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| Gives a man time to think... |
The Hit
Rick Evans wrote the lyrics for “In the Year 2525” in 1964 (using the old film, Metropolis, for a backdrop), sometime after he met Denny Zager at Nebraska Wesleyan University and sometime before they parted ways for a while - Vietnam, life, etc. When they reconnected again in 1968 and Evans played his pass at the song for Zager, who found a lot in the lyrics, but less in the music. In Zager’s words:
“Rick (Evans) said he wrote the lyrics in 10 minutes in the back of a Volkswagen van after a night of partying and a lot of Mary Jane. He tried the song with a few bands he was playing with at the time, but the music wasn't right and it wasn't working. I thought the lyrics were intriguing, so I rewrote the music so it blended better with the lyrics.”
The reworked version became such a hit around the Nebraska /concert college circuit that an owner at one of the venues fronted the money to record it - with another Evans-penned tune (“Little Kids”) as a b-side, and the single blew up from the regional market to holding the top spot in the Billboard Top 100 for six weeks near or around the moon landing (so, July 1969). Inspired by Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, it’s a heavy tune that reports from a future dystopia over a burned-out riff on hippie-rock. To flag two takes on “In the Year 2525’s” meaning:
“…a Randian dystopia where, in one instance, people's actions, words and thoughts are preprogrammed into a daily pill.”
Or, more specifically:
“The last stanzas of the song suggest mankind undergoes a continuing cycle of birth, death, and rebirth.”
So, there’s that. Also, if I could take only one album to a desert island and it was Zager & Evans, I would stop listening to music. I don’t mean this as a knock to anyone involved as people or artists - and I believe they leaned in the latter direction - but their sound includes an unusually high number of personal irritants. Maybe the problem was starting with a concept album?
The Rest of the Story
Wikipedia’s entry on Zager & Evans touches nearly every base - e.g., the all-Nebraska line-up, the other band members (e.g., Mark Dalton (bass) and Dave Trupp (drums)) - but glosses over all the personal issues that doomed Zager and Evans to be one-hit wonders. Also, for once, the “one-hit wonder” title is very well-earned:
“As of 2019, the duo remains the only act to have a chart-topping hit on both sides of the Atlantic and never have another chart single in Billboard or the UK.”
The tried a couple times, first releasing material around “In the Year 2525,” and again on an eponymous second album with “Mr. Turnkey” (pick of the bunch for me), but that only charted at higher numbers and only on the Australian charts. Again, and not to shit on a bunch of dudes who made it all the way from Nebraska doing, while doing some really out-there shit, you only have to listen to Zager & Evans to figure out why they didn’t go anywhere after. The story gets a lot more interesting, once you keep digging.
First things first, I’ve decided to read this 2014 “phone-call” between Zager and Evans as a flight of comic fancy - if one that doesn’t shade reality all that much. To flag some details: Zager & Evans ended both abruptly and not on the best of terms; moreover, looking back some years later, Trupp revealed that he never played “In the Year 2525” after it became a hit and, cruel twist, he got paid “contract scale” (i.e., “a couple thousand dollars”) for his studio work on the recording. Here’s why that mattered:
“The song continues to be played today. You may have heard it in Alien 3, or on a TV variety show. In 1993, an Asian techno-pop group climbed Japan’s Top-40 list with it. According to Wikipedia, ‘In the Year 2525’ has been covered at least 60 times, in seven languages.”
The specific accuracy of Trupp’s guesstimate on what the song returned aside (he called it a “$10 million dollar song”), that sure looks like a lot of royalty revenue foregone. The interview that came from happened before Evans’ death (natural causes) in 2018, but Trupp offers a plausible case that he was there when they drove the single to a regional hit by selling discs out of the trunk of a car - and fast too.
The other side of the story comes from the reminiscences of a friend of Evans, written for the same outlet (the Lincoln Journal-Star) in 2019. The author, L. Kent Wolgamott, talks about corresponding with a man who comes off as a recluse, an obsessive who satisfies his curiosity one project at a time. [Ed. - That’s a very humanizing read, by the way, even if it’s favorable.] To close shop on what I think of the band, the entire project reads like bad art to me, musically, lyrically, the whole nine yards. To given Evans credit, he absolutely took chances artistically, a high-risk, high-reward proposition, and I'll never stop praising that. That doesn't mean they can't miss with some part of the audience. Or a lot of it. Or just me. It doesn't matter. Like what you like, throw money at it, amen.
With Evans’ passing, the role of default spokesman fell to Zager (actually, it was probably always more him than Evans). Whether he’s geeking out on Chet Atkins guitar playing or looking back on his dystopian hit during a very dystopian year (love ya, 2020!), Zager looks like a man who found his calling (custom guitars) and a way to fund it (co-writing a massive goddamn hit). He’s still in Nebraska, very much doing his thing, making guitars for Lady Gaga, etc. All while the world burns down around him (and his son, who’s part of the business). Even he notes the tension with Evans, if while acknowledging it happened a while back.
About the Sampler
I tried to not make the sampler double as an act of hostility, so let’s see how I did. While “liking” any of this didn’t come easy, I dropped my two favorites in the middle of it - e.g., “In My House" and “Taxi Man” - to help carry people through the rest. Going the other way, I included songs like “Fred” (a bad version of dozens of other similar songs), “I Remember Heide” (as an era-appropriate cliché), and “The Plastic Park” and “Crutches” (the same, but more) as the kinds of songs that straight-up chase me away. For what it’s worth, I’d steer anyone who told me they liked “In the Year 2525” and wanted to hear more to In the Year 2525 (Exordium & Terminus). The eponymous follow-up feels like a concept album all the way down to the “Overture” that opens it, only from a band that didn’t lay the foundation for such a wild leap.
