Instead, Palumbo set out to write an album-length rock opera on Canada's Mounted Police. "Across the street from the hotel was the Mounted Police headquarters," he said. "For some reason, that fascinated me. I thought the country was ready to have a concept album about them."
Fortunately, the record company nixed that idea, much to the relief of the rest the band. The "opera" was reduced to one track, "Rangers at Midnight." Still, the resulting album was very strange indeed.
"We made some moves that weren't being made if you were trying to make a hit record," Palumbo says. "Looking back, I should have tried to do that, but I had such disdain about commercial music," Palumbo says.
Cashman even offered some Henry Gross songs, but Palumbo--thankfully--declined. (This pressure continued to the group's demise. Years later, D'Amico remembers Lifesong insisting they do a cover of the old Blues Image hit "Ride Captain Ride." In retaliation, they recorded it as a parody of Blood Sweat & Tears. Lifesong was not amused.)
The band itself was ambivalent about hit singles. "We were just doing what we wanted to do. We went for the art of it," D'Amico states. However, a crony from their Pittsburgh days, Bob Parissi and his band Wild Cherry, had just scored big with "Play That Funky Music (White Boy)." Griffiths remembers that whenever the song came on the car radio, an eerie silence would descend on everyone.
Animal Notes suffered the same fate as its predecessor: Critical approval and spotty reception. The album faired slightly better than the debut, stalling at 142 on the Billboard album chart.
This time, the (relative) failure was pinned to the band. By then, Minogue points out, the label had the distribution muscle. The album, he claims, "just didn't have legs. It didn't have anything that people could grab onto." In other words, no hit single. Now, Lifesong was as angry at Palumbo as he was with them.
The relationship further deteriorated when Cashman and West heard the song that was to be the single, "We Want Mine." It was a devastating attack on the label for not paying the band. "In the line `We ain't seen no silver since the airplane crash last year,' he was talking about the plane crash [that killed Jim Croce]," Minogue recalls. "The whole song was about Lifesong and it wasn't lost on them. I mean the label was started by songwriters, so they knew what it was about."
To tout the album, Lifesong placed a full page ad in Billboard, which read in part: "Animal Notes is the latest overt act in Crack the Sky's conspiracy to unleash the sardonic vision of that elegant lunatic John Palumbo. . .Crack the Sky has provided the startling and everchanging musical backdrop for the insights of this mad genius."
They were about to find out how mad their elegant lunatic really was.
By the time the third album was to be recorded, late 1976, the band was pulled in so many directions that something had to give. Lifesong was determined not to let out another weak album. The second tour had shown the band that once again middle America wanted simple rawk n' roll. And by Palumbo the genius was completely alienated from everyone around him.
They had chose to record in Bearsville New York, after the record company declined to pay for a trip to England. "They decided they couldn't trust me to be that far away," Palumbo recalls. "That's exactly what they told me." Turns out they were at least partially correct.
The elegant lunatic was staying in one house and the rest of the band staying in another. "I was totally miserable," Palumbo recalls. "Looking back on it, it was so insane. I was 20-something, with no responsibilities. I was paid to make music, but I was brooding. I guess I had a lot of time on my hands to think about how terrible things really were."
"I had managed to totally eliminate the fun aspect, I was taking myself way too seriously," he recalls. On days that could be considered a snow day, the engineer and production crew would take off to go skiing. Palumbo, infuriated, sat alone in the studio for 11 or 12 hours just playing the piano. When not recording, he read Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, convinced his mission in life was to "teach through music." He placed himself on a macrobiotic vegetarian diet and lost a lot of weight.
By then, communication between the label and the band had broken down almost completely. Minogue remembers Lifesong insisting that the band submit a demo tape of the songs they planned to use, which the band found insulting. When they did submit the tape, the company told Palumbo they didn't hear a single.
Eventually, Palumbo had had enough, and just quit. He remembers the exact words he told Witkowski: "I would rather not be part of this than make an album that is gray."
Immediately, Lifesong sent out a posse of people tight with Palumbo to talk him out of leaving. He recalls standing on the deck of his house overlooking the mountains and watching four limousines slip and slide their way up the windy, snow covered lane. "I'm standing there watching and probably enjoying all the attention. `Wow, look how important I am,'" Palumbo remembers.
"They had tried to convince me that because I had weighed 103 pounds that I was off my noodle." They asked Palumbo to take a blood-sugar test. The disease of the month, hypoglycemia was then thought to be at the root of most people's problems.
Looking back, Palumbo has to chuckle, "My blood sugar levels were shot. In my striving to become one with the universe, I neglected to give myself any protein. I was starving myself, and certainly the brain was taking a beating. So, in a sense they were right."
"Of course I didn't believe any of this. Record company: another trick. I absolutely rejected everything."