1968 at 50: THE WHITE ALBUM REDUX

I've already written about this one here. It's a record that means a lot to me and had a big enough impact for me to judge every other album I've heard since by its standard. What I'll be talking about here is the 50th anniversary re-release in its Super Deluxe form: book in slip cover with 6 CDs and a Blu-Ray with hi-res stereo and mono mixes as well as two formats of 5.1 surround mixes.

New Stereo Mix
As with Pepper the bass, drums and lead vocals are in the centre with left/right panning done to other elements as well as in some effects like reverb. What results is a freshened experience. Partly this is because the mix has been created from elements early in the process, yet un-compromised by the track bouncing process, partly by some deft EQ, effects and panning, and partly, simply, because it sounds new. Space has been increased which comes into play in tracks like Long Long Long which no longer sounds like an afterthought following the storm of Helter Skelter, the air around the almost choral vocal harmonies in Revolution #1 are like rays of light. There is some loss in the modernisation: Helter Skelter's bass has lost its obnoxious punch which it needs (it does sound more now but I miss the violence of it). The clean and shiny 2009 remasters are still available, however, and if these displease we can always go back to them.

Surround Mixes
A far more immersive experience that the Pepper 5.1 as the main soundstage is kept solidly in the front with ambience and some stray elements coming in from behind your ears. Helter Skelter's reduced bass is a worry here as the point of making a 5.1 is that the .1 part is a subwoofer that can take all the subsonic joy it can eat. On the good side tracks like Warm Gun with its swirling guitars and dreamy vocals or Back in the USSR with its big guitar crunch and Beach Boy doowops. Of particular note is Julia. I never cared that much for it as it seemed to just murmur in the background before the side ended (and my original has a sticky scratch in it). Here Lennon's fragile aching vocal seems to drift to the centre of the room and make its case like a plaintive ghost. It sends shivers.

Esher Demos
Some of these appeared on Anthology 3 in the '90s but here they are given full length and pristine audio quality. It's an unplugged White Album! Songs that didn't make the album will cause the most stir and you can hear why. Paul's Junk and George's Circles offer high melancholy that could have easily lifted the record or a later Beatles LP. But there isn't enough for a third disc. And you have to wonder why George had to give Sour Milk Sea away. These are demos but they are multitrack (George had a 4-track reel to reel setup) and began with good sound. Now they are available and I couldn't be happier. Put the discs on as a summer unplugged session and luxuriate.

Sessions
Revolution - The full initial recording without the later concrete musique moments or mama dadda chanting that make sense of the claim that Revolution #9 was made from it. You can find that on Youtube. There are plenty of moments that you'll know from the big soundscape, quite surprisingly in some cases.

Honey Pie - The version of this with just the instrumental track is far more beautiful that I would have expected. The clarinet group arrangement really soars. Without the cute vocal it's just a lovely piece of music.

Good Night with guitar and three part harmonies is more beautiful than I've ever considered it. John's finger style on the Casino really sparkles.

Helter Skelter version 1 is the full take of the one that was on Anthology 3. It has a kind of creepiness to it and works ok but it's important to remember that the fabled 27 minute version is just a longer version of this slow thumping thing with breakdowns and cover versions. I'd like to hear that once. I don't care that much that it isn't on here.

The later faster version with MacCartney playing around with live echo and the full thrash version sounds bigger and angrier. The way is clear to the album version but this is a great near miss.

Can You Take Me Back has been available in muddy dubs for a while. Hearing it here is shiny fresh condition. The way it comes in on the album between Cry Baby Cry and Revolution #9 is big and spooky. This full context isn't. It's great to hear but I still prefer that eensy eerie fragment between two strange tracks.

The Book
Honestly, I would have just bought the book if that's all there had been. Essays and articles on the album, it's context, design, packaging and songs and recording are pithy and informative and enriched with a lot of evocative photography. There are enlarged copies of the colour portraits and poster from the gatefold LP. The articles about the context and work are enlightening. It's fun, it's beautiful.

This is just a skim and I'm sorry if it has sounded like more advertising at times but I am that much its fan. And skimming is really the best you can hope for from one pass on such a gigantic monolith. But I do have a few thoughts in closing.

