Half-amusing musings on my music collection - Part 7: The mid-70s

The mid-70s was a mid-life crisis for the rock album, wedged as it was between its golden era and the explosion of punk, which seemed to consciously take a dump on the dinosaurs mentioned in my previous posts and heralded a new golden age of New Wave.  Some of those dinosaurs survived this brash meteor, but not always without injury.  1975 saw a final burst of sunshine before the rain, which appears to have fallen in 1976 (metaphorically, because in actuality 1976 witnessed an unprecedented heatwave).

Enjoying a second summer was Bob Dylan, who released "Blood on the Tracks" (10/10) in '75, which just about all Bob fans would rank as one of his 3 best albums; but Bob himself was quoted as saying that he didn't understand "people enjoying that type of pain" in reference to his divorce from Sara, which threaded its way throughout the album.  Much as I love Bob, I'm sorry to say that I do enjoy his pain on "Blood on the Tracks".  Bob's follow up in '76's "Desire" (9/10) and Rolling Thunder tour further demonstrated for the first time in rock history that you should never write anyone off.  My favourite story related to "Desire" is the fact that he recruited violinist Scarlet Rivera, whose input on each track gives the album its distinctive character, by driving past her in the street and deciding that she just looked like she should join his band.  He stopped and said hop in.  So, you just would, wouldn't you?

Another artist, resisting extinction and continuing to evolve and fascinate was David Bowie.  This was his 'Thin White Duke' era.  The term 'Thin White Duke' pretty much refers to the fact that he looked SHIT at this time, like a famine victim, consuming more heroin than protein and risking professional suicide by releasing an album of white soul music.  The words WHITE and SOUL go together like chocolate and fish or Jimmy Saville and children.  But Bowie being Bowie, even when he doesn't quite pull it off, manages to pull it off enough to admire his artistry.  "Young Americans" was too steeped in white soul for me, but "Station to Station" (9/10) developed from this to be more uniquely Bowie-esque

1975's top ten has mostly 10/10 and 9/10 albums for me.  Neil Young continued his beige (not purple, because beige is best) patch with the postponed release of "Tonight's the Night" (9/10) in which he laments the deaths of friends to heroin - the drug which best symbolised the 1970s' dystopianism in contrast to the idealistic '60s drugs of acid and pot - and "Zuma" (10/10) in which Crazy Horse are utilised once more as a very early precursor of '90s grunge.  Queen hit a peak with "Night at the Opera" (9/10), which features a great song that you might not know, but is worth checking out, called 'Bohemian Rhapsody' and "A Day at the Races" (8/10).  Both albums were named after Marx Brothers films.  This works much better than the titles "Abbot and Costello meet Frankenstein" and "Abbot and Costello meet the Mummy", but at the time it was the latter films that I was personally enjoying more on a summer holiday morning on BBC2.

The artistic curves were also moving in the right direction for Bruce Springsteen, whose album "Born to Run" (10/10) begins with perhaps the most poetic series of lyrics of all time (look up 'Thunder Road' and prepare to weep) and Roxy Music who put out "Siren" (8/10) in this year.  And Pink Floyd performed the impossible by following up and arguably equalling "Dark Side of the Moon" with "Wish you were Here" (10/10), the recording sessions for which were poignantly interrupted by an unrecognisable Syd Barrett, founder member and subject of the album's lyrics, who just wandered into Abbey Road like a ghost, clearly physically transformed by his drugs and mental health traumas.

But the cracks were beginning to show in the mid-70s.  Led Zeppelin conjured up a very decent double album "Physical Graffiti" (9/10) in '75, but following a near-tragic car crash that nearly killed him and his wife, Robert Plant was singing from a wheelchair on 1976's "Presence" (7/10), their first disappointing album.  Roy Harper and Willie Nelson both released their best albums in 1975 -  respectively "HQ" (8/10) and "Red Headed Stranger" (8/10) - but 1976 produced so few great albums that I don't own enough to comprise a top 10.  And those I do own, average a score of about 7/10 only.  It's a real dip.