Rick Evans wrote the lyrics for “In the Year 2525” in 1964 (using the old film, Metropolis, for a backdrop), sometime after he met Denny Zager at Nebraska Wesleyan University and sometime before they parted ways for a while - Vietnam, life, etc. When they reconnected again in 1968 and Evans played his pass at the song for Zager, who found a lot in the lyrics, but less in the music. In Zager’s words:
“Rick (Evans) said he wrote the lyrics in 10 minutes in the back of a Volkswagen van after a night of partying and a lot of Mary Jane. He tried the song with a few bands he was playing with at the time, but the music wasn't right and it wasn't working. I thought the lyrics were intriguing, so I rewrote the music so it blended better with the lyrics.”
The reworked version became such a hit around the Nebraska /concert college circuit that an owner at one of the venues fronted the money to record it - with another Evans-penned tune (“Little Kids”) as a b-side, and the single blew up from the regional market to holding the top spot in the Billboard Top 100 for six weeks near or around the moon landing (so, July 1969). Inspired by Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, it’s a heavy tune that reports from a future dystopia over a burned-out riff on hippie-rock. To flag two takes on “In the Year 2525’s” meaning:
“…a Randian dystopia where, in one instance, people's actions, words and thoughts are preprogrammed into a daily pill.”
Or, more specifically:
“The last stanzas of the song suggest mankind undergoes a continuing cycle of birth, death, and rebirth.”
So, there’s that. Also, if I could take only one album to a desert island and it was Zager & Evans, I would stop listening to music. I don’t mean this as a knock to anyone involved as people or artists - and I believe they leaned in the latter direction - but their sound includes an unusually high number of personal irritants. Maybe the problem was starting with a concept album?
The Rest of the Story
Wikipedia’s entry on Zager & Evans touches nearly every base - e.g., the all-Nebraska line-up, the other band members (e.g., Mark Dalton (bass) and Dave Trupp (drums)) - but glosses over all the personal issues that doomed Zager and Evans to be one-hit wonders. Also, for once, the “one-hit wonder” title is very well-earned:
“As of 2019, the duo remains the only act to have a chart-topping hit on both sides of the Atlantic and never have another chart single in Billboard or the UK.”
The tried a couple times, first releasing material around “In the Year 2525,” and again on an eponymous second album with “Mr. Turnkey” (pick of the bunch for me), but that only charted at higher numbers and only on the Australian charts. Again, and not to shit on a bunch of dudes who made it all the way from Nebraska doing, while doing some really out-there shit, you only have to listen to Zager & Evans to figure out why they didn’t go anywhere after. The story gets a lot more interesting, once you keep digging.
First things first, I’ve decided to read this 2014 “phone-call” between Zager and Evans as a flight of comic fancy - if one that doesn’t shade reality all that much. To flag some details: Zager & Evans ended both abruptly and not on the best of terms; moreover, looking back some years later, Trupp revealed that he never played “In the Year 2525” after it became a hit and, cruel twist, he got paid “contract scale” (i.e., “a couple thousand dollars”) for his studio work on the recording. Here’s why that mattered:
“The song continues to be played today. You may have heard it in Alien 3, or on a TV variety show. In 1993, an Asian techno-pop group climbed Japan’s Top-40 list with it. According to Wikipedia, ‘In the Year 2525’ has been covered at least 60 times, in seven languages.”
The specific accuracy of Trupp’s guesstimate on what the song returned aside (he called it a “$10 million dollar song”), that sure looks like a lot of royalty revenue foregone. The interview that came from happened before Evans’ death (natural causes) in 2018, but Trupp offers a plausible case that he was there when they drove the single to a regional hit by selling discs out of the trunk of a car - and fast too.
The other side of the story comes from the reminiscences of a friend of Evans, written for the same outlet (the Lincoln Journal-Star) in 2019. The author, L. Kent Wolgamott, talks about corresponding with a man who comes off as a recluse, an obsessive who satisfies his curiosity one project at a time. [Ed. - That’s a very humanizing read, by the way, even if it’s favorable.] To close shop on what I think of the band, the entire project reads like bad art to me, musically, lyrically, the whole nine yards. To given Evans credit, he absolutely took chances artistically, a high-risk, high-reward proposition, and I'll never stop praising that. That doesn't mean they can't miss with some part of the audience. Or a lot of it. Or just me. It doesn't matter. Like what you like, throw money at it, amen.
With Evans’ passing, the role of default spokesman fell to Zager (actually, it was probably always more him than Evans). Whether he’s geeking out on Chet Atkins guitar playing or looking back on his dystopian hit during a very dystopian year (love ya, 2020!), Zager looks like a man who found his calling (custom guitars) and a way to fund it (co-writing a massive goddamn hit). He’s still in Nebraska, very much doing his thing, making guitars for Lady Gaga, etc. All while the world burns down around him (and his son, who’s part of the business). Even he notes the tension with Evans, if while acknowledging it happened a while back.
About the Sampler
I tried to not make the sampler double as an act of hostility, so let’s see how I did. While “liking” any of this didn’t come easy, I dropped my two favorites in the middle of it - e.g., “In My House" and “Taxi Man” - to help carry people through the rest. Going the other way, I included songs like “Fred” (a bad version of dozens of other similar songs), “I Remember Heide” (as an era-appropriate cliché), and “The Plastic Park” and “Crutches” (the same, but more) as the kinds of songs that straight-up chase me away. For what it’s worth, I’d steer anyone who told me they liked “In the Year 2525” and wanted to hear more to In the Year 2525 (Exordium & Terminus). The eponymous follow-up feels like a concept album all the way down to the “Overture” that opens it, only from a band that didn’t lay the foundation for such a wild leap.
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