70. The Rolling Stones - Aftermath (April 1966)

1. Mother's Little Helper*

2. Stupid Girl

3. Lady Jane*

4. Under My Thumb

5. Doncha Bother Me

6. Goin' Home

7. Flight 505

8. High and Dry

9. Out of Time*

10. It's Not Easy

11. I Am Waiting

12. Take It or Leave It

13. Think

14. What to Do

B+

So here we are again with the Rolling Stones. There debut was a collection of mostly forgettable R&B covers, but they'd obviously made great strides in the intervening years. Aftermath is their first album of all original material, written mostly by Keith Richards and Mick Jagger but with a number of important contributions by the rest of the band. And really, it's a pretty good album. If not for a few unfortunate lyrical choices I might even call it a great one. The production, for one thing, is damned near perfect. Aftermath was recorded in California, and escapes the scratchy thinness that typified a lot of UK recordings in the 1960s. The instruments are well-spaced and theirs a ghostly ambience that really fills out the sound.

Musically, too, this is a brilliant album. From a musical point of view there's really only one bad song on the album - the interminable "Goin' Home", which is eleven minutes of minimal blues noodling over which Jagger makes a bunch of sex noises. At the time it was probably great make-out music, but since I consider Mick Jagger's voice an immediate boner killer all I can say is that it was obviously important in the development of music I actually like, even if I don't much care for it in and of itself.

The only real problem with this album is one that many people have noted, and that quite a few have jumped through hoops to justify - several of these songs are pretty misogynistic. Now I'm not one of those people to bemoan anything that slights the fairer sex. I consider myself an egalitarian, in that I think men and women are equally shit. But I also have a utopian tendency to believe we might move beyond that shittiness into a wonderful post-gender world where everyone is nice to each other. And songs like "Under My Thumb" don't help. 

Honestly, the problem isn't even that it's misogynistic. If a woman sang this song about a man it would be equally reprehensible. It's a revenge song, basically, in which the narrator celebrates having taken someone who was a jerk to them and transformed them into his creature. I won't say it isn't a true-to-life portrait of a thing that frequently happens. But a better songwriter might have introduced some irony, or written about the subject from a different perspective which examines the dynamic from all sides. Instead the Rolling Stones celebrate it by marrying jubilant lyrics to one of the catchiest pieces of music they ever wrote. There's really only one context I can think of in which this song is worth listening to, and that's if you're a sixty year old man and your drunk and thinking about your ex-wife who got everything in the divorce.

For all that, I have absolutely no problem with "Stupid Girl". Some girls are stupid. Some girls are arseholes. Anyone who was ever part of any remotely happening scene can probably think of loads of women who fit the bill for this song. But it does become a problem when Jagger is pretty much only singing about women. He clearly had some issues with them, and taken as a whole there's not much balance on this album.

"Out of Time", a brilliant evocation of American soul music, is a truly great song. It's catchy and buoyant and honestly great, with a wonderful singalong chorus. But at the same time it's pretty bleak, lyrically, being about a girl who left a man to be part of the Scene and came back to find he'd outgrown her. Except this is the Rolling Stones so that narrative is expressed in the most arseholish way possible.

I also quite like "Mother's Little Helper". On the surface it's a song about housewives relying on pills to get through the day, but at the same time it manages to be a commentary on the hypocrisy and straightjacket conformity of the older generation at the time. On the one hand, the Stones seem to be commenting on a way of life so soul crushing that you need to drug yourself to get through a single day of it. On the other hand there's the fact that the mothers popping these pills would be scandalised if they found out that their children were using drugs.

The last song worth mentioning is "Lady Jane". Given the Stones' reputation as hard rockers, this is a distinct anomaly - a sort of Elizabethan love song about courtly love, of all things, in which Jagger explains to a bunch of women that as much as he loves them he is sworn to Lady Jane, and will always go back to her. It's probably about cannabis.

Anyway other than that there's no much to say. Side one is all over the place3 and very patchy, but side two settles into a great blues-rock-soul groove and is a lot of fun. The good thing about the Rolling Stones at this point is that they seem to want to be experimental while also remaining catchy and listenable, and so you get a lot of boundary pushing music that is still a lot of fun. I just think maybe a few of those boundaries shouldn't have been pushed.

