1978 at 40

1978 and I went to my last softdrinks only school party ever and would soon add university parties to the social calendar where the music was better and the general scene a major lift. The few of us who fell into the thrall of the new music coming out of the UK and starting in our own land were about to get a feast of what we liked about the year before. The Sex Pistols disintegrated after a disastrous tour of America. By the end of the year Johnny was in PiL and all was forgiven. I cut my hair shorter every other month. My brother Greg joked that it was growing back into my skull. I was so punk I got Mum to buy me a leather jacket for my birthday. It was a Brando style, double breasted and I could wear it for about two hours per year in Townsville. The NME had more to say about the music I wanted to learn about and, late as it always was there, I bought each one for the next few years. Of course the charts were still dominated by streamlined baby-boomer rock and novelty songs but there was an undercurrent that a very few of us could hear beneath the blah. Things just seemed to change shape every few months. I went to Brisbane for the August holidays and wanted to stay there. By the Christmas holidays I lived in an extra corridor of the perceivable world where it was always a kind of hybrid of London and Transylvania, played a Maton Flamingo as raucously as I good through an old transistor amp and a Companion fuzz box and started writing my own songs.

THIS YEAR'S MODEL - ELVIS COSTELLO AND THE ATTRACTIONS

A revelation! I've never reconciled with My Aim is True. Apart from a few standouts I find its plinky plonky West Coast proto yacht rock indigestible. Yet, when I listen to its successor which I consider magnificent, I have to concede that if The Shamrocks (who became Huey Lewis' News) of the first album played on it it might have sounded indistinguishable from the first. Then again, if he'd had The Attractions on the first one it might have been as good as this. As it is I still think of This Year's Model as EC's debut album and My Aim is True as a kind of demo disc. Anyway ...

The Australian release on Radar included Watching the Detectives which hadn't appeared on any LP in the UK. I was glad of it as I remember thinking that if the rest of My Aim is True had resembled it I  would have liked it better. A spidery reggae with a spine tingling organ drilling through it as a lungless vocal mixed images about a girl more interested in the movie on tv than mucking around and the kidnapping case on the screen. 

But that was at the end of side one. The whole record starts with EC spitting out the first line before the rest of the band comes in. No Action, This Year's Girl, The Beat, Pump it Up, the songs sped past with constantly nasty observations about fashion victims and alpha males. A reader's letter to RAM once listed every statement on the album that began "I don't want..." It was massive. The record started with the phrase. There was even a whole song with that in the title. 

Through all this there was a lot of great playing. If this was punk (it was being called New Wave as a pointless distinction) it wasn't Never Mind the Bollocks with its ten tonne guitar band onslaught. This was furious with different textures, screaming organ chords, skeletal guitar lines, a very serious rhythm section with a master bass player who could play tunes like McCartney but thud and stone out like Aston Barrett. It was part film noir and part bubblegum and the refusal to resolve the two created a constant tension which might have been unbearable if it weren't for the fact that you could sing along loudly to every chorus. If the Pistols gave me strength to be myself this record dressed that up and sharp. If I think of 1978 I think of this record.

THE KICK INSIDE - KATE BUSH

Once the hormonal storm subsided at sight of the videos for Wuthering Heights on Countdown I bought the single and then the album. In the midst of punk this only claimed to be songs. Neither overcomplex and hippy like Joni Mitchell nor too gentle and accessible like Al Stewart, The Kick Inside went to strange dreamscapes and cinematic realms while somehow staying firmly on the grass of the green and pleasant land. The musicianship was exemplary and the arrangements intriguing. Wuthering Heights had her sounding like a ghost that thought it was still alive but Man With the Child in his eyes was delivered well beyond her tender age. If anything, she reminded me of the Bowie of Aladdin Sane or Diamond Dogs. In the end she was herself which is why she was also impossible to ignore. 

