1968 at 50: THE WHITE ALBUM REDUX

I've already written about this one here. It's a record that means a lot to me and had a big enough impact for me to judge every other album I've heard since by its standard. What I'll be talking about here is the 50th anniversary re-release in its Super Deluxe form: book in slip cover with 6 CDs and a Blu-Ray with hi-res stereo and mono mixes as well as two formats of 5.1 surround mixes.

New Stereo Mix
As with Pepper the bass, drums and lead vocals are in the centre with left/right panning done to other elements as well as in some effects like reverb. What results is a freshened experience. Partly this is because the mix has been created from elements early in the process, yet un-compromised by the track bouncing process, partly by some deft EQ, effects and panning, and partly, simply, because it sounds new. Space has been increased which comes into play in tracks like Long Long Long which no longer sounds like an afterthought following the storm of Helter Skelter, the air around the almost choral vocal harmonies in Revolution #1 are like rays of light. There is some loss in the modernisation: Helter Skelter's bass has lost its obnoxious punch which it needs (it does sound more now but I miss the violence of it). The clean and shiny 2009 remasters are still available, however, and if these displease we can always go back to them.

Surround Mixes
A far more immersive experience that the Pepper 5.1 as the main soundstage is kept solidly in the front with ambience and some stray elements coming in from behind your ears. Helter Skelter's reduced bass is a worry here as the point of making a 5.1 is that the .1 part is a subwoofer that can take all the subsonic joy it can eat. On the good side tracks like Warm Gun with its swirling guitars and dreamy vocals or Back in the USSR with its big guitar crunch and Beach Boy doowops. Of particular note is Julia. I never cared that much for it as it seemed to just murmur in the background before the side ended (and my original has a sticky scratch in it). Here Lennon's fragile aching vocal seems to drift to the centre of the room and make its case like a plaintive ghost. It sends shivers.

Esher Demos
Some of these appeared on Anthology 3 in the '90s but here they are given full length and pristine audio quality. It's an unplugged White Album! Songs that didn't make the album will cause the most stir and you can hear why. Paul's Junk and George's Circles offer high melancholy that could have easily lifted the record or a later Beatles LP. But there isn't enough for a third disc. And you have to wonder why George had to give Sour Milk Sea away. These are demos but they are multitrack (George had a 4-track reel to reel setup) and began with good sound. Now they are available and I couldn't be happier. Put the discs on as a summer unplugged session and luxuriate.

Sessions
Revolution - The full initial recording without the later concrete musique moments or mama dadda chanting that make sense of the claim that Revolution #9 was made from it. You can find that on Youtube. There are plenty of moments that you'll know from the big soundscape, quite surprisingly in some cases.

Honey Pie - The version of this with just the instrumental track is far more beautiful that I would have expected. The clarinet group arrangement really soars. Without the cute vocal it's just a lovely piece of music.

Good Night with guitar and three part harmonies is more beautiful than I've ever considered it. John's finger style on the Casino really sparkles.

Helter Skelter version 1 is the full take of the one that was on Anthology 3. It has a kind of creepiness to it and works ok but it's important to remember that the fabled 27 minute version is just a longer version of this slow thumping thing with breakdowns and cover versions. I'd like to hear that once. I don't care that much that it isn't on here.

The later faster version with MacCartney playing around with live echo and the full thrash version sounds bigger and angrier. The way is clear to the album version but this is a great near miss.

Can You Take Me Back has been available in muddy dubs for a while. Hearing it here is shiny fresh condition. The way it comes in on the album between Cry Baby Cry and Revolution #9 is big and spooky. This full context isn't. It's great to hear but I still prefer that eensy eerie fragment between two strange tracks.

The Book
Honestly, I would have just bought the book if that's all there had been. Essays and articles on the album, it's context, design, packaging and songs and recording are pithy and informative and enriched with a lot of evocative photography. There are enlarged copies of the colour portraits and poster from the gatefold LP. The articles about the context and work are enlightening. It's fun, it's beautiful.

This is just a skim and I'm sorry if it has sounded like more advertising at times but I am that much its fan. And skimming is really the best you can hope for from one pass on such a gigantic monolith. But I do have a few thoughts in closing.

Even the toughest of fans have argued for an ideal single disc version of this album. I wince to hear what they leave out. There are strong and weak tracks but I've never made one of these "improved" lists. One of the points of this album's appeal is its excess, there's just too much of it but it's the best surfeit in rock music history. From musique concrete to cute pop to stark and scary dreamscapes and horror rides and spooky lullabies, this one has it. I first heard it before I was told I should think about it as a band breaking up so to me it was the apex of their output. I though Abbey Road was lovely but too slick. This felt more purposed regardless what the truth was. The obvious camaraderie evident here in the sessions and demo recordings belie the official story so that now we not only have the best extension we could have wished for. What is often my favourite album feels fresher than it did when it was the least dated LP they produced (yes, including Abbey Road). It feels like a new release. I can't say better than that.

And a Happy New Year to ye!

1968 at 50: What I Didn't Get To (and Some that Didn't Get to Me)

If you see a title here of an album you love I recommend you skip this post. It will read like an adolescent scratching away at sacred cows in the hope of causing offence. It's not that. I wanted to open my ears and heart to what was shaping up to be an exciting mix of revisits and first listens. When I mention something here it's not necessarily because I think it's bad music but most typically, albums that begged more time than I had to appreciate them.

Hurdy Gurdy Man - Donovan
Some great songs here including the eerie title track and one of my gateway drugs to pop music from classical as a twelve year old, Hi It's Been a Long Time. The problem with this as I listened to it on long walks to let it settle into memory and engender thoughts was that for every great track there's one that doesn't create an impression. For every Peregrine there's a Teas. Eventually, I didn't have enough to form an opinion on. I'd be writing about my favourites and it would look like skipping.

Elecrtic Ladyland - Jimi Hendrix
I used to love this album but didn't hear it until the mid-2000s and kept listening a I was surprised that Hendrix proved to be a decent songwriter, not just a virtuoso guitarist. 1983, Midnight Lamp and Watchtower are masterworks that show real vision a far as lifting the showman into all round greatness. Except there's so much showmanship still there, so much is guitar pyrotechnics that it's hard for someone who finds that musically indigestible to write about with any understanding. Maybe it's just too big for me.

Wheels of Fire - Cream
From one of the greatest moments in the extended psychedelic era, The White Room, things descend to a mud of white boy blues that, while I like it better now than when I first heard the album as a teenager, does not have the inventive energy and melodic strength of its predecessor Disraeli Gears. There is a lengthy live component which is more what the band were about but it's largely lost on me. It would be an article whingeing about how the album wasn't as good as the first track.

Bookends - Simon and Garfunkel
There's a lot to like on this album like the psychedelic effects of the opening track, Garfunkel's field recordings of people at a rest home and some genuinely beautiful moments but I have a dog in this fight. My year 12 English teacher was a big fan and the way he introduced the idea of pop song lyrics as poetry was with this album. He taught it eloquently and inspiringly. But my most played record at the time was Never Mind the Bollocks which was slowly being usurped by This Year's Model and Armed Forces. I found more in those lyrics and I don't listen to lyrics. By the time Mr Cook sat us down to listen to the oppressively fragile Old Friends I looked up from closing my eyes and trying to connect and saw him softly mouth the words. I could not give this one a fair trial.

