537 Essential Rock Albums – Pt. 1 The first 270: Amazon.co.uk: Goodwin, Opher: 9781502787408: Books
46. Patti Smith – Easter
Patti Smith was that uncompromising powerhouse who crashed out of New York on the wave of all that Punk energy of the mid-seventies. This was the sound that powered McClaren and the British Punk movement. Patti was full of it.
I particularly loved her ‘Piss Factory’ single and used to play it all the time in the car as I was going to work just to put me in the mood. It’s a shame she never put that on the album. ‘Horses’ came out with its powerful version of ‘Gloria’ that blew the arse off everyone else’s. But it was ‘Easter’ that really grabbed me as an album. The fury of her performance was captured on the album and got straight through to me. It was raw and angry and that is often how I like my Rock to be. It launches straight in with ‘Til Victory’ and storms on through stuff like ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Nigger’, ‘25th Floor’, ‘Privilege’ and ‘Space Monkey’. It was high on rebellion and so was I.
Ironically Patti was heavily into the sixties scene with Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison, the Who and Beatles and these were the very people the Punk movement took to breaking away from. Patti didn’t. You could see that ion the stuff she chose to cover. All that stuff about never trusting a hippie was McClaren’s marketing ploy to create an artificial generation gap and a new image for the Sex Pistol’s. It worked very well but Patti proved that the spirit of rebellion was not just a Punk thing. It’s been there right through the whole of Rock, Jazz and Blues. You just have to tap into it.
Some people said that her hit ‘Because the night’, the Springsteen number, was a bit of a sell-out but I loved it.
47. North Mississippi Allstars – Shake hands with Shorty
Just when you think that Rock is truly dead and buried in a coffin of sanitised overproduction overseen by the major labels in their relentless drive to make more money from ‘product’ that does not offend the ears of the ‘middle of the road’ punter and can consequence reach the largest audience; just when you think Simon Cowell and ‘The Voice’, ‘Britain’s got talent’ and other sanitised shit has stolen the minds of all the world and you’ve given up hope; along comes a bunch of vibrant uninhibited musicians whose approach is rowdy, raw and ‘we don’t give a shit’ we’re going for it.
The North Mississippi Allstars was introduced to me by Lester Jones and I was bowled over again. They tapped into the blues from the Mississippi Hill County with the genius of RL Burnside and Junior Kimbrough and they did it with panache and exuberance. Their first album ‘Shake hands with Shorty’ was a breath of fresh air in the claustrophobic fem-fresh atmosphere of manufactured contrived garbage. It’s all one great dive down to the most popular common denominator – garbage for the garbage collectors.
They were real.
‘Shake ‘em on down’ really did shake the place. Luther and Cody Dickinson sure knew how to keep it real.
48. Nirvana – Smells like Teen Spirit
The trouble is that there is no unifying global scene anymore, no youth culture that is pushing the political and social packet. I was lucky enough to live through the sixties and Punk but was just too young for the 50s Rock thing.
Grunge evolved out of the Punk scene. It had attitude and style. I loved it. It’s great when something with a different sound comes along. Not only that but Kurt was writing really good songs with great lyrics and melodies. It was heavy but varied and different. His voice was great. ‘Nevermind’ kind of shot out of left-field for me. I had not heard ‘Bleach’.
My sons were really into it. They had a hard life. They had to rebel and it was hard to find something I hadn’t heard of or wasn’t in to that wasn’t completely crap. They thought they’d cracked it with Nirvana – shame I took to them so well.
I still rate ‘Nevermind’ really highly and play it a lot.
49. Velvet Underground – Velvet Underground with Nico
The West Coast San Francisco scene was into a peace and love Acid Rock thing which I loved. Los Angeles was a tougher, more hard edged with that R&B sound but the New York scene was a different scene altogether. It didn’t have any of that peace and love scene. The Velvet Undergound epitomised that.
They were Andy Warhol’s house band at ‘The Exploding Plastic Inevitable’. Like the Psychedelic scene they had great light shows in what was a multi-media extravaganza.
Andy Warhol put Nico in the lead vocal role cos she looked the part. She’d come out of his Chelsea Girls filming. It was inspired. Her voice, with its German accent, brought a totally different texture to the sound. It was a strange band. Lou had come in from Garage Punk bands, Mo was a female drummer which was very unusual for those times and classically trained John Cale brought all these weird experimental discordant bits and different instruments like the electric violin. It all gelled into something very different with a mixture of soft lyrical songs and harder Rock numbers. The subject matter was also totally different with an emphasis on heroin, sado-masochism, violence and transvestism. The two big numbers that knocked everyone out were ‘Waiting for my man’ about scoring heroin in Harlem and ‘Heroin’ which was a graphic account of a heroin fix that build up to a big climax. The softer numbers created a nice contrast of light and dark.
I visited New York in 1971 but I didn’t get to see the Velvets or get any flavour of that street scene. I guess I was focussed on the Greenwich Village Scene at the time.
