This is a section from the first part. One day I will get around to writing the second half!
537 Essential Rock Albums – Pt. 1 The first 270: Amazon.co.uk: Goodwin, Opher: 9781502787408: Books
You can’t take the order of thes4e albums too seriously. They would change from day to day according to mood. I love ’em all!
72. Jimi Hendrix Experience – Axis Bold as Love
Axis was the second Hendrix album and not quite as raw as the first. They’d developed their style a bit with beautiful delicate songs such as ‘Little wing’ and ‘One rainy wish’ which showed off Jimi’s incredibly beautiful guitar sound vying with heavier numbers like ‘Spanish Castle Magic’ and ‘You’ve got me floating’.
I obtained this album by swapping it for a mono copy of the Beatles ‘Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band’.
I was fortunate to see him perform a number of times and see that guitar playing up close. There’s never been anyone to get close to him as a guitarist or showman. He was schooled in the old R&B showmen school and learnt his trade on the Southern American chitling circuit with Little Richard and the Isley Brothers. It was all about putting on a show. He was imbued with antics he’d learnt from guitar innovators like T-Bone Walker, Johnny ‘Guitar’ Watson and Buddy Guy.
I love everything Hendrix did and have hundreds of hours of his outtakes and live stuff. It is sad that he only released four albums in his short life-time. Of the four this is the second best.
73. Kinks – Kinks
This was the first Kinks album and showed off the R&B style they’d developed as a Mod band. There were only a couple of originals on the album – the great ‘You really got me’ with its groundbreaking guitar riff in that distorted sound and the gentler ‘Stop your sobbing’. The rest of the album was covers of great R&B classics by Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Slim Harpo, Tommy Tucker and Lazy Lester.
I thought it was a brilliant debut.
I really liked a lot of the Ray Davies songs, particularly his satirical send up of English society, such as ‘Well respected man’, and his acerbic songs like ‘I’m not like everybody else,’ which I really took to heart. But I still go back to this first album. I think the slightly nasally drawl and great guitar sound made it special for me.
74. Mothers of Invention – Freak out
I prefer these early Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention albums to what came later when Frank had become a bit of a guitar hero. These albums were full of satire and zaniness and were no respecters of anything let alone the prevailing new hippie youth culture. He was a cynic.
Frank sent up everything. He despised the direction society was heading and the establishment who he believed was into controlling everything, was a libertine who believed that attitudes towards sex were ridiculous and seemed to have disrespect for everything going.
The humour in this album is excellent and the weird approach to song-writing is extraordinary. There are some fairly straightforward songs with doo-wop influence but it all veers off into weirdness, odd instruments and strange noises, interjections and experimental sections. Frank took on the great plastic society. He saw the whole fashion thing as being all part of it. He hated the hypocrisy of it all.
Frank is impossible to put into a category. I guess this album should be placed in a section of its own.
‘Who are the brain police?’ and ‘Help I’m a rock,’ used to really knock me out. But I guess frank summed it up himself in the song ‘You’re probably wondering who I am?’.
75. John Cooper Clarke – Snap Crackle & Bop
It is hard to select a top John Cooper Clarke album. I really love the ‘Very best of’ because it has my favourite track ‘Twat’ but that didn’t seem appropriate.
I finally settled on ‘Snap Crackle and Bop’ because of ‘Beasley Street’. That was the clincher.
When I first saw John it was at the height of Punk and he was snarling and spitting his poetry at the hecklers. When I saw him next he came with these backing tapes and spat the same hilarious vitriol over the tapes. Then he came along with a backing band.
I loved them all. He is certainly a one-off. It was a shame that he got into the heroin. I heard he’s shacked up with Nico for a while but now she’s dead and he’s back on the road.
I’ve got tickets to see him in Hull next month. I can’t wait!
76. Woody Guthrie – Columbia River collection
Now I’ve already been upbraided about putting artists into a Rock list who don’t play Rock. I make no apologies; it’s Rock to me!
You’ve already had ‘The Dust-bowl Ballads’ and this is his second really important collection of songs.
Woody was an absolute original. He was an individual who spoke his mind and lived his life without limitations. I’m sure that did not make him easy to live with or popular with certain sections of society but that was just the way it was.
His books and lyrics have informed Rock acts from Dylan and Springsteen to the Bragg and the Boomtown Rats. He was been insinuated into everything that has heart and a social conscience. Woody was that social conscience of the world. He wasn’t afraid to speak his mind and never had an eye for success or where the money was. Woody was always just Woody.
I never get tired of listening to him and I never can get enough.
This is a weird set of songs in that they were commissioned by the Colombia River Authority. They had built the Columbia River Dam and great Hydro-electric scheme and wanted a poet/singer-songwriter to give it some attention. Some genius of a bright spark thought it would be good to hire Woody. We are forever grateful.
In one sense the Colombia River Authority represented the establishment that Woody was so often at loggerheads with. Yet I think he thought the scheme was good and socially sound so he put his heart and soul into it. The result was this collection culled from tens of songs that he wrote in a very short time. Woody was never slow on writing songs, hardly a day went by without him scribbling something down.
