CHANGESONEBOWIE @ 50

It was the fastest way to get to hear the songs you had on tape from the great cassette swap of 1976 for real, on record. If you weren't alive then you don't know what that meant. You got used to the funnelled, mid-rangey sliver of the music and then, whe you dropped the needle on the shiny black expanse, eerything sounded real and got inside you. The whispered countdown on Space Oddity, the huge revving engines of Suffragette City, the glory of the Rebel Rebel riff all played as though they knew you, coming in and pushing past all the grey normality and making itself at home. This perfectly selected grab bag of singles and image (just having a copy made you feel urbane) gave you the same thrill of being out of time. Dumb as demolition and sharp as a stingray.

Space Oddity

The fade in is slow but intriguing. A soft acoustic guitar strum with atmospherics emerging from the silence like vibraphone, drums and guitar harmonics. It's like the murk of inner orbit. Also, I thought this when I first heard the song on proper LP vinyl instead of David H's tape of it. E minor swings to C major. They are both in each other's scale but seldom heard so close together. There is a sense of doom to it. Bowie plays the roles of Ground Control and Major Tom as Bowie's own whisper counts down to lift off. 

The big spooky drama of this song and its recording, especially in headphones, with its careful spatiality and muted colours really drew me in and, hearing it almost freshly in this way, I listened to it three times in a row. From Major Tom's harmonised statements, both jubilant and anxious to the futile one-way cry from ground control ("can you hear me mighty Tom?") brought home the desperate loneliness of space, better than the best sci-fi movie from the time. And there was something else.

That slow fade in had a purpose beyond the drama of the song. Those were the days when loud, honking DJs would talk over the intros to songs. It crammed the time in for as much advertising as they could manage and it discouraged home taping. I should have said it supposedly discouraged it but no kid who waited by the tape deck for their favourite song or a new one ever cared about it. Actually, it was almost a battle scar for the song as it existed on the cassette. In a way, it brought a star like Bowie closer to his fans. He knew what radio was like, too.

And there we had to leave him, in his tin can, drifting far into space as the electronics and ingeniously reassigned convetional instruments wove a mujsical tapestry of the huge expansive star field against which Major Tom was an invisible speck.

John I'm Only Dancing

I hated and hate this one. I hate it for its bait and switch, starting with the boogying acoustic guitar and then dribbling into an echoey mess before an ok chorus made me look over my shoulder in case anyone came in and witnessed me listening. I was fourteen and while I knew there was a kind of urbanity to claim by being supportive of the gay community it was still something that left me scared and baffled. And I was still fourteen. There is no amgibuity about this song's theme of a guy taunting his other with the protest that he's just dancing, not wooing. But the music doesn't cut it and it sounds like a cast off from Ziggy. Bowie liked it so much he reminagined it from scratch around the time of Young Americans as a cold funk number. Doesn't work that way, either.

Changes 

A friend at school wondered at the inclusion of this one, as did I. We both thought it was more recent. I was soon to discover it was part of Hunky Dory in which, when listened to, it sits very easily. It opens as a kind of cocktail jazz routine about youth both bored and running wild. The famous chorus with its shutter on the title word appears in muscial ambush and surprises with its brightness. Ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-changes (turn and face the strange). It is appropriately a pendulating position between a warning about the singer's coming influence and his own self-doubt. Bowie, persistently self-promoting (he really did try until it worked and it took years) and confident of his choices, had just come through a number of bold failures among the early hits. Man Who Sold the World is not represented on this compilation (and the covers album Pin Ups is similarly untapped) and its bleak borderline metal tracks might have caused upset (then, there is the inclusion of Only Dancing which wasn't an album track). Here, in this context as a kind of record of career steps, Changes makes great sense and on a side over served by guitar anthems, it's a refreshing inclusion with its subverted boogie piano figures and lazy sax smoke rings.

Ziggy Stardust

A year and a bit into bedroom guitar playing and I coudl work the riff out before I touched the instrument. It's a fanfare honed by the great Mick Ronson from chords to a progression of parts from stiff and crunchy to trilling to a loose swinging and then back again. Bowie comes in as though falling from a height with an extended, "oh yeah." It's the story of the rock star from the stars, the one who made it so big that the fans tore him to pieces. There are references to a few figures but the most recognisable is Hendrix who played it left hand with screwed up eyes and screwed down hairdo. A story of rock music made of some of the most arresting rock music.