The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter - The Incredible String Band
My sister tried to interest me in these folk in that summer o' 74/75 when I realised I had to pay more attention to rock music if I was going to survive high school. She didn't have this album but I did like one or two tracks from the one she did have. Thinking I'd been neglectful I visited this for the first time this year and couldn't listen to the end. It sounded like everything that repelled me about the psyche folk scene of the late '60s. Sorry, just beyond me.

Shades of Deep Purple - Deep Purple
Sorry, Deep Purple were one of those hand-me-down bands form the previous generation that kids at school would be devoted to. Mine was Led Zeppelin. Perhaps it was just a choice of which one you got to first or was recommended best (those siblings who promoted Led Zep also pushed Sabbath who I never took to). Not the band's fault, of course, but still, something I couldn't approach.

In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida - Iron Butterfly
Legendary drum solo that went for most of an LP side. I used to skip Moby Dick which was a lot shorter. I heard the real people part of the song at different points but couldn't bring myself to go there again.

In Search of the Lost Chord - The Moody Blues
My sister had this one, too, and I liked all of them but at last listen earlier in the year it doesn't reach across. Don't quite know why. I like the datedness of Piper at the Gates of Dawn and such. Not this, though.

Music from Big Pink - The Band
Not for me. Have tried and failed too many times to get into them at others' recommendations to no avail.

Ogden's Nut Gone Flake - The Small Faces
Some great songs but I cannot get past the diddlyoddlypodogooboo language of the narrator. This from an admirer of James Joyce. Go figure. The thing is I'd have to put that into context and try to be understanding but it would drag me down.

I also really tried to like Otis Reddings' Dock of the Bay album past the title track, Jefferson Airplane's Crown of Creation, anything by the Grateful Dead, Van Morrison's Astral Weeks, and a fair few others which just didn't make an impression. I have to state here, as well, that time was a big factor. Whether I knew an album or not I would listen to the entire thing every time I went for an extended stroll (which would be long enough to take in a whole 45-ish minute record. I tried with some things but where they repeatedly failed to strike or I lost patience with them and listened to something else or just whatever the sounds around me were I couldn't write about them. Understand that the era was not mine and I had trouble imagining the excitement that met these records when they were fresh. In all examples of what I did write about I discovered in formative teen years when they were older than my time's top 40 but were better. If it's any comfort that does mean that I have very few durable favourites from the mid '70s as they were eclipsed completely by my expeditions to the mid to late '60s. So, no hard feelings, it's just time.

1968 at 50: BEGGAR'S BANQUET - THE ROLLING STONES

The way it's told, this is the one where they broke from the bubble of the Beatles, the true Stones emerged, purged from their flunked leap at psychedelia, as the finally formed Greatest Rock n Roll Band in the World. This was the first of the big four that would forever define expectations of them. This and Let it Bleed and Altamont made them the meanest rock supermen on the globe. But there are problems with this story.

First, The Stones did benefit from the Beatles but they began and continued as themselves with records that the fabs would never have made like Satisfaction, 19th Nervous Breakdown or Jumping Jack Flash. It's not about capability here, it's about motive and will. Beggar's Banquet isn't a band taking the blue pill and soaring into their real selves, it's an album of developing musicians and writers restablishing what is important to them and letting go.

And think about it, most of these songs are dominated by acoustic guitar. Some recent commentary has suggested the influenced of The Band but I'm not interested in them enough to want to find out. What I hear is a mature approach to what was present on the first Stones album but now feels both relaxed and confident. It's not the first Stones album. It's the next. But it's also brilliant and tuckloads of fun.

It begins in what would have sounded primeval back in the year. Jungle percussion and the shrieks of a preverbal people. Suddenly there's a piano and a Mick Jagger introducing himself as a man of wealth and taste who then tells his tale of influencing the development of the human race from a long long year ago to shout out "who killed the Kennedys?" The chorus hopes you guessed his name but it's in the title of Sympathy for the Devil.

The progress of this one from a gentle folk strum to the frenetic and freaky anthem it became is documented in a film by Jean Luc Godard called variously One Plus One and Sympathy for the Devil. Damned and misunderstood, the movie's mix of fictional urban guerillas and the real Rolling Stones annoys both the politically active and fans of the band. That's kind of intentional but it's a lot less deep than many who whinge about it claim. All you need to do is watch: various street level would-be revolutionaries go through increasingly detached and meaningless military style training to the commands recorded on a tape, or, from the right, dictate from an already printed dogma book, an aloof Eve Democracy is interviewed while strolling through a wood, giving replies that are either cryptic or feather light. And so on. Meanwhile, a super group who don't really need to get out of bed in the morning work tirelessly on their new cultural bombshell taking it to heights of power it was nowhere near at the beginning. Urban guerillas with nothing to lose tread water while the supposedly idle rock stars work in concert to fashion something new: what is wrong with this picture?

This is not part of the song as heard on the album but it's cool knowing about it. One of the greatest album-openers has a disruptive movie that bears witness to its gestation. Could stop there, really.

But then you'd miss out on the poignant No Expectations which could reflect on many things the band members were going through but, featuring some sublime slide work from the soon to be doomed Brian Jones, I'll give it to the member who really wasn't going to pass through there again.

Dear Doctor is the kind of country twanger that Jagger used to self-consciously lampoon with lots of yeps and whoops. That happens here, too, but everyone's in on it and it's played with such conviction that it's hard to resist singing the harmony or laughing. Parachute Woman takes a tough acoustic blues figure and a guitary vocal tone, lets what will become Keith Richards' signature hot clean lead snake through it and a lyric that pushes sexual innuendo so far that the attempt could only be called tokenistic. Jigsaw Puzzle adds a Dylanesque whimsy to the same kind of acoustic electric interplay and takes the dramatic low end slide from Brian Jones (a lot meaner than No Expectations) and augments it with a screaming high note in the key line of the chorus which sounds epic. The side ends with the bad trip falling into a kind of controlled cacophony that is altogether beautiful. In vinyl terms the side is two long songs with smaller pieces between and a sense of zero surface space wasted.

Side two begins with one of Keith's cassette figures where an acoustic is fed through a cassette player and overdriven to sound like something that is neither electric or acoustic. Add Jones on both sitar and droning tamboura and a giant spacey drum that might be a tom or a snare without the snare. The I-VI chord figure breaks for a chorus that both extends and opposes it. The fade out intensifies with drones on the tamboura and a shennai and a raga like figure on the piano. It's hard to hear where the power is coming from as the vocal is so distant and the guitars not electric and turned up to "stadium". The truth is that the wholeness of the unit is pushing forth in a way that already announced itself on the previous side but is here offered in concentrated form. This is the model of Rolling Stones rock singles for the next few years and will be regarded as the Stones sound, eclipsing the half decade of earnest labour before it.

