127. The Band - Music from Big Pink (July 1968)

1. Tears of Rage*

2. To Kingdom Come

3. In a Station

4. Caledonia Mission

5. The Weight*

6. We Can Talk

7. Long Black Veil

8. Chest Fever

9. Lonesome Suzie

10. This Wheel's on Fire

11. I Shall Be Released*

A

What a strange album. By Turns deeply frustrating and heartbreakingly beautiful, it's hard for me to know what to make of it. I've listened to it four times, now, and each time I've found something new to love and something new to annoy me. I can see how it was so influential. The Band cherrypicked everything they liked from the broad, leafy tree of American music, and created something singular and lasting out of it. Perhaps it's because this, the first Americana album, was made mostly by Canadians. That outsider view let them approach American music differently, unburdened by expectations and reverence. It's not a perfect album (the lyrics are, sadly, often quite weak), but it is a very, very good one.

There are heavy moments here - "Chest Fever", with its organ solos, heavy drums and driving groove sounds like the sort of muscular blue eyed soul popular in the 80s, which is both a compliment on how forward thinking the Band were and a criticism, because that sort of music kind of sucks. The real strengths, though, are found in the album's more tender moments. "Tears of Rage" is a stunning opener. Co-written by Bob Dylan, it could be about almost anything. But the sound of the song is incredible, with sprawling guitars and chiming hooks. It's woozy and surreal and captivating. Then there's "The Weight", maybe the Band's most famous song. I'm a little bothered that the protagonist is looking for a room in Nazareth (shouldn't it be Bethlehem?), but it slowly coalesces into a gorgeous, uplifting number. Although once again, I'm not really sure what it's about.

My favourite song here, though (possibly because, having been included on Air's Late Night Tales compilation, it's the one I'm most familiar with) is "I Shall Be Released". The vocals are world-weary, rough, but pure and heartfelt, and the simple song about the cares of the world and hope of escape from them really touches a chord. It's also a beautiful piece of music.

So this is a great album, and obviously massively influential. The sound and approach to playing alone is revolutionary - loose, organic, and free of studio trickery. In its better moments, it's easily the most modern sounding album we've had so far. Apparently there's this mystique which surrounds Music from Big Pink, but I'm thankfully largely ignorant of it. The music itself more than holds up.

(On a side note, as a lifelong fan of Ab Fab, it was pretty neat to finally hear the original version of the theme song. Although it did stop me from taking the original seriously, since every time I heard it all I could imagine was Saffy berating Eddy or Patsy doing something ridiculous).

126. The Small Faces - Ogdens' Nut Gone Flake (May 1968)

1. Ogdens' Nut Gone Flake*

2. Afterglow

3. Long Agos and Worlds Apart

4. Rene

5. Song of a Baker

6. Lazy Sunday*

7. Happiness Stan

8. Rollin' Over

9. The Hungry Intruder*

10. The Journey

11. Mad John

12. HappyDaysToyTown

A

I expected a lot of things doing this project. Hearing a truly great song about a talking fly begging shepherd's pie from a magical charabanc-dweller wasn't one of them.

If you're a fan of the Dukes of Stratosphear, this is an album you really need to hear. It's the most obvious reference point for their pseudo-concept experiments. It's also a fucking great album. Side one is a wonderful collection of heavy psych numbers, incorporating excellent use of then-novel  flange, phase, and wah-wah. I remember reading a review of Tame Impala once that made the observation that all good stoners understand the importance of texture, and it's very much true of this album. The sound is dense, but weirdly light, and there's an excellent emphasis on the groove. Four kickass psych tunes culminate in the glorious single "Lazy Sunday", with its music hall trappings and wonderful singalong chorus. It's not "Itchycoo Park", but it's close.

What really sets this album a cut above, though, is side two. It's an absurdist fairy tale, consisting of songs and half songs interspersed with narration that sounds like James Joyce circa Finnegan's Wake if he'd bothered to make that famously impenetrable tome penetrable. Following the story of a magical character named Happiness Stan, who sets out to find the missing half of the moon and finds the meaning of life instead, it's a true joy to listen to. I love comedy radio plays - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and the Goons are particular favourites - and this album is honestly almost as good. The Goons analogy is actually apt - originally the band wanted Spike Milligan to narrate it. I think they probably lucked out in failing there, though - Stanley Unwin's borderline nonsense is a perfect fit for the light, joyful music and gentle nonsense of the plot. 

