THE BYRDS' TURN TURN TURN @ 60

If you tell someone that a band made the same album a few times in a row you will risk turning them off before you get any further. Well, I'll risk it this way: The Byrds made the same album five times, they just it better each time. While sounding unmistakably like themselves, especially when trying to sound like others, the songcraft and musicianship were constantly enriched. They are one of the signatures of '60s rock to the extent that the insertion of anything from their first five albums into a movie soundtrack will do more for the setting than millions of dollars worth of art direction. They were also one of those bands that only seemed to be on compilation albums for a long stretch. They seemed to have survived entirely on Dylan covers before fading into hits 'n' memories radio. That's what I thought until I heard this, their second, album.

To be a recording artist up to the early '60s meant you got art directed, hair and clothes, and told to sing this musical gimmick that some old man had written. When the nova event happened with The Beatles hitting the U.S. (i.e. the galactic) market, everyone wanted their music made by the people who wrote it. Add the instant cool of a young Bob Dylan and you could throw out all that lovey dove malarky and get some real statements out in the open. That's all fine if you were Dylan or The Beatles but most aspiring chart toppers weren't. 

This meant that those charts were stuffed with cover versions. Even the Fabs put covers on  their first albums to fill them out. So, when young folkie session man Jim McGuinn and friends went and saw A Hard Day's Night, everything fell into place. Some of that art direction and rock instrumentation later and his band made of friends and people who looked good in a bouffant started churning out the kind of cover versions that no one else was doing. Dylan's Mr Tambourine Man went from his quietly stabbing acoustic number to The Byrds' glorious cathedral of chime and choir. In 1965 that was like doing a metal take on Elliot Smith now. Like seeing any trope's origins, it seemed cliched until you knew.

So when the band went front and centre with their take on Pete Seeger's setting of lines from Ecclesiastes it mattered. I welcome you to YouTube versions by Pete Seeger and Judy Collins where you'll hear beautiful and elegant renditions of this perfectly constructed song. When you then hear the first track on this album with its impossibly thick and clean electric 12 string fanfare and solemn but shining vocal harmonies you will know the transportation of it. This is not a crass rock 'n' roll joke on the oldies, it's a strident celebration in a rock setting. Turn Turn Turn opens the window with a deal more force than anything on their impressive first LP through both the band's pluck in trying it on and the sheer perfection they achieve. If Judy Collins' melting solo rendition sobered you up, this new take could be the mental metronome to Vietnam War protests. Along with moments like The Beatles doing Twist and Shout or The Stones' Little Red Rooster, The Byrds Turn Turn Turn improved on and consolidated what they'd proved was their eternal contribution from the previous outing. 

Two important techniques are at work, here.  The first is the upped ante of putting dual 12 string parts in the arrangement. If the instrument's qualities made a difference in the first album, two at once broadened and reinforced huge swell of it. During the solo where McGuinn is playing a rapid claw hammer arpeggio of the changes against the melody ringing out in front the music is elevating. The other is that they got better at their own harmony scheme. This is simpler than you'd think. Two vocalists sang in precise unision, taking the song's melody. David Crosby added a descant, often improvised which lent a kind of organ chord effect to the vocals. While this approach can stifle creativity on the fly by being too regular, here it sounds spontaneous and free. This is one of the great cover versions. A lot of people think it's an original from the confidence and execution. It almost is. 

After this a bright bluesy riff  propels the whole band into a brief open string drone before the vocals come in, urgent and cool. It Won't Be Wrong is a throwback to early McGuinn songwriting but it fits in this treatment that establishes the uniformity of the music overall as busy, bright and, whether fast or slow, solid and centred. This one is all early Beatles with harmonies clearly schooled in the John low and Paul high approach. The return to the base key after choruses and bridge is a precursor of the same technique they'd use later in Eight Miles High, a gripping establishment of mode.

Set You Free This Time surprises with its mature sounding vocal and country inflections. It's one of the moments like Here Without You on the debut, that shows how confident a songwriter Gene Clark was. He takes the vocal, introducing a clearly distinct voice after the opening two choral performances. It's a more grown up look at a relationship song, as well, with the narrator recalling the early signs of trouble in the solo sections and the other's regret and pleas in the harmony second part of the verses which end with the title. The sense of heartbreak is palable and feels as strange in this album as the lead-heavy I Come and Stand at Every Door does in the following set.Because of that, I used to skip this one (as a teen listener) until experiences like it happened to me. Now, I find it beautifully sober.

Lay Down Your Weary Tune opens with the band in full voice and instrumentation for the large scaled chorus. This is broken by McGuinn's solo vocals for the verses. Like Mr Tambourine Man, the band is expanding a Dylan original to cinematic breadth with the unvarying melody pressing on like a march across an epic landscape. I will never tire of hearing this song.

And again a big sound is followed by an intimate one. He Was a Friend of Mine is led by McGuinn's acoustic arpeggios with the same clawhammer picking he used on the solo section of Turn Turn Turn. Like the title track, this is an adaptation of an existing tune, a folk song in mourning for a fallen comrade. McGuinn overlayed the sentiment with a statement of grief after the Kennedy Assassination. The shiummering harmonies' solemnity are timeless.

Side two begins with The World Turns All Around Her and it springs up with the trademark 12 string riff (the intro adds a little grinning swagger) and bright harmonies. It moves at a clip but the Clark original is about a boy pondering his mistakes in his broken relationship and pleas the new boyfriend be more devoted than he was. The middle eight which tells of his understanding of what he effectively threw away is a mster stroke of songwriting, allowing a pause and shift in feel and key before the final verse springs back into the compromised elation of the music. I will choose this as a single selection quite habitually.

Anyone who made anything of the shift to country rock years after this couldn't have heard this record with side one's country ballad and the hymn-like homily of Satisfied Mind. The solemn unision singing breaks out for the chorus when Crosby's descant soars high overhead. A joy.

If You're Gone is another Clark original and the lead is taken by him. The lyric is a series of propositions beginning with the word 'if". After a series of these conditional statements about the effect of the other he is singing to, the final two lines spook me out:  'If I love you I might never know your name. If you're gone then there is nothing that remains." Instrumentation is sparse but that is to aid the placing of the extraordinary backing vocals which are wordless hums forming organ-like chords. It's as strange as hearing a Yardbirds compilation album where Hang On Sloopy gives way to the Gregorian Still I'm Sad. It's quiet but heartfelt and unforgettable.

The second Dylan cover is The Times They are a Changin' and it gets the by now standard Burds treatment, making Dylan's voice in the darkness version danceable and radio friendly. McGuinn again lends his Dylan party impression to the solo lines before the other two vocalists chime in with harmonies. Not remarkable but not a skip either.

Wait and See is a McGuinn/Crosby collaboration and is superior filler with a lyric about seeing a hot girl. It's couched in brilliant harmonies and rich Rickebacker chimes and is over before it's begun.

So far, this sophomore effort comprises a consolidation of the great start of Mr Tambourine Man, expanding the band's musicianship (particularly the vocal arrangements) and songwriting powers in a carefully helmed quality management by the producer Terry Melcher. This sounds even more like the product of a tightly co-ordinated band that sound distinctive and pleasurable whether expressing sadness or sprightly energy. Then theres the last track.

Ending the last album with a kind of tongue in cheek version of a wartime oldie verged on embarrassing but was saved by an earnest approach that made it work. They try to do that again with Oh Susannah. The Stephen Foster classic from the previous century was known to anyone who'd had to sing it in music class in the American education system. It was a pretty good fit for the band that was clearly happy to embrace genuine folk tunes and filter them through harmony-laden rock. So, why oh why did they decide to do this one as a joke? We get the whole verse and chorus melody played out on the 12 string with cute little tinkles and bumps from Mike Clarke on the drums and then gthe band comes in for a romping vocal version. Repeat twice, including the excruciating 12 string melody. It's the sound of a band at rehearsal thinking they're being funny by doing an inappropriate version of an oldie or a softy (like a black metal cover of a Carpenters song). This kind of shit is only ever funny at the time and should never be recorded and heard again. If We'll Meet Again worked despite the humour and kept short of cringe, Oh Susannah on Turn Turn Turn bolts right into the centre of a grimacing faux pas. It means that the celebrations end with the plastered uncle who thinks his strangled rendition of My Way is a scream while the catering staff quietly clean up the tables with their eyes lowered.

The refreshed CD release of this from the mid-'90s features a number of extra tracks, including a decent cover of It's All Over Now, Baby Blue and a banging original The Day Walk (Never Before), both of which would closed the record in strength. Even the unfinished instrumental Stranger in a Strange Land would have done that. But no, this self-concious joke that is longer than everything else on the album apart from the title track, destroys this otherwise strong offering's chances of being thought of as a perfect advance from the debut.

I first heard this album when I was fifteen. A school friend had it at home as part of his elder siblings' collection and he taped it for me. It played me through that middle year period very easily, the heights of its invention, ringing electric guitar (which I didn't know was a 12 string, and angelic voices merged perfectly with the chirps of the cicadas out in the yard under the sun. The Byrds were one of the select bands I pursued when the great reissue revival of the early '80s brought us rereleases of The Kinks, The Who, The Doors and so on on new vinyl so we didn't have to rely on finding good copies at op shops. The 1996 CD was pure pleasure (apart from that one dud) and I fell into the joys of the album all over again with stunning presence and detail. 

Turn Turn Turn was a band tightening up everything that had worked for them on their debut release and presenting the thing they didn't have for that, experience. The sound is decisive and the songs, old or new, are strong. They might have kept that up for the rest of the decade without adverse criticism. What would happen, though, was further exploration. Call it acid, if you like, but add a lesson-learning disastrous tour of the UK and the restlessness of any young group of artists who need to find new paths. Not everyone did that as fast as The Beatles but this transitional effort opened the door on to years' more progression done with style and, curiously enough, honour.

Listening notes: I chose the1996 rerelease for this blog as its clarity, depth and presence exceed the vinyl rerelease of the '80s which I also had. As far as I know, this is still available. Before I forget, I should mention that this will be my final Byrds anniversary article as I've already done the remaining titles to the end of the '60s by them, having started in 2016 with the one on Fifth Dimension.

