What back story about an album intrigues you the most?

Abbey Road is a masterpiece. If a band that wasn’t The Beatles released something like the second side, they would be instant legends. But being that it was The Beatles who released the album, it’s still an achievement. After seven years of constantly recording, they can still come up with pure gold.
But the story behind the album is even more intriguing to me. The end of a band. The end of friendships. One last pull together to create something great.
It’s a story that I’d love to know more of.
What other albums have backstories that are as intriguing as the actual album? Trout Mask Replica comes to mind.
Anybody here have a favorite backstory?

 

It's hard to top the saga of The Beach Boys - Smile.

 

Nice one. Yes.

 

Another fascinating one is The Notorious Byrd Brothers. David Crosby contributed a lot to the album, but was half way through leaving the band. The members kind of hated each other at the time. He was out of the band by the time the LP was released (week after Christmas '67) and was replaced on the album cover by a horse.



The '96 CD remaster has hidden audio of the band verbally abusing each other during the sessions.


The resulting album is one of their finest, of course.

 

Leonard Cohen’s DEATH OF A LADIES MAN. Phil Spector was up to his usual mayhem with booze and pistols. At one point he put his gun to Cohen’s head and said “I love you Leonard”.
Cohen’s reply: “I hope so Phil”.

Spector also used Cohen’s scratch vocals as final takes and made off with the tapes before Leonard could complete work to his satisfaction.

Some of Leonard’s more fascinating lyrics wed to Spector’s wall of sound.

 

Big Star's Radio City. Another one where it was the worst times and experience for all the band members while it was being made, and it turned out into a masterpiece. Go figure.

 

1993:

Right around the time of the release of their album Give a Monkey a Brain...and He'll Swear He's the Center of The Universe, Fishbone's lead guitarist Kendall Jones suddenly quit the band to join his father's religious cult in Northern California. The bassist of Fishbone, along with some of the guitarists' siblings attempted a kidnapping to free him from what they perceiving as the mindwashing of the cult. It did not go well. Bassist Norwood Fisher was tried for attempted kidnapping (acquitted) by his own band member.

Bizarre, but true.

 

Pearl by Janis Joplin. To know she died while recording it gives the album a whole new dimension. I mean, you can’t listen to “Buried Alive in the Blues” or “Mercedes Benz” without feeling something in your guts.

 

I've always liked the story of Springsteen's "Nebraska" - a simple cassette of 4-track demos that wasn't meant to be a finished record, but needed to be.

 

I’ve heard about this, I should pick it up. Replaced by a horse. Hilarious! Are the session abuses as good as the famous Murray Wilson tirades?!

 

King Crimson's 1974 Red. When the recording sessions took place, Fripp basically knew it was over (and was perhaps not 100% decided, but was very near to moving on to very much other things), but the others (save for David Cross, who knew his stint was over but was asked back to the Red sessions to contribute, along with many other alumni and other, non-credited string players) probably thought the exact opposite.

What's even funnier is that when McGuinn (I think) was asked about this, he responded something along the lines of: That wasn't supposed to represent David. If it were, we would have turned the horse around.

As for that record, it's really a mix of the Byrds I love and the Byrds I can very much do without. And you can draw that line very clearly at Crosby's boot heels. Draft Morning and Dolphin's Smile are great songs; most of the rest don't get a listen.

 

Do unreleased albums count? I'm currently reading Brian Wilson's autobiography and that got me back into listening to the Sweet Insanity sessions he did in the studio with the controversial (now deceased) Dr. Eugene Landy. His shrink tries to become his muse - Brains and Genius was the term Landy coined. Hard to believe anything good could have come out of those circumstances and it officially didn't but there are actually some really good songs that were put down if you can past some of the production and lyrics. It would be almost ten years until Brian was able to release his second solo album (this is not counting the soundtrack to I Just Wasn't Made For These Times).

 

Aparently it wasnt so sudden. According to the Fishbone Doc’ after Kendalls’ Mother passed his father got in touch after a long sabbatical and made ammends with his greiving son. The sessions for the album had already been fraught with two competing factions and Dirty Walt wanted to kick Dowd out of the band. Aparently rhere was a bit of brainwashing going on and Jones began to be swayed away from the band as well as his girlfriend. Apparently Kendall called a meeting and told them that the music they were creating was made by the devil. He simply vanished and moved up north to join his fathers commune. He never intended to leave the band but when Norwood et al travelled up to try to get him to come back things escalated. What an ugly scene amidst creation of an ugly album ( Some people love it but for Fishbone it was way to dark) some great songs though.

 

Bernard Butler - the Johnny Marr of the band - left Suede before they'd finished recording Dog Man Star. They tried to paper up the cracks with various overdubs, though in some cases it's obvious that the recordings were unfinished (the beginning of the second verse of New Generation being the most glaring example). No matter. It's without a doubt their most beloved record, and although both Butler (on his own and with McAlmont) and Suede (with Oakes and Codling replacing Butler) went on to make some fantastic music, every Suede fan has a nagging question as to "what might have been?"

...which is only compounded by Here Come The Tears (an Anderson/Butler collaboration that simultaneously sounds like second-rate Suede and a genuine leap forward).

