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Albums with interesting stories behind them


apsham

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Howdy there.

Like many of you I find myself swamped with music - there is so much of it available I have no clue where to start and I end up listening to the same old stuff time and time again. I was sitting around this evening and I started thinking about how interested I can get in a particular artist or album from time to time, spending time reading about them and what was happening at the time - and I figured I would have a little project on my hands.

I want to start up a blog where I go over the history/reasoning/story behind a particular album before reviewing the album itself. I have this annoying thing where I want to find a project or extra reason to do anything that I can eat up my time with - so fire away and give a little blurb as to why you think a particular album would be a great candidate. Any genre and time period is fine.

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I'll see what I can come up with, I think one of the Pink Floyd albums involved Syd Barrett coming in to the studio completely out of his mind. Then he left and they never saw him again. There is more to it than that of course, but it's a start?

Wish You Were Here, which was partially dedicated to Barrett. Syd had been missing for years and showed up unannounced in the middle of recordings completely hairless, bald, no eyebrows etc and massively out of shape. Supposed to be part way through recording a take someone realised it was him and burst into tears. Probably Waters, the big drama queen.

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The cover to Appetite For Destruction was originally a painting of a woman who has just been raped by a demonic sex robot. They were forced to change it, and the replacement cover became one of the most iconic of all time. The sex robot was relegated to inside the gate fold.

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Rumors by Fleetwood Mac has to be one of the most covered "stories" of a band making an album, what with all the infighting and anger.

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Nevermind The Bollocks Here's the Sex Pistols has a bit behind it as well. For example, the song Submission was supposed to be about BDSM, bondage, that sort of thing per Malcolm McLaren. When he pitched the idea to Johnny Rotten, Rotten in turn turned it into a song about a Sub Marine Mission. Also, Steve Jones played all of the bass parts on that album, not Glen Matlock and certainly not Sid Vicious though Sid is featured as the bass player in the liner notes.

Or when the Ramones worked their first album with Phil Spector, they got an idea of how fucking crazy he was. I guess he held them all at his house at gun point because he was fucking nutty ass Phil Spector, I'll have to flip through the book and find the full story.

I can probably dig up some more stuff in books, unfortunately a few of them were borrowed and not returned.

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Deep Purples 1972 album Motor Head was being recorded in a casino in France. During a Frank Zappa concert someone fired a flare into the ceiling and burned the place down. The band saw it burning....and they gave us Smoke on the Water.

Actually the Album is called Machine Head.

It was supposed to be recorded at the Casino in Montreaux, which is in Switzerland not France.

The place indeed did burn down the day before their recording session was to be started, during a concert of Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention when an audience member shot a flare gun at the rattan covered ceiling. The Band was at the concert watching it. A picture of the burning Casino and the "Smoke on the Water" (over Lake Geneva) is in the inside of the LP Gatefold.

The story gets even more interesting later on. The band, with the help of Claude Nobs ("Funky Claude" in the song and manager of the famous Montreaux Jazz Festival), relocated to a nearby Theater, called the Pavillon but where kicked out from the Police after neighbours complained about the noise (at the time Deep Purple was by far the loudest band in concerts and recordings). Though not after the roadies of DP and the swiss Police fought it out, the roadies tried their hardest to keep the band in that theatre.

So they again relocated to a closed-down Hotel (The Montreaux Grand Hotel). The entire album was recorded in a hallway of the Hotel (a picture of which is on the cardboard sleeve of the Anniversary Edition CD release) with all the cables running through several rooms, corridors and down some windows to the Rolling Stone Mobile Truck. Which proved to be a problem since for every take they would've to walk through the entire Grand Hotel down the street to the van to listen to what they recorded. Annoyed by that, they just stopped going to the van. Machine Head's song therefore mostly recorded in 1 take live.

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