During a three-year period that included two album releases Jellyfish swam upstream against the tide of hair metal and grunge that permeated the music landscape. Headed by Roger Joseph Manning Jr. and Andy Sturmer, the duo crafted a pop sound that featured the hooks of the best bubblegum pop with harmonies that would make Brian Wilson smile and lush arrangements that offered sonic pleasures on repeated listenings.
Wearing outfits that looked like they were stolen from the set of a Sid & Marty Krofft psychedelic kids show, Jellyfish didn’t stand a chance of breaking through to the mainstream success it deserved. Instead, the band brief impression left a legion of devotees to look back at the material on Bellybutton and “Spilt Milk” with the fevered attention it deserves.
Last year, Omnivore Recordings put out expanded deluxe CD editions of Bellybutton and Spilt Milk They include the original albums remastered plus 51 bonus tracks — demos and live performances.
The beginning and end of Spilt Milk presents an example of the intense thought process and care put into their music. It begins with the quiet, contemplative “Hush” and is followed by the rumble and roar of “Joining a Fan Club.” The album ends with “Brighter Day,” wherein the last note of that song fades out, revealing that it is the first note that fades in on “Hush.” The album is both infinitely listenable and a melodic piece of art. Jellyfish wasn’t ahead of its time. It was part of no time and aligned with every time. Some never got it. Some hated it. Others remain enraptured to it.
I spoke with Manning, who now is an integral part of Beck’s musical family in the studio and on tour, about his time with Jellyfish and touched upon his solo albums and work as a session musician. His recent contributions include performing and collaborating with Adele, Emitt Rhodes and Boots.
I was going to ask this later but since we’re discussing session work now, for someone who worked on your solo albums and Jellyfish, you have a degree of artistic control and do things from scratch. When you do session work, do you have to re-wire your mind and remind yourself that you’re here to serve this person or serve the song? How do you deal with it?
You mean, how did I kind of shift gears? Well, there was very little shifting to do because the only difference was that in a band like Jellyfish or Imperial Drag or whatever, I was 50 per cent of the writing collaborative process. But after the songs were written, you had this raw song idea that needed to be fleshed out with arrangements and performances. And that’s what I do on anybody’s music. I show up with the assumption their song is intact and then we go to work flushing out arrangements.
Obviously, what I would do arranging on songs that I’ve been a part of there’s already some immediate inspiration, that excitement and you kind of have a focus where you’re heading. It’s a little more challenging sometimes to come in raw.
Part of what I do as a session musician is try to get inside the psyche of the songwriter. I always say, “The song is king.” In other words, the song will dictate an attitude, an aesthetic, an environment that it’s the musician, producer and the arranger’s job to flesh out. Some songwriters are very clear with what they want the song to have arrangement-wise. Others have no idea. That’s why every session job is challenging and that’s part of where the fun lies. Some people really want a lot of your opinions on one project and others you don’t need to offer up your opinion. There’s music, just do as you’re asked. [laughs].
It’s usually the former. Usually, part of why me or other people get employed is because there’s an improvisational spontaneous attitude that we can bring to somebody’s record. It’s really fun. I’ve always had fun doing that, and I continue to draw fulfillment out of it. It’s one of many things I enjoy doing. It’s continued to serve me over the years.
I was reading an interview with you and they were asking what bands you are into, what bands Andy was into, and you alluded to that with your answer. You were talking about him being into Van Morrison and Bob Dylan. So, was he responsible for the foundation of a song and you brought in the harmonies, the arrangements and the lush aspects to it?
In the respect that, for example, you can say something as simple and obvious as Andy wrote all the lyrics in that sense. Andy was much more a fan of poetry and the written word, in general. Simply, by virtue of the fact that I had gone to music school and was very fascinated with arranging, the mechanics of that, I was able to bring that skill set to our collaboration.
We both had ideas for arranging. Andy may have a countermelody for a string part or a background vocal but I was usually the guy and I enjoyed fleshing out that idea. What does it sound like when a string section plays this idea or a group of people sing this idea?