Suffragette City

Then it's the sudden big engine rev of Suffragette City just like on the original album where the stresses and fun of touring, phone calls and groupies with a call and response verse before the big chorus blows everything out to panavision and races off. The sax-ish solo and then horn section are synthesised and the tone is of a quality that forbids fatigue during the endless A to G chord riffing wall that Mick Ronson builds. A big yelling anthem for the big shows.

Jean Genie

Aladdin Sane is soley represented by its side one closer, Jean Genie. Bowie and his band settle into a perfect '60s influenced R&B stomper, including blues harp licks and an unshakeable rhythm section. Bowie singpiels through verses about the title character. A rock and roll animal who moves through crowds high and low, forging his legend. The name is intentionally suggestive of tough guy poet Jean Genet but it's also based on Iggy Pop, who Bowie knew and supported through some abjection to raise to prominence with a pair of recording projects that turned into classic albums. A Pete Townshend-inspired tremolo monotone guitar solo (inventively doubled on harmonica) builds to a final barnstorming chorus to close yet another side one. We're almost free of the mullet years.

Diamond Dogs

Side two opens with the next major album's title and opening track. A crowd at a gig and an announcer. I always thought he yelled, "This ain't rock and roll, this is David Bowie," where the surname was pronounced like taking a bow. But it's, "this is genocide!" The metallic riff cranks in with a Stonesy groove and we're off with the tales of post apocalyptic decadence. Halloween Jack goes from oxygen tent to the latest party and on from there. In the scope of this album, this song is like a ressurected Suffragette City but bruised and slow from high-strength painkillers making a slow progress through smoky streets and down into dens where you might as well stay if they're just going to keep you buoyant. The cluster of final chorsuses (stretching out in a groove so Stones-like that it includes the sax riff from the fade of Brown Sugar) might be warning about mutant or robotic pursuit creatures or slang for something to reverse the damage.

Rebel Rebel

It's followed seamlessly buy a bent string note and one of the greatest riffs in rock history. That is like how it happens on the album but from a different song, the grimy epic of Sweet Thing/Candidate/Sweet Thing but it works fine until you know that. It's the apex of the glamour that an unnamed character from Sweet Thing emerges with after the pleasures and ordeals therein. They shine in the spotlight, however ephemerally, a vision as compelling as that tangy, beautiful guitar tone. It goes on but you just want more.

Young Americans

The Young Americans album was fresh enough when this comp came out that it got two entries. The first was teh title track. I found the plastic soul of it difficult to listen to. Bowie's vocal is fine and the stories from Manhattan in the lyric are engaging enough but this is a case where I cannot get past the music that I dislike. It took me finally hearing it as part of the whole thing to get it. By then the music's beauty was also shining. through. I've still not allowed it past the gate but I'll listen more happily than I once did.

Fame

This was more like it. A slinky, creepy funk groove with a nervewracked call and response vocal of complaint and anxiety. A clean electric guitar rings out constantly like a telephone in the background. Someone always wants something. The second voice is the new York John Lennon, approaching the end of the special interest taken in him by the U.S. government. Bowie sings through a grimace. Then the two come together for the big screaming middle eight before things just return to the paranoia groove. A masterpiece.

Golden Years

More funk but with a cool modal harmony added and some futuristic tribalism. More imagery of limousines and manipulation at the stardom end of the spectrum. It's like Fame after the guy learned how to ride it. It appears here, preceeding Station to Station and farewelling the tupperware disco of Young Americans. There's video of Bowie in an other than quite fit state, miming this on Soul Train. It's worth your trouble finding it online. The album ends on a clean stop instead of a fade. Buy more Bowie. 

A photo from around that occasion shows him with slicked back hair, malnourished and smoking. It was on one side of the inner sleeve. The reverse of this is a gallery of cover art from the redubbed Space Oddity through to Young Americans, identifying all the LPs I needed to get to really touch the air around the star. The rear main sleeve had the tracks listed the same way that Station to Station would, thick red font with no spaces against a stark white background. The front announced the coming thin white duke look, hair as neat and sculpted as a '30s movie star, eyes gazing off in thought, one hand supporting his chin with the fingers fanned decoratively. This was not the sweaty live photo of a stadium rocker nor the abstract collage of a Hipgnosis cover but something that was drawn away from time.