The most admirable thing about this album, though, is how unassuming it sounds. This is psychedelic rock opera, but it just sounds like a good time. The Small Faces aren't trying to blow your mind lyrically or make some deep statement about the human condition. The ultimate message of their album is that life is short and sort of "just there", so you should live well, be true to yourself, and try and have a good time. Leave it to ELP and Yes to bludgeon people with pseudo-intellectual bullshit. The Small Faces knew that people knew that things were shit, so they made a great album to drag you up out of that funk and have a good time for a change. I tip my hat to them.

125. Simon & Garfunkel - Bookends (April 1968)

1. Bookends Theme

2. Save the Life of My Child

3. America*

4. Overs

5. Voices of Old People

6. Old Friends

7. Bookends Theme

8. Fakin' It

9. Punky's Dilemma

10. Mrs. Robinson*

11. A Hazy Shade of Winter

12. At the Zoo*

A-

More Simon & Garfunkel, which is always nice. Of course, it's 1968, so Bookends is a concept album. Thankfully it's a concept album in the sense of side one being a series of standalone songs loosely connected by theme (the cradle to the grave), which is a relief. And what songs! The obvious standout is "America", a truly beautiful song about a pair of lovers who decide to hit the road and travel around the country in search of some sort of vague ideal, gradually becoming disillusioned on one level while maturing and coming to a greater sense of understanding on another. Which sounds very heavy, but it's also a gorgeous and catchy piece of music. Would that other "intellectual" bands would learn from S&G's example. 

Really, though, all the tracks on side one are good. Although I was a little worried by the overt Sgt Peppersisms of "Save the Life of My Child". It's a bleak, heavy song loaded with social commentary, and it was wise to open the album with it, because it simply would not fit anywhere else. The rest of the songs on side one are pretty, melancholy folk-rock numbers, with the exception of the sound collage "Voices of Old People", which adds a bit of depth and "high art" to the proceedings. "Old Friends" is a particularly affecting song, being about what it says on the tin.

Side two is, in Simon's own view, just a collection of leftovers. When your collection of leftovers includes a song as brilliant as "Mrs. Robinson", you know you're a cut above. That said, I tend to agree with him. The other songs are musically pleasant enough, but kind of a wash lyrically, and I don't much care for the psychedelic rocker "Hazy Shade of Winter", which doesn't really fit on this album. But then there's "At the Zoo", a hilarious and catchy piece likening the world to a menagerie, in which we learn that giraffes are insincere and the zookeeper is a little too fond of rum. It's a pretty fun song. 

So this is an impressive, if uneven, album. What's really impressive is that the duo still had their masterpiece in them - the wall-to-wall brilliant Bridge Over Troubled Water. But we won't be getting to that for a while. In the meantime, Bookends does fine.

124. The Pretty Things - S. F. Sorrow (December 1968)

1. S. F. Sorrow Is Born

2. Bracelet of Fingers

3. She Says Good Morning*

4. Private Sorrow*

5. Balloon Burning

6. Death

7. Baron Saturday*

8. The Journey

9. I See You

10. Well of Destiny

11. Trust

12. Old Man Going

13. Loneliest Person

B+

When I was a kid, I lived off and on in an incredibly boring country town. One of the highlights of my existence was trips to the nearest thing you could call a city to do the weekly shop. On the way there and back, we'd sometimes listen to a battered old cassette of Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds, which I loved and still love. So I'm not one of those people to dismiss a rock opera out of hand. In fact, the idea is a pretty good one. I've just rarely heard it done well.

S. F. Sorrow can lay claim to being the very first rock opera. Perhaps inevitably, this means that it's both ahead of its time and dated, and not all the kinks have been worked out. It's a good listen, but deeply strange and kind of all over the place. I can't help but take my hat of to the Pretty Things for the ambition they display here, even if I was often left scratching my head. 

Musically, there's a diverse range of styles, but the most obvious debt is owed to the Beatles (this album was, perhaps not coincidentally, recorded at Abbey Road). There's also a bit of Pink Floyd in some of the weirder tracks. The experimentation is all anchored by the band's background in blues and R&B, though, so it seldom gets too weird. The singer's John Lennonisms get a bit much at times, though, and sometimes I felt like I was being subjected to an extended variation on "I Am The Walrus".

The plot, such as it is, I found quite difficult to extract from the lyrics. I have heard that the album was originally issued with liner notes which provided a great deal of context, but I haven't been able to find them online. So in the end I was left with a sort of bricolage consisting of my impressions from listening to the album mixed with exegeses by various rock critics. The basic outline, though, is that a guy is born, has a happy childhood full of imagination and play, gets sent to work in a factory, falls for a girl ("She Says Good Morning", which is a kick-ass rocker), and then gets sent to fight in WWI. After being demobbed, he moves to New York and sends for his love, who dies in the Hindenburg disaster. After that I don't really know what happens, except that things go from bad to worse for poor old Sorrow, as his world collapses around him. Then for some reason he meets the Voodoo deity Baron Samedi (here called "Baron Saturday", and this song is another highlight, being particularly heavy and weird). After that the album lost me, although the music was pretty cool. 