PUBLIC IMAGE 1ST EDITION

I was so excited at hearing the single Public Image, how it leaped beyond the Sex Pistols sound and how that band was only represented that year by the album of demos, practices and novelty tracks and couldn't compete. Swindle only really made sense as a movie soundtrack. It was fun but wore off. PiL's debut, however was the opposite. Public Image was pure magnificence, a soaring modal guitar figure and Johnny singing his  heart out, sounding ever more determined and real. The rest of the album was a chore until you learned to leave it on and let it get to you. Aside from the single every track seemed designed to irritate in some way. Eventually, all the fun I found in Swindle was eclipsed by this set. The best was to come. I ordered a copy through the local import shop. It was on clear green tinted vinyl and the plastic film finish on the cover art was blistered in a weird way, looking like rivulets running down the front. The woman at the shop tried to flatten them with a coin but that was futile so I got a dollar off the price.

ARE WE NOT MEN? - DEVO

Better loved by the people at the Uni parties I went to than by me this nevertheless grew on me. I think I was bothered by how conventional it sounded once you took the image away. But even I could not resist the speed up of Gut Feeling or the Great call and response of Uncontrollable Urge.

WHO ARE YOU? - THE WHO

This is where I parted company with the band. I quite like the title track which was a single and had a clip that was played on Countdown but hearing the rest of it was a constant deflation. I had spoiled myself with a compilation of their early singles and a cassette of Sell Out and nothing here stood up to those.

GERM FREE ADOLESCENTS - X RAY SPEX

Oddly this was given a track by track playthrough and discussion on local commercial station 4TO and it frustrated me that I could never find a copy locally. I got one in Brisbane much later in the year. Still listen to this one.

MAN MACHINE - KRAFTWERK

Another favourite of the local alt.unistudent. If I appreciated Krafwerk it was through the explanations of someone a crucial five years older than me. Love it now, though.

GIVE 'EM ENOUGH ROPE - THE CLASH

As soon as Never Mind the Bollocks came out I stopped listening to The Clash's debut album. I heard this one at parties and never bothered to get a copy.

THE MODERN DANCE - PERE UBU


A Uni Party disc. Another one that crawled back in the years after. Haven't heard it for yonks but it's welcome when I do.

OUTLANDOS D'AMOR - THE POLICE
The video for Roxanne came out of nowhere on Countdown one Sunday. I didn't quite get what they were doing with the reggae which seemed a lot starker than the fuller sound I was familiar with. I loved the harmonies in the chorus, though. Never had the album but thought I'd give it a mention.

AMBIENT 1 MUSIC FOR AIRPORTS - BRIAN ENO

Another one for the uni crowd but not a party album. It took me two decades to give this a proper spin. I would use it as intro music before my film nights as its beautiful cathedral ambience set a relaxed mood.

ANOTHER MUSIC IN A DIFFERENT KITCHEN - THE BUZZOCKS

I heard this more at uni than at the time but loved the punk aggression blended with high melodism and distinctive vocals. And in the north Queensland of the late '70s hearing "I hate fast cars" was a glass of cool cordial.

THE SCREAM - SIOUXSIE AND THE BANSHEES

One of the great debuts and albums of any kind from the rock era. Late night sounds and muffled offscreen drama surrounding thundering drums and slashing guitar all beneath the ghostly wail of one the most expressive and signature vocalists of this year and the next decade. One of those records you think you've heard too often until you put it on again and you listen to the end. 

PARALLEL LINES - BLONDIE

The third disc from the New York sass-squashers began with a run of great power pop but after that it was a sheer drop into filler and the album version of Heart of Glass which went for a whole afternoon (I'd never quite loved it in the first place). The previous set, Plastic Letters, still gets my vote as their best but the one after this was a lot less dependent on a hit single for its identity. The follow up had much better songs and a higher substance to filler ratio but the end started here. They knew they were a pop band and it injured them.

MORE SONGS ABOUT BUILDINGS AND FOOD

Heard tracks here and there and probably the whole album at Uni parties. It just made an impression. I liked rather than loved them and but for the next two albums (including the epoch-making Remain in Light) might have only just remembered them.









BAT OUT OF HELL - MEATLOAF
I liked the big voice but the whole rock and teen mythology felt older than Grease. The normal kids at school loved this one. I had to tape it (and the entire soundtrack album for Saturday Night Fever) for a friend (didn't bother with my own copy) and he went away with a tape of The Kick Inside. Lose-Win.

