121. The United States of America - The United States of America (March 1968)

1. The American Metaphysical Circus*

2. Hard Coming Love

3. Cloud Song*

4. The Garden of Earthly Delights*

5. I Won't Leave My Wooden Wife for You, Sugar

6. Where Is Yesterday

7. Coming Down

8. Love Song for the Dead Che

9. Stranded in Time

10. The American Way of Love

-I. Metaphor for an Older Man

-II. California Good Time Music

-III. Love Is All

A

You may think there have been some weird, trippy albums so far, but not many things could compete with the USA's sole studio effort. Words can't do this album justice. A group of avant-garde musicians getting together to record a guitar-free psychedelic rock album integrating complex electronic and tape effects? A singer (Dorothy Moskowitz) who manages to sound like Grace Slick if she took a bunch of downers after being assimilated by the Borg? The electric violin as lead instrument? This is very much the sort of stuff I like.

This album really leads with its weirdest moment. "The American Metaphysical Circus" starts with a collage of fairground calliope music and patriotic marching band tunes, then suddenly warps into an electronics-heavy, stoned-out dirge in which Moskowitz describes the titular circus, a nightmarish place where you can bleed children (instruments provided!) and torture a bear into whistling "Londonderry Air", and where "the price of admission is your mind". The nightmare quality is accentuated by the way that Moskowitz's vocals are slowly twisted and distorted until they become an unintelligible metallic howl. It's an incredibly bold way to start an album, a sort of Burroughs-esque political satire that doesn't really sound like anything we've had so far (and really, only sounds like bands that have deliberately aped it since, such as Portishead and Broadcast). In some ways, the rest of the album can't match the promise of the first track. But it still manages to be pretty great.

You have rockers ("Hard Coming Love", with its great distorted keyboard lead), gentle psychedelia ("Cloud Song" and "Love Song for the Dead Che"), and humorous satire ("I Won't Leave My Wooden Wife for You, Sugar" is a pretty funny look at a comfortably suburban man who has neatly compartmentalised his sadistic relationship with a teenage girl; "Metaphor for an Older Man" is all about closeted buttoned-down types crusing the New York streets for transexual prostitutes). "Where Is Yesterday" tackles one of my favourite philosophical questions (how can the present moment be so vivid, only to decay into the vagueness of memory?). There's even a somewhat dodgy Beatles knock-off ("Stranded in Time", probably the only weak song on the album). And things wrap-up with "Love Is All", in which the music melts into a collage of music concrete that includes samples of all the previously songs on the album, over which singer-composer Joseph Byrd repeatedly intones a statement about how much fun we all had. It's all strange, challenging music, much of it quite original in conception. Music hall, Dixieland jazz, modern classical, music concrete, Frank Zappa, Country Joe and the Fish, Pink Floyd, and (most obviously) a solid foundation in the songs Grace Slick penned for Jefferson Airplane. It's heady stuff.

My favourite song on the album, however, (though probably not the "best", whatever that means) is easily "The Garden of Earthly Delights". When I think about psychedelic rock, this has long been one of the first tunes that springs to mind. It's easily the most "Grace Slick-y" song hear, a rave-up where Moskowitz's ice-cold vocals swoop and sweep in long, drawn-out phrasings as she describes a garden of poison mushrooms and omnivorous orchids. It's just an incredibly fun, trippy song. Really, I'm disappointed. Before I started this project I assumed more psychedelic rock would sound like "White Rabbit", or the Silver Apples, or the White Noise, or early Pink Floyd. But nope! It's mostly just been a lot of distorted guitars and sophomoric humour so far. Oh well. We're slowly crawling towards the early-to-mid-70s, which is one of my favourite periods of music, and there'll be a lot more of this sort of weird shit to come.

So, anyway. A lot of the albums you must hear before you die are really more "albums that are pretty OK, I guess", but The United States of America is a classic like nothing else of its time.

