Parasol Records : Labels : Reaction : Richard Lloyd

Photos taken by Anders Torgander in Sweden in the mid '80s.

ALL MUSIC GUIDE: "This reissue is absolutely essential for all Richard Lloyd fans."

REVIEWS / PRESS QUOTES

MOJO MAGAZINE: "While the production is fashionably boomy and his singing gruff at best, there's something not to be denied about Soldier Blue or Watch Yourself, stirring trad-rockers that make Tom Verlaine's solo efforts sound overly academic. Meanwhile, you're never too far from a rapier insertion of Lloyd's Strat - the author of Television's thrilling high-wire excursions is in especially astral form on the Marquee Moon-esque title track and poignant Pleading." (Danny Eccleston)

MAGNET MAGAZINE: "Richard Lloyd proves on this 1985 solo album--now expanded to a two-CD package--that even half of the original guitar tandem of New York art-punks Television, produced enough raw power to light CBGB for a month. If you couldn't sort out Lloyd's work from Tom Verlaine's on Television's dazzling 1977 debut, Marquee Moon, then Field Of Fire will sear Lloyd's fretboard into your memory banks forever." (Jud Cost)

HARP MAGAZINE: "Revisiting his 1987 effort Field of Fire, Television guitarist Richard Lloyd has called a do-over on the production values of pop music’s nadir: the eighties. Not that Lloyd is trying to rewrite history; rather, he seems to be trying to learn from it. This 2-CD set features both the album as it initially appeared, and a significantly overhauled update on the bonus disc. Fans will be thrilled to hear the original album and to hear the revisions (with all new vocals). In some cases, he simply replaced or added a guitar, or tweaked a drum sound; in others, the only original element remaining might be the bass guitar. Lloyd employs this strategy thematically as well; for example, the anti-war track “Soldier Blue” is a critical tirade which Lloyd shortened from its original 25 verses. Lloyd’s re-imaginings will likely bear the distinctive mark of the mid-’00s to listeners a decade from now; the more important question is whether the songs will stand the test of time." (Edward Burch)

TAPE OP MAGAZINE: "In issue #56 I interviewed Richard Lloyd. He mentioned the strange 1985 Swedish sessions for this album, and his disappointment in the way the album sound. So when the rights to the album reverted back to Richard, his initial thoughts of re-release turned into reworking the songs. So what we get is two discs -- one is the original album as it was released in 1987, and the other disc is a re-sung, remixed version of the album plus two leftover session tracks. The original album was pretty reverb -- heavy, and the vocals were sung with an over -- the -- top push that kind of strains after a while. The new version is stripped back a bit, some guitars are redone and some aren't, and the vocals are all new with a new laid -- back approach that works better. The funny thing is I assumed I would like the new versions more, but in some cases there are things I like about the original versions. It's a good album and makes for some interesting listening experiments! Plus, you cannot discount Lloyd's stellar guitar work, especially on the Television-y title track." (Larry Crane)

POPMATTERS: "Renowned Television guitarist's exceptional musicality is again on display on this reissue of his sterling 1985 solo effort, which retains the original mix on disc one and gets a much-needed makeover by the artist himself on disc two... Lloyd re-records vocals here, guitars there, even strips down cuts all the way to the rhythm section before redoing the restand the result is a more fully realized Field of Fire. What’s better about the 2006 update? Everything. No more unnecessary guitar enhancements, no more “super loud artificial snare smacks” (to quote Lloyd’s liners), no more thin, trebly ‘80s mixjust guitars that sound like the Lloyd of old and drums that sound like drums. This also unearths two previously unreleased tracks from the session..." (Doug Sheppard)

IMPOSE MAGAZINE: "The second disc’s cleaner production and more natural vocals makes Lloyd’s music more vibrant and modern, partly because it does have a more contemporary post-1985 production aesthetic. Yet, there are distinctly Lloyd elements - rhythm guitars pull off Heartbreakers’ glam beats and the sharply melodic solos are speedier than anything dubbed post-punk." (HS)

SPIN MAGAZINE: "After years as a junkie mess, Lloyd -- the id to Tom Verlaine's ego in Television -- cleaned up and went to Sweden in 1985. The result was this grungy take on shiny 80s rock, with fat gaited-reverb drums, shredded vocals, and shredding guitars. For the bonus disc, Lloyd stripped off the Euro -- disco veneer and re-recorded it." (Will Hermes)

