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.