THE KINK KONTROVERSY @ 60

Strutting guitar riff and lead interplay honk out a blues workout as Dave Davies takes the lead vocal on Milk Cow Blues. It's a version of a standard so removed of most the versions the band would have heard that it qualifies as a rewrite. It's more of a record starter than an outright song and it's there at the front telling everyone at the party that The Kinks have come to play.

Ring the Bells tugs everything down with its acoustic guitar and laid back Ray vocal. It's a quiet celebration of being in love. Ray makes it sound like he woke up at half past three in the morning to reassure himself. The melancholy audible through the sentiment and the arrangement has already appeared on other Kinks records and it's gleaming the surface here.

Gotta Get the First Plane Home introduces a kind of playing Dave Davies would keep using throughout the '60s. It's a clunking staccato, just below amp breakup and palm muted, every note knocks at the next one. It's so good he starts the next song the same way, using the same beginning note. The song is a routine, gettin' back to my baby lyric and fills the time. Same goes for the next one When I See that Girl of Mine except that lines after the initial couplet of the verses stray from the R&B formula into the kind of extension Ray Davies would keep using ("I don't care if it rains or shines") whereby the melodic material reaches out beyond expectations and delivers more tension for the upcoming chorus.

I Am Free is a 6/8 rock waltz of the kind that The Stones were already mastering. Even the guitar interplay is Stonesy with strumming here and biting stabs there. Dave takes another lead. It's pleasant enough and the change in time signature is welcome.

And then the album wakes up. Till the End of the Day blasts to life as a trio of full barre chords crashes down to the open E. "Baby, I feel good, from the moment I rise..." It's a kind of reworking of the early days' chord riffs with new DNA injected. Everything is bright and speedy. The rock band is surrounded by a swarm of extra percussion and it gallops with the energy of the best weekend. Of their surrounding singles and most of this album, this is the song that kids would be getting their threads right for parties, dates, clubs and the whole world of the hungry night. Solid walls of shining harmonies, guitar punches and the pure momentum keep this one hurtling right up to the final four chord crash at the end as the tension between major and minor resolves into a slowly oscillating minor chord. And then you want to hear it again.

Side two. The World Keeps Going Round kicks into life as a kind of Spector wall of sound number if it had been recorded in a garage. Big distorted piano, drums and bass. If there's an electric guitar in there, it's so closely mixed with the piano that it's indistinguishable. Ray comes in with balancing lines: "You worry 'bout the rain. The rain keeps falling just the same." Then the obligatory romance line about breakup before the title line in the chorus resets the knowable cosmos. And then you get this: "What's the use of worrying cause you'll die alone?" Pure Ray Davies bleakness in a song that lopes and crashes like a drunk getting in before dawn. It might sound like bus stop philosophy like "plenty of fish in the sea" but there's a frown to the chorus that prevents any platitudinal warmth from spoiling it. This is the Kinks of See My Friends, their single from the middle of the year, a constant memento mori among the colours of Carnaby Street.

I'm On an Island starts with a strident acoustic chord progression and Davies in as close to the strange calypso accent he would persist with fo rthe next two decades on assorted titles. He's on an island but can't escape. His girl left him and he has nowhere to run. He's the only one on the island. He wouldn't be anywhere else if only she was there with him. This island is much more like the one in John Donne's poem. The approach is comical but it's the same message as See My Friends: being alone and young and abandoned is bleak. There's a perfomative quirk that might have come from playing it live or even just in front of the mic when they recorded it. After the refrain which ends on a held high note he starts the next verse as though out of breath and it sounds like he has been repeating the phrase to himself and anyone who'd hear incessantly: "I'm - on - an - islan'." It's not the first joke song The Kinks did (and certainly wouldn't be the last) but it's the most neatly presented one. A few months afterwards we'd get Dedicated Follower of Fashion and a sub tradtition in the band would be forever with them.

Then you get the anthem so much on the other side of Till the End of the Day that it was its B-side. Where Have all the Good Times Gone? opens with a sledgehammer version of the same chord progression as Till. Instead of the amphetamine rush of that song it's a crashing comedown as Ray whines over a steady rock grind that things are on the downswing. As the song progresses, it's clear how clever this lyric is by unfurling the guilt the previous generation want the new one to feel for taking all their new toys for granted, the delicious freedoms of the night clubs and the culture they were making, and then giving it fifty lashes of sarcasm. The good times haven't gone anywhere, they're here, now and swinging like the rest of London. The pummelling rock of the song feels like a bummer but the clear message is about kicking the downs and jumping into it. It doesn't rush to life like Till the End of the Day but the chorus with its low whinge bvy Ray and high, exuberant descant by Dave let any who will get the joke.

And then you get three songs, just when you thought the record had made its last statement. It's Too Late cunningly mixes a rock progression on acoustic instead of electric with a country melody. Girl regrets her breakup but he's no longer in the mood. What's in store for me matches a stinging 2/4 beat with a boy girl romance plea from Dave. You Can't Win is Ray in snarling mode pretty much just restating the title in different ways.

I've lumped all those together because, as listenable as they are, they cannot match the power of Good Times with its giant scale and strange exubrance. That was the song that should have closed the album, making a perfect compliment to Till the End of the Day on side one. After the big final chord of Good Times it feels like waiting for the post credit sequence in a 2020s film that never comes.

The package was a good one, however. The cover art showed a white background with four unconventional band member shots tha gave way to a large picture of Dave Davies caught with motion blur banging out a power chord on his hollowbody Guild. While the album suffers from the sense of being recorded before its original songs were fully baked, the standouts form peaks and tell listeners of the time that there was more to come. 

Listening notes: I strolled around or sat and listened to this as a high resolution download I'd bought from an online shop. It's in mono, not compressed and all of the wincing Shel Talmy production decisions jab at the ear but it is the cleanest version of what appeared on vinyl at the time that you can get. 

GARY NUMAN'S TELEKON @ 45

Fluid synths issue a cry in the dark (twice to give it meaning). A jabbing bass ground stabs until a drum fill brings in the steam rolling main keyboard riff, a minor arpeggio descending over the full band's grunting rhythm. The voice comes in after four of them, dry, sharp, tired. "And what if God's dead? We must have done something wrong." That's when you notice that this song's arrangement sounds like it wants to be a strut but it's about a self image of disintegration, the parts that might rise and stride are hanging aloof in the dark. "This wreckage I call me," he continues, "would like to frame your voice". Nothing's coming together and when the big riff from the start comes back in, the voice raises in a chant of farewell. I thought it was, "I can't hear you" but the album's lyrics sheet puts some Japanese characters there. He's singing, "I'm leaving you." A few words requesting erasure and more choruses to a brief fade into the blackness between tracks and there it is: the machine is winding down.

This is the fourth album led by Gary Numan and the second to bear his name as artist. It's also the third to get him a number one. Between the last and this he had been touring, finding himself in the bizarre position (as all rapidly rising stars find) of needing to be a jukebox of songs he'd barely finished. After slogging in local bands and setting up recordings and pub scale gigs, he was famous and famous for his strange desaturated world building words and music that placed him somewhere between the weird downer moods of northerners like The Human League and Joy Division and the emerging New Romantics with their more cinematic poptronica.

Dark and broody bass line dressed in then fashionable a chorus effect doubles a synth in a creep around a chord progression. When the lighter synth riff appears we get percussion that sounds like it came from a Sounds Latin LP found in an op shop. There's a lot of that on this album. It's an oddity that might sound to modern listeners as though the great monarch of electronic misery scapes discovered the percussion buttons on a home organ. What it really is is a broadening of the sound pallet. By this record, anyone who wasn't into him dismissed Gary Numan as rewriting his first songs over and again and this is often based on the kind of synthesiser arrangements he had pioneered. If you do that for a few years and then pop in some shakers and claves for expansion, the attacks come from the other side and ridicule the progression. No wins.

Anyway, Aircrash Brueau features this fresh percussive stock along with a more aggressive introduction of rock guitars. The learning curve for the listener is a gentle one, here, as it is set into one of Numan's character narrated songs. The ghost of a military pilot killed on a mission who returns to save other pilots from crashing. The same kind of strangely perfect blend of viola and synth play a breakout section that soars like the safest flight you've ever been on. The song ends with the more brooding bass and electronics of the intro. 

Telekon is a mid paced synth and bass led arrangement. The fragmented lyrics are like a diary written under distress. Is he singing "you end in reel one" or "you and the real one" in the chorus? It's hard to tell. Either way, that and the repeated unfinished description, "you are -" leave an icy impression as the wailing keyboards wind around the utterance like bandages. Numan has described this period and these songs as being the product of a neurologically troubling time as he tried to place himself in the context of a fame he always found difficult.

 Remind Me to Smile starts like Heart of Glass but quickly dispells the impression with a dark rising figure on the keyboards. "Reconsider fame. I need new reasons. This is detention. It's not fun at all."  It ends on a call and response chant of  snippets from touring, playing being in the spotlight: "Crawl crawl in love. I dive so clean. Toys toys so far. Boys boys you are..."

Sleep by Windows puts the new clear bass with the warm synth phrases centre. He addresses his fans and not for the last time. They can confess all the like to him, bare their schoolkid horrors and share their dejection but he cannot love them and asks if they at least dream. There is a cry of anguish towards the end: "We are just sound. We are just noise. We are all here to lie. Do you dream?" No answer. It's back to normal.

The old side two opens with the the energetic and almost screamed I'm an Agent. The rock attack is frontal as the lines speed by in a call to send in a series of measures to help an unnamed crisis. The pounding spectacular track provides us with a bang after the darkness of the first side. As soon as we start paying attention to the lyric, things aren't necessarily rock normal as the individual lines read more like overheard commands and threats than a string of thoughts. It begins to feel like a memory of a sensual assault.

I Dream of Wires begins with a kind of abstract cut up of synth sounds that could be emulating an animal. A throbbing ground takes over with a sly keyboard riff hovering over it. Numan's weary voice enters with a chromatic melody telling us that he's the last one with the skills to control the automated hell that life has become. He dreams of wires because the user friendly oppression does its best to obscure the working, leaving the leisured zombies powerless. From the second verse on, he's an octave higher crying out against more of the man machine wailing around him. Toward the end a most unmechanical sound, whistling, takes up the riff as though in defiance. The track ends with an upward flourish on the lead synth.

