"That's It! Stick It To 'Em! Tell Them How Avant Garde You Are!" Dept.

A request for a re-up of Tear The Top Right Off Your Million Dollar Head gave me an excuse to revisit it, and paste up some new sleeve art. I edited it a little, shortening the sound effect introduction, placing the mock-classical piece as an overture, replacing the frankly terrible-sounding live version of Circle Sky (both bass-heavy and shrill) with the original studio recording, and making many granular shifts too subtle for anyone but me to get excited about.

This all started years back, with my dissatisfaction with the movie soundtrack album, which I loved (owning three copies at a time when it was harder to locate than a rhinocerous clitoris) but felt needed work - the kind of work Jack Nicholson put into that dizzying sound collage (heard here in unique mind-blowing stereo). It needed to be more like the movie. It needed to be continuous, like a movie. Above all, it needed to be a puzzling, disorienting trip; not a bag of odds and ends. It took much more work than I anticipated, and I suspect some of the stuff I put in will never get out - trapped in the black box.

You can now play the album on an eternal loop, mirroring the structure of the movie - "and when you see the end in sight, the beginning might arrive." The theme of being trapped in a kind of Möbius Sunset Strip that twists through the movie is echoed even in the lyrics of the unused songs. "It's the end, the living end!" someone shouts at the beginning of California, as Peter sings "here I come, right back where I started from." Nesmith puts his characteristic spin on the Strip: "These things I think are new, I guess they're really old. It seems I've done 'em all before. Now I will go to someplace ... where things don't start just to end." That'll be Hollywood, mythical birthplace of the most fascinating and still misunderstood pop group. And Peter, who's always been the dummy, the idiot savant, sums up the frustration with Do I Have To Do This All Over Again, back on the wheel, stuck in the box ... puppets waking up from a dream - of being a boxer, a soldier, a musician, a suicide, a guru - into another dream ...

Although there are more songs on this version than the official release, it's a more intense listen, and it does justice to an intense movie; multi-layered, dreamlike, endlessly rich and deep. Fuck Kubrick. Grab your headphones and half an hour to yourself. Extra points for spotting the Firesign Theatre.

The James Joyce Connection

From an internet: "James Joyce’s experimental novel Finnegans Wake (1939) is considered a revolutionary masterpiece. Written over the course of nearly two decades, Joyce attempted to create a dreamlike state. Like the eighteenth-century Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico, Joyce believed that history is cyclical. Finnegans Wake is modeled on this concept. The story is written in a circular structure with no beginning or end. In fact, the novel’s opening line is a fragment of a sentence from the novel’s closing line which was left unfinished. Due to the complicated and fluid nature of the novel, critics find it difficult to summarize the plot. The novel does not have a single plot - instead, it has many stories ..."

Supernatural? Perhaps. Baloney? Perhaps not. This concept can occur to, and be expressed artistically by, a bunch of super-smart Hollywood brats quite as well as any Literary Genius or 18c philostopher. "The novel does not have a single plot - instead, it has many stories", or, as Head puts it: "We hope you like our story, although there isn't one ... that is to say there's many ..." The protagonist in Finnegans Wake is referred to as HCE, which can be understood as Here Comes Everybody. In this Fractal Expansion the Head equivalent is Here We Come, or HWC. Here they come, and there they go.

Swim with the mermaids ...

Back cover supplied (above, struggling against white background) .