From The Crawlspace Dept. - Old Woolhat's Tin Ear

Look, I love Michael Nesmith. In a wholesome, outdoorsy way. I have a dozen-plus albums of his that I consider lifelong friends that never get old. But that doesn't mean I kick all my critical faculties to the curb when listening to his music. He's made a few batshit bonkers moves in his long career - part of his charm - but I've gathered you here again to talk about his weird proclivity (steady at the back there) for fucking up his old albums.

Frank Zappa, another control freak, did this repeatedly, most notoriously with Cruising With Reuben And The Jets and We're Only In It For The Money, which he basically wrecked with his spiteful and hypocritical vandalism at the mixing desk. Nesmith's folly isn't as great; the albums he remixed aren't as important as Zappa's. But still. The Wichita Train Whistle Sings  and The Prison were fine records, and Nesmith should have been Saran-wrapped in the trunk of a Crown Vic with straws up his nose rather than allowed to get his fingers back on the faders. You'd be forgiven for thinking he could make Rays any worse. You'd be wrong.

The story of The Wichita Train Whistle Sings is well-known. If not by you, then look it up. I ain't here to copy-paste shit from the internet. d0 yUr oWn resErch. Oh okay. Basically he gave his song charts to fifty of L.A.'s finest, got them stoned and rolled the tapes as a tax write-off. It's a shitload of pure fun, and I'll take it over The Garden any day. Maybe the balance is a little off-center sometimes, but so was that of the musicians. It's more polished, cleverly arranged, and entertaining than you might imagine, certainly no waste of anyone's time, yet Nez saw fit to remix it for a 2008 reissue program. It remains harder to find, happily, than the original.

Our Allmusic hack gets it, predictably, catastrophically wrong, loftily opining that it "sounds better than all previous incarnations." The stupid fuck clearly hasn't heard any previous incarnations [sic - Ed.], probably hasn't listened to this one, and is regurgitating Nesmith's own liner notes; "the sequence has been altered to reflect the initial intent". Bullshit. It was his own project from ground up, and the original sequencing was his original intent - how could it be otherwise?

The remix sounds like Old Woolhat played the tapes through a walkie-talkie in a bleak underground liminal space, re-recording it onto a dictaphone wrapped in damp underwear. It is that bad. The original remains a crystal-clear transcription of a crazyhappy day spent screwing the I.R.S.

 

The Prison, released in '74, was a beautifully illustrated book with a soundtrack album, handsomely published in a box. The book wasn't the kind of book you'd want to read as, well, you know, a book. It was more like a sketch of an idea that needed a whole lot of work. The length of a CEO's introduction to a company report, and about as engaging, it was padded out with a superfluous French translation. Worse, it had no connection with the few lyrics on the album. Yet you were supposed to read it while listening to the music and let this - finger-waggle - "Third Thing" happen, a holistic synergy if you will, which opened a different state of consciousness. It was bullshit, of course, but an endearing kind of bullshit, well-intentioned and inventive. Give him credit for trying something different, rather than blame him for its failure. It was his first album for his own label, Pacific Arts, and it's unlikely RCA would have risked putting it on the racks.

The music was quietly revolutionary. Mostly instrumental, just him and Red Rhodes, ambling through songs like fields of wheat [oh, very good - Ed.]. A metronomic drum machine pattering like soft summer rain [oh, stop - Ed.], some minimal synthesizer. As if Kraftwerk had produced his previous album, And The Hits. It was a unique sound for unique material. Those wanting more country rock tunes were disappointed. Those seeking a consciousness-expanding holistic synergy were disappointed. But for those who let it take the time to work its magic, it became a much-loved and essential record. With Pacific Arts' limited distribution and mail order, it limped unnoticed out of print.

He clearly thought its commercial failure was the fault of the music, because when he got around to re-releasing the project in 1990, that was the part he messed with. He should have entirely rewritten the book - better yet, just trashed it - and let the music be, but no. He shamefully kicked Red Rhodes off into the distance, barely audible. He slathered on a sticky mess of new age synth washes and faerie keyboard tinkling. He added a mystical reverb to his vocals. And like Frank Zappa, he fucked up. Unable to admit his mistake (Texans don't make mistakes) he doubled down on the ghastliness with another two albums, the irredeemable The Garden and the even worse The Ocean, exhausting our critical leniency. Never mind. We don't have to listen to them, and dammit, we're not going to. But the original Prison is, in its quietly soothing way, one of his very loveliest albums.

 

Rays has never been anyone's favorite Nesmith album, leave alone declared a lost classic by even the most swivel-eyed of his fans [that'll be you, then - Ed.]. It's bizarre, but in a head-scratching way. What the fuck actual was he thinking? It sounds like the whole thing was played on a Casio VL-Tone in a motel room. There are maybe 2.6 songs on it, and they're kinda gnarly.

Coming thirteen years after his last "proper" album Tropical Campfires, it was a desperate disappointment, and it tanked. Hard. Thinking again that all it needed was a bit of folding and fluffing, Nez took a decade or so to nurture the work to completion. Let the great man speak:

“I like it a great deal [ri-ight - Ed.] and have been listening to it the last several months over and over. Something is realized in this iteration that is additive, incremental and moves the work into new territory that I did not intend or expect when I first wrote and recorded it. I am excited by it. In some sense it makes Rays a whole new work.”
 

So additive and incremental was this iteration that it never even made it to a physical format, being given away online, and only about three people have heard it (not me - I accidentally pushed the tone-arm right to the spindle about five minutes in).

From The Crawlspace will be a (very) occasional feature wherein [grammar - Ed.] I remix and remodel old posts to no great effect, hoping to give the bogus impression of making a vigorous contribution to the blogosphere, going forward.