BIG HITS (HIGH TIDE GREEN GRASS) THE ROLLING STONES @ 60

A great mess of growling guitars gets blasted by horns and the crazy wobbling disaster of Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing in the Shadow crashes to life. Buried vocals and frenetic pianos. Verses end in hazey harmonies. It's hard to know what's going on and things seem about to collapse at any second but it's just too much fun. Then you might be tempted by the middle eight to look at the words. A sudden calm, Jagger and acoustic guitar which intensifies as the band comes back in and the horn section rejoins:

Tell me a story about how you adore me. Live in the shadow. See through the shadow. Live through the shadow. Tear at the shadow. Hate in the shadow and love in your shadowy life.

Then it's back for another verse of cartoon madhouse before it finally collapses into more beautiful mess of electric guitar mire. Whatever this is about, it feels both mocking and dark. There is a video for this song made up of the band fleeing fans, getting noticed walking around the streets, and at their noted photoshot for the promo of this song in drag (supplemented by the same kind of images of them in their groovy normal gear lest anyone should get that wrong).

This song comes and goes in the Stones' catalogue. They got harder, more psychedelic, raunchier and darker but never before or since recklessly decedent. It could be the effects of a summer at the peaks of fame in Swinging London or the darker, more exhausting, trials of the road but what it does, pretty much for the first time is show a rock band glorying in the rock star lifestyle.

This opener is the first I'd heard of The Rolling Stones as a teenager beyond the hits and memories on the radio. My sister Anita bought this compilation for my birthday. She'd been there when I found the Yardbirds compilation the year before which put the hook in me about '60s music. When she saw me pick this she asked if I really wanted it. We were a Beatles household but something had happened one afternoon while napping to the radio after school. More on that later. But I had a yen for The Stones and it had to be satisfied. I insisted, put the record on and here it was, this giant schmozzle. At first, I took the brass as indicating the mooted Beatles ripoff strategy but this wasn't like anything the Fabs had done. It teetered and clanged and caterwauled. It's mess was its message.

Back in 1966, that was the point of front loading this best-of. Instead of a staid timeline approach, someone, probably manager Oldham, put the big, bad new ones on first. You could wait for the oldies at the end of the sides. Oldies, here, meant songs from the previous two years. Also, when The Beatles put out compilations at this time, they always started with Love Me Do. This one slaps the fan around a little, yelling, "hey, snap out of it, it's today!"

After this is Paint it Black (sorry, not putting the comma in) which blew my little mind apart with his Eastern Europe rhythm and further Eastern sitar. The song is about a profound grief that drags the narrator into a monochrome cosmos. The racing heartbeat of the bass and percussion, the traded licks of guitar and sitar with Jagger's alternating croon and scream force anyone who hears it to look into its heart and join the mourning. Proto Goth? Why not? It's all there: death, misery and despair. By the time the outro pits a hummed verse melody with Jagger's anguished cires for everything to be blackened, including the sun, there is nothing but darkness. I made cassettes of this record for a few school friends and they were all a little freaked by it. The song is still one from the band's catalogue that I will find and play for its own sake. 

Thunder! Twin guitars playing big chord riffs in unison, going through the same amp with a ton of reverb. As someone who's worked with limited tape space I know that the intro to It's All Over Now was done separately before the song began. there's some limited percusion and a lot of bass supporting the big rumbling guitars but it was done, like the intro to Shadows, to get your attention. After two run throughs we're neatly in the land of a Stones track in country mode with pecking rhythms and clucking solo and a mean voiced Jagger at the centre. Everything lifts for the hamonies of the chorus and it's bright as sunshine before falling back down. There's no more room for the intro guitars but there's an echo of them towards the last choruses when a big dark chord sounds at the start of each line and resolves into the chicken pickin' rhythm. A great recording of a sleek and cheeky song. The Stones' first UK number one.