Even the toughest of fans have argued for an ideal single disc version of this album. I wince to hear what they leave out. There are strong and weak tracks but I've never made one of these "improved" lists. One of the points of this album's appeal is its excess, there's just too much of it but it's the best surfeit in rock music history. From musique concrete to cute pop to stark and scary dreamscapes and horror rides and spooky lullabies, this one has it. I first heard it before I was told I should think about it as a band breaking up so to me it was the apex of their output. I though Abbey Road was lovely but too slick. This felt more purposed regardless what the truth was. The obvious camaraderie evident here in the sessions and demo recordings belie the official story so that now we not only have the best extension we could have wished for. What is often my favourite album feels fresher than it did when it was the least dated LP they produced (yes, including Abbey Road). It feels like a new release. I can't say better than that.

And a Happy New Year to ye!

1968 at 50: BEGGAR'S BANQUET - THE ROLLING STONES

The way it's told, this is the one where they broke from the bubble of the Beatles, the true Stones emerged, purged from their flunked leap at psychedelia, as the finally formed Greatest Rock n Roll Band in the World. This was the first of the big four that would forever define expectations of them. This and Let it Bleed and Altamont made them the meanest rock supermen on the globe. But there are problems with this story.

First, The Stones did benefit from the Beatles but they began and continued as themselves with records that the fabs would never have made like Satisfaction, 19th Nervous Breakdown or Jumping Jack Flash. It's not about capability here, it's about motive and will. Beggar's Banquet isn't a band taking the blue pill and soaring into their real selves, it's an album of developing musicians and writers restablishing what is important to them and letting go.

And think about it, most of these songs are dominated by acoustic guitar. Some recent commentary has suggested the influenced of The Band but I'm not interested in them enough to want to find out. What I hear is a mature approach to what was present on the first Stones album but now feels both relaxed and confident. It's not the first Stones album. It's the next. But it's also brilliant and tuckloads of fun.

It begins in what would have sounded primeval back in the year. Jungle percussion and the shrieks of a preverbal people. Suddenly there's a piano and a Mick Jagger introducing himself as a man of wealth and taste who then tells his tale of influencing the development of the human race from a long long year ago to shout out "who killed the Kennedys?" The chorus hopes you guessed his name but it's in the title of Sympathy for the Devil.

The progress of this one from a gentle folk strum to the frenetic and freaky anthem it became is documented in a film by Jean Luc Godard called variously One Plus One and Sympathy for the Devil. Damned and misunderstood, the movie's mix of fictional urban guerillas and the real Rolling Stones annoys both the politically active and fans of the band. That's kind of intentional but it's a lot less deep than many who whinge about it claim. All you need to do is watch: various street level would-be revolutionaries go through increasingly detached and meaningless military style training to the commands recorded on a tape, or, from the right, dictate from an already printed dogma book, an aloof Eve Democracy is interviewed while strolling through a wood, giving replies that are either cryptic or feather light. And so on. Meanwhile, a super group who don't really need to get out of bed in the morning work tirelessly on their new cultural bombshell taking it to heights of power it was nowhere near at the beginning. Urban guerillas with nothing to lose tread water while the supposedly idle rock stars work in concert to fashion something new: what is wrong with this picture?

This is not part of the song as heard on the album but it's cool knowing about it. One of the greatest album-openers has a disruptive movie that bears witness to its gestation. Could stop there, really.

But then you'd miss out on the poignant No Expectations which could reflect on many things the band members were going through but, featuring some sublime slide work from the soon to be doomed Brian Jones, I'll give it to the member who really wasn't going to pass through there again.

Dear Doctor is the kind of country twanger that Jagger used to self-consciously lampoon with lots of yeps and whoops. That happens here, too, but everyone's in on it and it's played with such conviction that it's hard to resist singing the harmony or laughing. Parachute Woman takes a tough acoustic blues figure and a guitary vocal tone, lets what will become Keith Richards' signature hot clean lead snake through it and a lyric that pushes sexual innuendo so far that the attempt could only be called tokenistic. Jigsaw Puzzle adds a Dylanesque whimsy to the same kind of acoustic electric interplay and takes the dramatic low end slide from Brian Jones (a lot meaner than No Expectations) and augments it with a screaming high note in the key line of the chorus which sounds epic. The side ends with the bad trip falling into a kind of controlled cacophony that is altogether beautiful. In vinyl terms the side is two long songs with smaller pieces between and a sense of zero surface space wasted.