The next song is a blues done as nakedly as the band would ever do. Jagger is probably erring on the side of vocal impression but it is a sincere take. Keith Richards' guitar is spidery and full by turns. There's some band history in the way here, though, and it's superficially unpleasant. The white invitation cover art credits the song to Jagger and Richards. This was the record company's intervention. The original (the toilet with graffiti) had the song correctly as by The Rev. Robert Wilkins but this didn't make it on to the song list. The problem is that the white cover was the official one for decades until the '90s cd rerelease reinstated the credit. This has apparently been rectified as far as royalties go but for any fan who took up the band's own enthusiastic recommendations of their influences it might have felt like the most contemptuous betrayal. The second aspect of the record company's clumsiness is that the substituted cover art with its dominance of white created exactly the opposite impression the band had intended: instead of a decidedly Stones-like taunt it looked like more Beatles copying.

Stray Cat Blues starts with some teasing electric licks and some strange vocalising from Jagger. When it breaks into its loping groove with weighty piano and feline guitar scratches it's clear what the intro referred to. In an album of consolidation points for the band's image this song flashes more strongly than most. It's about groupies, young groupies. The age of fifteen is mentioned. "It ain't no capital crime" moans Jagger. Maybe not but it's a lyric no one would get away with today. I listen to the businesslike groove and the delicious guitar tone and pretend the words are in another language. I know that's wrong.

Factory Girl is a more sincere country number than the one on the first side. A boy waits for his girl who works at the factory. A real violin soars sweetly and a mandolin on a mellotron tremolos around the vocal melody. It's more ambience than heartfelt but it's never unwelcome in the sequence.

Salt of the Earth begins with the sense of moment. Strident acoustic chords polished with hot clean electric arpeggios. Keith's strangled voice enters bidding us drink to the workers, foot soldiers to the humble figures suggested by the title. Jagger's welcome takeover of the lead vocal. A brief minor key bridge brings us back to the chorus but it's been building to something huge. By the time it comes around again it's sung by a gospel choir in a homecoming procession. After a bar's gap the drums kick us into the accelerating finale with more heavenly singing and Nicky Hopkins going for it on piano and Charlie Watts crashing into the fade. If the devil had the upper hand at the beginning it's the common folk who present it at the end.

Again, I don't think this is the Stones wresting free from the shadow of the dominant Beatles as much as regrouping after disaster and finding their strength had been there all along. If the self-styled bad boy stance has more articulation it's just from honing. They had emerged from the iffy position of flower power to embrace their real selves in greater songs, in cinema and a will to take the show to ever greater stages. After the medieval tights and recorders of the previous year it must have felt like opening a window.





Listening notes - I've owned a copy of this as a released vinyl record, a cd, a hi-res SACD and a hi-res remastered download. The latter is the freshest sounding I've ever heard it. The sound stage is articulate, the acoustic guitars sparkle, the vocals are in the room and Jimmy Miller's career-changing production has never sounded so alive. The original album and earliest cd releases were mastered slightly too slow. When I first heard the pitch corrected SACD it felt like a new album.

1968 at 50: THE KINKS ARE THE VILLAGE GREEN PRESERVATION SOCIETY

I had a few runs at this one and I ended up erasing all of them. Some were failed attempts at putting the album in context with the rock music bombshells delivered towards the end of 1968 like the White Album or Beggar's Banquet. Other approaches tried to incise the tracks and examine their vitals. In the end they all started feeling fake as they didn't have anything to do with the way I found the record and how it got into me and changed everything.

First, I didn't hear the whole thing until about 2007 when I found a discounted copy of the 3 disc deluxe cd release and thought, "why not?" Apart from Animal Farm I hadn't heard a bar of any of the tracks. I loved that one but it was like the great singles in that I assumed it was surrounded by filler in what looked dangerously like a concept album.

I'd got into the '90s rereleases of the earlier LPs on cd but it wasn't until I got a later box set that I really started listening to them as whole albums. There's a general progress to them which is typical of all the innovative U.K. bands of the '60s: the first sprinkle a few awkward originals among the covers of the live set and then, disc by disc, the best of this finds form as the central songwriter emerges and by the middle years you get albums that strive to cohere, that become whole statements.

By '66's Face to Face, The Kinks were putting out such statements, song cycles that told of their lives and times with all the energy of the first albums but with increasing confidence and artistry. By the following year's Something Else song form itself was being challenged and arrangements more adventurous, the songs deeper. By this one, The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society, they are a band in total control of their skills and, while there is a little extra coherence in lyric subject matter and some deft use of motif, this is less a rock opera than a good solid album.

Is that faint praise? Well, most albums by anyone have filler tracks or embarrassing ones or others still that feel like aural indigestion, the skippability of a record that drives all teenagers to hear their favourite records as edits. Good solid records get left on ... like this one.

Why? Because from the opening declaration with its basic but cruisy harmonies to the stories of steam trains as cranky old die hard rockers to the joys and silliness of family life as seen in photo albums to local "witches" resigned cats and so many more flawed and strongly drawn characters, the set never feels overburdened by self importance, never crowded. Each successive song feels welcome and their sequence is perfect. After the breeze and humour of the opening track Do You Remember Walter thumps to life with a tale of bittersweet friendship drift. Johnny Thunder's spidery acoustic guitars seem light and  relieving Picture Book's bounce. And so on, every new handshake and smile is enough for you to remember a name. It's the best school fete you've ever been to.

On the music front there is something so barely detectable that it might be nothing more than the kind of figure that all songwriters happen upon and for a time use in almost everything they write. It's a descending arpeggio, think of the notes of a chord played one after the other rather than together. The bugle tune Taps uses this for most of its length. Ray Davies puts it everywhere, not just an arpeggio but one falling through the notes from the highest to the lowest. It's the banjo-like figure on the electric guitar in the first bars of the opening song that feel like a sunny day. It's heartfelt in Walter and closes all hope with resignation: "mem-or-ies of people stay the same". It's the ba babba dah ba ba ba of the chorus in Johnny Thunder. It's stately in the main riff to Animal Farm. It's light and playful in Phenomenal Cat and in Monica it's open ended. These are just the examples I recall at first thought. I would bet there are many more, maybe buried in bass lines or formed by the interplay of vocals and instruments, but these are enough. This is not like the more classical use of motif Pete Townshend would use the following year for Tommy, an avowed rock opera, it's much more intimate, something you might only realise after many listens. It's another thing that lifts the album from routine practice, just another bunch of songs, and puts it on its own shelf.

Village Green has a lot to say about memory. The premise of the title track is the band identifying with a list of causes and imaginary community groups following a two line pattern of "we are ..." and then "God save..." At first the litany things from the past like china cups and things they want stopped like office blocks give a worthiness to the song but it's more about the virtues of being involved than the individual institutions or qualities (did a successful rock band from the '60s really value virginity?) The distance between old friends in time and space in Do You Remember Walter is painful, alternating between sadness and anger against inevitability. Village Green the song is a mix of tourist's idea of English quaintness and a story about a lost love who has long been in a marriage that seems a happy one. The boy who left town and has come back in a could of denial. Wicked Annabella is a kind of local myth used to terrify the children into eating their greens and going to bed early. The Phenomenal Cat remembers the pleasure of his youthful travels as he lazes into obesity and age. Family holidays and local fairs and anything else that might well stir the recollection of the good old days. But there's no nostalgia here.