Everything about the presentation was both sincerely commercial but also aloof from the motivation, the choice of singles and album cuts and a clear line of creative development in order of appearance. Not too many songs, nor just the big bangers, just eleven of the best to party with. It was the first Bowie album we all had and our few years' difference between this and the mullet years, the glam years, were filled with this side one. Want more, wanna get closer to the cool of the artist? Buy the records, they look like this. 

The cover art on the inner sleeve and on the releases of Space Oddity and Man Who Sold the World were revisions that conformed more to the Ziggy look from after their release. This allowed RCA to impose the damage control of the curly hair hippy of the first and the androgynous lounger in a "man's dress" of the latter. Everything looked as though it had gone from Ziggy to Duke so that we second gen fans could get it all without feeling too strange (and our parents wouldn't scream, "queer!")  

These weren't the songs of our generation, we just wanted to touch them. By the end of the year we were either trying to remember how Anarchy in the UK went because it was only on TV a few times and never on the radio. Well, not all of us but this record taught us that the green apple shampoo and sport shoe world could do what it liked as long we didn't have to know about it. We're going to Suffragette City and Jean Genie's at the wheel. God, it was worth numberless Eagles or Steely Dan records. It felt like home. And once we were done with it we were ready to leave.

Listening Notes: My RCA Japan CD found in an op shop is exemplary. You can also get it from an online shop as a paid download in higher res. The artwork is good enough if you found an LP for it just for display. Apart from the excerable John, I'm Only Dancing you can get all these tracks on the various hi-res releases of the original albums where each song sits better in context. If you have never had it, though, find it. 

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.

THE MODERN LOVERS @ 50

"One two three for five six!" Bam bam bam! And we're into the iconic sleeper that punk bands would be putting into their practices for decades. Road Runner tells you almost everything you need to know about this record: the garage rock slam, the fewer the chords the better, the sing talk vocals and the relentless progression forward. You hear the whole band and above it Jonathon Richmond's idiosyncratic vocals, goofy here, poignant there, occasionally stinging. It's a song about personal freedom but also about getting your driver's licence, slamming in a car and driving anywhere, connecting, feeling the modern world like the breeze through the window.

This band began in high school but Jonathon Richman was already a veteran. He'd been touing his stuff on stages since 1967, supporting the Velvet Underground and hanging with them. By the time this recording was made, its songs were crafted and ready, not so perfect that they rode on prepared parts but not so loose as to get jammy and ditch form. The music is appreciably a band effort and can get a little wayward but by this stage it's down to Richman's control over the various personae he adopts. These characters guide the songs.

Astral Plane is a horny teenager slyly telling the girl who won't sleep with him that he'll see her on the mystical setting of the title. It's done in a kind of jazz age snap, two four and be there. Old world has future Talking Head Jerry Harrison shine on organ. He loves the '50s apartment house in the 1970s sun, he loves the secret knowledge of the past and the young man he is now. 

This album is made from demos, partially produced by Velvet alumnus John Cale. The debt is there in the simple chords and clean tone of the rhythm guitar. The first distortion is on the wandering lead break in Pablo Picasso, a lament in envy of the artist's power over women. No one ever called Pablo Picasso an asshole. It plays on a single chord and Richman's vocal stands on the footpath watching as the master of seduction (be he Picasso himself or any alpha scenester leering around the town).  End of side one.

She Cracked drives on beeping guitars and restless rhythm section beating forward as Richman tells us about a girl who seems chaotic to him but he likes it. He loves, he hates, she eats garbage while he tucks into health food. She's big with the students and it makes him feel inadequate. "She cracked, I'm sad but I won't..." The shouted chorus could be from 1967 or the 1977 to come. Punk before its time.

