Half-amusing musings on my music collection - Part 3: The late-60s

 1967

If you were a hippy - and by 'hippy' I'm narrowing it down to the parentally-funded, middle-class, work-shirking, naively idealistic, 18-25 year olds from San Francisco's Haight-Asbury district - then 1967 was the 'Summer of Love' and the 'Age of Aquarius' and all sorts of lovely, let's-bang-each-other-bandy, psychedelic nonsense until the grim reality of life came along and bit them all on the asses.

If, like everyone else, you were working in a factory or office, somewhere grey and rainy, reading about hippies in the newspapers and growing your hair long and buying a Paisley shirt in sympathy, then 1967 was the year the ERA OF THE ROCK ALBUM began.

Consequently, my 1967 record collection has enough albums to constitute a top ten for the first time, but only just.  This means that Pink Floyd's "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn" (4/10) creeps in, for all its somewhat irritating nursery rhyme nonsense and over-indulgent psychedelic fatuousness.  It does this at the expense of The Rolling Stones' "Their Satanic Majesties Request" (1/10) which slips to number 11 of 11 on account of it being two songs short of a 12 inch disc of compressed cow dung.

In the lower regions of this top ten are albums which encapsulate the spirit of the time.  The Jimi Hendrix Experience announced their arrival, but had to come to Britain to do so, because Britain was cool then and the USA was all racial tension and Vietnam and not very nice stuff.  "Are you Experienced?" (7/10) and Cream's "Disraeli Gears" (8/10) laid down the blueprint for the future of blues-influenced rock and were totally cool without even trying.  So cool in fact, that Cream's Eric Clapton managed to hoodwink the world into thinking he was both cool and creative for the next few decades, despite being conversely dull and derivative.  Trying a bit too hard to be cool, but pulling it off at times just enough to inspire alternative music for the future, were The Velvet Underground on their self-titled 'banana' album (7/10).  But posterity will record that the most influential album of the year and perhaps of all time, was The Beatles' "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" (8/10).  Yes, you read that correctly.... only 8 out of 10.  It's a better album cover than an album.  Undeniably, it has some great songs, but if I'm being picky, a few are a bit too plonky-plodders, similar tempo, relatively average tracks by The Beatles' own high standards.  If they hadn't taken so long pissing about in the studio being 'experimental' with tapes and farmyard noises, then EMI might have held off releasing "Strawberry Fields Forever" and "Penny Lane" as a double A-side single and stuck these on the album instead of the rather-TOO-Indian "Within You Without You" and "Good Morning Good Morning".  Then it would have been a great album! (well.... 9/10 maybe)

The year's top 5 don't quite match the perfection seen in '65-'67, but they all earn themselves 9/10 on my geeky spreadsheet.  The Beatles' "Magical Mystery Tour" controversially nips in ahead of "Sgt Pepper's", because on this occasion it does contain "Strawberry Fields Forever" and "Penny Lane" and a lot of other great stuff besides.  I'm cheating slightly here, as it was only an EP in the UK.  The LP version (which is the original EP plus 5 tracks) that I'm including on my list came out in the USA in 1967, but was not given a UK release until 1976.  My rules, don't argue!

The Doors might be the sort of band you'd be misled into choosing to jump into a TARDIS and go back in time to see in concert, as the chances are that Jim Morrison would be drunk, get his willy out and cause the police to wade into the audience and stop the gig.  Personally, I'm happy enough just to listen to the records in my living room, with their first two, "The Doors" and "Strange Days" coming out in 1967.

Finally, just as everyone else was getting all psychedelic, experimental, revolutionary, radical, convention-breaking and LOUD, Bobbie Gentry and Bob Dylan released the beautifully acoustic, rural, folk country records "Ode to Billy Joe" and "John Wesley Harding".  In Bob's case, on the back of "Blonde on Blonde", this was another example of him doing whatever the fuck he wanted, whatever pleased him and whatever no one expected, all at the same time.

1968

The Stones bounced back big time from their lame Sgt. Pepper's/Piper at the Gates of Dawn pastiche to produce "Beggar's Banquet" (10/10) and thus take my accolade as the best LP of 1968.  I'm not sure the album sleeve artwork of a graffiti-strewn public toilet wall quite encapsulates the contents, which not only jump on the country-rock bandwagon, but sets up camp there for their next 4 albums. (That's a camp with a fire, a guitar and a lot of beans.)

The Beatles released "The Beatles" (9/10) to be forever known as 'The White Album', much of which was forged whilst finding themselves in India in the company of the Maharishi (before finding the Maharishi to be a fraud, funnily enough).  I'm not a fan of the term 'eclectic' as everyone (usually inappropriately) likes to lazily apply it to their record collection or music taste - everyone except me that is - but 'The White Album' is very eclectic, a melting pot of styles.  It would be a 10, but for the compilation feel to it; it's a lot of great unconnectable songs without quite being an album.  And "Revolution 9" is one of the few occasions I ever lift the needle before the end of a side.

