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My life flows serenely without the first two albums by Spooky Tooth. A few days ago, I wanted to buy the debut album by Silver Apples, but then I said to myself: "Oh, hell, another perfect record to add to my collection of perfect albums. Another record for those who brag. Another record where you can throw around words like seminal, avant-garde, precursor of bla bla bla."
It was at that moment that I decided to spend 6€ elsewhere (Silver Apples costs much more, of course). My choice fell on "Ceremony": what was supposed to be, in theory, the album of consecration for Spooky Tooth; the album that, instead, after the promising beginnings of the first albums, marked the end credits for them.
"Ceremony" is an electro-prog-christic gamble and tells the tale of that damned day when Gary Wright was captivated by the quirky French composer Pierre Henry.
The damned day when this liaison put an end to Spooky Tooth's ambitions to build credibility throughout the seventies, before being disavowed by the first Richard Hell passing by just to tamper with the organs like Procol Harum or yet another Keith Emerson's subproduct who had formed precisely within the embryonic Spooky Tooth.
But who is Pierre Henry, the assassin of Spooky Tooth? Henry is one of those refined and cultured composers, one of those "precursors of electronic music" and musique concrète, author, among other things, of "Psyché rock", better known as the Futurama theme (sorry, Henrì, that's life).
Henry was a student of Nadia Boulanger, just like Philip Glass in his Parisian years, and students of Boulanger also include Quincy Jones, Herbie Hancock, Aaron Copland, George Gershwin, and many, many others. Boulanger was also a sweet and fierce Parisian lady who treated madrigal repertoire with gloves (I own a copy snatched from the music history institute). In 1969, Pierre Henry, very sensitive to religious arguments with an avant-garde twist, so in vogue in East Europe among the likes of Pärt, Gorecki, and Penderecki, decided to involve Spooky Tooth (but why them?) in this sort of concept album with a memorable cover: the head of a man pierced by a nail. A nail that can be heard on the album and is not even the strangest thing.
Moreover, the sound engineer of this Ceremony is a certain Andy Johns who, after years of piccolo players, flutes, and moog caravans, decided to wink at the Richard Hell mindset, and soon thereafter would also be tampering with organettes, finding himself producing, trumpets sound, Marquee Moon by Television.
"Ceremony", however, is not very loved, neither by the lovers of Rolling Stone charts, nor by the Scaruffi followers, nor by those who cyclically resurrect misunderstood flops transforming them into cults. Not even Julian Cope saves it (who instead drools over Electric Storm by White Noise) and this somewhat surprised me, especially his insistence on the banal riffs of the album. I mean, who cares about the banal riffs of Ceremony: this record is so strange that at times it will seem like you're listening to two, three, four albums at the same time, like when Chrome freezes and all the open Youtube windows start playing together. It's an album with stunning atmospheres; they speak of a fusion between two distant worlds often unsuccessful, overlapped, forced, not fluid.
And then it's a religious album. It's an album that talks about something extraordinary: the stammering of man in front of the terror of abandoning everything and living with the trail of the last at the pace of Christ.
A much stronger message than the mannerism of the psychedelic Mass in F minor by the Electric Prunes, the presumptuous "La Bibbia" by Rovescio della medaglia, or the hypocritical and kitsch garage of Angel & the Brains, Italian precursors of the "beat mass" (a practice that led to the Italian sacred music repertoire made of keyboard arranger and all the worst of the worst in the land of Palestrina).
Ceremony is an album that has something other genre works lack: the acrid taste of the attempt. The aesthetic attempt to narrate in music the often-conflictual relationship between man and Christ. Speaking well of it is somewhat like sitting on the wrong side, where a good part of those comfortably seated on the side of reason are wondering who the hell is Pierre Henry, who the hell are these guys, how can someone insert madrigals, Futurama, Quincy Jones, and Television into a text.
I believe I can state that this is an experimental album just like the contemporary Canaxis by Holger Czukay (a student of Stockhausen even before being the leader of Can) and that too, yes, precursor, seminal, avant-garde and - to put it in Julian Cope's words - "still forward-looking to this day." All true. And long live Czukay, Can, and Stockhausen.
However, sitting on the wrong side and among the acrid attempts, we resolve these phrases with a hammer and a nail embedded in the head. After all, we are the men with embedded nails, victims of passion who claim to understand virtues. And so be it.
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