537 Essential Rock Albums – Pt. 1 The first 270: Amazon.co.uk: Goodwin, Opher: 9781502787408: Books
These are 537 of my all-time favourites – not in any particular order – that would change day to day.
Why not buy the book and check them all out?
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110. Bo Diddley – Bo’s big 20
Where would the British Beat groups be without Bo Diddley. Bo was short for Bad Boy and Bo certainly lived up to his name. He started as a boxer and street busker in McComb Mississippi before becoming discovered, moving to Chicago, encountering Muddy Waters and becoming a Blues Rocker. No one ever has quite that swagger that Bo Diddley had. He was one for the garish clothes and outrageous home-made guitars with weird tuning, weird effects, weird fur, weird shapes and incredible rhythms.
All these top 20 Bo Diddley compositions, plus a lot more, were the staple diet of British Beat Bands back in the 1960s. Along with his maraca man Jerome Green and the Beautiful Duchess in slinky dresses on bass he took the place over like a hurricane coming through. There was never a more boastful set of songs with ‘Bo Diddley’, ‘Hey Bo Diddle’, ‘Bo’s a lumberjack’, ‘Run run Diddley daddy’ and ‘I’m the greatest lover in the world’. Yet nobody deserved to be shouting out loud about their talents. This was the man who had written and performed all those great Rock songs that will go down in history – ‘I’m a man’, ‘500% more man’, ‘Cops and Robbers’, ‘Pretty Thing’, ‘Say man’, ‘Pills’, ‘Roadrunner’, ‘You can’t judge a book by the cover, ‘I can tell’, ‘Who do you love?’ and a load more.
A lot of them are on here and they sound as good as ever!
111. Bob Dylan – Another side of
In this, Bob’s fourth album, there was another departure. There was a more poetic approach with less overt politics. It brought a lot of criticism at the time from people who thought he was getting out of touch with the Civil Rights and anti-war movement. Yet this album was suffused with social concern. Even the humorous ‘Motorpsycho nitemare’ was painting a picture of the narrow-minded conservative anticommunist farmer.
This was the third acoustic album of note and contains one of my favourite Dylan tracks in the sensitive ‘To Ramona’. I always saw this as a poem to a young black girl who was feeling defeated by the institutionalised racism of sixties Northern America. Bob was telling her she would be OK she was better than all of them. It was a deceptive song that sounded soft and gentle yet disguised a real bite. The same was true in a different way for ‘Chimes of freedom’. This was an extraordinary poem that was based on a thunder storm in which the sounds of the church bells melted into the flashes of lightnin’ and crash of thunder. It was one of those mystical moments where Bob was imagining the wondrous spectacle being put on for all the unfortunates and socially deprived. Bob summed up his stance of moving away from preaching at people with both the songs ‘All I really want to do’ and the humorous ‘I shall be free No. 10’ in which he states that it wasn’t any use talking to him that it was the same as talking to yourself; in other words he did not know anything more than anyone else; he had no answers.
Though nothing was overt the album’s heart was still firmly based on fairness, justice and freedom. This was coupled with a number of great personal songs about the break-up of his relationship with Suzie Rotollo.
Altogether it was another incredible album.
112. Roy Harper – Folkjokeopus
Folkjokeopus should have been the album that launched Roy into orbit but it failed. That failure was due to the lack of understanding displayed by the Liberty label. They had seen Roy’s potential, wanted to realise it and create a commercial proposition and brought in the seasoned hit-maker Mickie Most to produce the album. The trouble was that this was not the direction Roy wanted to go off in and the two of them rapidly ended up at loggerheads. The album was largely made in a series of rushed first takes and the potential of Roy and the songs was not fully realised.
So why is it in here among the best albums of all time? Well it is here simply because of the immense quality of the songs. ‘McGoohan’s Blues’ in particular is one of the most important songs of the whole sixties. Very few songs even attempt to tackle the vast spectrum of society and its ills that Roy sets off to do and even fewer manage to pull it off.
When I first heard Roy do it live I was transfixed. The poetic lines hit straight into the centre of my cortex like cobra venom. I’d never heard anything as acidic. This was biting vitriol of the first order. It still is.
113. Pink Floyd – Saucer full of secrets
This was the first album of Pink Floyd’s after Syd Barrett left. There was much conjecture regarding the future of the band as Syd was seen as the creative element. It was widely regarded that the band would flounder in his wake. Even management sided with Syd and backed him rather than the rest of the band. The band were dropped.
