Games People Play

The Zoo Crew has the record spinning, and the Zoo Freaks are locked in on a cut that still feels like a high-stakes hand dealt in slow motion. Games People Play comes off The Turn of a Friendly Card, the fifth album from The Alan Parsons Project, and it is the kind of track that walks into the room already knowing the game. Lenny Zakatek handles the lead vocal, and he does it with that focused, slightly restless edge that made him the go-to voice when the Project wanted something that rocked harder than the usual studio sheen. If you are riding with us over at THE ZOO, you already know this one sits right next to the deep cuts and the hits that never quite left the highway.

The album itself was a gambling record in the best sense of the word. Eric Woolfson, the Project's co-writer, lyricist, and keyboard man, was living in Monaco while the songs were taking shape, and the Monte Carlo casino was basically the neighborhood. Alan Parsons later told Songfacts that the pair lived about ten paces from the casino doors, and that the whole record grew out of watching gamblers, hearing the machines, and thinking about the risks people take when the house always has the edge. Woolfson had written a completely different song called Turn of a Friendly Card back in the mid-sixties. He never liked that version, but he kept the title, and it became the spine of a concept album about chance, middle age, and the quiet fear of fading out. The whole thing was meant as a warning about the casino, not a postcard from the tables.

Games People Play got its name from a side door. Woolfson's wife Hazel was reading the well-known psychology book of the same title, and Eric saw that the phrase translated cleanly into the gambling world. The lyric is not a straight craps tutorial. It looks at the strategies people use on each other, the empty house after the kids have grown, and the refusal to spend the rest of a life quietly fading away. Billboard called the hook infectious and pointed at the twin guitar work in the middle as the bite that sold it. Record World liked the keyboard melodies riding the rhythm. On the charts it reached number 16 on the Billboard Hot 100 in March 1981, and it sat on Cash Box at 18. The seven-inch single, backed with the instrumental Ace of Swords, was tightened up: a section before the guitar solo was cut, the solo itself was shortened, and the whole thing was sped up a touch so radio could get in and out.

The studio story is one of those details the gear heads still pass around. A lot of Project tracks were built on a tape loop instead of a plain click track, and Games People Play is a clean example. Woolfson recorded a keyboard passage to a click, sliced out a good section, and edited that into a loop that set the tempo. That loop did not stay hidden in the control room. It ended up in the finished mix. The rough mix that later showed up on expanded editions is close to the record you know, except it carries extra percussion that the final version dialed back. Parsons also played an instrument of his own invention on the track, the Projectron, a tape-loop sampler in the neighborhood of a Mellotron. Around him were the usual road-tested crew: Ian Bairnson on guitar, David Paton on bass, Stuart Elliott on drums and percussion, Woolfson on keyboards, and Chris Rainbow on the backing vocals. Zakatek was not the default singer for the Project. Woolfson took more of the leads as the years went on, which is part of why this one stands out when the needle drops.

The album around it was made in a hurry by Project standards. Parsons and Woolfson usually took months. The Turn of a Friendly Card was cut in about six weeks at Acousti Studio in Paris during 1979 and 1980, then released by Arista in November 1980. Both men later called it one of their best, even with the clock running. The second side is a sixteen-minute suite built around the title piece, with Snake Eyes, Ace of Swords, and Nothing Left to Lose folded in. Gold Bug, the instrumental, borrows its name from an Edgar Allan Poe story, which circles back to the Project's very first album. Ace of Swords came off a pack of tarot cards. Woolfson has said that sitting in those Monte Carlo rooms, with the talk and the machines and the constant motion, is what got the title track and Snake Eyes moving. The band wanted something that would travel in every market, and Games People Play, along with Time, is what carried the record onto American radio.

To get how a record like this even exists, you have to go back to a kid who wanted into Abbey Road and would not take a polite no. Alan Parsons was born in London in 1948. He left school at sixteen after a counselor basically told him the academic road was a dead end, and he went to work for EMI at Hayes. The first job was in a television-camera research lab. From there he moved into a department that duplicated music onto reel-to-reel tape, right before cassettes took over. Hearing Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is what flipped the switch. He asked to transfer to Abbey Road, got some resistance, wrote a letter to the studio manager anyway, and landed an interview. By late 1967 he was a trainee tape operator, which meant finding the right spot on the tape, moving microphones, logging reels, and making a lot of tea.

The first big assignment was the Let It Be sessions, including the rooftop performance. He then assisted on Abbey Road and has said he watched from the steps on the last day as the four of them walked out for that cover photo. From tape op he climbed to assistant engineer and then balance engineer. His first session in the hot seat was with the Hollies in 1970. He engineered Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon and picked up a Grammy nomination for it. He also shaped records by Pilot, Ambrosia, Al Stewart, and John Miles, often doing more than the job title asked. He liked to think of himself as a recording director, closer to what a film director does than what a traditional engineer does. He was a semi-pro musician when he arrived at Abbey Road, and he set the guitar aside for years so he could learn the room.

In the summer of 1974 he met Eric Woolfson in the Abbey Road canteen. Woolfson was a songwriter and session pianist who had been sitting on Edgar Allan Poe material, and he also had a notion that the record business might become a producer's medium the way film had become a director's medium. He managed Parsons through a run of production hits, then the two of them folded Woolfson's songs and Parsons's studio craft into a studio band with a revolving cast. Tales of Mystery and Imagination arrived in 1976. By the time The Turn of a Friendly Card showed up, the Project was a known name, and Games People Play was the single that proved the concept could still hit the highway.

Parsons still tours the catalog with the Alan Parsons Live Project, and the official home for that is alanparsons.com. The Project's own site, which carries the Turn of a Friendly Card notes, lyrics, and credits for Games People Play, is the-alan-parsons-project.com. His official Facebook page is Alan Parsons on Facebook, and the Project page is The Alan Parsons Project on Facebook. On Instagram you will find him at alanparsonsmusic and the Project at officialalanparsonsproject. On X he posts as @alanparsons, and the Project account is @TheOfficialAPP. Fans still gather in the Facebook group Alan Parsons Project Fans and in The Alan Parsons Project - The original musicians and singers. That is the circle. The song is the hand. Take it or leave it, Zoo Freaks, but the record is already on the platter.