Tull's "Too Old to Rock and Roll:  To Young to Die" (7/10) perhaps summarises the problem.  The giants of rock were pushing 30 or in some cases not far off 40 and the next generation were still popping their zits and spending too much time appreciating the shower page in the Argos catalogue.  Willie Nelson's "The Troublemaker" (7/10) failed to match its predecessor and I even have to put a 5/10 album on my list, which is "Jailbreak" (5/10) by Thin Lizzy, a band who always flattered to deceive.

Although meriting only 6/10, Blondie's self-titled debut at least provides a seed for a renaissance of rock music in the late 70s, as you'll see in my next post. Well. To an extent, anyway.  I've just looked ahead.  I won't pretend that I've packed it with cool new wave, post punk albums.  I am, after all, a bit of a sad bastard, with more in common with Alan Partridge than John Peel, so please expect more Kate Bush and Supertramp than The Jam and Ian Dury next time round.

Half-amusing musings on my music collection - Part 6: The early 70s

 1972

The definite article has a special place in popular music.  It was the usual starting point for most bands in the 1960s when naming themselves.  "The Somethings".  And some bands were often reverently ascribed the addition of an unofficial one, such as "The Pink Floyd" or "The Led Zeppelin".  But the Eagles, despite being referred to as 'The Eagles', are in fact just 'Eagles' and in 1972 they released their first album, "Eagles" (7/10) as if to emphasis the absence of "The" from their name.  That fusion of folk and country soft rock, which by now you're probably mocking me for always including in these top ten lists (a genre like something comfortable that a middle aged man might take simple joy from, like a pair of slippers), remained popular in 1972.  It influenced both "The Late Great Townes van Zandt" (8/10) by the late great Townes van Zandt, who WAS great but still 25 years off dying, despite what the title suggested; and also Neil Young's "Harvest" (10/10).  "Harvest" is indefinably wonderful to me, much like "Hunky Dory" and the colour beige, which I associate with both records.  Beige is such a comforting colour - that must be my reason for loving those two albums so much, their beige-ness.  The Rolling Stones, having helped pioneer country rock, released "Exile on Main Street" (9/10) which continued to embrace this genre and threw in some blues and gospel for good measure.  Country music always makes think of beige too.  Probably due to cornfields and cow dung.  The early 70s were very country and beige.  Lovely.

But 1972, witnessed a juxtaposition (had to get that word in somewhere) between this warm beige-ness and the multi-coloured brilliance of Art Rock.  I won't say Glam Rock, though there is an overlap, as Art Rock is a bit more sophisticated and grown up than the likes of  T Rex.  Heading the field in '72 were Roxy Music and a new incarnation of Bowie.  The former released their self-titled debut (9/10) in which they managed to do a bit of all that mucking about being clever stuff that Prog Rockers and the likes of King Crimson did, but they did it on good songs with melodies that you could sing along to, not just nod analytically along with as you acknowledge the musicianship, which is a wanky way to listen to music.  And Bowie released "Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars" (10/10) which song for song is difficult to match any other album against.  It's always interested me that 'Starman' was a hastily written last-minute song, when they were one track short of an album.  It was his appearance singing this on 'Top of the Pops' that turned him into a star.. coincidentally.  That look to camera as he sang, "so I picked on you, hoo, hoo" won over the country.

Not wanting to be too down on the Prog Rockers, I have included Genesis' "Foxtrot" (7/10) on my list.  And Pink Floyd continued their journey towards the Dark Side with "Obscured by Clouds" (7/10).  But as some stars were ascending, others neared their end.  Nick Drake released his 3rd and final album, "Pink Moon" (8/10) and The Doors did an admirable job with their second LP without Jim Morrison, "Full Circle" (7/10). 

1973-4

Despite its hype and a thousand or more listens, I never tire of  1973's "Dark Side of the Moon" (10/10).  I'm not quite sure how Pink Floyd created it, but this was certainly a time for re-inventing the whole concept of the rock album.  Roxy Music continued doing it with "For Your Pleasure" (8/10) and Frank Zappa was strutting his stuff left of left-field with "Overnite Sensation" (8/10) and "Apostrophe" (8/10).  Across those two LPs, Zappa sings about dental floss farming in Montana, smelly feet traumatising a dog as it chews a slipper, Nanook the Eskimo clubbing baby seals with a lead-filled snow shoe, warnings to "watch out where the huskies go, don't you eat the yellow snow" and lots of pretty rude stuff about sex that I won't provide details for in case my mum reads this. (She won't, she got bored after part one).

