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.
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