1969@50: LET IT BLEED: THE ROLLING STONES

A plinking guitar figure. It's gentle but the sustain note quietly insists on urgency as it repeats down the scale, C# B A. The drums slide in from the second play and between the two a snake of guitar bends high on the board, waking. A distant falsetto ooh sounds a lament. The band crashes in with bass, extra guitar on the chords but the falsetto is still quiet and the snaking lead guitar confidently intensifying until it strangles around the rhythm for the start of the storm. Jagger comes in from kilometres away, singing of disaster looming and threatening his very life. And then the chorus, female and powerful but still distant bursts into the chant: War, children. It's just a shot away, just a shot away. A brief respite is messed up with some fiery blasts of bluesharp before a big bold guitar break takes over and then, oddly crawls down into the mix to slither. But then with a distant yell from Jagger Merry Clayton screams the centrepiece: "Rape! Murder! It's just a shot away, just a shot away!" Three times and on the third it's so urgent and pained her voice breaks on the word shot and then splinters for the last cry of murder. The storm continues and Jagger, much closer than before sings of love being just a kiss away. The last words are taken up by the women and repeated before they fall under the waves of thunder which rolls and bashes until the fade, moving on to new ground.

Just as Sympathy for the Devil was a revelation to any of its first listeners that the band thought of as the second in command of the British invasion had bloomed into something quite other to how it started, Gimme Shelter took that further. There are reasons for this and one is the transition that was happening between guitarists. Brian was on the floor and got in some maracas for one song and some auto harp on another before being picked up and carried back to Pooh Corner. Mick Taylor, fresh and almost illegally young, entered for only two album tracks and then didn't play in the style that would characterise his contribution to such acclaim in future efforts.

So, with Brian completely out of the picture and the new boy not yet given a defined role, the Jagger/Richards takeover was sealed. This is the first Glimmer Twins commanded production in a way that the previous one was like a refinement of the then current state with all the pop influences discarded. So, while it was fine to kick Beggar's Banquet off with something from the dawn of humanity, the follow up needed to rage as the band had never before. There are some precedents, of course; Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby and Citadel but the chaos of the first was unsustainable and force of the second too beginner to base a sound on. As it's almost entirely Keith on guitar here it's his hot clean tone that dominates and the sinewed textures of the lead lines in Gimme Shelter and further explorations that will colour these songs more than anything else. The big four (Beggars through to Exile) are thought to consolidate the Stones sound to the effect that anything they have tried since is not just judged by those records but discernably slight departures from them. If there had been nothing Beatlesque about Beggar's Banquet, Let it Bleed is the sound of a great muscularity shambling to the stage and dominance.

After the storm a gentle acoustic arpeggio introduces Love in Vain. It is joined by a solid hot slide guitar, brushed drums and bass. Jagger's vocal is plaintive and full throated after its burial alive in the opening track. But there's a problem. On original pressings of this album the song was credited to Jagger-Richards. It's since been recognised as the work of Ur bluesman Robert Johnson. This happened on the previous LP with Prodigal Son. It was happening a lot in Zeppelin-ville, too. Things would catch up but for now... The version, let's say, is a good one, though, slow as a hot afternoon and pining.

Country Honk is an acoustic rendition of Honky Tonk Women which was recorded as a single during these sessions (and features Mick Taylor in full flight as a lucid and lyrical guitar maestro). Here, starting with street sounds, car horns and studio chatter, a shambolic singalong shines with impromptu good humour.

Live With Me begins with a classic Keith bass line and kicks quickly into a lean rock song. I used to skip this one as what I could get from the lyrics seemed too play dough macho. Much later, finally reading them, I keep it on when I listen. "I got nasty habits," sings Mick. I bet you do. Hold forth. "I take tea at three." Yes, it's actually much more of a piss take at themselves and their reputation. Even the lines about the maid and footman later on have a kind of knockabout whimsy. Even the faux in faux decadence is camp and wide eyed. It's also the first track that sax guy Bobby Keys added his own dialogue and to great effect.

A swampy slide intro gives way to a big strummed chord progression for the title track. The slide will re-enter throughout, adding great texture to the message and the humour of the song. Is it Ry Cooder? He's officially on mandolin and there are stories ... I don't care either way but I do know that the voice of it fits what Keith was establishing already in the sound. The lyric is mainly a series of statements about needing the equivalent of shoulders to cry on that stretch into sex and drugs and rock and roll for six verses with Jagger finally calling: "you can come all over me." It's a massive washing tide of knowing flowing over the exhausted bodies of the fast living and the victims altogether and, while it is delivered in clear humour carries a lot of weight.

Flip the disc and after a few chugging electric notes like a key igniting an engine Midnight Rambler begins to strut from the speakers with a confidence made of a solid bass line, steady drums and stinging guitar as Jagger delivers the manifesto of a career criminal. The second verse intensifies this before a sudden stop. The guitars rise and fall in slippery waves until Jagger intones, "well, you heard about the Boston - " THUMP! He's just revealed which bad guy he's talking about. After a few more lines of slapping musical violence the grind behind him rises and swells as he tells us how he could be everywhere, in your hallway, on your stair. Reaching breaking point, the band push back into the rock blues groove of the first two verses  as Jagger continues with the criminal's arrogant snarling confession until it's too much for even him and he stops in a kind of stuttered climax.

I first heard this full album in 1982 and had been well versed in all manner of theatrical rock music as well as the more violent aspects of punk, and late '60s rock. Nothing of that was as intense or quite as powerful as this epic. And it wasn't like Dazed and Confused or In a Gadda Da Vida. There were no flashy solos, let alone overlong ones. There were, however, instrumental passages that felt more like scenes of sleazy night life from movies yet to be conceived by the like of Martin Scorsese or Francis Ford Coppola. The seriousness and assumption of character is more akin to mid-'70s Bowie than anything on a Sabbath record. The haze of wilful evil in this track still gets to me. Jagger on all four. Richards on texture and mood and the will to do it all with just three chords.

You Got the Silver is Richards' debut as a lead vocalist. More edible slide in the intro before Keith's much feebler voice comes in with the first hesitant lines of a straightforward love song that circles around a three chord honky tonk workout. But there are dynamics, it doesn't just begin, go and finish. The first lines are couched in a kind of shy admiration and wrapped in the sinewy electric slide before the rise of confidence brings a robust celebration out of him and the band. It's not a lot of song but it works.

Monkey Man begins with one of the most intriguing instrumental introductions the band or anyone of their contemporaries did. A piano glistens with a rising arpeggio over an ominous organ playing minor chords, pulsating bass and funky chord descent on guitar. This kicks into gear, the guitar switching to a more ragged rock attack before Jagger belts in lines about desperation and decadence as the guitar blasts and breaks back into the frenetic figure. A gorgeous instrumental break in a major mode plays the guitar against an octave slide figure and more glittering piano before Jagger comes back in, screaming about being a monkey. It's a kind of Jumping Jack Flash revisited with the sophistication that jet setting and a return to touring bestowed. It takes a few listens to mean much but once it gets to you it's there forever.

And then we come to one of the saddest and most achingly beautiful anthems of this anthem-heavy year. As they never had nor ever would again, The Rolling Stones begin with a choir. Not, a soul church congregation nor a battery of mighty women like on Gimme Shelter but a classical choir. It sounds funny to hear the high boys voices at first as they sing Jagger's lines about an old flame making a connection, with perfect pitch and clipped diction but the second listen on gives it the sadness it began with. A gentle acoustic strum rises as the choir finishes and Jagger comes in with a world weary voice with lines about women to meet, old friends who share time (and what they get from the Chelsea drugstore) and stories about other friends, of protests in the streets of the turbulent late '60s all of which fall into the refrain that while you can't always get what you want, if you try sometime you can get what you need. Trite? Only if read on a page without the music. The music rise in force to massiveness but it's not like the storm of Gimme Shelter, it's both merciful with building and cleansing choirs, raindrop piano figures, filling organ chords and soaring vocals. The old decade is grinding to a close. Everyone's a little scarred and torn, everyone's exhausted, everyone can't go on but the next ten are around the corner and everyone has to. As the storm of Gimme Shelter roared over the distance the great earthly heaven of this greatly forgiving song takes us with it into the peace it leaves behind. What a way to end the '60s not with the Fabs cooing about love and peace but the bad guys who had finally found their bad and a kind of sagacity as well. "you get what you neeeeeeeeeed!"

1969@50: What I Missed

I was alive in 1969 but was unaware of almost every record I've written about from then this year in the series 1969@50. I was still under ten and if I liked any pop music at all it was something cute they played on the radio. A year and a bit later I discovered the world of classical through an ABC radio show called Sunday Morning Concert. That tied in with my fascination of previous centuries and drawing scenes from them. My point is that none of these albums were on my radar at the time. The ones I've featured were mostly heard well after their release (in some cases decades) and they are the ones that have stuck with me and which I still listen to. Here are some I'd marked as candidates but could not stir myself into celebrating. That doesn't make them bad records just short of my taste or ones that have too few tracks I love. Anyway...

