Let Me Go Home

You are locked in with The Zoo, the listener-supported, commercial-free home of freeform album rock at thezoorocks.com, and the track on the deck is “Let Me Go Home,” cut two on Ammonia Avenue, the seventh studio album from The Alan Parsons Project. Arista sent it out on February 20, 1984, recorded and mixed at Abbey Road in London, with the digital master laid down on the Sony PCM 1610 system. Alan Parsons produced and engineered it. Eric Woolfson sat in as executive producer. Tony Richards assisted. The song runs three minutes and twenty seconds, written by Parsons and Woolfson, and it does not waste a second of that clock.

The lead voice belongs to Lenny Zakatek, the singer the Project regulars called The Voice. Behind him, Chris Rainbow stacks the backing vocals. Ian Bairnson plays the guitars. Eric Woolfson is on piano. Alan Parsons programs the Fairlight guitars. David Paton, the Pilot bassist who anchored so much of this catalog, holds the bottom. Stuart Elliott, the Cockney Rebel drummer, drives the kit. No Philharmonia swell on this one. That orchestra, arranged and conducted by Andrew Powell with Christopher Warren-Green leading, saves its weight for the title track and a couple of the other cuts. “Let Me Go Home” stays lean, closer to a tight rock single than to the cinematic epics the Project was famous for building in the same rooms where The Beatles and Pink Floyd had worked.

The lyric is a man who has had enough of the street. Shadows pass. He is living in a fantasy and living out of dreams. Nothing is the way it seems. He is haunted by reality and he wants the door, the lamp, the familiar room. “Let me go home. I had a bad night, leave me alone. Let me go home. I’ve had a hard time being on my own.” Woolfson wrote nearly all the words across the Project catalog, and here he keeps them plain. No Poe, no pyramid, no robot. Just the oldest rock and roll request there is: get me off this corner and back where I belong. On an album named for a chemical plant, that plea lands harder than it first looks.

The album title came from a real street. Eric Woolfson met John Harvey-Jones, chairman of Imperial Chemical Industries, on a Concorde flight to New York. Harvey-Jones invited him out to the ICI works at Billingham in England, figuring a songwriter might find something in the place. What Eric found was miles of pipe, steam, machinery, and almost no people and no trees, with a sign that read Ammonia Avenue. He thought it was as good a rock and roll name as Heartbreak Hotel. Parsons later described the record as mostly conceptless, with the title song carrying the observation about how we poison ourselves, and he noted the 1984-ish look of all that pipe and steam. Woolfson made sure Harvey-Jones received a gold record for the invitation. The sleeve was designed by Storm Thorgerson, the Hipgnosis man whose covers already defined a generation of album rock.

Ammonia Avenue followed Eye in the Sky, the 1982 record that had given the Project its biggest American moment. This one opened with Woolfson on “Prime Time,” then handed the microphone to Zakatek for “Let Me Go Home,” then moved through “One Good Reason,” Chris Rainbow on “Since the Last Goodbye,” and the Phil Spector-styled single “Don’t Answer Me,” which Woolfson sang. Side two brought Colin Blunstone of The Zombies on “Dancing on a Highwire,” Zakatek again on “You Don’t Believe,” the instrumental “Pipeline” with Mel Collins on saxophone, and the six-and-a-half-minute title track. “Don’t Answer Me” reached number 15 on the Billboard Hot 100 and the Mainstream Rock chart, number 4 on Adult Contemporary, and became the Project’s last Top 20 hit in the States. The album itself peaked at number 15 on the Billboard 200, number 1 in Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands, number 2 in Spain, number 5 in Austria, Italy, and Norway, number 8 in Sweden and New Zealand, number 16 in Australia, and number 24 in the United Kingdom. “Prime Time” and “You Don’t Believe” also went out as singles. A 2008 remaster added rough mixes and demos, including an orchestral overdub of the title song that showed Powell’s scoring with the backing track bleeding through the orchestra’s headphones.

The Alan Parsons Project was never a band in the ordinary sense. It was a studio partnership between Parsons, the engineer and producer, and Woolfson, the songwriter, lyricist, keyboard player, manager, and frequent lead singer. The name started as a working title on a proposal Woolfson took to 20th Century Records, and the label liked it enough that it stuck. Between 1976 and 1987 they released ten albums and, by the official count, sold more than 55 million records worldwide. Most of the work was done at Abbey Road. They hired the singer who fit the song instead of forcing every track through one voice. That bench included Zakatek, Blunstone, Rainbow, John Miles, and Woolfson himself. The core players stayed remarkably steady: Bairnson on guitar, Paton on bass, Elliott on drums, Powell on the orchestra charts.

Parsons had already earned his reputation before the Project existed. He engineered Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon and was nominated for a Grammy for that work. He had been on staff at Abbey Road, with credits on Beatles sessions including Let It Be and on Wings records, and he produced and engineered for Al Stewart, including Year of the Cat. He generally sat behind the desk rather than on the record, though on “Let Me Go Home” he is right there in the Fairlight guitars. Woolfson wrote the great majority of the music and all of the lyrics, played keyboards on nearly every track, and sang leads including “Eye in the Sky,” “Time,” and “Don’t Answer Me.” After the Project he turned to musical theatre. Gaudi and Gambler both carried songs from the album years. He died in 2009. Parsons later took the catalog on the road with his own band. The Project itself remained a studio idea, name-checked in The Simpsons and Austin Powers, sampled, and still turning up in films and sports broadcasts.

Lenny Zakatek was born Lenny du Platel on July 29, 1947, in Karachi, then British India, and has lived in London since he was thirteen. In 1964 he formed The Trailblazers, picked up a Motown influence on a tour of U.S. military bases in Europe, and came home in a soul frame of mind. From 1974 to 1981 he was the lead singer with Gonzalez, whose “Haven’t Stopped Dancing Yet” was a worldwide disco hit, and whose tours put him on bills with Bob Marley and the Wailers. Parsons heard that voice and brought him into the Project in 1977. Over about ten years Zakatek sang lead on twelve songs across eight albums, including “I Wouldn’t Want to Be Like You,” “Games People Play,” “Damned If I Do,” and, on this record, both “Let Me Go Home” and “You Don’t Believe.” Parsons also produced Zakatek’s 1979 solo album for A&M. Critics have called his Project leads the prototype of soulful progressive rock, and on “Let Me Go Home” you can hear why. He does not float over the track. He pushes it, impatient, a little bruised, ready to be somewhere else.

That is the cut. Abbey Road, 1983 into 1984, a street of pipes turned into an album title, a session singer who came up through soul and disco, and a three-minute demand to get back inside. The Zoo keeps the deep cuts spinning right beside the singles, the way freeform album rock was built to do. More on the Project lives at the official site, the-alan-parsons-project.com, and at Alan Parsons’ own page, alanparsons.com. The Facebook page is facebook.com/TheAlanParsonsProject, Instagram is instagram.com/officialalanparsonsproject, and the X account is x.com/TheOfficialAPP. Longtime fans still gather at The Avenue, theavenueonline.info. And the station that just played it for you is The Zoo, thezoorocks.com. Let him go home. Then stay here for the next one.