Tubes

The third album by Lynyrd Skynyrd, “Nuthin’ Fancy”, marked the end of their partnership with producer Al Kooper. It was released in March 1975, just in time for the start of sessions for “The Tubes”, the debut of the new band Kooper had set his sights on, and which he would go on to work with for four years.

In truth, the Tubes were less a band than a collective, as shown by the album credits: Fee Waybill (lead vocals), Michael Cotten (synthesizers), Vince Welnick (keyboards), Rick Anderson (bass), Prairie Prince (drums), Bill Spooner and Roger Steen (both on guitars and backing vocals). A seven-member rock band was already unusual enough, but even more unusual was the fact that they were joined by a whole series of supporting members whose activity effectively depended on the project: various co-writers (Michael Evans, Mike Carpenter, multi-instrumentalist Ray Trainer) and an entire theatrical crew, who followed the band on tour staging a show within the show, developing and pushing to its extreme consequences what the Alice Cooper had attempted a few years earlier.

The Tubes boasted a considerable cult following during the Seventies — the albums “Young And Rich” and “Remote Control”, released in 1976 and 1979 respectively, managed to poke into Billboard's weekly top 50 — and for a moment they even seemed to have broken into the mainstream at the dawn of the following decade, when the single “She’s A Beauty” (1983) reached number 10. However, their legend didn't hold, and today they're remembered by a very devoted but ultimately small cult following, unable to provide detailed information about a story that, given the sheer number of people involved, must have been quite a complicated one.

For instance, nobody knows who this Mike Carpenter is, credited among the writers of “Space Baby” on this debut album: a friend of the band, a member in disguise, a roadie? Things are a little clearer with Michael Evans, who would go on to co-write songs on later albums too and who would later become a Sony executive: even so, the nature of his relationship with the band remains unknown.

At least it's known how the Tubes landed their deal with A&M: George Daly, a talent scout for Columbia, had been trying to sign them for about a year, only to keep getting turned down by the higher-ups because the project was deemed too radical. Through the mediation of Rick Wakeman, he then pitched them to A&M: it wasn't common for a manager to hand a band over to a rival label, but Daly was clearly convinced they deserved an outlet, and sensed that if he kept pushing Columbia, they'd remain benched for a long while yet.

It's worth stressing that the Tubes, even while still an underground act, were already able to generate a considerable amount of activity around them. Watching their old footage, one might think those elaborate shows, with dance numbers, grotesque performances and Grand Guignol-style scenes, were made possible by the financial backing of the major label that signed them. In fact, the Tubes had already been putting on this format for two years, involving some of the best artists on the Californian scene (their choreographer was Kenny Ortega, who later became one of the most in-demand names in the music industry, a two-time Emmy winner as well as a successful director). Wakeman became their champion during one of their performances near San Francisco.

Once at A&M's court, under the guidance of Al Kooper, one of the best producers of the era, the road ahead seemed clear for the Tubes, and indeed, as already mentioned, their following kept growing for a few years, even as they had to contend with the embarrassment of the American media and one too many managerial missteps: in particular, their refusal to play on “Saturday Night Live” because they weren't allowed to perform more than one song in a row must be considered a stunningly short-sighted decision.

“Up From The Deep” and “Haloes” open the album by immediately laying out the band's recipe: a stylistic melting pot in which glam and progressive rock boil over with energy and pomp, dissolving the shape of the songs into a continuous flow of ideas. What follows is a succession of grand guitar interplay (hard rock distortion, heavy use of effects, but also a constant undercurrent of acoustic subplots complicating the dynamics) and keyboard work (majestic piano runs colliding with electronic hisses straight out of a sci-fi film score), fierce rhythmic breaks (with Prince showing himself capable of replicating the chaotic circus acrobatics of Keith Moon, but also of blending hard rock with jazz touches at a speed comparable to Ian Paice) and Broadway-musical-style vocal harmonies, with Waybill's aggressive voice front and center.

Also striking are “Mondo Bondage” — introduced by a hard-blues riff, before it veers off into space, complete with the usual unsettling synthesizer and a finale of sped-up tape — and the version of “Malagueña salerosa” (one of the most celebrated Mexican songs of the first half of the twentieth century, popularized by local music greats such as Miguel Aceves Mejía and Trío Los Panchos), whipped along by a fierce martial rhythm.

The band's sheer arsenal would have been enough to generate a constantly over-the-top atmosphere, but not content with the result, the seven of them, in agreement with Kooper, decided to add orchestral arrangements: they brought in Dominic Frontiere, a jazz musician and composer of scores for famous TV series such as “The Outer Limits” (1963) and “The Rat Patrol” (1966). Thanks to his contribution, the Tubes' recipe reaches full saturation: their poor standing with rock critics, who within a couple of years would begin favoring — as they still do today — a more restrained approach and leaner arrangements, perhaps explains why their cult failed to endure over the decades. This, of course, takes nothing away from the merit of their music, which shines through its uniqueness and boldness.

The lyrics too, mostly written by Spooner, are anything but accommodating: “White Punks On Dope” tells of wealthy young kids from the San Francisco area, often ravaged by drugs, while “What Do You Want From Life” is a sarcastic sketch attacking the consumerism fueled by TV promotions, with particular reference to the game show “The Price Is Right”.

As Kooper himself recounted:

We spent a good part of an afternoon writing up the list of prizes that could be won, reaching its peak with "a boy's arm holding an apple". As some of you may remember, that's the description Lady Chatterley gave of her lover's package. The line slipped past the censors because few DJs had read D. H. Lawrence at the time.

The two tracks just mentioned are perhaps the album's masterpieces. While "What Do You Want From Life" is a piece of psychedelic funk that would have fit right in on contemporary Parliament records by George Clinton, thanks to its plasticky synth flourishes and lavish soul choruses, "White Punks On Dope", with its blend of hard rock, relentless tempo changes and operatic choirs, shows how the music of the era was pushing toward a marriage of rock and opera on several fronts: that same year, 1975, had already seen the release of another genre classic, "Une nuit a Paris" by 10cc, while later that year would come "Bohemian Rhapsody" by Queen, a song that would probably not be considered so special if the wider public knew the tracks that had so strikingly anticipated it.

"The Tubes" stalled at number 113 on the American charts. Still, in 1977 the band made it to Britain, home of glam rock, performing "White Punks On Dope" on the Old Grey Whistle Test. Following that appearance, the single climbed into the local top 30.

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01/11/2020