If you didn't read my previous post on Liz Phair and her Girly-Sound demos, then let me reiterate my adoration for Liz and her work throughout her career. Yes, she hasn't been as consistent in recent years, but there are reasons and such things couldn't shake my respect for her. That said, her third full length, whitechocolatespaceegg, is a difficult piece to tie down. It's not nearly as in-your-face as her previous albums and deals more with familial issues. It's worth noting that at the time of it's creation and release she had recently given birth to her first child and was in the process of a divorce for which she acknowledged fault as she'd had an affair, all of which made the album sound more mature and clearly scared her then label, Capitol Records. The infamous story is that Gary Gersh, then Capitol's president, stated that the initial version of the album was "music for housewives" and demanded she continue working on the album.
To add injury to insult, the label she was initially signed to through Capitol, Matador Records, was in the midst of a messy end-of-contract negotiation with Capitol and, to achieve their release, signed Liz's contract over which released all other Matador artists from the original agreement and bound Liz to Capitol. Of the matter, in 2003 Liz said in an interview,
Matador sold themselves, me included. This is how it really works: Matador is an indie and they sold themselves twice to major labels, and I went along with them whether I liked it or not. Then Capitol, under Gary Gersh, dropped Matador. For Matador to get out of their deal, they sold me to Capitol, [and Capitol] kept me. It's really fucked up when you put it that way. I haven't had any safe zone where I was working for over a decade. It all worked out okay, but it took a long time.
Altogether, that is probably the nicest way you could put it, and you can read that whole interview here if you'd like, it's pretty damn good.
Oh yeah, long-time friend Jim Ellison of Material Issue committed suicide in 1996, which couldn't have made anything easier. Sometimes, when it rains it truly pours.
In the end, Liz earned too much shit and far too few sales in regards to whitechocolatespaceegg, and that's a bloody shame. It's different to be certain, but it's still a great album with great songs and that's what really matters. With that said, fans of Liz have been trading demos and studio sessions for the album for quite some time, leading to two bootleg comps of unreleased material, the first focusing on thirty tracks of varying quality, many actually repeating themselves, and the second consisting of tapes found left by Jason Chasko who had worked on the album, which featured alternate mixes, rough mixes, non-album tracks and the complete original album to boot! Man, that's a lot of Liz! As cool as all these recordings are, the core, for me at least, is the original version of the album, and that's what I'm featuring here today. That's not to say I won't post the other stuff, and I plan to do so eventually, but the album comes first.
For the record, several of the tracks here are the same as the versions that saw release on the official issue of whitechocolatespaceegg, though they're almost all different mixes, so don't be surprised if they sound similar. Enjoy!
Liz Phair - whitechocolatespaceegg (original version)
NOTE: Okay, I'm gonna give it another shot. This time, I made a new rar from the contents of the original and also uploaded track four on it's own. It's highlighted in the tracklist so you can grab it without having to re-download the whole album. There is still a recovery archive included in the rar but I guess it doesn't help much if you're on a mac. I'll have to look into better solutions for problems like these, but the only one that comes to mind is uploading each file individually, and I've never wanted to do that. Anyway, I'll let everyone know when I know more. For now, let me know if there are any more problems. Oh, and one more thing, just in case the new upload of the full album doesn't work right, I left the initial re-up active here so grab it if necessary. Enjoy!
01 White Chocolate Space Egg
02 Fantasize
03 Headache
04 Big Tall Man
05 Baby Got Going
06 Only Son
07 Bars Of The Bed
08 Oh My God
09 Ride
10 Waiting For The Bird (White Bird Of Texas)
11 Perfect World
12 Desperado Theme
13 Tell Me What You Like
14 What Makes You Happy
15 Freak Of Nature
16 Girls' Room
17 Russian Girl
PS - Big ole thank you to the fine phans of Phair out there who share her rarer recordings. You make a guy who lived near Oberlin College but didn't partake in their uptight bullshit extremely happy!
PS2 - R.I.P. Jim Ellison
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