Fleetwood Mac, in their original blues incarnation, released their first two albums this year.  The debut' LP's title is the band's name, but it would have been to the annoyance of the self-effacing founder member, (sublime) lead guitarist and main songwriter, Peter Green, that it has often been referred to as "Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac" (9/10).  So devoid of selfish vanity was Green, that he named his band after the bass player and drummer instead of himself.  If that example had been copied, then we might have had some interesting band names in subsequent decades, not least 'Vicious Cook' in the late 70s.  Their second album was "Mr Wonderful" (9/10), which was not named after Peter Green, even though we all think he was exactly that.

The rest of the list follows on nicely from 1967.  Simon and Garfunkel improve even further with "Bookends" (9/10), its highlight track being "America" and its quirky moment being "Voices of Old People" - which is just that, old Jewish New Yorkers talking.  The Doors do their own eclectic mish-mash with the weakest of the 6 they put out in a 5 year career, "Waiting for the Sun" (8/10), one of those albums which is named after a song that strangely appears on a different album.  Hendrix peaks on his double-LP "Electric Ladyland" (7/10), which contains "Crosstown Traffic" and "Voodoo Chile (slight return)" and has one of those album covers that you tend not to leave lying around as a teenager.  Townes Van Zandt, one of the least well known from my lists so far, picks up the country-folk balladeer mantel to wonderful effect with "For the sake of the song" (7/10); and Jethro Tull introduce themselves as a blues band on "This Was" (7/10), whereas what they 'would become' was more folk-prog rock.

But the story I like most belongs to The Band, who released "Music from the Big Pink" (8/10) in this year.  Under their previous nomenclature, The Hawks, they had been Bob Dylan's backing band in 1965-6 as he toured his new electric sound, attracting jeers (perhaps more for playing it "fucking loud" on equipment that couldn't cope, rather than for for having gone electric at all) and the famous cry of 'Judas' for betraying his folk roots.  Rather worn out by accompanying the enigmatic Dylan with his unpredictable approach to playing songs live, and by all the hostility in the audience, the Hawks spent 1967 recuperating alongside a post-motorcycle-accident Dylan in a large house near Woodstock, NY, called The Big Pink.  Together, Bob and what became The Band, played and recorded dozens of traditional and original country-folk songs, Americana if you like, and plenty there to release a wonderful album together.  As it turned out, that was too predictable for Bob, who pissed off without warning one day and cut "John Wesley Harding" with a different set of musicians playing songs he hadn't introduced The Band to at all.  The Band instead released their own album of music from the Big Pink and waited another 8 years before their 1967 recordings with Bob were officially released as The Basement Tapes.

Half-amusing musings on my music collection - Part 2: The mid-60s

We haven't reached the age of THE ALBUM yet.  Most bands prioritised the release of singles in the mid-60s.  People bought 45s and got up off their arse to change the record after 3 minutes.  LPs were merely collections of more songs, without the coherence and character that later came to define the pop/rock ALBUM. They were far less popular than singles, possibly due to their prohibitive cost - lots of guineas and shillings, whatever imperial measurement of money they still had in those days. Consequently, there just weren't enough good LPs around until 1967, so I don't own enough to list a top ten for each year.   As before, this post will be heavily dominated by the same two artists that are so highly favoured by me - Bob Dylan and The Beatles.

During this time, the two of these heavily influenced each other.  Dylan got The Beatles into marijuana and writing lyrics that went beyond "I love you, you love me" and The Beatles were a prompt to Bob to convince himself to get a band and plug into amps.  Consequently, each artist scaled a creative peak from 1965 into 1966 and produced between them four albums that have cemented a place in my all-time top ten.

1964

There's a lull before the storm, though.

Dylan peddled a couple of slightly dour folk offerings in 1964: "The Times they are a-changin'" (8/10) and "Another Side of..." (7/10).  More to be admired than liked, I feel.  In each case, Bob wrote and performed every song, no cover versions, a convention-shattering approach that paved the way for Dennis Waterman to write the theme tune and sing the theme tune to "Minder" in the late 70s and thus provide me with the perfect ringtone for my phone.

The Beatles matched this musical multi-tasking when they released "A Hard Day's Night" (9/10) and packed it with nothing but Lennon-McCartney accredited songs.  Not even poor George Harrison was allowed a look in this time, despite breaking his duck previously on "With the Beatles".  Between them, Bob, Paul and John raised the bar for other musical performers to write their own material.  Unfortunately, by the end of the year, much like 1963, the Beatles ended up cobbling together a relatively weak rag-bag of originals and covers on "Beatles for Sale" (7/10).  (Like I say, "relatively".  It's still a great album.)