Side two begins with one of Keith's cassette figures where an acoustic is fed through a cassette player and overdriven to sound like something that is neither electric or acoustic. Add Jones on both sitar and droning tamboura and a giant spacey drum that might be a tom or a snare without the snare. The I-VI chord figure breaks for a chorus that both extends and opposes it. The fade out intensifies with drones on the tamboura and a shennai and a raga like figure on the piano. It's hard to hear where the power is coming from as the vocal is so distant and the guitars not electric and turned up to "stadium". The truth is that the wholeness of the unit is pushing forth in a way that already announced itself on the previous side but is here offered in concentrated form. This is the model of Rolling Stones rock singles for the next few years and will be regarded as the Stones sound, eclipsing the half decade of earnest labour before it.

The next song is a blues done as nakedly as the band would ever do. Jagger is probably erring on the side of vocal impression but it is a sincere take. Keith Richards' guitar is spidery and full by turns. There's some band history in the way here, though, and it's superficially unpleasant. The white invitation cover art credits the song to Jagger and Richards. This was the record company's intervention. The original (the toilet with graffiti) had the song correctly as by The Rev. Robert Wilkins but this didn't make it on to the song list. The problem is that the white cover was the official one for decades until the '90s cd rerelease reinstated the credit. This has apparently been rectified as far as royalties go but for any fan who took up the band's own enthusiastic recommendations of their influences it might have felt like the most contemptuous betrayal. The second aspect of the record company's clumsiness is that the substituted cover art with its dominance of white created exactly the opposite impression the band had intended: instead of a decidedly Stones-like taunt it looked like more Beatles copying.

Stray Cat Blues starts with some teasing electric licks and some strange vocalising from Jagger. When it breaks into its loping groove with weighty piano and feline guitar scratches it's clear what the intro referred to. In an album of consolidation points for the band's image this song flashes more strongly than most. It's about groupies, young groupies. The age of fifteen is mentioned. "It ain't no capital crime" moans Jagger. Maybe not but it's a lyric no one would get away with today. I listen to the businesslike groove and the delicious guitar tone and pretend the words are in another language. I know that's wrong.

Factory Girl is a more sincere country number than the one on the first side. A boy waits for his girl who works at the factory. A real violin soars sweetly and a mandolin on a mellotron tremolos around the vocal melody. It's more ambience than heartfelt but it's never unwelcome in the sequence.

Salt of the Earth begins with the sense of moment. Strident acoustic chords polished with hot clean electric arpeggios. Keith's strangled voice enters bidding us drink to the workers, foot soldiers to the humble figures suggested by the title. Jagger's welcome takeover of the lead vocal. A brief minor key bridge brings us back to the chorus but it's been building to something huge. By the time it comes around again it's sung by a gospel choir in a homecoming procession. After a bar's gap the drums kick us into the accelerating finale with more heavenly singing and Nicky Hopkins going for it on piano and Charlie Watts crashing into the fade. If the devil had the upper hand at the beginning it's the common folk who present it at the end.

Again, I don't think this is the Stones wresting free from the shadow of the dominant Beatles as much as regrouping after disaster and finding their strength had been there all along. If the self-styled bad boy stance has more articulation it's just from honing. They had emerged from the iffy position of flower power to embrace their real selves in greater songs, in cinema and a will to take the show to ever greater stages. After the medieval tights and recorders of the previous year it must have felt like opening a window.





Listening notes - I've owned a copy of this as a released vinyl record, a cd, a hi-res SACD and a hi-res remastered download. The latter is the freshest sounding I've ever heard it. The sound stage is articulate, the acoustic guitars sparkle, the vocals are in the room and Jimmy Miller's career-changing production has never sounded so alive. The original album and earliest cd releases were mastered slightly too slow. When I first heard the pitch corrected SACD it felt like a new album.

1968 at 50: THE KINKS ARE THE VILLAGE GREEN PRESERVATION SOCIETY

I had a few runs at this one and I ended up erasing all of them. Some were failed attempts at putting the album in context with the rock music bombshells delivered towards the end of 1968 like the White Album or Beggar's Banquet. Other approaches tried to incise the tracks and examine their vitals. In the end they all started feeling fake as they didn't have anything to do with the way I found the record and how it got into me and changed everything.