The old steam train who doesn't want to grow up and accept his place in history is as deluded as the guy in Village Green. The adult recalling Annabella is stuck with the false image. The beauty in the life described in Animal Farm feels like a poignant or even desperate fantasy. Big Sky has God as an apathetic observer. All of My Friends Were There is a story of a public embarrassment and is related without fondness.

If anything this album is a warning against nostalgia from a Britain whose unconvincing attempt at the summer of love was starting to look like a winter of rioting and mud. The thing is that the package is delivered with such warmth. The smiles are wry and the frustration clanging but if there's wistfulness it is spiced with disappointment. And served up in some of the most gorgeous songs Davies ever wrote with a band (the last album of the original lineup) at its creative peak working as a strong solid unit. And the coherence stretches for days as, despite a greater range of musical traditions observed (from proto metal to music hall to more of Davies' always puzzling love of calypso) the record feels whole, a journey of stories rather than the reverse. It is, for me and many others, the apex of the band and it's chief songwriter.

So what was the everything I said this record changed?  Mainly it's to do with how my view of the Kinks changed. Having revered Davies' songwriting since I found it during the punk wars I had given him so little credit for a greater vision than a few sides of singles on a compilation album. It made me go back into the catalogue and hear the motivation in the earlier albums. It made me give up on the notion that great albums are made of consistently great songs but can as easily achieve that greatness through expert sequencing, highlighting the strengths of tracks that might have been lost if given too much or too little prominence. If anything, Village Green reminds me not so much of the albums around it as the novels written by writers with indestructible senses of vocation. Forget putting it next to Sergeant Pepper when you can jam it in with George Orwell's Coming Up For Air, a starkly anti-nostalgic tale of a crushing return. Village Green changed the way I think of albums full stop.

1978 at 40

1978 and I went to my last softdrinks only school party ever and would soon add university parties to the social calendar where the music was better and the general scene a major lift. The few of us who fell into the thrall of the new music coming out of the UK and starting in our own land were about to get a feast of what we liked about the year before. The Sex Pistols disintegrated after a disastrous tour of America. By the end of the year Johnny was in PiL and all was forgiven. I cut my hair shorter every other month. My brother Greg joked that it was growing back into my skull. I was so punk I got Mum to buy me a leather jacket for my birthday. It was a Brando style, double breasted and I could wear it for about two hours per year in Townsville. The NME had more to say about the music I wanted to learn about and, late as it always was there, I bought each one for the next few years. Of course the charts were still dominated by streamlined baby-boomer rock and novelty songs but there was an undercurrent that a very few of us could hear beneath the blah. Things just seemed to change shape every few months. I went to Brisbane for the August holidays and wanted to stay there. By the Christmas holidays I lived in an extra corridor of the perceivable world where it was always a kind of hybrid of London and Transylvania, played a Maton Flamingo as raucously as I good through an old transistor amp and a Companion fuzz box and started writing my own songs.

THIS YEAR'S MODEL - ELVIS COSTELLO AND THE ATTRACTIONS

A revelation! I've never reconciled with My Aim is True. Apart from a few standouts I find its plinky plonky West Coast proto yacht rock indigestible. Yet, when I listen to its successor which I consider magnificent, I have to concede that if The Shamrocks (who became Huey Lewis' News) of the first album played on it it might have sounded indistinguishable from the first. Then again, if he'd had The Attractions on the first one it might have been as good as this. As it is I still think of This Year's Model as EC's debut album and My Aim is True as a kind of demo disc. Anyway ...

The Australian release on Radar included Watching the Detectives which hadn't appeared on any LP in the UK. I was glad of it as I remember thinking that if the rest of My Aim is True had resembled it I  would have liked it better. A spidery reggae with a spine tingling organ drilling through it as a lungless vocal mixed images about a girl more interested in the movie on tv than mucking around and the kidnapping case on the screen. 

But that was at the end of side one. The whole record starts with EC spitting out the first line before the rest of the band comes in. No Action, This Year's Girl, The Beat, Pump it Up, the songs sped past with constantly nasty observations about fashion victims and alpha males. A reader's letter to RAM once listed every statement on the album that began "I don't want..." It was massive. The record started with the phrase. There was even a whole song with that in the title. 

Through all this there was a lot of great playing. If this was punk (it was being called New Wave as a pointless distinction) it wasn't Never Mind the Bollocks with its ten tonne guitar band onslaught. This was furious with different textures, screaming organ chords, skeletal guitar lines, a very serious rhythm section with a master bass player who could play tunes like McCartney but thud and stone out like Aston Barrett. It was part film noir and part bubblegum and the refusal to resolve the two created a constant tension which might have been unbearable if it weren't for the fact that you could sing along loudly to every chorus. If the Pistols gave me strength to be myself this record dressed that up and sharp. If I think of 1978 I think of this record.

THE KICK INSIDE - KATE BUSH

Once the hormonal storm subsided at sight of the videos for Wuthering Heights on Countdown I bought the single and then the album. In the midst of punk this only claimed to be songs. Neither overcomplex and hippy like Joni Mitchell nor too gentle and accessible like Al Stewart, The Kick Inside went to strange dreamscapes and cinematic realms while somehow staying firmly on the grass of the green and pleasant land. The musicianship was exemplary and the arrangements intriguing. Wuthering Heights had her sounding like a ghost that thought it was still alive but Man With the Child in his eyes was delivered well beyond her tender age. If anything, she reminded me of the Bowie of Aladdin Sane or Diamond Dogs. In the end she was herself which is why she was also impossible to ignore. 

PUBLIC IMAGE 1ST EDITION

I was so excited at hearing the single Public Image, how it leaped beyond the Sex Pistols sound and how that band was only represented that year by the album of demos, practices and novelty tracks and couldn't compete. Swindle only really made sense as a movie soundtrack. It was fun but wore off. PiL's debut, however was the opposite. Public Image was pure magnificence, a soaring modal guitar figure and Johnny singing his  heart out, sounding ever more determined and real. The rest of the album was a chore until you learned to leave it on and let it get to you. Aside from the single every track seemed designed to irritate in some way. Eventually, all the fun I found in Swindle was eclipsed by this set. The best was to come. I ordered a copy through the local import shop. It was on clear green tinted vinyl and the plastic film finish on the cover art was blistered in a weird way, looking like rivulets running down the front. The woman at the shop tried to flatten them with a coin but that was futile so I got a dollar off the price.

ARE WE NOT MEN? - DEVO

Better loved by the people at the Uni parties I went to than by me this nevertheless grew on me. I think I was bothered by how conventional it sounded once you took the image away. But even I could not resist the speed up of Gut Feeling or the Great call and response of Uncontrollable Urge.