Elsewhere, Simon and Garfunkel were on the bus behind, releasing their debut "Wednesday Morning 3am" (6/10) and putting the self-penned work of genius "The Sounds of Silence" alongside the traditional folk hymn "Go Tell it on the Mountain", which I remember singing (*miming to) at primary school and consequently couldn't get my head round seeing it in this context anymore than if Simon and Garfunkel had sung "Make me a Channel of Your Peace" or "Lord of the Dance"

1965

And then God said to Abraham...

These days, bands take three years to write and record an album of songs and they still can't match what The Beatles and Bob were doing every 6 months at this stage.  Imagine if that was the case with builders or decorators - "We can do the job, mate, but it'll take six times as long and won't be anywhere near as good as other firms."  You'd laugh them out of the door and back to their van, emblazoned with 'Coldplay and Sons' or something like that.

In 1965, these two leviathans of popular rock music each released their best album to date followed by an even better one.  Bob went electric, at least on side one of "Bringing it all Back Home" (10/10) and then demonstrated that this was merely a prophet making the path ready for the messianic "Highway 61 Revisited" (10/10 and my favourite album of all time).  The Beatles released "Help!" (9/10) and then "Rubber Soul" (10/10), the latter being worthy of a perfect score in my book, despite how much better it would have been if they had included on it the two singles from the time: "We can work it out" and "Day Tripper".  The mark of how untouchable Dylan and Lennon-McCartney were as songwriters, is the quality of the songs they left off their albums, remarkably still better than the best of what anyone else has ever done.  I sometimes think some bands would have been even better if they'd left more songs off their albums.  I'm thinking particularly of Manic Street Preachers, The Verve, The Killers, Coldplay and Mumford and Sons, all of whom should have left ALL of their songs off their albums and put someone else's on instead.

To finish my list for 1965, I'd like to share the sad story of Jackson C Frank, whose self-titled one and only studio album (7/10) provides the pathos for his tale.  When he was 11 years old, a fire at his school killed 15 other students and left him with burns to half of his body, that caused him long term joint problems on top of the inevitable trauma he experienced from the whole incident.  He met Paul Simon in England, whilst both were plying their trade on the British folk circuit.  Recognising his talent and the strength of his songs (the best of which, "Blues run the game", he recorded a cover of), Simon produced Frank's album.  In the studio, Frank was so nervous singing, that he had to be hidden from view.  Within a year of the album's release, he had plunged into a deep depression and was admitted to hospital.  He was left completely devoid of any self-confidence or song-writing ability.  He married and had two children, but one died at an early age of cystic fibrosis, leading to Frank being admitted to a mental institution.  By the 1980s, he'd moved back to live with his mother, but went missing in a search for Paul Simon, according to a note he left behind.  He continued to be periodically institutionalised and was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.  In the 1990s, he was shot in the eye by some kids messing about with a pellet gun and consequently blinded.  In 1990, he died of pneumonia, aged 56.  Not the luckiest man in the music business.  But a wonderful album that I recommend you listen to.

1966

On the subject of Paul Simon, two of his albums with Garfunkel feature in my list of best and only albums for 1966:  "Sounds of Silence" (8/10) and "Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme" (8/10).  By this point, Simon had found his song-writing spurs, proving a worthy rival to Dylan lyrically and Lennon-McCartney melodically.  Just imagine how shit these albums would have sounded if he'd discovered South African music this early on, like George Harrison did with Indian music.

George's Indian influences and his other song-writing contributions to "Revolver" (10/10) were a significant factor in making this Beatles album the best in my opinion.  So much so, that "Sgt, Pepper's", its 1967 follow-up, has always felt like a let down to me.  Not because it's not a brilliant album, but "Revolver" is just so amazing that it isn't even spoilt by having "Yellow Submarine" on it.  In film terms, that's like "The Godfather" having an animated musical sequence half-way through, in which Don Corleone, surrounded by cartoon woodland animals, breaks into a chorus of "The Bare Necessities" as he chases his grandson through the tomato plants with a water-spray-can before dropping down dead.  I'm not sure even "The Godfather" would retain its credibility in the same way as "Revolver" does.

And whatever The Beatles do (at this stage at least, as he has a year off while they're knocking out "Sgt. Pepper's"), Bob can do just as well.  And he does this with "Blonde with Blonde" (10/10), which I think is rock music's first double album and easily its best.  The nearest equivalent to a "Yellow Submarine" on here is "Rainy Day Women #12 and #35" in which Bob invents the hashtag two generations before Twitter, whilst singing that "everybody must get stoned" to the accompaniment of a comedy trombone.  "Blonde on Blonde" is all the better for this, for harmonica playing that is more seamlessly integrated into the electric blues sound, for more stunningly original expressionism in its lyrics and for the sheer audacity of putting an out-of-focus photo on the cover and giving the album a title that sounds like a lesbian porn film.

