On Experimentation: Musicians Spooky Tooth, Pierre Henry, Carlene Carter, Graham Parker and the Rumour, Nick Lowe, and painter Amy Sillman

I’ve got experimentation on my mind today.

“My first five albums were experiments, experiments in mixing these different

things, to find my own style of music.” This is what singer songwriter Carlene

Carter told reporter Jeff Spivak in his 2016 profile of her in the Democrat & Chronicle.

Why did I pull Carter’s debut record off the shelf today, decide to listen to it, read the liner notes after all of this time, and even look up an interview with Carter that discusses her experimental process?

I just set up a new painting studio in part of a cabin that my wife and I own about an hour outside of Pittsburgh. The cabin is furnished with hand me down furniture, hand me down books, hand me down records, mostly from my parents’ home that we sold ten years ago after my father died. (How is the meaning of a record impacted by its having been owned previously?) Between cleaning up the studio and cooking meals today, I sifted through my smaller record collection there and happened to pull out a record that I haven’t listened to before, Carlene Carter’s 1978 self-titled debut. Most of the records in the cabin like this one are orphans from the record collection I gathered for an exhibition. Carter’s record would have been easy to overlook amidst the 15,000 records I displayed in Pittsburgh’s 707 Penn Avenue Gallery,, a sort of fake record store with the docent cum DJ playing requested albums and posting a ‘visual record’ of the selected disks. I would have easily overlooked this particular record because I had never heard of Carlene Carter before today and probably have never heard any of her songs before today either. I only really knew of her through her family lineage: she is June Carter’s daughter and was raised by Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash. Country music royalty. Since I was in no particular hurry, I chose today to read the liner notes on the back of her debut album.

I love liner notes on the backs of record albums. I love looking to see who produced the record, which musicians played on it with the headliner, and where it was recorded. In the case of Carlene Carter’s debut, I might have assumed that she had recorded her first album in Nashville, with a distinguished who’s who of country music’s finest backing up Johnny Cash’s step daughter on her first official album. But, I would have been way off.

In 1978, Carlene Carter, basically a country music princess, flew to London, England, to record her debut record. Instead, the Rumour, a leading New Wave/Punk/Pub Rock band of the time that was working with English singer/songwriter Graham Parker, backs Carter on this record–not the expected slew of country musicians." It was an experiment, substituting American country music royalty for British pub music cult classic. In addition to Parker, who contributes acoustic guitar and backing vocals on a few cuts, the band included Nick Lowe and Andrew Bodner on bass, Steve Goulding on drums, Brinsley Schwartz on electric guitar, and Bob Andrews on piano. Sidenote: Carlene Carter must have gotten especially close to Lowe around this time because he became her third husband the following year.

The sound of this record is particularly intriguing, juxtaposing Carter’s distinctive Nashville-twangy voice with the four on the floor rumble of a well-oiled British bar band. While most of the songs were penned by Carter, and despite the fact that they are not especially distinctive or memorable, they are joined on the record by minor tunes by better known songwriting luminaries like Tracy Nelson, Graham Parker, and Rodney Crowell.

In general, I am more attracted to an imperfect but well-intentioned experiment than a slick and popular ‘success.’ Imperfection is way more interesting than perfection, if perfection even can be said to exist. The aspiration to be perfect is just plain boring to me. Sanding down the rough edges of anything can make it so smooth you don’t even feel it. Post-Camel Peter Frampton comes to mind.

Overall, I enjoyed listening to this record today. A worthy experiment, with a great sound and less memorable songs.

 Arriving home this evening, I pulled out another flawed experimental rock record, this

one less intentional and much stranger than Carter’s, Ceremony, “an electronic mass” written by Pierre Henry and Gary Wright and performed by Spooky Tooth and Pierre Henry in 1969. I had been thinking about this record recently, since I came across a mention of it in the first chapter of ‘Modulations,’ a history of electronic music edited by Peter Shapiro that I have just started reading. In his chapter on pioneers of electronic music, Rob Young introduces French composer Pierre Henry. Henry is well-known to have intersected with several pop music producers throughout his life time, but his collaboration with Spooky Tooth is perhaps the oddest, not only in terms of music, but also in terms of intentions and their consequences.

In 1969, several years before Jesus Christ Superstar would appear on stage, Pierre Henry approached Gary Wright, the lead singer of the early progressive rock band, Spooky Tooth, about working on a composition based upon the New Testament. Unclear whether this would influence composers Webber and Rice in the development of Superstar but there are similarities. Tracks on the resulting album are titled, Have Mercy, Jubilation, Confession, Prayer, Offering, and Hosanna, and consist of biblical lyrics intoned over Henry’s electronic noises and Spooky Tooth’s characteristic heavy proto-prog rock boogie. Overall, the album sounds more like a Pierre Henry project with a backing band than either of Spooky Tooth’s first two albums. In this sense, Spooky Tooth appears to function more like Henry’s band than as equal collaborators. Also worth noting that Henry approached Wright with the idea initially, and not the other way around…

Beyond its possible and undocumented influence on Superstar, Ceremony fascinating in its own right. It had a catastrophic effect on Spooky Tooth’s future at a time when they were on the verge of stardom. After releasing two promising, critically acclaimed, and increasingly popular rock albums, Spooky Tooth were expected to be breaking through as one of rock music's leading bands with their next release. Their third album, as yet unrecorded, was widely anticipated both by their fans and their record label. However, when their label, A&M Records, found out about this new project by Spooky Tooth and Pierre Henry, they decided to capitalize upon the band’s burgeoning popularity and quickly market it as Spooky Tooth’s third album. The resulting backlash was unprecedented, with the band itself and their fans universally horrified by the resulting album and its perception as a Spooky Tooth album, thinking that this was the follow-up to the popular Spooky Two album. Lead singer Gary Wright subsequently left the band for this reason and went onto huge international fame with his Dream Weaver album. His band mates were less fortunate, and Spooky Tooth never quite recovered from the release of the experimental Ceremony. 

Like Carlene Carter’s debut album, Ceremony is an uneven listening experience.

Although some of the tracks on Ceremony are tedious listening, others, especially the final cut on side two, Hosanna, are engaging. Good music is always worth a listen to me, no matter the genre. Experiments are not always perceived as artistic or commercial successes at the time they are undertaken, but sometimes they are reevaluated later and a new appreciation of the project emerges. Think about experimental painters like Vincent van Gogh. This is certainly the case for the intriguing experimental record, Ceremony.

After dinner tonight I sat down to read. I picked up a new book about one of my favorite painters, Amy Sillman, her recent monograph, The All Over. In the book’s central interview, Sillman describes her experimental painting process to curator Fabian Schoneich. “Half of my painting process is accident/chance/mistake/erasure/discovery…and this is balanced by about 50 percent decisions/analysis/editing/conceptualizing.”

As I said, I’ve got experimentation on my mind today.