I Remember I Was Vapour begins with an instantly pleasing interplay of all the new and typical elements playing together, synths, percussion, piano. "There's nothing here but us." "Remember, I ahve memories. Remember, I need to forget." Generous instrumental passages spread out and more expansive synth settings come out of the circuit boards in play.

Please Push No More. The title says all you need to know. A gentle piano figure is joined by Numan's more emotive and closest vocal yet. In a moment of relative clarity, he tells of images of intrusion, ridicule and demand and, finally, exhaustion. The chorus is the title and takes the melody of the opening piano figure, a plea. A fragile piano improvisation ends the track with electronic sounds that could be whale song. If it were not the product of an oppressed mind only thinking about serenity it would be the most beautiful thing Numan ever did, right down to the lingering last piano notes and sea creature croon at the end.

The Joy Circuit starts with bowed strings and synths. Acoustic drums, piano and bass guitar provide a thumping ground. After an assured first verse, the track collapses into rhythm free textures of strings and electronics. It starts again before collapsing again. You get the pattern. "Show me the new way. Love it, love it. It's so unusual but all I find is a reason to die. A reason to die." The energy strikes up again to the fade and even picks up tempo to the fade. Where will this lead?

Most immediately, it led to Numan touring the record and staging big concerts which he was considering to be his last, exposing him to the kind of pressure and public exposure he had so poignantly addressed in this record. That the cold and heavy mini epics of Are Friends Electric and Films that he was obliged to perform would have felt like relief when he needed to bare himself with this album's statements would have sealed the deal with a bow of irony for him.

For my part I remember lying in the back of a car as it sped toward the Gold Coast, looking up at the street lights as they sped past and the single I Die You Die came on the radio and someone in the front turned it up. The chugging electric guitar and screaming synths put a thrill and a chill in me all at once. I was young, ready and being delivered to the party of a girl at school whose land developer father was throwing for her eighteenth. I wasn't particularly into her but it was light years away from the sad and emotionally violent home life I had at the time (a sibling and his torn marriage) and that's where I needed to be. A new Gary Numan track that was both rocking and eerie was just the tonic.

That song was on the Australian release of the LP as the final track. It wasn't on the UK version, not that I knew. The purpose of this (and the omission of the other single We Are Glass and the bizarrely chosen On Broadway cover) seemed to suggest that the pop music direction of the single was not a fit for such a sombre album filled with farewells. You get all of that on later CD releases and official download versions but, like most extra tracks, these songs corrupt the statement of Telekon. They're all pretty good numbers but they don't have that ending on the fading of the Joy Circuit to get us thinking. 

Gary Numan closed the door for a spell as his record company put out live sets. He reemerged the following year with Dance and kept going. The initial fan base had, meanwhile, moved on to blitz and proto goth. He had a job ahead of him to rebuild his public but he never quite got to. Subsequent releases have been perfectly fine but nothing beyond Telekon matched the level of reception with the cry of restraint so perfectly or strangely. Apart from being a good listen and even better travel companion, Telekon is the kind of confession that feels like rthe conversation you have at a party with someone who becomes a lifelong acquaintance, neither close friend nor face in the crowd, just someone you were glad to have met and will always stop and talk to when you see them again.

TALKING HEADS' REMAIN IN LIGHT @ 45

I read in the late '70s Talking Heads described as a bubblegum Velvet Underground and still think that was only because a journalist saw their band photos. The band did three albums of guitar based pop with quirk and then they did this which changed their image from independent and odd to eerie, intense and unpredictable. There are other things contributing to that from the time but this LP changed the band as it entered global visibility. One side of intense emotionless funk followed by a continuous winding down until there was nothing left and the centre was missing. Taken as a whole, it felt like the band was burning white on re-entry and slowly parachuting to the end of the world. The cuteness, whatever there had been, was gone.

I'll touch only lightly on the history surrounding the record and musical direction as that is amply documented elsewhere and more deeply than I can do here. More, I want to provide a listening map for people like myself who mischaracterised it when new and never quite changed their impression. This, too, will be light; this is, after all just the next record that the band made, not a major manifesto.

That said, it was also a kind of therapy. The band was taking a break at the beginning of the year and the rhythm section (married couple Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz) were starting to feel like David Byrne's backing band. With the breezy new influences (see below) in the air, the band regrouped in Nassau and started from grooves rather than Byrne's lyrics. When they struck on something that worked, they learned it and played it to song lengths, preferring groove over traditional songwriting. Notable is the difference between this and jamming. The band was in effect sampling itself in this process. It is the sound of a group reinventing itself in repetition, bar by bar. This record saved the band from itself; not just a new direction, a cure.

Like any record by a working band this record had a precedent. The opening track on Fear of Music, it's immediate predecessor, is called I Zimbra and is a solid funk groove with African flavours and a strident chanting group vocal. The chanting is from a Dadaist text. It is the test flight for half of Remain in Light. This was Brian Eno's third outing as producer. He and David Byrne had collaborated on the strange industrial-Afrobeat record My Life in the Bush of Ghosts which also used the strident funk base, this time for a number of voice samples that took so long to clear that it was released after Remain in Light, though finished before. So, when Remain in Light appeared, heralded by the video for Once in a Lifetime from the weird end of the quirk spectrum, it would have felt like a perfected experiment. And it was, except that the sound and its unsettling effects followed the band into the next studio album and two live albums until they emerged with the quirky pop of Little Creatures and just kept getting smoother. But people still think of this album when they hear the band's name.

In an age of iconic record covers this sleeve was typical in its unsettling appearance. The front featured the heads of the band masked by a deliberately messy smearing of red. The band name in big white font on the top strip inverted the letters A. The title was the same on the bottom strip but smaller. This kind of taunting ugliness was typical of a time when independent artists were flouting the fame machine (regardless of how they were also chasing its goodies). The rear cover was of a flight of four world war two US military fighters above a mountain landscape, discoloured by polarisation (so the original blue was now red). It had a doomed feel, as though it were the planes of Flight 19 that vanished over the Bermuda Triangle. Neither side seemed to have a lot ot do with the music but their extension of it added the kind of grimy strangeness that made the perfect meaninglessness of recently deposed monarchs of record covers Hipgnosis look forever dated. This was also one of the first high profile computer-designed record covers.

I'm going to impose a scheme on this album. This is partly because the track sequencing itself suggests it but also the mid point, Once in a Lifetime, morphs from the sound of the first side into the more typical Talking Heads sound before grinding down to the unexpected finale. I also need to establish the base uniformity of the first side to avoid repeating myself in describing it. All three of the long tracks are built from a machine-perfect funk bed, feature David Byrne's atonal vocals in patterned statements, slow modal chants, and a mass of incidental noises, keyboard textures and some of guest guitarist Adrian Belew's most adventurous explorations.

Side one can immerse you or leave you feeling that every song sounds the same. I resist funk as a style of music. I am aware that it is dance music and its point is to provide a warm ground for that, but I dance like a drunkard and am left with music that I just want to push until it moves. That puts me among the second group. Until I lay back and let the thing work on me, all of side one sounded like a single track with two strange gaps. So, that's how I'm going to treat it here. 

Born Under Punches adds an insistent high pitched chromatic riff that might be processed guitar or someone punishing a set of steel drums. Among the clicking guitars and odd slap bass stabs. Byrne rants in a high nervous voice about his hands and being a government man, protesting a little too much. A gentle backing chant rises behind him about wanting to breathe and the heat going on. Crosseyed and Painless gives us a growling Byrne vocal about shape and shapelessness. He's panicking and doubting himself. The breezy chant behind him caution against the power of facts. The Great Curve gives us more uncertainty as teh world proves impossible to grasp as the figure of a dancer seems to both answer his queries and confound him more as the chant proves more complex and layered than anything else on the side. A squealing solo from Belew reminds us that we're at the end of the '70s and he did such a bang up job on Bowie's Lodger the year before. As the punching brass section comes in the chant returns to the notion of the dancer, the world moving on a woman's hips. The driving chant takes us to the end of the side and, if we've been listening as it's asked us, we feel as though we've lived through something important. Another monster Belew solo takes us into the fade. 

And it's odd that such a cold, impersonal take on what was traditionally a hot invitation to life has engaged us. This is not the funk of Fela Kuti or James Brown, nor was it the kind of academic reading you might expect of a gaggle of art school punks to produce. It had two effects: the realm of white music opened to the riches of the rhythms like never before, producing the likes of Heaven 17 and Josef K and: the realm of white music clutched at funk and made a gleaming junkyard of white T-shirt crap out of it for the next half decade. No one quite got it. The band kept at it in epic live shows with overpopulated stages, an intensified studio album and a movie for most of the ten years that followed. So, I guess it worked. 

Once in a Lifetime starts the flip with a bright and punchy backing that still bears the funk grooves of the first side but there's a real shift. The bass slams short staccato figures beneath the bubbling keyboard. For the first time on the album, the backing features a stucture of chord shifts and more of a verse chorus scheme .Byrne comes in with a series of propositions that he developed from hearing evangelical preachers. "And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack..." The chorus is similar to the earlier chanting except that it's a lot sunnier and easier to singalong to. The video, choreogrpahed by Toni Basil, is a standout of its time with a constant feed of video effects including Byrne in a suit against an infinite white background or mixed into an aquamarine liquid that could be through a microscope slide or the ocean. The version on the record is longer, featuring a manipulated middle section where Byrne is musing about the water in the sea. The sermon has gone from a question of where the parishoners' lives have taken them to something a lot trippier. But the reason this strange mini epic ruled its day's airwaves and still gets people on to the floors and yelling in their cars is that it's damnably catchy. After albums of mainstream denying shadow manufacture, Talking Heads had a hit on their hands. I still wonder what people who bought the album thinking it was a cute dancey ditty thought when they started at side one.

Nevertheless, the rest of the record plays like the old band upgraded. They can still cope with some funk but remember when they wrote rock songs. As stars of the post punk scene, they weren't about to turn prog. The call from Africa was too loud to try and sound like Miles Davis covering Shostakovich.

Houses in Motion is the closest thing to anything on side one. The funk starts up but it's a lot sparser and Byrne's vocal is world weary and a little paranoid. The choruses are more formal than before but don't feel as much like chanting. An Arabic break from Adrian Belew sounds so alien that it feels generated by electro mechanical sounds (but is his Roland guitar synth). 