Songwriting has always been two phases. For someone like me, it’s coming up with the chords, melody and beat – the music part — and then, with pop music you put the lyrics into that melody. I admire quality lyric writing. I certainly am opinionated about people whose lyrics move me and touch me, but ultimately, at the end of the day it’s not very important to me. I don’t want to sing foolish things or gibberish or nonsense. I’d like to be conveying some kind of thought that’s important to me but I’ve even heard, sometimes, that a great singer, their voice is so good and the song is so good, they can start reading out of the phone book. It’s still going to be a rich tune. I believe that’s true to a degree.
I’m just not compelled or as inspired by the lyrical component of the pop world than [I am] the music. That may even sound a bit hypocritical but I have been very fortunate to team up with two great lyricists in my collaborative years – Andy of Jellyfish and Eric Dover of Imperial Drag. For my solo records, like Catnip Dynamite, I’ve written all the lyrics and it took me forever to come up with that stuff. There are songs on there that I wrote in 20 minutes and the lyrics took two weeks, and I’m not exaggerating. I’m very proud of the lyrics that are represented on my solo records. I’m working on a third solo record right now and I teamed up with a friend of mine who helped. He’s contributed about 50 per cent of the lyrical content because it really helps speed things up. It helps move some of these songs along for me.
It wasn’t that black and white but Andy definitely, you can say, he wrote all the lyrics as did Eric Dover in Imperial Drag.
As far as the Jellyfish re-issues, did you listen to them?
Sure, because they went through a different mastering process.
What was your reaction to them, listening back with a critical ear?
The parts I did, the guitar I did, the background vocals — almost across the board I’m 100 per cent okay with the choices we made and how they held up. There are things I know now simply from making records for 20 years, that I know more about the recording process, the sonics, the engineering, the way the stuff sounds. And while Jack Joseph Puig, who engineered and mixed both records, is one of the great masters who lives among us, I would have voiced opinions or changes or had him do things differently because of I what I know now. I think stuff could have been represented in a way I would have preferred on some stuff.
But, as far as content, I’m at peace with it and happy that it stands the test of time for not only for me but a whole legion of fans.
As far as recording, is that correct that it took six months to record Spilt Milk ?
That sounds about right. We started in April of ‘92 and finished up in September of ‘92. That’s working, maybe there’s a week off here and there, five or six days a week working.
I’m listening to the demos on the re-issue and they sound pretty fleshed out and comparable to the final product was. What was it that made the album take so long?
Because, as you noticed, on the demos a lot of the ideas were already there. There is simply a process involved in wanting to achieve the best results. Say we had a guitar part on the demo that we liked and we thought was working. Well, now we need to recreate that guitar part for the album. That opens up a whole can of worms. You can spend hours or an entire day or more sculpting the right guitar tone for that one part and then you may want to make some changes or enhancements or try some…we tried to afford ourselves the luxury of experimentation and that takes time. So, while we said, “This guitar part’s working” but somebody might suggest, “What if change the second half of it?” Then, you’ve just got to audition that. Play with it and change it. And, of course, the computer’s not around. So, it’s always going to be slower on tape even though it sounds better.
And, it’s just the nature of the best. We did have the funds we needed from the record company to take our time and do what we wanted to do. Sometimes, you can get lost down a rabbit hole chasing something and three days later go, “You know what? It was good the original way that it was.”
Really, that’s it. There are demos from Spilt Milk that were just that. They were sketches. They weren’t completed or fleshed out. So, we spent time fleshing them out. Yeah, it’s the nature of the beast. I’m not proud of that. We didn’t want there to be three years between Bellybutton and Spilt Milk but between record company release schedules and the time it took to demo everything first…some bands don’t demo everything like we do. We made very, very elaborate demos because it was too frightening to go into the studio not knowing whether or not the majority of our ideas were solid. Andy and I had to believe 100 per cent, “Okay, this is working. This is mostly going somewhere. We feel that this is now fleshed out enough that we’re confident to be in the studio environment,” which can be very nerve-wracking, intense and the pressure can be more on you. The clock’s ticking. Money’s being spent. You don’t want to go in there with nothing, “I don’t know what we’re going to do on this song.” We didn’t want to leave it up to anybody but ourselves. Here we are 20 years later, you gotta live with it. We were trying to make sure that when this very day would come for ourselves and the fans…We really went over everything with a fine-tooth comb.
