Field Of Fire Deluxe: Notes from the CD Booklet
On January 7th, 1985, at about 6:10 in the morning, my friend Keith Patchell and I stepped off a plane at Arlanda airport outside of Stockholm Sweden into on 18 degrees Centigrade frigid morning, in what later turned out to be the coldest winter in northern Europe in 100 years. This was the strangely incongruous beginning to a recording project that was to be called Field of Fire.
A couple or months earlier several events had conspired to create the seeds of this project. The first was that after several years of considerably self-destructive substance abuse and a wrestling match with my guardian angels that I was in danger of winning, I did something interesting which is known as "hitting bottom". The details are unimportant, except to say that my "bottom" would have made Dante or Hieronymus Bosch proud, and that my guardian angels had turned around and with bowed heads were heading back to the Throne, ready to wash their hands of me.
The second component was that my friend Keith Patchell had made a trip to Sweden to seek his fortune and had asked my permission to use my name in the hopes of getting some music industry doors open to him. This permission I had given him, figuring that although it might open a door or two, he would be on his own after that.
This brings me to a strange moment. I believe in wishing, and I believe in what might for want of a better word be called prayer. Whether it is an actual appeal to forces outside of one's self or whether it is an act which aligns one's own inner forces is irrelevant. I believe that there are moments when one can make on act of inner decision which can turn the whole world on its face. And one late-night in October of 1984, I decided to make an appeal to those powers. Earlier I had done my very best in the "way of blame", the yoga of self destruction, the dismemberment of the senses spoken of in Rimbaud and Baudelaire, and I had given myself over to centripetal and centrifugal forces which should have torn me apart. But the life force would not let me go. But to put it bluntly, as for as my musical career had gone, I was a laughingstock and a shame. Perhaps I would do better by going in another direction altogether from music. This was my question and my appeal for guidance. I figured a couple of things: that if I wrote down my question, my prayer, my appeal for guidance, then I couldn't wiggle out of it. It would be an arrow sent flying out of the bow. So that's what I did that night - I wrote down on paper my prayer for guidance. Should I play music? Should I join a monastery? The exact wording is irrelevant, but after I wrote down my prayer I was looking at the paper in my lap and wandering how I would recognize the answer? Would it be a small still voice which I would not notice? Would it be on answer which I did not want to hear? I was thinking these thoughts about the mechanics involved in prayer and its answer when I was jolted out of my reverie. The phone was ringing. I looked at the clock which said 4:15 AM, and I knew that the phone call had something to do with my question. It was one of those moments that was so obvious it was stupid. Who was calling me in the middle of the night while I was looking at this paper I had written? It was the overseas operator asking me if I would take a call from Sweden. I couldn't imagine who would be calling me from there but I said OK while still looking at the paper with my prayer on it.
It was Keith Patchell on the telephone from Stockholm. The first words out of his mouth were, "There is a guy over here with a record company who wants you to fly over and make a record for him. Do you want to make a record?" I looked down at the piece of paper in my lap and I thought, "Who can argue with that?" So I said, "When?" Keith said, "He is flying to New York in two weeks and wants to meet you, and then he wants you to come over as soon as you can get your papers ready." I was still looking at the paper in my lap and I said, "I guess so."
Several weeks later a fellow by the name of Peter Yngen met me in New York. He was the head of a Swedish record company which at the time had several rock acts that were doing big business in Sweden. One of which, called Imperiel (the empire), was the biggest Swedish music business phenomenon since Abba, and their shows in Sweden were producing rioting and adulation verging on Beatlemania. His other big act was called Lolita Pop, who were almost as big. I gathered that he wanted to sell these acts in America and wanted to sign someone American to get his foot in the door. But there were some problems to iron out. His company was not rich but he had a wonderful recording studio in Stockholm with fabulous gear that I could record in, and he offered to lend me an apartment so I would have some place to stay while over there, and a small stipend to keep me going. The downside was that he could not afford to fly over any American musicians other than Keith Patchell and myself. This meant that I was going to be dependent upon using Swedish backing musicians. I wasn't so sure about that idea, but Keith Patchell had been over there for a couple of months and assured me that he would audition musicians while I worked on getting my papers ready and he promised to come up with a good rhythm section. I asked Peter about demos and he said he didn't need to hear any. So that sealed it for me. We shook hands and I began working on getting a passport.