Seen and Not Seen is less like funk than like a lot of the emerging British electronic acts like Cabaret Voltaire or the pre-Dare Human League. Byrne based the stilted vocal presentation on the testimony of John Dean at the Watergate hearings, someone being tightrope careful about the statements he made. A bright electronic descant, coupled with a Byrne backing mumbling melodically. The lyric about a man reimagining his face the way a character from Jorge Luis Borges or J.G. Ballard might, does not admit of a chorus and comes as goes like a floating idea that fades back into the dark of the vinyl.

Listening Wind is almost shocking in its departure from the scheme with percussion that could be either or both exotic and electronic. Belew's eerie guitar electronics howl around the bed track. Byrne's quiet vocal tells of a terrorist named Mohjik who assembles and delivers a bomb to an American settlement in the Middle East or North Africa. The tone of this neither condemns him nor condones the invaders but invests a heavy melancholy on the story. The pattern of the verses is an opening couplet describing Mohjik's actions, a triplet of lines about his thoughts which end abruptly before giving way to the mournful chorus about the wind in his heart and the dust in his head. The situation is grave and heart rending as we see he feels trapped by history.

The Overload takes things further down and might even be set after the war resulting from Listening Wind. A dark drone groans constantly as Belew provides the sound of helicopters growling around the soundstage. An organ beeps insistently. Howls and chirps sound out at the edges. I always see a wasted land turned into a desert by bombing. Byrne's vocal is either doubled or choursed, as close as he gets to a baritone range. The melody has a Gregorian feel to it, modal and moaning. A series of statements that don't always flow prevent the song from cohesion, suggesting that this is a world beyond it. A weak signal, a collapse, the removal of the insides and other troubling images alternate with possible reasons for the change like changes in weather or a condition of mercy before more declarations of massive scale damage: A gentle collapsing of every surface. We travel on the quiet road. The overload. The fade takes its time, numbing unchanging, a stasis before a final cataclysm that feels like it is only growing for every second it doesn't happen.

There is a story about this and it's the kind of story that should be true, regardless of its veracity. It goes like this: the band had read about Joy Division, the music described in journalism, but had never heard the music itself, so decided to write and record their guess at how it sounded. I find it hard to believe that A bunch of New Yorkers so deep in the scene would never have come across both of the band's albums. The song that The Overload most resembles is the last track on Unknown Pleasures, I Remember Nothing. It, too is a constant dark drone with a vocal that alternates between anger and a defeated moan. Sounds of shattering glass and other atmospherics that wander around the stereo image as well as stabs from a distorted bass fill the room with a revisit to an interpersonal atrocity, perhaps one that wore on without getting worse or better.

In The Overload the line about the missing centre reminds me of Yeats's poem The Second Coming: Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold". It gives the scene a dangerous fragility and the conversants knowing little more than that they continue to live, setting off along the road to wherever it takes. I first heard the entire album early the next year, at the on-campus digs of a Uni friend. We were all afternoon drunk and sedate in the Brisbane warmth when the funky record we were listening to started to slow down. I had assumed it was just us, the talk decelerating into fragments, the taste of beer or rum and the thick smell of marijuana smoke taking their measure. And then it ground to the droning stasis of The Overload and the mournful observation: The centre is missing. Mine host, still with enough energy for it, sprang up. He crossed the floor and lifted the needle. Stark silence. We were grateful. "That's enough of that." I think he might have put on The Clash or something and their pre-cringe stab at rap The Magnificent Seven. I don't know if my timing's right on that but whatever it was, it sounded busy and hip without getting all blitzy. Against every impulse I had, I wanted to hear The Overload again.

KINDA KINKS @ 60

The Kinks returned from a tour of Asia. Ray had new songs and the label needed more product. The band piled into the studio with Shel Talmy and slapped their second album down. It's an interesting platter with a sizeable gap between hastily conceived numbers, odd covers and a clear emerging voice.

The opening blast of Look for Me Baby and Got My Feet on the Ground do the work of beat bands at the time by keeping everyone dancing. The second has Dave Davies a car length out front with a high energy rasp as the band keeps time almost inaudibly below.

It's the third track that stands up and takes the spotlight. It's a heavily influenced folk number with a kind of Latin shuffle and complex acoustic guitar arpeggio figure. This is what Pentangle wanted to sound like at the other end of the decade. Ray Davies' vocal is a little more stretched than on the rock numbers. Nothing in the World Can Stop Me Worrying About that Girl. You can hear the cousinship of the R&B the band made their own in the clubs and parties of the newly swinging London but this has a melancholy cool that would be heard again on this album and to this day from Davies. Brother Dave provides a muscular electric reinforcement but it's Ray's quiet, exacting tone that rules here.

The first of two covers sees Dave's return to the mic. Nagging Woman is a rock version of Jimmy Anderson's menacing blues from the previous decade. Dave sounds a lot younger, whiter and petulant. Remember, covers weren't just filler to the British bands that put them on their early LPs, they were picked from the live sets and offered as cred. The problem was that any band with burgeoning writing talents was going to feel the squeeze of having their covers sound like local copies as the new blood rose. Wonder Where My Baby is Tonight is not quite that. It's a piano led 2/4 knees up with a jealousy theme. Perfectly amiable. But it's the side closer it where the show stops as everyone forgets to sip their drinks and has to listen.

Tired of Waiting For You is the kind of undeclared exotica that the band was pulling out of their hat that made them, however new to public attention, influencers of their world. A plinky arpeggio moves between two chords a tone apart. Dave's guitar emphasises the drone-like feel an octave lower with a hot clean growl. The bass and drums are sparse as Ray's voice takes the centre with a rising figure in the melody. The repetition in the lyrics and the melodic scheme show that a great rock song really doesn't need to be Shakespeare or Mozart to work. "So tired, tired of waiting, tired of waiting for you." His voice almost cracks every time he finishes that chorus, it's the only thing the narrator can think of. He recalls that he's lonely but his love, who's also aware of that, shows him the contempt that will keep the bond both durable and ill. And then Ray shows what he can do with a middle eight. The song falls into recess as he sings with a pained gentleness, "it's your life and you can do what you want. Do what you like but please don't keep me waiting." He's just telling her what she needs to do to keep him there. Repeat. The song ends on a clean finish: a fadeout might have hammered the point but it wasn't necessary. Ray Davies wasn't just showing his sensitive side, he was playing a role that left him vulnerable, a character in someone else's story. All that in two and a half minutes.

Side Two opens with the other cover. This is really not the joyous magnificence of Martha and the Vandellas' Dancing in the Street. Just as their early take on Long Tall Sally was only ever going to be overshadowed by The Beatles' explosive version, the band didn't have the sheer force to approach the big music of the better known take. If the backing had been used for a new original it would have been more impressive. 

The next song is almost that. Don't Ever Change begins with the same broad rhythm section and guitar power but takes it into something more like Merseybeat with Beatley melismas in the verses. But the choruses add a saddening touch and then we get another Ray middle eight which comes out of nowhere to drag real emotion out of the identikit pop filler. "Don't ever cha-ange," he sings in an aching descent. When he repeats the line it's from the shadows behind the sweetness of the verses. It's all teen stuff, asking her never to leave him but its a plea from the heart, from someone railing at the injustice of love and the cruelty of the bond. The thing is that, as ill fitting as it is against the boppy body of the thing, it fits, the reverse, tear stained side of it is there to hear. The next time this comes up it's resolved more conventionally, but we know what we've heard.

Come On Now is an energetic rocker with a solid riff from Dave and a shouting vocal with some party-like backing vocals from the band and Ray's wife Rasa. It's just under two minutes of swinging London joy.

So Long is where that kind of songwriting meets the folk of the previous side. A highly accomplished acoustic arpeggiated figure on an acoustic provides sturdy ground for Ray's arresting chorus and rise/fall verse melody. Wonder Where from side one was not a fluke. This band could fashion it and throw it at the wall with the best. They'd already shown how they could rock with the punishing early singles. Now, Ray was clearly showing skills beyond the shouty beat band image they were shaking from.

You Shouldn't Be Sad is another perky love rocker with a more Motown sophistication thrown in. 

Something Better Beginning begins with proof that you should never record guitar with too much amp reverb. Dave's figure might have been a fanfare like motif but has to be obscured until it's wrapped in tinfoil from a chocolate wrapper. The song has a Drifters lilt but the work given to a full vocal arrangement and, bad guitar tone aside, feels like a finished project rather than filler for the last track. The title and chorus phrase hints at the wit and economy to come. It sounds like a young man demanding the newly sparked good time turn into a happening thing but the logic of the chorus itself is more humble and vulnerable: "Is it the start of another heartbreaker or something better beginning."

So, success around the traps, in the charts, exotic tours had strengthened this band from a kind of one hit novelty to an act of clear promise. Davies has remarked on the record that it was the product of a lot of squabbling with Talmy insisting on a raw sound where Ray wanted to develop into new textures (clearly evident in the acoustic numbers but generally true of the songcraft, here). The singles from this time include Set Me Free and the eternal See My Friends as well as the razor satire Well Respected Man. 

This was the year that Rubber Soul turned bands long players into statements to hang on and that movement was already happening in the lower ranks. This is no Rubber Soul but the rapidly maturing voice of one of his lifetime's finest songsmiths is gaining impressive definition. The Kinks are one of those bands whose reissues came decades after their deletion, building a new and devoted fanbase. Mostly, you had to find a good singles compilation with one or two deeper cuts like Hermans Hermits or The Zombies. It took earnest effort on the part of fans of  the power of great rock music but it worked. The good thing is that we heard it all at once and the bad is that we heard the early efforts without the context of having waited for them to be released one by one. It means they can sound a little ragged. the cure for that is, as it ever shall be, listening.

THE WHO BY NUMBERS @ 50

1975 and The Who had had a year. They toured the massive Quadrophenia, appeared in and rearranged Tommy for the big screen (effectively rerecording a double album with guest vocalists), dealing with the likes of Oliver Reed and Ken Russell. When it was time to get a new album done the band was ready for a rest. Pete Townshend hit thirty and worried that he might be too old to play rock music, that the kind of things he was writing might not mean anything to the fan base whomever they might be then. It wasn't as though the band was flagging, having begun the decade with the classic album Who's Next and the epic rock opera Quadrophenia, both of which went down a storm live and sold in respectable numbers. Maybe they had said everything they could say. Maybe it was time to hang up the guitar and keep drinking. Moonie'd be into that. But they made the album, anyway, bugger the critics.

