Black Sabbath - Born Again - Unmixed Demos
I’ve never heard the demos, but I absolutely adore this album.
It’s a little different than the release…a few missing lyrics & alt lyrics (mostly from Zero the Hero) along with Fallen which wasn’t released and an extended version of Stonehenge.
Bruce Dickerson…Skunkworks Demos (without vocals). I forget I had this. Very cool to hear these demos as they do differ a little from the release. My favorite from Bruce.
Haha I was curious if you had ever listened to it,G…to me it’s a masterpiece…it’s one of those that is polarizing but you don’t k ow how many reviews I’ve read that said that they didn’t get it until about the 3rd or 4th spin and it finally sunk in…the story behind the making of it is batshit fucking crazy …the Capt basically had a commune going and it was like a fucking cult…with the Magic Band being put through all kind of psychological torture and playing 21 hours days in the studio…he threw one of the band members down a flight of stairs…
They basically lived in food stamps and charity…childhood friend and collaborator Frank Zappa was bought in to produce and spent as much time trying to wrangle in the madness as he did on producing the music…had to bail a couple people out of jail etc…
Amazing album…
I’ve got a couple of different versions of those Born Again mixes…got one of them from Japan…
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I’ve never heard those Skunkworks demos…I really like that album… different from anything else he did…I think Chemical Wedding is my favorite of his but Skunkworks is a close second …gonna have to look into those demos…
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Was this in a book or documentary or something? I love this kinda shit. I hadn’t heard how nuts that was. I think I’d heard just enough that I kinda wrote it off as just a band of hippies doing a bunch of drugs and pushing out an album, but goddamn, sounds like shit was crazy and brutal.
Yeah I’ve read about it over the years in various articles but also read the Capt Beefheart biography…it’s amazing how out there those sessions got…those guys were living on a small cup of beans a day…the stories are wild…and god damn if you can’t hear it in the music…
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Captain Beefheart- Trout Mask Replica
Wow that was shockingly bad.
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Fuckin A . . . (taken from Wikipedia)
In preparation, the band rehearsed Van Vliet’s difficult compositions for eight months, living communally in a small rented house in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles. Van Vliet implemented his vision by asserting complete artistic and emotional domination of his musicians. At various times, one or another of the band members were put “in the barrel”, with Van Vliet berating him continually, sometimes for days, until the musician collapsed in tears or in total submission to Van Vliet.[14] According to John French and Bill Harkleroad, these sessions often included physical violence. French described the situation as “cultlike”,[15] and a visiting friend said that “the environment in that house was positively Manson-esque”.[16] Their material circumstances also were dire. With no income other than welfare and contributions from relatives, the band survived on a bare subsistence diet. French recounted living on no more than a small cup of soybeans a day for a month,[17] and at one point, band members were arrested for shoplifting food (whereupon Zappa bailed them out).[18] A visitor described their appearance as “cadaverous” and said that “they all looked in poor health”. Band members were restricted from leaving the house and practiced for fourteen or more hours a day. Van Vliet once told drummer John French that he had been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and he would see nonexistent conspiracies that explained this behavior
Haha that’s what most people say on first listen…it’s one of my favorite albums,what can I say…
Yeah they go deep into it in the book…wild shit
Sounds like a joke album or at least what I could get through (about a minute of frownland.) Although, I think I know who inspired Ween though.
HAHAHAHA!!! I might have been confused about Trout Mask Replica, to be totally honest. I think either I just fondly remember a few choice tracks or maybe I’m remembering something completely different altogether.
I just tried to give it a listen and . . . . yeah, I couldn’t handle more than a few snippets of a handful of tracks. I thought I’d advanced to the level of sophistication to appreciate this genius album, but . . . nah, I’m still apparently a simple-minded clod. I think I’ll try it again sometime, though (when my wife is gone). It’s weird because as much as it grates on me and feels insanely uncomfortable, there’s also something drawing me back to it and feeling like I need to hear more.
The comments on YouTube are pretty good, though.
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Ha ha ha the comments are gold!!!
This album sounds like the entire band falling down stairs but still continue to play their instruments.
What’s crazy to me is somebody here wrote above that The captain made them practice 14 hours a day for 8 months? I smell bullshit their instruments are out of tune and their timing is horrendous. It sounds like a one take improv.
Queer Bait read a deep biography on this whole saga, but even Wikipedia notes this stuff (I posted an excerpt above). But you’re partly right… following the intense abuse and long tortuous rehearsals, they finally surfaced for the recording and banged it all out in one 6 hour session.
It’s wild stuff and only makes me want to keep trying to listen to the glorious clusterfuck some more.
Hard enough for us to listen to a song or two… I can’t even imagine being put in “the barrel” and getting berated for a week by The Captain.
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I knew I would be way in the minority with this one on prongs hahaha…but I will always recognize it’s genius and I stand by it …it is the ultimate grower album…and the atonal sound of the album is by design, grmps…believe it or not those guys are all serious musicians…amazingly most of them are still alive…
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Btw for anyone who cares,there were several different phases of the Captains discography…
His first 2 albums are bluesy and rhythmic and don’t have the heavy avant garde leanings that came with Trout Mask…then comes Trout and he goes off the wall bizarre for a few more albums…then he has his more commercial period of 3 albums that almost seem like normal blues inflected 70s rock…then he goes back to the avant garde stuff for his last few albums that also have a kind of weird new wave bent to some of it…and then the stuff he did with Zappa which is its own animal…
A whiplash discography if there ever was one…I love all of it…I could listen to the Captain read recipes and would find joy in it,but that’s just me…
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I’ll fuck around with it again when I have some time. It’s one of those albums like “Metal Machine Music” that fascinates me with the back story, meaning, context, and creation moreso than the product itself. I do sometimes take the “Emperor Wears No Clothes” angle on a lot of this stuff when I see many put stuff like this on their “greatest” lists or declare the genius, and I think that’s largely a fair and accurate assessment. But I know YOU ain’t just posturing and are legit in your appreciations and evaluations so I’m sure there’s something there. Will try again soon to see if it eventually clicks.
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