So anyway, this is a great album mostly, but I just fucking hate "Goin' Home" and "Doncha Bother Me".

69. The Mothers of Invention - Freak Out! (June 1966)

1. Hungry Freaks, Daddy

2. I Ain't Got No Heart

3. Who Are the Brain Police?

4. Go Cry on Somebody Else's Shoulder

5. Motherly Love

6. How Could I Be Such a Fool?

7. Wowie Zowie*

8. You Didn't Try to Call Me

9. Any Way the Wind Blows

10. I'm Not Satisfied

11. You're Probably Wondering Why I'm Here

12. Trouble Every Day*

13. Help I'm a Rock (A Suite in Three Movements)*

- I. Okay to Tap Dance

- II. In Memoriam, Edgar Varese

- III. It Can't Happen Here

14. The Return of the Son of Monster Magnet

- I. Ritual Dance of the Child-Killer

- II. Nullis Pretii (No Commercial Potential)

A

Where to begin? Really, this is a bizarre and monumental album. Luckily, while time has not diluted its strangeness, it's also a pretty accessible one. The album is frontloaded with pop and rock parodies, so the first disc is in a lot of ways a comedy party album. True, "Hungry Freaks, Daddy" takes no prisoners, and is a scathing critique of the vacuousness of modern America. And really, that's what the whole album is about - a sustained attack on the homogenised, moronic state of affairs in the mid-1960s, when it was obvious to everyone that something had to change but no-one was really sure of how. Which might make this sound like a chore, but thankfully Frank Zappa can be very funny when he wants to be. Just look at "Motherly Love", which leans into the ambiguity of its title while sending-up songs about bands getting laid. Or there's the delightful "Wowie Zowie", with its line "I don't even care if you don't shave your legs!", which sounds like something Johnny Karate might have written. And "Go Cry on Somebody Else's Shoulder" could be a 1950s pop-rock standard, if not for the overblown and self-parodying style in which it's written. 

None of which does justice to the strangeness of the music. The first half of the album is anchored in and comments upon rock conventions, but it also features odd guitar choices, bizarre multi-layered vocals and frequent intrusions by instruments like bells and what I think is a kazoo. "Who Are the Brain Police?" is a song so odd that by the end of it your brain feels like it's melted like the chrome and plastic mentioned in the lyrics. 

Things get really weird, however, on the second disc; which in a lot of ways might as well be a different album. Things kick of in a sort of normal way with "Trouble Every Day", easily the best song on the album and one of the best pieces of social commentary in music I've ever heard. This is a driving blues rocker that starts with the narrator watching the Watts Riots on TV and gradually spirals out into a biting commentary on everything from racial violence to capitalism trapping people in menial jobs and the general state of America in 1966. It's also, hilariously, the song that got the band signed - the guy from the record company only heard them play this song, and thought they were a white blues band. And really, the Mothers' facility with this sort of music is such that it's apparent they probably could have had considerable commercial success if they'd stuck to it. As it is, it sort of stands in the middle of the album as proof that the Mothers weren't just a bunch of atonal weirdos, but could crank out genuinely catchy and well-constructed songs with highly intelligent lyrics. They just had grander ambitions.

Those ambitions become apparent on the rest of disc two, which is comprised of two experimental suites that make use of sound collages, overdubs, weird timing shifts and repetitive beats. One of the sections is dedicated to experimental music pioneer Edgar Varese. Then again, there are also lyrics about a rock that dreams of becoming a policeman, and dialogues with a woman named Susie Cream Cheese, which really goes to show the commingling of high and low art that defines this record (and, though I'm no expert, would more or less define Frank Zappa's output for years to come). The only real disappointment is that "Return of the Son of Monster Magnet" starts excitingly enough, but never really goes anywhere. Apparently the label pulled the plug halfway through recording it, much to Zappa's chagrin, and this probably explains its unfinished sound. It does, however, stand-out as an obvious precursor to one of my favourite bands, Can - it almost sounds like something off Tago Mago.