BAYOU COUNTRY: Creedence Clearwater Revival - This is one the other side of the mass of material from the late '60s/early'70s that I can't get into for a number of reasons but mainly related to a reliance on a blues-rock vocabulary that I am alienated by. This band improved immensely and swiftly in subsequent releases with John Fogerty proving a mighty writer, singer and guitarist but that was in the future.

KICK OUT THE JAMS: MC5 - I didn't hear this one until a few years ago though I was apprised of the band's place in rock history from my teens. A friend's sister had a copy of the album High Times which contained one great song (Over and Over) and a lot of blues-rock workouts that left me cold. This debut is boldly a live album intended to pass along the excitement of an MC5 show with its haranguing between song calls to action and a hard rock set that ends in a fashionably Eastern-influenced jam. When I reformatted my cds and gave most of the hard copies away to friends or donated them locally, I just added this to the pile without making flacs, never thinking to revisit it. It's not that it's dated with its "sisters and brothers!" yells, it's just not my kind of music, regardless of how stirring it might have been to witness. They did the right thing by their fans, I'm just not among their fans.

IN THE COURT OF THE CRIMSON KING: King Crimson - The title track is good but I can't get into the rest of it.

UNCLE MEAT: The Mothers of Invention - Sigh. This is one of the most exhausting records I've ever tried to listen to. I am defeated.

TROUT MASK REPLICA: Captain Beefheart - Of all the avant rock I was aware of like this or anything by Frank Zappa, my resistance to this stems from the feeling I get that it is done less from musicality than a need to be anti-conventional. It just sounds cold to me. Contrast that with the following decade's Residents who did seem to put music of conviction in the blend of recording as event and showbiz.

A SALTY DOG: Procol Harum - Like The Band, The Faces, Jeff Beck Group and many others from the turn of this decade I find it too hard to connect with the music. I wonder if it's because they start from a part of the reimagined blues timeline that left me cold. I will give this one points for committing to its overall feel and trying to stretch a little beyond this but I struggled to listen all the way through and couldn't have done it justice in a fuller write-up.

GOODBYE: Cream - For me it was one great album and a lot of extended blues-rock. Sorry, it's just a deaf spot for me. All of Disraeli Gears and about three tracks off Wheels of Fire and I need to declare myself an infidel.

IN A SILENT WAY: Miles Davis - Utterly sublime workouts of poignant melodies by a jazz supergroup on the verge of inventing jazz/rock fusion but avoiding everything that tainted that genre with overly rarefied noodling and nerve-defying complexity. This is a solid favourite of mine which I enjoy quite frequently in an SACD in 5.1. It's beautiful but it's hard to describe.

THE GILDED PALACE OF SIN: The Flying Burrito Brothers - Good album but by flac-ed copy left the best song (Sin City) only half complete. I kept trying to remember where I'd seen the CD but it never turned up and by the time I went to write up the next one the time was past. Perhaps I'll write it up as an unheard classic on its own.

SONGS FROM A ROOM: Leonard Cohen - This would really take too long a run up for me to do justice to and every time I tried I kept getting lost. I'll feature the early Cohen canon in a dedicated article later.

ON THE THRESHOLD OF A DREAM: The Moody Blues -  great childhood favourite and important to my own musical development but missed the date. Perhaps an article about what seems to be an unjustly forgotten band of innovators.

SCOTT 4: I know. How could I? He's got everything I like including a lean towards cinema rather than rock. I immersed myself in the record for a few weeks and emerged with only a few tracks to return to and the sense of a single approach to arrangement that quickly got on my nerves. I love, however, Boy Child and The Rhymes of a Woman.

UMMUGUMMA: Pink Floyd. For a long time this set was a punk joke, chiefly for the endless instrumentals with titles that ended with phrases like  "... and grooving with a Pict." When I finally attempted to listen I gave up well before the halfway mark and never returned. I've really got into this bands stuff from before and after but this and some of the earlier seventies records just don't connect and I think I'm still right about that (the same way I was right to find The Stranglers ghastly old yobs with occasionally good songs).

There are probably more.

1969@50: BALLAD OF EASY RIDER - THE BYRDS

A bright and easy arpeggio on an acoustic guitar with a swell of a string section rising. McGuinn's vocal enters with the lines about the river flowing and things going where they will. This retake of the Byrds newer contribution to Dennis Hopper's groundbreaking film Easy Rider is a lift from the sombre one in the film and on the soundtrack album. The band went with the decision to strengthen their link with the runaway success of the movie, leading with this track and giving the whole album its title. But this did not sustain. No further tracks have any direct relevance to the film apart from having a distinctly American flavour with revisits to the country rock of the album before the previous one.

It's not just the identity of the record to the movie. Unlike Dr Byrds where McGuinn insisted on flying the Byrds flag by taking every lead vocal, the singing is shared and the sole original founding member is even absent from three of the tracks altogether. How thinly can you stretch a well known musical entity before it warps beyond recognition or snaps entirely?

Fido contributed by and sung by soon to depart bassist John York is pleasant enough with some fine guitaring from Clarence White and a drum solo that doesn't get too boring. A swaying rhythm swings between the first and fourth chords until it ends.

Oil In My Lamp provides something like a progression in that its harmony put it pleasantly between the old Byrds and Baptist church sangin'. The song is a hymn associated with the early years of school but here actually compels with a commitment to the the brightness of the plagal motion of the tune and the strength of the vocals. It is entirely harmonised but the clearest voice is drummer Gene Parsons.

Tulsa County is a tasteful country cover with some fine bending guitar slinging, a strong McGuinn vocal, sweet harmonies that work for being a lot less formal and blocky than the trademark Byrds harmonies, fiddle and gentle Nashville lilt.

Jack Tar The Sailor begins with some lovely atmospherics on the guitar, settles into a kind of mid Atlantic folk with McGuinn supposedly trying a British accent to go with the origin of the song. McGuinn knew what he was going for and would have felt emboldened by the emerging of the brash folk fusion of UK acts like Steeleye Span, Pentangle and Fairport Convention. The trouble is that he just sound like he's pretending to be about ninety-seven years old. The the bands efforts create a genuinely beautiful setting but the vocal just makes every good thing drag like a corpse across a pub floor.

Jesus is Just Alright begins with very tasty minor key country rock guitars. The harmony vocals are blocky and eerily reminiscent of the style of close-to-home success of Crosby Stills Nash and Young. And then it ends.

It's All Over Now, Baby Blue rises as a country flavoured dirge that takes forever to finish the title line at the end of the chorus. They had done a more folk-rock take during the Turn Turn Turn sessions which might have struck them at the time as more of the same but plays far better than this interminable outing.

There Must be Someone I can Turn To sounds sincere, authentic and like the cover version it is. It's good but should it be here? McGuinn absent.

Gunga Din begins with a superbly bright and difficult acoustic arpeggio. A gentle country rock motion tells a tale of sad disappointment and societal rejection. Lovely nimble fingered Telecaster work in the outro. Nothing to complain about, really.

The Woody Guthrie cover Deportee is full country or as close as they close on Sweetheart. Is it bitchy to suggest that McGuinn's vocal sounds like a mix of Chris Hillman and Gram Parsons? Great song, though.

The final track is Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins and reinstates the earlier tradition on Byrds albums of a goofy closing track. After a reconstruction of the Houston countdown Roger comes in with an acoustic guitar and gentle harmonium with a few lines that are over before they've begun.

You can put this album on and leave it on. It's what a Byrds album sounds like when the band is a version that more resembles the ship of Theseus and the repaired beams and masts, for all their faithfulness to the original design, stick out. The half-arsed cover art which McGuinn infamously hated for its corny warped typeface and bizarrely contrary image of a biker who looked more like the rednecks at the end of the movie than the freedom-seeking hippy of the movie. And the shortfalling insistence on the link with the movie that runs out after the first track doesn't help. Not even the barely coherent liner notes by Easy Rider star Peter Fonda can help.

This is an album that begs the faint praise it often draws. Not all bands produce at their best album after album. The Byrds had more than their share of upsets and reversals of fortune that, when seen with clear hindsight, would puzzle the staunchest fan as to why they bothered with the strongest debate held by just when they should have split and found new careers. I'm not a fan of Sweetheart of the Rodeo. I think it's bland and pandering rather than bold. The return to exploratory rock afterward with Dr Byrds was better but then it was followed by this. And there was both good and dire to follow but no further sheer brilliance. McGuinn's relative aloofness from the project had a lot to do with the ongoing saga of the mooted musical Gene Tryp which he envisaged would spring him off to a new and bigger career. This album's lack of force beyond the level of elevated muzak bears witness to its central figure's distance from the centre. Ah well ...

1969@50: DAVID BOWIE

A gently strummed acoustic guitar fades up alternating between C and E Minor. A picked electric bass joins and a vibraphone swells up and then light drums. Bowie's vocal enters harmonising with itself and something's changed since the last record. The sci-fi story is unsurprising from someone who sang about all those grave diggers and messiahs to the starving and it wouldn't be the last. No, its the quality of his voice. It's a little broken, damaged. The 1967 album of the same title had him chopping and changing with each track as though the next voice he put on might be the gold. The only thing left of that here is the London lilt: that he would never abandon.