TORONTO STAR/THE ANTI-HIT LIST: "The temptation for an artist to revise a flawed work is usually as ill-advised as it is irresistible. On the reissue of his second album, this Television guitarist has it both ways: the first disc presents the music as it originally appeared in 1985. The second uses parts of the original but also incorporates newly recorded elements sometimes a vocal, sometimes everything but the drums. This punchier version sacrifices the epic guitar solo of the original but also feels less dated, with new vocals that approximate a high-pitched Warren Zevon." (John Sakamoto)

MAXIMUM INK: "Masterfully combining electric honky-tonk, East Coast art-punk, even power rock chords, Television’s ace guitar-slinger creates a sonic banquet that explodes with bluesy twang and angular arpeggios. Lloyd believes in music’s liberating salvation and each track of this double disc reissue passionately cries out - don’t think, act, don’t talk - dance." (Jon Noyd)

ROLLING STONE/ROCK DAILY: "A double-vision reissue of Television guitarist Richard Lloyd’s second solo album: a CD of the complete 1987 release; another CD of Lloyd freshening the rushed, dated production on the original tapes with new vocals and more guitars. They are both great albums. The first highlights the Keith Richards-style bite Lloyd brought to Television’s guitar poetry; the second peels back the reverb and emphasizes the slicing force Lloyd brings to every stage." (David Fricke)

NPR/SHADOW CLASSICS: "Lloyd deserves the chance to tweak his music and bring it closer to what he heard in his head all those years ago. And, at the same time, those who loved and have missed the original deserve to encounter it as they remember it. Give this veteran of the rock trenches who remains woefully under-appreciated as a guitarist credit for understanding that, and offering both the tried-and-true and the new-and-improved." (Tom Moon)

HIGH BIAS: "Recorded in 1985 and originally released in 1987, Field of Fire is guitarist Richard Lloyd’s second solo album. It’s been out of print for years, but Lloyd secured the rights a couple of years ago and set to work on a reissue. It’s a welcome return. “Soldier Blue,” “Keep on Dancin’” and the stunning title track roll strong melodies, powerful singing and, of course, smashing guitar wrangling into big, shiny balls of classic rock & roll. Of course, the original recording shows its age in the keyboard sounds, gated drums and typical 80s mix job. But the songs and performances are strong enough to overcome such carping, and besides, Lloyd has included a bonus for fans who cringe at the sound of a Yamaha DX-7: a bonus disk with a contemporary remix, some new guitar arrangements and re-done vocals. The latter is arguably unnecessary, but some fans might appreciate Lloyd’s more restrained performances on tunes like “Pleading” and “Losin’ Anna.” They’ll definitely appreciate the inclusion of a pair of unreleased songs, the romantic “The Only Feelin’” and the pointed “Tobacco and Corn.” Lloyd and Reaction give us the choice of which Field of Fire to play, thus fulfilling both fan expectations and artistic license." (Michael Toland)

OTHER MUSIC: "Originally released in ’85 (the U.S. release was in ’87), Field of Fire was Lloyd’s second solo album after the demise of Television, his hugely influential band with Tom Verlaine and company. That group was best known, of course, for the fierce, soaring guitar interplay between Lloyd and Verlaine, and to some degree both men have struggled in their solo careers to reignite the fire they stoked together. The original Field of Fire, title notwithstanding, achieved this goal at times, but perhaps not consistently. There are moments of true inspiration, great songwriting, and a few incendiary solos from Lloyd (perhaps most notably on the stellar title track) that tempered the somewhat lackluster backing band, occasionally spotty song selection, hoarse shout of a vocal delivery, and very “80s” production. Lloyd freely admits that this album was recorded at the low-point of his personal life and career, and heavy drug use and deep depression surely left their mark on the production, for better or worse. Nonetheless, even in its original form, this reissue would be a warm welcome for any big fans of Lloyd and Television. But wait, that’s not all you get; this great double-CD packs the remastered original album with a second disc of Lloyd’s re-imagining of the album. He took the original tapes back into the studio in 2005, stripped off the original raw vocals (Lloyd was apparently going for a powerful live vocal delivery in ‘85 that sometimes lacks dynamic on the original) and much of the instrumentation, and built a new Field of Fire from the ground up, adding some great guitar work, much more subtle vocals, and a mix far more appropriate to the sound of the music. The results? Actually, they are great. This seems to be one of the very few cases where an artist may have actually improved on his original by digging up the corpse. But really, what does it matter? You get a great reissue of the original PLUS a re-imagining of the album that adds levels of nuance and taste that are often thrilling." (JM)