First, I didn't hear the whole thing until about 2007 when I found a discounted copy of the 3 disc deluxe cd release and thought, "why not?" Apart from Animal Farm I hadn't heard a bar of any of the tracks. I loved that one but it was like the great singles in that I assumed it was surrounded by filler in what looked dangerously like a concept album.

I'd got into the '90s rereleases of the earlier LPs on cd but it wasn't until I got a later box set that I really started listening to them as whole albums. There's a general progress to them which is typical of all the innovative U.K. bands of the '60s: the first sprinkle a few awkward originals among the covers of the live set and then, disc by disc, the best of this finds form as the central songwriter emerges and by the middle years you get albums that strive to cohere, that become whole statements.

By '66's Face to Face, The Kinks were putting out such statements, song cycles that told of their lives and times with all the energy of the first albums but with increasing confidence and artistry. By the following year's Something Else song form itself was being challenged and arrangements more adventurous, the songs deeper. By this one, The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society, they are a band in total control of their skills and, while there is a little extra coherence in lyric subject matter and some deft use of motif, this is less a rock opera than a good solid album.

Is that faint praise? Well, most albums by anyone have filler tracks or embarrassing ones or others still that feel like aural indigestion, the skippability of a record that drives all teenagers to hear their favourite records as edits. Good solid records get left on ... like this one.

Why? Because from the opening declaration with its basic but cruisy harmonies to the stories of steam trains as cranky old die hard rockers to the joys and silliness of family life as seen in photo albums to local "witches" resigned cats and so many more flawed and strongly drawn characters, the set never feels overburdened by self importance, never crowded. Each successive song feels welcome and their sequence is perfect. After the breeze and humour of the opening track Do You Remember Walter thumps to life with a tale of bittersweet friendship drift. Johnny Thunder's spidery acoustic guitars seem light and  relieving Picture Book's bounce. And so on, every new handshake and smile is enough for you to remember a name. It's the best school fete you've ever been to.

On the music front there is something so barely detectable that it might be nothing more than the kind of figure that all songwriters happen upon and for a time use in almost everything they write. It's a descending arpeggio, think of the notes of a chord played one after the other rather than together. The bugle tune Taps uses this for most of its length. Ray Davies puts it everywhere, not just an arpeggio but one falling through the notes from the highest to the lowest. It's the banjo-like figure on the electric guitar in the first bars of the opening song that feel like a sunny day. It's heartfelt in Walter and closes all hope with resignation: "mem-or-ies of people stay the same". It's the ba babba dah ba ba ba of the chorus in Johnny Thunder. It's stately in the main riff to Animal Farm. It's light and playful in Phenomenal Cat and in Monica it's open ended. These are just the examples I recall at first thought. I would bet there are many more, maybe buried in bass lines or formed by the interplay of vocals and instruments, but these are enough. This is not like the more classical use of motif Pete Townshend would use the following year for Tommy, an avowed rock opera, it's much more intimate, something you might only realise after many listens. It's another thing that lifts the album from routine practice, just another bunch of songs, and puts it on its own shelf.

Village Green has a lot to say about memory. The premise of the title track is the band identifying with a list of causes and imaginary community groups following a two line pattern of "we are ..." and then "God save..." At first the litany things from the past like china cups and things they want stopped like office blocks give a worthiness to the song but it's more about the virtues of being involved than the individual institutions or qualities (did a successful rock band from the '60s really value virginity?) The distance between old friends in time and space in Do You Remember Walter is painful, alternating between sadness and anger against inevitability. Village Green the song is a mix of tourist's idea of English quaintness and a story about a lost love who has long been in a marriage that seems a happy one. The boy who left town and has come back in a could of denial. Wicked Annabella is a kind of local myth used to terrify the children into eating their greens and going to bed early. The Phenomenal Cat remembers the pleasure of his youthful travels as he lazes into obesity and age. Family holidays and local fairs and anything else that might well stir the recollection of the good old days. But there's no nostalgia here.

The old steam train who doesn't want to grow up and accept his place in history is as deluded as the guy in Village Green. The adult recalling Annabella is stuck with the false image. The beauty in the life described in Animal Farm feels like a poignant or even desperate fantasy. Big Sky has God as an apathetic observer. All of My Friends Were There is a story of a public embarrassment and is related without fondness.