The sceptics were confounded. The album picked up the threads from the first album and developed them. The band went on from strength to strength after that and established themselves as one of the top bands in the world. Syd produced two excellent albums and faded off into seclusion and the life of a hermit. Management had let it slip through their hands.
Syd’s only writing contribution to the album was ‘Jugband Blues’ with lyrics that were very apt. The rest of the album ran with the spacey theme of ‘Astronomy Domine’ from the first album. It seems that the acid experience of psychedelia’s voyage into inner space was to be expressed as an exploration of outer space. Other bands, such as Hawkwind, would head down the same direction. Psychedelia was melded to Fantasy, Sci-fi, Space and Madness. It made for interesting explorations.
The stand out tracks on the album were ‘Saucer full of secrets’, ‘Let there me more light’ and ‘Set the controls for the heart of the sun’ all of which featured heavily in their live performances.
Far from being finished the creative reins had been taken up by the other members and the band was really just beginning. Syd’s ghost was to haunt them forever but they had found a way forward and it was good.
114. Jefferson Airplane – After bathing at Baxter’s
This was Jefferson’s third album and was released in 1967 at the height of the San Francisco hippie dream. It was more of a concept and not so commercially rocky as the previous album. The sound was more developed into an Acid drenched feel which reflected the bands adventures with LSD. There were not particular stand-out tracks so much as a general feel to the album that reflected the philosophy of the hippie generation. The five suites were: ‘Streetmasse’ ‘The War is over’ ‘Hymn to an older generation’ ‘How suite it is’ and ‘Shizoforest love suite’. They related to the hippie themes of love and peace. This album summed up the rejection of the commercial society with its exploitation, money-driven aggression, violence and war.
The album reflected the communities dream of creating a new order with different values; where everything was not all about grabbing what you could whatever the cost.
Jefferson Airplane were the standard bearers for the San Franciscan hippie movement and this album was a statement of that; they were the band of the people. This was a new world and the old one was yesterday.
The album was full of experimentation, acid guitar, harmonies and lyrics that reflected the changes the band were part of. This was music from the new generation to the new generation.
1967 was a good year for great albums.
115. Love – Love
This was the first 1966 debut by Love. It was punkier and more unpolished than later albums and was replete with brilliant songs. It started off with a rocked up version of David & Bacharach ‘Little Red book’ and went on from there.
The stand-out tracks were ‘A message to Pretty’, ‘My flash on you’, ‘No matter what you do’, ‘Coloured balls falling’, ‘Mushroom clouds’, ‘And more’ and the sombre ‘Signed DC’ with its theme of heroin addiction. The themes were nuclear war, hard drugs and relationships. It immediately established the band as a major Los Angeles band and put them right up there in the forefront of the new counter culture.
Ironically the stark theme of the anti-drug song ‘Signed DC’ was to bounce back at them as hard drugs were principally to blame for the band falling apart a little while later.
116. Beatles – Revolver
Rubber Soul was the album that first showed evidence of the band reaching out towards songs that were a bit more substantial to what had preceded them with songs like ‘In my life’ and ‘Nowhere man’ but it was Revolver that really made the break.
This was 1966 and the Beatles once more asserted themselves as a creative force that was right on the apex of what was happening in youth culture. This was a departure from everything that went before with its over-amplified guitar and experimentation. They were not merely creating one new sound but a whole pile of them. There was the incredible electronic experiment of ‘Tomorrow never knows’ with its LSD soaked sound and lyrics, ‘She said, she said’ with its trippy sound, ‘I’m only sleeping’ with that new floating sound and backward guitar, that guitar sound on ‘Taxman’, strings on ‘Eleanor Rigby’ and on and on. This was an album where every track was an experiment, a new sound a departure from what had gone before.
The Beatles were loose in London and London was raging. The Beatles were soaking up art, beat poetry, electronic music, LSD and anything that came up. It was the greatest creative phase of their career. All the themes that were to surface in the rest of their output were nascent here. Revolver was a melting pot of experiments and all of them were successful. There wasn’t a dud track and few of them sounded similar.
While this might not be the best Beatles album it was the most ambitious and creative. It set the scene for their development and fed into the melting pot for all the other bands. This album helped spark the flame that was going to create the incandescence of the late sixties Underground Psychedelic, Progressive and Acid Rock scenes in England and America. The bands were all listening to what each other were putting out and trying to go one better. This sparked a period of great experimentation all fuelled on the new youth counter-culture. It was a great time to be alive. It was a can-do culture. Anything was possible. You just had to try. We were about to change the world.