When you mentioned about computers and tape, you sounded like you’re a fan of analog. If you were recording a Jellyfish album now would you go the Pro Tools route because it could be cheaper and easier to do?
There’s a huge trade off and it’s one that I take advantage of all the time. For example, all my solo records including the newest one…well, that’s not true. The first two solo albums, they’re all done on computer. There’s no tape. I didn’t have access to a tape machine. This third one, I’ve actually tracked some drums and other instruments to tape and then being transferred into the computer. There are just huge conveniences and luxuries that the computer can afford and it helped me realize a lot of dreams and fantasies.
On the solo records it was important to me that I try to play everything by myself even though I know many, many wonderful musicians. If I played a guitar part on a song, I mostly got it but there are a few places where it’s just, “Oh, that’s not very good.” Normally, we would try to redo it again but there was charm in it or I really played the right note with right tone at the right time. Well, the computer can assist me in finessing that part to make it sound more solid, more in time, more whatever. There’s no mystery, a lot of singers will use Auto-Tune now to get their pitch more exact. The reason they’ll do that is there’s lots of singers who can’t sing at all but you do have a few singers, obviously, who are talented, they’re trained, they practice their craft. If they go for a performance and convey the right emotion and have all that wonderful once in a lifetime charm, the last thing you want to do, believe me, is redo it, try to recapture all that charm just to correct a few notes, pitches. If you can nudge those note pitches with some software, you can do it and not losing any of the charm. There’s huge advantages.
I’m not so analog righteous. I’m not militant about any of it. Whatever gets you to the finish line. At the end of the day if you write a good song and you have very good performance, execute it, period.
Focusing on the word ‘performance’, was it important to you to have the live tracks as well as the demos on the reissues in order to show the full scope of the band, showing that you can do it live as well as in the studio?
It’s not so important to me. I know growing up, as a fan of my favorite bands, I enjoyed hearing demos. I enjoyed hearing the live thing. It humanized the group more, and as a musical architect learning to do these things, I love hearing how the ideas evolved. That’s endlessly fascinating to me as a fellow musician, arranger and creator.
Those hardcore fans, of which those are the ones that are out there 20 years later, that is legitimately fascinating to them. And it gives me great joy to be able to share that with them. A lot of my heroes, when they made demos, they had such poor equipment to work on, the demos sound atrocious. It’s very hard to hear anything. We were at least able to record on some pretty decent gear back then in the late ‘80s, early ‘90s. So, it’s fun to share those ideas.
I always remember when your first album came out, “Bellybutton,” it blew my mind because it was so poppy and then the outfits looked like H.R. Pufnstuf. As if you came off that set and kept the outfits. For those who liked the band then and still are a fan, it can be frustrating to see that people don’t get it. Were you just philosophical about it? “We weren’t ahead of your time, we were in no time, in this time and that time and every time. Some are going to like it and some aren’t going to get it, but we did what we wanted to do and now we’re movin’ on.”
That’s a really great way of putting it. We definitely set out to do something where there was no compromise and we wanted to have the freedom — thankfully, we had a record company that believed in that — to present our vision. Then, it’s like whoever wants to come to the party, great. It was important to me that we had a major label forum running behind us, advertising us…All I ever wanted was to have everybody at least hear it. In other words, Jellyfish be given a chance. And I believe we were. We had three Buzz Bin videos on the first record, lots of press. There was less on the second album, but it was still out there. People knew who Jellyfish was and knew when the second record was out. And, we saw the results.
I always joke that in the late ‘80s, Jellyfish came out amidst the height of Hair Metal — the success of Guns N’ Roses and all those MTV hair metal bands and here we were doing our thing and yet we still managed to get some airplay in front of an audience. And then by the second album we came out at the height of grunge and still managed to make some noise and our wares be shared with the public.