Clearly, in the 70s, rock music felt confident to move beyond the sexual innuendo in 60s music and just come out and say it.  Listening to Bowie's "Aladdin Sane" (9/10) I found myself, as a teenager, having to turn down the volume during 'Time' when he sings, "Time is flexing like a whore, falls wanking to the floor."  I mean, that is REALLY rude, David!  To think that the same album includes his cover of The Rolling Stones 'Let's Spend the Night Together' which was seen as so rude in the 60s that The Stones had to perform it on TV with the main lyric tweaked to 'Let's spend some time together'.  But I think Bowie's reference to self-abuse - and groupie-nailing Frank Zappa's obsession with all things sexual - was unusually explicit for a rock album at this time.  Bowie was not lyrically explicit the following year on "Diamond Dogs" (9/10), but the initial artwork depicting him as a human-canine hybrid, did feature a great big pair of dog's bollocks.   These were the years of the 'Carry On...' and 'Confessions' films, which admittedly were getting naughtier, but were still more cheeky than explicit, especially by modern standards.  That very English (almost camp) cheekiness is evident in Queen's "Sheer Heart Attack" (8/10) in '74 and concealed in innuendo in the (rarely camp) lyrics of The Stones and Led Zep.  Both of these rock giants put out albums worthy of their big stadia tours in these years: The Rolling Stones' "Goats Head Soup" (8/10) and "It's Only Rock and Roll" (8/10); and Led Zeppelin's "Houses of the Holy" (9/10).

Dylan was on the comeback trail at this time, touring with The Band (his first tour since 1966) and bringing them into the studio at last to add their unpolished genius to "Planet Waves" (9/10) in 1974.  Bob had been spawning imitators since day one and some who were clearly influenced by him, but were original enough to make the "new Dylan" epithet an inappropriate burden.  Bruce Springsteen was a case in point and his first two albums were distinctively poetic and soulful in an east-coast 1970s American way that always conjures up for me the scene in 'Rocky' where a group of singers are performing a cappella around an oil-drum fire on a cold night in a grim Philadelphia street.  Each Springsteen long-player had a long title - "Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ" (9/10) and "The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle" (9/10) - very much in keeping with the Boss's tendency for long concerts, then and now. 

One of my favourite Alan Partridge quotes was when he referred to 'Wings' as 'the band The Beatles could have been'.  At this time, Paul McCartney went from solo artist, to solo artist with wife to solo artist with band.  The first album by 'Paul McCartney and Wings' is fully deserving of Partridge's ridicule, but in 1973 they released "Band on the Run" (8/10) which might just win the accolade for the best post-Beatles LP by an ex-Beatle, by a nose anyway.

Rounding off the top tens for these two years are 1973's "Desperado" (8/10) by Eagles, or The Eagles, or whatever you want to call them, and 1974's "Heart like a Wheel" (7/10) by Linda Ronstadt, "Walls and Bridges" (8/10) by John Lennon, "I want to see the bright lights tonight" (8/10) by Richard and Linda Thompson, "On the Beach" (10/10) by Neil Young and "War Child" (7/10) by Jethro Tull.  As with the deleted Bowie album cover, all of these 1973-4 albums were indeed the dog's bollocks.

Half-amusing musings on my music collection - Part 5: 1970 and 1971

In 1970, The Beatles split.  Not because Yoko had been lying in a bed in Abbey Road studios, mad as a box of frogs.  And it wasn't to do with Phil Spector doing a production job on "Let it Be" (9/10) that McCartney would consider to be Spector's greatest crime (although, I'm not as sure that adding strings to "The Long and Winding Road" is in the same ballpark as murder, sexual molestation and psychological torture.)  The real reason for The Beatles split was because in 1970 they had so many brilliant songs that it would have been showing off to stay together and release them on one (probably triple) album.  THAT would have made The Beatles bigger than Jesus (don't burn my blog!), unless Jesus had been resurrected AND released a triple album of similar material.  Something not easily done in first century Galilee.