This brings us to January 1985, getting off the plane into the Swedish Winter air. I thought we would be going to Stockholm but I was wrong. Keith and I were shuttled off to a little town in the middle of the country called Oerobro (meaning penny bridge). FOR A MONTH. We were being shuffled off to the boonies! I was told this was to lower costs and because some of the musicians were living there. It was the hometown of Lolita Pop and both our new bass player and drummer lived there and were connected with Lolita Pop. I mode some wonderful new friends, but understandably, the strongest memory is of provincial gray icy cold and perpetual snow. That year the snow was still a foot thick in early June. Truly bitter, where your breath froze as you exhaled and you watched it form an ice cloud and fall. If you spat on the ground you heard it clunk. We rehearsed on the second floor of a kind of warehouse where Lolita Pop had their stuff stored. I met Thomas Johansson who played bass and who wrote lyrics for Lolita Pop. and Peter Olsen, who had also played drums for them. Both of these people were wonderful fellows, but both of them had put down their musical instruments for a long time, and were quite rusty and were being asked to work with me to get an entire record album ready in a month from start to finish. This was a considerable task. On top of this was something else worth speaking of.
My first solo record for Elektra which was called Alchemy, was a record of very melodic pop - for the most part it avoided the brash colors and forcefulness such as evidenced on some of the first Television record. It was retrospective, sentimental and verging on pretty. Having left Television, this was done on purpose, to show a different palette. Now, after having not made another record in six years, I was in possession of a different kind of force - a violent and dark energy demanding expression, and this new record was meant to convey that kind of energy which was pent-up in my unconscious. I'm not sure that my new friends knew quite what to make of it. I was a pretty hard taskmaster, and sometimes I wanted to cry because I was unable to convey that magical violent masterful force which I wanted from them. These Swedish musicians were complete sweethearts, and I wanted cutthroat Exile on Main Street Murderers. But we did the best we could.
Some of the things I remember: the crunch of the snow under our feet which were now clad in strange Swedish shoes called Slumcreppers - fur lined shoes with zippers up the front of them. Not very pretty, but cheap, and they actually worked. The smell of frozen air, which would fill with little floating crystals. I was told that up north some of the houses had the doors on the second floor so that when the snow piled up you could still get into the house. We found a sauna. Sitting in it for on hour would warm up the core temperature of the body and then we could go out in the freezing night in our T-shirts for a little while. I remember being told that there are several deaths every year from idiots throwing vodka on the rocks in the saunas and dying of alcoholic poisoning. We didn't try that. We were given chits for free meals in a social center in the middle of town where all the teenagers ate lunch. We made a strange sight, Keith and I - two American rock and roll musicians and a bunch of Swedish artist types. We were real curiosity items, and the questions were endless about why on earth I would want to relocate to Sweden and play with Swedish musicians. The younger Swedish rockers could not understand and it wasn't something I could answer with any degree of confidence - the Swedish musicians and young artists seem to have a love/hate relationship with their own country, and the fact that I was there playing with some of their hometown crowd I think burst the myth for them. You know, like an actor breaking the fourth wall. But there was nothing I could do about it - I've already explained how this came about.
After a month of freezing and rehearsing the date of moving to Stockholm loomed. I think we were all excited to be leaving the boonies and to be going to the "big town". Of course, coming from New York, the "big town" seemed pretty provincial, but I like Stockholm a lot. It is easy to live in, and everybody wants to practice their English with you, so the language barrier is not as powerful as it might be out in the countryside where the old people have no English, or very little. We were given an apartment in the South Island, which is sort of like Brooklyn is to Manhattan. This meant we had to commute to the studio. Later an apartment in town opened up and I got to move to within a couple of blocks of the studio. A friend of mine gave me a bicycle, and as the days grew longer and warmer I took to bicycling all over town in the middle of the night. But I am getting a little ahead of myself.
Peter Yngen was absolutely correct about his studio, it was a world-class setup in the basement of 36 Rostlogsgattan. Gattan means Street, so whatever roast logs means, we were there.