So, is this just the big stadium band by the numbers, a routine platter for the masses?

Side One.

Slip Kid

The album kicks off with an almost Latin drum pattern. Townshend counts to eight and his guitar enters in big growling form. Daltrey comes in with aggression intact. The strange lyric goes from a kind of boy soldier to a much older figure, still fighting. A middle section addresses an old man, telling him that his blackmail won't work. When I first heard this song I was thirteen. It was fresh on the radio and I was trying to work it out. Does it mean the guy is a soldier all his life? And what of the title and the chorus? Slip kid sounded like the kind of slur for non-Anglo Europeans that was spat around where I grew up but it could also easily be about paper slips, items of bureaucracy, things carried for validation and identity. The song has a powerful anger to its rock punch. Finally, the line "there's no easy way to be free" keeps sounding. It's a snarl about responsibility. That Daltrey tirade is followed by a conventional guitar solo. Pete could wheedly wheedle with the best of them but what follows that is the stuff I always found more impressive as he uses a volume pedal to release poignant, painful notes that sound like voices or bowed strings. It's a patch of open sores. A solid bass run brings us back down to the cure, punching rock music. Another verse repeats the points before a quiet chorus of, "no easy way to be free" as the track fades. So, great, we're only getting started and we're already confused. 

However Much I Booze

This song starts with the kind of perky acoustic strum that makes me want to throw the record across the room. When the band comes in it gets worse. Townshend is at the mic and it sounds like one of the big and bright ones from Who's Next. As the boppy arrangement progresses and Pete sounds increasingly chirpy we can't help but hear the desperation. He's describing what might just have passed for a loveable drunk persona, even to the point where his resignation, "there ain't no way out," even sounds cheeky. It isn't until the middle section where a welcome minor key progression supports a howling lament of self-reflection. This just ends with another statement of no way out and when the sprightly song rushes back in it finally sounds as it should, cloying, breathless, protesting too much but resigned. It's a song of surrender.

Squeezebox

There's a diamond in the middle of Baba O'Reilly where Townshend sings a vulnerable moment in his beautiful falsetto. It almost always brings me to tears. Here a similar moment of great poignancy is put into a leering schoolboy snigger. And all of that is set to whacky country swagger (there are even banjos plunking along). After the first two songs, this feels like a grasp at comic relief. It's genial enough but it's also wincingly smutty. This was a worldwide hit, so what the hell do I know? 

Dreaming from the Waist

Like something from Quadrophenia, this is an easy blend of smooth acoustic and Daltrey growl with harmonies of spun silk voices. The ageing rocker can't stop ogling and desiring, screaming in frustration when the sublime harmonies rise to the surface around him to remind him that he's dreaming. The twist is that his dream is for the day he can control himself. Everyone who turns thirty thinks they're over the hill; how must it be for rockstars who have intoxicated themselves with pills, booze and shagging for a decade. They were teenagers before any of that happened and now The Guardian is asking their opinions on welfare. The concern feels funny but it's from real anguish which makes the Pete Townshend of However Much I Booze the main character of this album. This is yet another of his arias. It's also another of his workouts as his fiddly lead really stands up and noodles all that horniness he's on about. Oddly enough, it's an exceptionally clean tone.

Imagine a Man

This ends the old side one. It's one of the three I remember from radio in 1975. Its shimmering beauty caught my tiny mind as I tried and failed to understand its lyric. Daltrey's voice flowed over the broadening music and the swelling harmonies; it could have been about fly fishing and I would have revered it. It is yet another reminder of age and mortality by a thirty year old who seems to feel about eighty. For Townshend's purposes, it feels like a step back for perspective after his confessions of lusts and vices: "Imagine a soul so old it is broken and you will know you invention is you and you will see the end." Musically it might have come from Tommy or Who's Next but it works perfectly here, solemn but uplifting. People forget how good the Who were with harmonies.

Side Two

Success Story

And now for the real comedy song. John Enwistle's Success Story bams into shape as a four on the floor rocker with a big frontal electric 12 string riff. Teen gets home from his job and sees a rock star on tv repenting and getting religion. He sees a gap in the market and forms a band which gets famous to the extent that he's slaving away on take two hundred and seventy six and remembers it used to be fun. He sees the pop star preacher on tv again who has now adjusted for the new religion which for our hero is the same kind of day job slog he left in the first place. It's funny and rocking with no apologies needed for either. As such if forms a kind of antidote to Townshend's ocean of ponderance. Entwistle takes a couple of shots at Townshend who did take up religion and was famous for smashing his guitars. Not all in good fun but that is Townshend slamming away on the 12 string as he used to in The Kids Are Alright.

They Are All in Love

Townshend wanders the streets and clubs, sees the glossy magazines and tries to place himself in a culture where once hoped to die rather than grow old. All of the young things, the consumers and lovers are behind a barrier impenetrable to the motives that made him famous. A mid tempo swing with piano and a melodic vocal from Daltrey who blows a raspberry instead of naming a fashion rag. The title is a chorus of painkilling harmonies but it's a sweetness that reminds him of his isolation.

Blue Red and Grey

A ukelele strikes up and Townshend keeps to a gentle voice, as though he's trying not to wake anyone, and tells us he's not like friends of his who chase the sun, retire at magic hour with cocktails or whatever else their lifestyles demand. The only demand he bows to is the meditative one of enjoying the entirety of his life as it passes, drags, snows, rains or thunders. It is one of the least cloying religious songs on record.

How Many Friends

A slow rock ballad finds our narrator in a bar getting praise from a much younger man whose motives are worrying him. Other scenarios force him to ask himself about his connection. He sees aching beauty on a cinema screen, remembers the value of handshakes and friendship. There's no answer to the question. The music is the kind of shiny declarative rock you could find in the musicals of the time, aria-like verses with rousing choruses. There's nothing essentially stagey about the piece in context but if you heard it outside of that you might ask if it was a number from A Chorus Line.

In a Hand or a Face

This begins with the sharp and brittle three chord riff played on a  12string electric clean but pushed to overdrive. Daltrey comes in with all his force, the band behind him in live power. It's a curtain closer and feels like it but it's also a strong reminder of the LP the band made ten years earlier with its slashing guitars, thunder drums, pummeling bass and central scream. This is at the other end of that tunnel. It bursts with clear sightedness and frustration. The chorus where the tight and insistent harmonies recall the impressive moments of I Can See For Miles (recall without duplicating, those are sublime) repeat: "I am going round and round." The song and the album end cleanly on one of the repetitions. "Is it weird that you hate a stranger? Can a detail correct your dismay?"

After starting their '70s in the stadium with the monumental Who's Next and outsizing that with Quadrophenia, this was a band that had made it over the bump stronger than when they approached it.

I didn't know any of that when I heard it on the radio. I taped Slip Kid and loved its growly rock. I'd disembarked from the ivory tower of the young classical bigot to embrace what rock could offer. I had turned thirteen, started high school and found that anyone else who might have attempted contrarianism on that basis concealed it. No girl alive would turn her eye to such a thing. So, I started watching Countdown and listening for AM radio. After finding a few fresh morsels among the dreck (and enjoying the supply from siblings' record collections) I felt my way to the dramatics of songs like these. They weren't about teen love but the lust of the burnout, it felt like great theatre and rocked like the clappers.

We had a sheet music booklet of hits from a few years before and one of the songs was the Overture to Tommy. I played the opening chords on the home piano and they sounded like Mendelsohn. The textures I heard in Slip Kid and Dreaming From the Waist and more tipped me into Townshend's approach to orchestration. I wasn't thinking in these terms but I was feeling it.

I think of my own panic at approaching thirty and smirk. This was the work of someone who was ready to give up. But it doesn't sound like it. Pete Townshend was not a burnout he just thought he was. The band behind him might not have been emotionally engaged for the recording process but they are in fine form. However much this might be the extended statement of a single mind and however richly his demos for the others got, when they had to, they fronted up and played for their lives. In the end I can say that I heard Quadrophenia much later and have never been able to engage deeply with it. But this one, this by the numbers throwaway made me wonder what kind of adult I would be. I know I can say that of old James Bond movies or Commando comics but this felt like a conversation with someone from the front line whose stories were laced with exaggeration but made of truth and is much more than I could say of Sherbert or Te Sweet (much as I thrilled to them). It made me feel grown up in the best way.

Rolling Stones No. 2 @ 60

"It is the summer of the night," begins producer and manager Andrew Loog Oldham's back cover spiel. It continues in the style of A Clockwork Orange, then a recent publication. Oldham is casting the band as the droogs and the rubbish-cluttered streets of London as the setting. Part of this originally included a passage about robbing and battering a blind man which was quickly edited and left that way until the flurry of '60s reissues in the '80s when it was restored. I had one of those, in mono, the David Bailey front cover brooding solemnly in a muted blue grey.

It is the kind of packaging that makes you wonder what people made of it when they first saw it and put the music on. Was it really this bunch of long haired thugs really the ones who began with the jaunty speeded up version of Solomon Burke's Everybody Needs Somebody to Love? Where Burke's original is groovy and smooth with audience sounds that morph into backing vocals, the Stones version perks it up to a strut as Jagger welcomes everyone to the show and the twin guitar assault of Richards and Jones bring a bounce and slash to the 2/4 beat. Like with the first album, the band pushes the cover version into how they did it live. Same song but the treatment is younger and brasher.

Down Home Girl mixes a chunky rhythm guitar with a warbling slide as Jagger adopts more of a swagger for this song with its muddling of sex and eating (she smells like turnip greens and her kisses taste of pork and beans). There is neither the brass of Alvin Robinson's original nor his big voiced delivery. Both come across as comedic and groovy.

You Can't Catch Me is delivered faithfully. The breathless story of getting a streamlined new car and tearing up the pike is one of Chuck Berry's most defiant statements of personal freedom. It's a different thing, though for a young black man to be happily and openly proud of his new car and for a group of post war Brits. There is an odd reversal to what the surface of this suggests, though. The U.K. was not a car culture at the time and any kind of car of a young 'un's own was a hell of a flex. By this stage, the band had crossed the U.S.A. on wheels and could add that to the mix. Oldham's production was always a blend of guesswork and input from the band but the decision to add a delay to Keith Richards' rhythm guitar was a zapper, it adds combustion to the rolling rattle and bass thump. Jones's soloing and licks add new material from the original, providing extra texture. It's a great effort.