WHO ARE YOU? - THE WHO

This is where I parted company with the band. I quite like the title track which was a single and had a clip that was played on Countdown but hearing the rest of it was a constant deflation. I had spoiled myself with a compilation of their early singles and a cassette of Sell Out and nothing here stood up to those.

GERM FREE ADOLESCENTS - X RAY SPEX

Oddly this was given a track by track playthrough and discussion on local commercial station 4TO and it frustrated me that I could never find a copy locally. I got one in Brisbane much later in the year. Still listen to this one.

MAN MACHINE - KRAFTWERK

Another favourite of the local alt.unistudent. If I appreciated Krafwerk it was through the explanations of someone a crucial five years older than me. Love it now, though.

GIVE 'EM ENOUGH ROPE - THE CLASH

As soon as Never Mind the Bollocks came out I stopped listening to The Clash's debut album. I heard this one at parties and never bothered to get a copy.

THE MODERN DANCE - PERE UBU


A Uni Party disc. Another one that crawled back in the years after. Haven't heard it for yonks but it's welcome when I do.

OUTLANDOS D'AMOR - THE POLICE
The video for Roxanne came out of nowhere on Countdown one Sunday. I didn't quite get what they were doing with the reggae which seemed a lot starker than the fuller sound I was familiar with. I loved the harmonies in the chorus, though. Never had the album but thought I'd give it a mention.

AMBIENT 1 MUSIC FOR AIRPORTS - BRIAN ENO

Another one for the uni crowd but not a party album. It took me two decades to give this a proper spin. I would use it as intro music before my film nights as its beautiful cathedral ambience set a relaxed mood.

ANOTHER MUSIC IN A DIFFERENT KITCHEN - THE BUZZOCKS

I heard this more at uni than at the time but loved the punk aggression blended with high melodism and distinctive vocals. And in the north Queensland of the late '70s hearing "I hate fast cars" was a glass of cool cordial.

THE SCREAM - SIOUXSIE AND THE BANSHEES

One of the great debuts and albums of any kind from the rock era. Late night sounds and muffled offscreen drama surrounding thundering drums and slashing guitar all beneath the ghostly wail of one the most expressive and signature vocalists of this year and the next decade. One of those records you think you've heard too often until you put it on again and you listen to the end. 

PARALLEL LINES - BLONDIE

The third disc from the New York sass-squashers began with a run of great power pop but after that it was a sheer drop into filler and the album version of Heart of Glass which went for a whole afternoon (I'd never quite loved it in the first place). The previous set, Plastic Letters, still gets my vote as their best but the one after this was a lot less dependent on a hit single for its identity. The follow up had much better songs and a higher substance to filler ratio but the end started here. They knew they were a pop band and it injured them.

MORE SONGS ABOUT BUILDINGS AND FOOD

Heard tracks here and there and probably the whole album at Uni parties. It just made an impression. I liked rather than loved them and but for the next two albums (including the epoch-making Remain in Light) might have only just remembered them.









BAT OUT OF HELL - MEATLOAF
I liked the big voice but the whole rock and teen mythology felt older than Grease. The normal kids at school loved this one. I had to tape it (and the entire soundtrack album for Saturday Night Fever) for a friend (didn't bother with my own copy) and he went away with a tape of The Kick Inside. Lose-Win.

SOME GIRLS -THE ROLLING STONES

I had the year before bought the album Goats Head Soup which I still like and the year before that I got a '60s compilation which started a lifelong fandom of the British Invasion era of the singles band. This one was from the heart of their initial stadium band era and I could take or leave it. Miss You was fun and I had a friend who loved the whole platter but all I could think about was that I could have bought a copy from the local K-Mart which had the original cover art with the movie stars on it (replaced after a lawsuit by pictures of the band).




SINGLES!

Hit Me With Your Rhythm stick made a performing monkey out of me as I'd do the vocal before Biology class over a period of months. Pump it Up cured the golden oldie laid back bore of the first album and made the '60s sound like the future. The clip with the geeky one doing the stagger walk in a suit stolen from a scarecrow sold me on so much. No One is Innocent had me on the fallen angel Johnny's side so I thought the first spin was fun before being too good for it. The flip, Sid's My Way was more my stuff. Forever Autumn sounded enough like the Moody Blues to be enjoyable but it was from a concept album so embarrassing it was played to us in the English class as art. Warm Ride was an old sounding song with a great dynamic vocal. Dreadlock Holiday was a fine soundtrack song for a funny clip. Rasputin was so goofy that it never failed to stir a young drunk to the dance floor under the house to try the Russian kick dance and land on his bum bruise to be. Khe San worked as a modern day bush ballad but was also the first sign that Cold Chisel were nothing like the rip snorter that journalists who had seen them live had promised. It sounded like new country. It was fine and probably deserved to be bogan anthem #1. Sultans of Swing sounded like JJ Cale with Segovia on a Strat. Full boomer groove but I loved it. I Can't Stand the Rain popped, clicked and raged behind a barnstorming vocal and an arrangement that changed under every verse: beautiful. Werewolves of London: performing monkey time for me again. Best Friend's Girl sounded like everything on the crumbling Super Hits LPs in the rumpus room which was fine with me. Because the Night began and ended my fandom of Patti Smith. Take a Long Line had an old jug band cut their hair and dress punque. Cheesy n eeesy but it worked better than when the Stranglers did the same thing. Miss You was the Stones doing disco and we all knew the spoken bit before Economics. Baker St still thrills with a quiet slice of life and a murdering sax hook. Ca Plane Pour Moi was and is laughable bullshit but catchy enough to transcend the language barrier. Turn the Beat Around sounded like a kind of Masonic chant for performance at Studio 54, dancey and creepy all at once. Every 1's a Winner won and again proved that as punk as anyone got, Hot Chocolate could still make it through.

Here's the thing about these two photos of me: the one at the top was taken by someone else 

and the one at the bottom was taken by me. Which one am I smiling in?

1968 at 50: SWEETHEART OF THE RODEO - THE BYRDS

Only months after the release of their most sustained progressive rock album The Byrds shocked their fans and critics alike by producing this slab of country. Originally envisaged as a history of American 20th century pop music by Roger McGuinn the album was steered with increasing persuasion towards country by new recruit and visionary Gram Parsons. Parson's contributions were pared back due to legal entanglements and the band lost their initial fanbase. So, was it worth it?

A steel guitar pickup kicks us in as You Ain't Going Nowhere begins. McGuinn's familiar voice takes us through the Dylan song with an effortless twang and the harmonies come in like cleansing showers. If the country stutters on guitars here and there let us know what we're in for they don't sound wrong or forced. The song was unreleased until this version (the original would come out later on the Basement Tapes album: same as the final track).

I am a Pilgrim begins with a shuckshuck from a fiddle and Chris Hillman's easy vocal is supported by banjo and fiddle. Longer than expected breaks of the strings between verses seem to request we take it easy and not get upset about our favourite progressive band sounding like it was born in Nashville. No harmonies but Hillman's voice proves an easy listen.