The studio which was called Mistlur (some name as the record company, which means "foghorn" in Swedish) had plenty of great microphones and a wonderful Neve 24 track recording desk, which sounded absolutely terrific. In fact. it still does. The studio is eventually purchased by the drummer who was brought in towards the end of our project to play on a couple of songs named Sankan Sanquist, or Sankan for short. Peter told me that he had hired a fantastic audio engineer for me to work with, Christer Akerberg. Christer did most of the engineering on the record. He got great sounds and lived up to his reputation. We got started. I can't remember the order in which the songs to play but there was lots of details that were still only in my head - the rehearsals had been dodgy, and it was difficult for me to get people to play what I wanted to hear. But it is often that way - one has a dream, a conceptualization of a song which lives only in one's imagination - the image making part of us. To try to get that image reproduced in reality is the artist's dilemma. Sometimes it happens easily. Sometimes it is a nightmare, and sometimes one simply accepts the modification and the input that reality itself adds. One works with what one finds. So this record was something like that. At the end of the day, it speaks for itself.
So we worked, and we found out new things. One of the things I found out was that although Christer was a terrific engineer, he liked to take a long time to get sounds, and he liked to endlessly tweak, and he seemed to hear nuances that even I did not hear or think mattered. A couple of times I played the rhythm guitar for a song for six to eight hours while Christer moved the microphones around inch by inch and turned knobs by millimeters. Luckily we were not on the clock, but eventually Peter wandered what we were doing that was taking so long. I had to tell him that the engineer was working at a glacial pace, that the rhythm section was struggling, and that I was at my wits end. By this time we were beginning to have some tracks finished and were starting to mix. That's where I really needed help. because it was just taking too long with Christer. So Peter suggested bringing in his partner. Stephen Glaumann. Stephen helped me to solve some of the problems we had been having in production and he also did the mixing with me. For that help I gave him a co production credit, even though he really only come in at the end. But that didn't bother me because I was pulling my hair out at that point. So that's how it went.
Why have I revisited this record and re-recorded vocals and arrangements and remixed it? These are legitimate questions and deserve an answer. For one thing, Stephen was doing a lot of mixing in those days, a sort of Euro disco rock. As a result, the mixes of Field of Fire have a certain "80s" sound quality - gated reverbs on the drums, super loud artificial snare smacks; poky and clicky bass drums, and choruses and reverbs behind some of the guitars. There might not be anything wrong with that. but I wanted to regain some of the naked skin of the original recordings. Anytime I watch a commercial for a hair product, I usually prefer the before pictures than the superfine fake after pictures. I like some nitty in my gritty Then there was the issue of the vocals, which were purposely "pushed," sometimes shouted. Since I got the rights to the recordings back, it seemed like a good time to smooth out the vocal performances as well as add background vocals. So that's what I did, and as I opened each new song for review, I look for ways to make it more interesting either as an alternative version, or as an improvement, or just for my own artistic license. That ought to answer any questions. If you have any others, write me.
The "Field of Fire"
What is the "Field of Fire"? To me, the field of fire is a phrase which has a deeper meaning than the ordinary meaning in the rather pedestrian lyrics of the song. The "field of fire" is the opposite of the Buddhist term nirvana - it is the field of experience, of identification, of sticky lusts, whether they are sex, drugs, gambling, war, greed, etc. The "field of fire" is that horizontal plane of being that all men encounter by being born into this lunatic asylum/reform school planet called Earth. Some think that life is an amusement park. Others of us know better. Old soul, young soul, we are all stuck in the Field of Fire like Dorothy crossing the poppy fields.
Thank you Ric Menck, Geoff Merritt, John Telfer, Peter Yngen, Ulf Sandquist, Keith Patchell, Bill Flanagan, Chris and Tina Franz.
Richard Lloyd
New York, 2006.
It's never easy meeting your idols, and I was nervous the day I met Richard Lloyd. I'd heard stories that he could be, shall we say, a bit mercurial, which didn't frighten me, but then again I wasn't sure what to expect either.
I was in New York by invitation of my friend Matthew Sweet, who was in the very early stages of recording the album that turned out to be Girlfriend. Matthew and I were sitting together in the lobby of a walk-up rehearsal studio in Manhattan, patiently waiting for Richard to arrive so we could run through some songs. My leg was bouncing up and down with anticipation. I was finally gonna get to meet Richard Lloyd.