120. Big Brother and the Holding Company - Cheap Thrills (August 1968)

1. Combination of the Two*

2. I Need a Man to Love

3. Summertime

4. Piece of My Heart*

5. Turtle Blues

6. Oh, Sweet Mary*

7. Ball and Chain

C+

The cover art by Robert Crumb is easily the best thing about this album. It's funny and vibrant and seems to promise an incredible listening experience with lots of twist and turns through strange and exotic lands. Instead what Cheap Thrills is is a collection of mediocre blues-rock tunes (and one classic), which simultaneously foreground Janis Joplin's vocals and completely fail to put them to good use.

Now I've never been a huge fan of Joplin, but I do like some of her songs off the Pearl album. And "Piece of My Heart" is such a well-constructed song that I'm pretty sure a macaque could give an effective reading of it. I also kind of like "Oh, Sweet Mary", which is really a dreadful song but has a fun, psychedelic surf sound, a good beat, and a nifty guitar riff. "Combination of the Two" is also a solid opener, consisting of a rollicking groove over which the group promise to rock you to the core and show you a great time. But do they? No, not really. Instead they set about butchering Gershwin's "Summertime", with the band playing completely at odds to the material and Joplin giving a histrionic vocal that sets my teeth on edge. I guess it must have seemed novel in the 60s to take a song your grandma likes and put it through the blender, but that doesn't change the fact that it's fucking terrible, and I have trouble making it through. As for the rest of the songs, they're pretty much forgettable (if you can ever forget Janis Joplin's larynx-shredding warbling).

Still, I have to be fair. This is not a good album, but it was a popular and influential one, and a lot of people seem to like it. Joplin may not be my cup of tea as a singer, but she broke new ground for female vocalists - I mean, it would take a long time for people to catch up to the idea that a white woman could sing raw hard rock and blues. And the techniques she explores here would be put to much better use by Robert Plant and John Fogerty. Ultimately, though, I'm reminded of a comment someone made once on a forum I used to frequent - "Why the hell does everyone lose their shit every time a young white woman comes along who sounds like an old black lady?". She was talking about Amy Winehouse, but it's just as true of Joplin at this point in her career. In a lot of ways she's the female Jim Morrison - strip away the mystique and mythology and all you're left with are a couple of OK songs. 

I read that some publication or other called this "the epitome of blues rock". That is bullshit - the epitome of blues rock is clearly ZZ Top's Tres Hombres. But whatever. 

119. The Byrds - The Notorious Byrd Brothers

1. Artificial Energy

2. Goin' Back*

3. Natural Harmony

4. Draft Morning*

5. Wasn't Born to Follow*

6. Get to You

7. Change Is Now

8. Old John Robertson

9. Tribal Gathering

10. Dolphin Smile

11. Space Odyssey

A+

One of the nice things about doing this project is that bands start to come and go like old friends. I'll have wandered off through months of time and dozens of albums, and then suddenly I'll run into the Byrds again and it's all like "Hey, man! How you doing? What you been up to?". As it turns out, what they've been up to is producing one of the best albums I've heard in ages. I knew they had it in them, but up until now the Byrds' albums have all promised more than they've delivered. The Notorious Byrd Brothers fulfils that promise - opener "Artificial Energy" is the closest thing to a bad song here, and really the only reason for that is that its up-beat, brassy production and galloping pace are at odds with the gentle, beautiful mood of the rest of the album. (It's also a pretty dark song, about a guy taking too much speed and winding up in gaol after killing a gay guy).

The rest of this album flows gently from one song to another, with the tracks often literally blending in to one and other. The musical style is hard to pin down, because this album is just so experimental. Blues, folk, country, jazz and electronica all mixed together, with some songs wandering through multiple styles throughout their course. What holds it all together is the dark, delicate mood and the Byrds' glorious harmonies. It also helps that the band were firing on all cylinders here. By the end of this album only Roger McGuinn and Chris Hillman were left in the group. Thankfully, Crosby stuck around long enough to contribute the astonishing "Draft Morning", a song about an ordinary guy getting sent off to fight in Vietnam and trying to come to terms with the horror of what he's being forced to do. (It's not a folky dirge, though - there are swooping melodies and a chaotic mid-section that features combat sound effects). The group also produced two beautiful renditions of Carole King compositions - The introspective "Goin' Back", a song about trying to reconcile youthful innocence with the pressures of the adult world, and the gorgous "Wasn't Born to Follow", which seems to be quietly political in its presentation of a pastoral alternative to modern life. And yes, I know Carole King is uncool. I don't care. I grew up listening to her so I like her anyway.

