Bizarre Follow-ups

Sometimes musicians return to the studio after big hit albums by trying to top that album commercially. However, here are 4 albums where the artists instead went in a memorably weirder, less-commercial direction.

HIDDEN GEMS

Todd Rundgren | A Wizard, A True Star
After the seeming fluke success of his 1972 double-album Something/Anything? — which was full of soft-rock staples you’re sure to hear now and again in your friendly neighborhood grocery or at the dentist’s office — Todd Rundgren responded by making his weirdest, least accessible album to that point. To call this album “schizo” is an understatement. The first half is dominated by oddball 60-to-90-second songs, typified by the track “Dogfight Giggle,” where the sounds of dogs barking and someone giggling are sped-up and played over and over. Even when the album relaxes into more conventional songs, the choices are odd: Rundgren (who, it should be pointed out, is one of the whitest people in the world) does a 10-minute medley of R&B hits including “Ooh Baby Baby” and “La La Means I Love You.” If you have the right sense of humor or sense of adventure, you will find this album greatly rewarding.

Harry Nilsson | Son of Schmilsson
In a way, Harry Nilsson’s hit album Nilsson Schmilsson is as weird as anything he’s done. I mean, side two of the album features the sappy piano ballad “Without You,” back-to-back with the goofy, vaguely Caribbean lark “Coconut” (later used in Reservoir Dogs), and then chased with the 7-minute down-and-dirty rock freak-out “Jump Into The Fire.” So the similarly eclectic follow-up album Son of Schmilsson should have been a big hit too, right? Of course, the catchiest song on the album, “You’re Breaking My Heart,” has a refrain centered around the phrase “Fuck you,” so radio airplay was out of the question. Similarly, Nilsson refuses to tone down his often smutty or bitterly dark sense of humor throughout the album, making each song just subversive enough to miss the mainstream despite its impeccable studio craft. Now, a few decades later, the mainstream has shifted enough that your modern listener should be able to listen and end up appropriately taken with the quality of the songwriting and performances, with little chance of being offended.

Fleetwood Mac | Tusk
Fleetwood Mac had been tooling around as a blues rock band for about 7 years before Lindsay Buckingham and Stevie Nicks joined the band and made it a commercial behemoth with the group’s self-titled 1975 album and a little record from 1977 you may know called Rumours. Inevitably, after Rumours sold a gazillion copies, Lindsey Buckingham decided he was a Brian Wilson-caliber genius and piloted the band toward making the overstuffed double-album Tusk, which offered up a handful of smooth tracks that Rumours fans would dig, like Stevie Nicks’s “Sara” and Christine McVie’s “Over & Over.” However, there’s a lot of time to fill on two records, so there’s also a bunch of straight-up weirdness filler, like the marching band and primal drumming of the title track, the twisted bluegrass of “That’s Enough For Me,” and the lo-fi crunch of “The Ledge.” The album is infinitely more interesting for the inclusion of these seemingly out-of-place bursts of energy to break up the tasteful mid-tempo numbers.

The Clash | Sandinista!
Subscribing to the notion that bigger must be better, The Clash followed their seminal double-album London Calling with the triple (!) album Sandinista!. The conventional wisdom about this album is that it only has one memorable song, the opener “The Magnificent Seven,” and the rest is a barely discernible, indulgent hodgepodge. And, indeed, Sandinista! features lots of world music styles: jazz, disco, and any number things of that aren’t punk rock. But – and here’s the key – there’s a ton of catchy tunes on here. From the reggae of “One More Time/One More Dub” and the early white-man rap of “Lightning Strikes” to the more conventionally Clash-y rock of “Police On My Back” and the pseudo-‘50s bop of “The Leader,” this album has more than enough songs to justify its 2 ¼-hour length.

by Justin Remer