The Last Time was the first time the band released a single with an iconic riff. Played high on the board, this nagging figure stands its ground until the chorus and then can't wait to get started just before that's over, crawling back in under the rug. Any guitarist who hears this for the first time can't wait unti it's finished to work it out. It's a lot less obvious that it appears. For good measure, Keith Richards' solo uses it as a starting point and provides his own responses. Jagger's vocal is on the bassier side which fits with the emotional gravity of the lyric (grave for the age group he and the fans were part of) about a doomed relationship. The chorus backing spares down for the crucial lines in the chorus when the words, "maybe the last time I don't know" have a moment before the riff twangs back and the band bash into life again. The outro is Jagger screaming what he's already said in frustration as the backing vocals almost mock his hesitation by repeating, "maybe the last time." This was the Stone's first originally written single, a number one hit. There is a similarity to note between the chorus and that of The Staple Singers' This May Be the Last Time but, really, it's only very superficially similar. Neither song detracts from the other.

Heart of Stone, another original, wasn't a single in the UK but could easily have been. It's a torchy blues rock ballad with lots of seventh chords falling on the dominant below that way fourths do in hymns. The progression and structure spice it up with some extended minor key passages, falsetto backings and a tidal chorus. A guitar figure below the swell, uses a wobbly amp tremolo to great effect which serves as a kind of truthtelling undercurrent to Jagger's swaggering claims of living like a lothario before the chorus has him protesting far too much before hanging himself on the title phrase in his baritone range before the next verse. Keith's fiery solo does the rest, a twanging blast to highlight the self admonition of the lyric.

Buddy Holly's Not Fade Away takes us further back in time to the early attempts at hitmaking. The Stones tear through it, pushing all the force out of their dual acoustic guitar attack, Jagger's screaming vocal and blues harp over a restless swell of percussion hammering the Bo Diddley pattern. When the electric guitar comes in for the solo it models itself on Hollys own chord crunching but at the punkier speedy pace of the version, like an amphetamined heart beat breaking the china. This is how you do a cover.

The time machine races all the way back two years for the first attempt at a single with Come On. See also Not Fade Away in that this is a gutiar forward speed up of the original. Chuck Berry's track is a mid paced rocker played and sung with a knowing smirk of a guy having a bad day ever since he broke up with his girl. The Stones put another chordy riff front and centre with hot clean guitars in unision and a big harmonica for accents. Jagger's vocal is a kind of lift from Berry's but like the rest of the souping up it's a young man's impatient response. There's a key change for the last verse which features a kind o fanfare from the harp that signs its death warrant as being anything but conventional showbiz (along with the key change itself). This reminds me of those very early publicity photos from the time manager Andrew Loog Oldham tried to get them decked out Beatle-style in matching suits. That lasted. This was probably added here at the end of side one where anyone listening might have found it a charming folly, but I also think their first number one was omitted so its Lennon MacCartney byline and royalties wouldn't be a problem. Then, when the contemporary listener got up and turned the side over, the advancement of a single year would become a giant thing.

Da Daa Da Da Daaaaaa. The fuzztone climb from a B on the A string to the D will live for evermore. Keith dreamed it and imagined a horn section playing it. Oldham claims to have suggested he try his new fuzz box but that sounds like a scene from a biopic. However it happened, after several uninspired takes the one with the fuzz box worked. And it sold all the fuzz boxes that Gibson had on sale and had bedroom guitarists overdriving their amps to get there, too. After this, the opening plea sings the title: "I can't get no satisfaction." Underneath that is a strong bassy dual guitar attack on a bedrock bass and a restless drum kit. Then the verses. Jagger is hitting out at everything, commercialism, useless information from the radio, contracts and showbiz ... biz, and even the good things like the fame and all the sex get tarnished by money and bad timing and he just can't get satisfied as the riff insists that all of this will just keep going on and on. The middle eight is big, heralded by a change in the drums and features a stadium sized chant, "Hey hey hey, that's what I say!" as that riff rolls on. And Jagger sounds like he's powerful enough to snap his fingers to stop it but it just is not going to happen. It's less about him than the fans, though, whose satisfaction in a briefly rising affluence clued them into wanting satisfaction in the first place, instead of accepting the kitchen sink lot of the generation gone. This is an anthem to the youth he was and sang to. Like The Who's My Generation, it never gets old.

