537 Essential Rock Albums – Pt. 1 The first 270: Amazon.co.uk: Goodwin, Opher: 9781502787408: Books
Another ten essential Rock albums.
82. Eddie Cochran – Memorial album
It was yet another tragedy that put pay to a multitude of possibilities. Eddie was another one of those unique personalities similar in many ways to Buddy Holly. He had the looks, voice, guitar playing and song-writing skills that could have blossomed even more. What we have are the vestiges of what was surely to have become even more.
Eddie’s guitar playing was not only good but also extremely innovative. The riffs he created on ‘Summertime Blues’, ‘Something Else’ and ‘Come on Everybody’ are still informing guitar playing now. I would loved to have heard what songs he might have come up with in the sixties. It was not to be and he met his death in a road accident in Britain while touring. Gene Vincent was badly injured in the same crash.
The memorial album was one I got when I was about thirteen and I used to play it a lot. It had all those tracks I’ve already mentioned plus ‘Jeannie, Jeannie, Jeannie’, ‘Milk Cow Blues’ and ‘Hallelujah I love her so’.
83. Yardbirds – Roger the Engineer
I loved the Yardbirds right from that first live album ‘Five Live Yardbirds’ and the first couple of Blues singles ‘I wish you would’, ‘A certain girl’ and ‘Good morning little schoolgirl’.
There was that speeded up Blues that stormed into complete freak-outs. They then went through their chart singles phases after Clapton left and became increasingly adventurous and experimental with Jeff Beck and ended up with that pre-Led Zeppelin phase with Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page giving them a dual lead guitar blitzkrieg.
It’s a shame Keith Relf accidentally electrocuted himself on his amplifier. I would love to have seen them reform for a concert or two.
I did get to see the Yardbirds last year but they only had Jim McCarty the drummer out of the original band. Chris Dreja had been replaced with Top Topham. The young lads did a great job but it was really a tribute band.
I chose ‘Roger the Engineer’ because it was a brilliant example of the way the band had developed from its Blues roots to create a psychedelic album fully at home in the Sixties London Underground. Jeff Beck’s guitar was amazing. ‘Over under sideways down’ and ‘Psycho Daisies’ are great examples.
84. Roy Harper – Lifemask
Well we had to get around to another Roy Harper album and this one is another contender for his best album of all time if only because of the incredible ‘The Lord’s Prayer’. That twenty three minute epic is surely the most adventurous epic ever written?
But this album did not stop at that. There were also great songs such as ‘Highway Blues’, ‘All Ireland’ and ‘South Africa’ making it an album of considerable social and political content as well as exceptional musicianship.
This was one of the Abbey Road albums that I was fortunate enough to get to sit in on and I was mighty lucky to do so. Jimmy Page was a revelation and I got to meet up with Keith Moon, Dave Gilmour and Keith Moon among a pile of others. Roy was certainly the centre of a lot of attention from the Rock elite due to the quality of his songs.
This was Roy at his absolute peak when everything seemed possible. His gigs were exceptional and it looked as if he could do no wrong and was about to go mega. Sadly that was not to be. Roy had a hundred ways to sabotage his own career and that was probably for the best. If he had become mega we might not have had all those fabulous later concerts in small venues and all those great albums. Besides he’d have probably killed himself.
But what an epitaph this album would have been!
85. Bob Dylan – Highway 61 revisited
This was the second of Bob’s great electric album trilogy of the mid-sixties.
Bob had progressed from the acoustic troubadour singing songs of social import about civil rights, anti-war and racism to electric songs about society and dark rambling dreams delivered in a spitting stream of consciousness poetry that came straight out of the Beat Generation of the 1950s. There’s not a weak track on it and it has the wonderful ‘From a Buick 6’ and ‘It takes a lot to laugh, it takes a train to cry’ ‘Tombstone blues’ and ‘Like a Rolling Stone’. The album was another milestone in the long line of milestones. Dylan continued to forge his craft into new directions, dig up new ground and develop his persona into the hippest dude on the planet with his shades, polka-dot shirts, wired out hair and cool expressionless ace.
The only problem looming on the horizon was the fact that he was getting so strung out on the amphetamine rush, the speed of life and the harrowing weight of expectation. He was full of nervous tics, nicotine stained fingers and restlessness.
The next album was to be his last for a bit. If he couldn’t get off this treadmill then he was bound to explode. His neurones were firing pure plutonium. It was either going to be spectacular or go down with a whimper.
