Jellyfish – Fan Club
Jellyfish is a star that burned brightly but too briefly in the power pop firmament, blasting itself to bits in a kind of dull supernova of creative differences after only two albums. To say that those two albums have attracted a following would be something of a massive understatement: there’s actually a tribute album out, and even brief association with Jellyfish has made cult rock heroes out of musicians like Jason Falkner, Roger Manning and Tim Smith. For music fans who missed the pop revolution of the 1970s, Jellyfish rolled almost all of that experience into those two albums, spruced up for the early ’90s. For a band with a legacy of two albums and a handful of B-sides, Jellyfish is cited as a seminal influence by an alarming number of artists these days.
In 2002, Not Lame Records assembled this box set – with label founder Bruce Brodeen putting his home on the line to pay for the licensing and duplication – featuring demos, rare tracks, and even live appearances. In the grand scheme of things, there’s precious little in the way of new music – in this context, meaning completely new songs – that fans haven’t heard before, but there’s still enough here to cover four discs.
The Bellybutton demos feature several songs that I hadn’t heard before, which simply didn’t make the cut for the band’s first album. While they’re not bad songs, they’re just not quite on the same level as “The King Is Half-Undressed” or “The Man I Used To Be”, including a very early version of “Bye Bye Bye” (which ended up on Spilt Milk) and a cover of Donovan’s “Season Of The Witch”, among other things.
Jumping ahead to the disc of Spilt Milk demos and outtakes, and other songs from the same era, it’s easy to tell that even the demos were so intricate and polished that they would’ve done many an artist proud as final mixes. Not so for Jellyfish, though – and one wonders if that quest for perfection (and the inevitable headaches that result from that quest) isn’t what drowned Jellyfish once and for all. There are numerous new songs on this disc as well, including a cluster of demos recorded of songs that Manning and Andy Sturmer penned for potential inclusion on a Ringo Starr solo album. They’re all good stuff, very well pitched to Ringo’s strengths and the styles he and his listeners are accustomed to, but they wouldn’t have been bad Jellyfish songs in their own right either – that, perhaps, being the no-lose propostion in cooking up a bunch of Ringo-esque/borderline-Beatlesque songs: whatever Ringo didn’t want was probably a likely candidate for the third album that never happened. The only song that seems like the odd man out from the “Ringo demos” is “Watchin’ The Rain”, a song which just never quite seems like something that either Ringo or Jellyfish would’ve done – a kind of nondescript ’80s-style ballad. On the opposite end of that spectrum is the dead-center perfect tribute to the Beatles that is “I Don’t Believe You”. If you didn’t know it was Jellyfish, you’d probably swear that it was some previously undiscovered tune by the Fab Four themselves.
B-sides as well as one-off soundtrack and compilation singles that were released between Bellybutton and Spilt Milk land on this disc as well, including the infamous Super Mario Bros.-themed “Ignorance Is Bliss”, originally released on 1991’s all-star Nintendo White-Knuckle Scorin’! album, back from the days when Nintendo was nearly eclipsing just about everything else on the pop culture scene. Unlike most artists who contibuted a single to that compilation, Jellyfish actually did their homework and delivered a song that’s literally about Super Mario – from King Koopa’s perspective! It’s destined to go down as a disposable novelty single, but it’s worth at least a couple of listens for the sheer musicality of it. Disposable novelty song or not, the group poured a lot of effort into it.
The live discs are a revelation, showing the sheer determination of the group to replicate their complex sound on stage. That they actually pull it off, more often than not, without significantly dumbing down the arrangements of either their own densely-orchestrated pieces or any number of cheekily chosen covers, is just this side of a miracle, again a testament to the combined musical skill of Jellyfish. The Spilt Milk live disc really shines, including a couple of demonstrations of an addition that the group made to the set list just for concerts in Japan. (It’s probably no surprise that Andy Sturmer, post-Jellyfish, went on to produce Puffy Amiyumi, and most of the former Jellyfishers’ solo and side projects have far, far less difficulty finding a label home in Japan than they do anywhere in the English-speaking world. Obviously they made their impact in Japan.) The last track on the last CD is the Jellyfish cover of “Think About Your Troubles”, the group’s 1994 contribution to a posthumous Harry Nilsson tribute album, and the last thing they recorded.
So what’s the sum total of these four discs of on-stage antics and in-studio rarities? If the two studio albums alone didn’t do it for you, Fan Club will finish the job of filling your ears with glee and filling your heart with melancholy that Jellyfish, as an entity whose whole was at least as great as the sum of its very 
talented parts, didn’t continue. The demos and B-sides and other tracks, stuff that the band felt was not album material or single material, are – for the most part – better than a lot of stuff that other groups feel is album material or single material. Jellyfish wasn’t a band that could do no wrong, but in the space of two albums and at least any many years’ worth of touring, Jellyfish also hadn’t dropped anything lamentably bad in our ears. This was a group that burned bright and burned out fast, the only consolation being that its various members are still active turning out their own stellar pop music.