SOME GIRLS -THE ROLLING STONES

I had the year before bought the album Goats Head Soup which I still like and the year before that I got a '60s compilation which started a lifelong fandom of the British Invasion era of the singles band. This one was from the heart of their initial stadium band era and I could take or leave it. Miss You was fun and I had a friend who loved the whole platter but all I could think about was that I could have bought a copy from the local K-Mart which had the original cover art with the movie stars on it (replaced after a lawsuit by pictures of the band).




SINGLES!

Hit Me With Your Rhythm stick made a performing monkey out of me as I'd do the vocal before Biology class over a period of months. Pump it Up cured the golden oldie laid back bore of the first album and made the '60s sound like the future. The clip with the geeky one doing the stagger walk in a suit stolen from a scarecrow sold me on so much. No One is Innocent had me on the fallen angel Johnny's side so I thought the first spin was fun before being too good for it. The flip, Sid's My Way was more my stuff. Forever Autumn sounded enough like the Moody Blues to be enjoyable but it was from a concept album so embarrassing it was played to us in the English class as art. Warm Ride was an old sounding song with a great dynamic vocal. Dreadlock Holiday was a fine soundtrack song for a funny clip. Rasputin was so goofy that it never failed to stir a young drunk to the dance floor under the house to try the Russian kick dance and land on his bum bruise to be. Khe San worked as a modern day bush ballad but was also the first sign that Cold Chisel were nothing like the rip snorter that journalists who had seen them live had promised. It sounded like new country. It was fine and probably deserved to be bogan anthem #1. Sultans of Swing sounded like JJ Cale with Segovia on a Strat. Full boomer groove but I loved it. I Can't Stand the Rain popped, clicked and raged behind a barnstorming vocal and an arrangement that changed under every verse: beautiful. Werewolves of London: performing monkey time for me again. Best Friend's Girl sounded like everything on the crumbling Super Hits LPs in the rumpus room which was fine with me. Because the Night began and ended my fandom of Patti Smith. Take a Long Line had an old jug band cut their hair and dress punque. Cheesy n eeesy but it worked better than when the Stranglers did the same thing. Miss You was the Stones doing disco and we all knew the spoken bit before Economics. Baker St still thrills with a quiet slice of life and a murdering sax hook. Ca Plane Pour Moi was and is laughable bullshit but catchy enough to transcend the language barrier. Turn the Beat Around sounded like a kind of Masonic chant for performance at Studio 54, dancey and creepy all at once. Every 1's a Winner won and again proved that as punk as anyone got, Hot Chocolate could still make it through.

Here's the thing about these two photos of me: the one at the top was taken by someone else 

and the one at the bottom was taken by me. Which one am I smiling in?

1968 at 50: SWEETHEART OF THE RODEO - THE BYRDS

Only months after the release of their most sustained progressive rock album The Byrds shocked their fans and critics alike by producing this slab of country. Originally envisaged as a history of American 20th century pop music by Roger McGuinn the album was steered with increasing persuasion towards country by new recruit and visionary Gram Parsons. Parson's contributions were pared back due to legal entanglements and the band lost their initial fanbase. So, was it worth it?

A steel guitar pickup kicks us in as You Ain't Going Nowhere begins. McGuinn's familiar voice takes us through the Dylan song with an effortless twang and the harmonies come in like cleansing showers. If the country stutters on guitars here and there let us know what we're in for they don't sound wrong or forced. The song was unreleased until this version (the original would come out later on the Basement Tapes album: same as the final track).

I am a Pilgrim begins with a shuckshuck from a fiddle and Chris Hillman's easy vocal is supported by banjo and fiddle. Longer than expected breaks of the strings between verses seem to request we take it easy and not get upset about our favourite progressive band sounding like it was born in Nashville. No harmonies but Hillman's voice proves an easy listen.

The Louvin Brothers' The Christian Life is next and it's a tad troubling as McGuinn's vocal verges on hick caricature. The glorious chorus lifts this but every verse just comes back to sounding like parody which is not what you want if you are trying to do what this album has already stated as its intention. Also, the Louvin Brothers were iconic, their harmonies the stuff of legend and, while they were partly pushed into doing a number of gospel heavy albums like Satan is Real they were well capable of folky greatness without a speck of religious affiliation. If the Byrds are trying to eat and have their cake by slyly winking at their rock fanbase with this one it must fail with them as offputting and alienate the Opry audience they'd got their hair cut to please. Well, it's a lovely chorus.