The back half of the album can't match the sheer quality of side one, but it's still lovely. And I particularly like that McGuinn included another of his little sci-fi mini-epics - the great "Space Odyssey", which is a moog-heavy reimagining of Arthur C. Clarke's classic short story "The Sentinel", which formed the basis for the novel 2001: A Space Odyssey and the Kubrik film of the same name. I haven't smoked pot in a very long time, but this album is really tailor made for countercultural weirdos to get high and groove to.

Thankfully, like all the best drug music, this album is also great while sober. It's a sort of window into a strange and beautiful world that might never even have existed - a time of love-ins and happenings and people making daisy chains, reacting against the shitshow that was the mid-20th century by just trying to live a happy life to the fullest, away from all that crap. I have a love-hate relationship with hippie crap, but the Byrds were smart, and they were actually talented, and the Notorious Byrd Brothers is a really great album. I look forward to Sweetheart of the Rodeo, which apparently annoyed so many people and is therefore probably awesome. 

118. Blue Cheer - Vincebus Eruptum (January 1968)

 

1. Summertime Blues*

2. Rock Me Baby

3. Doctor Please*

4. Out of Focus

5. Parchment Farm

6. Second Time Around

B

There are two problems with this album. Firstly, it only makes sense when under the influence. The first two times I listened to it, it left me cold. The third time I had a bottle of wine and it was... ok, I guess. The second problem is that this album is basically just background music for getting fucked up. I can't imagine anyone having any more fun than I did sitting down sober and trying to listen through it on headphones.

That said, some albums are important because of inherent quality, while others are important because of the ideas they contain. And this album is obviously a massively influential one. Of the stuff we've had so far, only Hendrix and Cream come close to matching the sheer thunderous madness of this album. The idea is a simple one, but it works - take a bunch of your favourite blues tunes, crank the volume up to one million and eleven, and play as sloppily and crazily as you can manage. Vincebus Eruptum has been called the first metal album, and while it honestly doesn't sound much like metal (aside from a couple of riffs that show up which have a distinct Tony Iommi flavour) the volume and rawness of the music were an obvious influence on the emerging metal scene. It's a long way from this shit to something like At the Gates, but the swirling, primal guitar solos and crunching riffs point the way forward towards a new era of heavy rock.

All said and done, though, I didn't much care for this. Like I said, it makes good background music when you're lit, but I doubt I'll ever feel the need to come back and listen to it again. I mean, the Stooges did this sort of thing much better, and if I'm being honest then aside from a handful of songs I don't even like them very much.

It must have been pretty amazing when it first came out, though. The sheer audacity of approach must have floored people. But unfortunately something being the first doesn't make it the best, and what floored people in 1968 is probably going to make people who grew up with punk and hardcore and noise and NWOBM just sort of sigh at it's quaintness. But then again, it's possible that without Vincebus Eruptum and things like it, none of those things would have come to pass (or at least in the form they have now).

So, yeah. This is a decent album, a very important album, but not something anyone who actually likes heavy metal would be that impressed by, in my opinion.

117. Aretha Franklin - Lady Soul (January 1968)

1. Chain of Fools*

2. Money Won't Change You

3. People Get Ready

4. Niki Hoeky

5. (You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman)*

6. (Sweet Sweet Baby) Since You've Been Gone*

7. Good to Me As I Am to You

8. Come Back Baby

9. Groovin'

10. Ain't No Way

B+

So I'm on record as disliking Aretha Franklin. I can explain that dislike perfectly by using one of the songs here as an example. Franklin's cover of the Impressions' "People Get Ready" starts out as a very well-performed, if a little fiery, rendition of the song, only to devolve into a lot of aimless testifying that completely misses the point of the original's understated charm. I get it, Aretha Franklin - you had an amazing voice. Maybe just tone it the fuck down a little.

