Sweden Rock Magazine - Prisoners in Paradise (translated!)
Sept 27, 2021 10:26:55 GMT 2
Post by Stein on Sept 27, 2021 10:26:55 GMT 2
The recent issue of Sweden Rock Magazine (#08/2021) features a special on the album Prisoners in Paradise with input from Joey, John Levén and Kee.
Here is my translation of the special!
EUROPE - Prisoners in Paradise
by Carl Linnaeus
When the Out of This World tour wrapped up in Brussels on April 5, 1989, EUROPE had the plan set for their fifth album. It was going to be more swinging, harder and riffier - and it would be ready in the foreseeable future. That did not happen.
The making of Prisoners in Paradise is like a three stage rocket. The first phase began in May 1989 when singer Joey Tempest, guitarist Kee Marcello, bassist John Levén, keyboardist Mic Michaeli and drummer Ian Haugland set up base in California to write, rehearse and record an album on the other side of the Atlantic for the first time. The change of scenery wasn't the only new thing. In a warehouse in San Francisco, the material would for the first time be put together by a collective. Gone were the days when pretty much all of the songs were written by Joey Tempest.
"We had a discussion and decided that everyone else in the band would be more involved in the songwriting," says Joey. "They had started to become more interested in it. They had gotten better and put more time into writing. Mic has always been very musical and had ideas, but here he started to get down to action with his material. Of course, Kee was also a songwriter and Levén started to come up with ideas. I welcomed it, I thought it was fantastic. We knew each other so well that it was easy to put the material together collectively."
For the most part, the band was living together. Each member had an apartment in a rental complex in San Francisco. Every morning they took the elevator down to the garage, hopped in two Chrysler LeBaron cars and went to the rehearsal room.
"Earlier, Joey had sent demos to us and then we'd meet up to rehearse them," says John Levén. "Now that we were living together and going to the rehearsal room every day with the mindset of writing songs, it was a different vibe. It was different to start from scratch, all together. Maybe that's why it became a little more guitar oriented and more relaxed. Out of This World had been more of an attempt to follow up The Final Countdown. Now we thought, 'Fuck it, let it loose.' Not that the previous albums were bad, but we thought we should riff it up a little more on the next album."
"For the first time I started to use 'drop-D' tuning in EUROPE," says Kee Marcello. "I had previously used this guitar tuning when I played on Mikael Rickfors' soul album Rickfors in 1986. Back then I did it because I liked to capture the chords in a different way, but now I did it to make the riffs sound fatter."
In England, the recurring hard rock festival Monsters Of Rock had to be canceled after the previous year's tragic accident when two spectators lost their lives in the turmoil that arose in the quagmire in front of the stage. In its place, on August 19 - the same day that Joey Tempest turned 26 - a one-day event was held at the National Bowl Amphitheater in Milton Keynes. EUROPE had been given the spot just below headliners Bon Jovi and made a detour from the rehearsals in San Francisco. The turnout was huge - 60,000 people - when EUROPE took the stage led by a straight-haired singer. The fact that the poodle hair was now history was symbolic. EUROPE were set to show that they had more than ballads and grandiose synth fanfares to offer. Daringly, they played four songs that were so new that no one had heard them - "Yesterday's News", "Seventh Sign", "Little Bit of Lovin'" and "Wild Child". The procedure was sassy. So was the material. The reaction did not take long. The important hard rock magazine Kerrang was so taken aback that they considered EUROPE to be louder than Motörhead. On the plane back to San Francisco, the five Swedes could be happy with their surprise attack. They had earned valuable hard rock credibility for their upcoming album.
Having tried out the new material in Milton Keynes, it was time for Los Angeles. On September 17, the band booked the legendary venue Whiskey a Go Go on the Sunset Strip. Another new song, "Bad Blood", had been added to the setlist. However, they would not perform as EUROPE.
"At that point we could have probably sold out an arena like Irvine Meadows, but we wanted to do a secret gig," says Kee. "It was the in thing to do and it was a perfect opportunity to see how the new songs would go down. We called ourselves Le Baron Boys, because Chrysler sponsored us with their cheaper LeBaron cars during the making of the album."