After the whispered countdown behind the vocals, Major Tom lifts off, wonders at the sight of his home moving into the distance. Something goes wrong and his ship is set to drift away from the earth forever as he contemplates his complete isolation in a tin can far above the world. A mellotron string section (thank you, Rick Wakeman) and glissandi on the stylophone and more spacey vibraphone and sparse drumming work for a song that seems to float in zero G the way its protagonist does.

Bowie would phase out his quaint weird tales over the next few albums and was already beginning on this album with songs that feel far more personal than any he'd released. The President Joes with the Running Gun Blues and Supermen to come would drift off into the dark matter the same as Major Tom while our Div explored the benefits of narrating as though from experience.

Unwashed and Somewhat Slightly Dazed gives us a promising title but begins as though it's going to be a sensitive ballad with sawshy acoustic guitars and a gentle vocal. Before you know it the gears crank up and it starts a kind of Bo Diddly shuffle with a full band and becomes a kind of Dylan/Velvets rant. He's a poor hippy and she's the daughter of riches, craning her neck to see him from the height of her window. But he's dangerous and sexy and he draws her attention (though her own attraction to him makes her sick). It drags into a jammy chord progression of guitars and blues harp until it ends.

Don't sit down is a joke that came out of a jam session that should have been erased. It's a little like seeing an interview with the stars of a new whacky comedy gad about and then cringing when you see the trailer. Anwyay...

Letter to Hermione is a gentle, sensitive ballad about a lost love that still burns in the spurned narrator. It's personal (and autobiographical, by the way) and heartfelt if a little precious. After the previous track, its discipline and melodic performance are welcome.

Cygnet Committee begins in stately fashion with Bowie chugging an acoustic guitar as the pieces of a roack band seem to wake around him (some of them backwards). The sense of an epic is clear and lifts as we hear the initial lines about a kind of exhausted love. Something tells you it isn't about a boy and girl but an individual and a population. The song deftly progresses through a set structure a few times but never quite feels like it as a lot of thought has been given to dynamics and momentum. The narrator is at times a fallen messiah or cult leader and at others just another hippy pressed into fatigue by the futility of trying to generate mass creativity. At one point slogans like All you Need is Love and Kick Out the Jams are directly quoted. The age is at its end and it's a mess. Musically, it is heavily influenced by Jacques Brel's creepier moments like My Death but it sounds like much more than a copy. It sounds like someone who has found a genuine path from influence through inspiration to originality. Space Oddity aside, this is the first song on this album that sounds like a lot of the decade to follow will sound in terms of its boldness, scale and sense of progression. By the time the drums find the bolero beat under Bowie's increasingly impassioned plea for life he has well and truly arrived ... as himself.

Janine, which would have opened side two of the original vinyl, seems a straighforward bright boy/girl song with a catchy chorus and guitar riff. He holds off being open with her, feeling it might be too much. By the time you get to lines like, "but if you take an axe to me you'll kill another man," we are in a place darker and more dangerous than bohemian Chelsea in the still Swinging Big Smoke.

An Occasional Dream begins as a quite jolly whimsy with bright acoustic guitars bearing a light vocal. An electric bass comes in, then drums, and then a hippy dippy flute section. The song describes an old affair with real longing, leading to the chorus which plays broad and stately. It's beautiful but sounds like a doomed version of Bowie and I can never remember more than the chorus.

Wild Eyed Boy From Freecloud emerges as another acoustic ballad but soon transforms through extra orchestration, developed structure and vocal performance into what, for all the world, sounds like a show tune. The people of a small village imprison the wild eyed boy who has come preaching love and communion with nature. He is brought to deliverance by his mystical home and the villagers seem to turn toward him. But having already made their decision to hang him the villagers get flattened by the bouldering rage of Freecloud. Once back home the boy kicks pebbles off the clouds in shrugging disgust. There are several sections and the orchestral arrangement builds through them. And one of the things that happens is a shift from Bowie's usual voice, familiar from the first full LP  to the strong stage-ready wail that would serve him through Ziggy to Diamond Dogs. We're hearing the first of many epics that, though they shifted from Broadway to the rock theatre he would begin to develop as a main approach from the next album onward. Bowie liked the song so much (there's more than a little autobiographical allegory happening in it) that he put it in the set of his last gig as Ziggy, years later.

God Knows I'm Good begins with lush acoustic chords. Bowie comes in with a straightforward vocal about an impoverished old woman caught shoplifting. As the shoppers and staff close in judgementally and the woman collapses she intones the title phrase which is also the chorus. That Bowie narrates this from a first person perspective is notable as he didn't really pursue this avenue, moving on to explore storytelling from deeper within his characters. It's not a bad song and the chorus is compelling but it is rendered near colourless by the peaks of the songs either side.

Memory of a Free Festival is announced after Bowie asks the producer if he should. He describes in a plain melody a joyous occasion of music, drugs and love which seems to have included a mutually acceptable alien abduction. The arrangement begins with a simple harmonium which holds Bowie's invoking tone well. The slow chant, whether solo or choral has a pleasing build: Sun machine  is coming down and we're gonna have a party, uh huh...

I think I've been clear about my bias here. This is the Bowie of the golden shoulder length perm of Dylan-worshipping hippies. The look and lifestyle might well have suited him but its time was gone by this set. The new one emerging from beneath it was far more exciting. Taking the goofy novelty songs he was happy to do the last time but blending them with compelling stories gave us Space Oddity which still sounds fresh. Cygnet Committee, with a little work, could have been on Diamond Dogs or Station to Station. Most of the rest falls between the world he was leaving and the one he was planning. That one, the one that produced a decade of brash and inventive greatness, could dazzle even when it misstepped.

Tony Visconti, near lifelong producer and arranger was here for all but Space Oddity which he felt was gimmicky. Undersung when other collaborators were around like Brian Eno (still incorrectly assumed by many to have been the producer of Low), Visconti proved a fine arranger and sound production thinker. The peaks of this record have the sound of a great artist forming and emerging from the artistic suicide of pleasing a peer group and that sound has a lot to do with the musicality and coaching of Tony Visconti.

When this album was rereleased it was with a Ziggy-era photo on the cover, IBM font and named after the opening track. You could feel the embarrassment just holding it. As for Bowie himself, next stop was a rock outing that approached metal, and after that a poppier effort which showed more clearly than anything how far he had come from sensitive new age laments to intense epics like Life on Mars or deceptively gentle malefactions like Quicksand. Bowie was turning a little to such greatness in this album but he had a skin or two to shed before he could. That is also the sound you hear here, and not for the last time.

1969@50: BASKET OF LIGHT - PENTANGLE

A tricksy dual guitar figure is anchored by a double bass the band kicks into a smooth groove before the light-bearing voice of Jacqui McShee sounds a bright modal tune about getting away from it all, whose chorus is wordless: ba duppa doodah. The next verse has her providing her own descant vocal before a middle eight moves to the minor and creates a lot of space. The bass anchor returns for the last verse and we end symmetrically with the intro. This is not folk rock. And it's not prog, either. Prog would have made the odd number time signature imposing. Pentangle make it seem effortless. If anything, it's folk jazz. Worst nightmare? Give me a minute.

Once I Had a Sweetheart begins with a gentle rocking motion between acoustic guitar and bowed bass. Jacqui comes in with the title as first line. Congas and non-rock percussion enter and the song builds. No middle eight nor gear-changing chorus, just the ghostly nightmare of a lost love sung sweetly. Then an instrumental takes over and we notice that we've already been hearing a tambura drone. We notice that because the sitar comes in with a poignant solo that sounds like longing. When The vocal re-enters for the final verse it is set deep in ethereal harmony, the final line "after I'm gone" echoing into the fade.

Springtime Promises begins with a guitar figure in a similarly jazzy mode to the opening track and proceeds to sound like the most conventional song so far. Sung by its co-composer Bert Jansch, it tells of the change of the seasons both literally and figuratively as people respond to their own changes. Busy but light percussion and Danny Thompson's masterful bass playing match Jansch's acoustic mastery.

Lyke Wake Dirge freezes from the first with a Gregorian whispered three part harmony telling of the soul's journey from the darkness of death through purgatory. If it sounds old with all them thees and mayests it should. Even though its refrain of "and Christ receive thy soul" is every fourth line that is considered an interpolation of a pre-Christian funeral dirge. We are going way back in time. This is a little like ghost stories for me: I don't believe but I still like the eeriness. It sounded like a spell and not a good one.

Train Song continues the jazzy course of Light Flight and Springtime Promises with a rhythm suggestive of locomotion in the guitar and McShee's scat song descant. Jansch's vocal about the pain of leaving his love has an exhausted pain in it. The descant pouring over it in a breakdown feeling like balm. The lyric contains the album title and compares love to a kind of surreal trap. The track and side end with Thompson bowing his bass with a stuttering spiccato that rises through to an uneasry harmonic that might suggest a retreating train whistle or a troubling idea of a soul rising into dissipation.