The material I refer to is scattered across the huge output of Beatles solo albums in 1970-1 and their final release as a band, "Let it Be".  The solo LPs securing positions on my top ten lists are 1970's "McCartney" (8/10) and George's triple album "All Things Must Pass" (8/10) and 1971's "Imagine" (8/10) and Paul and Linda's "Ram" (8/10).  Lennon's 1970 solo effort "Plastic Ono Band" doesn't quite make the list, but is a great album.  And Ringo's 1970 "Sentimental Journey" isn't in my collection, because, well, it's Ringo.  Solo.  Bless him.  I suspect he'd be allowed one song on the 1970-1 Beatles triple album that never was.

So, that's a combined score of 41 across '70-71 for The Beatles.  Untouchable.  But who are the others heralding the new decade with copious amounts of nice noises pressed onto vinyl?

The Doors score a perfect 20 by maturing into a more bluesy style, keeping willies in trousers on stage and growing a beard and getting fat in Jim Morrison's case.  "Morrison Hotel" (10/10) and "LA Woman" (10/10) frustratingly show them at their absolute best, sadly just before Jim quit the band, moved to Paris and died in the bath.

Jethro Tull's "Benefit" (10/10) and "Aqualung" (9/10) continued to prove that one of the best additions to the standard guitar-bass-drum-keyboards foundation for rock bands was a flute.  (We are a year or two away from Roxy Music making the case for a sax.) Standing on one leg, wearing tights and a codpiece whilst playing the flute might not have stood the test of time as well as the actual sound, but such is the joy off listening on vinyl over watching on You Tube.

After years of trying different styles, laughing with gnomes and floating in a tin can, David Bowie's creative peak began in 70-71, even though he was a year away from a commercial breakthrough.  He grew his hair long, donned a dress and draped himself over a chaise longue for the cover of "The Man Who Sold the World" (9/10).  Because (or maybe despite the fact that) the content  was not quite as camp or feminine as the sleeve suggested - the riff on 'Width of a Circle' rivals Led Zep's more overt masculinity - his record company couldn't see those conservative Americans wanting to buy a rock album with a transvestite on the cover and so changed it on the US version for a 3rd rate cartoon of a man in a cowboy hat with a rifle wrapped in a blanket under his arm, standing outside what is probably a mental asylum.  That's what America got for its inability to cope with a bloke in a frock.  A year later, Bowie unveiled a work of genius that few people appreciated straight away.  "Hunky Dory" (10/10).  Way beyond my powers of description, so I'll move on...

Led Zeppelin continued to name their albums after themselves, much like heavyweight fighter George Foreman, whose five sons are all called George.  "Led Zeppelin III" (9/10) surprised the critics with the emphasis shifting from rock towards folk; but in '71 the balance between the two was perfected on "Led Zeppelin IV" (10/10).  Or whatever you want to call it, because by that time, Zeppelin were so huge, that they confidently released an album with no title and no writing on the front, back or spine to indicate that it was their album.  Not something Showaddywaddy could get away with it.

On "Hunky Dory's" 'Song for Bob Dylan, Bowie sings that "we lost your train of thought", referring to what many at the time saw as Dylan's demise.  At this time, people may have believed that Bob had lost HIS train of thought, or perhaps his mind.  One particular 'Rolling Stone' music critic would have agreed, having famously headed his review of 1970's "Self Portrait" with the words "What is this shit?".  It doesn't nudge into my 1970 top ten, but it's far from shit.  The follow-up shut a few people up, though.  "New Morning" (8/10) was Bob's most varied album ever in terms of style, even embracing jazz-styled scat singing from a female backing vocalist.  'Rolling Stone' did not respond with "What is this scat?".  They missed an opportunity there.