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Disc One: The Bellybutton Demos, 1988-89
- The Man I Used To Be (4:23)
- Bedspring Kiss (4:45)
- Deliver (3:07)
- Now She Knows She’s Wrong (2:15)
- Queen Of The USA (5:13)
- Always Be My Girl (3:36)
- I Wanna Stay Home (4:10)
- Let This Dream Never End (3:59)
- Season Of The Witch (4:22)
- That Girl’s A Man (3:42)
- Calling Sarah (4:48)
- All I Want Is Everything (3:12)
- Bye Bye Bye (3:48)
- She Still Loves Him (4:27)
- Baby’s Coming Back (2:53)
- The King Is Half-Undressed (3:40)
Disc Two: The Bellybutton Tour, 1990-91
- MTV Top Of The Hour (0:20)
- Much Music, Canada (0:30)
- The King Is Half-Undressed (3:49)
- Sugar And Spice (2:14)
- 91X, San Diego (0:19)
- Two All-Beef Patties (0:15)
- Mr. Late (3:38)
- No Matter What (2:43)
- All I Want Is Everything (4:25)
- Much Music, Canada (1:07)
- Hold Your Head Up / Hello (5:24)
- Calling Sarah (4:06)
- She Still Loves Him (4:08)
- Will You Marry Me (6:41)
- Baby Come Back / Baby’s Coming Back (4:25)
- Now She Knows She’s Wrong (2:50)
- Let ‘Em In / That Is Why (5:12)
- Jet (3:18)
- Much Music, Canada (0:37)
- The King Is Half-Undressed (3:38)
- Baby’s Coming Back (2:57)
- I Wanna Stay Home (4:05)
- She Still Loves Him (3:51)
- All I Want Is Everything (4:24)
Disc Three: The Spilt Milk Demos, 1991-92
- World Cafe (0:40)
- Spilt Milk Intro (0:44)
- Hush (1:18)
- Joining A Fan Club (3:45)
- Sabrina, Paste And Plato (2:11)
- New Mistake (4:05)
- Glutton Of Sympathy (4:02)
- The Ghost At Number One (3:25)
- All Is Forgiven (4:09)
- Russian Hill (4:43)
- He’s My Best Friend (3:42)
- Family Tree (4:00)
- Spilt Milk Outro (1:14)
- Ignorance Is Bliss (3:55)
- Worthless Heart (3:06)
- Watchin’ The Rain (4:11)
- I Need Love (3:09)
- I Don’t Believe You (3:21)
- Long Time Ago (3:47)
- Runnin’ For Our Lives (3:40)
- Fan Club message (6:02)
Disc Four: The Spilt Milk Tour, 1993
- Glutton Of Sympathy (4:58)
- Baby’s Coming Back (3:01)
- That Is Why (3:30)
- The Ghost At Number One (3:29)
- Joining A Fan Club (2:51)
- World Cafe (1:09)
- I Can Hear The Grass Grow (3:26)
- New Mistake (4:03)
- Eleanor Rigby (1:35)
- S.O.S. (1:14)
- S.O.S. (2:08)
- All Is Forgiven (4:12)
- Sabrina, Paste And Plato (2:25)
- Joining A Fan Club (4:35)
- The Ghost At Number One (3:49)
- The Man I Used To Be (4:48)
- Glutton Of Sympathy (4:04)
- New Mistake (4:43)
- Think About Your Troubles / hidden track: The King Is Half-Undressed (11:00)
Released by: Not Lame Records
Release date: 2002
Disc one total running time: 62:20
Disc two total running time: 74:56
Disc three total running time: 69:09
Disc four total running time: 71:00
The band’s final group effort before going their separate ways to new
I barely remember the lavish 1979 British/U.S. co-production of Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles. I seem to remember being hyped up about it (as I was about most anything that had to do with space), seeing a little bit of it, and then my mom deciding unilaterally that this miniseries was Not For Me. And oddly enough, I haven’t seen it in its entirety since, despite it being on DVD these days. (That’s a gap in my SF TV knowledge I need to correct one of these days, come to think of it.) But boy, do I remember the music. I had already seen Battlestar Galactica and Buck Rogers (and, of course, Star Wars) by this point, but The Martian Chronicles clearly had Music From The Future. With its futuristic synth sweeps giving it a foothold in the new wave sound while its orchestral components were firmly tied to the disco-fied ’70s, The Martian Chronicles’ music is bold, brassy, memorable, and that spacey element pushes it just far enough across the line to make it sound, musically, a bit like a science fiction version of Dallas.