 

Fleetwood Mac - Rumours. There had to be quite tension out there yet they produced perfect album

 

The second Moby Grape album. Skip Spence strung out on acid, trying to kill a band member (Don Stevenson) with a fire ax convince that he was out to get him. Spence was put in The Toombs and, later, committed to Bellevue Hospital. Peter Lewis left the band at one point. While their second album wasn't the masterpiece their first was, it is a very good album. Skip, when he was discharged, went to Nashville and cut the cult classic album Oar. The band limped on and, later, Lewis joined the Marines.

 

The false start recording of Goodbye Yellow Brick Road in Kingston, Jamaica... Elton and the band were trying to catch some of the Stones' exotic locale cred (and tax advantages) from their GHS sessions there the previous year. The project had a different working title ('Silent Movies, Talking Pictures') and was plagued with problems from the start. The studio was woefully inadequate, the piano was useless... and the band feared for their lives during the violent unrest in Kingston surrounding the Frazier vs. Foreman prize fight going on at the same time. They only completed one track... a never-released alternate take of 'Saturday Night's Alright For Fighting'... before pulling the plug and decamping back to the tried & trusted Chateau d'Heureville in France.

I've often wondered how different (or successful) the record would have been if they had stuck it out in Jamaica.

 

The Clash -- London Calling. Producer Guy Stevens poured a beer into the piano at one point because he wanted Strummer to stop playing. He swung chairs at the band menacingly during recording in order to coax a more intense sound. He lay behind the wheels of a CBS exec's limousine so the exec couldn't drive away until the label gave in and upgraded LC to a double album.

 

Straight Up - Badfinger

Badfinger’s best album (IMO), partially produced by both George Harrison and Todd Rundgren, from which came the all-time classic hits “Baby Blue” and “Day After Day”. Sadly, the band would only come close to this level of quality one more time, with “Wish You Were Here” 3 years later but I think it would have been interesting to be in the studio during the sessions for “Straight Up”.

 

There's literally thousands of great back stories, most of the great records seem to be conceived and recorded in turmoil. Below from Merge records describing some of the back story for Richard Buckner's The Hill, released in 2000 ...

On the 100th anniversary of Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology, Merge is reissuing the epic it inspired: Richard Buckner’s The Hill.

The Hill started in 1996 in an old garage that had been converted to The Ranch Olancha Motel, a dusty place near the mouth of Death Valley, between Lone Pine and Dunmovin, California. Buckner, who was en route to Tucson, Arizona, to record what would become Devotion & Doubt, stayed a week in a room with no phone, no television, carrying his guitar, a four-track recorder, and a copy of Masters’ Spoon River Anthology. He tinkered with a few of the book’s poems, put them on a cassette, and forgot about it until an acquaintance discovered it in his truck four years later. Beset with writer’s block and looking for a distraction, Buckner would find in the tape the spur he needed.

Recorded in Edmonton, Alberta, and Tucson, The Hill converts Spoon River poems to music. You’d wonder why a poet in his own right would feel the need to sample another’s work. But Masters’ book of poetry tells much the same story Buckner is accustomed to, the kind of story that makes him distinct among storytellers.

Each page of Spoon River Anthology reads as a final, postmortem dictum of a different deceased resident—more than 250 of them now passed—in the fictional Midwestern town of Spoon River. The epitaphs are important for Buckner because, in death, these people strip the breathing city of its dishonesty. Each one, from Reuben Pantier to Elizabeth Childers to Oscar Hummel, is no longer concerned with whispers and pointed fingers that are often the consequence of a life laid bare for all to see. They’re unleashing themselves, without fallacy or attachment.

Buckner chooses 18 of these confessions, each given a unique rendering. Backed by Calexico’s Joey Burns and John Convertino and surveyed with Buckner’s unflagging vocal desperation, Spoon River’s residents come back to life. Like so much of his career, Buckner disappeared into Spoon River and returns to us with its story.

 

Which of course reminds me of....

 

I was just reading, I don’t understand, so the album was never released?

 

The first Mayhem record. Bass player murders guitarist, family insist bass player’s bass playing is removed, band confirm they do that but actually don’t...

 

Bob Mosely was the one who left the band and joined the Marines. Had some issues of his own although not as radical as Skip's behavior.

 

Lifehouse by The Who. So many great Who songs from this period! All but one song on Who’s Next were written for a concept album called Lifehouse. Pete Tohnshend had written enough material for (at least) a double album that was never quite finished. They were frustratingly close when plans for that double album were scrapped and the single album Who’s Next was released instead.

The 50th anniversary is coming in 2021. I would love to have a 50th anniversary set of all the most complete Who and Pete Townsend versions of the songs from this era. They could use Who songs whenever possible, and add in some Pete Townsend demos of the missing Who songs, and also use some of his ‘Baba’ synthesizer instrumentals as link tracks, where appropriate, to sprinkle more of that Baba O’Riley / Won’t Get Fooled Again flavor throughout. Many of us have made our own CD-Rs of this material. My 2 CDs would have needed to fill 5 LP sides if it had come out back in 1971, but if Brian Wilson can present SM!LE on 3 LP sides, what’s wrong with using 5 for Lifehouse?