Songs The Spacemen Taught Me (Or How I Came To Love Spacemen 3)

I’m sitting in my basement with only one intention: to listen to every single Spacemen 3 record that I own, review them, and discuss why I’m such a Spacemen 3 fanboy to the extent that I would listen to all of their recorded output (at least, what I posses) some 15 or more years after they disbanded. They’re a group I never got the good fortune to see live, but was fortunate enough to discover while they were still in existence.
It helps that I got in their good graces on the album that many, including myself, consider to be their highwater mark, The Perfect Prescription. It came in complete happenstance; a cassette version of the album (Glass Records) that sounded like shit and was anything near the sonic quality of what you’d expect a pre-recorded “official” cassette to be. I’m talking audio quality here, and while pre-recorded cassettes typically fell well below the kind you could make with a good old Maxell XL-II, this version what even below the normal-bias shit you’d get from your friendly, money-loving record company.
Yet it worked.

The tape hiss, the wow and flutter, the decaying oxide all added to the element as if it was itself a band member.
I knew nothing about the band before I got the cassette. To be honest, their name intrigued me as did the cover art which featured two dudes on it. One of them was seated in front of a Vox amp, strumming a chord on his Fender Jaguar with his eyes closed. The other guy standing next to him held a Fender Telecaster Thinline. His eyes were closed too.
For me, the image of these two guys who looked stoned and around the same age as me, was enough to warrant interest.
And the music I discovered within the poor fidelity of the cassette was enough to warrant continued interest.
Their sound was completely minimal: seldom straying from one or two chords and frequently without the aide of a drummer. The guitars were a blend of vintage six strings, fed through vintage amplifiers and effect pedals. There was lots of feedback, and often it was left unchecked to the point where the drone of fuzz created a layer of sound that hung in the air like a fog. Within the fog, you could make out subtle nuances and harmonics; Spacemen 3 were first and foremost a guitar rock band for people who didn’t give a shit that the same chord, key, and tempo would be played to the point where either your patience was tested or your hallucinogens were wearing off.
The lyrics were a perfect compliment to this primitive sound, with lots of drug references, odes to Lou Reed, and halfhearted pleas to higher beings and doctors to help them break their chains of drug addictions.
It would be remiss for me not to suggest that a band like The Velvet Underground certainly helped prepare myself for Spacemen 3; they have an obvious debt to them (repaid in full on “Ode To Street Hassle” from The Perfect Prescription) but while the V.U. seemingly reinvented themselves on each of their four albums, Spacemen 3 seemed content on exploring and perfecting “Sister Ray” to the point where every measure of that song could create an entirely new being.
Like the Velvet Underground, Spacemen 3 only released four proper albums during their time together. Afterwards came the obligatory push of legitimate, semi-legitimate, and complete bootleg releases that seemed content on providing the Spacemen 3 cult with every recorded note they made. Like a good fan-boy, I’m working on owning all of these, but can freely admit to becoming frustrated with the endeavor as I’ve noticed a ton of overlapping and bottom scraping along the way. I’m trying to become more sophisticated at this, and perhaps this can serve as a flow chart for my own obsession and as a reference guide “for all the fucked-up children of this world.”
The listing of the following albums represents the timeline in which they were recorded and not in the order they were released. The “proper” four studio albums are designated with a “*” following the album title. These are the albums that novices should first start with.

For All The Fucked-Up Children Of This World We Give You Spacemen 3

Fucked-Up takes a five song demo from 1984, labeled here as the band’s “first ever recording session,” tacks on 2 additional “alternate mixes,” and calls it a release. Hardly essential stuff, but if you’re into hearing a band find their way around frets, arrangements, and tempos then this would be your album. Strictly for completists, the Spacemen at this point haven’t reached the wall of sound that they later explored, but they have a pretty good blueprint in place.

Taking Drugs To Make Music To Take Drugs To

The next step forward from the initial recordings from ’84 found on Fucked Up, Taking Drugs To Make Music To Take Drugs To are the demo sessions from late ’85. There’s a lot of replication here, but if you’ve become obsessive enough to document the Spacemen’s progression, you’ll find it here. Rawer (!) than the Fucked Up sessions, the tracks are starting to become more realized and closer to the final product found on Sound Of Confusion. A lot of tracks from both that album and Perfect Prescription can be found here. The performances are tentative at times and both Sonic Boom and Jason seem to be discovering the right arrangements to match their drug-addled visions. There’s an inconsistency in fidelity (this release was first issued as a bootleg) and Taking Drugs isn’t necessarily a title that one needs to seek out. “2:35” is repeated three times, “Hey Man” is found twice (once titled as “Amen”) and the others? The better versions can be found on the proper releases. Only “Mary Anne” (which features the same chord progression as “Transparent Radiation”) and a cover of “It’s Alright” stand out as tracks that can only be found here.

