TMBG’s first live backing band album, John Henry, turns 30 today.
The album, along with Flood, Apollo 18, and Factory Showroom, have their publishing rights still held with Elektra, so don’t expect any fancy celebratory releases of the original album.
HOWEVER!
Due to the uncertainty of moving from a mostly electronic (tape and sequencer) backing to a full band for a full album, TMBG decided to do a set of recordings for all the songs planned for the album. These were produced by Pat Dillett, who’d been working with the band as an engineer for Flood and Apollo 18, with whom they’d work for Factory Showroom and basically all of their successive independent work.
The recordings, not designed for distribution, are thus fair game for the Giants to sell anywhere and any way they want. And specifically today they are available as a free download at the TMBG online shop, both mp3 and wav files.
Compared to the final album, the mixing is a lot lighter. Sometimes I think that the drums get a bit buried compared to the final release, but the arrangements sound a bit more like what I expected from TMBG as they evolved through their first 4 albums, and the sound strikes me as a little bit more reflective of how they turned out in their live shows around this time. If you wished John Henry had an acoustic balance a bit more like Severe Tire Damage, you should definitely check this out.
I wouldn’t say it’s, strictly speaking, better, but it probably is more palatable to the more diehard TMBG fan, and I think does a lot to help contextualize John Henry relative to the rest of their studio work. It doesn’t replace the final album for me, but there aren’t many albums that take me through as full a spectrum of human emotion as the final either. The more pronounced lower-mids (guitar distorition in particular), drums, and overdubs have me favoring the final versions of Subliminal, Destination Moon (the tubular bells!!), and Out of Jail; similarly, O Do Not Forsake Me gains significant affect in its performance by a professional choir. Spy’s demo (which was released on the ‘Why Does the Sun Shine?’ EP), however, feels much more like a TMBG song in the manner of, say, Hearing Aid and Hot Cha in a way that the album version doesn’t.
[John Henry, as released, was produced by Paul Fox (who’d worked with vaguely-associated-with-TMBG groups like 10,000 Maniacs and XTC among others) and who gave the album a heavy, strong mid-90s feel, bordering on the heavy drums-and-guitars feel of grunge and metal music of the time. It’s an odd sound, and given that it only happened for this one album (TMBG never worked with Fox again) it at once feels like their least (for being most tied to the popular recording style of the time) and most experimental sound (because none of their other albums tend to be tied to the popular recording style of the time they were made) equally.]
It’s also available on CD and a 12"+7" vinyl combo, if you’re the sort who’d want a professionally-made, physical representation of the album.