Then there's Hospital. "When you get out of the hospital let me back into your life. I can't stand what you do. I'm in love with your eyes." Slow descending chords on the organ sound like church. It always sounds to me like the boy from I'm Straight made his move and it ended in disaster. Now, he waits outside the singles bars she goes to, incel to stalker. "I can't stand what you do, sometimes I can't stand you. It makes me think about me, how I'm involved with you," he says in a rush and then, more quietly, "but I'm in love with this power that shows through in your eyes." He's never said any of this to her. When she does get out of hospital the only contact between them will probably be confined to visual, all those eyes, tear stained or worthy of obsession, and it will frustrate. It's not all droolingly superficial; he does think of her, how she would met the world as a young girl with wonder and, though the line is joking it's also scarifying, he goes to bakeries from a lack of sweetness in his life. Have you ever been this controlled by obsession? You have if you lived through the years fifteen to twenty. If you were dirven to poetry it would not have been this clear-eyed and empathetic. He's not puffing himself up, pretending his crises are two sided, he's admitting he has no power to change this and that any attempt at concilliation is doomed. It will ony mean more pain. The power that shows through in her eyes will only be directed toward him in self defence. The wrong person went to hospital. The slow circles of the chord progression roll on.

Someone I Care About is the kind of Kinks track that every garage band in the land tried out. He doesn't just want sex, he wants someone he cares about, ending the riff on the seventh with the cry, "alright, gentlemen". Three and a half minutes of exhilaration. Girlfriend's end of the party slumping slow rock. Richman himself sounds end of night. He walks into the gallery and looks at the art. He goes to the baseball stadium and feels the awe of the game. Both things let him understand the majesty of a girlfriend.

Modern World is all hand claps and spiky seventh riffing, distorted organ solo, call and response choruses and more Jonathan siging abou the girlfriend he needs. He likes the modern world because it's not as bad as all the students go on about. He likes it all. He's the same guy in the car with the radio on in Road Runner. Full circle.

This album sits by itself. I don't mean that it isn't as derivative as any record by a bunch of adolescent will be. I mean the derivations are just not important. Yes, I can hear the Velvet Underground in these grooves along with half of what went on Nuggets. I can hear Television, Talking Heads and a world of late '70s punk, as well. What I don't hear is the unpolished nihilism of a band that didn't quite fit into anything when it was recorded and didn't on its release years later.

The tracks were recorded and finished by 1972 but the LP didn't come out until 1976. It's a blend of sessions, remixed from the source tapes. Jerry Harrison donated his tape of Hospital. He was already in Talking Heads by then but happy to help. By then, the Modern Lovers no longer existed beyond this, their only official platter. By 1974, after a failure to turn these recordings into an album and a lot of internal unrest, the band dissolved, leaving Jonathan Richman to go it alone which he is doing to this day. So, why bring the thing out at all?

Well, this reminds me of a case from decades later and in a different medium. Tarsem Singh's film The Fall, a fantasy about the wonders of storytelling and the imagination comparable to The Princess Bride, contains some of the most arresting visuals you are likely to see but is held up by decent writing and performances that are pitch perfect. On its release in 2006 it did some festival business but stiffed whenever it was offered to everyday cinema audiences. Why? Because it's a hard sell. The international images are breathtaking, the humour works and the balance between it and the more serious concerns also works. But. There are character deaths, animal harm, some convincing gore and a central motivation of self harm. This is a kids movie that can't be shown to kids. 

The Modern Lovers wasn't very 1972 at all. It had strong songs that could rouse or provoke thought. The music was engaging all through. Richman's personality carried every track. But it just wasn't The Faces or Blood Sweat and Tears or Humble Pie or Led Zeppelin or Don McLean or Carol King or ... I could do this all day. If it had been released when the New York scene bands were springing up, it would have been one of the few records of that tribe that had a chance at hitting. But by that stage it was another seminal stack, one of the records everyone had and then other people wanted to sound just like it. It was hard to sell stalking and venerality that wasn't cock rock in the early '70s. 

Jonathan Richman's teenagers weren't Bruce Springsteen's, David Bowie's or even Alice Coopers. They had no glamour, no class or bravado, they were losers. By 1976 when it did get released, disco was young and appropriately mindless, love songs sounded like Boston. Over the pond, the stirrings of the so to be infamous snarls and walls of power that would be British punk were making room in the crowd for the likes of this record but it was and remains a personal discovery. People then and since hear the goofiness of Road Runner and think they're in for a bubblegum Velvet Underground. They probably give up after Pablo Picasso.