Get Off Of My Cloud begins with a drum hook that keeps to a two barr pattern with the semiquaver ratatat at the end. When the guitars come in, playing big accents with the snare and then the same ratatat at the finish. The bass keeps a stubborn I IV V pattern and, if you listen, Brian Jones plays a connecting figure on an electric twelve string. Jagger's vocal is an extension of the call in Satisfaction, this time, telling the suited and uniformed world to keep out. While he didn't live on the ninety-ninth floor of a housing estate tower as he says, he could guess at the stress. Everyone's barging in complaining about the noise, offering a five pound prize for having the right detergent, and even when he goes for a drive and pulls over for a sleep, he gets so many parking tickets on his windscreen that they look like a flag. The vocal standard is lifted into the melody that Satisfaction dispensed with in favour of a rallying shout and is the better for it. When the call and response chorus that tells everyone else in the world to get lost, the monotone shout comes back and sounds right. This is how you follow up with something same but different.

Then we dip right down into introspection and acoustic and strings ballad territory. As Tears Go By was the first Jagger Richards song. It was never a UK single but was given to Marianne Faithful to take to the top of the charts swaddled in strings and Spector percussion. The Stones' own version has a gentle and lovely acoustic twelve string intro and backing before the strings enter to swallow everything but the vocal. Jagger sings it straight with genuine emotion as his twenty year old narrator looks ruefully at ten year olds playing the way he used to do. It's not made of much but it works every time. The biopic scene plays Oldham as instigator, locking Jagger and Richards in the kitchen until they came out with a hit. The still signature R&B band didn't think much of it (three of them aren't on it) and thought that putting it out would be like copying The Beatles (whose Yesterday had only just appeared. 

Then there's 19th Nervous Breakdown. A big bright chord figure keeps plinking out until a rising octave bounce crawls under it soggy with tremolo and growls until the whle band come it with a rollicking account of a society deb, old and jaded before her time who doesn't respond to anything the narrator tries to help her with. It's one of many songs Jagger wrote about what he found in the upper echelons of Swinging London. These observations pepper the Aftermath and Between the Buttons albums but this one really gets it right first time. The unstoppable force of the verses and the Chuck Berry style descending vocal melody do plenty but then there's the stop start chorus: "You better stop! ... Look around" (huge distorted guitar bend) and the rising Eastern floavoured chant of "Here it comes, here it comes here it comes. Here comes your nineteenth nervous breakdown." The middle eight interrupts the song but gains the ground back instantly with the harmonies and chugging guitars. On to the fade with Bill Wyman's dive bombing stutter on the bass. 

I woke from an afterschool nap one day to hear this plaiyng from halfway through on the radio. I didn't know it nor guessed at who it was. All the time, the messy perfection of it was sculpting a resolve in my brain: if I ever form a rock band they will sound like this. It was back announced and I needed my own copy. As for the band that sounded like 19th Nervous Breakdown. Ah, you can't lose 'em all.

Lady Jane follows with more about Swinging London, this time set in a kind of Elizabethan mating game. Gentle guitars and a ringing dulcimer provide the time machine as Jagger bids farewell to a number of ladies, announcing he's decided on Lady Jane. The name refers to female genitalia in the "scandalous" novel Lady Chatterly's Lover which would serve a sense of irony, given the delicacy of the music. True or not, the song only develops out from its beginnings when an expansive harpsichord part beds the instrumental section. I like the dark and light of it, the high and low, even without the gorgeous music. After Breakdown, it's a gently numbing rest.

Time is on My Side is a lazy and taunting blues ballad that starts (if you have the right version) with a lovely wailing guitar played high and leading into the chorus. This deep cut from the second album is modelled on Irma Thomas' original (i.e. original with a full vocal) but set within the band's context. The organ keeps things smooth as Jagger effectively jibes at his departed love (even going into a petulant spoken word section) and assuring her that she'll just keep running back to him. I've never loved this one but it's effective. Caution, some compilations put a version on with a dirge-like organ intro that will have you putting the jug on and coming back.