If anything this album is a warning against nostalgia from a Britain whose unconvincing attempt at the summer of love was starting to look like a winter of rioting and mud. The thing is that the package is delivered with such warmth. The smiles are wry and the frustration clanging but if there's wistfulness it is spiced with disappointment. And served up in some of the most gorgeous songs Davies ever wrote with a band (the last album of the original lineup) at its creative peak working as a strong solid unit. And the coherence stretches for days as, despite a greater range of musical traditions observed (from proto metal to music hall to more of Davies' always puzzling love of calypso) the record feels whole, a journey of stories rather than the reverse. It is, for me and many others, the apex of the band and it's chief songwriter.

So what was the everything I said this record changed?  Mainly it's to do with how my view of the Kinks changed. Having revered Davies' songwriting since I found it during the punk wars I had given him so little credit for a greater vision than a few sides of singles on a compilation album. It made me go back into the catalogue and hear the motivation in the earlier albums. It made me give up on the notion that great albums are made of consistently great songs but can as easily achieve that greatness through expert sequencing, highlighting the strengths of tracks that might have been lost if given too much or too little prominence. If anything, Village Green reminds me not so much of the albums around it as the novels written by writers with indestructible senses of vocation. Forget putting it next to Sergeant Pepper when you can jam it in with George Orwell's Coming Up For Air, a starkly anti-nostalgic tale of a crushing return. Village Green changed the way I think of albums full stop.

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.

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.

1968 at 50: A SAUCERFUL OF SECRETS - PINK FLOYD

Calling a famous band's album transitional is almost a guarantee that most fans will drop it after a single listen, if that. We want to hear all of our favourite music at full strength. Some, like New Order's Movement or Led Zeppelin's Houses of the Holy can get repatriated by the fanbase over time. But Pink Floyd, who really only made transitional albums between Piper and Meddle seem doomed to a section of its timeline as lost years. If you listen from Piper onwards you will hear nothing but continuity building to a clear development. Then again, when you have and then suddenly don't have one of rock history's great human enigmas that can kind of get in the way. So, this is a post-Syd album (even though he's on it) in a way that Obscured by Clouds or Atom Heart Mother aren't. Until that's dealt with the record gets slotted into the post Morrison Doors albums as a curio for the completist. But there's a lot more here than that.

Let There be More Light opens with a pacy R&B guitar riff weirded by a chromatic organ wash. It settles into a half pace thud before Waters enters with his soft vocals in a chant that breaks into a more panic-ed acid rock blast. And back and on. It's a sci-fi story of an alien race descending on earth to inspire us to evolve. After a namecheck of the Beatle's Lucy the track continues to a fairly formless instrumental fade that cannot peak.

Remember a Day features Syd on slide which adds worlds of atmosphere. Ex-Beatles engineer Norman Smith, returning to produce from Piper provides the tom tom thump that Nick Mason couldn't arrive at which lends a solid loping quality. A cinematic piano part is gently lowered on top by Rick Wright who also lends his smooth and airy vocal to this song about childrens' play and imagination. This is the song from the album that appeared on the Relics compilation and, until the record rose from its obscurity as half of a twofer (A Nice Pair) to a decades later release in its own right, was the sole evidence of the set. The eerie beauty of it promised an album composed entirely of it but it's the only moment like it here.

Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun begins with a murmuring bass line, ceremonial tom toms, vibraphone and a near whispered vocal fro mWaters. The cryptic lyric suggests a kind of legendary link between the ancient world and space travel (but really it might as well just be nice phrases following each other). There's no real development to this one but the atmospherics from the continued interplay of the organ, bass and whispered repetition of the phrase "the heart of the sun" give it a dark and pleasing flow. This is the only track that all five members played on. That doesn't mean they were all there at the same session (it was recorded between Piper and this one with Syd and finished off with Gilmour).

Corporal Clegg bursts to life as a guitar heavy dose of psychedelia mixing yelling guitars and a theatrically nasty lead vocal (Nick Mason in his only sung vocal in the band's recording output). The irony of wartime heroism and the personal devastation it wrought in families is typical of the themes of late '60s Britpop where the creative controls had been given to the bands themselves instead of their management. We go from Clegg's pathetic achievement to a choral presentation of his mother's gin-soaked pride to a kazoo-heavy knees-up. Overlong but well played and mark-hitting.

