TALKING HEADS' REMAIN IN LIGHT @ 45

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

KINDA KINKS @ 60

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE WHO BY NUMBERS @ 50

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

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

Side One.

Slip Kid

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

However Much I Booze

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

Squeezebox

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

Dreaming from the Waist

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

Imagine a Man

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

Side Two

Success Story

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

They Are All in Love

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

Blue Red and Grey

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

How Many Friends

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

In a Hand or a Face

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

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

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

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

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

Rolling Stones No. 2 @ 60

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE WHO'S MY GENERATION @ 60

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

"Out in the street!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BOWIE'S YOUNG AMERICANS @ 50

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE BEATLES' HELP @ 60

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE BYRDS' MR TAMBOURINE MAN @ 60

It starts so slightly but it sounds like a wave. A jangling riff rings, joined by a bass that slides up the neck, a tambourine shakes and as the drums rattle in the sound is overwhelmed by harmonies so pure and filled with light that they sound like they were singing in Florence in the 16th century. A clue to the source material comes in after the chorus as Jim McGuinn (also playing the Rickenbacker 12 string) enters with his best Dylan voice. A single verse from the many in the original is sung before the chorus re-enters with its brilliance and Bach style symmetry is evoked before the opening riff and bass slide play unto the fade. What had been an aching ode to a wandering life of discovery and daily adventure became as tightly packaged as a tin of beans and as remote from the legumes in the pods. It was like a tv commercial of a Dylan song. Dylan loved it. You could dance to it. It's meteoric chart performance brought him income he didn't have to work for. If Dylan's original was poetic and poignant, this one was all teen marketing, playing back the tasty bits with extra sugar in bite size form. Also, it's completely beautiful as music and sounds so much of its time that the charm and exquisite textures reach across decades to delight anyone who hears it. 

It got me in the mid '70s when I was foraging around for '60s sounds because the radio was almost entirely crud. It was on a compilation record from the middle of that decade. There were all sorts of stuff on the sides but The Byrd doing Mr Tambourine Man soared out past the crackles and surface hiss and filled the room. So, I liked the Byrds.

It was halfway through the following decade when I found my own copy. Like The Kinks, The Byrds back catalogue was slow to make it through to reissues. I snapped this one up as soon as I found a reprint in a shop. I was surprised when I got it home and put it on.

After the title track opens the album we plunge straight into the Gene Clark original Feel a Whole Lot Better with its hyped up 12 string riff lifted from The Searchers' Needles and Pins. It's a good contrast within a limited pallet that makes the album feel like it is going places. A slight change in tempo brings the pace down for the cool of Dylan's Spanish Harlem Incident. Again, the band shift the song into the teen market with a constant jangling guitar and bright harmonies. You Won't have to Cry is a Clark/McGuinn co-write and follows a more Beatlesque path, adding enough distinction to warrant its strident presentation.

It's Here Without You that stops the traffic, though. The minor key riff and tight harmonies move with a sombre purpose that suggest (without remotely sounding like) Gregorian chant. The middle eight breaks out within the arrangement of harmony forward vocals, ending on a major interval before returning to the quiet pain of the verse melody in a shift that still sends shivers. It's a small masterpiece that would inform a strand of melancholic songs that the band would excel in despite the overall leanings (and record company) pushing them toward happier sounds. When Gene Clark left a few albums on, he took songs like this away and the remaining writers in the band had to follow the template.

The Bells of Rhymney is a soaring rendition of a Welsh folk song, revived by Pete Seeger and taken into the celestium of folk rock greatness. This arrangement has the honour of inspiring George Harrison (who had inspired McGuinn to take up the 12 string Rickenbacker) to pinch it with a little modification for one of his songs on Rubber Soul, If I Needed Someone. The final moments are a wordless vocal climb against the 12 string flow, an ascension.

Side two starts with Dylan's All I Really Want to Do and, while it feels more perfunctory than Mr Tambourine Man, it yet keeps the band in touch with what was making them famous. Another sombre Gene Clark number I Knew I'd Want You dispenses with the band's now signature initial riff, plunging straight into the band with vocal harmonies. The rise at the end of the middle eight when David Crosby climbs in falsetto over the unison vocals of McGuinn and Clark is pure shimmering joy.

Jackie De Shannon's Don't Doubt Yourself, Babe follows with a kind of Bo Diddley jangle and perky folk rock that ends up sounding like the Byrds doing a school trip singalong. Chimes of Freedom is another Dylan workout and joins All I Really Want to Do in the band's second-tier Bob covers. We'll Meet Again is the kind of thing the Byrds would try on the next album with their goofy cover of Oh Susannah, an awkward attempt at making an old standard into a groovy beat band rocker. It falls flat on its face. It's not as embarrassing as Oh Susannah but if it ever worked, the effectiveness was locked in a dark room back in 1965.

That said, this is one of the most indicative debut albums of its era, not only presaging the next three LPs in character and tone but reaching beyond the band's abandonment of the cute kings-of-jingle-jangle role as they explored deeper expression. For me, hearing it after a few others, I was surprised to find out how playable it was. The only really icky moment is the final track and that's not a difficult skip. Their sound is one of its decade's central points of gravity, influencing all other rock bands at some point, even the one they took their inspiration from. The title track and Clark number I Knew I'd Want You were backed by the Wrecking Crew with McGuinn on his signature 12 string and the three vocalists at the mic. The rest, however, is all the band that took it on tour.

To listen to this LP is to engage with a rare moment when a group that formed from an idea of what a rock band was coincided with the ideas of an A&R department of a record company. From the bright and joyous electric 12 that lifts all the songs to the cathedral like harmonies (Clark and McGuinn in unison and Crosby descanting) were a source point that not even The Beatles quite found (they repaid the good turn on Rain which, in the best style, didn't copy The Byrds, just showed their influence). All the tiny details gathered in a happy weave that proved stronger than the simple sum of parts and conquered the ears and sensibilities of a generation. Do yourself a favour.