My final 1966 album, is not The Beatles or Bob Dylan for a change.  It's Richie Havens' "Mixed Bag" (6/10).  Richie covers both The Beatles and Bob Dylan on this album.  There's no escaping them.

Half-amusing musings on my music collection - Part 1: The early 60s

 I guess I should explain the title first.  

With almost 6 weeks of the school holidays ahead of me, I'm hit by the urge to self-indulgently write about stuff that interests me.  Again.  And, as normal, to justify putting this online, I'll attempt to make it amusing, so that you don't have to share my geeky interest in music, give a shit about my personal ratings out of 10 or appreciate the chronology around which I'm structuring this series of posts.  You just need to be bored enough to spend 5 minutes reading something half tongue-in-cheek that's hopefully half-funny enough to make you smile for (according to the maths) a quarter of the time.  That's one minute and 15 seconds of smiling.  Personally, I'd get face-ache if I smiled for that long.  But if I manage that, then job done.  If not, then you might at least find the music focus interesting.  And if not that either, then you probably won't have got this far reading anyway.

So, I'll start with 1962, the earliest year which spawned an album that I own.  I'm not including compilations, no 'best of' stuff (hence the lack of any old pre-1962 rock and roll records from the rack), just studio albums, because a cigar's a cigar, but an album is a good smoke, or something like that.

1962

I have just two albums from this year.  Bob Dylan's eponymous debut (6/10) is a raw first outing for my number one musical idol and best given a wide berth if you normally find his idiosyncratic voice a bit scratchy on the ear-drum.  You might wonder if he's gargling cat litter on this record, but there's some respite when he punctuates his verses with a toot or three on his harmonica, mimicking a locomotive steaming through the song with a little too much bluster.  No classic Bob on here, nearly every track is a cover, but "Baby, Let me Follow You Down" is a real favourite of mine and his version of "House of the Rising Sun" is notable for its bleakness and Bob's decision to sing it from a female point of view ("it's been the ruin of many a poor 'girl' and me, oh God, I'm one").  The traditional narrator of the song was a woman before The Animals (inspired by Bob's version to record it) switched the gender.  Bob may have been ahead of his time, but he wasn't identifying as a woman in 1962.

The second album from this year is Willie Nelson's "And then I wrote" (7/10) which, in contrast to Bob's, includes a suite of songs which he did indeed write.  Most notably, it features his classic "Crazy", made famous by Patsy Cline, who struggled, whilst learning it, to imitate Willie's unorthodox method of singing his words out of step with where the music suggests they should be. Patsy was eventually encouraged to just sing it her own way.  Which she did, beautifully.  But Willie singing it his way is equally wonderful in my book.

1963

Only 3 albums from this year, two of which mark the start of Beatlemania in the UK.  My own mania for The Beatles means that they each get a high rating.  "Please, Please Me" (8/10) was, for the most part, recorded in one day.  Knowing what a strain "Twist and Shout" would have on Lennon's voice, this track was left until the end of the session and you can hear his worn vocal chords being stretched in desperation as if he was an Everton fan in the last 3 minutes of losing a match 1-0 to Liverpool.  It took me until my uncool middle age to appreciate this album, due to the covers of easy-listening and girl-group pop hits of the early 60s; and even the Beatles originals don't stray outside of (what Lennon once referred to as) the "I love you, you love me" lyrical theme.  That album and the title track single launched The Beatles into instant stardom in the early Spring of '63 and so by the time the pressure was on to release a quick follow up in the autumn, they had a weaker set of songs to stick on "With the Beatles" (7/10).  Part of this was due to the start of the habit of not (usually) including singles on albums, as it was assumed the fans had already bought them or would do so.  Hence, no "From Me to You" (my favourite early song of theirs), "She Loves You" or "I Want to Hold Your Hand".  It was released the same day that John F Kennedy was shot dead, so might not have hit the headlines in that sense either.

The final record in my collection from 1963 was Dylan's second, the one that similarly catapulted him to fame.  "The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan" (9/10) showcases several sides of his early, folk troubadour persona.  There's folk protest ("Blowin' in the Wind" and "Masters of War"), folk ballads ("Girl from the North Country" and "Don't think twice, it's alright") and folk with apocalyptic abstract expressionist lyrics ("A Hard Rain's a-gonna fall").  I shan't avoid the predictable corny follow-up to that sentence - it's a folking good album! That's 5 of the best 30 songs he ever wrote, all on one piece of vinyl. (Well, maybe 4, as I'm never knocked out by "Blowin' in the Wind", so excuse the hyperbole.)  On a recent trip to New York, I posed for a photo in the same street as the album cover shot and had this as my Facebook profile picture for ages.