I first heard Richard's band Television when I was 15 and living in my parents' basement in the small town of Barrington, Illinois. I'd just joined one of those record clubs, the kind where you send in a penny and they send you 11 albums on the condition that you then receive on album of their choosing every month, which you then either pay for and keep or return. Well, that whole system got a little too advanced for me, and I started getting albums by Bulldog and the Capital City Rockers that I wasn't crazy about, but I wasn't paying for them or returning them either. I think my dad eventually bailed me out of the whole mess, but not before I received an album called Marquee Moon by Television.
To be honest, through a few strokes of good fortune I happened to clue into the whole punk/new wave/power pop thing pretty early on. My first window into that world come via a magazine called Rock Scene, published by Richard and Lisa Robinson, that featured mostly pictures of the goings on in and around the New York club and concert scene throughout the seventies and on into the eighties. As far as I know, Rock Scene was one of the first magazines to regularly feature photos of the bands playing at a seedy little dive in the Bowery called CBGB's, and in one particular issue they ran a two-page spread on a band called Television that caught my attention.
Back then my conception of a kick ass rock band would have been Led Zeppelin, with their long, flowing locks blowing freely in the breeze created by the very mega-watt amplifiers they stood in front of. Today they call it "Classic Rock". Then it seemed mystical and showy. Opening the pages of Rock Scene to this Television photo spread was really quite shocking. Here's four guys sitting on a few dilapidated folding chairs in this non-descript white walled room, with only a few small Fender amps and a set of drums to provide any real aesthetic value. The singer is as skinny as a rail, has a neck like a crane, and greasy hair parted down the middle. He looks vaguely like a cross between Jackson Browne and something altogether more sinister. The bass player doesn't look all that dissimilar. Both are wearing those cheap black slip-on loafers, the kind the old men at my Grandmother's retirement facility wore. Except for a rather unkempt afro hairstyle, the drummer looks fairly normal, and only the guitarist, the really young looking one, resembles what I recognize as a genuine rock'n'roller. There's a look in his eye, a look suggesting that the innocence of his youth has been lost, to music, a woman, drugs, or all those things. He is instantly my favorite.
In the late seventies rock music was not on TV very often, and there were only a few magazines available on the drug store newsstand that wrote specifically about rock and roll. You could not go on line and download a song instantly, or find out obscure information about a band via the internet. An occasional article or photo was all you had, and, of course, there was the music. Back then the music was still the most important thing. Unfortunately, when I first saw the photos of Television I don't think they'd even signed a record deal yet, so all I had were the photos, and I kept coming back to them like a moth to a flame. There was something so stark about the imagery, something so simple, so uncluttered. The more I stared the more beautiful the pictures became. I tried hard to intuit what they might sound like, but everything I felt for the band was based on those photos.
The day Marquee Moon arrived in the mail via the record club I couldn't have been more unprepared for it. I was supposed to be studying for a test, but as usual I was listening to records. I heard my dad coming down the stairs, so I grabbed my schoolbooks from under the bed as if to deceive him, but he saw right through me, smiled and handed me the package. When I ripped it open and saw the stark photo of the band, and the darkly hued blues and blacks of the cover I felt overcome with excitement. I had it! I finally had it! I was finally going to hear Television.