Hunting song begins with a delicate and creepy glockenspiel and a percussive double bass played high on the fingerboard. Jacqui comes in with a tale as a traveller who sees a medieval hunting party with a Revelation-like ten kings and queens. After a brief instrumental break the vocal melody begins phase B with a cascading variation of the first section with the double bass edibly echoing the vocal descents. The narrator, at a low emotional ebb witnesses a scene between two of the hunting party and then we hear their dialogue, Jacqui as the lady and Bert Jansch as the knight. She has a magic horn which compels the truth. She means it as a gift for the king. The knight has a jape in mind, though. Another busy but delicious acoustic instrumental and then we are into section C with a more stately melody. The traveller reaches a castle where the lord and lady are bidding farewell to each other as he heads off battle. Before we have taken note of it we have been propelled by a rhythm section of bass and congas. The medieval setting has become almost Latin jazz. This comes to a head and returns to 1232 with a gorgeous and wordless round of male and female voices in a  minor mode. Bert takes up the end of the story as the warrior returns to find his life undone by the magic horn with its fatal truth. Jacqui assumes the final lines as the traveller or perhaps something more omniscient to pronounce a death by dark arts.

This song is set in a terrifying pre-Raphaelite painting where medieval figures seem to wander in woods made of dark matter. See my earlier comment about ghost stories. I think I had read Alan Garner's folk horror novel The Owl Service not too long before hearing this. I fuse them both in my memory. There is both a luxury in the music and a coldness in the tale that tie a knot of scowling horror. I loved and was scared by this song.

The folky jazz of Sally Go Round the Roses serves a pallet cleanser after the epic Hunting Song. The arrangement loosens the pulse of the Jaynettes version. The vocals come and go, interweaving like someone haunted by thoughts that cannot be shaken. This might be a lazy afternoon shot at an oldie but it still gets to me.

The Cuckoo brings the glockenspiel back out of the prop room to add an iciness to the traditional song about constant birds and deceitful lovers. After an instrumental featuring some tasty acoustic guitar and bass interplay the song repeats with the verses in reversed order. That made me think of the use of reversed actions in spells and - Maybe The Owl Service was still on my mind.

House Carpenter begins with a banjo and Jacqui singing the first lines about marrying below her station. Bert Jansch comes in as a smarmy tempter. The woman leaves her young family for adventure on the ocean wave. The ship goes down and she drowns longing for her simple life, her husband and children. And then she stands in front of bright hills which she takes for heaven until disabused by her tempter who explains that it's actually hell. The band below gains breadth with tambura, sitar, bass and drums. The final scene in hell is delivered acapella by McShee before her last yearning futility sinks into a tide of banjo and sitar which play to the fade.

Much later, when I was able to piece it together, I marvelled at how producer Shel Talmy who had made The Kinks and The Who sound so boxy had developed in a very few years to produce this wonder of blended styles. There is just nothing wrong with this production.

I heard this album in the holidays that divided primary from high school. It was a different kind of graduation. My sister Anita who was into all things medieval borrowed a copy from her friend Penny (whose collection also boasted the best cast recording of Jesus Christ Superstar and an original mono Revolver) and we listened to it in the rumpus room as the sky dripped monsoonal tears without.

It was olde worldey enough for me to tolerate and never got too close to rock music for me to worry about impurity. And its tales of dark deeds set in imaginative arrangements with frequently breathtaking vocal arrangements captured my Hammer horror mind. I drew pictures of ancient intrigue, death beds haunted by masked figures bearing candle sticks.

The music itself bore such character as offered mystery with every play. The hillbilly twang here, eastern drone there and some of the most intricate guitar interplay were a revelation. I was slowly coming around to the idea that there was some music made after the eighteenth century that I could like (and some of the source material here predated that limit by centuries itself).

Also, both Anita and I shared a surprised smile at hearing the very first track of this record. Light Flight was the theme of a great little UK series about three young women sharing a house at the end of Swinging London. You can Youtube it but if you do you might struggle through the pacing and theatrical dialogue and performances but at the time it felt grown up. The theme version is shorter, unaccompanied and has different words but the connection was thrilling.

I bought my own copy in the eighties when I saw it had been re-issued on vinyl. More recently, I got it as a DVD-Audio with a big surround mix. It still works as music without nostalgia. I can't hear an old Sherbet or even a Queen song without opening a room in the mid seventies wing of my recollection. But this ba bu budoodah opens a window and sunlight and fresh air come in.

1969@50: LED ZEPPELIN II - Revisited

A cough then BADAH BADAH DUH! The biggest riff in recorded history so far stutters and crunches. Then it's made even bigger with a bass the size of a skyscraper. Then the song lifts off with Plant's vocal screaming in bewilderment about his girl. We haven't heard a single snare hit yet and it's already spanning oceans. Then Bonzo slams another stuttering figure leading to the chorus which is augmented only by a slide with backwards reverb. Another verse with the full band and then the great weird chasm of cymbals, distorted theremin squeals and screams, distant wails and orgasmic uhs. Soon enough this forms from the primeval mist with some dinosaur thuds and a scratchy solo that seems to lose control of itself until the drums bring us into the last verse which breaks for a giant scream and an upward wail of looooooove before the riff returns with all hands on deck rising back to the clouds with its engines crunching and the of its voice screaming into the heavens.

I'm aware of the hyperbole in that description and how silly it might read today. The thing is that Led Zeppelin at their most fulfilled inspired and continued to inspire hyperbole as new younger listeners find their way to them. That's what I heard as a second generation fan: it was big and powerful and the obviously sexual tone of the mid section carried a special cache, once you got over playing it where adults could hear you listening (it was a headphone song). But that's the last you'll hear of that tone here. I've already written enough about this album here. What I'll do instead is pay mind to its context at the time of its release, what it meant to me and how it sounds now.

1969: release
LZ II sounds as vital and airier than the debut for two reasons: it was done at its own pace, not that of the self-funded budget of the first; it was done after the band had become a real live band. The rapidity of the band's success in the world's biggest market meant that they could pick and choose when and where to record and as they were the type of band to improvise new material on stage the great love feedback from their growing numbers of fans forged enough new songs to suggest a new album only months after the release of the first. Extra time and tight time plus a lot of affirmation from their public.

There was an increase in original material but the light-fingered practices of the first album were still in force. It's not hard to see where this comes from: the band had a massive stock of blues numbers to choose from and if the rest of them started up a groove in rehearsal or on stage the singer had better find something to do. Unfortunately, until the break that led to the third album Plant's invention was inferior to his ability to put something familiar over the new instrumental material. I deal with this further below. Otherwise, Songs like the What is and What Should Never Be, Thank You, Heartbreaker and Living Loving Maid demonstrate that a little more concern for detail in Whole Lotta Love or Lemon Song would have gone a long way.

1975: first listen
My acquaintance with this one began with the visit of my brother's entourage mentioned here. I was knocked over by the power of this album and listened to it daily over the break between grades eight and nine during a particularly wet monsoon in Townsville.

After that, after punk and the whole minimisation of rock into anti-rock the band and their legend were rendered the stuff of jokes, relics of their time like tie-dye flares or incense. I gave all my Zep records (including a few deep dish US import copies) to my brother who warned me that I was giving away a stock of good ideas. Then, years later in a different city, I picked up a copy I found at a Salvos and again thrilled at the force of it. I got the rest, as well, and then on CD when that happened and again more recently as his-res downloads of the remastered albums (which are so far the pinnacle of any presentation of the band, no contest). It's still good. It has problems but it's still good.

Plagiarism?
This issue plagues this band and with good reason. Whole Lotta Love's verse lyrics and melody are too close to Willie Dixon's You Need Love to ignore. Is it a rip-off? Take the vocal away and there's NO resemblance. But you need the vocal. They not only used it but allowed themselves to be credited for the song. See also the Lemon Song. They added a riff but the song is Willie Dixon's Killing Floor. Bring it on Home isn't just lifted from Howlin' Wolf the acoustic frame is sung in blackface. These have since been publicly attributed to the correct artists as shared credit but only after law suits or by settlements. It was wrong to publish without proper credit (and whether they did it or let it happen amounts to the same thing). They were found out and paid for it. But the other side of this is that once people start doing this they don't stop so in a very few steps you start getting absurd comparisons that are claimed to be plagiarism. The lesson of this is that no one should be too big to escape the charge, it is NOT tall poppyism: if you expect giants like Led Zeppelin to play it straight do so, yourself, and think before you accuse: there's a good reason why the Stairway to Heaven case found in favour of Led Zep and if you still don't know why after listening with honesty to the two guitar figures you are not qualified to make the call.

Today
I listened to this again yesterday evening and was again taken by the power and confidence of the record. It is a successful exercise in scale and texture variation. From the stadium-sized riff of the opening track to the understated slide guitar in the pre-chorus of Ramble On and much more this is the statement of a band spoiling to get bigger and better. That they did.

