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.