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.
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