ALL MUSIC GUIDE: "When Richard Lloyd's second solo album was released -- in Europe in late 1985, in the US in early 1987 -- fans of his pioneering work with Television and his hugely underrated 1979 solo debut Alchemy were so thrilled to have the singer and guitarist back after a long bout with drug addiction that overall, we tended to politely overlook the fact that Field of Fire is an extremely spotty record with a number of irritating production and arrangement quirks that make it an exceedingly frustrating listen. That's no longer the case. Twenty years after its initial release on the tiny Swedish label Mistlur, ownership of the master tapes reverted to Lloyd, and rather than simply give the album a proper CD release -- it had appeared on a tiny unknown label with a different cover in the early '90s, in an edition of perhaps dubious legality -- Lloyd decided to give Field of Fire the honor of doing it right. Disc one of this expanded two-disc set is Field of Fire as it was originally released, with all of its virtues and flaws as they were. First among the virtues, the outstanding title track, with its ragged but hopeful tone and the most impressive extended solo of Lloyd's entire post-Television career. Among its cons: inappropriate state-of-1985 arrangements and mixes, an unfortunately spotty song selection and perhaps most egregiously, Lloyd's vocals. According to the extensive liner notes, Lloyd's hoarse croak of a voice on this album was not the result of overuse or drug-related issues, but a deliberate stylistic choice on Lloyd's part, an attempt to replicate his onstage vocal intensity. The passage of time has apparently revealed to Lloyd what a bad idea this was, because the second disc features entirely new, considerably less strained and mannered vocals recorded in 2005. Furthermore, Lloyd has stripped down the original tracks in most cases to nothing more than the drums, which themselves are relieved of that annoying reverb that helped ruin so many otherwise good albums in the '80s. Field of Fire was originally recorded with minimal rehearsal with a group of Swedish musicians that Lloyd barely knew, and while Lloyd's extensive essay in the liner notes makes plain his gratitude to the Mistlur label for giving him the opportunity to record again at his lowest professional point, he does rightly concede that the musicians he was working with weren't necessarily the best for the job. Replacing most of the bass, keyboard and guitar tracks with new and better iterations helps nearly as much as the re-recorded vocals at revealing the strengths of the album. While there are still a couple of dogs in the track lineup -- "Losin' Anna" is still an embarrassing white-boy-blooze exercise that, ironically, is far worse than either of the resurrected outtakes found on the second disc -- the revised takes strengthen previously lackluster songs like "Watch Yourself" and "Black To White," and the shuffled track order improves the album's flow. The one odd flaw of the revised version of Field of Fire is that Lloyd includes the edited five-minute single mix of the title track rather than the full eight and a half minute epic, excising most of that career high point solo in the process. While it's interesting to hear the extremely rare reworking of the song, it's a bit of a shame not to hear the original given the same treatment as the rest of the album. Regardless, this reissue is absolutely essential for all Richard Lloyd fans." (Stewart Mason)

LINER NOTES
Richard Lloyd

On January 7th, 1985, at about 6:10 in the morning, my friend Keith Patchel and I stepped off a plane at Arlanda airport outside of Stockholm Sweden into an -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 of 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 Patchel 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 an 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 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 far 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 wondering how I would recognize the answer? Would it be a small still voice which I would not notice? Would it be an 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 Patchel 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 Imperiet (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 Patchel 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 Patchel had been over there for 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 shuffled 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 made 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 an 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 Rostlagsgattan. Gattan means Street, so whatever roast logs means, we were there. The studio which was called Mistler (same 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 the 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 wondered 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, Stephan Glaumann. Stephan 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 came 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 rerecorded 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.

Richard Lloyd
New York, 2006