This record can be unlovely on first listen. It needs to be lived with, listened to while walking or doing the dishes so the spiky bits normalise and you start to hear what Richman is talking about. When the cute songs become one with the Hospitals and She Crackeds it sounds like a whole deal. Not bad for a record made in shifts months and even years apart. The CD releases are all good and include extra tracks that feel right like I'm Straight and Dignified and Old. Finally, an augmented record that improves on the original. If you come across this version, fine. If you come across the original version, fine. Just commit to a few times with it. You'll keep it because it'll keep you.

Listening notes: For this article I listened to thevery clean and full mastering at CD resolution from a legit retail online shop. It's the best I've heard it.

My 1985

View from my balcony at Bangalla St Auchenflower, taken 1985

In January I boarded the Sunlander to Brisbane for the last time. I didn't mark the occasion with any particular note as I didn't realise that the rail service would be retired and I wouldn't set foot in Townsville again for almost four decades. I tried not to think of the reduced purpose there was of my staying in the Auchenflower place or even Brisbane. I felt directionless. No uni, no band. Things were going to change.

Everyone had moved out except my brother who didn't bother with the rent any longer as he had no justification and knew I could just move out. He hadn't stopped being a dick. That was for life. The quieter house felt good in that it was peaceful but also empty. Everyone else had moved out to get away from Stephen. Fair enough.

I kept writing the book and tried to keep in touch with the people I knew at Uni. I kept writing songs though I had no idea what I'd do with them.

Over the next months, my parents would come down to work on the house and be somewhere else. I think both had retired and were wondering if they wanted to sell the place or even move into it. It worried me. I was still kicking the can down the road. Dad would get to work on the things that needed attention. I woke to the thunder of his hammer on the roof. He replaced the boring white door with a carved one and fixed the wobbly front steps and everything that could got painted. I did the balcony outside my room.

The songs I'd written were burning a hole in my creative pockets. I went to the cinema one evening and Greg spotted me from the street. After catching up I asked him if he'd be into helping out with them. He was keen. We practiced a few and organised with Pat Ridgewell to use his 4-track reel to reel studio under his house in Taringa. They worked as well as they were going to and we took tapes away. 

Margot came over one day and announced she was moving to Melbourne for a job at Latrobe Uni. Would I be interested in starting a share house with her? Dad stepped up his hints about how intolerable life at number 24 was going to get including me giving up my room. I had to move out somewhere. Melbourne sounded great so, after a lot less dithering in the conversation, I said yes and, after she left, I started planning it.

I bought three teachests through the Trading Post and filled them with books and everything else I was taking. (check diaries for dates)

As to music, I still listened to 4ZZZ and 4EB. I kept up with whatever TV brought news (Rockarena was a favourite) but I felt a decreasing affinity with what was appearing on them. I noted REM but was puzzled as to The Smiths' popularity (still am). A vein of electronic music was thickening and heating to enter the culture but it left me cold. At twenty-three, I was feeling old. I was listening to the songs I'd done at Pat's place as though they were golden oldies.

Then again there were some songs to note.

Live it Up had Mental as Anything joining the OzRock battalions, crossing lines that didn't seem visible anymore. Would I Lie to You continued Eurhytmics' regugitation of Sweet Dreams. Walking on Sunshine sounded like it came from the late '70s. Like a Virgin and 1999 proved I was right in my indifference to both Prince and Madonna. She Sells Sanctuary did sound good with its big riff and old school rock vocals. In Between Days made the Cure sound like New Order and I didn't get why. Nick Cave's Tupelo was intriguing but not played enough. Echo and the Bunnymen brought out no albums but the great single (especially as a 12 inch) in Bring on the Dancing Horses. Talking Heads seemed like they were just being absorbed by the mainstream with things like Road to Nowhere. Simple Minds did someone else's song for a movie and it was a stunner (Don't You Forget About Me). We Are The World was a lousy song in comparision to the U.K. one for the same cause but it was easier to sing the chorus and got to more people. I started watching Live Aid but woke up when it was over. Remember that crack about The Smiths? I did like How Soon is Now. Bittersweet was the Hoodoo Gurus best. 

