the original Metal Boxes

"The album was originally released on vinyl in a circular novelty package of a metal replica of a giant tobacco tin, inside which was a poster created with five connected paper circles with pictures of the band members. This proved too expensive and not successful as the tins tended to roll off of shelves and it was quickly followed by a paper/card replica with a gatefold cover."

Talking about this, of course

The bit about the tins rolling off shelves tickled me, I must say.

I don't remember having that problem with Metal Box myself, though. 

I was amazed when reading up on Ogdens' Nut Gone Flake  to discover just how hugely successful it was - six weeks at number one in the UK.

"Lazy Sunday" was a #2 hit in the spring-summer of 1968

 

"They make it very clear they've got no room for ravers"

But verily tis something that hast Droppeth Away Unto Nothingness

I can't think of Ogdens' Nut Gone Flake ever having been a reference point for groups, even though it's Peak Psychedelia, or the last gasp of it. 

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Another anticipator of Metal Box would be this release

Not metal, admittedly - but the concept is the same: a drab-looking utilitarian style of packaging... in this case, reinforced cardboard

Inside the carton, the album itself has a whole other cover with the band as sailors on the town (possibly a nod to the musical On the Town) and about to get up to debauched malarkey  (outcome depicted on the flip)

And then there was even more on the inner sleeve

The record's theme was sex (hence the idea of the plain brown wrapper) and it was supposed to be a return to a music-first direction after the ultra-theatricality of the Billion Dollar Babies tour.  Alice here submitting to the rest of the band's desires

Nobody was convinced or interested. 

Now John Lydon was a huge fan of Alice Cooper, although I doubt he was a fan of this record, as it's utterly denuded of inspiration. He did describe Killer as the greatest hard rock album of all time.

He was also a fan of the Small Faces - or at least the Sex Pistols were, they covered some of their tunes if I recall correctly.

The idea of the metal canister apparently came from Dennis Morris, their photographer friend, though. 

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There's probably other earlier examples of canister or chest-like containers for recordings - monumental box sets in the world of classical music, for instance. 

Later examples of tinned records? 

Chain Reaction issued 'career round-ups' of their artists's vinyl-only output on compact disc, encased in finicky metal containers. Some purchasers complained that this packaging damaged the disc. 

Feel like I got sent something by Merzbow in this sort of packaging. 

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Going back to where we started - Ogdens' Nut Gone Flake

Never quite got on with the Small Faces - there's something off-putting about them - the voices, even the look of Steve Marriott. Even the name of the band! 

But I love the combination of heaviness and groove on this tune, with the phased drums and colorized bass and the warm psychedelic keyboard. 

Another Small Faces song I adore is "Itchycoo Park"

Now, where did that religious-y, choirboy-like quality come from?  

The Who went into that high, pure zone with their singing as well.

It seems to be a uniquely British contribution to rock. 

Well, there was The Byrds, I suppose. "Eight Miles High".... some of the songs on Younger Than Yesterday and Notorious Byrd Brothers.

Perhaps it's the resort to folk and country vocal styling, as opposed to rhythm-and-blues. Neither folk nor country do sex, as such. There's no carnal heat. 

But the English psychedelic era stuff has a distinctly churchy quality, almost Anglican.

Psalmic. Monkish even.

The "she was a virgin of a humble origin / she knew of no sin" section of this 

Think of the vocal tonality in "Rain" by the Beatles - this sort of pulsating awe. There's nothing like it in rock prior to that, which the exception maybe of "Eight Miles High"

It seems to relate to  a certain kind of LSD-triggered ascesis, or at least an above-it-all fleshlessness -  rock becoming disincarnate, its mind on higher things.... no longer this-worldly.

Apparently Ronnie Lane got into Sufism. 

Actually there is also the Beach Boys, to be fair. "God Only Knows" etc.

Now Phil Knight's a big fan of Marriott's next venture, Humble Pie. Completely different vibe - earthy, sweaty, rutting. Following the lead of Canned Heat.

I have never been able to summon the intestinal fortitude to try the Pie, I confess.

Newly recovered footage of the Pie playing at Biba's, of all places - the glam-rock-aligned retro-boutique turned department store. 

The Dropped Away

I have written before about the Drops Away Syndrome... that thing where artists seem supremely relevant and core-canonic at a particular moment, but then their reputations dip precipitously and never recover... such that no young person currently emerging into the condition of  informed, well-listened  fandom would bother to check 'em out, in some cases simply because they don't even know of that group's or artist's existence...  

So here's the New Musical Express's critics consensus of the 100 All-Time Greatest Albums from June 1st 1974. Let's look at the charting artists who've subsequently Dropped Away largely or utterly. 