Time is On My Side is moved significantly from the version that the band would have been thinking of. The first recording had a sung chorus but a trombone verse melody which The Rolling Stones would have quietly overlooked. Irma Thomas' big version is like a gospel number with glorious choral backing and a soaring lead voice. It's great but strange as the congregational sound doesn't suggest the lyric of an abandoned lover taunting his fleeing partner that they will just come running back. The Stones start with a moody organ and stinging lead guitar before the harmony chorus barges in. Jagger adds a plaintive vocal for the verses but it's rendered acidic by a dash of world wise observation. When the band comes back in for the, "you'll come running back" pre-chorus and the guitars are thundering below, it's the first moment of true magic from the band on the record as they lift a difficult cover to heights by pushing what they already were.

The first Jagger Richards number on the record is What a Shame. It mixes a slinky blues guitar figure and a shouted Jagger vocal. There's not a lot to it but it does sound like a band learning from the music they were covering and doing it for themselves. Brian Jones plays a thrilling if brief slide solo and Jagger presents a decent blues harp break. Grown Up Wrong does the same thing but adds a bluesy harmony to the chorus that would launch a thousand American garage bands.

Side two opens with a real oldie from the '40s but it's the Chuck Berry version that fired the Stones'. The lead guitar licks are lifted wholesale and Jagger's vocal is a honed version of Berry's. The pace is stepped up and the soloing guitar tone benefits from the early decade's overdrive but it's still a recognisable cover.

The Drifters' Under the Boardwalk is a bold choice given its vocal-heavy arrangement in the chorus. They keep to the original, adding the Spanish style licks on a 12 string acoustic and relatively exotic percussion. Jagger's vocal is smooth and creamy against the joyous take by Johnny Moore out front of the Drifters. But it's the execution of the chorus that steals it with a big booming group harmony that comes in like a storm cloud. It's close to the original but, again, the band is starting to sound much more like the one they would mature into. 

Muddy Waters' I Can't Be Satisfied is delivered with reverence with the slide licks of the original intact and the whole extended opening repeated. Jagger sings it almost as thought he's afraid of it, his voice sounds boyish against Waters' bellowing declaration. It's a perfectly pleasant version but if you hear the way it first sounded it doesn't quite survive the comparison.

Pain in My Heart sees the band fleeing from the notion of recreating Otis Redding's master yearn and providing their own retooling. Instead of the brass that serves as the foundation of Redding's take, a very cleverly inserted fuzz bass adds weight and size to the recording. Jagger doesn't go near Redding's but keeps to the aggression of his best tracks here, sad but not tortured. Oldham's worship of Phil Spector's massy sound gave him some ideas and they serve well to create a monstrous monolith on the way to the end of the record. 

Off the Hook is the last of the three originals and it's an amiable laddish strut with blues tinged rock guitars and a confident vocal by Jagger whose shouted lyrics are at a higher pitch than he'd revisit. It's fine, you wouldn't skip it. 

Then comes the blistering take on Suzie Q. Dale Hawkins original is no slouch at bluesy sleaze and he's held aloft by unaccredited co writer James Burton whose searing Telecaster riffs and licks dominate. The Stones don't go near emulating Burton, wisely keeping to be more themselves but the tune and tude were made for Jagger whose snarl and growl float on the raw guitar attack like a snake on river water. If they played that live like they do here, the night would turn to day from calls of encore. And that's the closer.

If the debut feels a little shy of the greatness that the band was emulating it feels confident here. The all important singles were telling the story as they do with all bands from this era. This album was sandwiched between two titanic originals after years of mostly covers. The Last Time has a snakey riff that every bedroom guitarist who hears it tries to work out (and most are wrong, it's played way up high on the middle strings). After the LP was the epochal (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction with an unkillable riff and defiant vocal that never gets old. The Stones would seldom not record covers but from the time of those two singles they never had to release any to chart. 

This means that the singles kicked their profile above the skyline while the next album was for the connoisseur with interpretations of R&B classics and a sprinkle of dwarfed originals. But, back here on album two, they were still happy to serve an apprenticeship, getting the energy of their live sets on record until come what may. They own Time is on my Side and Suzie Q the way their chart rivals The Beatles owned Twist and Shout and Long Tall Sally. That's getting somewhere. It would only take one more year for the albums to turn original and the singles to chart the unknown. The best sign off I can think of is to say that this band is still playing to crowds and dipping into these numbers out of love as much as nostalgia. This is how they sounded before the nostalgia.

THE WHO'S MY GENERATION @ 60

How this intro has never been used to introduce a bad guy in a movie, I'll never know. The big grumbling guitar chords descending, slow and aggressive. Pete Townshend is already playing them tremolo (rapid back and forth strumming but on whole chords cause this bad guy is not a mandolin) but he's going through the tremolo setting on his amp. It's hot clean, on the very edge of overdrive. And it's a twelve string. And this is not jingle jangle like the Byrds or the Beatles, it's something else. At the second iteration Roger Daltrey shouts, "OUT!" Pause.

"Out in the street!"

The whole band crashes in  with a doctored Bo Diddley beat and falsetto backing vocals as Daltrey growls to his woman. A brief talking blues moment is followed by Townshend flicking the pickup toggle switch to make his guitar stutter. then its back into the punchy groove. These lads have joined the party through the kitchen door and it's going off.

And that is pretty much the early Who. Except there's more.

Younger listeners might wonder at the presence of cover versions on the first outings of British Invasion outfits. There are reasons. First, these early platters were meant to represent the live band and no band ever began with a set list of originals. Second, covers were a way of identifying themselves to an audience who knew the numbers. Third, when you covered your heroes there was always the chance that you'd outdo them. Showbiz and hubris. On the latter, it was an act of defiance to follow their derivative opener with something by James Brown. Brown's original is one of his more subdued tracks. His vocal is mostly smooth and the track is piano led with shining backing vocals. The Who do all this but tighten the rhythm and thicken the texture with the same guitar attack as the first song. It's how we play it in Shepherds Bush, mate. It's the cheek of it that gets them through.

Then there's something that sounds like it crawled out of the drains. The Good's Gone begins with a jingling twelve string that starts a bright drone over the pulsing band. Daltrey comes in, mean as ever, complaining about the vaporising love in his relationships. He's joined by Townshend and John Entwistle on backing vocals. The track punches and drones for over four minutes (almost heretical even for an album track back then). Such an insistent return to the tonic note and a refusal to add too much as its long course plays out make it sound like psychedelia two years early. What Townshend is doing is trying to outdo Ray Davies whose powerful droning numbers like See My Friends and Tired of Waiting For You inspired any songwriter who heard them, leading to an heralded early eastern music influence into British rock. The harmonies repeating the title with their bright and smooth solemnity sound as much like a funeral dirge as a beat group love song. The Brits were changing rock music and it wasn't just The Beatles.

La-La-La Lies starts with a Motown rhythm on the piano, energetic tom toms from Keith Moon. Daltrey's vocal is almost sweet and the shoop shoop backing vocals could be from anywhere in the Vandellas' songbook. It's brief and enjoyable and feels like it's in there as a show of variety. Much too Much follows with a more natural British rock swagger with Daltrey recriminating from the shadows while the chorus turns the light on with Beach Boys choirs.

And then there's this. A pummelling assault of guitar and bass that are indistinguishable from each other and manic drumming. It's a song of pauses with instrumental responses. 

People try to put us d-down. (Talkin' bout my generation)

Just because we get around. (Talkin' bout my generation)

The things they do look awful c-c-cold. (Talkin' bout my generation)

I hope I die before I get old. (Talkin' bout my generation)

It's all out salvo across the divide without a wink of cuteness. Nothing on this side has approached the hard density of this number. All members are driving with the rising to the seventh of the refrain, the hard crunching stops, Daltrey's intentional stutter that evoked a Mod searing with speed and Entwistle's gymnastic bass breaks. The home stretch where the backing vocals and the lead blend off balance under Townshend's powerchords leads to a key change that feels breathless and violent. Daltrey is outright screaming as the band sing the refrain in rapid fire underneath. It comes to a searing final chord and a final repeat of the title, emerging from the dust of the rubble. It's too big for the fade that would have routinely finished similar tracks from the time. 

This song was a declaration of war that rang out well beyond the generation it claimed. It was 1977 before I heard it in full and it fitted perfectly in with the punk singles coming out of the U.K. at the time. Not a second of this song doesn't work. Even the stutter with its contested origins, sounds like someone too young and hyped to be polite blurting it all out because it has to come out. Like You Really Got Me, Satisfaction, The Beatles' version of Twist and Shout, this is song to play to anyone who doesn't understand what was so special about rock music.

If you heard this album on CD or an old C90 tape, the next song might have you puzzling as to why they followed one teen epic with another. The Kids Are Alright begins side two of the LP. Just as side one started with a Townshend signature guitar chord so does this except that it's very differently mooded. First, this is another twelve string rocker and the single guitar track dominates the same way that later Who songs would thunder with overdrive. This tone is clean and heavily compressed. It starts with a lone hard strum on an A sus4. This always struck me as a response to the brash bash at the start of A Hard Day's Night. That one would have bedroom guitarists puzzling for decades (it's an accumulation of all the band's instruments playing somethign different as well as a piano chord). That Townshend wanted to show he could do it, too, suits this song of sadness and anger perfectly.

After that chord the block harmonies come in acapella. "I don't mind" Daltrey takes over. As the band crashes through this constantly energetic rock song, his voice is as much a character performance as it is in My Generation. The two pair well as a kind of mini song cycle. But if My Generation was Clockwork Orange's Alex shouting at the world, this one is more like the original final chapter where the droogs are a few years older and mellowing out into normies. In The Kids it's the mod who needs to quit the scene. It's tough, though, he can't get married to his girl because they're both underage and her parents shut it down. The scene is getting samey and he wants to quit it for the rest of the world at least as far as he can go. Everything's old and sour now. The guys dance with his girl and he doesn't mind. It makes it easier, if anything, for him to quit and get out into the light.