In the event it was going to be the whimper. Perhaps we should be incredibly grateful. We still have him. That did not look likely at one point.
I do wish that the single ‘Positively Fourth Street’ had been included in the album. It was Bob’s attack on all the Folkies that were putting him down because he had gone electric. It is the most vitriolic record ever made and my favourite track of all time for a long while. I’m sure it would have fitted in.
86. Pink Floyd – Dark Side of the Moon
After the splurge of psychedelic mayhem with Syd and a great follow on the Floyd languished slightly as if looking for inspiration and direction. There were a few meandering albums that were good, experimental but seemed to lack shape. The question was did they have the song-writing skills to hit the heights again? Did they have the impetus to write great songs and get the band motoring?
The answer was a resounding yes.
‘Dark side of the Moon’ was a change in direction. It was a different sound altogether and it came in ready formed.
This wasn’t psychedelia and it wasn’t Prog-Rock. At least not like anything we knew. It was something else.
In many ways it was sparked by what had happened to Syd and was a story of madness.
The lyrics were there and so were the songs. They were coupled to that same innovation we had come to expect with all its weird sounds, asides and experimentation.
It’s hard to remember the impact it had on me when I first heard it. I have heard it so many times now that it tends to become too familiar. It was immense. The tracks are so varied and each is an extraordinary masterpiece. You can hear the attention to detail that has created them yet they are not over-produced. They retain their vitality.
87. Jefferson Airplane – Volunteers
Well the album starts with ‘We can be together’ and ends with ‘Volunteers’ and has a big theme of the revolution, activism and getting out on the streets. They were still out there pushing the Hippie philosophy with a tougher political edge.
This was the album that was urging the kids to continue the struggle to build something better. It was about social change.
The music was a little tougher but still full of those harmonies with a swapping around of lead vocals.
I saw Jefferson Starship recently and they only had one member of the original airplane. I’d love to see them get together again. I caught them a couple of times in their heyday and they were great.
88. Bob Marley – Catch a fire
‘Catch a fire’ is the third album I’ve put in from Bob. I actually had a ticket to go and see Bob Marley in Santa Barbara back in 1979 on what turned out to be his last tour. It was spectacular. I’ve heard the CD and seen the DVD. The only hole in it is me. I was prevented going by family commitments. I thought I’d catch him some other time. It was not to be.
Bob stood for a lot of things but I think the most important was respect. You can hear the emphasis on bringing the black races back in from the cold starkly on this album on numbers such as ‘No more trouble’, ‘Slave driver’, ‘400 hundred years’ and ‘Stop that train’. This was an album all about emancipation and freedom.
This an album by the original Wailers with Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer. It was the first on Chris Blackwell’s Island label and sounds most subdued than later Marley albums which seemed a bit more unrestrained. That’s not a bad thing but it does create a mellow vibe which is exemplified by ‘Stir it up’.
89. Robert Johnson – King of the Delta blues singers
Robert Johnson is considered by many to be the consummate Blues singer. There is still some consternation as to how he managed to play some of the tracks and people have suggested that it was speeded up. I think that is highly unlikely.
Robert only recorded twenty nine tracks in two sessions but they are considered so important that many people trace the whole Blues and Rock phenomenon to his door. I’m not sure about that either. I think it would have got there anyway. But, none the less, Robert was remarkable and highly influential.
He was dead in 1938 at that magic age for Rockers – twenty seven! Perhaps he started all that on that dark night at the crossroads and Jimi, Brian, Jim and Janis were all part of the deal!
But no – we are getting absurd. There was no crossroads, devil or pact of any kind. Robert was a young lad about town ladies man who got himself poisoned when the landlord put strychnine in his whisky because he was making eyes at his wife.
I spoke to Dave ‘Honeyboy’ Edwards about this last year before he died. He claims to have been with Robert that night. The two of them were playing together and Dave refused the whisky. He helped Robert home as he had bad gut ache but nobody expected him to die. They thought he’d get over it in a day or two. His death came as a shock.
I visited all three of his graves but Dave reckoned it was the one at the back of the church of Mount Zion that was his real grave.
The sad thing was that he was being checked out to come and play for a white audience at Carnegie Hall. It could have all taken off for him. Who knows how that might have gone if he’d lived? We’ll never know. They got Big Bill Broonzy instead and he became a bit of a celebrity, touring Europe and recording.
I saw Son House, who taught Robert how to play guitar, so I suppose I saw the very beginning of Rock Music. It’s kind of like the astronomers looking around for the energy left hanging around from the Big Bang. Robert was the Big Bang in music.