 

12. Layla – Derek & The Dominoes

Debatable, but I think in terms of young listeners today, this would be the highest-placing album / artist in the list that is completely off the menu

Followed probably by this...

17. Bridge Over Troubled Water – Simon & Garfunkel

And then (the curse of Clapton again)

20. Disraeli Gears – Cream

Debatable but I feel like your average becoming-hip youth would be more likely to have heard Les Rallizes Denudes than....

29. Back In The USA – MC5

Pretty certain that the eminence-with-critics held by this next chap during the early '70s (even more so in the States - where the likes of Marcus and Bangs thought he was some kind of saviour, a ruffian poet) is completely non-existent... not just with Gen Z but millennials and Gen X too 

32. Gasoline Alley – Rod Stewart

34. Every Picture Tells A Story – Rod Stewart

 

37. In The Court Of The Crimson King – King Crimson

Possibly pockets of interest in this lot among neo-prog and math-rock types, but generally dropped away I'd say

40. The Soft Machine – Soft Machine

Utterly voided

41. Hot Rats – Frank Zappa

I do have a student who is a Zappa nut.... but generally, off the table for anyone after punk

Now we get into the seriously gone-gone, dropped away zone ....

42. Traffic – Traffic

44. Music From A Dolls House – Family

50. Stand Up – Jethro Tull

54. Taylor, James – Sweet Baby James

Despite singer-songwriterism having returned with Lana D-R and Phoebe B et al 

Zappa again

58. Mothers Of Invention, The – We’re Only In It For The Money

60. Beck, Jeff, Group – Beck-Ola

Absolutely mystifying to anyone who came to consciousness after punk = the Great Stature of this axe-bore.

68. Mothers Of Invention, The – Freak Out

Zappa yet again. Apart from the Beatles, Stones, and Dylan, Frank & crew have the most placings on this chart, I think - and are the most annulled, whereas the Other Three are more impregnably canonic than ever.

70. Stills, Stephen – Stephen Stills

His daughter once took my photograph, on our porch, just feet from where I now type. Once tried to listen to Manassas but had to give up after 5 minutes. 

71. Winter, Johnny – Johnny Winter And

The whole blues-god, new prodigy of blues rock guitar thing... it's one of the most unreconstructable phenoms in rock history. Supposedly Johnny Winter's record deal was the biggest advance in history to that point, for a new act. 

72. Cocker, Joe – With A Little Help From My Friends

Alongside Joplin, surely the least-listened to Woodstock-era artist among all subsequent generations. 

75. Rundgren, Todd – A Wizard, A True Star

Despite influencing Prince and anticipating Ariel Pink in his recorded-it-all-on-his-Todd DIYness, Rundgren has not endured. I once spent an evening in the company of some Norwegians and Mr R and a succession of incredibly pricy vodka sours (this was during an Oslo music festival). He had bitter tales of recording with XTC and the intransigence of one Andrew Partridge. Did not respond well to my soused suggestion that he play Nazz's "Open My Eyes" at his concert the next night.

77. Jefferson Airplane, The – Crown Of Creation

Quite unrecoverable, I should think. I'm surprised this gets the nod and not After Bathing At Baxter's, my personal favorite in their most curious, trapped-in-time discograpy. Amazing how many albums they recorded after the famous hits...  they even had their own label, unhappily named Grunt.  Then the delta of solo albums, offshoots, Jefferson Starship...  almost a landfill in its own right.

81. Country Joe & The Fish – Electric Music For The Mind & Body

An absolutely forgotten group - for the longest while I myself had no idea they recorded this piercing psych rock mini-classic, having only ever heard the folksy protest ditty "Fixin-To-Die". I think the only reason I checked it out was I read that Tom Verlaine had been influenced. Psychedelia is obviously enduringly hip, if going through up-phases and relative dips, but this group - and acid rock generally, a different animal to psych  really - is not on the listening-list. See also Kaleidoscope (the US one not the Brit). 

85. Mayall’s, John, Bluesbreakers – Bluesbreakers

More Blues Boom boredom. Or so I assume. Wild horses couldn't drag me to the turntable  - or to Tidal - to give this a fair listen.

86. Traffic – Mr Fantasy

Traffic again. Very well respected once - their second album gets in Greil M's list at the back of Stranded, he says it's a British Music From Big Pink. I like the psych hit singles well enough. John Barleycorn is a particularly trapped-in-time listen.

90. Moby Grape – Moby Grape

Another one that makes the GM Stranded list (compiled around 1978 I should think so a post-New Wave lingering-on of Old Wave taste). I've tried but I can't find anything distinctive or memorable about the Grape. 