The constant ringing guitar and stormy rhythm section provide a frenetic confusion for the situation. They sound like the best party band in history but the guy at the mic no longer feels it and hates that he has lost that. My favourite moment of this favourite of mine is the solo. After the third verse ends there's a kind of clearing of the floor. Townshend plays a single note. It feels small but solid. As a twelve string note it's doubled so it's shiny. This builds to a chord as the band swells around it, insisting until it's pumping, sharp and heavy. Then, a single big chord rings before a machine gun muted 16 round chord from the middle eight kicks everything back in and the final verse leads to a repeated harmony chorus with a slight variation in the higher register before ending with the opening sustain chord ringing below. If I have the time when I listen to this I always play the whole song again.

Please Please Please is another James Brown cover that does credible service to the original. It's a guitar led attack rather than the piano of Brown's version but it's performance, apart from Daltrey's impassioned screaming, is an impression rather than a conveyed message. It's Not True combines harmonies with a jaunty 2/4 beat and a strutting vocal from Daltrey. A series of increasingly absurdist lies that give it the sense of a first run of the far superior Substitute from the following year.

I'm a Man is a cover of Bo Diddley's assertive statement in talking blues which the Yardbirds had already fed amphetamines. The Who's version features the kind of dynamic arrangement  with piano breaks, some electronic growling on the guitar as well as the Townshend stutter. But it's a different thing when Bo declares his stance in the world of chicken fried steaks and the much younger Londoner at the mic here. Daltrey sounds like the youngest Athur Daley Spiv in history or one of those people who wake up one day speaking Medieval French. The pretty twenty-one year old mod with the voice of the flasher from under the bridge cannot work. It probably did work live but here it sounds weird.

A Legal Matter is Townshend's only lead vocal. It's a kind of retake of the Stones' The Last Time, with a touch more country twang. His narrator is restless in his marriage and had served his wife up a divorce. While the sense of joke is high here, it sounds out of place already in an album with My Generation and The Kids Are Alright. The mood wouldn't be revisited until John Enwistle was asked to write the song for the molesting Uncle Ernie in Tommy.

The Ox is a whole band jam based on a pedestrian blues riff. Moon stars as the octopus drummer who is still lofty on purple hearts. A young Nicky Hopkins is heard giving the studio piano a workout. Some nice noise making on the guitar and amp combination from Townshend but this is one that I'll leave on only if I don't bother to press stop. It fades after a while. End.

Shel Talmy's production is different here. The thin and scratchy sounds of the early Kinks records has gone and is replaced by a much fuller sound and attention to the details of the blend. Townshend's compositional guitar playing is always exactly where it should be, whether he's sneaking around with automotive coughs, rapid stutters or proto power chording. Entwistle's bass is never shy nor allowed to fall below the mix into a general boom. Moon's drums are clear to the extent of detail of each part of the kit (well, under those circumstances, you shouldn't expect to hear a lot of kick drum) and the vocals, if at too many times, pitchy, come in where they need to. So, who did the learning? The Kinks albums kept sounding thin and The Who just kept growing. Ok, so this was the only Talmy production but Townshend's influence beyond it becomes clear.

I still find those covers annoying because the originals aren't my kind of thing. But the best of this platter can make me crave repeat listening. The breadth of mood, from anger to humour, is impressive even in a scene where both qualities were abundant in postwar youth. The more I see these debuts in context of each other the richer I find the experience. If nothing else, this record served to slam the experience of a violent live sound into a vibrant and dynamic beast that could break its own bounds and keep running. The cover with its thick stencilled font in two colours features the band looking up from what might be the docks. None of them are smiling like The Beatles still did on their albums. Are they searching the sky or waiting for an answer to their challenge?

BOWIE'S YOUNG AMERICANS @ 50

The common wisdom about David Bowie's '70s career is that he chameleon-ed his way through a parade of characters with stunningly different personae. The truth is a little harder. It's more like phases. Early '70s was long hair and folk to metal to pop. Ziggy was glam played with razor blades and then, after reaching the end of what rock could give him, he left the funeral and took up soul. Kind of.

There's no persona attached to Young Americans. Even the visage, the spiky mullet of the Ziggy years has softened to a white '70s nightclub ghost. The eyebrows haven't grown back yet but give them time. What is different is that this album was the one that broke him in America. It and the lead single Fame made him mainstream radio fodder and assured his place permanently in the music firmament in pop music's biggest and most central market. That said, this is the one that nobody calls favourite, if they remember it's in the line up at all. So what's wrong?

First, it just doesn't sound like him. The title track kicks off with a tom tom flourish and a shambling groove with soprano sax garnishes. Bowie sounds like he's singing in a Donovan style tremolo but it might be delay. From the off he's telling us something crucial about the exercise: he's not trying to sound black. He loved soul from his mod days and planned a music genre forward album, not a passport to the Apollo. This means that, like his flirt with metal in Man Who Sold the World, Bowie made a Bowie album that absorbed influences to enhance his songwriting. Fine, but does it work?

Not always. But the kick off  Young Americans is an amiable shuffle through a series of scenes underneath the American Dream, stories of disappointment and struggle as the big women's chorus brightly chimes in with all night and alright and breezy supports of the line Young American. A light and cokey energy drives the track and it's almost over before you realise there hasn't been a note of guitar before you get a little on the home stretch. It almost needed the cover sticker, "contains no rock music".

Win is a kind of ballad with its floaty phased guitar, distant women backing vocals and bedroom vocal. The chorus flashes to life with wailing guitars and crashing cymbals. Underneath this is a lyric telling of a relationship based on power as much as love. When his almost whispered vocal ends the chorus with, "all you've got to do is win," it sounds equally that it is a condition for lifelong success and a more intimate interpersonal victory. It could easily be an expansion of the opening track.

If you hear Fascination and wonder at Bowie's sudden aptitude for funk, know that it is Luther Vandross's music that Bowie wrote words to (and credited Vandross properly). Treated bass and wah wah guitah start the groove before Bowie enters in falsetto until the chorus comes in with a call and response between him and the backing singers. It's a testament of lust examined as physical sensations adding up to the arresting state of the title. After two verses and choruses the song stretches out in a jam to the fade.

Right enters with a languid funk groove before a sax starts in with some tasteful ninth harmonies. After some taut vocals the interplay with the backing singers allows all the voices to form more of a texture than bearers of statements. Nevertheless, the repetition of never turning back and doing it the right way could be sexual or relevant to some of the substance abuse Bowie was going through at the time. But the groove is all with this one, despite the seriousness of the fragmented voices, and the groove rules us until the fade at the end of side one.

The most Bowie sounding of all the tracks, Somebody Up There Likes Me, might remind you of When You Rock and Roll With Me. A forward thrusting full band arrangement strides to the verses which seem to be about a public figure who might be a Kennedy or a Christ. Very rich backing vocals include blissful intervals and some perky falsetto oohs flown in from Sympathy for the Devil. Through all the joy of the music (which could easily be ironically so) there is a warning of the big pollie smile hiding rapacious corruption.

Across the Universe is the Beatle song covered with none of the panache that Bowie had applied (not always successfully) to the songs that inspired his youth on the Pin Ups album. This outing is a grimacing travesty. It sounds like Bowie came in one morning and was played this cover that he'd forgotten recording and he had a take recording it with as many vocal tricks as he could muster. No one has ever covered this song well. Bowie's attempt is not a rule breaker.

Can You Hear Me? Starts with the confident groove of a Son of a Preacher Man but cruises instead as a breezy love song. The brass and strings is the closest the album gets to the classic Philly soul sound he was trying for. The big brassy choruses and outro with its perfect vocal harmonies are a joy.

Fame is a collaboration with John Lennon and one of the few hard funk songs I actually like. Also, it got him on to Soul Train. Fame begins with a flourish of guitar textures like a billowing cloud before it ticks into a hard funk workout. Bowie's vocal is anguished and nervous. As he sings fame in a downward portamento, Lennon rasps it with an upward motion. The arrangement was concocted from several sources including a cover of Footstompin' that Carlos Alomar added to with the essential riff as well as the style rather than the substance of other music. James Brown later lifted this arrangement whole for his song Hot (there's a tribute!). This scarring song about dodgy management was Bowie's first American number one, an edgy funk workout produced after all the big singalong songs he'd already done. A chiming piano chord repeatedly reminds us of a constantly ringing phone. A middle eight with both Lennon and Bowie in full scream mode impresses and Bowie's old friend the varispeed comes in for a descent on the word fame form chipmunk high to baritone low. The thump and growl moves us into the fade. Game over.

After acquainting myself with it in the past few weeks for this blog more than I have ever listened to the whole album, I can say that I like it much more than I used to. The only skip track is the Beatles cover and the last song is one of Bowie's killers. Is it good? Is it bad? It's effective. Bowie extracted himself from the grammar and routine of rock music and lived up to a self-imposed challenge. What he gave up is songs that stadium crowds and shower balladeers could sing. There are catchy hooks throughout the two sides but nothing to jog the memory into putting this on for that special number. Fame is a go to but I defy any casual home singer to tackle Young Americans. 

That said, this record got him through. After it was over, the tour that it parasitised from Diamond Dogs was done and he had a couple of real American hits on his hands, this one was quietly allowed to rest in the shade of Dogs, before it, and the mighty Station to Station, that came after. There are funk workouts on the follow up (including the sublime Golden Years and the far less interesting Stay) but that was it for outright honking grooves. After that it was the Berlin albums to the end of the decade and then it was stadium pop Bowie. But, back o'er the years, in 1975, this was the latest (and who knows, last) album by the weirdo star man who really did fall to earth with such identifiably street level sounds. His look on the cover is like the pod people in Bodysnatchers stopped mid transition where the features are only just recognisable and give you the creeps to see. There are real concerns in these songs and some inventive music that used the flavours of untried traditions to forge something rich and strange. It's just such a pity it's so hard to remember.

THE BEATLES' HELP @ 60

Retrospection tells stories that were not known to the participants at the time. A backward look compels the stories, though. Until The Beatles reached the end of 1965 their albums were received with approval but the arrival of Rubber Soul put them at a level of importance among critics that has never been reversed. That lead up does tell a story though: two LPs of live sets cleansed in the studio with audible peaks in the originals, a fully original set to go with a movie that presents a new integrated sound, a mixed bag that industrial pressure had squeezed out and now this one, their fifth, that went with another movie. It looks like a staggered climb from influences to influence, from the tangible club band to stardom and here, now, in this one, a sustained push at the formulae to breaking point. 