It's hard to describe the sensation of dropping the needle on an album for the first time. There are so many factors involved in the initial listening experience. What sort of mood are you in? What kind of expectations do you have? Are you able to focus or is something distracting you? There are so many variables. Going into Marquee Moon for the first time, my expectations couldn't possibly have been higher. Could this band I'd been staring at for so long actually be as great as I imagined they were? I was almost scared to find out, but I ripped off the shrink wrap and stuck the vinyl on my dad's old hand me down stereo, and when the first few jagged chords that introduce "See No Evil" came poking through the speakers, I tell you honestly, I don't think I would have needed to hear any more. It was instant infatuation. In fact, I picked up the needle and dropped it back down again, and again, and again. I must have listened to just the intro 10 times before I even made it to the first verse, and when I finally did hear the singer's voice, all cripple-broken and torn so gracefully from his swan-like neck, I could feel the tears welling up in my eyes, as if all the emotion and pent-up teenage angst I'd been feeling was finally allowed to be released. As I continued to follow the arrangement tension began to escalate, and just after the second chorus I braced myself for what I could sense was coming. The guitars sounded brittle slashing against one another, with drum fills ricocheting between them like gunfire. Then. Suddenly. The explosion. A shower of notes raining down and out of the speakers like sparks from a welder's gun. White light white heat, the energy of a thousand suns, heaven and earth colliding. I sat stunned and felt the exhilaration welling up inside. I needed to hear it again, and again, and again. I didn't even make it to the second song until a couple of days later. I'd never been so infatuated with a song, ever, and it was the guitar solo at the center of it that I waited for, to feel the exhilarating release, like one gigantic mental orgasm. And it was Richard Lloyd playing that solo. It was Richard Lloyd doing that to me.
I believe a lot of this was running through my mind as I sat there with Matthew waiting for Richard to show up, and when the elevator doors opened up and I saw the neck of his guitar case, I was almost beside myself. In reaction I shut down, could barely speak, just stared at his hands and shuffled my feet. It was awkward, because I knew Richard could tell I was uncomfortable.
Fortunately, we had music to fall back on, and after Richard and Matthew adjusted their amps, wouldn't you know it, Matthew suggested we warm up with "See No Evil," and although Richard let out a little groan, he dove straight into the riff, and I felt chill bumps running up and down my spine. As we raced into the first verse I glanced around the room and realized it wasn't much different from the one in which those old Television photos were taken, and I looked over at Richard, his face radiating the expression of someone completely lost in concentration, and for a split second I could put myself in the picture, and it felt beautiful.
Being able to work with Richard on the expanded edition of Field of Fire has been a most enjoyable experience. As I've come to discover over the years, he's a sensitive and highly intelligent fellow, and I suppose he'd have to be to play the way he does. I think it took a lot of courage for him to go back and revisit this music and a time in his life that has long since passed, and it's a testament to his maturity as an artist that he's been able to recapture the magic of the original recordings, while at the same lime reframing them in a way that sounds and feels more refined, and possibly, more lasting.
He'll always be my hero.
Ric Menck
Los Angeles, 2006.
Richard Lloyd's FIELD Of FIRE has been one of the great lost albums. It's good to have it back. The record was recorded in Sweden in 1985 and released in the USA in 1987. It was a breath of fresh air. Lloyd's muscular songs and raging guitar work cut through all the cutesy video music of the time, staking out ground between the mainstream guitar rock of Bruce Springsteen and Neil Young and the post-punk music of the Clash and U2. FIELD OF FIRE was passionate without being corny and anthemic without being dumb. It was also a fair representation of Lloyd's live shows at the time, which were hurricanes of focused intensity.
Richard Lloyd's music was hard and loud but it was never noisy. His musical sense was too strong for that. Each note he played had a purpose. The guitar playing on FIELD Of FIRE recalled Mick Taylor's work with the Rolling Stones and Richard Thompson's electric storms around the time of SHOOT OUT THE LIGHTS. There was on element of wild abandon contending with fierce control, like a man holding onto the reigns of a team of charging horses.
The album summed up years of triumph and frustration for its maker. Richard Lloyd grew up in New York City. As a kid he hung around Greenwich Village clubs listening to music. He played guitar, he wrote poetry, he got into a little bit of trouble. One night as a teenager he saw his hero, Jimi Hendrix, in a club in Sheraton Square. Richard went up and began talking to him about the guitar. Hendrix - perhaps under the influence of some chemical? We'll never know - reeled back and punched him. Young Richard took it as a lesson about not confusing the artist with the art.
A few years later Lloyd was in a band with his friend Tom Verlaine. They were looking for a place to play and went into a dive on the Bowery and talked the owner into letting them work there. The club was CBGB's and Tom and Richard's band, Television, started a revolution in that bar. Their friend Patti Smith joined them there, then they started splitting bills with a Queens band called the Ramones.