You Don't Miss Your Water, by contrast, sounds like a Byrds song with an added steel guitar and honkytonk piano. McGuinn is in fine and unaffected voice and the harmonies are up to par and more. This convinces where the last one worries.

Enter the chief architect of the album's country lean. Gram Parsons sings You're Still on My Mind without irony as the session musicians plink and plonk their way through a drunken heart number. It works but at this stage it couldn't sound less like a Byrds track. Yes, by all means progress, but here is the sound of one person's agenda vs the rest of the band. It doesn't sound like progress. It sounds like an invasion.

Pretty Boy Floyd is McGuinn returning to his childhood folk influence as he dusts off the banjo and in fine Byrds voice courses through the Wood Guthrie number with a fiddle, double bass. The pace and voice retain the Byrds stamp and link this one to Wild Mountain Thyme, Old John Robinson and any number of folk songs the band had rocked up on previous albums.

The indisputable jewel of the album opens the second vinyl side as Hickory Wind spreads like honey over our ears and Parsons sings his own co-write with sincere plaintive voice. At last every country element comes to the aid of the song which could easily be a rock track or a Vegas ballad. With hindsight we are hearing the future of Parsons and the Byrds (i.e. a split). But this is a sublime piece.

One Hundred Years from Now is another Parsons composition but sounds like it could come from Turn Turn Turn, being harmony vocals only: minus the 12 string (with the riff on a steel). Lovely but very, very light.

Chris Hillman cover The Blue Canadian Rockies and as with his country flavoured contributions on Younger than Yesterday it falls back into the tracklist without creating a lot of texture. Hillman's voice doesn't detract but adds little.

Parsons takes the vocals on Merle Haggard's Life in Prison with his customary confidence. Like so many of the tracks here the arrangements feels played by session musicians rather than the band. Haggard's own recordings were often done this way but then you get him and his burned in style at the mic. Parsons does well but even he can't lift this cover above being a cover.

Dylan's Nothing was Delivered begins with a beautiful steel guitar figure and proceeds to a country shuffle. McGuinn takes it to a comfortable Byrds place, with the chorus changing from the 2/4 of the verse to a harder 4/4 grind for the chorus. Get rid of the steel and add a 12 string and this could be on any of the earlier albums.

I wonder what fans heard when they listened to this for the first time. There had been many indications from the first album on that the band was committed to the American-ness of their music and had a good grounding among them in the folk music of America. More than a handful of tracks on any of these LPs attest to their willingness to try country. When I first heard Hey Mr Spaceman in the early '80s it sounded like a hoedown to me. So, why, with all this ready made scholarship, does this album sound like pandering and sometimes ridicule?

Two years earlier the song High and Dry on the Rolling Stones album Aftermath was clearly a kind of Nashville/Leadbelly hybrid and Jagger, uncertain of what the fans might think, throws a "yep!" in every other line to let the universe know he's not so square as to do this for real. (He was still at it in Beggars Banquet but with a lot more maturity.) Why does a band who knows their country and shows how strongly they can express it through their own rock base end up treating it so lightly?

But none of this sounds as authentic as Gene Clark's Set You Free This Time from the Turn Turn Turn album, one of the touted origin-points of folk rock. Set You Free is clearly a country song, and a good one, and done without a nudge or a wink. Even Chris Hillman's dull 2/4 numbers on Younger Than Yesterday have more going for them as far as country rock claims might go. Too much of Sweetheart sounds like the kind of parody that happens at the end of band practices but played with top shelf sessioners.

It really has to be Parsons. Pushing himself further out front, alienating the band from its music and trying to hoist a flag with his name on it as well as the Byrds. To me, it's just a poor fit. The music is ok, if on the light side and you can leave it on but it's just nothing compared to hearing a Mr Spaceman rub shoulders with the frenetic jazz rock of I See You. See, The Byrds were already deeply invested in blending and emerging as themselves. It's not just the lack of Rickenbacker jangle here or the absence of Crosby's sublime descant, it's a wrong turn and it was one from which the band would never find their way back.