The Louvin Brothers' The Christian Life is next and it's a tad troubling as McGuinn's vocal verges on hick caricature. The glorious chorus lifts this but every verse just comes back to sounding like parody which is not what you want if you are trying to do what this album has already stated as its intention. Also, the Louvin Brothers were iconic, their harmonies the stuff of legend and, while they were partly pushed into doing a number of gospel heavy albums like Satan is Real they were well capable of folky greatness without a speck of religious affiliation. If the Byrds are trying to eat and have their cake by slyly winking at their rock fanbase with this one it must fail with them as offputting and alienate the Opry audience they'd got their hair cut to please. Well, it's a lovely chorus.

You Don't Miss Your Water, by contrast, sounds like a Byrds song with an added steel guitar and honkytonk piano. McGuinn is in fine and unaffected voice and the harmonies are up to par and more. This convinces where the last one worries.

Enter the chief architect of the album's country lean. Gram Parsons sings You're Still on My Mind without irony as the session musicians plink and plonk their way through a drunken heart number. It works but at this stage it couldn't sound less like a Byrds track. Yes, by all means progress, but here is the sound of one person's agenda vs the rest of the band. It doesn't sound like progress. It sounds like an invasion.

Pretty Boy Floyd is McGuinn returning to his childhood folk influence as he dusts off the banjo and in fine Byrds voice courses through the Wood Guthrie number with a fiddle, double bass. The pace and voice retain the Byrds stamp and link this one to Wild Mountain Thyme, Old John Robinson and any number of folk songs the band had rocked up on previous albums.

The indisputable jewel of the album opens the second vinyl side as Hickory Wind spreads like honey over our ears and Parsons sings his own co-write with sincere plaintive voice. At last every country element comes to the aid of the song which could easily be a rock track or a Vegas ballad. With hindsight we are hearing the future of Parsons and the Byrds (i.e. a split). But this is a sublime piece.

One Hundred Years from Now is another Parsons composition but sounds like it could come from Turn Turn Turn, being harmony vocals only: minus the 12 string (with the riff on a steel). Lovely but very, very light.

Chris Hillman cover The Blue Canadian Rockies and as with his country flavoured contributions on Younger than Yesterday it falls back into the tracklist without creating a lot of texture. Hillman's voice doesn't detract but adds little.

Parsons takes the vocals on Merle Haggard's Life in Prison with his customary confidence. Like so many of the tracks here the arrangements feels played by session musicians rather than the band. Haggard's own recordings were often done this way but then you get him and his burned in style at the mic. Parsons does well but even he can't lift this cover above being a cover.

Dylan's Nothing was Delivered begins with a beautiful steel guitar figure and proceeds to a country shuffle. McGuinn takes it to a comfortable Byrds place, with the chorus changing from the 2/4 of the verse to a harder 4/4 grind for the chorus. Get rid of the steel and add a 12 string and this could be on any of the earlier albums.

I wonder what fans heard when they listened to this for the first time. There had been many indications from the first album on that the band was committed to the American-ness of their music and had a good grounding among them in the folk music of America. More than a handful of tracks on any of these LPs attest to their willingness to try country. When I first heard Hey Mr Spaceman in the early '80s it sounded like a hoedown to me. So, why, with all this ready made scholarship, does this album sound like pandering and sometimes ridicule?

Two years earlier the song High and Dry on the Rolling Stones album Aftermath was clearly a kind of Nashville/Leadbelly hybrid and Jagger, uncertain of what the fans might think, throws a "yep!" in every other line to let the universe know he's not so square as to do this for real. (He was still at it in Beggars Banquet but with a lot more maturity.) Why does a band who knows their country and shows how strongly they can express it through their own rock base end up treating it so lightly?

But none of this sounds as authentic as Gene Clark's Set You Free This Time from the Turn Turn Turn album, one of the touted origin-points of folk rock. Set You Free is clearly a country song, and a good one, and done without a nudge or a wink. Even Chris Hillman's dull 2/4 numbers on Younger Than Yesterday have more going for them as far as country rock claims might go. Too much of Sweetheart sounds like the kind of parody that happens at the end of band practices but played with top shelf sessioners.

It really has to be Parsons. Pushing himself further out front, alienating the band from its music and trying to hoist a flag with his name on it as well as the Byrds. To me, it's just a poor fit. The music is ok, if on the light side and you can leave it on but it's just nothing compared to hearing a Mr Spaceman rub shoulders with the frenetic jazz rock of I See You. See, The Byrds were already deeply invested in blending and emerging as themselves. It's not just the lack of Rickenbacker jangle here or the absence of Crosby's sublime descant, it's a wrong turn and it was one from which the band would never find their way back.

1988 at 30

I began 1988 quite cruisily. When money got low jobs came up at the theatre I worked at which really filled the gaps. I tried to bleach my hair but it only went as far as a kind of auburn. That's the back of my head in the photo. The share house changed personnel and character but still managed to feel like a fun neighbourhood. The Sunday morning recoup with tea and fry-ups was always worth it as the previous night's skylarking was confessed through creaky voices. We'd laugh our way out of our hangovers. The band I'd started in Brisbane and resurrected the previous year recorded an album's worth of music in one of the bedrooms on a Tascam Portastudio. The audio quality is still impressive but the songs (mine) were mostly under worked. Fun doing it, though.

GREEN - R.E.M

I was a fan up to the previous album but I felt the band was getting mired into rising success with big stadium rock songs. They were also taking themselves seriously to the point where they were getting dull. None of that stopped me buying a ticket beyond my means at the time to see them at Festival Hall in Melbourne early the following year. I had actually thought they'd broken up. It had been a year and more since the last one and not a peep in the music press. My flatmate Tracey taped the single Stand from the radio one morning and got me down to blare it in the kitchen ghetto blaster. It was great, quirky and perky, big dumb pop and there was a White Room style wah wah guitar solo. I was down at Polyester that morning to get my copy.  Pop Song 89 bashed into it. Get Up was a great upbeat number with a lovely weird breakdown. You Are the Everything was strong and moving. Stand was big, joyful and dumb. World Leader Pretend had a great sparse third verse that sounded like Cat Stevens. But after that you get a lot of what was already establishing itself as formula. Start with a big rock song, blend in some earnest acoustic numbers, start side two with a minor key rocker that sounds political and take whatever was getting kicked around at practices and slap it into a song. It was the last REM album I bought. The first side was fun and the second remains an indistinct blur of fuzztone, growling Michael Stipe vocals, mandolins and accordions. My days at the time were directionless and seemed endlessly so. This album reminds me of that.

DAYDREAM NATION - SONIC YOUTH

From the sensational Evol set from '86 and the good highlight record Sister from '87 we got this sprawling mess of tuned down overdrive, drones and buried vocals. I played it once and forgot about it. I saw them at the Corner a few months later and they were great. This was the one that broke them locally (as with Green and REM, just quietly). It was the last Sonic Youth album I ever bought.










ISN'T ANYTHING - MY BLOODY VALENTINE

If you're cool you should say you prefer this to the better known and loved Loveless (because that's better loved and known). I like it a lot but it's not a patch on its more famous follow-up.















SURFER ROSA - THE PIXIES

Liked this but didn't love it. Loved the later Doolittle. As with MBV you're meant to say you prefer the earlier to the latter because .....
















