Jellyfish was an American rock band that formed in San Francisco in 1989. Led by songwriters Andy Sturmer (drums, vocals) and Roger Manning (keyboards, vocals), the group was known for their blend of 1960s classic rock and XTC-style power pop. They released two albums, Bellybutton (1990) and Spilt Milk (1993), that proved influential to many subsequent acts in a similar vein.
Sturmer and Manning met in high school and shared an admiration for jazz, post-punk, and British pop music. Following a stint as members of Beatnik Beatch, they quit the group to continue songwriting with one another and formed Jellyfish, with Jason Falkner and Roger's brother Chris joining on guitar and bass respectively. After the tour for Bellybutton, Falkner and Chris Manning were replaced by Eric Dover on guitar and Tim Smith on bass. The group viewed Spilt Milk as their "masterpiece" and the fulfillment of their original grandiose vision for the band, emphasizing bombasticity, vocal harmonies, orchestration, and studio experimentation.
During their five-year existence, Jellyfish attracted critical acclaim and a devoted cult following, but struggled against prevailing rock trends (hair metal and grunge). Their only charting single on the Billboard Hot 100 was "Baby's Coming Back". Three other songs were top-twenty hits on Billboards Modern Rock Tracks chart: "The King Is Half-Undressed", "That Is Why", and "The Ghost at Number One". Elsewhere, they had six songs appear on the UK Singles Chart, although none reached higher than the top thirty.
Jellyfish broke up in 1994 due to poor record sales, Sturmer's discomfort with his role as frontman, and artistic conflicts between the two songwriters. Manning subsequently formed Imperial Drag with Dover, and pursued careers as a solo artist and session musician. Sturmer worked with the Japanese pop duo Puffy AmiYumi and continues to compose music for animated television programs. From 2017 to 2022, the trio of Manning, Dover, and Smith recorded together as the Lickerish Quartet.
Formation While attending Amador Valley High School in Pleasanton, California in the early 1980s, Andy Sturmer and Roger Manning met and bonded over their love for jazz. Later in the decade, they joined Beatnik Beatch, a group fronted by Chris Ketner. Sturmer was the group's drummer, singer, and songwriter, while Manning was keyboardist. The duo soon began collaborating with one another, writing compositions that were stylistically different from the songs the band was producing at the time. As a side gig, the two also briefly wrote commercial jingles for companies such as Montana Hawk Shooting Range and Shutterbug Camera Store. In August 1989, a year after Atlantic Records released Beatnik Beatch's eponymous debut album, Manning and Sturmer left the group to continue songwriting with one another. At this juncture, they were still signed with Atlantic Records, but grew dissatisfied with the label's lack of interest for the new project. Virtually their only advocate at the label was A&R man John S. Carter, who was soon dismissed from the company.
Sturmer was the group's de facto leader and frontman. Although Sturmer and Manning were each credited for 50% of their writing collaborations, typically Sturmer's contributions were musical and lyrical, while Manning's were only musical. Manning commented: "Andy was perfectly capable of writing completed, finished great songs on his own. I could write lyrics, but it was a painstaking process." In Sturmer's summation: "It's not collaborative on every level. I write all the lyrics, but we write the music together. The way Roger and I write is that we embellish each other's ideas, like painting a picture. We grew up together and had a lot of the same records in our collection, so we don't have to explain our offbeat ideas to each other."
Jason Falkner was the lead guitarist for the Three O'Clock, a Los Angeles-based Paisley Underground band. He originally put a newspaper advertisement looking for "like-minded musicians" influenced by XTC, David Bowie, and the Blue Nile. Manning responded to Falkner's ad and the two met to collaborate. Nothing initially came out of the meeting. However, once Manning and Sturmer left Beatnik Beatch, Manning reconnected with Falkner to see if he was interested in joining the new group. Falkner was persuaded by the prospect of a major-label deal. He joined with the understanding – promised by Manning without consulting Sturmer – that he would be a contributing songwriter. Tensions arose immediately, as Sturmer was not ready to accommodate this arrangement, while Falkner struggled to connect with Sturmer on a personal level. Manning later called Falkner "the perfect part of the Jellyfish triangle during that period of our evolution".
The name "Jellyfish" came at the suggestion of an Atlantic executive, but was initially ignored by the group. Once they finished recording for their first album and had to pick a name for themselves, Sturmer decided to go with Jellyfish, for lack of any better alternative. According to journalist Paul Rees, the name was chosen to evoke the feeling of something graceful, yet amorphous and ephemeral.