Dire Straights did an oafish song called Money for Nothing and I have cause to recall it. I was, by September, ready to the trek south to Melbourne. I called my father who was happy for me, venturing away from the family dependency. When I asked him for money he made the usual noises about having none but asked how much. I said $500. He laughed warmly and told me how to take receipt of it through the bank. I knew I should have asked for more.

The bus left frorm Queen St. Stephen and a few of the people form the '84 house saw me off. And off I was. The bus took over a day to reach Melbourne and that's how long I had to listen to the first two tracks of the Dire Straits album Brothers in Arms which begins with Money for Fucking Nothing. Two yobbos who spoke in grunts and mumbles in the seat in front of me were the perps. They even mentioned that they were headed for North Melbourne which is where my friend James lived. I lived a few uneasy hours imagining them seeing me on the street. I hate those two songs to this day.

But then we crossed the Victorian border and charged along to the outskirts. The city's older look beguiled me adn I couldn't stop beaming. Finally, we taxied into the terminal in a massive spring downpour. James appeared at my shoulder as I got my luggage. We embraced and he drove me to his place where I'd be staying for a while as Margot and I went house hunting on the weekends. He reminded me that I owed him a bottle of bourbon which we picked on the way. We drank. A lot. And at one point we walked to Carlton where I had my first Melbourne coffee. It was cold and rainy and it felt like a city. I was home.

THE BEATLES' RUBBER SOUL @ 60

The sharp treble of the opening riff of this album tells us about the album we're about to hear. Cheeky bluesy bends lead into a loping circular riff on the guitars and bass. The vocals are strict parallel fifths and resist easy identification of which of your favourite Beatles is singing. This is a proto-funk workout and you're being asked to dance as sleazily to it as you can. The chorus brings in more swagger with a piano filling in with a rise and fall to and from a seventh. A boy is told by a girl that she wants to be a movie star and the quickest he can get is to offer to be her chauffeur. She accepts, even though, in the killer final verse, that she doesn't even have a car. Across the decades, that's still funny.

But while it's not what you would call a career change into comedy, it fulfils the notion growing in the culture that an album can be a multifaceted statement from performers who could do the lot. The Beach Boys had already released their Party! album, a set of covers (including Beatle songs) with chatter and laughter flown in during the mix. Drive My Car isn't quite that but it was pointing to something that they had an increasing lean toward: variety. It was a Fabs song, no question, but its "beep beep yeah" ultrapop harmonies were both moderne and showbiz.

Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown) changes things immediately with a gentle acoustic strum and a beguiling melody which Lennon then obliges by singing. "I once had a girl or should I say she once had me." I wonder what the contemporary listener made of the strange bright twanging of George Harrison's sitar as it echoed Lennon's vocal lines. The lyric, like the previous one, is a narrative. He wanders home with a woman from a club or a party, they drink wine and chat until the morning but she makes it clear that he's not welcome in her bed. The next morning he burns the fancy wood of the title to burn the place down. It's not quite the joke of Drive My Car and its subtlety is snide. It took a schoolfriend of mine to suggest the meaning of the last line before anything like it occured to me.

You Won't See Me Feels different from anything earlier. The piano and organ are pushed forward and rhythmic and the guitars are small scratchy bites in the distance. A very active bass holds the ballast as the chords go up the stairs, back down and back up with a sturdy forward motion. The song also speeds up as it goes along. It's a Paul song, one of his disgruntled boyfriend numbers (The Night Before, Another Girl etc.) but it moves like a gleaming diary. It's melodic, cool, bright with doowop harmonies but he's telling her to act her age. It's meant as a quirk-of-love number but just comes across as a report by a contractor. It might be softer in texture and more cuddly but really, it's not that far from what Gang of Four made of the same theme.