THE SERPENT'S EGG - DEAD CAN DANCE

I was sitting on the floor with a few other people at a friend's place and The Chant of the Paladin came on. I couldn't recall a word of the conversation that happened over it. I should say under it for I felt as though I'd just been hypnotised. A little later I was given a tape of the whole album. I would fall into a great dark world of black lakes and dewy verdance, never wanting to return. Like the best gothic movies ever, this doesn't need a plot as the atmosphere is so compelling. I still listen to this.








JOY DIVISION - SUBSTANCE

Both sides of the three singles, the rerecorded Ideal For Living EP, and various odds n sods made for a brilliant listen. The CD and double cassette had more (I had the cassette, wouldn't afford a CD player for six more years). The audio quality was fresh and big. I had most of this on singles but things like From Safety to Where ... were elusive. Bought it again on CD and then on hi-res download. Still listen to it. The New Order Substance had come out the year before as a double vinyl with both sides of each 12 inch. Neat. Got that on CD as well but it hasn't appeared on HD DL yet.






LIFE'S TOO GOOD - THE SUGARCUBES

An erratic mix of passionate screams over guitar textures that seemed to change with every track and the most idiosyncratic vocals since Kate Bush, odd dadaist paens to demons, birthdays and mothers. World welcome Bjork. There was a band as well but they had trouble keeping up. Tracey brought this back from the UK, too.













16 LOVERS LANE - THE GO-BETWEENS

A very enjoyable set from a band who had settled into a breezy groove typical of the time with its Brandy Alexander afternoons and champagne with strawberries and talk of books from Picador and op shop treasures. It reminds me of hot chips on St Kilda pier and sundown at the Esplanade and spring evenings of aimless discussion. I can listen to it but this one (and the previous one Talulla) is mostly just nostalgia for me. By contrast the much earlier Before Hollywood still sounds like a current record.








VIVA HATE - MORRISSEY

I only liked the Smiths selectively: most of the side one of Queen is Dead, some great tracks off the debut, not a note of Meat is Murder, and some outstanding singles like How Soon is Now? Apart from that I found them bland, emperors in new clothes. But Tracey, a Smiths fan and the only other person in the house apart from me who bought records, had this. I loved the Vini Reilly guitar playing and Morrissey's melodies and phrasing and lyrics. It was pretty obvious what fans really dug about them and after all the blather about how good Johnny Marr was (I found his playing mostly muzak-like) here was proof to me that he'd added very little of great worth. Suedehead, Every Day is Like Sunday, Late Night Maudlin St and The Ordinary Boys were great Smith songs with better guitar playing. I even bought this on CD in the next decade for those numbers. For some reason this reminds me very pleasantly of the time. Must have been having some fun.

I AM CURIOUS ORANJ - THE FALL

It was a much cleaner sound than the one I remembered from the early '80s but that suited it. Anyone who could turn the hymn Jerusalem into an attack on sponging deserves my admiration if not support. A good mid period Fall.















NOTHING'S SHOCKING - JANE'S ADDICTION

I would come to greatly prefer the next one but the song Jane Says really put a hook in. I don't remember hearing all of this at the time, just tracks here and there, mostly at pubs or parties. The overall sound was strong with the screechy vocals and clean guitars. Maybe I liked the sound more than the songs.












Singles:
Belinda Carlisle sang Heaven is a Place on Earth which sounded like a commercial for the kind of car that none of her old Go Gos fans would be able to afford. Don't Worry Be Happy made you feel like making Bobby McFerrin very unhappy. Stutter Rap was funny for about four hearings as you collected all the jokes and then it sounded like old jokes. The follow-up This is the Chorus about Stock Aitken and Waterman contained the song's sole joke in the title and so didn't even need to be heard. Bananarama sang Love in the First Degree and again sounded like everything they opposed when they hung around with Fun Boy Three. The local Chantoozies sounde like Bananarama if they'd never gone through the cool phase. George Michael's Faith and I Want Your Sex had memorable titles. Fairground Attraction with their song Perfect were available for scapegoating for the mounting blandness that was consuming UK pop. Robert Palmer's Simply Irresistible sounded like everything else he'd done after he started having hit singles. Kylie was so lucky to have been title checked in a parody song about her producers. Rick Astley could not have known that his number one would lead to an "I fuck one goat" joke on the internet decades later but that it would be the only reason anyone would know about the song in 2010. John Farnham's Age of Reason wasn't that bad but had none of the hooks of the big breakthrough in '86. The Mercy Seat was, I had to admit, good. The Church released their final signature tune in Under the Milky Way. Sonic Youth showed they could sound like smooth college radio with Teenage Riot. Morrissey hinted strongly that he really was the songs in the Smiths with Every Day is Like Sunday and Suedehead. The Pixies showed pretty much everything they were ever going to do with Gigantic except that it was sung by the other lead vocalist so they had to open with their big one to get it out of the way instead of leaving it for the encore. The Go Betweens' Streets of Your Town sounded like anything from its album and the one before but had a breezy charm. Swans released a grab at a hit single with a pleasant cover of Love Will Tear Us Apart. Siouxsie and the Banshees came up with a corker in Peekaboo which mixed hip hop drumming, jazz age dance and a vocal that seemed to come from a different part of the room with each line and it wailed with rage about the star and customers of a peep show. The video was great, too.

The Bicentennial of the Invasion (not its official title) ended with only one of the original gang at my place. Goodbye Miriam, Tracey and Ian and welcome Anne, Marie and Steve and (soon enough) Catherine. The Gatekeepers' 12 inch single Indoors came out to no better acclaim than a dismissive review in RAM (whose star was fading anyway). Well, its value as an artefact rose a little in the next decade (more, in fact than it deserved, though I did like the first B-side, Ogre so much that I remixed and mastered it for a b-side of the single The Smile that You Prefer in 2015). Christmas was wonderful at one of the apartments over the Black Cat where future flatmate Steve was digging, sipping bubbly and nibbling on duck and tapinade while a huge storm flooded Brunswick Street so that the trams looked like gondolas slicing through it. Then on to the fabled local royal house at Westgarth Street where I had a funny first conversation with a near-future love. We didn't care so much about New Years then. I gave up my ticket to the big Punters Club bash as it was already crowded at eight, went back home and hopped in with Tracey's crew and went to a dull party in the burbs before coming back in and finding a few pleasantly scummier house parties in Fitzroy and Carlton before giving up and going straight to tea and toast at dawn.

1968 at 50: WAITING FOR THE SUN - THE DOORS

The first thing you might take note of here is the cover art. Unlike the debut with the band members dominated by Morrison or the circus performers in the street of Strange Days we get the type of band shot that would be posted to a bedroom wall if you stretched into a rectangle. The band stand side by side, no one bigger than any other, in some long grass. The sun is behind them. It looks warm. The band name in the characteristic blocky font is behind them and the title beneath in a more exotic lettering. It looks like someone wants to outrun some hype. It looks hippy, not Nietzchean. When you hear the bright colours of the keyboards, the classical guitar and notice the near total absence of blues based rock you might start thinking pop. But this is a record that aims to mess around with your expectations. It's clean but it's dirty.