91. Big Brother & The Holding Co. – Cheap Thrills

San Francisco and all that made deep inroads into hip British taste - the magazine ZigZag was almost completely built around wistful West Coast longings among those just too young to have experienced it in real-time, let alone real-place.... Quicksilver Messenger Service epigones.... Hot Tuna hold-outs.... People who held their breath and waited and waited until the Grateful Dead would do their sporadic  live concerts in the U.K.  

(The first - and only, still - person of my own generation to suggest Big Brother might be worth listening to was J. Mascis...  in one of the several interviews I did with Dinosaur Jr, he was going on about a recent influence on his playing  being BB & THC's guitarist James Gurley. That gave me a right revisionist frisson, that did).

93. Doctor John – Gris-Gris

Dropped away utterly!

97. Newman, Randy – 12 Songs

I know a writer of the generation after mine who loves Newman (Mike Powell of Stylus / Pitchfork etc) but I would wager that His Gruffness's standing has plummeted precipitously. But in the early '70s he was the very definition of sophisticated and discerning rock taste, such that Marcus devoted an entire chapter of Mystery Train to his uuuurv, jostling alongside Sly Stone (!), The Band (!) and Elvis Presley (!!).

98. Spirit – The 12 Dreams Of Dr Sardonicus

More ZigZaggery.

I've tried with this group, this record, a bunch of times over the years but it's never stuck. My former MM colleague Paul Lester is a huge fan of Spirit even to the point of loving obscure Randy California solo albums. A fan of Rundgren too. (I think some of this may index to having grown up reading NME writer Max Bell, an Americanophile who wrote a riposte to Mick Farren's famous Titanic piece about the decadence of rock (the one that is said to have helped precipitate punk). Bell was - in early 1976 no less - like, "No, there's all this great music coming out of the U.S.A. Rock's getting every more sophisticated. It's just the UK scene that's a shithole. Start buying imports". )

99. Miller, Steve, Band – Sailor

Even more ZigZaggery. Children of the Future makes that back o' Stranded list. For those who know him only for "The Joker", "Abracadabra" and all those affably rockin' AM radio staples of the mid-70s, it's something of a head-swerve to learn that Miller was once revered as one of the finest blues-rock guitarists of his day and that the first couple of SMB albums are considered psych-era classics by some. 

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So that's 30 albums that have Dropped Away - almost a third of the list. Which is not that bad, I suppose. It means that 70 percent of the music esteemed in 1974 still has some kind of standing in today's taste-schema - fifty years on. 

However I would wager that if there's an equivalent list that the NME did in 1979 or 1980 - and there may well be - the Dropped Away proportion would be larger, possibly considerably larger. And that subsequently there's been some canonic readmission, a bit of Dropped-Away-But-Steadily-Stealthily-Climbed-Back.  Revisionism and rehabilitation. Restoration.

For most of the Dropped Away here would have originally Dropped Away within four years of this list being compiled. It was the catastrophic Transvaluative Event of New Wave that caused all these artists to suddenly become utterly irrelevant, indeed in many cases actively repugnant to young ears. It happened almost overnight. 

Of course, many of the usurping upstarts have themselves suffered subsequently from the dreaded Drops Away Syndrome ... for who of the young generation listens to, or has even heard of, Eddie & the Hot Rods, the Motors, Graham Parker and the Rumour, Boomtown Rats, Eater, Mink Deville, Tom Robinson Band, the Vibrators, the Damned, the Adverts...?

New Wave (premature sighting)

 

Melody Maker, November 1967

(via Peter Stanfield's post on Velvet Underground literature)

Höchnagogic Pop

 

Art's original punk, says the Guardian, of Hannah Höch - edge-of-Dada photomontagist. 

But actually Höch is Art's original hypnagogic cassette designer 

These are all from the EXBX Tapes label out of Michigan which ran from 2004 to 2011. Presumably designed by owner Daniel Dlugosielski? Loads more at the link.  And the aesthetic continued with new label Moon Myst Music.

Used to love this stuff - something about the combination of amateurism and genuinely trippy / unsettling results.

Collage is much harder to do than you think  - I've tried a few times: 

My attempts to pastiche the hypnagogic montage style 

Here I actually tried to create some non-existent hypnagogic cassettes (on the Freon label) to fool da readership:

Not a collage but a doctored found image

Below a found image whose graphic properties are so intensely of its period that I repurposed it wholesale and unchanged (taken from an America private school yearbook of the early '70s, as were the source images for the Freon cassettes and some of the other collages) 

Back to the better stuff, the unreal deal

More hypnagogic artwork from other labels, all from about 15 years ago

Very much in the Pop Art meets Psychedelia zone, as I tagged the music back then

But in fact the artwork's  possibly more Pop Art meets Surrealism

Some cool stuff but nothing I like as much as the EXBX cassette inlays

I feel one of my Eye Candy series coming on...