now to try to hang on to our youth longer and longer, and while I’m in no way advocating a return to men wearing suits and hats all the time, or women having to wear dresses and stockings, I do think that there comes a time when putting on a costume in public is just silly. Except, of course, at my college reunion. And get off my lawn, you damn kids!

Speaking of college, when I worked at WPRB, David Bowie released Scary Monsters, which turned out to be another career resuscitator for him. It had a bunch of good and interesting songs, top notch musicians, including Robert Fripp, Roy Bittan and Carlos Alomar, and it hit a sweet spot between commercial and experimental, with rock, disco and electronic influences. It was both a commercial and artistic success, and is commonly considered to be Bowie’s last great album.

Princeton is only a few miles from Grover’s Mill, the site of the alien invasion from Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds radio show, which was a Halloween trick and treat of its own back in 1938. Common wisdom was that the broadcast caused wild panic, but more recent studies indicate that the craziness was overstated. I got the idea of getting a bunch of extra copies of the album from the record company and sending some WPRB staffers out to Grover’s Mill on Halloween to hand out the albums to people. What I don’t remember is what we required before we would give out the precious vinyl, who went, and how, in the pre-cell phone era, we reported this on the air. I know that we had some sort of a remote board, but maybe one of my reader/friends will have a better memory.

I do remember thinking it was a pretty funny idea. And it wouldn’t surprise me if my copy of the album, sitting in a box in my basement, was from that same package of freebies.

MONSTERS: WEREWOLVES OF LONDON

1978 was generally a pretty good year for lycanthropy. Warren Zevon had been one of the few Americans to crack through my then very Anglocentric and punky taste in music, with his shaggy west coast looks beguilingly betraying his in your face attitudes. "Werewolves of London" is arguably a pretty slight song, essentially repetitive and without a middle eight, relying almost totally on it's pounding piano motif, quirky lyric and howl-a-long chorus. Rely away, it worked and it still works for me. OK, it helped that I was a devotee of the Lon Chaneys, junior and senior, namechecked in the song, and who each played myriad mosnters in the black and whites. I had also been to Lee Ho Fook, the Chinese restaurant then a staple of the Sino-British food connection, with drying and seemingly decaying ducks hanging forlorn in the window, and more fried rice than you could ever eat. (Quick interweb check reveals it's still here, alarmingly, or reassuringly, as I swiftly add seemingly to the sentence ahead of this.) Some of the rest of the lyric was beyond me, but folklore has it that the perfect hair of the unknown be-tailored individual was some sly reference to James Taylor. (No, me neither.) What I didn't know, however was that the rhythm section on the song was Messrs Fleetwood and Mac(Vie). Here it is, anyway:

I was a convert, and bought up his live LP, Caught in the Fire, baffling and bemusing my friends with the other strange lyrical deviations of this innocent looking madman. Looks, I gather, perhaps enabled him to get away with much excitable behaviour in his real life, too, to all intents maybe a man not too nice to know, as drink consumed him, rather than the other way round. I have his biography on my shelf, waiting to be read, and it is said to be an uncomfortable read. Ironically it wasn't alcohol but tobacco, his other vice, that killed him, via lung cancer, in 2003, leaving a later legacy of songs a little more reflectful. But only a little.

My loyal reader, hi, Kenny, knows I am a lover of the cover, with a bad habit, expensive anyway, of hoovering up other versions of songs I like, so here is a scattering of those who have covered this paean to panmorphism. I offer you David Lindley , The Flamin' Groovies and even The Grateful Dead. Aficionados will note the date of the last performance. I guess you had to be there........

Retail therapy