This contains some of his greatest efforts like ‘Pastures of Plenty’ and ‘The greatest thing that man has ever done’.
I’m not sure what the Colombia River Authority made of it.
77. Love – De Capo
This is the second Love album to feature in the list. I don’t rate it quite as highly as Forever Changes but it comes close. It is less refined and has more of a range of style.
I think there are a number of stand out tracks such as ‘!Que Vida!’ ‘She comes in colours’, the more experimental ‘Revelation’ and ‘Stephanie knows’ and it certainly pushed the boundaries.
This was Los Angeles in the late sixties when the Hippie culture was ruling the roost. The album reflects that hard edge that was present in the sixties in Los Angeles. The Freaks there were not quite so soft and gentle as their San Franciscan counterparts.
This album still has that Punk edge of the first album with some of the softer lyrical songs like in the ‘Forever Changes’ album plus a bit more of the psychedelic sound.
When Arthur was touring in the 2000s with Baby Lemonade he was joined by Johnny Echols who had emerged from his problems. It was good to see them on the same stage and looking good. I had a chat with him but he was really evasive.
If only Arthur hadn’t died so suddenly we might have really got some great new material. Who knows?
78. John Lee Hooker – I’m John Lee Hooker
So where do you start with John Lee Hooker? He recorded a million albums under a hundred different names. I bet he didn’t even remember who he was or what he’d done half the time.
I was tempting to go for some of his great last albums where he did a lot of his important tracks with other artists because the production was so good. But you can’t do that.
John was so influential bat in the early sixties with his Blues Boogie style and idiosyncratic rhythm. His songs like ‘Dimples’ and ‘Boom boom’ were covered by everyone. I had to select something that represented that and pick my way through the mine-field of his range of styles, all of which were good.
‘I’m John Lee Hooker’ seemed to fit the bill. It had most of his good stuff and was an electric Hooker. You can’t really go wrong! This has got ‘Dimples’, ‘Maudie’, ‘Boogie chillun’, ‘I’m in the mood’ and a host more and there’s a bit of a range.
You can’t have enough Hooker can you?
79. Sonny Boy Williamson – Bring in on home
Sonny Boy Williamson the second was another stalwart of the sixties Blues scene. He toured Britain using both the Animals and Yardbirds as backing bands before either of them were famous. So he had great taste in musicians.
Sonny was one of the leading experts on the mouth-harp and I remember him on TV playing it without hands, sucking it in and out of his mouth and still making it sound good. He influenced a lot of bands and produced some great songs. My favourite was always ‘Bring it on home’ but there were loads more. I was tempted to put ‘Down and out blues,’ as my selection because that was the main one I grew up with but this album has most of the tracks I wanted to hear.
I love Sonny’s soft mellow voice and that harp phrasing. He was one of the major Chicago players.
I went to see his grave when we were out in Mississippi. It’s tucked away in the back of a field outside Tuttwiler. It took a bit of finding but I wasn’t the only one who’d made that pilgrimage. There were a number of stones, rusting harmonicas and a big bottle of whisky.
I think he would have liked that! But hey – don’t start me talking!
80. Who – Live at Leeds
This should not have been ‘Live at Leeds’ it should have been ‘Live at Hull’.
The who had a formidable reputation as a live band. You only have to look at their performance at Monterey to see that. The Who, Hendrix and Otis were in a different league and blew everyone else away – and there were some big bands there! They were intent on capturing their live act on record.
They were hot and set out to record some live shows with good recording equipment. There was a general opinion that the recorded albums did not really do them justice.
Hull was to be the gig but in the end there were some technical issues and uit was the Leeds gig that was selected. A shame! Still – the Hull gig has since been released and is just as good. But ‘Live in Leeds’ was the album that showed what a great live band the Who were. It roared. From the opening chords it powers through.
I loved Mose Allison’s ‘Young man Blues’, Eddie Cochran’s ‘Summertime Blues’, ‘My generation’ and everything else too!
This is what Rock ‘n’ Roll can sound like. The band was at the peak of their power.
81. Traffic – Mr Fantasy
There were quite a few little Pop songs that Traffic got involved with and a couple of them are on this album but there were also some exceptional songs like ‘Dear Mr Fantasy’, ‘No Face, No Name, No Number’ and ‘Heaven is in your mind’.
Traffic had created a new and distinctive sound that was very different to the Spencer Davis sound. Stevie Winwood obviously wanted to align himself with the new Progressive Underground Rock scene that was burgeoning in London. This album managed that.
I saw the band quite a bit live during those early years and they were always very musically tight and interesting. They were the sort of band who managed to create a mood.
It was a shame they eventually split up and Stevie went off to form the supposed Supergroup Blind Faith. I never did like them. I saw them, after all the hype, in Hyde Park, and was filled with expectation. All that was shattered. It seemed to me that Blind Faith had ripped the heart out of three good bands and come up with mediocrity in the process.
I did see New Traffic at the Jimi Hendrix Experience Royal Albert Hall farewell concert and found them really disappointing.
This was a good album.