If you do come back you'll get a perfectly chosen closer, Little Red Rooster. Willie Dixon's sly blues taken up by Howlin' Wolf is a slow burn and intense workout of nuance and raw indolence. No surprises that The Stones would adopt it. They pare back on Wolf's passion and tension for a much cooler walk through with Brian providing illustrations on his slide guitar. There is a quiet threat in Jagger's reading. He's not trying to scare you the way Wolf does, but if you listen carefully, you should be scared. It's a late night with intoxicants take and a great way to end side two.

So, why have I done all this writing on a compilation album? Aren't they oversupplied with comps? A new one seems to surface every other year with the same songs on it. Sure but this one really is different. First, this was the first time most of these tracks had appeared on LP. At a time when albums were only just coming into view as cohesive statements, this provided one from singles and first explorations. It came out mid-'60s, at the start of an electrifying career and showed what they could do with fame and access to wider culture and the possibilities of songcraft and the studio. The journey from blues standards to proto-psychedelia alone is pretty extraordinary.

It's a good answer to anyone determined to push the old fiction that the band only aped The Beatles by front loading each side with tracks that only they could have taken to such extents. You want sitar like in Norwegian Wood? How about putting one in a dirge of grief that ends in a humming chorus and cries of despair? You want horns like Got To Get You Into My Life? Try them in the weird ramshackle Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby? The Fabs did lots of playing around with guitar arrangements but never to the extent of the real orchestration between Richards and Jones in most of their songs at this time. This album is a training manual for that. Would The Beatles have ever done anything like Satisfaction, Cloud or Breakdown? With that ferocity? No, they didn't need to as they were a different outfit and did things their own way. All the players in that rich period of pop music knew each other, dropped in on each others' sessions and drank at the same wells. This is a potent early testimony to that.

Also, it got me thinking about how you put rock songs together. The guitar orchestrations I talked about above were the starting point. If you play guitar, this feature of the early Stones will strike you straight away. So many of the tastemakers laud the advent of Brian replacement Mick Taylor for his fluid melodymaking as a lead player and they're right, but for me, The Stones were at their most arresting when it all sounded like a big soup which every last shake of spice could be clearly tasted. I defy every dual guitar rock line up to do this as well as this band at this time.

This record came out after their first fully band-composed LP Aftermath. I first heard it about ten years later. I can still hear Nita trying to turn me off the purchase and I can still feel the joy of going against that. From that birthday until I started buying the reissued early releases, this collection was always near the front of the stack.

Listening notes: as I long ago gave my copy of this to a friend and later the CD, I compiled it from the HD version of The Rolling Stones Singles: The London Years. This is a superb compilation that simply puts the A and B sides of all the UK singles until the Sticky Fingers era. As a CD it's three discs of mostly mono mixes (as they would have been on 45 discs). I cheated once and took the non-organ-intro Time is on My Side from another compilation as the guitar intro was the one on this article's compilation. The audio quality of this set as a hi-res package is stellar to the extent that it can be. It faithfully replicates the original mono masters which means it didn't get beefed up for the kids o' today. I put the songs in the order that they appeared in on the 1966 LP. So, it's not a pure experience but my point was that the sequence added up to greatness at a time when I couldn't have cared less as to the quality of audio reproduction or the sample rates. It's just a great set of songs. 

REM's LIFES RICH PAGEANT @ 40

This is what happens when you lie down after work. You don't want to get up again but when you have to, you cut through the routine and find easier ways of doing things again. That includes a vow to never make the same mistake. Everything starts leaning towards formula but it works. It also means you dismiss all the tiny accidents that keep your life from being too predictable. When R.E.M. lay down after years of touring that had led them to the good but patchy Fables of the Reconstruction, they came back with this. Front loaded with the hardest rock they'd ever done and a wind down on the second side for a poignant acoustic moment before a big finish: The Formula.

After a sharp and twangy tango riff the band bashes into Begin the Begin with layered guitars, feedback, big gated drums and a huge bass clean enough to distinguish individual notes. Stipe at the centre sings right out front and in a perfectly cleared stereo pocket that you can hear every syllable. It's still word salad or deflected malaprops but it's right there in your ear. From here to the end of the decade, REM albums started with a barnstormer.