What's really great about all of this is that even though Frank Zappa composed all this strange music, he did it without the aid of drugs (unless you count coffee and cigarettes). That probably explains why this music, as strange and crazy as it is, holds up so well today. The title Freak Out! is extremely apt, but this is also very disciplined and carefully constructed music. It's very much music for your mind, which is nice; and rewards repeat listening and careful consideration. At the same time, it's also very funny. And prescient, really. "It Can't Happen Here" features the lyrics "Who would have thought that they would freak out in Kansas? Who would have thought that they would freak out in Minnesota?"

Another thing I'd like to mention before I finish is to do with Zappa's personal politics. I don't know much about the man, but from what I do know he seemed alright. As someone who is very much on the fence about most things politically, it's nice to have someone to look up to who had an equal distrust of both the counterculture and the conservative establishment. The dualism prevalent in political thought is frankly deeply annoying at times, and it's frustrating to feel that you have to sign up for one team or another and then relentlessly tow the line. People should be thinking for themselves, making informed decisions, and not just throwing in their lot with one side or the other out of a desperate need for acceptance. They should also, every now and then, maybe freak out a little.

68. Paul Revere & the Raiders - Midnight Ride (May 1966)

1. Kicks*

2. There's Always Tomorrow

3. Little Girl in the 4th Row

4. Ballad of a Useless Man*

5. (I'm Not Your) Steppin' Stone*

6. There She Goes

7. All I Really Need Is You

8. Get It On

9. Louie, Go Home

10. Take a Look at Yourself

11. Melody for an Unknown Girl

B+

Sometimes, listening to these albums, I have to wonder why they were included in the Book. It's called 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die, after all. That kind of implies that all the albums included will be amazing and important works of art. And when you consider that so many brilliant albums weren't included (there isn't a single Yo La Tengo album, for God's sake; and for some reason they left out the three best Bjork albums), some of the stuff that does make it in can be a real collection of headscratchers. 

All of which is my way of saying that Midnight Ride is a pretty good album, but maybe not something you need to immediately seek out. I think it was mostly included for context - a lot of music like this was being produced at the time (although not necessarily of this quality), and it tends to get overshadowed in retrospectives by more high profile acts. When people think of the late 60s they think of Hendrix, the Stones and so forth. Paul Revere & the Raiders' main claim to fame these days is a throwaway joke in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood about how desperately uncool they were.

This might make it sound like I'm dumping on Midnight Ride, but I'm not. I'm actually quite fond of it. The Raiders marry intelligent, accessible lyrics to a driving garage rock sound with just a hint of psychedelia thrown in (as was the fashion at the time). And a couple of the songs are genuine classics. "Kicks" is one of the first and very best anti-drug songs, and while it was released at a time when such views were deeply unfashionable, from the perspective of 2023 it seems like a timely warning of things to come. It also helps that it's a kickass rocker that sounds like it was written for people to do drugs to. And like most great anti-drug songs it was written from personal experience - the song writing team behind it were trying to reach out to their friend who was an addict. The central message of the song, that "you can't run away from you", is one of the most important lessons a person can learn in life.

The other really great song on the album is another Brill Building composition, "(I'm Not Your) Steppin' Stone". This song just straight-up rocks, and sounds like it could have been by the Animals. The title says it all really, and it's a lot of the fun.

The rest of the album is mostly solid, danceable garage rock, and an obvious precursor to a lot of punk and power-pop of the ensuing decades. "Little Girl in the 4th Row" is a pretty ballad, and "Melody for an Unknown Girl" is an honestly quite terrible instrumental with a cringeworthy spoken word intro. The real outlier on this album is probably "Ballad of a Useless Man", which is both a solid rocker and a pretty dark song about a man's descent into unemployment, poverty and alcoholism. So it's not all jangly guitars and paeans to self-empowerment.

