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.
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