I often say Jellyfish was the most punk rock thing happening at that time because while it was sing-along pop, which is part of what our intention was with what we believe were very straightforward sing-along melodies and classic pop elements, it was very much against the grain of the current trends at the time, which is just funny. It’s almost like all of a sudden, “There’s this other sound besides grunge so I don’t know what to do with it.” And that’s okay because maybe that kid never heard the Beatles. Maybe that kid had never heard Cheap Trick. From his perspective that music was old people music. It was no different than when I was a child and I would hear the Duke Ellington big band or Bing Crosby or something. That was old people’s music in a time so far away I couldn’t even conceive of it. The fact of the matter was that the sounds of Duke Ellington or Chuck Berry or Elvis Presley, that was only 15 years before Kiss and the Sex Pistols, Queen, Cheap Trick and all that stuff. So, I get that.
We weren’t afraid to be happy and light and celebrate the whole range of emotions that can be part of the human experience. It doesn’t have to just be the heavy, tough guy attitude, although I love that stuff, too. I’m a huge hard rock fan.
I always also say that there are never any middle-of-the-road Jellyfish fans. You either totally got what we did, and have basically stayed with us until now and you have fond memories of your experience with those records, or you didn’t get it and didn’t bother with it. People are either super-rabid and travel around and catch all of our shows, buy all of our merchandise, join the fan club, all that stuff or it’s kind of like, “Who are those guys in the silly hats? It doesn’t speak to me at all. I’m going to be over here listening to hip hop.” That’s fine. You do what you do. Like I said, I’m eternally grateful that we were given a chance. I would have loved for Andy and I and the rest of the guys to have been able to evolve through our differences as people and heal through our differences and be making records to this day, but that was not to be.
On the “Fan Club Message,” you and Andy mention that you met Brian Wilson and possibly doing something with him. Was he still under the influence of Dr. Eugene Landy and not quite himself, and did anything come out of that?
I don’t know to what degree or not that he was involved with Dr. Landy on Brian’s healing journey at that time in his life. The only reason that we came in touch with him at all was because Don Was had made it known that he had heard our record and was very much a fan. He reached out to us to work with Ringo Starr and we worked on a song (“Weight of the World”) and we sang for the video for Ringo on that album called Time Takes Time from ‘92. After that, Don Was worked for everybody from Brian Wilson to Kim Basinger, all kinds of people. When he was speaking to Brian about making a new record, they were in very early conversation about it. It was Don’s idea to have Brian write with Andy and I just to see what would happen and to, I don’t know, bring some youthful perspective into Brian’s work. I think they were hunting for what Brian should do next.
That afforded a wonderful encounter with Brian. That was all because of Don. In a nutshell that was a very awkward afternoon. We went to Brian’s studio in Santa Monica. Prior to that, I knew that we were going to meet with him, I told Andy, “I’m not walking into that room without at least one idea to try to play because I don’t want all of us to be sitting around the piano going, ‘Duuuuh.’”Here’s our hero, expecting him to come up with something. “Oh, do you have any ideas?” “No, I don’t have any ideas.” “Do you have any ideas?” I knew Andy and I were going to be nervous and in awe being in the presence of one of our favorite composers of all time. I certainly was. I knew if I had some ammunition that would alleviate some of that. So, I feverishly set out to come up with an idea. I came up with a verse and a chorus for a song. No lyrics. I played it for Andy and he thought it was really solid. He said, “That’s great. Let’s at least show up with that.” And we did. We got in there and nobody had an ideas and I sat down and said, “Well, here’s one Andy and I like. We’d like to play it for you.” And I just mumbled a bunch of gibberish as I always did when I didn’t have lyrics. Brian got quite excited about it, which was incredibly weird and flattering. In fact he got so excited about it, he started to come up with a bridge idea for it on the spot. I noticed as we were all working on music together, myself and Andy and everybody, all got very relaxed. And Don was sitting there, and he was getting into it. We were all talking. This wonderful environment was being created. I’m like, “This is so cool. We’re all relaxed. We’re all making music.” That took about an hour. And after one hour, one of his many assistants comes running up behind him, taps him on the shoulder and says, “Brian, sorry to bother you but it’s time for your 2:30 nap.” And he looks at all of us and he says, “Well, that’s it guys. Great working with ya. Gotta go take my nap. I’ll see you around.” And that was the beginning and end of our encounter with Brian Wilson because I don’t know what happened afterwards.
