Psychobabble

The Zoo Crew has got a real favorite spinning for the Zoo Freaks over at THE ZOO, and it is one of those cuts that still sounds like it was built in a laboratory and then left out in a thunderstorm. Psychobabble comes off Eye in the Sky, the 1982 album by The Alan Parsons Project, and it sits on the second side like a warning label. Alan Parsons and Eric Woolfson wrote it together, same as most of the Project material, and they brought Elmer Gantry back in to sing it. Gantry, whose real name is Dave Terry, had already cut May Be a Price to Pay on The Turn of a Friendly Card, and his voice has that slightly desperate edge the song needs. He is not pleading. He is done with the session.

The story behind the title is almost too good to be made up. On the notes that came with the 35th anniversary edition of Eye in the Sky, Eric Woolfson’s wife Hazel said he wrote Psychobabble about the coursework from her psychology degree. Their daughter Lorna filled in the rest. Hazel figured she talked about the degree a little too much around the house, and Eric decided a lot of it amounted to psychobabble. That is how a family joke turned into a rock song about somebody who is tired of being diagnosed. The lyric walks through a dream that is neither Kodachrome nor black and white, a dream in Dolby stereo that still does not sound right. Somebody is reading his mind and will not look him in the eye. He keeps saying he does not care. You can tell he cares.

Parsons has said Psychobabble was the first thing they started for the album, roughly a year before the rest of the tracks. They cut it at Abbey Road, the same rooms where he had already spent years as a tape operator and then an engineer. When they mixed it, he put reverb on David Paton’s bass so the part would sit up front instead of hiding under the guitar. He called the bass a featured part, which is engineer talk for “turn that thing up and leave it there.” The middle section is where the song goes sideways on purpose. Parsons took the cue from the shower scene in Psycho and stacked in the usual horror-film clichés, then dropped air-raid sirens on top of it. He later admitted he had no idea why the sirens were there. They just seemed like a nice idea at the time. Ian Bairnson’s guitar solo comes roaring out of that mess, and the choir arranged by Andrew Powell hangs in the background like it wandered in from a different record. The single went out in the United States in November 1982 and made it to number 57 on the Billboard Hot 100. It never became the radio monster that the title track was, which is fine. Some songs are better when you have to go looking for them.

Eye in the Sky as a whole is the Project’s biggest album, the last one that went platinum in the States, and the one that gave sports arenas Sirius forever. The title came from a day when Woolfson heard the phrase three different ways: a casino surveillance room in Las Vegas, a spy satellite on the news, and a weather helicopter. Psychobabble fits the same mood. The whole record circles belief, surveillance, and the feeling that somebody already knows what you are thinking. The song just says the quiet part out loud and then laughs at the language used to explain it.

If you want the long version of how this music got made, you have to go back to a kid who left school at sixteen. Alan Parsons was born in London in 1948 into a family that already lived in show business. His great-grandfather was the actor-manager Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, his mother was an actress and folk singer, and his father played piano and flute. A cousin was the film actor Oliver Reed. Parsons himself messed around with folk and blues as a teenager and played lead guitar in a London band called The Earth, but the studio is what stuck. He went to work for EMI at Hayes, first in a lab trying to improve a television camera tube, then in the department that duplicated reel-to-reel tapes. One of the masters that came through was Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. That was the record that made him ask for Abbey Road.

They were not eager to take him. Abbey Road already had a reputation, and an eighteen-year-old from the tape plant was not the usual hire. He wrote a letter to the boss anyway, got an interview, and started as a trainee tape operator. The job was pressing record, cueing tape, moving microphones, and making tea at all hours. His first assignment as a tape op was the Let It Be sessions, which put him in the room for the Beatles’ rooftop concert. He worked as assistant engineer on Abbey Road and Let It Be, then qualified as a balance engineer. His first session in the hot seat was with the Hollies in 1970. The record that made his name was Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon, which earned him a Grammy nomination and a reputation for doing more than an engineer was supposed to do. He thought of himself as a recording director, closer to what a film director does than what a fader-pusher does. You can hear that on Al Stewart’s Year of the Cat, where he added the saxophone and turned a folk idea into the hit, and on the Hollies sides he shaped.

In the summer of 1974 he met Eric Woolfson in the Abbey Road canteen. Woolfson was a songwriter and session pianist who had already been managing Parsons’s production work with Pilot, Steve Harley, John Miles, Ambrosia, and the Hollies. Woolfson had an idea that the music business could become a producer’s medium the way film had become a director’s medium. He also had old material based on Edgar Allan Poe. They folded those ideas together and started The Alan Parsons Project. The first album, Tales of Mystery and Imagination, came out in 1976. Parsons turned down Pink Floyd’s offer to work on Wish You Were Here so he could build the Project instead. It was never a band in the usual sense. It was Parsons and Woolfson plus a rotating cast of singers and players, many of them from Pilot, cutting concept records at Abbey Road. By the time they reached Eye in the Sky, the method was set. Woolfson brought the songs and a lot of the keyboards and vocals. Parsons built the sound. Psychobabble is what that partnership sounds like when the lyric is a private joke and the mix is a horror movie.

The catalog and the stories live on the official Project site at the-alan-parsons-project.com, where the Eye in the Sky page still carries the track list, the credits, and the Psychobabble lyric. Alan Parsons’s own site is alanparsons.com. The Project keeps an official Facebook page at facebook.com/TheAlanParsonsProject, an Instagram at instagram.com/officialalanparsonsproject, and an X account at x.com/TheOfficialAPP. Fans keep the conversation going in the Alan Parsons Project Fans group at facebook.com/groups/AlanParsonsProject, and the long-running Italian fan site The Parsons Day is at theparsonsday.altervista.org. If you are hearing this one on the Zoo, turn it up when the sirens come in. That middle section was supposed to feel a little wrong. It still does.