1988 at 30

I began 1988 quite cruisily. When money got low jobs came up at the theatre I worked at which really filled the gaps. I tried to bleach my hair but it only went as far as a kind of auburn. That's the back of my head in the photo. The share house changed personnel and character but still managed to feel like a fun neighbourhood. The Sunday morning recoup with tea and fry-ups was always worth it as the previous night's skylarking was confessed through creaky voices. We'd laugh our way out of our hangovers. The band I'd started in Brisbane and resurrected the previous year recorded an album's worth of music in one of the bedrooms on a Tascam Portastudio. The audio quality is still impressive but the songs (mine) were mostly under worked. Fun doing it, though.

GREEN - R.E.M

I was a fan up to the previous album but I felt the band was getting mired into rising success with big stadium rock songs. They were also taking themselves seriously to the point where they were getting dull. None of that stopped me buying a ticket beyond my means at the time to see them at Festival Hall in Melbourne early the following year. I had actually thought they'd broken up. It had been a year and more since the last one and not a peep in the music press. My flatmate Tracey taped the single Stand from the radio one morning and got me down to blare it in the kitchen ghetto blaster. It was great, quirky and perky, big dumb pop and there was a White Room style wah wah guitar solo. I was down at Polyester that morning to get my copy.  Pop Song 89 bashed into it. Get Up was a great upbeat number with a lovely weird breakdown. You Are the Everything was strong and moving. Stand was big, joyful and dumb. World Leader Pretend had a great sparse third verse that sounded like Cat Stevens. But after that you get a lot of what was already establishing itself as formula. Start with a big rock song, blend in some earnest acoustic numbers, start side two with a minor key rocker that sounds political and take whatever was getting kicked around at practices and slap it into a song. It was the last REM album I bought. The first side was fun and the second remains an indistinct blur of fuzztone, growling Michael Stipe vocals, mandolins and accordions. My days at the time were directionless and seemed endlessly so. This album reminds me of that.

DAYDREAM NATION - SONIC YOUTH

From the sensational Evol set from '86 and the good highlight record Sister from '87 we got this sprawling mess of tuned down overdrive, drones and buried vocals. I played it once and forgot about it. I saw them at the Corner a few months later and they were great. This was the one that broke them locally (as with Green and REM, just quietly). It was the last Sonic Youth album I ever bought.










ISN'T ANYTHING - MY BLOODY VALENTINE

If you're cool you should say you prefer this to the better known and loved Loveless (because that's better loved and known). I like it a lot but it's not a patch on its more famous follow-up.















SURFER ROSA - THE PIXIES

Liked this but didn't love it. Loved the later Doolittle. As with MBV you're meant to say you prefer the earlier to the latter because .....
















THE SERPENT'S EGG - DEAD CAN DANCE

I was sitting on the floor with a few other people at a friend's place and The Chant of the Paladin came on. I couldn't recall a word of the conversation that happened over it. I should say under it for I felt as though I'd just been hypnotised. A little later I was given a tape of the whole album. I would fall into a great dark world of black lakes and dewy verdance, never wanting to return. Like the best gothic movies ever, this doesn't need a plot as the atmosphere is so compelling. I still listen to this.








JOY DIVISION - SUBSTANCE

Both sides of the three singles, the rerecorded Ideal For Living EP, and various odds n sods made for a brilliant listen. The CD and double cassette had more (I had the cassette, wouldn't afford a CD player for six more years). The audio quality was fresh and big. I had most of this on singles but things like From Safety to Where ... were elusive. Bought it again on CD and then on hi-res download. Still listen to it. The New Order Substance had come out the year before as a double vinyl with both sides of each 12 inch. Neat. Got that on CD as well but it hasn't appeared on HD DL yet.






LIFE'S TOO GOOD - THE SUGARCUBES

An erratic mix of passionate screams over guitar textures that seemed to change with every track and the most idiosyncratic vocals since Kate Bush, odd dadaist paens to demons, birthdays and mothers. World welcome Bjork. There was a band as well but they had trouble keeping up. Tracey brought this back from the UK, too.