So I guess this is a good album musically, but it doesn't really achieve its intended purpose. If you got high and listened to it I imagine it would be a profound (if exquisitely depressing) experience. I'd definitely recommend it, just because it has a few killer songs, is admirably strange, and shows the occasional flash of brilliance. Then again, I remember a guy I know saying that there's a point in every rock opera where the artists lose control of the story and things devolve into aimless self-indulgence. That's true of S. F. Sorrow, but then again it's also true of The Wall. Definitely check this album out (your mileage may vary, after all).

123. Iron Butterfly - In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida (June 1968)

1. Most Anything You Want*

2. Flowers and Beads

3. My Mirage*

4. Termination

5. Are You Happy

6. In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida*

B-

I think the only real experience I'd had with Iron Butterfly before listening to this album yesterday was the episode of The Simpsons where Bart sells his soul. And really, having heard this album, I don't think I've been missing much. It's all perfectly fine late-60s rock and pop, but there's not much remarkable about it. Even the Book states that the only real reason to listen to this album is the title track, and in this age of iTunes, Spotify and YouTube, that really means there's no reason at all. Still, this is an OK album. I guess maybe if I was really high? I don't know.

What really surprised me, given the status of  "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" as perhaps the first heavy metal track (whatever the hell that means - what is it with people trying to find "firsts" all the time?) is how pretty this album is. The first two songs seem to owe as much to Neil Diamond and the Beatles as they do to Cream or Blue Cheer or the Doors. There's lots of delicate vocal harmonies, pretty melodies and gentle instrumental flourishes (including a lot of keyboard or organ, which is why I mentioned the Doors). Things don't really get heavy until "Are You Happy". 

But really, the title track is the reason people care about this album, and it's pretty good really. The main riff (dun-dun-DUNNA-DUN-DUN da-da-da) is both heavy and catchy, and you're probably humming it now. The lyrics are pretty stupid, but they add to the cool mystery of things. The song probably didn't need to be fifteen minutes long and include a lengthy drum solo, though. Then again, the track doesn't really get good until after said solo, when the drums gradually morph into a gentle, insistent groove overlaid with gentle organ playing, which in turn slams back into the main riff. I mean, I sat there and listened to the whole thing, and while I doubt I'd do so again any time soon, I didn't hate it. 

In the end, this is another one of those albums more important than good. It sold a bajillion copies and you can see the influence of the title track everywhere (even if the idea of a lengthy jam bookended by a killer riff was stolen from Pink Floyd, who in turn stole it from jazz). There were times when it reminded me of Can, whose debut Monster Movie was pretty strongly routed in contemporary psych, and whose epic "Yoo Doo Right" seems to owe a debt to this sort of thing. In the end, it's a fun listen, but I really think its time has passed. 

122. Doctor John, The Night Tripper - Gris-Gris (January 1968)

1. Gris-Gris Gumbo Yay Ya*

2. Danse Kalinda Da Boom

3. Mama Roux*

4. Danse Fambeaux

5. Croker Courtbullion

6. Jump Sturdy

7. I Walk on Guilded Splinters*

A

So the List has taken a turn into some weird shit. Imagine Tom Waits recording a concept album about the plot of Angel Heart. Now imagine that this album is almost as good as that hypothetical album would be. Doctor John managed to cook-up a truly unique and arresting sound. This music slinks out of the stereo with a knife between its teeth. Voodoo chants mix with Brazilian pop, New Orleans funk and passages that sound remarkably like John Barry's theme for The Knack, and How to Get It. It's really quite indescribable. Probably the easiest thing to focus on is the mood, which is dark and druggy and creepy as hell, only to suddenly open up into moments of genuine beauty. It's all very strange and very hypnotic, an attempt to capture everything great and strange and overlooked about the music and culture of New Orleans in a handful of songs. As someone who holds a rather romantic notion of the Big Easy I enjoyed it immensely. This is much more "spooky voodoo shit" than it is A Confederacy of Dunces. 

I was actually surprised to find that I'd heard this music before, though. A very old, very strange man made me put the first track on once and started talking about how he and his friends used to take acid to it. Then he kind of wandered off into a ramble about how Indian civilisation is hundreds of thousands of years old and completely cyclical but Europeans won't admit it. So that gives you some idea of the kind of audience this music attracted when first released. Obviously it was a massive hit. 

Anyway, if you ever have access to a bunch of mushrooms on Halloween and decide to hold an orgy, I'd strongly recommend this as the soundtrack.