Nowhere Man starts with three-part harmony. They would die before the admission but it's an approach for more expected of The Hollies (more on them in a bit) with the vocals pressed into glittering light as chords. John's bright lament speaks of a man without purpose or form, a hollow vessel. Lennon claimed this as a self-description but it could easily apply to any of the bright young things they collided with in Swinging London Clubland. He understands this all too well and appends, "isn't he a bit like you and me?" The middle eight sees the vocals bifurcate between Lennon's gentle croon and the others applying more of the doowop goodness. The guitar solo is actually a dual attack, two of the new Stratocasters with as much treble as was permitted by the International Ear Safety Commission as Lennon's and Harrison's guitars, already on the piercing bridge pickups were put through several channels in series to defeat everything under 1khz and advance everything above. I'm guessing about that but if you know the song, you know. The beautiful arpeggiated figure ends on a triplet down to the lowest G and is capped a silver bell like harmonic, one of the gentler innovations by the band. The final repeated line of, "making all his nowhere plans for nobody" is topped by MacCartney way above everyone. Ten years later, Queen would sign their names to this approach.

George had two numbers on Help and he has two here but there's a difference. While the Help songs are fine examples of mid-'60s they pretty much just take their place on their sides. Rubber Soul was already proving to be a major shift and the third songwriter needed more to compete with. His first was this, Think For Yourself. A thick fuzzbass leads chromatically from G to Am. Dm to Bb and so on. George didn't know the rules and just threw the chords together because they sounded good that way. It's why his debut Don't Bother Me is more lively and driven than either of the Help songs which were written more conventionally. Think For Yourself seems to constantly change its footing yet stays solid. The chorus ("do what you wanna do ...") has a James Bond ring to it and punches home the message to do what it says in the title instead of flailing into destruction. If You Won't See Me was coldly bitchy, this is brutal. George's droning solo vocal set in bright harmony backing helps the medicine go down.

The Word is more contemporary funk with a more controlled but still complicated guitar/bass figure than Drive My Car. A falsetto harmony tells us to hear the word that's so fine, it's sunshine, it's the word love. Lennon's solo verses sound like confessions of life before and after knowing the word before the others come in. While I can appreciate the proto hippy message, and the music which is sublime, this always sounds like a commercial to me. I never skip it but I never play it for its own sake.

Michelle rounds off side one with a thick Eurovision croon from Paul that, with his characteristic deft handling of minor chords, has a beguiling dusk by the sea romance to it rather than the IloveYouloveEverybody'sTruelove boy girl songs they made themselves famous with. It features a curly guitar solo with the tone knob all the way to zero for a continental jazzy touch. I'm saying all this but the thing is beautiful.

Side two opens with the Ringo number. As with the cover version of Act Naturally on Help, this original (Lennon, McCartney and Starkey who said he contributed about five words) has a pop country flavour. Big bright harmony choruses with solo vocal verses and a few downmixed asides to help the hoedown gallop. It's ok. 

Girl, on the other hand, isn't ok. Musically, it's outstanding: finely honed progressions and light strumming with a slow folk feel as Lennon recounts his tale of unrequited devotion. The middle eight shifts up a few steps with an intense minor passage as the backing vocals sing the word tit rythmically in falsetto. The chorus of, "ah girl," is puctuated with the kind of loud inhalations that would have otherwise been edited from the mix. They sound like long tokes by a broken lover telling his lot. Surprising us with a kind of Greek folk passage at the end of dual guitars plucked like bozoukis that takes us far further in thatn we expected to go before lightening back up for the chorus to fade.

I'm Looking Through You is another Paul as aggrieved boyfriend but this time it's a jaunty folksy number that screams into mid-decade pop for the chorus. Ringo reputedly taps on a matchbox for the rhythm. The trebly guitar from most of the rest of the album is back. A middle eight sounds like Paul doing folk the way he did bluegrass in I've Just Seen a Face. It's songs like this, though, that, as they push the band forward through contemporary pop to heights, where it's important to recall that these songs were penned by twenty-somethings whose burgeoning control of their lives could get shirtfronted by their still developing emotions. "And you're down there!" screams Paul.

In My Life is one of the most poignant Beatles songs. So many of the tricks of the trade the writers had so far amassed are here including perfect placement of minor to major juxtapositions so that they just sound natural rather than overly dramatic, judicious use of harmony vocal and double tracked solo lines. For such an aching and gentle song it's suprising to hear only electric guitars and played so sparsely and exactly. George Martin's celebrated faux Elizabethan solo (achieved by playing at one speed and inserting it at another)  charms wihout effort and the repeated  guitar figure that plays with the translucent thirds is gorgeous. Is this a young person projecting himself into age or just one discovering a premature nostalgia? On the surface it's a love song that lists the treasures of memory as little compared to his current love. This works prefectly well but there's a lurking doubt working. Lennon's final bare falsetto of the refrain can send shivers. 