I'm not knocking the number. It's a big, rousing rock song that grinds and prods in all the right places. It's just set in an album side that does the same thing. Also, there's no more space. The difference between Radio Free Europe, Pilgrimage and Laughing on the debut Murmur is enough to feel like three different places described by the same band. Here, after the big push of the opener, we get what feels like the same song, even though the first is in a minor key and the second in a major. Play them on an acoustic and they're different. Hear them on the record and it's like getting crushed by a compactor.

Things change with Fall on Me. The opening guitar figure is gleaming and clean. The tune is very easy and it works a treat, a plea for environmental respect. The drums are huge and Stipe is right out the front delivering the syllables as though they've been cut by a Sheffield knife. It's beautiful but it's up to standard rather than standing out. 

Ok, enough of the whinge about mainstream slickness. I'm getting sick of it myself. One of the positive points about all this is that things like Stipe's environmentalism have been brought out more clearly with this more conventional approach. Fall on Me works a treat because of that. So, too, does the next track, Cuyahoga about a river that was so defiled by industrial contempt that the water itself caught fire. The band's take is a mix of former jangling glory and multi-layered guitars. Stipe is again front and centre with crisply defined vocals. His plaintive performance is strengthened through melancholy but there is another card up the sleeve. The verses are long enough for listeners to think that there won't be choruses but, after two of them the music mounts and releases into the river's name with the backing and lead vocals harmonising. It still sends shivers down my spine. 

In Hyena, a racing rock effort begun with the sounds of real hyenas, the chorus resurrects the band's patented coutrapuntal choruses in which the title is sung like a riff against backing vocals that carry more of the message. This feature, evident in the first independent single onwards, is R.E.M.'s foot-down insistence of the retention of something of what they were and were still good at.

The lowes-fi point of the record closes side one. Underneath the Bunker is a guitar tango with Stipe singing down the line on a hotel Bakelite phone. This just sounds like a goof off like the one on Reckoning when the band goes into a disco workout before Don't Go Back to Rockville. But then the Latin influence, title, and strangled vocal about sitting out disaster presage side two.

The Flowers of Guatemala is a beautiful showcase of a band who showed they could combine big with gentle in numbers like Camera and Perfect Circle. I played this once while getting through a wrenching hangover and it soothed to near banishment. The trippyness and mentions of colour and happiness suggest psychedelia but the lyric is worth pursuit. The flowers are covering bodies left on the street by US bullets and covered by local grief. Amanita, repeated in the words, is a deadly mushroom. This wouldn't be the last time the band turned its sight on US foreign aggression but it was the most poignantly presented one with music of glory that celebrated the fallen rather than the victors.

I believe starts with a burst of solo banjo before kicking into a full band performance. "When I was young and full of grace, I spirited a rattlesnake." Images of transition rush past as fast as information to the young. This is a song of discovery, of mistakes and triumphs, of all things worked out by trying and seeing. It's a joyous celebration of change which the exultant chorus reaches high to exclaim.

What if We Give it Away? is the closest thing to a song form the first two albums. A leisurely pace and space between the strings, drums and voice, like the skeleton of a machine. The lyric is a dialogue remembered by a single voice. Someone has lost the way they lived and people who wear designer labels like symbols of success are distant and triumphant. The chorus is the title. The song stops for it as it lifts then falls, the guitar riffing under the last syllable as the machine starts again. There is a real ache here. It's not the quiet grief of Camera, there's a whole landscape here, but more of a lament of a loss that happened without a fight. 

Just a touch might mean something but I've never found it. A punky guitar riff bends back on itself as Stipe yells and the band goes along. There's something like this on all the albums to this point and, depending on anything catchy I'll either live through them or skip them. This< i've since learned, is a very early song that someone at a practice resurrected and they used for filler. I'll still skip it.

In Swan Swan H a lvoley minor key 12 string acoustic plays along with a 6 string in the other channel which describes a strong countermelody. Stipe's vocal is grinding and frequently feels angry or frustrated. Images of the defeated South, slavery and the wasteland of longing for a past that never was or, if it had existed, was a far more morally arid and brutal place.

