537 Essential Rock Albums – Pt. 1 The first 270: Amazon.co.uk: Goodwin, Opher: 9781502787408: Books
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.
121. Jefferson Airplane – Crown of Creation
This was the fourth Jefferson Airplane album and a nicely textured one. There were nice dynamics with softer phases and more rocky parts in which Jorma’s guitar seared. There was even a short electronic track. It had the usual range of vocalists, harmonies and sound that we associate with the Airplane. It also worked the same philosophy. We had to build our own society. The rules of the other one were no good. This was the counter-culture. We could play in the sand if we wanted. We didn’t have to put on a suit, make loads of money or shoot people. There were alternatives. We could make new rules and do what we wanted.
The stand-out tracks for me were the David Crosby track ‘Triad’ left off the Byrds album ‘Notorious Byrd Brothers’ because of their bust up, ‘Lather’ which was very atmospheric, ‘If you feel like china breaking’, and ‘Crown of creation’, which was based on the words from the John Wyndham novel Chrysalids. ‘House at Pooneil corners’ was a great finale with its feedback, harmonies and lyrics.
I love the ‘Crown of Creation’ track best which was basically saying that we were the new mutants who were superior and destined to take over. The old society was destined to become fossils. The counter-culture was at war with society and we were going to win. Life is change. My only gripe at a biologist is that we aren’t created; we evolved.
122. Beatles – With the
After the revolution of the first album everyone was expectantly waiting to see if the Beatles could maintain the momentum. The answer was not long in coming. It was yes and no.
I remember the excitement of going down to pick up the album and the nervous energy. I was almost beside myself with horror when my Dansette broke and had to rush down to my friend Jeff down the road to play. He was only too delighted and we played it over and over, then he kept it for a week until my Dansette was repaired.
In many ways it was as good as the first. It certainly did not disappoint. There were the same mix of great R&B covers this time with half the numbers being quality originals.
The covers were all great – ‘Devil in her heart’, ‘Please Mr Postman’, ‘You really got a hold on me’, Chuck Berry’s ‘Roll over Beethoven’ and the brilliant Barrett Strong cover ‘Money (that’s what I want)’. They proved they could do the stuff different and every bit as good as the originals.
Then there were their own songs; good Poprock for the most part – ‘All my loving’, ‘It won’t be long’, ‘I wanna be your man’, ‘Hold me tight’ and the others. There was even a George Harrison song ‘Don’t bother me’.
There was also the obligatory classic song from the shows in ‘Til there was you’.
They had moved on in that they were writing more songs but somehow the album slightly lacked the spark and vibrancy of the first. Overall it kept them at the same level. They’d proved they weren’t a one album band.
123. Doors – Doors
The Doors debut album was a stormer and another of those 1967 wonder albums. It was definitely out there in the sixties counter-culture though it would be hard to classify it as Acid Rock or Psychedelic. It came in from the Blues side with a great cover of Willie Dixon’s Howlin’ Wolf classic blues ‘Backdoor man’. There were lots of musical elements, Jim Morrison’s great poetry, drug references and a lot of controversy. The album was censored because of the drug references and Jim’s version of ‘The End’.
‘The end’ was the focal point of the album and their live performances at the time. It was an epic song, coming in at just short of twelve minutes, which featured an oedipal vision of a son killing his father and fucking his mother. I can’t see why the record company had a problem with that? Anyway they edited out Jim’s use of the word ‘Fuck’ and also references to getting high.
‘Light my fire’, which, unbeknown to the Doors, was the song I first started to learn to play on the guitar and subsequently led to me giving up any pretension of being a guitarist, was released as a single, created more controversy with Ed Sullivan, became a big hit and also propelled the album to the top of the charts.