Ultimately, I do think this is an album worth hearing, if only because it's a window into the tastes of Middle America in the mid-to-late 60s. That Silent Majority Nixon was on about. It's like watching Mad Men - you don't see the picture postcard version of the 60s, with lots of longhairs and groovy iconography; instead, you're getting a look at the 60s as it was actually lived. Kids dancing to Paul Revere & the Raiders, a band whose music made them role models for sane, straight folks whose countercultural tendencies extended no further than growing their hair a little longer and maybe sharing a joint at a party now and then. The people who hated Pat Boone, but weren't terribly interested in Jefferson Airplane either. As a kid who grew up so straight edged you could have used me as a ruler, yet has always loved rock music, I can speak for the importance of music like that in providing support and giving a voice to the nerds, dorks and squares of the world.

Although I would like to stress that this album does totally rock.

67. The Mamas and the Papas - If You Can Believe Your Eyes and Ears (February 1966)

1. Monday, Monday*

2. Straight Shooter

3. Got a Feelin'*

4. I Call Your Name

5. Do You Wanna Dance

6. Go Where You Wanna Go

7. California Dreamin'*

8. Spanish Harlem

9. Somebody Groovy

10. Hey Girl

11. You Baby

12. The 'In' Crowd

C+

Jesus Christ they need to clean that toilet.

Some albums seem designed to piss me off. This album manages to combine one of my least favourite styles of music - overproduced vocal pop - with one of my least favourite cultural movements - California hippies. The result is a superficially pretty album of bland pop which, when you dig into the lyrics, is actually a pretty smug and self-indulgent celebration of 1960s sleaze. This is an album where you'll hear the words "groovy" and "square" used unironically. "Straight Shooter" is entirely about drugs, but written in a coy way so that it comes across as a goofy love song. "The 'In' Crowd" is an unbearable song about how great it is to be hip and doing also sorts of crazy things. There are some nice shout-outs to female sexual empowerment on this album, but they're presented in a deeply unappealing way. And somehow all this shit led to the development of music such as the Carpenters and Kamahl. It's deeply irritating.

That said, there are a few good songs. "Monday, Monday" is very pretty, although far too long. "Got a Feelin'" is a beautiful folk ballad that points the way towards a lot of gentle psychedelia to come. And of course "California Dreamin'" is a beautiful song that everyone knows and that will outlast us all.

The problem with this album is that it stands somewhere between a collection of house wife's favourites and a self-consciously hip bunch of songs about sex and drugs. The result is that there's something for everyone, but as a whole, for me at least, it doesn't really hang together as an album. I suppose my big problem is that the Mamas and the Papas decided to take one of my least favourite approaches to an album - finding a unique sound, and then milking it for all it's worth. There's a bit of variety on this album, but not enough to rescue it from being overproduced schmaltz. 

So, yeah. Rolling Stone ranked this the 112th greatest album of all time in 2012. Your mileage may vary. To me, bar a couple of songs, it's pretty much everything that was wrong with music in the late 60s and early 70s - pretty but vacuous, wide-eyed but sleazy, and deeply, obnoxiously hip.

It's honestly making me a bit worried. The late 60s produced some of my very favourite music, but at the same time I forgot about all the hippies, hipsters, and the general breakdown of society that allowed so much crap to slip through. I won't go into it, but I have a lot of strong personal reasons for hating that sort of thing with a passion.

For all that, I plan to give a good review to the first Velvet Underground album. I'm complicated.

66. The Kinks - Face to Face (October 1966)

1. Party Line

2. Rosy Won't You Please Come Home*

3. Dandy

4. Too Much on My Mind

5. Session Man

6. Rainy Day in June

7. A House in the Country

8. Holiday in Waikiki

9. Most Exclusive Residence for Sale

10. Fancy

11. Little Miss Queen of Darkness*

12. You're Lookin' Fine

13. Sunny Afternoon*

14. I'll Remember

A-

And so we come to the Kinks, a band of which I've long been fond even though I've only heard a couple of their albums. If you come to this expecting "You Really Got Me" or "All Day and All of the Night" you'll be pretty disappointed. This album marks the point where they dropped the fast, heavy beat style for which they still remain famous and adopted a softer, smarter approach to song writing. Ray Davies emerges on this album as one of the finest lyricists of his generation, writing a collection of bitingly satirical songs about everything from the upper classes to the commercialisation of Hawaii to girls who go to discotheques. The album cover is really pretty misleading (and apparently the band opposed it). From the cover you'd expect a bunch of out-there psychedelic pop, but that's really only true of "Fancy" and "Rainy Day in June", both of which are decent songs but feel deeply out of place on this album, which is mostly humorous and literate rock.