It gives the first wave of records a sense of motivation. It's almost nonsense, though, made up by people like me. The band was building on the success it had established and through sheer application they responded to a continual positive feedback to sharpen their focus. The wonder of it is that it worked. Most bands were happy with the strike rate of something like Beatles for Sale, a handful of bangers and proven covers. There are covers on this one but by now they feel alien.

The originals stun. The title track kicks off with a shout, putting what might have been a middle eight as the introduction, an audible cry for help. The cry gets higher each time until it's pushed into falsetto. A deft, rapid arpeggio brings it down as the song moves forward with a confession in Lennon's tight rasp about being aggressively independent until he in confronted with his need for others. As with the opening, there is a call and response as he trades his strong lead with a gentler backing from George and Paul who anticipate his lines. The counterpoint of it, as though thoughts compelled the outward statements, works because of the texture of the voices as much as the weave of melodies. The chorus lifts to urgency as Harrison's low strings guitar figures step down between Lennon's vocal lines. A third verse strips the backing down to acoustic guitar and lead vocal, picked up halfway through by the rest of the band, leading to the final chorus and falsetto finish. Lennon later said that the song really was a confession of need. There is nothing fanciful about the claim. All of the track's musicality suggests it in under two and a half minutes.

Next up is Paul's The Night Before which begins with the first appearance of electric piano on a Beatles song. The chords rise until MacCartney's soaring vocal reaches to a note that glides down and blends with smooth harmonies in an infectious melodic figure. The middle eight is more of a shuffle but ends with a Paul flex as he screams the high end of, "it makes me wanna cryyyyyyyy". He plays the lead guitar in the break and at the end in this one (as well as two others) and it sounds like its doubled with either the electric piano or another guitar. This one is all flavour and scope. The second Anthology compilation of the '90s included an outtake from these sessions called That Means a Lot. Distinct from this melodically, it carried the larger production sound to Phil Spector density. It was given to PJ Proby who did it brilliantly but I wish it had made it on to side two of Help. Anyway...

Up third is You've Got to Hide Your Love Away and a vision of the future. Lennon sings a song of wounds. The first lines are gentle but for the next, the voice hardens until, after a folky descent, the chorus rises to a shout. Repeat and end with an unusual double flute playing of the verse melody. That acoustic sound, like whispering guitars, bugged me for years until I realised it was a combination of Harrison playing at standard pitch, Lennon playing a 12 string capo-ed, and, if you listen carefully, a ride cymbal played with almost imperceptible lightness. But the elephant here is Bob Dylan. Dylan had met and befriended The Beatles the year before and his growing influence on the entirety of western pop music extended into the Beatle citadel. The previous album's I'm a Loser was a great first take but this one uses influence more cannily, the way they'd gone to write an Everly Brothers song with Love Me Do and ended up sounding like themselves. I'm a Loser sounds like that but Hide Your Love sounds more like a hard absorption. It's going to be there until Donovan teaches them finger picking. There is an urban legend that this one is a veiled tribute to manager Brian Epstein's closeted gayness to which I say, "who knows?". The chorus could easily point to that but it could also be a hooded confession about straying from marital fidelity (hey, Norwegian Wood was just around the corner). It's pleasant to think it's a nod to Brian, I'll admit.

George Harrison had progressed from covers and Lennon and MacCartney numbers given to him to produce his own songs and they were gearing up. I Need You starts with a guitar figure made plaintive through a volume pedal. Against a country canter, George sings a confession of pain and vulnerability in the face of rejection. With the movement through the relative minor and showbiz changes, this one reaches back to an earlier Beatles aesthetic but it's never unwelcome in the sequence.

Another Girl finds Paul again trying for a Spectorish density with a busy blues shuffle and a message of young adulthood spite. But is it? He's saying his ex was fine but this new one is so much better. As this is delivered to a second person (the ex) it rings like a long groovy thumbed nose, not just flexing but cruel. The melody carries on from the more modal, non-diatonic style of The Night Before but sticks to its limits (very like Can't Buy Me Love) until the middle eight which broadens out and surprises with shifts between major and minor. Paul plays lead but it's mostly illformed and noodly. The production is big on reverb and bass boom. A bitchy but enjoyable number.

I used to dislike You're Going to Lose That Girl, mainly for what I took as a reliance on old '50s formulae. But the more I hear it, how deftly it moves between the warnings in the verse where Lennon shows how he can make a vowel sound percussive ("if you don't take her OUT tonight") in a harsh but solidly melodic tone and then singing the word lose in purest falsetto. This makes the transition to the middle eights creamy with a melismatic curl for the ages. The harmonies of the other two in call and response throughout with a complication in the bridge is bliss and the final collision of the falsetto and harmonies just makes you want to hear it again. Rubber Soul really is just down the road.

Ticket to Ride begins with a fanfare-like figure on George's 12 string before the drums roll in like a panzer division with the bass and rhythm guitar hitting the one and an anticipated three in the bar along with the kick drum. Lennon comes in solo for the first two lines before MacCartney brings the magic with a high chest voice descant. The middle eight adopts a shuffle beat which makes the giant twanging verse rhythm all the more lumbering when it returns. Paul plays lead again but with much more tasteful figures that serve the transition between parts. The song ends on a new vocal motif, "my baby don't care". This is the end of side one and all the new Beatle songs played in the movie which were shot like music videos and are probably the best way to watch the movie if seen as a string.

In the U.S. a flip of the LP led to a side of deft but unengaging out of context orchestrations of Beatle songs by George Martin. This was a step up from the American Hard Day's Night LP which featured the same kind of thing but played as session musicians as a fake beat band playing robotic instrumental covers.

The U.K. original album is a different beast, kicking off with Ringo's cover of the Buck Owens' Act Naturally. This fits with the movies and Ringo's self-effacing charm. George provides expert licks on the Gretsch and Paul adopts a Southern twang for his harmonies. If you know the original, this will sound like a pub cover played in lab conditions. Owens has a real nuance to his vocals that added a pathos to the lyric of a guy got lucky in his career but knows it's not because of talent. He also had the efforts of his lead guitarist, Telecaster maestro Don Rich who provided the note perfect harmonies which Paul is emulating. The deep twang solo is done twice here but only needs to happen once in the original so that its mock seriousness stands out and keeps the joke alive. It's a decent enough cover but, like many, if you know the swaggering and good natured original you'll miss so much of it, here.

It's Only Love is one of my favourite Lennon melodies and a song he regarded as an embarrassment. It's chromatic lilt and vocal tone shift for the chorus always win me over. It's a kind of companion to You've Got to Hide Your Love Away but there are reasons why that is on side one and this on side two. Vox amp tremolo is used to great effect on the electric figures and, as it's two electrics playing (one without tremolo) it sounds a little wobbly, like future chorus pedal. 

George's second song on the album is a cheerful country number that opens with some George Martin bar room piano. An electric piano forms what would have been an electric rhythm. The verses and harmonies have a distinctly folky feel. I can imagine The Seekers doing this one. The pair in the lyrics tease each other but always make up. That's about it. George's solo is all Chet Atkins and enters and exits in seconds as the summer holiday middle eight takes over and a verse and chorus take it to the end.

Tell Me What You See is a kind of Latin work out as far as The Beatles ever got. It's perky and sweet with MacCartney taking solo lines from the bright harmony verses. It's almost never mentioned on its own but its amiability and shift in the vocal texture make it a keeper for me. Another significant use of electric piano seal the deal.

I've Just Seen a Face is a perky acoustic folky gallop by Paul. Beginning with a dizzy rising guitar figure, Paul jumps right in with a quick vocal of love at first sight and a chorus that probably had open mic nights at folk clubs deafen with juggernaut whole crowd singalongs.

What might surprise anyone who comes across this album is that Yesterday is buried here on the second side. MacCartney is intensely proud of this song. He delights in relating how he dreamed the melody, scarcely believing he could have composed it. It was the first one of his notorious sale jobs from among his songs that the rest of the band suffered for. It is, apart from George Martin's string arrangement, just Paul on acoustic guitar and vocal. As a lyric it's all longing and regret, astutely describing the lost lover as believing in the past to a near religious extent. Musically, it is a very well turned melody with a pleading bridge and heartfelt vocal. The band did not want to push this gentle ballad and it ended here as the second last song. It went on to be one of the most covered songs in all history so, let 'em stew on that. I marvel that this perfectly modulated vocal was done on the same afternoon as the larynx-annihilating I'm Down.

Finally, like with Everybody's Trying to Be My Baby on the last LP, we end with a rock classic cover. Dizzy Miss Lizzy bangs and screams and wails its way to the end of the album. I suspect it's here as Lennon didn't have that extra song and wanted to follow Yesterday with something irreverent and gutter level. I have no supporting data for that, it's just a whimsical guess. I say it as I hate this song and wish it had been left off the record in favour of That Means a Lot. But that's just me.

Help feels like it's struggling to break free of the early career records with new instrumentation like electric piano, flutes and bowed strings as well as guitar and amp effects, and a musical expansion that allows country and folk in without irony. Paul particularly is gathering strength as a composer and has his eye on using production to add texture and character. George is showing real promise as singer and songwriter. And Ringo's drumming continues to delight with its nuance and subtlety.

For all that, though, remember those hindsight stories, it plays more as a closed chapter on the band that took it to Shea Stadium for the biggest concert in the constellation. If they'd stopped there this album would be as revered as Abbey Road is now. As it is, you have to move the heavy curtain of Rubber Soul aside to get a look at it, against encouragement. As an LP, still before the album format was the currency for rock artists, this one doesn't just have bangers but makes sense from track to track, weakening on the second side. A final bow to influences in the two covers and the stage is set for The Beatles as THE band. I wonder, if fans at the time hearing Rubber Soul winced a little at the insistent sophistication and just wanted the old pop band back.

Listening notes: I usually listen to this as a mono mix from the 2009 releases but this time added a playthrough of the 1965 stereo mix which does lift proceedings enough to prefer it. Unavailable nowehere on earth.