Superman is a cover version of a late '60s obscurity by The Clique. It's worth tracking down. The original is mostly acoustic but features a big group vocal which just spreads out in the chorus. R.E.M.'s version begins with a ring pull audio from a Godzilla toy and launches into a full electric arrangement that takes a lot of the charm from the original but brings it up for a larger venue airing. That said, it's a stunner, immediately catchy and joyful. And that said, the lyrics are as icky as John Lennon's for Run for Your Life or The Who's I Can See for Miles. All up, if you pretend it's in Latin, it's a corker of an album closer.

So, where does this leave us? A band that had hit the ceiling and driven itself into exhaustion, depression and frustration that the world didn't hear things its way, pulled itself out of that quicksand (lumpy with the remnants of other bands, most bands) and broke the ceiling. Or, did they get sick of everything and push to get into the bigger venues and on the syndicated radio stations and start letting their epistle to the Worldians ring out louder than the blander hitmakers? It's a mix as they never quite ditched the charm of their melodism and contrarian edge but, in diving into the unambiguous statement and the big, long show, they risked being dismissed as sellouts.

I saw them just after Green came out. It wasn't at The Corner, it was at Melbourne Festival Hall. After a breezy set by The Go-Betweens, R.E.M. came out blasting with Pop Song 89 and owned everyone in front of them. If Stipe had been notorious for anti-stardom ploys like turning his back on the crowd or saying nothing all that had gone. He communicated directly, comparing the effects of imperialism between the USA and Australia, joking about sub-atomic particles (after a show of hands, he laughed and said, "you're all liars"). Then, when the intimate number You Are The Everything came up he did turn around, facing the audience for the crucial final couplet. He knew the power of it and it worked. It was, in fact, a show, the type of which they had never deigned to perform only three years earlier. I left afterwards, making my way through the crowd with a numb smile on my face, and walked home the few kilometres it took.

A week later, I went to see Sonic Youth (who did play at the Corner) and slammed and swayed my way through a set that developed like a time lapse film, from creepy cinematics to deafening roars, the guitar textures alone would have impressed. The show was shorter and the venue tiny by comparison. There was no message more than the punk gigs I'd gone to in my teens. You like this? Go and do it yourself! I got out, sweaty and exhilarated. 

But I didn't think it was better. R.E.M. played a set that worked the world over and got to the furthest reaches of the stadium. Sonic Youth made you part of it. R.E.M. sold more, were sung along to while dishwashing and hoovering happened and everyone came to know the singer's name and his stance on anything he was asked about. He became Sting and Bono's rival on the world's stage and we understood every last word he said. That began here.

It began with Lifes Rich Pageant more than the three seminal indy albums before it because this felt like they had a plan. Part of that was sounding more radio friendly with singalong choruses and force. Do I miss the earlier records? I still have them and will easily put any of them on to hear. In the house I shared when this record was new, this was the first LP we all yelled along to, dancing in the living room and the hallway.

It was spring in Fitzroy, big, bright and warm. One day was a trip to the beach, another night was a gatecrashed party. After one of those, I was washing the dishes with flatmate Tracey and a song from this came on the radio, an album track.  I didn't have a copy at the time but mentioned that's who it sounded like. Trace asked how I was so sure. That, I said when the next verse started, the unmistakable voice of  Michael Stipe. She bought her own copy by the end of the week. I taped it.

I thought the big rocky sound was a sellout but I kept that to myself. I loved this album. As much as I'd enjoyed the obscure lyrics from the growling voice and the oddly sweet '60s guitar of earlier, I really did get hit by this. They would never be the "college band" again and I would miss that, but they would be big and shiny and happy, ridiculed by the cool but bought in millions of discs by new fans. Begin the begin. Well, they did warn us.

Listening notes: I put the recent hi-res remaster for this review. It's respectful and doesn't suffer from the brickwalling of the loudness wars. You can hear all of it online but I'd recommend you hunt down an early CD in an op shop. I think it would sound stronger that way.