And really, I think the Kinks would have to be one of the most consistently funny bands of all time. Ray Davies is a master at wry, observational humour, and not afraid to go dark when need be ("House in the Country" features the lyric "he got his job when drunken daddy tumbled down the stairs"), although he also shows a remarkable tenderness at times. And the band are all great musicians, playing straight rock like "I'll Remember" or "Party Line", but also getting sophisticated with stuff like the gorgeous and hilarious "Sunny Afternoon".

The argument that this is a concept album, though, doesn't really hold water. Supposedly it's a song cycle about British society, which is all well and good. But then how do you explain the inclusion of "Too Much on My Mind", which is about nervous exhaustion? "Rainy Day in June" is about elves and gnomes, although I suppose it could be commentary on English weather. And "Fancy" is a gorgeous bit of Indian-influenced psychedelia but hardly biting satire. So I don't know. 

In any case, this is a great album. It's not the Kinks' high point, but it shows how they were going to develop into one of the greatest bands of all time. As I understand it, the decision to go soft and smart resulted in a drop in sales but a massive improvement in their critical profile. And really, we haven't had anything like this before on the List. This satirical, documentary approach to song writing is completely new within the parameters of the Book. It's certainly welcome, as I've long since grown tired of all the love songs, and Bob Dylan wandered up his own arse about halfway through Highway 61 Revisited, never to emerge. Songs that tell stories, and make clever observations, are some of my favourite types, and I'm looking forward to the shift in music that occurred around this time.

65. The Monks - Black Monk Time (March 1966)

1. Monk Time*

2. Shut Up*

3. Boys Are Boys and Girls Are Choice

4. Higgle-Dy-Piggle-Dy

5. I Hate You

6. Oh, How to Do Now

7. Complication*

8. We Do Wie Du

9. Drunken Maria

10. Love Came Tumblin' Down

11. Blast Off!

12. That's My Girl

A

I remember the first time I heard the Monks. My friend at the time played "Monk Time" for me. The first words out of my mouth were "Is he even playing chords?". And truly, "Monk Time" remains one of the strangest songs ever recorded, a thunderous beast that disintegrates into atonal organ solos and the singer screaming "Stop it! I don't like it!" in between stream of consciousness rants about James Bond and the Vietnam war. And yet for all its teetering on the edge of making sense, it has a rock solid beat and you could probably even dance to it. That's really the album in a nutshell - raucous, unhinged music anchored to primitive, insistent grooves. No wonder this has been called the first punk album, and a progenitor of krautrock. Probably both statements are misleading, though. The Monks never made much of a splash, and it wasn't till well after punk kicked off that people stumbled across their music and started letting it influence them. That said, they've obviously been pretty influential - "I Hate You", for example, could easily be an early song by the Fall.

Anyway, this is a great album. The lyrics aren't especially deep, but that's kind of the point. These were a bunch of U.S. servicemen stationed in West Germany who clearly didn't believe in the modern world, and thought it was kind of insane. In the best punk tradition, they responded with deranged lyrics about the insanity of the modern world, the impulses we constantly have to quell to get through life, and a general attitude of "The world is crazy and it's driving me insane". Musically, it rejects a lot of the conventions of the time, and although it can occasionally sound tame by modern standards it must have been utterly baffling at the time. The main strength, musically, is that even though they were making heavy, distorted, unhinged music, the Monks understood how to craft a catchy, danceable song. The result is highly experimental music with confrontational lyrics which remains surprisingly listenable. It's out there, but the Monks clearly had an appreciation for garage rock and R&B that anchors their songs. 

So, yeah. This is a must listen for anyone interested in experimental rock. The great thing about it is that the Monks had a "try anything" attitude that means you can never be sure what the next song will sound like, or even which direction a given song will make. For every outre venture there's a simple rock number like "We Do Wie Du", or the polka-meets-psych funk of "Drunken Maria".

Really, there's no way to do this album justice in words. It's about twenty years ahead of its time.