2 July 2013 (Day 183) – Acts In Disguise

Obviously my real name is not otis.youth.  I chose it because I wish to remain anonymous; you never know what nefarious elements out there can do with just your name.  As if to prove that, yesterday I received an obviously fake letter from overseas designed to scam me.  Just one reading of the envelope and letter was sufficient to determine how the scammers obtained my mail address from a particular non digital source.  Unfortunately for them, that immediately gave their game away; well, that and the poorly phrased English, the wild and inaccurate guesses about my family tree and the misspelling of one aspect of my name. 

And this provided me with the theme for today’s listening.  There are a hell of lot albums out there by established acts who go under assumed names as if to hide their true identities.  Obviously in most instances, these identities can be determined by just as single listen, especially if the artists involved have distinctive voices or playing styles.  But from what I’ve been left to understand, in many instances, this occurs at the insistence of one or more of the acts’ record companies who have allowed them to record and release the results on the other act’s label.  The idea seems to be that if the act releases the material under a different name, this would not divert too many sales away from the act’s established catalogue.

If true, this is another example of how record companies truly do not understand how music fans operate.  First, as I’ve already mentioned, if the acts have anything distinctive about them, their presence in the new entity becomes immediately apparent.  Second, it reveals a breathtaking naivety about music fans, especially today.  It may come as news to them, but fans really do read music magazines, websites or  newspapers and listen to radio stations etc that will report on and review the eventual results.  Finally, and most importantly, the labels don’t seem to understand that such an album amounts to free publicity for the act’s back catalogue.

And so today’s listening dips a toe into some of my favourite examples of acts in disguise, starting with a partial one:

(# 493) The Chris Stamey Experience – A Question Of Temperature (2005)

True identities: Chris Stamey and Yo La Tengo

The origins of this mindblowing album go back to 2004 when the album was originally released (and credited to the true identities)  in a very limited run as part of an anti George W. Bush re-election effort.   Fortunately, sanity prevailed and the album was given a full release. Although Stamey is identified, very few of the numbers here sound like the quirky tracks that would have been recorded by the group with which he is most often associated, The dB’s.  (One of their tracks, Summer Sun, is covered here.)  On the other hand, the album sounds very much like a lost Yo La Tengo album with Ira Kaplan’s idiosyncratic guitar playing very much to the fore.  It starts off with a brace of superb cover versions, the most well known being The Yardbrid’s The Shapes Of Things, Cream’s Politicans and Television’s Venus.  But the absolute highlight of this set is the awesome 10 and a half minute MacCauley Street (Let’s Go Downtown).  A classic slow/freakout/slow number of the type often utilised by the latter day Sonic Youth (refer to Murray Street tracks such as Rain On Tin or The Empty Page), this starts off with quiet half sung/spoken lyrics that clearly position the song as a form of modern day homage to The Velvet Underground.  (Lou Reed is even name checked in this part of the track.) The middle five minutes or so is an inspired Yo La Tengo freakout with guitars and Kaplan’s e-bow exploding in all sorts of directions as if trying to replicate the VU’s improvised workouts on their live renderings of Some Kinda Love before fading to an organic end.  (Sonically speaking, all of the guitar and e-bow lines in the middle section appear to have been allocated one channel or the other, and so fiddling around with equalizers, speakers, etc, can produce varying results.)   It is very close to the finest single track I’ve ever heard from this veteran band.

(# 494) Hindu Love Gods – Hindu Love Gods (1990)

True identities: Warren Zevon and R.E.M. minus Michael Stipe

This album consists of a number of cover versions knocked out during the recording sessions for Zevon’s Sentimental Hygiene album.  (Zevon’s band on that album was essentially, Peter Buck, Mike Mills and Bill Berry.)  It’s not meant to be taken as anything other than an enjoyable romp through a number of well known songs.  Of these the highlight is their barnstorming version of Prince’s Rasberry  Parade. Close behind is a stomping performance of Battleship Chains a track made famous by The Georgia Satellites, the blues standard Mannish Boy and other blues classics such as Crosscut Saw and Travellin’ Riverside Blues.  A version of Woody Guthrie’s Vigilante Man rounds things off nicely.

(# 495) The Dukes Of Stratosphere – Chips From The Chocolate Fireball (1987)

True identity: XTC

Easily the most intriguing of these acts owing to its highly ironic and totally unforeseen consequences, this is a compilation of the debut 25 O’Clock mini album from 1985 and the full length 1987 release Psonic Punshot.  XTC recorded these records as a homage of sorts to the British psychedelic acts of the 1960s they loved and which also seemed to inspire much of their work at the time.  XTC was not referenced on the original releases with each member adopting a fictitious identity and certainly the 6 tracks which make up 25 O’Clock are hard (at least to me) to pick out as them.  However, it was hard to miss distinctive XTC touches on Punshot, especially on Collidescope, Vanishing Girl and You’re My Drug.  Closing track Pale And Precious plays out as an astonishing Pet Sounds era homage to The Beach Boys.  Incredibly, despite the fact XTC were releasing amazing albums under their own name simultaneously, they were massively outsold by their alter egos.