Bellybutton
Jellyfish recorded their first album Bellybutton at Schnee Studios in Hollywood with producer Albhy Galuten, best known for his work with the Bee Gees on Saturday Night Fever, and engineer Jack Joseph Puig. Unusually, the band's demos were almost as fully realized as the studio recordings. Manning explained that the group took extra care in writing and arranging material due to the stresses of hourly studio costs, as they wanted to use the time to experiment musically, and because "Andy and I had to believe 100 per cent, 'Okay, this [song] is working. This is mostly going somewhere. We feel that this is now fleshed out enough that we’re confident to be in the studio environment.'" No synthesizers or sequencers were used on the recording. Redd Kross bassist Steve McDonald, who played on the album, said that Manning intended the record to sound "somewhere between Queen and Partridge Family".
Sessions lasted from September 1989 to March 1990 while the band were shopping around their demos to various labels and struggling to extricate themselves from Atlantic. Despite never playing live, they became subject to a bidding war among eight labels. Ultimately, they signed with Charisma Records, a newly-formed subsidiary of Virgin. Bellybutton was released on July 27, 1990 when the prevailing rock music trend was hair metal. Manning remembered that the band were "very aware" of that fact and believed that "in being true to ourselves, we couldn't have been more opposite to what was going on in music." The album peaked at number 124 on the Billboard 200 and was well received by contemporary music critics with singles "The King Is Half-Undressed" and "Baby's Coming Back" enjoying moderate radio play. However, album sales numbered at a then-underwhelming 100,000 units sold.
Reviews for Bellybutton ranged from favorable to mixed, with most critics focusing on the group's resemblance to older acts. The band were sometimes dismissed as a revivalist nostalgia group, exacerbated by the flamboyant 1970s-era outfits they wore on stage and on promotional materials. They were also often tagged as alternative rock despite being out of step with any other act in the genre. Sturmer said that the group "never tried to suck up to any genre of music. We just did what came naturally to us and didn't worry about it." Falkner said that they "uniformly loathed the whole lumberjack rock star thing that was starting to happen [...] We didn't want to be an everyman band at all." He denied the assumption that the label forced the group into their Willy Wonka-style image: "There is no record company on the planet that would make people dress like that. That was all down to us." Later, the band toned down their image as they tired of critics writing about their clothes rather than the music.
Jellyfish recruited Roger's younger brother Chris on bass guitar and spent 12 weeks rehearsing for their 50-minute live show. From August 1990 to September 1991, they toured in support of Bellybutton, opening for the bands World Party and the Black Crowes. Their stage show featured an assortment of props, including a white picket fence, a bubble machine, Lite-Brite, and an eight-foot tall standee of Gavin MacLeod. They played the biggest show of their career in front of 72,000 people at Wembley Stadium, as the first of five bands opening for INXS. A considerable cult following began to form around Jellyfish, although the heavy touring schedule fatigued the group substantially. Tensions also worsened among the band members. Frustrated by having his songwriting contributions ignored by Manning and Sturmer, Falkner left the group after the tour. He later said: “I was told that Jellyfish would be an equal three-piece, with us writing and playing everything. That turned out to be a total joke. I felt like I was duped." Chris also quit the band to become a chef.
Spilt Milk
As Jellyfish gathered prestige among industry insiders, many began soliciting the band for collaboration, including actress/singer Kim Basinger and Tears for Fears' Curt Smith. Following the Bellybutton tour, Sturmer and Manning worked with Ringo Starr for his 1992 solo album Time Takes Time. Five songs were written for Starr, but only one was used ("I Don't Believe You"). Sturmer and Manning also appeared in the music video for Starr's "Weight of the World". They were then invited to work with Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys. Wilson and Jellyfish had one songwriting session, but it was unproductive. One of the two songs they worked on, "Wish it Would Rain", later appeared on Manning's solo album Solid State Warrior (2005), albeit with Wilson's contributions omitted. The band also contributed the Mario-inspired song "Ignorance Is Bliss" to the 1991 compilation Nintendo: White Knuckle Scorin'. For the 1992 MTV Video Music Awards, Sturmer and Manning backed William Shatner as he sang the Best Song nominees.
After their sessions with Starr and Wilson, the band was dedicated to making their next album Spilt Milk "their masterpiece". Manning and Sturmer spent about eight hours a day, six days a week writing songs together at Sturmer's house in Cotati, CA between October 1991 and March 1992. Galuten and Puig returned as co-producers alongside Manning and Sturmer. Recorded from April to September 1992 on a budget of $300,000 (equivalent to $ in ), the album's music was more aggressive, bombastic, and reliant on vocal harmonies and studio experimentation than Bellybutton. Manning reflected that Spilt Milk represented "the total vision we had for Jellyfish. The grandeur that was in our hearts from day one was finally realised with that album." Bassist Tim Smith was recruited for the sessions and upcoming tour. Also featured on the album were guitarists Tom "T-Bone" Wolk, Lyle Workman, and Jon Brion (the latter soon formed the Grays with Falkner).