‘Break on through (To the other side)’ was basically the story of how the Doors got their name and the philosophy that Jim espoused. It came from Aldous Huxley and William Blake. Life as we know it is one limited dimension. It we pushed hard enough we could break through the barriers that held us back; there were doors to higher dimensions of existence and drugs and drink could get you there. Well no one could say Jim didn’t live his philosophy. He was prodigious in his consumption and towards the end was a bloated alcoholic who sadly died in the bath-tub in Paris at the age of twenty seven.
Strange how those two numbers crop up time after time – 1967 and 27.
It was another incredible debut though they were to go on and surpass it.
124. Captain Beefheart – Drop out boogie aka. Safe as Milk
Well, what do you know? – Another 1967 release. The debut from Captain Beefheart was very weird for 1967 but positively normal by comparison with his later work.
It featured none other than Ryland Cooder on guitar. Ry soon left saying that Don was completely impossible to work with.
It might not have been psychedelic but it was acid drenched desert blues/rock of the first order. Nobody had ever heard anything quite like it and it positively roared and rumbled.
I saw the band, who were John Peel’s favourites, when they came over for their first tour and they blew me away. I have never seen anything like them. The numbers charged along like a runaway train.
This was an amazing debut album with incredible tracks the like of no one had imagined before – ‘Electricity’, ‘Drop-out boogie’, ‘Abba Zabba’ ‘Yellow brick road’ and ‘Sure enough ‘n yes I do’. They were so far out they’d gone out the other end of the counter-culture.
That was quite something but shortly they were going to get a lot weirder and better and more complex and blow away all these early efforts with even greater works.
Without doubt they were, and still are, my favourite band. Even the present Magic Band under John French and without the good Captain is immaculate.
When they arrived at customs for a subsequent tour Rockette Morton arrived with a huge American toaster pulled out and splayed on his head like a helmet. They weren’t weird at all.
This album stonked!
125. Phil Ochs – I ain’t marching any more
Phil’s second album carried on it the same vein as the first. He was adept at taking a new headline of a social issue that had taken his interest and developing it into a song. This is what had prompted Bob Dylan into scathingly calling him more of a journalist that a song-writer.
These early songs did not have the poetry of Dylan or even his later more complicated songs which were a lot more poetic but they did have a lot of humour, bile and passion and they fired their heavy artillery at their mark. There was no mistaking what Phil stood for. It was right in your face. He was for equality and civil rights. That came straight at you through songs like ‘Here’s to the State of Mississippi’. He was for the unions and fairness for black and white with ‘Links on the chain’ and he was against the whole hideous threat of war in all its guises as with ‘Draft-dodger rag’, ‘I ain’t marching anymore’ and ‘The men behind the guns’.
Phil lacked the genius of Dylan and suffered by comparison but his songs were good and honest and his aim was true. His passion shone through. He knew what he believed in and he set about doing something about it.
Phil epitomised what became known as ‘the protest movement’. It wasn’t so much a protest about what was going on so much as a desire to create something a whole lot better. There was nothing negative about Phil’s songs. He was highlighting what needed addressing. His anger was focussed and he wanted something doing about it.
This is an album packed with socially motivated songs that is both stimulating and thought provoking. That is summed up by Phil’s song ‘Days of decision’. He was part of that movement towards building a new, fairer world.
We need our idealists and men of conscience. Where are the voices speaking out right now? Where are our Dylan’s and Och’s when you need them?
126. Buddy Holly – Buddy Holly story vol. 2
This was the second posthumous album to come out after Buddy’s terrible death. The first one was crammed with all the hits and this one had a few of those plus a lot of lesser known tracks including some that Buddy had not quite finished.
It was less Rock ‘n’ Roll than the first and represented more of the last chapter in Buddy’s life when he was separated from the Crickets and living in New York. A number of these songs are softer but they all have the Buddy Holly trademark melodies, vocals and genius.
There isn’t a bad Buddy Holly album. I chose this one because it was one I used to play a lot and it kind of closes the circle for me.
At the time of his death on that last silly tour Buddy was already talking with the Crickets about getting back together. He was writing great songs and the future looked great.