It turned out to be an excellent sponsorship deal for the carmaker, as the demo songs that were immortalized during this period are referred to as the Le Baron Boys recordings among fans, even to this day. These songs, recorded both in the warehouse in San Francisco and in the rehearsal studio S.I.R. in Hollywood, follow in the same rough footsteps as the new songs that were premiered live in August and September. "Rainbow Warrior", "Blame It On Me", "Wanted Man" and the suggestive ballad "Don't Know How to Love Anymore" exude a homogeneous vibe of 70s hard rock. However, one song stands out.
When Joey produced Tone Norum's album One of a Kind in 1986, he also provided her with material, including "Stranded" which, carried by its synth riff, would become a bit of a hit. EUROPE's rendition of "Stranded" is located among the so-called Le Baron Boys recordings.
"We thought Joey had written such a good song for Tone," says John Levén. "We reckoned we could do that one and rocked it up a little. It's a strong song, even if it's a little poppier."
"I don't know whose idea it was to pick that one up," says Joey and laughs. "We recorded a demo of it in the warehouse in San Francisco where we rehearsed. However, I never had any plans to release 'Stranded' with EUROPE, it was more of a test. I never felt it was an idea to go down that route with the band."
EUROPE's version of "Stranded" has a different bridge. However, Kee does not remember this recording. "The version I've heard has a drum machine and we would never have used that on a EUROPE demo. I think what leaked is Joey's original demo that he showed Tone. However, I remember that we tried out 'Stranded' in the rehearsal room. We did the same thing with 'Talk of the Town', a song that was on my previous band Easy Action's second album That Makes One. We tried it out before both Out of This World and Prisoners in Paradise. Joey liked it, it had a strong chorus, but we could never get the shuffle rhythm right."
Kee reckons that there are several songs that are incorrectly referred to as Le Baron Boys. "Joey did some demos in London with the famous songwriter Russ Ballard ('Never Gonna Say Goodbye' and 'Little Sinner'). It's not me but Russ playing the guitar. I can hear that in his awful vibrato."
"The material which is referred to as Le Baron Boys is more spontaneous and unfinished," says Joey. "You can hear that the lyrics aren't finished on certain songs. They are pure demos, but if you look at their expression, it's stripped down, raw and heavy. The idea of Prisoners in Paradise was to go further in that direction."
In the spring of 1990, the band moved operations to Los Angeles, where they would stay in apartments on North Fuller Avenue. Creativity was bubbling. All they needed now was a producer who could provide the material with the weight and authority it deserved.
"We had been discussing producers and we really liked the sound that Bob Rock stood for," says Joey. "We thought he made albums like The Cult's Sonic Temple sound superb, and heard that he was on his way to the top. We had started working with the legendary manager Herbie Herbert and he came down to the S.I.R. studios, where I remember that we were rehearsing at the same time as Lenny Kravitz. We asked Herbie to call Bob, which he did: 'Bob, I've got EUROPE here, they would really like to discuss making an album with you.' Bob was very positive. He flew us up to his studio in Vancouver, we met, went out and had some beers, talked and listened to our demos."
"We were damn happy after the meeting with Bob," says Kee. "Among other things, he was known for finding a new approach with bands that needed a vitamin injection. Just look at what he did with Mötley Crüe after their daft Girls, Girls, Girls. He did Dr. Feelgood where everything just slaps. It was really an injection of steroids and vitamin C. He had done similar things with other bands and was well-known for it. After our meeting with him we felt like, 'This is fantastic, now we really get a chance to do something beefy.' In our minds we had 'Wild Child' and 'Rainbow Warrior', these heavier, riffier songs in the back of our minds, and thought about what they could sound like with Bob Rock. We felt like, 'Wow, what an album this is going to be.'"
After shaking hands on producing EUROPE's fifth album, the party parted ways. The band was well-rehearsed at this point and was now just biding their time. They split up between Los Angeles, San Francisco and the Caribbean and were waiting to get into the studio.
"Everything was hunky-dory," says Joey about the plans to work with Bob Rock. "It really felt like everything was set. But it turned out that Metallica had also had discussions with him leading up to what would become their Black Album and I think it was a priority for him to work with them."
Curtain call. Suddenly the whole strategy had vanished into thin air. When manager Herbie Herbert received the cold shower, Kee was in the Turks and Caicos Islands, where the band members were registered for tax reasons and owned a house. The guitarist was lying in the pool when the telephone rang.
