Looking back on the album over twenty years later, however, it has held up surprisingly well. There are a number of great songs here, and they are performed with great energy. It's not surprising that this material stayed in the live set while 'Rhinos' was left by the wayside. Even when I saw them during the 1999 Space Party there was no material from 'Rhinos' in the set. True they only played four songs. This was also their last studio album for United Artists. They turned in one last live album to finish the contract and went off for a brief stay at MCA.
Produced by anton Mathews + Man with a lot of help from David Charles. Recorded at Rockfield's new flash, ultra modern 24 track studio (but we only used 16 of them) People who helped us on the miming are David Hamilton-Smith, David Charles, and Robin Black.
No . . . There are Man musicians and people who have somehow managed to do something to the music on this album. We would like to thank Anton's brother, James for his harmonica and jaws harp, also for helping out with the vocals, Anton, David Hamilton-Smith and Clint on knee vocal. Many thanks to Clint for the attempt but when we sobered up the next day we had second thoughts. Strings on 'Grasshopper' are by the Mountain Fjord Orchestra. Sax solo on 'Rock & Roll You' by Chris Mercer. Strings on 'Rainbow Eyes' by Stuart Gordon.
Helpers, hinderers, roadies, setter uppers, taker downers, get theres, get us backs, go by the name of Cunningham, Newcombe, Smith and Hopper.
Pipes by Plu.
Thanks to Sandos Lopez for the bottleneck. Don't lose it now. Special thanks to Rick Griffin for the cover art (its a privilege to have our stuff wrapped up in your stuff). This album is dedicated to everybody who is dedicated to something including Jim Beam, Sir Frank Roche, Johnny Kidd, Wepal, Peter Cushing, The City of Angels, Raymond Chandler, and Kenny Wisdom. This album is specially dedicated to the six hundred members of the Thames Valley Police force, who enjoyed themselves at the Windsor Free Festival in August 1974. You are no longer policemen, you are now targets . . . We love you, but be careful who you turn your backs on of course. We know you are only obeying orders. Now where have I heard that before?
Let me tell you about our set up. Ken, Terry, Micky and me, we take care of the music. Tam and Jeff drive the trucks. Foster, whose real name is Phillip Cunningham, books the flights, the hotels and the restaurants and makes sure we don't get no trouble. Pip, whose real name is Phillip Newcombe, is the band's chauffeur. So now you know the set-up.
I'm gonna tell you about a night in August. A cool, empty night, the kind that makes you thing that maybe there really is a God in Heaven, the kind of night that birds sing for free, the kind of night that starts out as an ordinary night in August and ends up as an ordinary night in August.
Now Foster is a big man. Not as big as the Chrysler building, just about a little smaller than Mount Rushmore, just about eye to eye with the Eiffel Tower. He drinks. When I say that I mean that when he gets thirsty, he has to throw himself into a reservoir. When Foster gets lonely he calls across town and a girl answers. She's a singer with an extra pair of eyes and ten thousand ways of making you want to touch her. Foster knows them all. Now and then he gives into temptation. When he doesn't feel lonely anymore, he comes back home and sleeps for two days.
One night in August, with his mouth tightly closed to stop any of the tequilla falling out, Foster snapped. When Foster snaps there is usually a mess. It's to do with his size. I mean to say if a fly goes beserk in a room thate's not too much mess to worry about, but you get a rhinocerous in the same room and just upset him a little bit and you better get the cleaners in. So Foster snaps and there's a mess. he tries to take everything apart that has parts. Which is most every thing. So the cleaners came in, one of the cleaners was Terry, the other was Pip. Know the names? Now Foster is a big man. He thinks he's Attila The Hun, and Al Capone and Desparate Dan. But even Al Capone could be beaten up by the Royal Marines. He could buy them, but he couldn't fight 'em single handed. So Terry comes up from behind and gives the back of Foster's head a massage with a large earthenware flower pot that has a large rubber plant in residence. Foster thinks it's somebody brushing the back of his hair. Foster sacks Pip. He's allowed to do that. He's a tour manager. That's pretty close to God. Pip tries to rip Foster's looks lungs out, but they won't come up. Terry hits foster in the chest with a chair. Success! (E CLA. Mark) Foster notices it. Foster forehead now looks like fourteen pounds of liver. The picture of Sitting Bull on his T-shirt has more blood on it than Sitting Bull himself saw during thje whole time he was managing the Sioux nation. Then the cops arrive. Though many more than is neccessary. It's always like that. Pip and Terry didn't kill Foster but only just. They take Foster to hospital where he gets twenty seven stitches in his head. The cops treat Pip and Terry like they're the Windsor Festival and take them down to Chelsea jail, where the cops don't even know what a tootsie roll is. I don't know what a tootsie roll is; I mean I've got a good idea but I couldn't draw you a picture of one. I could draw you a picture of most things, but not a tootsie roll. It's no big thing. Nobody's perfect. So let's drop it . . . OK?