1969@50: ARTHUR (Or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire) - THE KINKS

Where could you go after Village Green? You'd just created a picture of everything you love about the England you knew and wished for and then everything that was wrong with it and even crushed up the last grains of nostalgia that only gets in the way. You still can't tour the big market because of that mysterious performance ban. More of the same? That's never been good enough. A movie? I would have loved that (do it in the style of the Dead End Street video with Ken Loach behind the camera). Too much can go wrong. What is as grim as it is funny and, however bleak it gets, still has mass appeal? British TV. Right up to the '90s the U.K.'s television broke ground as a matter of course. Yes, there were plenty of endless soaps, naff game shows and unendurable variety shows but there was also Nigel Kneale, Denis Potter and Dr Who; there was Play For Today and talk shows that could really get into the shadows. You wanted more power to dig into the best and worst of where you lived, if you were Ray Davies and co. you went to TV and a new dimension. Actually, they went to Ray but he was in. And then, at the eleventh hour it all fell apart. Then again, there was this album.

So, what, is it Tommy? No, the songs tell of things like military service, post war austerity, boomtime affluence etc. but there are no dialogue songs or descriptions of present action. In absence of the tv movie it was written for, it comes across as more of a concept album, a kind of grimly real echo of Village Green (which, itself was not without its own counter points). Outside of its purpose as music for pictures some of it can lag which is why I'd recommend listening all the way through. Very little is as immediately engaging as the album before it but the developing image has a lot to give.

We start in the dull grey echo of history's biggest empire and where better than a sprightly toast to the monarch at the centre of its most powerful moments, Victoria. A bright, roistering tune that rises and falls before soaring into a chorus consisting only of the name. A melancholy middle eight with a lot of power behind it (this is a great Dave Davies album, apart from anything else) belies the flag waving and feels like nothing so much as someone viewing the ashes of a Guy Fawkes bonfire and wishing it could have gone forever. A clean solo from brother Dave if full of cheer and leads to more jubilant chorusing. A quick tour of the empire, commonwealth and peoples and we finish on more shouting chorus before eventually ending on a very understated frown in the horns of the brass section.

An acoustic guitar matches a military snare drum and the band comes in for a descending chorus of Yes, Sir. No, Sir. A bright section only dresses up the grind of military service in recruitment promises before the embittered chorus quashes all that. A strange folky interlude in a minor key and 2/4 rhythm reinforces the sense of servitude before an officer class type sings coolly of hoodwinking the soldiers into thinking they're more than gun fodder with a posh cackle rounding it off. The dour chorus plays us out.

Some Mother's Son uses the kind of rising melody against a broadening harmonic structure as stirring military songs to sing of the horrors and futility of war, its grief and devastation. Backed by an acoustic led band and the harmonies that people often forget about when thinking of The Kinks. A sober and quietly angry statement.

Driving is the love child of Picture Book and Autumn Almanac but you get over that as soon as it kicks in and go along with the simple pleasures of getting away from the city and the grinding costs of workaday life to picnics with beer and pastries on the grass in the sun. Arriving at the exact point where we need a break from the empire and the wars, the exuberant chorus lifts us to the air.

Brainwashed begins with a soul groove led by the bass and blasts to life with a brass section. A swift and wordy verse details how the benefits of social mobility, welfare and the notion of consumerist freedoms are just more control with the forceful refrain: get down on your knees. This is not couched in irony nor seems specifically from a character point of view (though it suggests student activism or even unionism). It's almost over before it's begun, leaving the way a great rock song should with you wanting more. Of all the songs on the album this is the one I can most easily imagine backing a montage of images from the movie.

Australia rushes to life with an emigration pitch. As the song proper kicks off we get more of the same except this is a Kinks song so it has levels. A stunning long setpiece lists all the advantages of moving from the big smoke to a clean living sunny paradise in the southern seas, without drug addiction nor class distinction. The rich vocal arrangement is meant to remind us of the utopian teen choruses of The Beach Boys and the time and feel changes are very reminiscent of the adventures that Brian Wilson and co were finding in albums like Pet Sounds and Smiley Smile (even more in the uncompromised original project simply titled Smile). Dave has a few lines of his own and Ray's voice is rendered cartoony here and there by pitch control. This pushes into the elongated instrumental section that takes up most of the track with Dave Davies showing how expressive he can be with a clean guitar sound, swirling backing vocals. It sounds like the mind of someone who has come to a big life changing decision and is tripping on the good vibes of massive self support. Yes, there is a massive irony involved but the band is making it sound so good that we get into a forgiving mood. Even an Australian from 1969 could have told them they'd been sold a pipe dream but the point is not the reality at the other end of the boat voyage but the promise of escaping stagnation. The band play out the single chord ground (it approaches psychedelia) and we land on a low piano chord. End of side one.

Side two begins ice cold with a slow minor key arpeggio on acoustic. Ray Davies comes in with a gentle whispering vocal: "Now that you've found your paradise this is your kingdom to command. You can go outside and polish your car or sit by the fire in your Shangri-La..." A sombre French horn responds to the next lines about what this suburban sterility has replaced. A gorgeously harmonised second section bids Arthur to sit back and relax into his superannuated comfort before the soaring chorus of the name Shangri-La takes us into a swooning state. But this is a Kinks song. As Ray's melancholic tremulous last La closes we bash into a rock progression that crashes into a near metal rant: "All the houses in the street have got a name 'cause all the houses in the street they look the same..." Nothing's nothing. All the shoulder-crushing burdens of a work life just take different forms and the downward push keeps downward as the band sing  Shangri-La la la la lala la ... But then we're brought back by a grand brass foundation to the slippers and rocking chair. But is that really so bad? He's in his place and knows it. He can't go anywhere. You might scoff but he's blissing out on cocoa. "Shangri-Laaaaaaaaa. Shangri-Laaaaaaaa..."

I bought a Kinks compilation in the late '70s. It was a double and, as I later learned, was part of a series that had identical covers but for insets of the different bands and the word file in the title. The Kinks File had a great selection covering the Pye label years and however cruddy the masters used (very tired bass-free horrors which, if heard by any vinyl-forever nong, would change the notion about LPs' superiority) but it was this song that really just stopped me in my tracks. The delicate beauty of the melodies or the perfectly-judged brass arrangement might have been enough but the songcraft just won it. We go from pitying Arthur in his Emo-Ruo type home with all the ghastly little problems that seem to shrink him but in the end, however trapped we believe him to be, we just can't touch him. Heart-rending but elating, it's just brilliance.

Mr Churchill Says extends Yes Sir, No Sir but in a lighter vein. Slyly bending guitar notes slink around Ray's voice as he repeats the forceful rhetoric of the Blitz, countering with the warmer sentiment of Vera Lynn's We'll Meet Again. A brightly distorted guitar chord progression starts up under an air raid siren. Ray sings about the scene of a German bombing. A brisk instrumental which might be panic or rebuilding finds Dave Davies is great form playing a fluid Spanish flavoured solo over a shuffling 2/4 backbeat. The band return for a proto rap, repeating the words of Churchill as the scared kids remind the others of absent teachers' threats. Quick fade. Violence and leadership and destruction. Worth it or just more passing time?

A harpsichord introduces us to a woman who "bought a hat like Princess Marina" which she wears while dusting the house and scrubbing the floors. An unnamed he buys one like Anthony Eden which also gives him a lift, if only unto himself. But they and everyone else are doing it tough enough to recall Depression-era songs and to cry: "this poverty is hurting my pride." Suddenly the band picks up and cracks open a cabaret shuffle and returns to the tune of the opening verses. She's still in the hat, feeling like a Princess though the cupboard is bare. And she don't care. By this stage we might be noticing that the same melody that sounded like an Anglican hymn at the start fits perfectly into a winking music hall singalong by the end. This is a counterpart to both the carefree joys of Driving and the frown of Brainwashed on the previous side. This is a Kinks song, though, so it's allowed to sound like a knees up and sad at the same time.

Young and Innocent Days begins with a beautiful acoustic guitar interplay between Ray and Dave. The lyric about longing for the vision of youth is not nostalgia (we've already seen where that goes for Arthur) but more a kind of grief for a view of the universe that is not so manhandled and bruised. A brief instrumental section is born on grandeur with some big piano octaves low on the board but we return to the quieter reflection and end with the interlocked guitars gently meandering down the scale.

Nothing to Say sets up a call and response chorus as a man recalls a happy childhood to his father but now a father himself finds that Dad is silent on anything that might care about. The son tries drawing the father out but "all the words that you spit from your face add up to nothin' ". Another visit over and even less to show for it than the last one. The upbeat rock of the song with is gospel choruses only accentuates the emptiness and sadness of the silence between the generations. Arthur closes the door as his son's family leave. Fade.