Reputedly Mick Jagger paid millions for a short piece of 1930s film that had someone busking in the background who just might have been Robert Johnson!
Those albums are all we have and they are superb and much covered. If I listed the people who had covered them it would fill pages. The songs are etched into the canvass of Rock – ‘Crossroad Blues’, ‘From Four til late’, ‘Sweet home Chicago’, ‘Terraplane Blues’, ‘I believe I’ll dust my broom’, ‘Last fair deal going down’, ‘Come on in my kitchen’ and ‘Last fair deal going down’, to name a few.
90. Fleetwood Mac – Blue Horizon sessions
One of the bands who were influenced by Robert Johnson, if mainly indirectly through Elmore James, was Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac. Jeremy Spencer was an Elmore James fanatic and the band performed a lot of Elmore James’s slide guitar songs with a great deal of panache.
I’ve rather cheated here putting the Blue Horizon sessions because that is really not an album; it’s a whole bunch of six CDs with all their material with Mike Vernon at Blue Horizon. Sorry about that but it is all absolutely mandatory in anyone’s collection.
Liz and I used to go and see them regularly at places like the Toby Jug at Tolworth and they were always great value for money – after all – it did cost all of 25p to get in! They were great fun live, really exuberant and great to dance to because of that rhythm section.
When that first Peter Green album came out it was amazing. The album had a different atmosphere to anything else. I just adored it. It had all these songs by my idol Elmore James – ‘Shake your money maker’, ‘Got to move’ and ‘My heart beat like a hammer’ and all these great things by Pete Green like ‘Long grey mare’ and Robert Johnson’s ‘Hellhound on my trail’. I’d seen Pete play a lot when he was with John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers and I loved his fluid guitar style. The band seemed to have everything. McVie’s bass was spot on and Mick’s drumming was so crisp. It just worked perfectly.
All those sessions were brilliant. They were the best British Blues Band on the scene. They then went on to add the incredible Progressive Rock sound created from Pete’s brain – ‘Green Manalishi’ and ‘Black Magic Woman’ and then added Danny Kirwin into the mix.
91. Paul Simon – Songbook
I discovered Paul Simon through this album before he teamed up with Art Garfunkel and went into the more commercial side. This was nice and simple and allowed the songs to shine through. In a way I suppose I thought this album was more pure and honest; it hadn’t had the gloss put on it. These versions were unadorned. They seemed more real and passionate to me.
Paul was obviously attempting to muscle in on the mid-sixties Folk scene which had risen to prominence because of Dylan and Greenwich Village. There were the anti-war sentiments in ‘On the side of a hill’ and the civil rights issues with ‘A church is burning’ and ‘he was my brother’ which became labelled by the media as ‘Protest’ songs. And it is probable that these type of songs were not Paul’s forte. He was naturally inclined to the more personal songs. But I loved the raw versions of ‘I am a rock’, ‘Sound of silence’ and ‘A most peculiar man’. The album was splattered with his delicate love songs.
Paul was living in London and trying to insinuate himself into the vibrant London Folk Scene when he recorded this album. Then the ‘Folk-Rock’ Simon & Garfunkel album took off unexpectedly and he beetled off back to America and a new life.
Paul did not want this album out. He probably thought it would be at odds with the more polished later albums. I prefer it.
92. Cream – Goodbye
Cream had come to the end of their life. Relationships between Ginger Baker and Jack Bruce had deteriorated to the point of violence and animosity. Not only that but Clapton thought that their creativity and innovation had got itself into a rut. Despite the fact that they were taking everywhere by storm and their shows were searing Rock at its very best they wanted out.
The heavy schedule of touring and recording had exacerbated the situation and Ginger blamed his hearing problems on Jack who he said was turning his amp up to max all the time and blasting Ginger with deafening sound.
Eric had also been beguiled by the Band and seemed to want to leave behind his loud Rock style for a more sedate type of music.
They were persuaded, fortunately, to do one last album and this was it. It was supposed to be another double album like ‘Wheels of Fire’ with one album of live and one studio, but there was not enough material for this so they opted for a single album with a live side and a studio side with one live track. I would have liked more but this is still good. The live version of Politician was particularly good. I’ve always loved that song.
Goodbye was not quite the epitaph it could have been. It was good but it could have been even better as that double album with five or six more studio tracks. All three of the studio tracks ‘Badge’, ‘Doing that Scrapyard thing’ and ‘What a Bringdown’ were excellent. Cream certainly had not lost it.