STATION TO STATION @ 50

We open on a black and white movie. An old steam locomotive hisses thickly and rhythmically from one side of the field to the other. A distant wail of guitar feedback like an industrial era whistle. Piano notes plonk up and down and up and down like footsteps on a platform. The rest of the band join the progress, stopping to play a fancier figure before falling back into the grinding rhythm. Then a croon:

The return of the thin white duke, throwing darts in lovers' eyes.

You can see him, tall, gangling, in a Panama hat and cape, maybe a cigarette at the end of a long holder, in silhouette, walking dangerously toward you. Is he a vampire? A criminal mastermind? He breaks into song, a distant operatic caterwaul of travel and dark adventure, driving like a demon from station to station. Feels like Europe, mittel Europe, lightless nights, cocktails and betrayal. 

And then it launches into a big jaunty rock groove with a vocal that David Byrne would have replayed on a loop for whole afternoons. 

It's not the side effects of the cocaine. I'm thinking that it must be love.

And everything's too late. It's too late to be late again.

Bowie's strangest and most indefinable persona, the Thin White Duke, starts the only album he lived on with the biggest epic since Width of a Circle from his metal showcase The Man Who Sold the World. Is the Duke the same guy but older and more lethally experienced?

The European canon is here.

Maybe it is. This ain't Young Americans, this is regicide. The world conflicts of Aladdin Sane, the apocalypse of Ziggy. The post apocalyptic delirium of Diamond Dogs. And now this. 

The cover art is a still from his sci-fi film The Man Who Fell to Earth in which, impeccably cast as an alien, Bowie finally came through on the big screen like one of his stage identities. Pencil thin, his designer suits haning from his shoulders and his big fringed hair bright orange over his bloddlessly white face. Even the typesetting came into it. Red on white, sans serif font running together above the photo on the front and the same on the back with the strangely brief track listing. Six songs? Was he trying to outdo Led Zeppelin? The first track spills over the ten minute mark. Nothing's under four minutes, most are over five. This is not the guitar slinging of the Ziggy albums nor the big bright blue-eyed soul of the previous disc. It sounds like a band but the band is only allowed to play the songs, not drift into solos. More than Young Americans, this is a studio bound record.

Having put us through an itinerary of the dark and mystic underworld, Bowie then gives us a funk workout that is sharper than anything on his funk record. Golden Years starts with a delicious Strat riff that breaks into a dreamy dance track with big, modal, harmonised vocals chanting the title. It sounds like a ritual. The solo vocal comes in with a reassuring tone and follows the scansion of the bassline. He's talking to someone he calls (in falsetto) Angel. He offers her a bright life and his protection as they move from limousine to limousine and a cable of five star hotels. The cheerful handclapping disco is blended with the solemnity of the chorus chant which makes it sound like he means it. There's a video of Bowie miming this on Soul Train in late '75. He's a barely contained mess in the brief interview with he host who senses potential disaster and rushes the singer into the number. Once the groove comes up he's fine, though, mouthing every syllable and improv perfectly. One of the very few white artists to appear on the show, he towers on the riser above a crowd of happily grooving black audience and it feels both warm and alien. It would have been the weirdest sounding song they ever danced to. They seem happy about it.

Word on a Wing is the second epic of the album. Slow single notes on a piano. Someone's thinking about a melody. Slowly beneath it, a synthesised high string sound. The band comes in with a sweet sounding backing. Bowie's voice is confident to charming as he intones: "In this world of grand illusion you walked into my life out of my dreams." Like many of the other lines, this will be repeated to different effect throughout this intriguing song. It sounds increasingly like an earnest plea for meaning, connection and fulfilment. the chorus goes further by invoking a lord and the wish "my prayer flies like a word on a wing." Another thematic motif is the notion of a scheme of things. 

This is interesting. It's interesting as Bowie was an avowed atheist at this time, though he was dabbling in a host of mystical avenues. We might be getting presumptuous by thinking the lord he's addressing is the one of the Bible. Could be Nietzsche. Could be Crowley. Bowie was going through such a foggy lifestyle involving any number of self-medications like magical arcana and plain old drugs (he's already mentioned the cocaine). His appearance in the Soul Train video borders on alarming. He looks anorexic, not just thin and he's barely coherent during the hosts interview. He famously claimed that he couldn't remember writing and recording this album at all. Is Word on a Wing a real plea to a power, any power, to redeem him?

