I've never known what to make of this album. It rocks too much to be jazz. It's too ethereal to be rock. It's too nervy and dissonant to work as ambient music. Not only is this music something new and strange for 1969, it still stands outside of time almost sixty years later as one of the strangest, prettiest albums ever recorded.
I say "pretty", and that's important. Davis' career up to this point had been largely defined by prettiness, and his career from this album onwards represented a turn away from that aesthetic towards increasingly dissonant, rhythmically complex forms of music. In A Silent Way isn't so much a transitional album as a one off experiment, a sort of proof of concept that it was possible to make strange, jammy music that still held up.
The best way to convey the oddness of this music is to deconstruct the title track. It starts with a pretty, ethereal intro, then launches into a descending electric piano melody that carries on for some time, continuing even as a funky and even danceable keyboard riff wanders up from the depths of the song and fades in an out of the mix, until rock drums kick in and the whole song starts to swing. Then there's a final, almost ambient section featuring some very tender trumpet from Davis. It's an odd track. If you go into it with any expectations about how a track should be structured, you'll probably be left baffled. There's really no other choice but to accept the music on its own terms and sit back and enjoy the ride.
I think Davis recorded several better albums before and after In A Silent Way, but this is an incredibly important and influential piece of work. I personally have always found it slightly too busy for my tastes, but I still like it a lot. It's something special. It's also worth hearing because it points to a different direction Davis might have chosen to follow, instead of the intense, loops-and-splices heavy fusion monsters he ultimately went with. Davis would return to pretty, borderline ambient music with his Duke Ellington tribute, "He Loved Him Madly", but in between shit got pretty damned weird. Of course I love a lot of Davis' 1970s output so I'm not really fussed. In the end In A Silent Way is a great cap to the first half of Davis' career, an album strange and beautiful in equal measures, the echoes of which you can still hear in music today.
I usually listen to albums at least twice for this, but once again I'm not doing that because I don't want to.
This is not the worst album I've listened to for this project. In fact, there's even some pretty good music here. No, the problem is having to sit down and listen to an hour and fifteen minutes of this crap, uninterrupted. I tried. I got distracted several times and flipped through a coffee table book. Is that doing the Who a disservice? The Who have countless fans and made millions of dollars. I don't care what the Who think. If anything the Who should be apologising to me for expecting me to want to listen to songs like "The Acid Queen" and "Fiddle About".
The plot of this album (or "Rock Opera", if you will) is pretty easy to follow in general, although it gets confusing in the particulars. Basically a boy is traumatised by his parents, becomes psychosomatically deaf, dumb and blind, lives a terrible life, regains his senses after being subjected to a painful shock, and this somehow results in him becoming a sort of messiah figure (I think because the music in his head makes him some kind of pop star, though I'm not sure) - only for him to screw up and be left alone again. Along the way he gets tortured by his cousin, sexually abused by his uncle, given acid (and possibly raped - it's a bit vague) by some random woman, and also turns into a pinball prodigy because Pete Townshend wanted a pinball-loving critic to give the album a good review. There's a certain peverse creativity at work, but I have to wonder why primary songwriter Townsend went with such an incredibly bleak narrative. Supposedly it's all about the spiritual and philosophical beliefs of some guru or what have you that he liked, but not much of that comes out in the lyrics. Instead the listener is subjected to a bleak, horrific story, shown a glimpse of light at the end, and then Tommy fucks it all up with the help of his uncle (I suppose, being deaf, dumb and blind, Tommy may not have realised it was Uncle Eddie who asaaulted him?) and has a sort of mild revelation or something at the end which I didn't pay much attention to because I was really, really bored.
Musically there's some good stuff, like the extended instrumental piece "Underture", and the faintly satirical pop song "Sally Simpson" (tellingly, these songs were written independently of Tommy and shoehorned in). What's annoying is that a man who wrote so many great pop songs before and after Tommy would fumble things so badly here. Maybe someone out there thinks "Pinball Wizard" totally rocks, but I don't. And it's not like opera can't contained short, catchy standalone tunes. But what's really annoying is that the wit and warmth that made an album like The Who Sell Out so great is almost entirely absent here. I guess Townsend wanted to attempt something serious and profound, but that's not really where his strengths lay. After this he'd go on to pen the bloated Who's Next, which a lot of people love but which I don't really care for, either.
On a side note, I hate being called "Tommy". So it's perhaps inevitable that I'd hate an album where someone keens "Tommy can you hear me?" over and over again.
Anyway, I can see why some people would like this but I do not. It's an important album in that it popularised the rock opera form (even if we've had two much, much better rock operas already from the Pretty Things and the Small Faces), and I guess there are a few good tunes buried deep within its bloat. Like I said, the big problem is the length. Taken individually there are some great moments here, but as an album Tommy is a depressing, nigh-incoherent slog.
The final Beatles album on the List, and I couldn't be happier. There are a lot of reasons for this. The main one is that I just fucking hate writing about the Beatles. There's nothing new, positive or negative, that can be said about the group, and whatever was said was said far better by someone much more talented and informed than I am. Then there's the cultural weight the group have - I'm glad no-one reads this blog sometimes, because I don't know how I'd cope with someone attacking me in the comments because they earnestly believe that "Savoy Truffle" is the apogee of Western Art. I'm looking forward to moving on to smaller, less weighty artists, and finally putting the Fab Four behind me.