Sound Of Confusion*

The debut…and a great starting point for the uninitiated. The Taang! Records version which is out currently does an adequate job of presenting the original 7 tracks in their entirety. They also add “the first single and demo” (which is actually the Walking With Jesus e.p.) on the end of it. Sound Of Confusion is one of those stunning British debuts and it’s the sound of a band that’s very much in tuned with where they wanted to be and it provides a great blueprint into what they could have eventually become.
The Walking With Jesus e.p. that ends the set on this disc is obviously culled from the record itself; there are noticeable pops through out it and some of the high-end is cut of at points. Taang! could have worked harder at locating the master tapes for this. The version of “Rollercoaster” from it adds another 10 minutes of fuzz ‘n feedback, “Walking With Jesus” is performed at a quicker pace than the version that ends up on Prescription and “Feels So Good,” another track that would appear on the second full-length shows up here for the first time too. There is a demo version of “2:35” that’s included on here too, but it’s completely redundant and offers no new insight. but it’s very obvious that they’ve culled these songs, literally, from the record itself; there’s noticeable surface noise and cut outs on the high end. But fuck it: the bonus material is gravy anyway.

The Perfect Prescription*

From the opening fade-in drone guitar, one can hear a progression from The Perfect Prescription over Sound Of Confusion. First of all, the release itself is essentially a concept album that mends itself perfectly to a drug experience. Secondly, the band’s playing has increased nicely. Not to the point where they’d be mistaken for experts of their instruments, but instead, their performances are confident and assured. Surprisingly, a lot of the material here was in their setlists for some time, so how they were able to take songs from their catalog and incorporate them into a complete and update concept album about the drug experience is astonishing. But it works, and The Perfect Prescription is a masterpiece of psychedelic layers and is, without question, one of the top ten albums of the 80’s.
“Take Me To The Other Side” is a requiem for the pleasures of drug use, and the pro-drug vibe continues until things start to crash during side two’s “Call The Doctor.” The ups-n-downs of drug usage are finally brought to a hilt with the seventeen minute long piece “Rollercoaster.” While The Perfect Prescription doesn’t do much lyrically to describe the effects of foreign substances on the human body, the music provides a complete and accurate account of these events.
A remarkable masterpiece that sounds as essential today as it did when it was first released twenty years ago.

Forged Prescriptions

If The Perfect Prescription blows your mind, then its companion Forged Prescriptions (released 16 years after Perfect) will give you a similar experience. Disc one is based on the “alternate mix” of the Perfect album; it contains more studio effects than the original release. On the second disc are the demo versions of the album. It does provide some nice insight into the Spacemen’s rehearsals “Take Me To The Other Side” contains some different lyrics, there’s an unreleased “Velvet Jam,” and an unreleased cover of Roky Erikson’s “We Sell Souls.” While Forged Prescriptions isn’t as essential as the original, it’s still a very worthy trip.

Dreamweapon: An Evening Of Contemporary Sitar Music

The story goes that the original mixes of The Perfect Prescription were too “complete” and would be impossible to recreate on stage. So Sonic and Jason toned down the released version and, perhaps, in the process discovered the power of their minimalism.
Their live shows would often test their minimalist dogma, but nothing reflects it better than a performance at Waterman’s Arts Centre in Hammersmith, England on August 19th, 1988. That show was recorded, albeit not in the most professional sense of the word, and released under the title Dreamweapon.
The title itself is a direct lift on La Monte Young’s minimalistic “dream music” experiments in which melody in music is disregarded in favor of a series of overtones and harmonics. Young’s most common point of reference is The Velvet Underground (John Cale and original Velvet’s drummer Angus MacLise played in some of Young’s projects), so it’s of no surprise that the Spacemen picked up on some of his theories and tried them on themselves.
The Waterman show presented here is one song, one chord, and lasting for forty-four minutes. If the listener can get beyond the obvious challenges of this, they’ll find that within those forty-plus minutes is perhaps the most pure expression of the Spacemen’s vision. It’s not a listen that can be recommended first or to those that expect to hear any sense of melody. But for me, it’s one of the Spacemen 3’s finest achievements; the guitar patterns drone on and on, to the point where the listener is lost into a trance-like stage. If there was ever an album more appropriately titled, this would be it.
Throughout the performance, the band loops prerecorded sounds of subway arrivals, a perfect (even if it wasn’t intended as such) commentary on urban repetitiveness and how even the most mundane sounds can be viewed as music if you’ve got the headspace to believe it. The headspace of the audience is questionable: throughout the performance, you can hear people chatting away thanks to the open-mic recording technique used during the performance. Oddly enough, even the audience conversations somehow lend a positive role to the recording.
The release I have from the mid-90’s (on the Sympathy For The Record Industry label) contains a great Sonic Boom guitar workout called “Ecstasy In Slow Motion” and a fifteen minute-long “Spacemen Jam” rounding out the disc. Later releases include the introduction music they used to start their performance. Interestingly, this music (found as the “Ecstacy Symphony” pieces on the Prescription disc(s)) continued to be used by Jason on Spiritualized shows.