Arthur begins with a playful shuffle. Dave's vocal recaps Arthur's life from his youth and ambitions to the unremarkable place he holds in a world that's passed him by. He's seen wars rise and empires fall and felt the press of authority and suffered from the class system. Then finally, in the affluence that arrived so late in his life, he could do nothing with it but get comfy and snooze. But the clapping gospel gallop of the song is not mocking him for a single beat. They love and understand Arthur. Of course, it's too late now to change his life but at least, finally, someone is telling him something other than get in line or pay your bills or abandoning him. The lesson of his life is his life, if we but heed it.

This album found The Kinks at a hopeful point. The tv movie fell through but Ray did go to the US, produce a Turtles album and dissolve the performance ban which re-opened the biggest rock music market in the world up for them. They toured, more soberly this time, and were well received. Arthur did better there than in the UK where people would be more likely to get it many references to conditions during and after the wars. Maybe they'd had it and its newness to Americans and their very different World War II were able to dance to the music.

If the production had lifted from Ray Davies taking over from Shel Talmy's one-take wonder style, it was now peaking. The sound of the band on this record is stellar. Dave Davies' attention to the tone he's getting and the choices he's making are compelling. And everyone's playing better. Extra instrumentation aside, this set sounds like a magnificent live performance with inspired vital playing.

And then, this is a Kinks album, there are the songs. Far less immediate with fewer radio-friendly choruses and more complex structures and shifts in tempo and tone this is not a pop album like any of the previous ones. They'd kind of got to the top of that with Village Green. And this was meant to be part of a movie. That it wasn't and survives as an album without the pictures (and only the barest of indications of what they might have been) is testament to the drive of Ray Davies himself who showed that he could change his factory's production from canon shells to kitchen appliances and come up with something as strong as this production.

And finally, there are the songs. Nothing as lovable as a Waterloo Sunset or Animal Farm but a lot of commentary from the heart, commentary on the lives of people who were unsung and trampled by history. And if those ordinary folk who dolled themselves up to forget about their empty bellies or took a little comfort in country escapes in their second hand cars were spiky here or growling there it was because they had crawled out from punishing servility and the terror of warfare. Ray loved and understood them because Ray, more than anyone else like him, more than Townshend or Lennon or Jagger, had compassion, wrote his songs with compassion. That's why it's such a pity the movie wasn't made because it would show us that his kinship was less with those rockstars than with the quietly industrious people who worked to make British television strong enough to leap across the decades and slap us into sense. Well, it didn't happen but then we still do have this album.



Listening notes: The 2016 Hi-Def remaster of this album available at online shops like HD-Tracks or Pro Studio Masters (not affiliated with either) is simply the best I've heard this record. The audio image is clear and deep with a lot of air around all the instruments. A fresh remix is due out at the end of the month as of writing which promises to address the overpanning of the late '60s stereo but for now this is my recommendation.

1969@50: ABBEY ROAD - THE BEATLES

This is a tough one. The Beatles' season finale is hyped as a perfect record. This means that when it comes up in conversation with enough people it starts raining objections. Some honestly dislike it or are indifferent to it or, if given to bullshit, contrarian. This used to happen to Sergeant Pepper and then Revolver when that one usurped it as peak Fabs. Now that Abbey Road has been given the deluxe treatment in a fiftieth anniversary release it's the turn of the swansong. Me? My go-to Beatles is usually the White Album and while I'll leave Abbey Road on if I start it it will no more be my first choice than Beatles for Sale. It's probably just overfamiliar and perhaps its perfection is an issue. So, I'm going to do this in bits.

First, I'll loosely describe it for someone un- or less familiar with it than I am. Then I'll look at the Super Deluxe version that I, of course, bought, and talk about the new mixes and the sessions material. Finally, I'll trace its history with my ears as it went from a kind of nursery singalong record to a trove of undercurrents, some quite dark, that suggest the substance beneath the polish.

The Album.

Abbey Road is the last album to be recorded as a project by The Beatles. They were still fresh from the Get Back project that was later released as Let it Be. That back to basics exercise was a failure and when the suggestion that the next one should be a return to form it was taken up and this is the result.

Come Together slinks to life as a moody bass riff with an ominous drum pattern. Low key rhythm guitar pulses under Lennon's sharp vocals that sing of a character adorned in a blend of nonsense phrases and ugliness. The chorus breaks out of this with a shout of the title which could be sexual or a call to other action, political, perhaps (it had started as a campaign jingle for Timothy Leary), the guitar breaking out in loud bar chords before surrendering back to the swampy bass. A solo emerges from a bed of electric piano and wails clean and distant above. It returns after another verse and chorus as the refrain is repeated with falsetto extensions to the fade. This song has always creeped me out. The line, "hold you in his armchair you can feel his disease," made me wince as some horrible images came forth. But it is a great groove with a piercing vocal and guitars so subdued they can be indistinguishable from the piano and a rhythm section performance that's both sexy and disturbing.

After a big run on the tom toms Something settles into the lushest ballad the band ever did as George Harrison celebrates the love of his life in a descending progression through the major with a B section in the minor rounded off in a gorgeous guitar figure ending in an affirming major chord, supported by a string section and organ. The middle eight soars with McCartney providing some light-bearing harmony. Harrison's vocal is delicate until the bridge but this effectively prevents the richness of the arrangement from spilling into cloying overstatement. The solo on a clean Les Paul is smooth and tasteful, completing the air of worship in the track.

Maxwell's Silver Hammer is one of the McCartney gateway drugs for young listeners to get into the Beatles. Its thumping progress and wry vocal (he even breaks into laughter at one point) belie that it is a tale of serial murder. The jaunty verses give way to a big yelling chorus that anyone can sing. I never feel like enjoying this song and wince a little as it starts straight into the verse but I'll leave it on as the arrangement does have riches like the between verse bass figure, splendid harmonies and momentum. It marks the first appearance on a Fabs album of the Moog synthesizer that George had bought the year before and the passages that feature it here are properly orchestral and even novel (like the wailing whistling tone towards the end) so that it sounds like a n instrument, not a gimmick.

Oh Darling begins with a tense electric augmented chord before launching into a big torchy love song from Paul with sublime backing harmonies and a fiery vocal (including a deliciously screamed bridge). A big doowop figure on the bass, hot but clean Gibson playing (especially in the bridge) and some expert drumming make it a welcome one each time.

Octopus's Garden is not just the Ringo song but, as with the previous album, one he wrote himself. After George's sprightly guitar intro a knockabout whimsy proceeds as Ringo dreams of living under the sea. An instrumental section features a bright solo from George, studio effects of bubbling water and a Four Seasons style falsetto backing vocal. I shouldn't like this but it's just so amiable that I get caught up in it.

I Want You (She's So Heavy) starts with a ringing electric guitar arpeggio in the minor but spiky and difficult with sevenths, sixths and an augmented. Harrison descants on the Les Paul, taking to the top of the fretboard for that difficult last chord. And then it's like a different song, a dark blues groove with fluid bass, muted electric guitars and some emotive organ work from Billy Preston as Lennon sings the plain phrases: "I want you, I want you so bad, I want you so bad it's drivin' me mad, it's drivin' me mad." In the chorus he speaks of the third character thus:"She's so heavy" as the dark opening arpeggio figure returns. Same again and then an instrumental verse which feels looser and bluesier than we're used to from this band, a third verse (same as the first) and then a coda section made of the arpeggio figure and an increasingly heavy bass figure playing almost as long as the rest of the song. This just keeps going and seems destined for a slow fade as the synthesised wind noise rises and starts to overwhelm everything. And then it just stops. It's sudden, not a slow wind down like The Ventures, an abrupt whiplash crashing halt that makes the silence at the end of the old side one deafening.

Flip the record and the sweetness of Here Comes the Sun tinkles into being with acoustic guitar, capo-ed high on the fretboard, a bright but light George vocal, some gleaming organ and swirly synthesizer. The sun's out and it's a lovely day. A mid section with Beach Boys style harmonies and some cleverly rising synth from beneath feels like the first gulp of a cold drink on a hot day. The Buddy Holly like melody yields to some very Beatley surprise chords that extend the harmonic motion. It ends on a gentle acoustic arpeggio and we just want to hear it again or jump in a pool. And hear it again.

An electric harpsichord plays an arpeggio of a strange progression that goes from standard minor to out of key major chords and seventh chords. There is no resolution as the shifting harmony will not allow a conclusion. This is joined by an electric guitar playing more or less in unison. And then after a wordless harmony descent that sends shivers the song Because sets in with a series of phrases of a plainness that, in this eerie luminous setting sound strange. Complex three part harmony drive this for two more times. A synth with a melancholy ringing tone plays the central melody under lush vocals that, still wordless, lead us to the final chord which feels like it's been abandoned in the middle of things. A beautiful but spooky song.

Which brings us to the element of the album that gets the most attention: the medley. For my purposes here I'm going to count everything from here to the end of the record as the medley, even though there is a gap between Bathroom Window and Golden Slumbers. This is because everything between that song and the last chord are linked and there is a reprise of the opening song of the medley during Carry That Weight.