And yet, for all of these things that should be fatal blows, the music from The Martian Chronicles works quite well in its own little continuum. The late British composer Stanley Myers (who composed, among a great many other things, a very early Doctor Who adventure) did a great job of devising very adaptable themes and motifs, and then developing those fully. It may come across as a bit cheesy according to modern sensibilities, but it’s a musical time capsule of sorts, and one that I enjoy returning to quite a bit.
More or less an album songs performed by or inspired by the Intellivision video game console, Intellivision In Hi-Fi is an affectionate throwback to the days when video game music was anything but hi-fi. To come even close to approximating a popular piece of music was a feat, and achieving true polyphony, even in just a flat, synthesizer-esque tone, was pure luxury. Intellivision was the first home game console to manage this level of musical sophistication, and even so, it only did so on the most primitive of levels – no attack or decay or anything as fancy as sounds intended to emulate acoustical instruments. But even with that extreme return to the basics of making music, Intellivision game designers pulled off some real winners – the jazzy chase music heard when Snafu drops from a four-player game to a two-player death match, the catchy theme (coined by a then-unknown musician named George “The Fat Man” Sanger) from Thin Ice, and the sticks-in-your-head-and-stays-there music from Shark! Shark!. All of these and more appear on Intellivision In Hi-Fi.
The Eight Shoes reunited once again in 2002 for a series of short radio comedy sketches airing weekly on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered from Independence Day through New Year’s Eve. Phil Proctor, David Ossman, Phil Austin and Peter Bergman revive such cracked classic characters as private detective Nick Danger and the now-retired General Curtis Goatheart to probe the post-9/11 national psyche through every available orifice. 
The long-awaited follow-up to 1999’s stellar self-titled album sees Oceania – vocalist Hinewehi Mohi, Killing Joke alumnus Jaz Coleman, and an assortment of other players – staying on course, mixing native Maori instrumentation and poetry with modern musical styles. And if the fact that I can’t seem to stop listening to it is any reliable indicator, this second album is even more compelling than the first.
For the follow-up to 1983’s reasonably successful Information, rocker Dave Edmunds turned once again to Jeff Lynne not just for production help, but for the ELO frontman’s unique songwriting style. The result was Riff Raff, a 1984 album which further pushed Edmunds into a more modern style. Kicking off with a Lynne-produced cover of the Four Tops’ “Something About You”, Riff Raff is a bit of a mish-mash, veering back and forth between different songwriters (Edmunds himself only penned one song, while Lynne wrote and produced “Breaking Out”, “S.O.S.” and “Far Away”). Somewhat surprisingly, with Edmunds producing the tracks that Lynne didn’t produce, the “sound” is fairly consistent from song to song. Within that context, though, Lynne’s songs fare the best, again sounding very Secret Messages-era due in no small part to the presence of keyboardist Richard Tandy, with “S.O.S.” being the best of the three.
Culled from the tour supporting of his excellent 2001 album Rockin’ The Suburbs, Ben Folds Live gives us a chance to hear Folds unplugged – just one man and his piano…as if that’s somehow a limitation. Folds makes the best of some of the more “produced” numbers by getting the audience to provide some backup (most notably on “Army”, which demonstrates that there were a lot of damn good singers in his audience that night, as does “Not The Same”). In other cases – “Fred Jones Part 2”, “The Luckiest” and “Jane” among them – he doesn’t need any elaborate backing; the songs are strong enough to stand on their own merits.
Hailing from Georgia, Paul Melancon is working on carving himself a nice little niche in indie power pop circles. And to listen to Camera Obscura is to discover why he’s earning that respect – Melancon is obviously a student of the Beatles and Brian Wilson, wistful melodies and vocal harmonies, and densely wordy songwriting. The song that drew me to this album is an unabashed valentine to Melancon’s personal pop pedigree, a song in which the singer yearns to “be just like Jeff Lynne.” That proclamation in itself would be enough to get my attention, but this song is easily the high point of the album as it effortlessly appropriates many of the ELO frontman’s trademark licks – call-and-respond backing vocals, stratospheric synth glissandos, a guitar riff that tastes just a little like “Sweet Talkin’ Woman”, and real live strings. If someone was going to pay a musical tribute to Lynne, I can’t think of a better way – and yet the song is playful too, trading on Lynne’s reputation as a studio-bound recluse and hinting that the person singing the song, by trying too hard to be like his hero, is headed for a ruined relationship.