It starts with a micro snare roll, getting the band's attention. And then it's straight into a light grind which sounds like a synthesiser to a post-1970 ear but is probably a combination of organ, bass and fuzz guitar. The riff will be familiar to any Kinks fan as its note for note and the same scansion as All Day and All of the Night. Jim Comes in with the chorus: "Hello, I love you. Won't you tell me your name?" Let me jump in your game. It would be moon/June except the verses open up to a running commentary of the dark, beautiful woman causing a chaos of attraction around her as she walks along in the L.A. sun. With more sex=paganism imagery we build to a scream as the fade out pours into silence and Jim is reduced to a moaned: "I want you." It's a fun song but the creep it holds for today's listener can't be gently erased. Jim's horny and says so. The summer of love has grown out into any other summer and a rock star's thoughts turn to the birds and the bees.

A soft dive from a bass guitar and we're into a smooth jazzy shuffle with bip bop guitar and synchopated organ chords so muted and staccato you wonder if it isn't actually a Fender Rhodes. Morrison comes in lightly: "She lives on Love Street. Lingers long on Love St..." Jim talks about the girl he's with and the Venice Beach lifestyle she leads, admired like the goddess in the last song but more of a hippy queen.  An acoustic guitar is added for the piano solo before Jim starts talking about the store where the creatures meet. "I guess I like it fine ... so far". Happy go lucky or usey? If feels light but we know better as he la las into the fade.

Not to Touch the Earth starts with chromatic wavy lines played on guitar, bass and organ. It's a toppling rhythm. Morrison with lines about not touching the earth and running. What follows is a list of paranoid images about mansions, outlaws, snakes 'n' such building a sense of panic and danger. This leads to a crashing dissonant end with Jim mumbling underneath: "I am the Lizard King. I can do anything. This would qualify for the "psychedelic non sequiturs" one contemporary critic complained of but for the fact that it is the only remnant of the side filling epic Celebration of the Lizard recorded for the album but not released until decades later. A version of it was caught on the Absolutely Live double set. It carries a lot more power than the studio version. Not to Touch the Earth was the longest continuous sequence that also felt like a finished song. As such it slots in fine in the original sequence, giving us a little of the raging band of the previous two albums while also feeling like it's from the same sessions as the rest of this one.

Summer's Almost Gone is a beautiful languid lament for the passing of the season. You could read it about aging or the passing of any happiness but all you only need to let it pour in with its gentle twilight beauty. Ray gets a gorgeous piano solo.

Wintertime Love is a solid oompahpah waltz with the band churning through a passable beerhall ode to the pleasures of indoor life during the cold months. It never quite feels like a novelty number as the arrangement is so dynamic and well wrought but it only really seems to be there to answer the previous song. That said I wouldn't have the album without it. Morrison coming across like Sinatra doing Mr Kite gives it a place in history.

Side one closes with a song thick with cinema. In fact the band thought so, too, as they made their own video for it despite it not being a single. An eerie high organ figure sounds as Morrison solemnly croons for us to wait until the war is over for the Unknown Soldier. The band kicks in after a breath with a forward marching rhythm as Morrison describes the horrors of war reported at the breakfast table. A break has the band marching to Morrison's sergeant goading. A pause and a gun shot. The eerie organ slinks back as we're bade make a grave for the Unknown Solider. The previous rock forward motion kicks back in with a slightly modified lyric before breaking into a joyous bright motif as Morrison screams: "It's all over. The war is over."  This still doesn't sound tokenistic or corny the way that Fixin' to Die Rag from the same era does. The dynamics of the arrangement that feel like a tightly edited film sequence prevents that. A minor masterpiece.

Spanish Caravan might have been an indulgence for Robbie Krieger's talents and left there. But it's a lot more. Opening with a beautiful Flamenco flourish of minor and 6th chords on the classical guitar it quickly forms into a brisk traditional dance. Morrison croons the lyrics about the mystic caravan from the distant past, making the flat lines undulate with form they don't deserve. The next pass at the verse is in full electric mode with Krieger and Manzarek doubling on a fuzzy new figure which rocks like its birth year. Morrison doesn't rise to a scream as he might but adds more power with his lower register croon.  It comes to the kind of crashland the album has spent a side establishing but still feels stately and adventurous all at once. Generally, if the song wasn't a Morrison-led number it was Krieger. This could go either way with band forged masterworks like Light My Fire or embarrassingly naff ditties like Running Blue. Here, the  approach to take it to the band worked. The opening sequence is lifted openly from an old Spanish piece but the band was sued for a detail from Kreiger's playing later in the song.

My Wild Love is a capella but for percussion it is entirely vocal with Morrison adopting a creaky moan in his story of a woman who tries to outrun a debt with the devil. Two melodic figures, one for each line in a couplet rise and fall while the claps and tinkling beneath give it the fell of a cross between a chain gang chant and Native American song. The rest of the band follow the melody but in wordless moaning stopping and starting according to the dynamics of the piece. Morrison doesn't start screaming until the final verse, falling back to the moan for the last lines about her endless race from the Devil. Of all the styles attempted on this most eclectic of Doors albums this is the least expected.

We Could Be So Good Together is a snarly blues rock going little further than the title with Morrison's narrator promising the world to his intended while gleefully admitting it's all lies. The band are in tight form with good interplay between the keyboards and fuzz guitar. Little more than that but it doesn't outstay its welcome and rocks fine.

Yes, The River Knows provides relief with a piano-led croon that might be about a romanticised suicide or a more metaphorical drowning in love or rejection. It strikes me that the lyric is kept vague enough to allow the meaning you want but the lusciousness of the piano and Jim's croon and the downward falling cadences don't let a lot of brightness in.

Five to One is the closest thing on this album to the two previous with its rant rant rant assault in the bass and guitar and Morrison's taunting vocal. This is the song that the irksome worshiping biography No One Here Gets Out Alive comes from. What starts as a call to action to all the youth and hippies to band against the established order and use their numbers. This rises to a searing solo from Krieger but that ends in a breakdown where Morrison describes something more likely, the hippies falling into dejection at the greater society leaving them to rot unless they throw off their floral crowns, join the mainstream and make it in their prime. There's no revolution here, it's all broken ideals and sellout. The Doors were no more hippies than the Velvet Underground and this sour (but appealing) joke on the wistful love generation that they will end up as war fodder or wise up as consuming drudges is as clear a statement as any the band made to their generation,

The lightest sounding of all the Doors's records, Waiting for the Sun contains this kind of middle finger hiding in the family portrait more than a few times. Breezy to strident it is never less than easy to listen to and belies the purported end of Jim's notebook songs to produce a band that could start from scratch with a developed (if not quite new) sound. With a renewed vigour for wicked tongue lashing and arch jokes on the summer of love and then with added sheen in the arrangements and production achievements Waiting for the Sun showed the world a band that could shed its old scales and reveal a streamlined new skin ready for shrewder business. Then Jim got drunk. But that's another story.