This album blew everyone away because of its totally unique varied character. It came out in 1967 and was immediately seen as one of those important albums. There was a whole bunch of them that year. However it didn’t really get universal recognition for a while. But the Velvet Underground were seen as one of those seminal bands that were to prove so influential on all those who came after.
I liked ‘White Light- White Heat’ but I think this first album was the best.
50. Lightnin’ Hopkins – Lightnin’ Strikes
Dick Brunning introduced me to the blues and Lightnin’ Hopkins when I was fourteen. This album was very different to anything I’d ever heard before. I was into Rock ‘n’ Roll with Little Richard, Chuck Berry and co, and Beat music with the Beatles, Stones, Kinks and Who. It took me a while to get my ears attuned to Lightnin’s blues.
This album sounded as if it had been recorded in a really big echoey old building. There was a lot of atmosphere and a great depth to the sound.
There was just Lightnin’ Hopkins with an amplified electric guitar and some bottle tops nailed on to his shoes. You could imagine him sitting in some empty church or a chair with his amplifier, a big guitar and a sombre mood. He was playing these intricate guitar runs with very distinctive rhythms and his rich Texas voice.
I have heard a lot of Lightnin’ and some of it is quite light and folky, some is quite funny, but this album wasn’t; it was very serious and atmospheric.
After I’d got into Lightnin’s voice and got used to the intonation I really started following those guitar lines. I loved it. On some of the tracks he kept time by tapping his feet on the ground with those bottle tops. It was crazy.
I had this album for years but when I went to America I lent it to a friend called Adam along with 37 other Blues classics. When I got back he’d moved and I never saw them again.
There are a number of albums released with the same title. I have it on CD but somehow it is not quite the same. Even so every time I put it on it takes me straight back to Dick’s room, sitting on that bed nodding my head in time as Lightnin’ sang ‘Worried Life Blues’ and hit those amplified runs. It had a rawness I’d never heard. That was the start of my love of the Blues.
51. Leonard Cohen – I’m your man
It is hard to believe that Leonard is 80 years old. I went to see him again last year and he did a really long three hour show, had an amazingly talented band and sang as good as I’ve ever heard him. The fact that the show was three hours demonstrates the number of quality songs he has written over the years.
Some people find him depressing and seem to think his songs are almost suicidal. I can’t understand that because I find such a range of emotions there. A lot of them are very tongue in cheek, celebrations of love or quite droll and ironic humour while others have a serious side. Whatever it is the lyrics are special. Leonard has a way with words.
This album is a favourite of mine. I was talking about it a week ago with one of my kids who told me I used to play it every morning when I took them into school. I can’t believe that. There are too many brilliant albums to have got fixated on one; but I did play it a lot.
The song ‘I’m your man’ is one of those ones I was talking about; it is suffused with humour and never fails to hit my funny bone.
Leonard is a poet and has a rare ability to paint pictures with words. There is a serious edge to a lot of his songs and ‘First we take Mahattan’ and ‘Everybody knows’ have serious social observation. As I love that sort of thing it gets to me.
I love Len he is a songwriter with gravitas.
52. Fugs – Belle of Avenue A
If ever there was an anarchic bunch of lunatics it was the Fugs. They were full of fun and as crazy as Hell. They combined street theatre, poetry and politics in a mad sprawling symphony of madness promoting sex and drugs and opposing war. There was liberal doses of liberalism, anarchy and poetry.
There is nothing like the Fugs. I loved their extreme lunacy. They seemed to sum up that sixties thing. There was a punk craziness to it and home-made, can-do attitude.
The message was that you could do anything you wanted; just get out there and do it.
Their first couple of albums set the tone for what was to come later. They were pretty extreme.
The music was a mixture of styles and ‘Belle of Avenue A’ was a bit more electric. There were almost tender songs like the anti-war ‘Mr Mack’ and Country & Western on ‘Belle of Avenue A’. There were political themes reflecting what was going on with the kids on the streets as the Vietnam War raged on.
I loved the other albums but I tended to play this one more than the others. They reflected the activism and madness, the revolution and social change of those turbulent times to me.
53. Phil Ochs – A toast for those who are gone
Straight out of the Greenwich Village Folk scene Phil was really the epitome of the Left-wing song-writer straight out of the 1950s activism of Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie. Phil wrote his topical songs on war, civil rights and social equality by focussing on the news stories of the day. Dylan cruelly jibed that he wasn’t a song-writer he was a journalist. This was unfair. He was someone who wore his heart on his sleeve and believed in justice and freedom as much as anyone. Phil did his bit to create the world of equality, free of sexism and racism that we now enjoy. He did his bit for the revolution by writing these socially motivated songs which he sang with passion and anger and sometimes even a fair bit of humour thrown in.
These early albums have some great and important songs. He was a major player even though he never really received the attention he deserved. He was a little in the shadow of the genius of Dylan whose powers eclipsed Phil and caused him immense frustration. His lack of success led him to take to drink which destroyed him and led him to sadly take his own life in the mid seventies.
To me he was a great man. His songs still resonate to me and his sad story could have been so much different.