After a gentle minor key piano intro Paul sings You Never Give Me Your Money as elements of the rest of the band come in around him. A bass flourish here and a guitar line there and the second of his double tracked vocals broaden the image of his voice during the lament section. The boogie version rolls with tack piano, a phone-thin vocal, undtil a beautiful circular arpeggio and harmony section until the final stage with the climbing 7ths and augmented chords and rocking vocals, more arpeggio guitar, some lovely distorted guitar soloing and a falsetto chant of 1,2,3,4,5,6,7, all goo children go to heaven that fades into a nocturnal setting complete with whistling cicadas. From this comes a sleepy guitar duo of Leslied chords and low string phrases through amp tremolo. Lush harmonies announce the Sun King as organ, guitar wash let us float on a bright, warm day to the smooth harmonised croon of nonsense Spanish. Then Mean Mr Mustard barges in with fuzz bass and a snotty rude vocal from Lennon about a ghastly little man. This is all but interrupted by the high speed splash of Polythene Pam with its shattering acoustic chords, Beach Boy harmonies and nasal Scouse vocal. Because it can go nowhere good it develops into a clean and high guitar solo on a minor theme before a momentum brings it to (Oh, look out!) Paul starting something new: She Came in Through the Bathroom Window, a sub-nonsense pop poem with minor key chorus and more of the surf guitar from the transition.

After a clean break Paul's piano gently vamps a minor chord. The strings come in with his vocal, a lullaby about going home which gives way to a big torchy chorus. This gives way to the whole band singing Carry That Weight which transforms back into an orchestral version of You Never Give Me Your Money which, itself, returns to Carry That Weight. The arpeggio from the end of Money is interrupted by the rocking intro to The End with McCartney screaming a single line before a brief drum workout on the tom toms built with a tough guitar chord rhythm. Then the three guitar playing members trade licks, Paul's scratchy I-really-can-rock line is taken up by George's but-I-can-play-this-thing-better melodic line into which John's heavily distorted chords come in punching. Twice.

Suddenly over a gentle piano chord vamp, Paul comes in with his cosmic line: "and in the end the love you take is equal to the love you make" as the orchestra swells to the same rising chord progression as in Something with George winding a beautiful concluding guitar vine around it.

Silence. Over. But-

Bam! Paul sings a silly little tune about Her Majesty which ends on a dorp, thumb picked acoustic note. That's the end.

This was one of the first rock records I sat down and listened to from beginning to end, probably when I was about twelve. Until that time my first musical fandom was classical. I was a record buying fan of Bach and Mozart and dug into book bound sets of great composers and some old 78 rpm shellacs of Beethoven and Elgar. My sisters were always trying to draw me out to listen to rock music and the two points that got me were Anita's embrace of medieval-based folk or Pentangle's jazzy revival of it, and a great cast recording of Jesus Christ Superstar, a work that, unlike Hair, behaved like a real opera. Marina was more search and destroy in her approach but forewent the Zappa or Sabbath and instead sat me in front of Abbey Road.

Because she happened to put side two on first I for years considered that the first side. The rich prettiness of Here Comes the Sun still makes me think of the flowers in the nursery dripping from the sprinkler. Because still looks like an endless blue North Queensland sky. The medley didn't faze me at all because the melodic riches, reprises and rapid changes in character, style and tone sounded natural to anyone who considered classical music natural. I was impressed with the orchestration, not just the orchestra but the way the arrangements added such a wide-ranging pallet to the sound. Because there are moments of harder rock I finally heard how it could be used. Notice that: I wasn't thinking oh it's rock but there are real strings, but that's what happens when you compose a song cycle with a rock band.

The other point about accepting the cultural dominance of rock music was getting to high school and steadily understanding that that was crucial to social survival. I still had a lot to learn. When I tried to impress a girl called Caroline with my new fandom of The Beatles she scoffed, saying that they were "as old as the hills". Who did she like, then? The Bay City Rollers. Several Countdowns and afternoons of seeking out The Bay City Rollers later I worked out how to tell her why The Beatles were better. That lasted.

The other side was made easier by hearing side two first. Come Together sounded like a hex, Something was beautiful, Maxwell was fun, Oh Darling was both goofy and intense, Octopus's Garden was a kids' song and the epic doom-blues I Want You seemed to live in a hellish wasteland where desires could never be fulfilled. That was the side that showed me that it could just be song after song. What happened with me seemed to have happened to the rest of the listening world: a new pop music record would need to sound like this one. Rock music loosened its stylistic belt in the decade to come with scenes like metal, glam and prog creating a massive pile of possibility, self-congratulation and bigger and bigger crowds until punk slapped the snowy cap off it. But when all that crawled back and found its own way into what pop became, the expectation of compositional prowess and variety had gone, swept under whatever sound a band affected. Just think of a band from the early '80s onward and see for yourself how little they changed. There are always exceptions but the ones who got to the top in time to secure their positions post-napster like U2, REM, Madonna, Michael Jackson, you name it, all chose to deliver more of the same. That means that when anyone like Sufian Stevens or Polyphonic Spree comes along there's a big appreciative swell. And still, when expressing the virtues of harnessing disparity for a stronger wholeness, The Beatles in the late '60s are invoked. And Abbey Road is the apotheosis.

Super Deluxe

So if it was so damn good, why bring it out yet again with a mix that might as well be twiddling a few knobs? To make more money out of the brand. Of course, that's there. But in this case the treatment that was given to Pepper(and the White Album after it) works. You don't have to buy it. The original mix is and will remain, perfectly good. But if you want what fresher ears and expertise can do to bring it into the times then at least have a listen.

The new stereo mix applies a sophistication that was not available to the team of George Martin and the Fabs in 1969 with an eight track console. Giles Martin and Sam Okell had access to the various stages of tracking and didn't have to bounce anything down. Once it was reassembled they recreated the original mix with the enhanced clarity and made decisions from there. The result is different. If it were only about clarity then this would be the least relevant of any attempt at rejuvenation as the 2009 stereo remaster stands as a great audio work.

Most of the changes have to do with equalisation and panning that work to create a little more air around the tracks and allow a deeper audio image. Some of the wide panning typical of the era of the original mix is retained but better balanced. Overall balance is improved with the more contemporary centring of vocals, bass and kick drum which will appeal to the younger ear as more "natural" sounding.

The other effect of this extra clarity is the enhancement of another aspect of the album that can tip the balance of opinion away from other perceived peaks like Pepper or Revolver. That is that the standard of performance is elevated beyond anything the band recorded previously. Harrison's lead playing is fluid and freer, McCartney's bass is utterly stellar throughout whether it's keeping to the slinky groove of Come Together or adding dramatic virtuosity to I Want You, Ringo's drumming manages to be both conventional and highly individualistic and tricksy without drawing undue attention to itself. Everyone is in good voice and the vocal harmonies are perennially breathtaking throughout. It simply sounds like the best the band would ever sing and play. That's a problem for anyone who likes the rough edges to the slickness audible on the White Album and Revolver but a blessing to any who laud the sophistication of it for becoming the standard in record production.

The Sessions discs are more of a mixed bag. As with the Anthology albums in the '90s there are tracks you'll happily revisit and others you probably will never bother listening to again. The extended I Want You with the dialogue about  a noise complaint and the enlightening answer to it. The take has a lot of Billy Preston organ jamming in it and suggests what it potentially might have sounded like live. Paul sings Goodbye to an acoustic and it's pretty. The demo of Something is so close to the arrangement of the final version it just sounds like a lesser version. The Ballad of John and Yoko with just John and Paul (acoustic guitar and drums respectively) sounds gleaming and new and provides a very listenable early stage. Lennon singing the closing guitar licks shows him planning his electric part. Old Brown Shoe is the same kind of case as Something. An early take of Oh Darling shows McCartney trying a more restrained approach to the vocal than the original. It's fine once. An early stage of Octopus's Garden just barrels around before the bits you want to hear are there. That applies to Maxwell's Silver Hammer and the medley tracks. Standouts from the remainder of the discs are the Come and Get It demo (same one on Anthology 3 but with beefier mastering) the medley with Her Majesty restored between Mean Mr Mustard and Polythene Pam. It's fun for fans of the album to go through this and there are plenty of hints as to how the band worked and, to some degree, thought, as this masterwork was being constructed.

Me, I put it at the end of The Beatles' catalogue both chronologically and stylistically, as it should be. If anything the slickness can tip me against a replay in favour of something rougher around the edge. That said, I'd sooner listen to Please Please Me with its tight cardigan of British showbiz than the forced rawness of Let it Be. The White Album consistently wins for its variety, great songs and range of quality from slickness to plainness. There is nothing plain on Abbey Road. Even Lennon's screaming on I Want You feels perfect. So, why go ahead and shell out for the big super deluxe? The book and the Blu-Ray audio with its 5.1 mix.

The 5.1 mix is stellar. If the individual parts are already clearer and airier in the 2019 stereo than the original mix here they have added intimacy. The throb and grunt of Come Together punches out. George Harrison's delicate vibrato vocal is suspended in the air before you in Something. The harmonies on the second side in Because or Sun King (but really all through) lift and breathe around you like visible summer breezes. The guitar trio stings and fires across the front of the image in The End and the final orchestral chords, garnished with a sneaky reprise of Harrison's guitar closer on Something spread like the warmth of a hot tea on a cold morning. In short, the experience is magnificent.