Nearly all jazz makes me want to pour petrol into my ears and set fire to my head.  Especially scat.  And improvisational jazz.  All that smug nodding along to a careering rhythm that sounds like a never-ending trickle of piss into a toilet.  However, used sparingly, like garlic (which I also hate in larger quantities), jazz can enhance music in another primary genre, and Nick Drake's 1970 sophomore folk album "Bryter Layter" (9/10) is the jazziest thing in my collection.

If jazz is garlic to me, then Prog Rock is pepper.  I can take more of it, if the whole dish is a good one, but pile too much on and I want to spit it out.  Tull were dabbling with prog and did so more after 1971, but early Genesis were steeped in this genre.  Prog rock is always very clever, but very clever stuff can be either dull or down right irritating.  1971's "Nursery Cryme" (8/10) makes the peppery prog palatable by presenting it in a context of Victorian gothic folk supernaturalism, dark mystery, wit and even a sprinkling of music hall.  But more importantly, the songs are enjoyable and not annoying as most prog rock tends to be when it conforms to type and disappears up its own arsehole.

A final few mentions. 1970 saw Simon and Garfunkel bow out on a high point, with their unsurpassable "Bridge over Troubled Water" (10/10) and Neil Young cemented his place as a writer of classic songs on "After the Goldrush" (9/10).  1971 heralded Pink Floyd's transformation from psychedelia into something altogether more recognisably Floyd-ish with "Meddle" (9/10), while The Rolling Stones released "Sticky Fingers" (10/10) with another iconic Andy Warhol penis-obsessed album cover.

Thus ends the golden 3 year period, 1969-71, in which I've rated 13 albums with perfect scores of 10/10.  The rest of the 70s produces only 12 albums of that same quality and there are diminishing returns thereafter.  It's not the case that I've donned rose-tinted glasses to view this era with, nor have I worn brown-tinted ones for the rest of the time; it's purely because between 1969 and 1971, the world was blessed with the creative fruits of The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, David Bowie, Neil Young, The Doors, Simon and Garfunkel, The Rolling Stones, Nick Drake and Jethro Tull.... ALL AT THE SAME TIME!! Talk about buses!

Half-amusing musings on my music collection - Part 4: 1969

Based on a series of calculations carried out on a Bletchley Park enigma machine, 1969, 1970 and 1971 each score higher than any other year for the quality of the albums in my top ten lists.  This post will focus on 1969.  We've never had it so good.

1969

The Beatles' final recorded album, "Abbey Road" (10/10), lives up to the iconic status of its sleeve better than "Sgt. Pepper's" does, though I know many would disagree with me.  Not least, because of the inclusion of "Maxwell's Silver Hammer", a jaunty, kids' TV jingle about a vicious murder, and "Octopus' Garden", which would have made far fewer ripples on the pond of popular culture if it had been written and released by Aussie children's performers, The Wiggles, as you might be forgiven for thinking it had been.  But I like those songs.  And they in no way compromise the perfect 10 rating for an album that witnesses George Harrison's song-writing hitting its creative peak and the most seamless, musically coherent sequence of disassociated songs pieced together on side B.  Given that the album cover was shot outside Abbey Road studios in London's St John's Wood, where my parents grew up and were living at the time, and that the record came out two months before they married, then its strong visual image of George, Paul, John and Ringo on the zebra crossing was an inevitable choice of arm tattoo for me when I whimsically opted for some Beatles-related, permanent skin marking.  (A tattoo of the Sgt. Pepper's cover, would have cost a small fortune and caused me to pass out several dozen times.)

Like The Beatles, Led Zeppelin are one of those few bands who would have been unrecognisably poorer for one of their members being someone different - something they understood when they chose to split up following John Bonham's death in 1980.  And the magic of the Bonham-Jones-Plant-Page interplay surprisingly had no gestation period - Zeppelin arrived fully evolved, like a chicken plopping out another fully grown chicken and skipping the whole egg bit.  They first played together as a band in August 1968, toured that Autumn as 'The New Yardbirds' and released their debut album "Led Zeppelin" (10/10) in January 1969, faultlessly and characteristically Zeppelin from the outset.  In the same year, they released "Led Zeppelin II", inspiring every rock band from that year forward and prompting a similar debate over which is better, I or II, that was soon to eternally rage in respect to 'The Godfather'.