That said, I mostly found myself enjoying this album. A lot of that has to do with Franklin's backing band, who provide a drum-tight, almost dirty, and rhythmically propulsive background for Franklin and the Sweet Inspirations to wail over. "Niki Hoeky" rocks like few songs we've had at this point. "Chain of Fools" hits like a hammer. It's pretty great.

But, ultimately, this is not the sort of music I like. I do like R&B, but I prefer mellower, more understated stuff like Curtis Mayfield or Erykah Badu. When I think about this sort of bold, brassy stuff, I have to admit that I kind of feel like a voyager in a foreign land. Everyone else seems to love this shit, and I'm, just like "What the hell is the fuss about?". Then I go and listen to Belinda Carlisle. None of us are perfect. 

So, this is a very good album for what it is, but what it is is something I don't give a shit about. So probably listen to it, because you will probably think it's great. 

Also, let's just look at the lyrics for "Ain't No Way" for a moment:

"I know that a woman's duty

Is to help and love a man

And that's the way it was planned"

Yeah, score one for Women's Lib, Aretha. Still, The Blues Brothers was pretty cool.

116. Laura Nyro - Eli and the Thirteenth Confession (Match 1968)

1. Luckie*

2. Lu

3. Sweet Blindness*

4. Poverty Train

5. Lonely Woman

6. Eli's Comin'

7. Timer

8. Stoned Soul Picnic*

9. Emmie

10. Woman's Blues

11. Once It Was Alright Now (Farmer Joe)

12. December's Boudoir

13. The Confession

A-

This is the sort of thing I was hoping to encounter when I embarked on this project. Before I purchased my copy of 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die I had never even heard of Laura Nyro. It turns out she's a pretty big deal and enjoyed consistent low-key success and cult status throughout her career, but somehow she slipped under my radar. Which is a misfortune that has finally been redressed. 

Since I knew nothing about Nyro, I was looking forward to coming to this album. Of course all I had to go on was the cover, title, and the brief write-up in the Book. Based on said cover and title I was expecting a dark, weird album of proto-goth balladry. So when I hit play on Spotify and the joyous riot that is "Luckie" burst out of the speakers, I was gobsmacked. It's hard to describe the music on this album. I guess the best way I could would be to call it a sort of cubist soul. There are odd time changes, Nyro's voice yoyos through her register with almost reckless abandon, and the production and arrangement seems to draw on every trend then current in popular music. But it all holds together, because Nyro possesses a clear vision of what she wants her music to be, and a solid understanding of what makes a great song tick. So rather than coming across as proggy self-indulgence, the songs instead have a wonderful sort of careening quality, and everything follows on logically based on the emotional needs of the material. There's a sort of jazz quality to the music in this respect, although it would be stretch to call this music jazz. I guess a good modern point of reference would be a band like the Fiery Furnaces, who similarly managed to write killer pop numbers that sounded like five songs stitched together into one. The reissue also includes piano-and-vocal demos of several songs, and these show that the songs were all carefully worked-out and strong enough to stand on their own before being draped in the album's rich, beautiful arrangements.

Lyrically, Nyro presents a series of portraits of a sort of easy-going Bohemian way of life. There's sex (the way "Luckie" wanders through a series of lyrical labyrinths before coalescing into Nyro belting out "I'm gonna go get lucky!" is great). There's drugs (cocaine in "Poverty Train", booze in "Sweet Blindness", and pot in "Stoned Soul Picnic"). There's ruminations on womanhood and celebrations of friendship and romance. Honestly, the lyrics are probably the closest thing to a weak point this album has, but what Nyro lacks in complex insights she makes up for with inventiveness, humour, and great imagery. And that voice! Laura Nyro could probably sing the phonebook and make it sound riveting.

So all in all this is a pretty great album, and I fully intend to listen to more of Nyro's stuff. Albums like this make slogging through this project worthwhile.