Blessed Is the Meek:
Believe It
Record review by Clark Humphrey for The Stranger, 10/26/95
The press kit for the compilation CD It’s Hard to Believe It: The Amazing World of Joe Meek (Razor & Tie) talks about the early-’60s UK record producer-engineer-songwriter as an Ed Wood of music, a tragic figure of promotional energy but dubious talent at the center of a stable of bizarre non-stars. Not quite so. Joe Meek was a troubled genius who never came to terms with his homosexuality and eventually did himself in, but he was also a technical wizard, a savvy self-promoter (the first successful independent producer in the EMI-ruled UK record biz), and someone with a highly developed sense of what made a great pop single. The hundreds of sessions staged in his London home studio indeed included a lot of schmaltz and tripe, but even his secondary work conveyed a sense of urgency and excitement.
And unlike Wood, Meek had genuine hits. The entire electic-power-pop strain of music can trace its roots to the eternal space-age instrumental “Telstar,” which leads the CD. Credited to the Tornadoes, who essentially executed only the rhythm tracks, the tune is really a tribute to Meek’s writing, engineering and tape-manipulations, and to his space-age wonderment at the possibilities of aural fantasy. More importantly, it’s a lesson in deliberate lo-fi. Meek had his frequent partner Geoff Goddard perform the lead on a clavioline, a primitive electric organ; he then used equipment of his own devising to compress its sound. The result is a delicate clash between the galactic imagery of the arrangement and the honed-in focus of the final sound. It is, as all great pop singles are, a brief moment of perfection.
The CD’s other 19 cuts will be first-time experiences for most of you. (Even its other U.S. Top 10 hit, “Have I The Right” by the Honeycombs, isn’t really part of today’s classic-rock canon.) They’re a cross-section of mostly US-inspired styles of the day: Country-rock, blues-rock, good-girl balladeering, dead-teenager rock, monster-movie rock (including the novelty great Screaming Lord Sutch), note-perfect tributes to Buddy Holly and Eddie Cochran, even Stereo Action bachelor-pad music. They all feed easily into Meek’s precision primitivism. Even the dross shows off his eccentric genius, adding echo-on-reverb-on-compression and string sections from nowhere to make the most of even the tritest material. He’d turned down the chance to produce the first Beatles record, preferring to work with studio bands and pre-fab celebrities he could personally mold (bleach-blond pretty boy Heinz, Petula Clark wannabe Glenda Collins).
By February 1967, when a distraught Meek shot his landlady and then himself, the UK pop revolution he’d pioneered had passed him by. By the end of the year, Sgt. Pepper and prog-rock would render the pop single an obsolete commodity for the next decade. But his work survives; and now’s the perfect time to bring it back.