The British impresario Malcolm McLaren come into CBGBs and was knocked out by the stripped-down songs, the low rent decadent vibe, and by Richard's ripped T-shirt and Television bassist Richard Hell's spiked hair. He went back to London and organized the Sex Pistols around that motif.
Television was built around the twin lead guitars of Verlaine and Lloyd. Their influence was enormous, their image and songwriting inspired Talking Heads, their guitar work inspired U2 - you can hear Television's trail all down the next twenty years of rock. The band did not last long enough to reap the benefits won by those they inspired. Richard developed a drug problem and the band broke up. The rhythm section continued to work with Verlaine, now billed as a solo artist. Richard made one terrific solo album, ALCHEMY, for Television's label - but he was in no shape to promote it and the label lost faith in him.
By the mid-eighties he had cleaned up and come back to work, but he was burdened with a bad reputation. So he went out to prove himself, night after night, with a small band in whatever clubs would book him. Lloyd worked his way back with determination and the talent that his drug use had obscured. He had everything to prove. FIELD OF FIRE proved it.
The album was made in Sweden, with Swedish musicians for a Swedish label run by a Television fan who was excited to have Richard Lloyd in his studio. It took more than a year for the record to find an American release, when it did it won critical acclaim and a cult following. There was a lot of flirtation at the time between Lloyd and A&M Records - who slapped him on the back and welcomed him to the label — but never came through with a contract. Years later, Richard ran into one of the A&M executives involved in the negotiation who told him that everyone at the label loved him, but that their business people had disliked his business people and so squashed the deal. It's impossible to know if that is true or not, but that sort of thing happens to promising musicians all the time, and usually they never find out what went wrong.
In the years following FIELD OF FIRE Lloyd mode more albums for small labels, toured and recorded with Matthew Sweet and others, broke his wrist in a bike accident and had to lay off the guitar for months, and made one more album with a reunited Television. Verlaine and Lloyd were able to patch up their old differences and in the years since, Television has come back together for a few dates every year or so. These concerts are events for their fans, and feature as many new, unrecorded songs as old favorites. So far in the 21st Century, Television has chosen to stand outside the disintegrating record industry and present its music only in live situations, for the audiences lucky enough to be there on that night.
In 2005 the rights to FIELD OF FIRE reverted to Lloyd. Fans had been asking for the album for years, and it seemed simple enough to make it available again. Here Richard was faced with a dilemma - the circumstances of the album's creation had resulted in some compromises that he had always wanted the chance to fix. He took the tapes into a New York studio with the aim to re-mix the record and clean up a few subtle flaws.
Once he got to work, though, he saw the chance to make the album better, to make it closer to what it had always wanted to be. He could get rid of some of the dated 80s keyboard sounds, clean up the clutter of some of the original mixes, and give the whole CD greater clarity than the original LP had. As he worked, he also played with the idea of re-singing some of the songs. This was a big decision. The original FIELD OF FIRE had been recorded with the screaming intensity of one of the live shows Lloyd and his band played during that time. Some people loved that sense of abandon in the record, and some thought it was fine in a club but too much to hear over and over. Lloyd knew that to re-do the vocals was more than just tweaking the mix, it was remaking a beloved album. It would open up FIELD OF FIRE to new listeners, but might be seen by old fans as compromising a classic.
Why choose? He decided to do both. The new FIELD OF FIRE contains two disks, the album as it was released in 1985, and a new, cleaned up, and partly re-recorded version completed by Lloyd in early 2006. The differences are revealing and every listener will have his own take on which FIELD Of FIRE he prefers. It's nice to be able to pick the best from both.
Richard Lloyd is one of the great rock guitar players. Everybody knows that. It's fair to hope that this re-release and re-imagining of FIELD OF FIRE might help more people to recognize that he is more than that. Richard Lloyd has been a catalyst for a great deal of what has been good in rock & roll for the last thirty years. He has done work of a consistently high standard without the support of major labels or radio or the apparatus of the music industry. He is a real musician. and that puts him outside of and above the fads that govern the pop business.
The flavors of the month come and go. The real things roll on regardless, acquiring power as they move forward. Richard Lloyd is the real thing. We're lucky to have him, and we're lucky to have FIELD OF FIRE back again.
Bill Flanagan
New York, 2006.
