Album of the Day — February 22
Missing Persons — Spring Session M — 1982
Missing Persons — Spring Session M — 1982
22.February.2021
Missing Persons
Spring Session M
1982
The hallmark of a classic album is its ability to transcend the era in which it was recorded and released.
Missing Persons Spring Session M is a classic album.
Last week, musician/artist Reggie Watts posted the video for Missing Person’s “Destination Unknown” on IG, and somebody quipped: “Lady Gaga should give Dale Bozzio half of her money.”
Millennials may get their knickers in a knot over that comment, and while I don’t entirely agree with the comment, I agree with the sentiment.
Dale Bozzio wasn’t the first to be quirky, but she did help normalize quirkiness and individuality to the MTV generation. And much like Lady Gaga, she and her bandmates were loaded with talent.
But then, all that is old becomes new again …eventually. It just may wear different clothes …or meat suits.
Nonetheless, when Missing Persons debut Spring Session M (an anagram of Missing Persons …clever) album emerged, there was nothing quite like them. Even among “New Wave” artists.
Sure, an argument could be made for Siouxsie and the Banshees or Kate Bush (to name just two), but it would be a few more years before those two artists found success on this side of the pond.
What made the LA band stand out from the other “New Wave” bands were two things:
Exceptional musicianship. This is at the core of Missing Persons — guitarist Warren Cuccurullo, drummer Terry Bozzio, and bass player Patrick O’Hearn were all members (at one point) of Frank Zappa’s band. Getting a gig with Frank Zappa was one of the high watermarks for any rock musician seeking legitimacy.
As good as the core group was, it was Dale Bozzio’s (also a veteran of Zappa’s band) unique high-pitched staccato singing style.
The Missing Persons origin story, post-Zappa, began by convincing Cuccurullo’s father to finance a demo of his son’s new band , consisting of Warren and the married Bozzio’s. The trio then booked time at friend and former boss Frank Zappa’s new studio. Hiring studio musicians to flesh out their sound, Missing Persons emerged with a four-song EP called Missing Persons.
The EP was part pop music, part synth, part rock, and all talent.
Aggressive touring led to Missing Persons becoming the “must-see” live act in Los Angeles. Adding fuel to that fire was their song “Mental Hopscotch,” which had become a #1 song on the influential LA-based radio station KROQ.
After a couple of years on that treadmill, a bidding war broke out and Missing Persons signed with Capitol Records.
After signing the band, the band got Patrick O’Hearn on bass (another Zappa veteran) and Chuck Wild on synthesizer and ensconced themselves in the studio with producer Ken Scott (Pink Floyd, Jeff Beck). Wisely, Missing Persons combined the four-song EP with eight new songs and emerged with Spring Session M.
It’s much too diminutive to dismiss Missing Persons as a “New Wave” band or call Spring Session M a “New Wave” album. There are elements of that here, primarily synth. Pick any song, but if you want to hear a fine example of Cuccurullo’s blistering guitar work, listen to “Mental Hopscotch.” You’ll also hear Terry Bozzio’s indelible ability to maintain the band's unique beat — it may sound like a drum machine, it’s not.
The trio of Bozzio, Bozzio, and Cuccurullo maintain a level of excellence throughout Spring Session M that, arguably, was not common among other “New-Wave” bands.
When critics took the time to ignore the band's aesthetic (which was odd), Spring Session M received mostly positive reviews. The album peaked at #17 on the Billboard Top 200 and quickly went gold.
All 12 songs were written by some combination of the Missing Person trinity (Bozzio, Bozzio, and Cuccurullo).
Spring Session M spawned four singles:
“Words”
“Destination Unknown”
“Windows”
“Walking in L.A.”
The song “It Ain’t None of Your Business,” as sung by Dale Bozzio, comes across as a very pro-feminist song:
Don’t — tell me what to do
And don’t you ask me where I’m going to
I have to do what’s right for me
Why is that so hard for you to see?
Tryin to get along with you is not an easy thing to do
Your suspicious nature drives me mad
You’re wrecking everything that we had
It ain’t none of your business
Where I’m going
It ain’t none of your business
Who I’m seeing
It ain’t none of your business
Discovering it was written by her husband Terry Bozzio and Warren Cuccurullo makes it seem less feminist and a little darker.
Part of the original four-song EP and Spring Session M “Destination Unknown” is as much an existential crisis as anything written by Sarte or Camus:
Life is so strange when you don’t know
How can you tell where you’re going to?
You can’t be sure of any situation
Something could change, and then you won’t know
You ask yourself
Where do we go from here?
It seems so all too near
Just as far beyond as I can see
I still don’t know what this all means to me
You tell yourself
I have nowhere to go
I don’t know what to do
And I don’t even know the time of day
I guess it doesn’t matter anyway
Missing Persons participated in all the big moments of their time: rigorous touring, quirky videos that MTV played ad infinitum and a slot on the 1983 US Festival.
The festival, financed by Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, was conceived to be the next generation of Woodstock. Missing Persons played with top-tier artists like David Bowie, U2, The Pretenders, and The Clash.
Correctly, Missing Persons did NOT play on the first day, which was “New Wave Day,” but on the third day, “Rock Day.”
Because at the end of the day, Missing Persons was a rock band.
The band limped along for two more albums, Rhyme & Reason and Color in Your Life. Despite the latter being produced by Chic wunderkind Bernard Edwards, neither album got much commercial attention.
During a quick promotional tour for Color in Your Life, the Bozzios marriage went down in flames …along with it, Missing Persons.