Still, here's a good example of what I mean. Abbey Road is generally regarded as one of the greatest albums of all time. I think (IIRC) that Australians even voted it their very favourite album in a poll conducted by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. But I'm only giving it three and a half stars, because while it's a pretty good album, it's not really super duper great. And yes I know that this was the last album the Beatles recorded as a unified group, that by many it's regarded as the perfect cap to their career and all that. But that's part of my point - the Beatles the group, and the legend, are so entwined with the Beatles' music that it can be hard to separate them, and try to be even slightly objective. I guess I'm lucky, though, in that I'm just some crank with a blog, and don't really have to be objective at all.
So with that out of the way, I'll put it bluntly - side one of this album kind of sucks. "Come Together" starts with a nifty bass line and some innovative pattering drum work, only to be sunk by Lennon's fucking awful "surreal" lyrics. Which is annoying, because I would much rather have heard the song that intro promised, instead of the self-indulgent twaddle we got. Harrison's "Something", thankfully, is a love song for the ages. It's almost good enough to carry you through the faux-Twenties children's singalong murder ballad "Maxwell's Silver Hammer". Really, what the hell was McCartney thinking? Not only is this a stupid song about a young man bashing women's heads in with a hammer, but he was convinced it was going to be a big hit and insisted on an obsessively perfectionist execution that pissed everyone in the band off. Maybe he was on to something, though, because I was taught to sing this song in primary school, and as a kid I thought it was kind of cool. What you make of a man coming to visit a class of fifth graders and teaching them to sing "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" is up to you.
After that is McCartney's "Oh! Darling", which is a pleasant but unremarkable and rather too long soul song hindered by the inclusion of a very annoying and chirpy guitar overdub. I think McCartney gives a decent vocal performance, though, very raw and powerful. Too bad the lyrics are about as deep as a cup of tea.
"Octopus's Garden" is Ringo's chance to shine on the album, and it's just not a good song. I think if they'd gone in a more experimental direction with the music, like "Yellow Submarine", it could have worked. But it's just a straight rock song about living with an octopus. Maybe it's meant to charm the child in all of us? I don't think Ringo is a terrible singer, but this is a pretty terrible song.
Side A is rescued by John Lennon, who makes up for the shittiness of "Come Together" by closing things out with the heavy, proggy "I Want You (She's So Heavy). There's not much to this song lyrically, but I really like it as a piece of music. The changes between the simple, vaguely Latin 50s rock of the verses and the pummelling arpeggios of the choruses are great fun, and it's a great, if somewhat out of leftfield, closer to side one.
So that's that, really. The problem is that there was a compromise struck between Lennon and McCartney, where the former wanted an album of standalone songs while the latter wanted to basically follow on from Sgt Pepper's. This means that side one is a grab bag of the group's pet songs, some good and most mediocre-to-bad. Thankfully side two is much better. Things open with the gorgeous Harrison number "Here Comes the Sun", which Carl Sagan wanted to send on the gold record into space (they couldn't afford the rights). Then there's the pretty "Because", which has stupid lyrics but gorgeous harmonies. And then there's the Medley.
The Medley is kind of a head scratcher. It's just a collection of bits and pieces the band had lying around, none of which were substantial enough to be proper songs, all woven together by George Martin and linked by recurring musical themes. It doesn't really make any sense at all, lyrically. But it's a great deal of fun, and there are brief moments of beauty like the Pink Floyd-esque "Sun King" and the humorous rocker "She Came In Through the Bathroom Window" that more than makeup for nonsense like "Mean Mr. Mustard" and "The End". Then there's a hidden track for no reason which I think is about Paul McCartney wanting to fuck the Queen. Fair enough, She wasn't bad looking in 1969.
So what to make of it all? Abbey Road is a mishmash of sounds and shows McCartney and Lennon to be running on empty, lyrically. If not for the George Harrison numbers I'd say it's not even worth bothering with. The uneven song writing is however made up for to a large extent by the absolutely beautiful production. This album sounds gorgeous. Every note is recorded perfectly, and the arrangements are subtle but impeccable. It's a pity the Beatles were running out of steam as songwriters, because as musicians this album represents a real highpoint in their careers. Some might complain that George Martin sanded a few too many rough edges off, but the Beatles were always a bit quirky as songwriters, and the contrast between their oddball ideas and the sheer prettiness of the production is, I think, integral to Abbey Road's success.
I wouldn't say I'm being too hard on this album, because as I said I think it's pretty good over all. The low-key, tossed-off nature of some of the songs is probably some of the point. The relatively understated Abbey Road does after all follow the towering Sgt Pepper's and the sprawling, self-indulgent White Album. I can certainly see why fans like it so much. However true it may be, it seems to show the Beatles both as individual songwriters on side one, and back together as a cohesive unit on side two. This is really what you'd call a "fan favourite" - to the uninitiated, it's kind of baffling, but to fans its something really special. And the whole idea of a loose song suite was incredibly influential - everyone from Yes to Kate Bush took note, and I have to tip my hat to the Beatles if only because I wouldn't give up side two of Hounds of Love for anything.
So, a beautifully recorded and musically influential album of strange, uneven songs. I'm not really sad to see the Beatles go (I really don't want to have to listen to Let It Be again, even if it does contain "Across the Universe"), but it's been a fun journey watching them develop from a scrappy R&B combo into what was, for a few brief years, the very best band in the world. It's hard to really know what to think of them. The Beatles were so popular that everyone aped their music, which means that we live in a cultural environment where the Beatles are the origin of most of what we listen to, which means that we effectively like the Beatles because they created everything we hear. It sort of like how everyone loves Shakespeare because everyone loved Shakespeare and copied him, and we now live in the world Shakespeare created. It's a very perplexing cultural feedback loop, and fun to think about. A lot more fun than listening to "Maxwell's Silver Hammer", anyway.