16 LOVERS LANE - THE GO-BETWEENS

A very enjoyable set from a band who had settled into a breezy groove typical of the time with its Brandy Alexander afternoons and champagne with strawberries and talk of books from Picador and op shop treasures. It reminds me of hot chips on St Kilda pier and sundown at the Esplanade and spring evenings of aimless discussion. I can listen to it but this one (and the previous one Talulla) is mostly just nostalgia for me. By contrast the much earlier Before Hollywood still sounds like a current record.








VIVA HATE - MORRISSEY

I only liked the Smiths selectively: most of the side one of Queen is Dead, some great tracks off the debut, not a note of Meat is Murder, and some outstanding singles like How Soon is Now? Apart from that I found them bland, emperors in new clothes. But Tracey, a Smiths fan and the only other person in the house apart from me who bought records, had this. I loved the Vini Reilly guitar playing and Morrissey's melodies and phrasing and lyrics. It was pretty obvious what fans really dug about them and after all the blather about how good Johnny Marr was (I found his playing mostly muzak-like) here was proof to me that he'd added very little of great worth. Suedehead, Every Day is Like Sunday, Late Night Maudlin St and The Ordinary Boys were great Smith songs with better guitar playing. I even bought this on CD in the next decade for those numbers. For some reason this reminds me very pleasantly of the time. Must have been having some fun.

I AM CURIOUS ORANJ - THE FALL

It was a much cleaner sound than the one I remembered from the early '80s but that suited it. Anyone who could turn the hymn Jerusalem into an attack on sponging deserves my admiration if not support. A good mid period Fall.















NOTHING'S SHOCKING - JANE'S ADDICTION

I would come to greatly prefer the next one but the song Jane Says really put a hook in. I don't remember hearing all of this at the time, just tracks here and there, mostly at pubs or parties. The overall sound was strong with the screechy vocals and clean guitars. Maybe I liked the sound more than the songs.












Singles:
Belinda Carlisle sang Heaven is a Place on Earth which sounded like a commercial for the kind of car that none of her old Go Gos fans would be able to afford. Don't Worry Be Happy made you feel like making Bobby McFerrin very unhappy. Stutter Rap was funny for about four hearings as you collected all the jokes and then it sounded like old jokes. The follow-up This is the Chorus about Stock Aitken and Waterman contained the song's sole joke in the title and so didn't even need to be heard. Bananarama sang Love in the First Degree and again sounded like everything they opposed when they hung around with Fun Boy Three. The local Chantoozies sounde like Bananarama if they'd never gone through the cool phase. George Michael's Faith and I Want Your Sex had memorable titles. Fairground Attraction with their song Perfect were available for scapegoating for the mounting blandness that was consuming UK pop. Robert Palmer's Simply Irresistible sounded like everything else he'd done after he started having hit singles. Kylie was so lucky to have been title checked in a parody song about her producers. Rick Astley could not have known that his number one would lead to an "I fuck one goat" joke on the internet decades later but that it would be the only reason anyone would know about the song in 2010. John Farnham's Age of Reason wasn't that bad but had none of the hooks of the big breakthrough in '86. The Mercy Seat was, I had to admit, good. The Church released their final signature tune in Under the Milky Way. Sonic Youth showed they could sound like smooth college radio with Teenage Riot. Morrissey hinted strongly that he really was the songs in the Smiths with Every Day is Like Sunday and Suedehead. The Pixies showed pretty much everything they were ever going to do with Gigantic except that it was sung by the other lead vocalist so they had to open with their big one to get it out of the way instead of leaving it for the encore. The Go Betweens' Streets of Your Town sounded like anything from its album and the one before but had a breezy charm. Swans released a grab at a hit single with a pleasant cover of Love Will Tear Us Apart. Siouxsie and the Banshees came up with a corker in Peekaboo which mixed hip hop drumming, jazz age dance and a vocal that seemed to come from a different part of the room with each line and it wailed with rage about the star and customers of a peep show. The video was great, too.