Our current generation of young music makers might well be inspired by Zeppelin, but their delicate/principled (*delete) sensibilities would probably be shocked by what they'd call 'toxic masculinity' in the lyrics; but Robert Plant is by all accounts - including those of two friends who have worked with him - a thoroughly nice bloke.  Not toxic at all.  So, when he sings that he wants you to squeeze his lemon until the juice runs down his leg, you just have to judge it in its 1969 context.  As you would 'On the Buses'. Similarly, on Jethro Tull's finest outing "Stand Up" (10/10), these lyrics might also cause a Twitterstorm these days if a well-known pop star employed them in a song: 

"Don't want to be a fat man, people would think that I was just good fun... too much to carry around with you, no chance of finding a woman who will love you in the morning and all the night time too... I've seen the other side of being thin, roll us both down a mountain and I'm sure the fat man would win." 

But you know, if you're convinced that in the 1960s everyone was sexist, racist and laughed at fat people, it's best you bugger off and stream some Ed Sheeran from your phone instead.  Not that you'd be wrong, of course.  You might want 1969 rock albums to carry the same warnings as so many old films and TV shows online - something along the lines of "reflects attitudes of the time", which I recently saw applied to Grange Hill on Britbox... ignoring the fact that like most things, even stuff today reflects attitudes of the time, on account of being made by people living at that time.

1969 was also the year in which The Doors pulled in an orchestra, had Jim Morrison in full crooner mode and added a dash of easy listening to their distinctive sound on "The Soft Parade" (10/10).  That's another band with 4 irreplaceable musicians.  And The Rolling Stones ploughed the country-folk-rock furrow some more on "Let it Bleed" (10/10), demonstrating that on the contrary they could replace a band member, by sacking the unreliable Brian Jones midway through recording and becoming an even better band by substituting him with Mick Taylor.  Jones died a month after leaving the Stones, the first of many rock casualties during these 3 years.  The death count for '69-71 might imply that the reason why music was so good at this time was because musicians were dying for their art.  They weren't, of course.  They were just filling their bodies with all sorts of nasty crap.

The remaining 4 albums from my 1969 top ten are also either folk or country influenced, or both (as you'd expect from someone with a non-eclectic taste in music).  Neil Young's second album and first with Crazy Horse, "Everybody Knows this is Nowhere" (9/10) has an awful cover shot of Neil leaning on a tree like a catalogue model for lumberjack shirts, fooling potential buyers into believing that this is a K-TEL compilation of cheesy middle of the road ballads.  Instead, it contains two of his most loved and oft-played, heavy and grungy, epic guitar work-outs, "Cowgirl in the Sand" and "Down by the River".

Nick Drake's debut "Five Leaves Left" (9/10) is pure English folk without any grunge. Drake was too shy to perform live, an affliction you'd wish on Chris Martin.  Consequently, his records remained little known for many years after his tragic death in 1974, until other musicians and song-writers started crediting him as an influence.  Coming from similar comfortable, middle-class, suburban or village backgrounds, and even more deeply immersed in Britain's folk traditions were Fairport Convention.  But they were taking these traditions and modernising them, as best exemplified on "Unhalfbricking" (8/10) and "Liege and Lief" (8/10).  Tragedy plagued Fairport as well.  In between these two albums, drummer Martin Lamble and Jeannie Franklyn, girlfriend of guitarist Richard Thompson, were both killed when the band's transit van crashed on the motorway following a gig.  If it wasn't for Jimmy Saville's subsequent 'Clunk Click Every Trip' campaign, more rock stars might have perished in the Health-and-safety-adverse 1970s.

It is often said that 1969, with its many tragedies - those mentioned here and some key cultural turning points, such as Hell's Angels stabbing a young man to death at the Rolling Stones' Altamont concert and news of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam - marked the end of 1960s optimism and idealism as much as it marked the actual end of the decade.  But in doing so, it began three glorious years of music.