 The title track begins after you've given up listening for it and then lifts into a sci-fi landscape of chromatic organ shimmers and low level noise. This fades under a rising tribal tom tom onslaught which brings its own atonal soundscape. That folds under a lengthy choral and wonky noise fest which closes with a major third. This might have been avant-rock but it was already well behind progressions in orchestral music like Stockhausen's or the freer jazz movements and, even within the greater rock area, already snagged by the like of Zappa and Beefheart. For all that it's an easy twelve minutes of atmosphere  created by well engineered recording. Like Interstellar Overdrive on the debut this was a kind of mid point between the jamming live shows and the freedom of the studio. If the tale it told had no plot that wasn't going to stop the band revisiting this territory and would take years and albums until the sublime Echoes on 1971's Meddle established the strengths of blending explorative textures with confident musicianship. For now it was the bit of the album where the tab you took on side one kicked in and every squeak and thrung made perfect sense.

See Saw shimmers with jazz chords, piano, vibes, mellotron, the big late '60s bass and guitar. Rick Wright's pleasant lead vocals (like Syd in a torpor). Siblings growing up and drifting apart after the closeness of the realm of the family. Occasional jazzy interventions in the rhythm never jar and the flow is maintained. While the lyric lifts it above a mood piece the swamp of audio effects like flanging, tremolo and massive reverb keep this one in the late '60s never to emerge. You can hear the way to great gig in the sky but it's too buried in its times.

And now we must address it, the Effervescing Elephant in the room. Jugband Blues is the only obvious indication that Syd Barrett was still there. From its stark opening with guitar and echoey vocals, through a thumping refrain to a real Salvation Army band and back down to a fragmented mess this is a capsule of Syd's progress from the cheery wit of the opening about him being there but not being there to rhymes that sound like he's making them up on the spot. Then there's a brief wistful moment where he seems lost and then there's a ragged jolly bit about not caring and then the Salvation Army band comes in with a splodgy refrain and then there's a wandering psychedelic dissonance which ends as though cut with a scapel. After a little silence the acoustic guitar drifts back in with Syd asking questions and ending on: "And what exactly is a joke." He's not smiling. He means it. Does that make it funny? We're left with silence. Nothing like the self appreciative calls and laughter that would interlard the White Album later in the year which told listeners that everyone should be in on it. But here it's nothing, the same silence that Syd heard the evening that the rest of the band decided not to pick him up on the way to the gig.

And then it's over and the wild-eyed scarecrow with the fright wig has left the building, stumbling without direction into forty years of night. Actually, Syd heads off back to his Chelsea loft and paints. And strums chords and writes lyrics, recording two LPs that veer from brilliance to distintegration before he heads back home to Cambridge and his family who help him manage his schizophrenia. The rest of the band, to their eternal credit, ensure that he is looked after financially, getting a guernsey on every Floyd compilation album and royalties from his songs they still play live. Invaded by journalists and then knuckle-headed fans who are quick with cameras but slow with learning about privacy he goes to the shop and makes bizarre furniture in his house and then dies at sixty, affluent and voluntarily obscure. The record label keeps releasing legacy-violating albums of outtakes and failures from the Black Lagoon but anyone who loves a bit of Syd leaves them in the shop.

After that The Pink Floyd becomes just Pink Floyd and they get into it, experimenting and carving off everything that fails until you get to Meddle's crafted songs and epic and then the one that hangs them on the stars of the firmament, Dark Side, after which time they will be able to endure the ridicule of the punks and indifference of the post punks and receive visits from the newly curious for evermore. But for a moment here there was real conflict and through a couple of LP sides of assured psychedelia you can hear the instant of severance, the cracking of execution and the silence that made the promise.

1968 at 50: ODESSEY AND ORACLE - THE ZOMBIES

There was a shadow in my awareness of music as I crossed from twelve to thirteen. I was a classical fan and heard most of any other music as noise, the stuff that got through the way that the juddering grind of roadworks can get through a poorly insulated cinema. But some did get through and when they did it was sneaky. I noticed them less as music than glimpsed scenes. The cold doom of Riders of the Storm whispered out of the Sunday morning oldies radio, showing me murderous hitchhikers and sweet families on a rainy afternoon drive. And one morning it was A song called Time of the Season. A chilly Latin beat and a kind of ghostly overlapping vocal of seduction. Not a sexy seduction but a sleazy one.