The Bicentennial of the Invasion (not its official title) ended with only one of the original gang at my place. Goodbye Miriam, Tracey and Ian and welcome Anne, Marie and Steve and (soon enough) Catherine. The Gatekeepers' 12 inch single Indoors came out to no better acclaim than a dismissive review in RAM (whose star was fading anyway). Well, its value as an artefact rose a little in the next decade (more, in fact than it deserved, though I did like the first B-side, Ogre so much that I remixed and mastered it for a b-side of the single The Smile that You Prefer in 2015). Christmas was wonderful at one of the apartments over the Black Cat where future flatmate Steve was digging, sipping bubbly and nibbling on duck and tapinade while a huge storm flooded Brunswick Street so that the trams looked like gondolas slicing through it. Then on to the fabled local royal house at Westgarth Street where I had a funny first conversation with a near-future love. We didn't care so much about New Years then. I gave up my ticket to the big Punters Club bash as it was already crowded at eight, went back home and hopped in with Tracey's crew and went to a dull party in the burbs before coming back in and finding a few pleasantly scummier house parties in Fitzroy and Carlton before giving up and going straight to tea and toast at dawn.

1968 at 50: WAITING FOR THE SUN - THE DOORS

The first thing you might take note of here is the cover art. Unlike the debut with the band members dominated by Morrison or the circus performers in the street of Strange Days we get the type of band shot that would be posted to a bedroom wall if you stretched into a rectangle. The band stand side by side, no one bigger than any other, in some long grass. The sun is behind them. It looks warm. The band name in the characteristic blocky font is behind them and the title beneath in a more exotic lettering. It looks like someone wants to outrun some hype. It looks hippy, not Nietzchean. When you hear the bright colours of the keyboards, the classical guitar and notice the near total absence of blues based rock you might start thinking pop. But this is a record that aims to mess around with your expectations. It's clean but it's dirty.

It starts with a micro snare roll, getting the band's attention. And then it's straight into a light grind which sounds like a synthesiser to a post-1970 ear but is probably a combination of organ, bass and fuzz guitar. The riff will be familiar to any Kinks fan as its note for note and the same scansion as All Day and All of the Night. Jim Comes in with the chorus: "Hello, I love you. Won't you tell me your name?" Let me jump in your game. It would be moon/June except the verses open up to a running commentary of the dark, beautiful woman causing a chaos of attraction around her as she walks along in the L.A. sun. With more sex=paganism imagery we build to a scream as the fade out pours into silence and Jim is reduced to a moaned: "I want you." It's a fun song but the creep it holds for today's listener can't be gently erased. Jim's horny and says so. The summer of love has grown out into any other summer and a rock star's thoughts turn to the birds and the bees.

A soft dive from a bass guitar and we're into a smooth jazzy shuffle with bip bop guitar and synchopated organ chords so muted and staccato you wonder if it isn't actually a Fender Rhodes. Morrison comes in lightly: "She lives on Love Street. Lingers long on Love St..." Jim talks about the girl he's with and the Venice Beach lifestyle she leads, admired like the goddess in the last song but more of a hippy queen.  An acoustic guitar is added for the piano solo before Jim starts talking about the store where the creatures meet. "I guess I like it fine ... so far". Happy go lucky or usey? If feels light but we know better as he la las into the fade.

Not to Touch the Earth starts with chromatic wavy lines played on guitar, bass and organ. It's a toppling rhythm. Morrison with lines about not touching the earth and running. What follows is a list of paranoid images about mansions, outlaws, snakes 'n' such building a sense of panic and danger. This leads to a crashing dissonant end with Jim mumbling underneath: "I am the Lizard King. I can do anything. This would qualify for the "psychedelic non sequiturs" one contemporary critic complained of but for the fact that it is the only remnant of the side filling epic Celebration of the Lizard recorded for the album but not released until decades later. A version of it was caught on the Absolutely Live double set. It carries a lot more power than the studio version. Not to Touch the Earth was the longest continuous sequence that also felt like a finished song. As such it slots in fine in the original sequence, giving us a little of the raging band of the previous two albums while also feeling like it's from the same sessions as the rest of this one.

Summer's Almost Gone is a beautiful languid lament for the passing of the season. You could read it about aging or the passing of any happiness but all you only need to let it pour in with its gentle twilight beauty. Ray gets a gorgeous piano solo.

Wintertime Love is a solid oompahpah waltz with the band churning through a passable beerhall ode to the pleasures of indoor life during the cold months. It never quite feels like a novelty number as the arrangement is so dynamic and well wrought but it only really seems to be there to answer the previous song. That said I wouldn't have the album without it. Morrison coming across like Sinatra doing Mr Kite gives it a place in history.