"It was Herbie who told us that we were up shit creek. Bob Rock was out of the picture and we had already started to book a world tour. Furthermore, Bob Rock's manager was producer Bruce Fairbairn, and Herbie and Bruce were good friends in private. They used to have a gang that once a year went up to Newfoundland in Canada, rented a big Jaws boat and went out and drank beer, smoked joints and fished blue marlin. Herbie was a bit old-fashioned when it came to business, a handshake went a long way for him. He had a solid reputation in the industry and people rarely dared to screw him. So when Bruce Fairbairn called him and said they were backing out, that there were no signed papers anyway, that was the last time Herbie talked to him. He told Bruce to go to hell. It was a fiery conversation. After that, they never talked again. Herbie cut all ties with him. They became mortal enemies, at least as far as Herbie was concerned. For us, it was a disaster, because we had everything planned out. What the hell were we going to do now?"
Beau Hill was always on the periphery. A producer who, thanks to his productions with Winger and Warrant, had been at the forefront of the radio-friendly hard rock sound that was customary at the midway point between the 80s and 90s. Joey remembers that Beau had approached him after the gig at Whiskey a Go Go in September 1989, extended his hand and expressed his desire to work with the band. Kee in turn says that he ran into Beau at the hard rock convention Foundations Forum a few days later and re-established an old contact, since Beau had been asked to produce what was supposed to be Easy Action's second album with original singer Zinny Zan in 1985.
"I said it was a shame that there was no collaboration with Easy Action, because it would have been fun to work with him since I liked what he had done on Ratt's Out of the Cellar," says Kee. "Beau said, 'Yes, but that was then, I would love to produce your current band.' I explained that we had already decided to work with Bob Rock. He said, 'How fun, but you know what it's like in this business - shit happens.' Then he gave me his business card. When Herbie called me on the Turks and Caicos Islands and painted a hellish scenario where we'd end up with an eight-figure loss for not having a album and going on a world tour, I came to think of Beau. I rummaged through all my jackets and found Beau's card, then called him and said, 'This is Kee, shit just happened.' This was only a few months before we were scheduled to go into the studio. Producers at that time, especially of that dignity, were usually booked two years in advance. Beau said, 'Oh,' and sighed. 'I'll call you back in ten minutes.' It was the longest ten minutes of my life. When he called back, he said it would work out. I called Herbie and said I had solved everything. After that he called me 'Keesus'. I actually saved our asses that time."
Here is my translation of the special!
EUROPE - Prisoners in Paradise
by Carl Linnaeus
When the Out of This World tour wrapped up in Brussels on April 5, 1989, EUROPE had the plan set for their fifth album. It was going to be more swinging, harder and riffier - and it would be ready in the foreseeable future. That did not happen.
The making of Prisoners in Paradise is like a three stage rocket. The first phase began in May 1989 when singer Joey Tempest, guitarist Kee Marcello, bassist John Levén, keyboardist Mic Michaeli and drummer Ian Haugland set up base in California to write, rehearse and record an album on the other side of the Atlantic for the first time. The change of scenery wasn't the only new thing. In a warehouse in San Francisco, the material would for the first time be put together by a collective. Gone were the days when pretty much all of the songs were written by Joey Tempest.
"We had a discussion and decided that everyone else in the band would be more involved in the songwriting," says Joey. "They had started to become more interested in it. They had gotten better and put more time into writing. Mic has always been very musical and had ideas, but here he started to get down to action with his material. Of course, Kee was also a songwriter and Levén started to come up with ideas. I welcomed it, I thought it was fantastic. We knew each other so well that it was easy to put the material together collectively."
For the most part, the band was living together. Each member had an apartment in a rental complex in San Francisco. Every morning they took the elevator down to the garage, hopped in two Chrysler LeBaron cars and went to the rehearsal room.
"Earlier, Joey had sent demos to us and then we'd meet up to rehearse them," says John Levén. "Now that we were living together and going to the rehearsal room every day with the mindset of writing songs, it was a different vibe. It was different to start from scratch, all together. Maybe that's why it became a little more guitar oriented and more relaxed. Out of This World had been more of an attempt to follow up The Final Countdown. Now we thought, 'Fuck it, let it loose.' Not that the previous albums were bad, but we thought we should riff it up a little more on the next album."
"For the first time I started to use 'drop-D' tuning in EUROPE," says Kee Marcello. "I had previously used this guitar tuning when I played on Mikael Rickfors' soul album Rickfors in 1986. Back then I did it because I liked to capture the chords in a different way, but now I did it to make the riffs sound fatter."