I think what happened was that he and Don decided to not pursue working together. So, even if Don wanted us to follow through with that, there was something politically going on in their relationship where that was not going to happen. And we all know, Don never did do a record with him.
However, I was so happy with that idea, that 15 years later I decided to complete it, and it became the song, “I Wish It Would Rain,” which is on my first solo album. Now, I did not include Brian’s bridge because he came up with it very, very quick and I thought it was, do I dare say, just a bit average even for him. I didn’t think there was anything special about it. I would have loved to have sat down with him and written something more special but that was not to happen. So, I came up with another bridge and wrote the lyrics and fleshed out the song myself, and I’m very happy with what I came up with. But that’s the story behind that tune.
I saw a video of you onstage during the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony doing “Satellite of Love.” What was that experience like for you?
For me the most exciting aspect of that was, and I didn’t realize to what degree this was going to happen, I got to see and be up very close and experience – just to see them play live and experience their person — a lot of my heroes. While it was wonderful, of course, to see Ringo and Paul McCartney — Ringo and I had already met, of course — I was very much taken aback and in awe in the most pleasant way with seeing Stevie Wonder and Bill Withers in their glory. Stevie Wonder played so much that night and he spoke. I even accidentally rode an elevator with him. I was too shy to say anything, but just to have that closeness…Stevie is one of my favorite songwriters, performers, keyboardists ever. The amount of what he’s offered that I’ve connected with compared to other artists is just mind-blowing to me.
Anyways, to see him perform…and Bill Withers is such a talent and such an incredible songwriter. I loved being around Joan Jett and seeing her get inducted. The rock ‘n’ roll spirit that the Runaways represent and capture is so important to me; a brilliant time in American glitter rock, if you will, teen almost punk, early punk. It had such an influence on me as a kid and even to this day. I saw her name on the induction list but I was very surprised when I got there how much I was emotionally affected by her presence and I got to say something nice to her and to Kenny Laguna, the gentleman who was basically responsible for her solo career. He really helped her launch. I got to talk to him for two seconds about his involvement with bubblegum bands in the Sixties and he was blown away that I knew any of that.
That music, the bubblegum music like 1910 Fruitgum Company, Brooklyn Bridge and the Katz & Kasenetz production team was very much inspirational to Jellyfish, if for no other reason just their aesthetic, their visual conceptual side. So, that was super cool.
Finally, your next solo album, do you have a time table for its release?
Unfortunately, when it’s done, it’s done. You’ve got to keep in mind, one of the things that’s been going on last year and a half for me, not only has Beck been promoting the most recent record I’ve played on quite a bit and I’ve enjoyed touring again with that family because I don’t normally tour at all. That’s been new and exciting but I’ve also been doing a lot more session work as a keyboardist and doing something very new — I’ve done it my whole life but nobody knew me for this or asked me to contribute in this — as an arranger. So, I’ve been doing more orchestral string arranging for people’s projects, and it’s been so much fun.
I’ve just been very busy working on other people’s records. Then, if I’ve got three days here or a week there or a weekend there I pull up my album and I start chipping away at it. I’m making progress. I’ve got 14 songs in the works that I’m very proud of. They’ve all got lyrics. They’re all ready to be sung. It’s just fleshing them out. I have not changed my standard of perfection and excellence and what I’m going for. Sometimes, I can be my own worst taskmaster but I’m not going to give my fans anything that doesn’t…hopefully, it’ll blow them away as much as it’s blowing me away. So, that’s what the delay is, but just suffice to know that it is happening and moving forward.
