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Beat Construction - The Free Design / You (Really) Could Be Born Again
By Fred Schmalz
The Free Design were family. The musically trained Dedrick clan landed in New York City from a small town outside Buffalo in the mid-1960s and decided to start playing out on the Greenwich Village coffee shop circuit. Younger brother Chris's arranging and songwriting skills flowered, and the group, at that point consisting of Chris, Bruce, and sister Sandy, caught the attention of producer Enoch Light, who signed them to his fledgling Project 3 label. On the surface, the Free Design might appear to be a cynical 1960s record producers Brady-meets-Partridge marketing ploy: siblings singing sugary pop harmonies. The truth, however, is far from that.
Their first single, the anti-gravity "Kites Are Fun," grazed the charts in 1967, and an album of the same name quickly followed. At first listen, Kites Are Fun sounds like a kind of parody - in the expansiveness of the arrangements, the un-ironic wholesomeness of the lyrics - it's almost like children's music. But the simplicity of the title track's recorder solo belies something more fragile, some complex emotional trigger. Soon, all the shiny innocence starts to creep you out. That edge rescues the Free Design's sound from the easy listening bin.
"My mindset then was, 'How do I take everything I've ever learned about music and create something that will work in this new situation, hopefully in a slightly new and unique style?'" Chris Dedrick remembers. To give potential buyers a touchstone, Kites Are Fun includes covers of several pop hits of the day ("59th St. Bridge Song", "Michelle", "A Man And A Woman"), but the band radically rearranges the tracks into sophisticated jazz-pop that falls somewhere between the sounds of the Fifth Dimension and Lambert, Hendricks and Ross. Hearing those songs creates a "Oh, THAT'S what they're doing" moment, where you realize that by playing covers, the band isn't abandoning its sound, but rather bringing other writers' work into the Free Design space - a parallel universe of the well-scrubbed, the precious.
Unfortunately, Project 3 proved unable to get the album adequate distribution. By their third LP, 1969's Heaven/Earth, the group's sunny outlook had gained enough edge to include the wry "2002, A Hit Song" a self-mocking ode to selling out. The band outlines the recipe for success, ending with the inevitable Sing It with reckless abandon / And go to the bank with your money, but then realizing There's just one fact that we just can't quite shirk / We did all this last time / And it did not work. The song is self-deprecating - an autobiography of the group's own commercial struggles. The Free Design carried on though their struggles, however, releasing seven albums with consistently modest sales before splitting. The prescience of "2002, A Hit Song" is striking. Over the years, fans of psych and pop, including many producers and DJs, discovered the Free Design for themselves. Artists like Beck, Belle & Sebastian and Pizzicato Five started calling the Free Design an influence. In homage, Stereolab named a song after them.
"I don't think musicians normally think about how they might influence future generations," Dedrick notes. "I certainly didn't." But now the Free Design and its audience will get a chance to hear how other musicians hear their music. In 2003, Seattle based Light In The Attic began reissuing the entire Free Design catalog. The label also enlisted artists and producers to remix tracks for a three-EP series called The Free Design Redesigned.
Redesigned Vol 1, which is out now, features Peanut Butter Wolf, Madlib, Mellow, Sharpshooters, and members of Belle & Sebastian. The second volume hits this summer and includes tracks by Stereolab & High Llamas, Manitoba and Super Furry Animals. The third Redesigned EP is slated for a fall release and includes the Polyphonic Spree, Boom Bip and Kid Koala & Dynomite D.
"The range of approaches is noteworthy," Dedrick says about the remixes. "One artist will take a tune and leave it basically untouched, simply adding a contemporary drum beat. Another will almost completely obliterate the original at many moments in the remix. The surprises come in the form of just how differently people hear and want to hear, what they listen for as much as what they listen to."
"It was hard as hell," DJ Nobody says about remixing "Girls Alone", which appears on Redesigned Vol 2. "The more I heard the song, the creepier it sounded. It seems to be about girls being watched from windows by ill dudes, yikes." DJ Nobody enlisted Mars Volta keyboard player Ikey Owens "because the vocals became buried underneath all of the distortion," he says. "I decided to have Ikey play the vocal melodies and it became sort of an instrumental cover of the song. He ripped it." Although politics were notably absent from the Free Design's work, Grey Album producer Danger Mouse hooked up with Murs to remix the unreleased song "To A Black Boy" on Redesigned Vol 2, with Murs' lyrics written to draw attention to the plight of 18 year-old Marcus Dixon, an African-American honor student from Georgia who was sentenced to ten years for having sex with a 15 year-old white girl. "I'm surprised what happened to Marcus is not considered more newsworthy," Danger Mouse notes. "We thought it was the perfect subject matter. I just wanna use some of this crazy attention more positively." Danger Mouse and Murs were pointing listeners towards an online petition at www.act4justice.com and also recommending that people "just tell a friend" before the Georgia Supreme Court threw out Dixon's conviction and prison sentence in early May.
"The reason the remix thing wasn't happening in 1969 was not technical, it was philosophical," Dedrick says. "Engineers and producers had less inclination to sit in the arranger's seat." Now generations of arrangers who are a little more brash are coming to the music anew, applying to the Free Design's fragile but complex sounds ears that hear entirely different colors and minds that imagine wholly new ideas.
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