In England, the recurring hard rock festival Monsters Of Rock had to be canceled after the previous year's tragic accident when two spectators lost their lives in the turmoil that arose in the quagmire in front of the stage. In its place, on August 19 - the same day that Joey Tempest turned 26 - a one-day event was held at the National Bowl Amphitheater in Milton Keynes. EUROPE had been given the spot just below headliners Bon Jovi and made a detour from the rehearsals in San Francisco. The turnout was huge - 60,000 people - when EUROPE took the stage led by a straight-haired singer. The fact that the poodle hair was now history was symbolic. EUROPE were set to show that they had more than ballads and grandiose synth fanfares to offer. Daringly, they played four songs that were so new that no one had heard them - "Yesterday's News", "Seventh Sign", "Little Bit of Lovin'" and "Wild Child". The procedure was sassy. So was the material. The reaction did not take long. The important hard rock magazine Kerrang was so taken aback that they considered EUROPE to be louder than Motörhead. On the plane back to San Francisco, the five Swedes could be happy with their surprise attack. They had earned valuable hard rock credibility for their upcoming album.
Having tried out the new material in Milton Keynes, it was time for Los Angeles. On September 17, the band booked the legendary venue Whiskey a Go Go on the Sunset Strip. Another new song, "Bad Blood", had been added to the setlist. However, they would not perform as EUROPE.
"At that point we could have probably sold out an arena like Irvine Meadows, but we wanted to do a secret gig," says Kee. "It was the in thing to do and it was a perfect opportunity to see how the new songs would go down. We called ourselves Le Baron Boys, because Chrysler sponsored us with their cheaper LeBaron cars during the making of the album."
It turned out to be an excellent sponsorship deal for the carmaker, as the demo songs that were immortalized during this period are referred to as the Le Baron Boys recordings among fans, even to this day. These songs, recorded both in the warehouse in San Francisco and in the rehearsal studio S.I.R. in Hollywood, follow in the same rough footsteps as the new songs that were premiered live in August and September. "Rainbow Warrior", "Blame It On Me", "Wanted Man" and the suggestive ballad "Don't Know How to Love Anymore" exude a homogeneous vibe of 70s hard rock. However, one song stands out.
When Joey produced Tone Norum's album One of a Kind in 1986, he also provided her with material, including "Stranded" which, carried by its synth riff, would become a bit of a hit. EUROPE's rendition of "Stranded" is located among the so-called Le Baron Boys recordings.
"We thought Joey had written such a good song for Tone," says John Levén. "We reckoned we could do that one and rocked it up a little. It's a strong song, even if it's a little poppier."
"I don't know whose idea it was to pick that one up," says Joey and laughs. "We recorded a demo of it in the warehouse in San Francisco where we rehearsed. However, I never had any plans to release 'Stranded' with EUROPE, it was more of a test. I never felt it was an idea to go down that route with the band."
EUROPE's version of "Stranded" has a different bridge. However, Kee does not remember this recording. "The version I've heard has a drum machine and we would never have used that on a EUROPE demo. I think what leaked is Joey's original demo that he showed Tone. However, I remember that we tried out 'Stranded' in the rehearsal room. We did the same thing with 'Talk of the Town', a song that was on my previous band Easy Action's second album That Makes One. We tried it out before both Out of This World and Prisoners in Paradise. Joey liked it, it had a strong chorus, but we could never get the shuffle rhythm right."
Kee reckons that there are several songs that are incorrectly referred to as Le Baron Boys. "Joey did some demos in London with the famous songwriter Russ Ballard ('Never Gonna Say Goodbye' and 'Little Sinner'). It's not me but Russ playing the guitar. I can hear that in his awful vibrato."
"The material which is referred to as Le Baron Boys is more spontaneous and unfinished," says Joey. "You can hear that the lyrics aren't finished on certain songs. They are pure demos, but if you look at their expression, it's stripped down, raw and heavy. The idea of Prisoners in Paradise was to go further in that direction."
In the spring of 1990, the band moved operations to Los Angeles, where they would stay in apartments on North Fuller Avenue. Creativity was bubbling. All they needed now was a producer who could provide the material with the weight and authority it deserved.