Heady days.
117. Captain Beefheart – Clear spot
This was the Captain’s seventh album and continued the more commercial style of the previous Spotlight Kid without diluting the quality of the songs. It was quite apparent that Don Van Vliet was unhappy with the reception the band had received and the lack of sales. He desired greater recognition. This was all to explode in his face when after this the band up and split and he produced, in an attempt to become commercial, the dire Bluejeans and Moonbeams album. Fortunately that was in the future and this album continued the string of brilliant albums the Captain had produced using a large number of different musicians. John French, AKA Drumbo, was the only constant, having the task of interpreting Don’s strange musical requests and organising the other members of the band to put his ideas into practice, and he was absent on this one.
The result was great though. The album featured some of the Captain’s greatest numbers such as ‘Crazy little thing’, ‘Sun zoom spark’, ‘Clear spot’, ‘Low yo-yo stuff’ and the wondrous show-stopper ‘Big eyed beans from Venus’ along with a number of other brilliant tracks. The album should have been enormous but failed to ignite apart from the substantial group of cognoscenti who marvelled at just about everything the Captain produced. They thought it was superb.
118. Rolling Stones – No.2
This seems to slip through the net when we think of the Stones. The first album gets all the plaudits for that early Blues debut and rightly so; it was a great debut. But this album is its partner and almost equal. Once again it was made up of mainly R&B covers from the likes of Chuck Berry, Drifters, Solomon Burke, Muddy Waters and Dale Hawkins but there were three numbers attributed to Keith and Mick ‘Off the hook’, ‘What a shame’ and ‘Grown up all wrong’, which did not stand out as being out of place.
The album had a slightly mellower feel than their first album which was probably down to the production. It was not quite as sharp. But none the less it continued the reputations of the band. They were a good blues group who were putting their own very English interpretation on the blues songs and R&B they were covering.
119. Jimmy Reed – Bright lights, big city
Jimmy was one of the stalwarts of the British Beat groups. He, Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley provided the majority of the material that was covered by those British Beat bands. Jimmy was also the most commercially successful of the Blues singers. His languid, laid-back style with it’s distinctive beat proved very popular. It was copied by a number of the Rockers, such as Elvis, and also gave Jimmy a lot of personal chart success. Part of that fluid style was due to fluid. Seemingly Jimmy liked a nip or two and they used to ply him with booze before recordings because they reckoned they got the best out of him that way. It seemed to work. I had a couple of Jimmy reed albums when I was fifteen and I used to play them to death.
I was fortunate enough to catch Jimmy in London in 1971. He was pissed out of his head and had his son on bass and was brilliant.
That rhythm and beat that Jimmy invented had found its way everywhere and permeates music. It was the basis of all those swamp-blues artists in the 1960s such as Slim Harpo.
I could have chosen any of the Jimmy Reed albums. They are all great but ‘Bright lights, big city’ has all the big numbers on and there are a whole load of these: ‘Bright lights, big city’, ‘Big boss man’, ‘Shame shame shame’, ‘Take out some insurance on me baby’, ‘Baby what you want me to do’, ‘Ain’t that loving you baby’, ‘Hush hush’, ‘Honest I do’ and a whole lot more.
120. Billy Bragg/Wilco – Mermaid Ave
Billy had proved himself a great songwriter and someone who espoused a social conscience. It was in this capacity that he was asked, along with the band Wilco, to put music to a number of Woody Guthrie lyrics that were discovered in his estate. Woody’s legacy was immense. He had always been scribbling songs, poems and bits of prose on scraps of paper.
Woody’s daughter Nora had been sorting these lyrics and come up with the idea of them being put to music by someone sympathetic to Woody’s music. Billy was ideal.
It proved to be a magic choice because, although Wilco and Billy seemingly did not get along, the combination was electrifying. The album brought those lyrics to life and the music lived and breathed Guthrie.
The result was nothing like either Billy or Wilco had done before or since. It had a mystical nature of its own. The essence of Woody’s hand was in them all and the album was greater than the sum of its parts.
This is an album that I come back to time after time. I find it haunting. The songs are full of Woody’s wit and detailed observation. His tales of childhood and sexual awakening, the McCarthy witch-hunt, lust and social justice are all moving and stirring.
I saw Billy doing these songs with his own band and the stirring ‘You fascists bound to lose’ was a fitting finale to the show and great summary of Woody himself.