Playing With Fire*

The third Spacemen album finds hints of separation starting to enter: Jason Pierce starts incorporating more subdued material while Sonic Boom continues the exploration of ear-shredding guitar freakouts. There’s still a sense of continuity between the two, however, as both ends of the spectrum (pun intended) are based on a format of minimalism.
As a result, it all works beautifully together and some of the band’s finest material can be found here. “Revolution” created enough of a stir in the indie rock circles for Mudhoney to take notice and cover the song for one of their singles while befriending the Spacemen during a European tour. The two bands are, of course, perfect complements of each other, with one (Mudhoney) wonderfully tapping into the Detroit garage rock fury while the Spacemen explored the extraterrestrial leanings of primitive guitar workouts.
Spacemen’s albums come complete with appropriate covers that directly point at the band’s primary influences. When they don’t cover their idols, they offer up their own penned tributes. Like The Perfect Prescription’s “Ode To Street Hassle (and Forged Prescription’s “Velvet Jam”), Playing With Fire provides its own tribute to Alan Vega and Martin Rev’s band Suicide with the song, unimaginatively titled “Suicide,” an eleven minute exercise in guitar feedback brutality.
The bonus tracks on the Taang! Records reissue feature a live version of “Repeater (How Does It Feel?)” and “Suicide” (also found on the Threebie 3 e.p. released the same year as Playing With Fire) as well as the b-side of the “Revolution” single: a cover of Suicide’s “Che” and a stunning rendition of “May The Circle Be Unbroken.”

Recurring*

By the time Recurring was released, the two primary creative forces in the band hated each other to the point where they refused to work with each other. To address this, the album featured one side of Sonic Boom’s material and side two contained all of Jason’s tracks. There’s an obvious difference between the two sides resulting from this and I will confess to (initially) liking side two more. Boom’s material heavily relies on synthesizers and drum samples; Jason’s material is more organic and follows a road he would continue to travel with Spiritualized. I’ve grown more appreciative of Sonic’s side over the years as I discovered much of the krautrock formulas he was trying to explore. At the same time, Jason’s material is a tad stronger and the lyrical content feels like an end point, which is exactly what Recurring ended up being. My least favorite (official) Spacemen album, but that shouldn’t deter you from finding out how fantastic side two of Recurring really is.

Losing Touch With Your Mind

I remember browsing though the Spacemen 3 section of The Record Collector a few years after they had disbanded, hoping to find a rare import or two. I found this title, complete with no record label listing or supporting documentation. I can only assume that this is an un-official release not sanctioned by the band members; the fidelity of the tracks included here also point to illegitimacy. What you get is a collection of different mixes of Spacemen 3 songs, most are too subtle to be vital and, therefore, this becomes the first release of many that followed (some even legitimately authorized by Sonic Boom) that are redundant, bottom-feeding, and somewhat exploitive. Try to avoid this one, even though the packaging looks decent, particularly in the vinyl configuration.

Admittedly, the Spacemen 3 catalog is a mess, and it can be a frustrating endeavor for anyone who’s initially exploring them. Stick with the proper releases, try them on in order, and discover if you want to get involved with the posthumous compilations that (seemingly) repeat the same songs over and over.
By the time you get to the last album Recurring you’ll be able to decide which way you should go with their solo material; side one of that album sounds a lot like Sonic Boom’s first release Spectrum after Spacemen broke up while side two sounds a lot like the first Spiritualized album Lazer Guided Melodies.
The other frustrating thing about Spacemen 3 releases is how often they seem to fall in and out of print (this is a big problem with Sonic Boom’s Spectrum material and his later E.A.R. project and it’s starting to be an issue with some Spiritualized albums now). Because of the inconsistency in availability, I believe that it is depriving this band of the unanimous praise lofted towards My Bloody Valentine and The Jesus & Mary Chain. For every fan of Loveless or Psycho Candy, they should also allow one offering from Spacemen 3. The problem then becomes, which one to choose.
Hopefully, this overview helps with that.

Todd Totale is pursuing the following Spacemen 3 titles to complete his collection and “to make me feel better.”

Recurring
The import version. It’s been remastered and it includes some additional tracks on it. My version is the original release, so watch me drop $35 for a title that I already own. Brilliant.
Performance
A live set from the Perfect Prescription European tour. Because I don’t have enough versions of ”Take Me To The Other Side” already.
Live In Europe 1989 (a.k.a. Spacemen Are Go!)
A live set from the band’s final tour.
Translucent Flashbacks
A collection of b-sides and rarities. I only need this because it has a Sun Ra cover on it that used to be on my cassette of Perfect Prescription.
Threebie 3
Maybe. I actually have everything on this mini-lp already. So I’d be buying this just for the cover art (which is nothing really) and…well…I’d be buying this for the cover art.