The Road to Freedom album-review

On Mon, 29 May 1995, Andrew McPherson figured out that there were only about 100,000 Scientologists in the world instead of the claimed 8 million by doing some math on the below:

> "Help make Scientology history! We could give LRH (Hubbard) a Gold Record
> right now, if every Scientologist inthe U.S. bought only 12 copies of LRH's
> *Road to Freedom* album."
I recently was given a copy of this Road to Freedom[tm] album.

Whatever poor musicians had to work with this cheese, we'll never know. On the tape [I didn't get the liner notes, unfortuately], it just says "Words and music by L. Ron Hubbard." There are a bunch of studio musicians trying to make this drivel sound listenable, with titles like "Make it Go Right," "Why Worship Death" "The ARC song," and "The Good Go Free."

Whoever worked on this had a background arranging jazz [Corea? Hancock?], and multipart vocals.

The vocals seem hurried, like they didn't have the time to lay the tracks right. A lot of the instrumentation sounds to me like old FM-technology synthesizer/workstation stuff with drum machines, but some arrangements appear to have humans on them.

I laughed out loud at the ARC song, which tries to capture a slow soul, or modern R&B sound. The instrumentation works, and they must've hired some sister to sing [she's not on the other cuts], but the lyrics have me OTFL, because I've never met more than one black scientologist [and she was an oreo].

Some of the tunes had a hard time fitting lyrics into the melody, like what happnes in the studio when someone brings in some lyrics and wants to hire studio musicians to put it to music, and the studio looks at it and digs out an old work tape that has something in 4-4 time that they'd never use for anything else anyway, and charges the lyricist for "original music."

I don't know who engineered the song "Thank You for Listening," but...

I think they've taken LRH's voice off some tape or other [this album was released in 1989, after his head was enshrined posthumously], singing a little ditty that has a musical climax on a low note. The funny part is, LRH apparantly couldn't hit the low note, so it's been pretty blatantly dubbed in and had a lot of effects dumped on it to make it sound like Barry White or something. Just this one note that occurs twice throughout the whole short song.

Lyrics on the songs jump from idealistic waxing to paranoid us-versus-them about an 'insane society.'

It made me think, this must be how it is to be a Scientologist: You are convinced you are living among insane people, and everything you were brought up to believe is untrue. You walk the razor's edge while being told that only your group has the true answers that will save humanity.

A little pressure..?

I think this is why they were asking for all members to purchase 12 albums each, so it would go platinum or something.

I don't think it ever did. I never heard of it before.

Even the Scientologists didn't buy this one!

--------------------------------------m. council, human being Hell, if you understood everything I say, you'd council@luna.cas.usf.edu be me. -Miles Davis -------------------------------------------------------------