Foster gets fined two pounds at the Old Bailey, for being the drunkest person in the world and runner-up in the most disorderly section. So where's the rest of the boys while this is going on. Micky is in bed. Let me tell you about Micky. Micky digs readheads. That covers women and dogs. Micky don't say very much. If he tries to talk the hind legs off a donkey he says 'hullo' was it this one? Ken's got a TV face. The people who know about thest things have told us that. We believe them. They've got no reason to lie to us, so we believe them. Wouldn't you believe them if somebody told you that? I would. I did. So OK, just let it drop. Ken drinks blackberry brandy; always trust a man who drinks blackberry brandy. Ken can drain a bottle of blackberry brandy by just looking at it. Jeff's in bed, too, Jeff is happy, all the time. He doesn't know why. I don't know why. Nobody knows why. Jeff stays on the nest so long that he thinks he can fly. Tam's always in bed. Tam sleeps twenty three hours a day. He only wakes up for an hour for the pleasure of going to sleep again. During that hour he puts away two-fifths of Scotch Whiskey. Tam is scottish; Tam spends a lot of time in flesh parlous, here all the girls in the photographs look like butcher shops on fire. Places like this remind me of people. Crude and vulgar on the outside but with the hard stuff under the counter.
And me, I was in bed, too, but that's another story.
Stay clean, Deke.
P.S: That's it . . hop you over-read the mistakes which might be in this long tele. Took me quite a long time+ (to make them)
PS 2: Pipes by Plu: Name is Loz ee Lopez
Love Edith (export DPV.)
5-9378 L long'
The re is two losee lots of overprinting
What's overprinted?
loprtob the that is overprioeing
No I mean which bit+ I get mad if I have to give this againjg
No I will tell you the lines and you can repeat OK+ OK++
Last Passage The PS?
I am just counting +
Line 24
Line from the top of Foster gets . . of from the last line upwords?
349. %9'534 @35' 85 8' 6 33=%
Line 6 from Foster gets
He tries to talk the hind legs off a donkey he says 'hullo'
was it this one?++ Yes +
Which one else? everything clear now (hopefully)
OK the new one is the line after
It is the next line I want+
I don't know why. Nobody knows why. Jeff stays on the nest so long
that he thinks he can fly
Great that's it sorry about that I am glad I caught you before you
cut off beke I am even more, as otherwise I was forced to let it through again.
By and nice afternoon
Edith
5%378 LIBRE D
The most obvious result of this defection was to leave Deke with part-time piano-playing duties. There were other changes, too; having failed to turn Man into the Principality's Queen (in sales terms, that is) big-time producer Roy Thomas Baker had departed, United Artists allowing the band to produce themselves with help from Anton Matthews. And instead of London's Morgan Studios Man were back where they felt most at home; Rockfield Studios in Monmouth, Wales. Indeed, the inner sleeve of 'Rhinos' had thanked Kingsley Ward 'for building a Welsh 24-track studio expecially for us.'
In the end, they only used 16 of the 24 tracks to cut an album that, Jones reflects, was 'a totally different record. To me "Rhinos" has got a little bit of grandeur about it and "Slow Motion" hasn't! It all sounds rushed as if we've gone in, written the songs, recorded them and there's no space . . .'
No, don't put this CD back in the racks -- there's rather more to 'Slow Motion' than that! It's claustrophobic all right, more 'power cut and strike' Seventies music than platform heels and tie-dyes, but . . . it could in fact have rated as one of the 'downer' albums of all time had tow of the four tracks they omitted -- 'TV Dinner' and the oppressive 'A Name And Number' -- been included. Instead, the two sides of the vinyl album were seasoned with a pair of delicate ballads in 'Grasshopper' and 'Rainbow Eyes'.
'Grasshopper' was an epic effort: written by Deke (though, like all the tracks, credited to the band jointly), it called for strings -- and plenty of 'em! 'It was a great experience,' recalls Ken Whaley, 'seeing a full orchestra in Olympic Studios putting on the strings -- at the command of a bunch of freaks like us!' There were also, he recalls, 'four or five minutes more at the end that I wanted on.' Micky Jones says it 'reminds me of the Egyptians and Israelites, that little figure going through it, I think Deke had his mind set in Egypt at the time. . .'
Micky wrote 'Rainbow Eyes', a song 'about chicks who play little games' which -- like so many rock lyrics of the period -- in retrospect displays a rather unenlightened attitude to the female sex. 'I remember thinking some of the words were a bit sexist,' remarks Ken Whaley, whose contributions were to 'feel and arrangements'. But these two tracks are either great favourites or disliked intensely . . . by musicians as well as fans, it seems! Strings on 'Rainbow Eyes' are courtesy of ex-Incredible String Band and Neutrons man Stuart Gordon.
Elsewhere, the darker side of Man is allowed free rein -- something Deke Leonard admits is down to him. 'Do you know the way you lose sight of the big picture and start going down little alleyways? I started going down this really morbid alleyway full of real black images.' One of those was 'Bedtime Bone', where his 'particularly sick' lyric on 'the futility of life' was rewritten by Micky; anywhere the new words didn't fit simply became an instrumental passage. The overall feel led to the provisional title of 'Johnny McLaughlin Meets Abbey Road'; the thought of the Mahavishnu Orchestra meeting the Beatles clearly appealed to Melody Maker , who acclaimed the album release as Man's 'Sgt Pepper', no less!