What's your name? Who's your daddy? Is he rich? Is he rich like me?

I knew the song was old but not how old. I didn't imagine a band in flower power kaftans but a single wax faced destroyer with slicked back hair and a close-fitting suit. He emerged from the shade of the terrace with a jaded smile and folded himself under the skin of the pretty young woman standing alone there. He would consume her from the inside out in the muted light of his chic apartment and rest, exhausted, recharging for the next one.

I think I got the image from the guy on the cover art of Frank Zappa's Weasles Ripped My Flesh, a record whose atonality and jazziness scared me. I don't know why I associated the character in the Zombies song with that image but it happened. Thereafter, the zombies had a cache for the sinister borne entirely of a casual misassociation of mine. So, when the hits 'n' memories station played She's Not There or Tell Her No they came from the dark end of the stage. That's before you get to the band name.

Decades later I picked up a cheapo CD compilation which opened the image out to reveal a British invasion sound stirred with a little jazz and even some classical influences. I'd also picked up the repute that their troubled magnum opus might have rivalled Sgt Pepper for breakthroughs. The comp had a few tracks from the album so, finally, in the teens of the 21st century, I found a copy.

Care of Cell 44 I already knew and enjoyed but here it was in context as an album opener. A few plinks of tack piano and were strolling through a typical late '60s four on the floor sunny day song. Then the title occurs to you and you start listening to the words. Colin Blunstone's grownup choirboy tenor lights above the jaunty Britpop and the chorus bursts out of a humming vocal quartet into a brilliant high spot with harmonies but Penny Lane this ain't. He's talking about his girl who's getting out of prison today. It's not so much the prison aspect but the driving optimism of the performance without so much as a glance at the elephant there in the corner: in prison for what? I'm biased, I suppose, but given the era my thoughts hurtle straight to Mary Bell (Google is thy friend and sage). And, of course, is it even a prison?

A Rose for Emily takes the tacks out of the piano. Blunstone pipes in with the tale of a lady whose roses nurtured the love of everyone who picked them but never received one herself. Loveless from youth to death, her pride protecting her from love's pain, Emily has lived entirely for the distant pleasure of other people. The chamber choir and piano arrangement and sweetness of the melody belie that, while this does not have the nightmarish storm of an Eleanor Rigby, this song does not let up in its recounting of human futility. It's sad but it's also severe. There's a real need for all that Mozartian pez candy in the harmonies.

Maybe After He's Gone begins with a minor key vocal melody countered with a descending bass that bursts into a bright chorus featuring the title. The plaintive verses insist on the narrator's memories of a love, the minor descent telling us of their futility. The chorus is all hope and choral backing vocals ... but still futile. After a stark, simpler-backed admission of dark loneliness the chorus repeats with diminishing backing finally ending in an acapella call and response that sounds like his own voice just repeating his futility.

Beechwood Park comes in with a very similar counterpoint but with a gentler mix of organ and guitar through a Leslie speaker. Blunstone's chalky tenor leads us through verses of beautiful memories that end in the the dark in Beechwood Park. A major key middle eight tells of his compulsion to return to the memories before the chorus circles back with the distance of the time. He's longing but enjoys the melancholy without descending into the madness of morbid jealousy of the previous song. Bittersweet, not just bitter.

Brief Candles leads a vocal with a gentle but richly melodic line on the piano with the voice doubles. A man resists the truth of the need for the affair to end as the woman telling him this tenses at the table and tries to work out how to exit. The chorus speaks for both identically as they think of themselves as the brief candles of Macbeth's soliloquy. A beautiful song with a chorus that rouses even though it shouldn't. The verses, incidentally, are sung by the three different vocalists in the band. Blunstone's chalky choir tenor is easy to pick but the others are difficult to tell from him. Telling.

The old side one ends with the first of two epics left to close LP sides. Hung Up on a Dream begins with a key-stretching piano intro. The band swell behind it until a cymbal crash gets us under way. It can be easy to forget how steadily rocking this song is, given the ethereal choiring and Summer of Love fantasising it goes into. The chalky tenor enters describing a world made flowers, vibrations and neon. He understands that he might well just be hung up on the dream and it's easy to forget, as he was barging in past you that he is remembering this, not predicting it. With its cinematic climaxes and restarts, lush with thick Mellotron string sections, gleaming clean electric guitars and otherworldly backing vocals it soars and spreads more like proto-proggers the Moody Blues than anyone else. But lingering on the mind of the listener as the angelic aahs and crashing cymbals play us to the final trailing Mellotron chord that the dreamer will never regain the ecstasy of the dream. The silence at the end of side one is thick with the most gorgeous despair you will hear in a 60s album.