The Super Deluxe set is a book in a slipcase that reproduces the original artwork but with an extended track listing on the back. The book is a hardcover of roughly LP 12 x 12 inches. Opening it reveals the CD with the original album and the Blu-Ray in pockets with miniature original album covers. The two Sessions CDs are housed the same way inside the back cover and have alternative photos from the same shoot. A quick flip through reveals a lot of articles and photography of the band in the studio, shooting the iconic cover image of them walking across the zebra crossing on the titular road. There are articles about the lead up to the album in the band's timeline, a track by tack account of the genesis of each song followed by a detail of its recording including who played what, articles on the cover, the release and reception and the album's legacy involving personal memoirs and a more historical approach. What you get is context and the context is an extension of the celebration of a great record that feels like its own celebration whenever its played: a celebration of sunshine, nature, a busy and productive life, silliness and gravity, the plain wonder of a blue sky and the journey to the equation: in the end the love you take is equal to the love you make.

1989@30

Milli Vanilli try to outstare everyone who found out about them.

The Times
The most consistently enjoyable period of share house living I have ever known. Marie H, Steve J, Catherine Mc. and all the people you brought with you who (with a few exceptions) were among the most fun and intriguing I've met. There were skirmishes and conflicts which are inevitable between people in close quarters who also share the edges of each other's social lives, of course,  but even they added to the richness of the year's character.

I started writing a novel called The Day of the Fete which was about tourist monoliths (like big pineapple or big animal sculptures) and Murphy's Law. Eventually, years later, I gave up on it as I had to admit that my shortcomings as a fiction writer outweighed any ability I had to write fine pastiches. I had got back into reading some weird and wonderful books from the dawn of the novel that challenged the form before it had established itself like Tristram Shandy. Big influences, you might say. Until then, I felt like a novelist which was important in a social scene that demanded you be either a creative viceroy or an informed consumer. I really was trying to write a novel but found out swiftly how much social heft I could have in inner Melbourne by not only making the claim but being able to quote myself. Yes, I know how this sounds (well, I know how it is) but I also know how much fun I had.

Apart from a lot of predawns that were party or club nights ending in front of Rage I took in more from the local live scene (by that I really am talking about a few blocks around where I lived) and let whatever was happening in the wider world o' roque. That said, I saw REM at Festival Hall and Sonic Youth at The Corner. Both bands had released major albums in the months before but I was already growing cold from them but the gigs were great.

It was a splendid time to go op shopping. My thang was '60s tuxedos with satin shawl collars and a satin stripe on the trousers. I'd wear that during the day. No ties but the shirt buttoned to the top. I plonked that look until I turned 30 and had to ditch almost everything I was and start a real career. That was later (and a good thing) but for then it was the veriest of verys. One of those would set you back about $20 but a jacket without trousers would be more like $10 or under. I had about five at any one time between 1987 and 1992 so they never went threadbare. That said, I don't have them now so out they went at some point. Anyway, music.

This was a time I returned to listening to a lot of classical music. I had brought tea chests full of vinyl records from Brisbane and a lot of them were music from before the twentieth century. When a friend returned my copy of Mozart's Requiem it was a hit with the entire house. What could the realm of rock  music provide to outdo any of that? Have a look.

Floating Into the Night - Julie Cruise

I remember getting ready to go out with at least one housemate and walking past the radio and having to stop because something strange yet familiar was coming out of the speakers. I stopped for a second. So did Steve and we exchanged a look. It was the ethereal song from Blue Velvet with the big string section and angel vocal. Really? Someone released that? I didn't even think of the Blue Velvet soundtrack because the next track was from the same album and was to be a part of the weird tv series about which at that time we only had rumours: Twin Peaks. Falling was a revelation, adding a great big girder of a baritone guitar. I was at peak Lynch, then, having been a fan from the first I'd seen (Elephant Man and then Eraserhead) and this music felt like one of his movies. The series lived up to the music (well, most of it). This meant more to me than any more conventional music release from that year.

The Burning World - Swans

Swans went from the tough but eerie Children of God to this strangely light outing. The mood was there in things like I Remember Who You Are and the mighty God Damn the Sun but it was swathed in strings and a half-arsed attempt at world music by Bill Laswell who was sledged for his efforts by the band themselves. Oddly, the easiest listening Swans record turned out to be the hardest one to put on. The separate single, a cover of Joy Division's Love Will Tear Us Apart was very pleasing and I still listen to it.







Lick - The Lemonheads

Heard it. Forgot it.














Disintegration - The Cure

Endless instrumental intros and songs that sounded like beefed up outtakes from 1981. I had given up on this band years before and was never able to reconnect.
















Doolittle - The Pixies

To me this sounded like '60s bubblegum grown up to older teen bubblegum. But in a good way. I was slowly beginning to accept that rock was stagnant and that only the quality of this or that reiteration of it would distinguish one act from another. The Pixies did have that Goldilocks blend, though, at least for this one album.












Technique - New Order

I dug New Order up to about True Faith in 1987. After that I lost contact with what they were doing and let the pass by. I've tried this one a few times but can't get into it.
















Bleach - Nirvana

I heard this after they were famous, much later. If I'd heard it at the time I would have passed.

















The Stone Roses

I went to a party that played the single from this, Fools Gold, on a loop for hours while everyone got into some spiked punch. Sounded and felt exactly the same as hearing it straight. Works for me.











Ok, so not a big year for albums from my perspective. How bout them ol' 45s?

Hits 'n' Memories!

Roxette in 1989 staring until everyone
forgets it's not 1981 anymore

Roxette had the look but I couldn't. The already featherlight Bangles sang a stadium ballad about an eternal flame and sounded like the blockbuster hits of a decade to come, prematurely ageing the young band. The Proclaimers yelled about going five hundred miles and then five hundred more, from one football hooligan party to the next. Fine Young Cannibals revealed themselves to be the MOR popsters they'd begun being but had belied with a good debut single. Simply Red hit with a plea about not knowing me by now but I sighed, knowing I never would. A Stepford Wives version of the Beach Boys sang about Kokomo and sounded like old men in Hawaiian shirts coming on to young women in sprayons, with big hair.  Jive Bunny again proved that the UK could still churn out novelty singles that embarrass anyone except lonely psychos who thought it was funny. Milli Vanilli were exposed as models miming to other people's voices. Why was that a scandal? Billy Joel claimed his generation was not the one that started the fire. (He went straight there!) Who said they were? Smelt and dealt, indeed. Madonna thought that someone or something was like a little prayer but I remained an unbeliever. Tone Loc rapped about the Wild Thing and then a glass of Funky Cold Medina. Cher wanted to turn back time (who didn't?) Phil Collins got up for Another Day in Paradise, all the wrong people listened and it was a hit. Transvision Vamp didn't care and nor did I. Roy Orbison at least sounded like himself and pleased with You Got It. Neneh Cherry sang about a Man Child and it was actually moving. And R-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-aaaaaaige! played on unto dawn with countless vows among its viewers to quit if the next song was bad. But all of the songs were bad and the sun rose upon the irascible timewaster like the light of violent redemption.

Come on, 1990s
Ok, it was really back to classical for me. Rock music felt less and less current. The emerging electronica held more promise but at the hoary old age o' 27 I felt it was for the "younger generation".  Then again, most of that stuff that I did hear was at clubs and parties. Rock's effective death meant I could resign from it and acknowledge what I liked rather than follow bands (until trip hop but that's later).

So the '80s were over. I went to a New Year's Eve wake which was fun until an old flame turned up and we went on an adventure which eventually led nowhere, as it had to. That's the thing, though, the turn of the decade felt so humdrum. There were things changing (pop music was getting electronic again but we'd soon see the return of the flannel and fuzz pedal soon enough and race back to the '60s again) but now, with me approaching thirty, I was slowly admitting that this was not my culture to determine anymore and I had to find a place within it or get out altogether. If all the kids were wearing flares and sniggering at my dyed hair I knew which way I'd step.

But other things were ending at different paces. The approach of thirty nagged me. I was on the dole but stringing the year through a series of casual jobs which started to feel like deckchair arrangment on the Titantic. I persisted with the novel I was writing but understood that at some point I might well have to admit it and leave it behind: I had all the time in the world for years and it still hadn't been properly started. This was still before the loosely bound gang that was mine started coupling up and moving into more affordable areas. Then again, I woke on Jan 1 1990 lusciously exhausted from what I took as a rekindled flame who lay next to me, I could still go to the Perseverance or the Rose and guarantee I'd know someone I'd want to see, I could still claim to be an aspiring great Australian novelist and I was even getting back into the idea of writing and playing music again. Sod it, I thought, roll on cruise control, I'm in. Fuck the future!

Me in 1989 trying to outstare everyone
who found out about me