Wait is a leftover from the Help sessions and added as filler. It's fine with a lot of good volume pedal, harmonies and guitar rtones but its stop/start structure still bothers me. It feels like it never quite takes off.

George's second serving, If I Needed Somone, is a shimmering display of harmony and the last whole song 12 string showcase he would present. He happily confessed that he adapted the main riff from The Byrd's Bells of Rhymney but after the opening few notes the two figure diverge. The song is George solo for standout lines but mostly the same kind of tight and bright harmonies we've been getting this outing. Lyrically it's like a nice version of Don't Bother Me, assuring the girl he'll let her know and first if he ever finds himself lonely and miserable. I wouldn't buy that either but it does at least have thering of honesty. (The Hollies released this as a single the same day as Rubber Soul was released. It charted respectably but George, while accepting the first charting of any song he wrote, and the royalties that followed, called the recording rubbish, as though done by session musicians. A public spat ensued. It's a fine recording of an arrangement near identical to the one here.)

Last and worst is John's Run For Your Life, one of the many from his Beatles catalogue that he largely disowned. You can hear why. An aggressive acoustic strum is joined by the band (including a riff on that wicked Strat bridge pickup). It's a great folk rock groove. But then the words kick in. "I'd rather see you dead, little girl, than to be with another man..." This line is lifted from the rock standard Baby Let's Play House, recorded by Elvis and Buddy Holly, but the rest of it is Lennon playing around with that notion and just going on. The chorus makes the threat of murder sound like a sea shanty. It even got to me as a fifteen year old when I heard it. My head shot up as its violence rolled on. I made up a persona for the narrator. That helped. It was hard to relate the singer of In My Life with this psycho. Even to the fade and the end of the album where he's riffing on the word now, it's a committed act. 

I first heard this courtesy of my sister's boyfriend back in the mid-'70s. Before it, I'd heard all the later albums and had a few compilations of the earlier material. This was the first opportunity to hear all the songs I knew in context with all those I hadn't heard. I listened through headphones while my family were watching the Saturday movie on TV. I looked into the strange warped image of the band on the cover, stretched, a forest behind them and the joke title in big, orange, boopy '60s lettering. The faces are confident, four young blokes on top of the world. That's what the record sounded like, too.

I wondered, if I was ever going to be a rock star if I'd have the opportunity to make a statement like this: I've arrived, take this. The music was a mix of instantly appealing pop with glittering harmonies and arrangements that breathed with jangling electricity and warm timber surfaces. The songs were either about slight things or jokes, or very deep issues with one song after another feeling like a statement. Then a Vox organ stab and fiddly treble guitar lick would come in and it would again just sound like pop from the '60s.

Later, when I had all the initial sequence of studio albums I was able to make a comparison. There is a clear line of development and dare on the timeline. Then when the bigger sounding songs from Help give way to these if feels like all the others were public prototypes. It would be another year or so until I heard its successor (now that I think of it) which immediately won me over. If Rubber Soul is Revolver's younvger, callow self, it yet is a couple of sides of engagement that, heard, are not forgotten. And if Revolver made me think of a dark and alluring movie, Rubber Soul feels like the makers of great pop songs who had more than an hour to spare to do something more with the routine. Of all that came before, this one is the first that seems like a latest album. There were no singles in the U.K. from it but they did bring out the mighty double-A Day Tripper and We Can Work it Out. I have to work hard to imagine what it felt like to hear this and wonder what would follow.

Listening notes: I chose the version on the Mono box set as it sounds the most like the one I first heard and is the mix that the band themselves approved. The sound on the CD is stellar. Also, this brings me to the end of Beatles blogs as I've come full circle, staring with Revolver in 2016, picking up Please Please Me on in 2023. Now I'm here. It's been invigorating considering these records again after letting them get so familiar. I'd reommend it.