"We had been discussing producers and we really liked the sound that Bob Rock stood for," says Joey. "We thought he made albums like The Cult's Sonic Temple sound superb, and heard that he was on his way to the top. We had started working with the legendary manager Herbie Herbert and he came down to the S.I.R. studios, where I remember that we were rehearsing at the same time as Lenny Kravitz. We asked Herbie to call Bob, which he did: 'Bob, I've got EUROPE here, they would really like to discuss making an album with you.' Bob was very positive. He flew us up to his studio in Vancouver, we met, went out and had some beers, talked and listened to our demos."
"We were damn happy after the meeting with Bob," says Kee. "Among other things, he was known for finding a new approach with bands that needed a vitamin injection. Just look at what he did with Mötley Crüe after their daft Girls, Girls, Girls. He did Dr. Feelgood where everything just slaps. It was really an injection of steroids and vitamin C. He had done similar things with other bands and was well-known for it. After our meeting with him we felt like, 'This is fantastic, now we really get a chance to do something beefy.' In our minds we had 'Wild Child' and 'Rainbow Warrior', these heavier, riffier songs in the back of our minds, and thought about what they could sound like with Bob Rock. We felt like, 'Wow, what an album this is going to be.'"
After shaking hands on producing EUROPE's fifth album, the party parted ways. The band was well-rehearsed at this point and was now just biding their time. They split up between Los Angeles, San Francisco and the Caribbean and were waiting to get into the studio.
"Everything was hunky-dory," says Joey about the plans to work with Bob Rock. "It really felt like everything was set. But it turned out that Metallica had also had discussions with him leading up to what would become their Black Album and I think it was a priority for him to work with them."
Curtain call. Suddenly the whole strategy had vanished into thin air. When manager Herbie Herbert received the cold shower, Kee was in the Turks and Caicos Islands, where the band members were registered for tax reasons and owned a house. The guitarist was lying in the pool when the telephone rang.
"It was Herbie who told us that we were up shit creek. Bob Rock was out of the picture and we had already started to book a world tour. Furthermore, Bob Rock's manager was producer Bruce Fairbairn, and Herbie and Bruce were good friends in private. They used to have a gang that once a year went up to Newfoundland in Canada, rented a big Jaws boat and went out and drank beer, smoked joints and fished blue marlin. Herbie was a bit old-fashioned when it came to business, a handshake went a long way for him. He had a solid reputation in the industry and people rarely dared to screw him. So when Bruce Fairbairn called him and said they were backing out, that there were no signed papers anyway, that was the last time Herbie talked to him. He told Bruce to go to hell. It was a fiery conversation. After that, they never talked again. Herbie cut all ties with him. They became mortal enemies, at least as far as Herbie was concerned. For us, it was a disaster, because we had everything planned out. What the hell were we going to do now?"
Beau Hill was always on the periphery. A producer who, thanks to his productions with Winger and Warrant, had been at the forefront of the radio-friendly hard rock sound that was customary at the midway point between the 80s and 90s. Joey remembers that Beau had approached him after the gig at Whiskey a Go Go in September 1989, extended his hand and expressed his desire to work with the band. Kee in turn says that he ran into Beau at the hard rock convention Foundations Forum a few days later and re-established an old contact, since Beau had been asked to produce what was supposed to be Easy Action's second album with original singer Zinny Zan in 1985.
"I said it was a shame that there was no collaboration with Easy Action, because it would have been fun to work with him since I liked what he had done on Ratt's Out of the Cellar," says Kee. "Beau said, 'Yes, but that was then, I would love to produce your current band.' I explained that we had already decided to work with Bob Rock. He said, 'How fun, but you know what it's like in this business - shit happens.' Then he gave me his business card. When Herbie called me on the Turks and Caicos Islands and painted a hellish scenario where we'd end up with an eight-figure loss for not having a album and going on a world tour, I came to think of Beau. I rummaged through all my jackets and found Beau's card, then called him and said, 'This is Kee, shit just happened.' This was only a few months before we were scheduled to go into the studio. Producers at that time, especially of that dignity, were usually booked two years in advance. Beau said, 'Oh,' and sighed. 'I'll call you back in ten minutes.' It was the longest ten minutes of my life. When he called back, he said it would work out. I called Herbie and said I had solved everything. After that he called me 'Keesus'. I actually saved our asses that time."
(you can watch that interview 