Or, and I'm not being flippant, is it just a creative exercise in imagining prayer, a character in desperation as his voice grows in intensity, circling back to the scheme of things, the age of grand illusion, settling on the cooing falsetto of the chorus? Then, when he is done, we return to the serenity of theopening moments, a high soprano voice descends but seems to transform into a synthesiser. It reminds me of a scene from Peter Carey's Bliss where a character facing execution is briefly elevated by the sight of a butterfly but then sees that it's just a lolly wrapper lifting and falling in the breeze.

The old side two opens with TVC15. A boogie piano plays a honky tonk figure as distant backing vocals lift the glottal stammer of The Yardbirds Good Morning Little Schoolgirl. The band and double tracked vocals come in with a story of a man whose girlfriend was devoured by a television. The story was Iggy Pop's from a night of tripping and Bowie took it more into the territory of David Cronenberg's Videodrome which was seven years from production. The verses are run on and ragged in scansion but have the meaty tone of a '70s band invoking a '50s band. A brief moment of order happens with Bowie crooning "transition, transmission," over stylised '50s palm muted guitar before the big chordy chant takes over: "Oh my TVC 15, oh oh, TVC 15. Repeat. Just a funny story or a tale of technological consumption? If nothing else, it's superior filler.

Stay is a hard funk workout with near metal guitar filling it out. The bass pushes past the guitars  and dances in the centre while the drums go on a gymnastic workout. Bowie's vocal sounds anxious as he tries to get her to stay the night. The melody is modal like Golden Years but its furrowed concern makes it constantly uneasy. This is like a Young Americans track that's woken after a nightmare. I finally got around to leaving this playing when listening to the whole album. It gives so little but insists so much. I used to skip it, even on the vinyl I knew it on, first. Bowie himself loved it or felt it needed resolution as he kept putting it into his sets into the following decade. The song ends on a lengthy solo that plays into the fade. Desperate but do I care?

Finally we come to the song that turned me on the record. Wild is the Wind is a cover of a song by Dimitry Tiomkin and Ned Washington and had become a standard by the likes of Johnny Mathis. A gentle sway of clean electric guitars and acoustics, drums, bass and piano. Bowie's vocal carries nothing but sincerity and his voices climbs all around its dolorous melody, melancholy but deeply romantic. It seems to curl out from the darkness of the night like a single plume of cigarette smoke that forms into a billowing cloud of silver cloud before it dissipates and fades. Utterly beautiful.

This was the first Bowie record I bought when it was new. The school cassette freemarket gave us all complete Bowie collections between tapes and vinyl and everyone had their favourites. I came to Station to Station almost by accident. I was studying for late high school exams, smoking too many cigarettes and needing something in the background that I wouldn't get distracted by and sing along to. This mostly neglected album suggested itself with its stark red song titles against the white of the sleeve. I put it on. The big gushing start of the title track took to the air and I was right, it would support not subvert my efforts at swatting. And I kept on turning to it, enjoying the sound of its brittle arrangements and big spooky vocals, sitting on the floor of my room with the lights out. It got to me as none of the others had. I don't mean I liked it better, it was more that I felt it got to me more directly. Like The Sex Pistols at the end of 1977, or This Year's Model in 1978, it was a record that knew me.

It is still an effortless listen. The arrangements all sound like they could be easily played live. The basic rock band of Ziggy to Diamond Dogs but with the particular sheen of Aladdin Sane, the shining piano and often beligerent guitars. It thankfully lacked the overproduction of Young Americans. Most of all it revisited the spooky Bowie of After All, Aladdin Sane title track, We Are the Dead, or The Bewley Brothers. That "I don't know what I was thinking but I had to follow it" sound. It does frequently freezes down to mechanicality, even the funk tracks and would lose a lot of Bowie fans going through the '70s albums. If you do step on to its platform, take a seat on the bench and wait. Here be treasures and they feel how you do.