If you're looking for pure petulance in song, 'Rock & Roll You Out' is hard to beat; it was written by Deke after being refused admission to Pandora's nightclub in Swansea for wearing jeans. A sax solo, credited on the original sleeve to Chris Mercer, was replaced at the last moment by a locally-produced alternative. 'I like a brass section, but we really needed a harmonica, it was a blues thing. I was going to do it, but we needed a proper harmonica player and Anton Matthews said his brother could do it. he was really good; it was the only time I ever met him . . . he came in, did the solo and f***ed off.'
'You Don't Like Us' was a second piece of prime paranoia, this time from the other guitarist. 'It was basically about a holiday initially where I got everything ripped off. I took my wife out for a fortnight's holiday and we parked our car by a beach somewhere. We were driving down south, thought we'd stop off and got back to find everything gone. . .'
Exactly half of this album made it to the stage repertoire: 'You Don't Like Us', 'Bedtime Bone', 'Hard Way to Die' and 'Day and Night'. The latter's distinctive country hoedown slide guitar intro can still be heard in the Man set today, but as an instrumental interlude only. Shorn of the song, it sounds quite jolly . . . but lend an ear to the verse following the prelude and you'll discover it's guite a nasty Leonard-penned story of domination and devilment. Ken Whaley doesn't think the recorded version of 'Day And Night' is as good as the live performance, but what about that strange bleeping sound that links it to Rainbow Eyes? Deke: 'I rememeber we came in one day and switched the ARP (synthesiser) on, and it started playing this tune. We liked it, so we put it on tape.' Someone who didn't stay on the tape was founder-member Clive 'Clint' John, who dropped by the studios to add backing vocals but found his contribution erased 'because when we sobered up the next day we had second thoughts.'
Last but not least, the cover, which ended up somewhat differently from what had been planned. Like the logo, it was designed by Rick Griffin, the eccentric American artist who'd designed the sleeves of Quicksilver Messenger Service, Man's greatest single influence. (It was no coincidence that his artwork adorned 'Maximum Darkness', the live album recorded with Quicksilver axeman John Cipollina in 1975, now reissued as BGOCD43.)
On this occasion, Deke recalls, 'we wanted to give him as hard a test as possible. So we thought we'd give him a title: if you said the green bonkey climbs up a blue tree than he draws a green monkey climbing up a blue tree. So we came up with "Slow Motion" because it's purely a movement thing -- and how could he do slow motion?'
Giffin's responce was to have Mad magazine character Alfred E. Neuman shaking a fish, dropps of water falling from it as if in slow motion. 'Which is fine,' Leonard continues, 'but Mad objected -- which I always found ironic since they made their money lampooning -- so it was narrowed down to just the fish.' The original has only been seen of pre-release posters and as a rarity in album covers books. The sleeve would originally have been slated as a gatefold, hence the UAG catalog number prefix, but after all the shenanigans emerged as a single sleeve with an inner bag containing Deke's notes sent by telex from some foreign shore. Since the notes for 'Rhinos' were dictated by telephone, this was clearly an ongoing tradition. . .
Af for the back cover picture, taken in America on the previous tour, that too has a story to tell, due to the absence of Malcolm Morley. 'He decided to leave,' reveals Micky, 'hence he wasn't on the picture on the sleeve. That's what usually happens; whoever's not in the picture isn't in the band a few weeks later! Ken left in similar circumstances on the next US tour.' Curiously, Ken Whaley himself recalls 1974 as 'a bit of a limbo period -- our second US tour was being put on and off constantly, as far as I can remember.'
So there you have it. Only 'Hard Way To Die' survived intact to grace the Nineties Man set, yet that was one more track than the much-lauded 'Rhinos' managed! Today, 'Slow Motion' remains conpulsive if uncomfortable listening. The out-takes didn't get on there. Deke 'I think we probably preferred the stuff that came later.' Micky: 'We didn't want to end up like Leonard Cohen.' Happily, and for all its faults, 'Slow Motion' ended up as Man.
Had the cards fallen differently, it's not impossible it could have worn a much valued credit on its sleeve: 'A Winston O'Boogie production.' John Lennon, no less, had been headhunted to produce the album after hearing and enjoying a couple of 'Rhinos' tracks a Man-fan DJ in San Francisco had played him. Lennon's then-girlfriend May Pang was enrolled in the plot by a pal in United Artists' American office, putting Man albums on the turntable as the ex-Beatle woke up, got out of the bath, and so forth. There's no saying what effect Lennon might have had on this album had the plan succeded - but 'Beef Jerky', a track on his own 1974 release 'Walls And Bridges', is a close first cousin to Man's 'Spunk Rock'. . .
For now, though, turn up 'Slow Motion', less a primal scream than an affectionate punch in the guts: play to your favourite Leonard Cohen fan and hide all sharp instruments!
Michael Heatley
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