This album features some of his great political early songs such as the title track, ‘Going down to Mississippi’, ‘I’ll be there,’ ‘Do what I have to do,’ and ‘Ballad of Oxford Town (Jimmy Meredith)’. Phil was a voice for justice and like Woody before him he was prepared to stand up against the thugs and sing his songs.
His songs still inspire me today. You have to stand up against fascists, racists and the hatred of the intolerant. Phil wasn’t afraid to sing out against and we should all take a leaf out of his book.
There are things worth standing up for. We have to stand up against injustice and inequality and make our voices heard. The alternative is that the intolerant and bigoted become the violent bullies of the future.
Thank you Phil.
54. Buffalo Springfield – Buffalo Springfield
Buffalo Springfield were another of those West Coast bands that came out the same folk based sound as the Byrds. The band was short-lived mainly due to the incendiary relationships between the massive egos of messers Neil Young, Stephen Stills, Richie Furay and Dewey Martin.
Many people prefer the second album ‘Buffalo Springfield again’ but I prefer this one. It has some brilliant songs on it ‘Flying on the ground is wrong’, ‘Burned’, ‘Nowadays Clancy can’t even sing’ and the more political ‘For what it’s worth,’ which focussed on what was going down on the Sunset Strip as there was confrontation between the burgeoning new Youth culture and the establishment in the form of the police. Heads were getting bust.
They were short-lived but highly influential and spawned the solo careers of both Neil & Stephen as well as Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. That’s quite a legacy.
55. Muddy Waters – Chess Anthology 1947-72
I love those later albums with Johnny Winters but I also love the early stuff of Muddy’s with that searing slide guitar. That was the stuff that set the Rolling Stones off and all those other British beat groups.
The anthology is a double album with all those seminal tracks such as ‘I want to loved,’ ‘I can’t be satisfied,’ ‘I just want to make love to you,’ and ‘I’m ready’. I could name a dozen others. Willie Dixon lit the fuse and Muddy Waters detonated. His voice and guitar smoked.
I don’t know how many beat groups covered ‘I’ve got my Mojo working,’ or ‘I’m a Hootchie Cootchie Man’ or ‘Mannish Boy,’ but I do know nobody did them better than Muddy.
Muddy had that swagger. He’d come up from the Delta to Chicago and proved himself one of the big three acts vying with Elmore James and Howlin’ Wolf for that top spot. He probably had the most exciting act in Chicago but then Howlin’ Wolf clawing his way up the curtains was maybe that slight tad better. Who knows? I wish I’d seen them in those sweaty clubs in Chicago. I think they toned down their act for us soft white Europeans. Muddy used to put a bottle of coke down his trousers, shake it up, flip the top off at the climax of a song and spray the audience. You don’t get much more climatic than that.
When I went round Mississippi I went to the Delta Museum in Clarksdale and sat in Muddy’s cabin. They’d taken it down and brought it inside. That seemed a bit strange. I also went along to the place the cabin had been and looked out over those fields he once worked in. Muddy is a legend. I only got to see him perform three times and he was immense. I wish it could have been more.
I’ve got my Mojo working but it doesn’t seem to work for me. Without Muddy there might have been a lot of bands who would never get going. The Stones even took their name from one of his songs and he introduced both Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley to the world as well as Little Jacob Walters and Otis Spann.
Imagine a world without Muddy? It would be different. I saw his son Mud Morganfield play in York this year. He was OK but his pa was something else.
56. Roy Harper – HQ
It is a big debate as to which is the best Roy Harper album. There are at least three jostling for that spot. I usually plump for Stormcock but in the right mood I might go for HQ. On another day I’d go for Lifemask on the strength of the mighty ‘Lord’s Prayer’ and then I might go for ‘Bullinamingvase’ because of ‘One of those days in England’. It matters little. This list is in no distinct order.
HQ is Roy with a Rock band. It has the cream of Rock musicians on it including the amazing Jimmy Page and Dave Gilmour.
Nobody has ever made an album quite like this, merging serious lyrics with intricate, yet accessible Rock. I rate ‘The Game parts 1-5’ as one of the best Rock songs of all time with its social commentary on the direction our civilisation was heading. That riff knocks it straight into your head and hits you right between the eyes.
Then you’ve got the diatribe against religion with ‘The Spirit lives,’ ‘Hallucinating Light’ and the incredible ‘When an Old Cricketer leaves the Crease’ which should have been a huge hit. Never has there been a better and more haunting song about death. John Peel always said he would have it played at his funeral. It was a shame that he didn’t – but I will!
The rest of the album is good but with those monster songs this album has to be one of the greatest albums ever.
Roy has always been lauded by Rock’s hierarchy but has never had the commercial success his talent deserved.
This album deals with the usual big themes of civilisation, politics, religion, love and death. You can never accuse Roy of ducking any big issues. He has never been one for producing nice little albums of ditties; Roy prefers a big, deep canvas of meaningful proportions. Yet he does it so well with great panache and incredible musical invention and originality. There is no one similar.
I would love to someone of Roy’s calibre on one of those dire Cowell-like TV talent shows. I’m sure he’d stun the whole gamut of audience, panel and viewers. They would not know what to make of real talent! I’d love to see it!