Side one closes with a song thick with cinema. In fact the band thought so, too, as they made their own video for it despite it not being a single. An eerie high organ figure sounds as Morrison solemnly croons for us to wait until the war is over for the Unknown Soldier. The band kicks in after a breath with a forward marching rhythm as Morrison describes the horrors of war reported at the breakfast table. A break has the band marching to Morrison's sergeant goading. A pause and a gun shot. The eerie organ slinks back as we're bade make a grave for the Unknown Solider. The previous rock forward motion kicks back in with a slightly modified lyric before breaking into a joyous bright motif as Morrison screams: "It's all over. The war is over."  This still doesn't sound tokenistic or corny the way that Fixin' to Die Rag from the same era does. The dynamics of the arrangement that feel like a tightly edited film sequence prevents that. A minor masterpiece.

Spanish Caravan might have been an indulgence for Robbie Krieger's talents and left there. But it's a lot more. Opening with a beautiful Flamenco flourish of minor and 6th chords on the classical guitar it quickly forms into a brisk traditional dance. Morrison croons the lyrics about the mystic caravan from the distant past, making the flat lines undulate with form they don't deserve. The next pass at the verse is in full electric mode with Krieger and Manzarek doubling on a fuzzy new figure which rocks like its birth year. Morrison doesn't rise to a scream as he might but adds more power with his lower register croon.  It comes to the kind of crashland the album has spent a side establishing but still feels stately and adventurous all at once. Generally, if the song wasn't a Morrison-led number it was Krieger. This could go either way with band forged masterworks like Light My Fire or embarrassingly naff ditties like Running Blue. Here, the  approach to take it to the band worked. The opening sequence is lifted openly from an old Spanish piece but the band was sued for a detail from Kreiger's playing later in the song.

My Wild Love is a capella but for percussion it is entirely vocal with Morrison adopting a creaky moan in his story of a woman who tries to outrun a debt with the devil. Two melodic figures, one for each line in a couplet rise and fall while the claps and tinkling beneath give it the fell of a cross between a chain gang chant and Native American song. The rest of the band follow the melody but in wordless moaning stopping and starting according to the dynamics of the piece. Morrison doesn't start screaming until the final verse, falling back to the moan for the last lines about her endless race from the Devil. Of all the styles attempted on this most eclectic of Doors albums this is the least expected.

We Could Be So Good Together is a snarly blues rock going little further than the title with Morrison's narrator promising the world to his intended while gleefully admitting it's all lies. The band are in tight form with good interplay between the keyboards and fuzz guitar. Little more than that but it doesn't outstay its welcome and rocks fine.

Yes, The River Knows provides relief with a piano-led croon that might be about a romanticised suicide or a more metaphorical drowning in love or rejection. It strikes me that the lyric is kept vague enough to allow the meaning you want but the lusciousness of the piano and Jim's croon and the downward falling cadences don't let a lot of brightness in.

Five to One is the closest thing on this album to the two previous with its rant rant rant assault in the bass and guitar and Morrison's taunting vocal. This is the song that the irksome worshiping biography No One Here Gets Out Alive comes from. What starts as a call to action to all the youth and hippies to band against the established order and use their numbers. This rises to a searing solo from Krieger but that ends in a breakdown where Morrison describes something more likely, the hippies falling into dejection at the greater society leaving them to rot unless they throw off their floral crowns, join the mainstream and make it in their prime. There's no revolution here, it's all broken ideals and sellout. The Doors were no more hippies than the Velvet Underground and this sour (but appealing) joke on the wistful love generation that they will end up as war fodder or wise up as consuming drudges is as clear a statement as any the band made to their generation,

The lightest sounding of all the Doors's records, Waiting for the Sun contains this kind of middle finger hiding in the family portrait more than a few times. Breezy to strident it is never less than easy to listen to and belies the purported end of Jim's notebook songs to produce a band that could start from scratch with a developed (if not quite new) sound. With a renewed vigour for wicked tongue lashing and arch jokes on the summer of love and then with added sheen in the arrangements and production achievements Waiting for the Sun showed the world a band that could shed its old scales and reveal a streamlined new skin ready for shrewder business. Then Jim got drunk. But that's another story.