Side two kicks off with a Mellotron flute piece a little sweeter than the one that drew life from the Beatles' Strawberry Fields Forever. But that's  ok as we've cleared all that darkness of the first side and we're back in the late '60s. A beautiful wassailing chorus bursts into bright counterpoint singing of a girl's beauty in the different seasons. The solo vocal verses observe her a little more cynically as she walks by with the accessories of adulthood like Dolly Bird dresses and diamonds. We proceed through seasons that bloom in variations of the opening chorus and the verses age and sage her until the final one starts under water with the piano playing a strange offbeat until both make their way from the right channel to the middle as the charges of ephemerality are again drowned by the carol singers who blithely sing the seasons on until the last word is heard on the flutes that began us.

I Want Her She Wants Me is every band's choice of the fusion of now and then, the harpsichord. But this isn't the blues soloing of Ray Manzarek on Love Me Two Times, it's a far more comfy arpeggio rolling over the bass and drums. Blunstone coos his story of an uncertain love exploding into the joy of mutuality. A little minor key reminder that all was not always well and we're back with such confidence that we end with countless affirmations of the title. Two minutes and fifty seconds of bliss.

This Will be Our Year features Blunstone singing sweetly over thumping Beatlesque piano. A brass section comes in for what sounds like the best pub singalong of 1968 (before Hey Jude came out, that is, so there wasn't a lot of time). The handclapping last drinks is brought down by Blunstone's persistently melancholic vocal timbre but lifted by his riffing on the opportunities given him by the fruity chord progression. It sounds like a closer but there will be more.

And stranger. With a grinding frown straight out of the first side The Butcher's Tale (Western Front 1914) starts with a harmonium vamp that feels like trying to walk in mud while every step sucks your foot into the void. Some eerie booms and echoes enclose the chords before the vocals enter, sour and tired but with the perfect diction of someone whose voice must be heard. Bassist Chris White sang this song of his penning after failing to get Blunstone to do it. The performance is perfect, plaintive and angered drawn from the best of Brecht and Weill soaring to a heart rending cry of the shaking that all who face such horror must suffer. Rod Argent's harmonium part mixes the grinding that anything more energetic that one chord per bar makes of the instrument (generally powered by foot pumps) and a J.S. Bach like grandeur.

Too grim? Well now it's back over the channel to Swinging London to a four-on-floor flurry of parties and happenings where the roll call of names choirs out under the chorus as Blunstone's vigorous but pure tenor repeats the chorus: they are friends of mine, friends of mine. The second verse has a angelic descant like the one in Dream but it's much chirpier. It starts it charts  it ends.

Which brings us back to Do.

Dundun Dun ts ahh. Dundun Dun ts ahh. Time of the Season announces its sexiness before the first line. What could be an arch hedonist's sigh at the sight of beauty in the dark or the daunting thrill of a corridor to adventures over voting age announces that we're in for something fresh and strange. It is both stately and depraved. Blunstone's vocal enters wearing a cape, announcing that it is "the time of the season when love runs high". And a line or two, to "let me try with pleasured hands." The song shifts to the next step on the grand staircase to talk with harmonies flashing of the sun and promised lands until the massed angels of the band's vocalists converge in mighty blinding chords to sing: IT's the TIME of the SEE-EA-SON for LOVE ING. After a breath the opening tomtom and breath resumes but the vocal field changes. Blunstone's lines are countered by Argent or White, sometimes echoing them, sometimes predicting them. We do not know if the demon is centre stage or on the shoulder. This is the verse I remembered from childhood about who's your daddy and is he rich. The ringmaster of the rites has blended with the crowd enough to lure prey into the shadows. "Has he taken any time to show you what you need to live?" the questions slithering around each other until the steps to the chorus are met again and again the host of light reminds us that it's the time of the season. Instead of another verse we get a Hammond B3 solo so jazzy that it qualifies as sinful in a rock song. The second verse repeats as that is the one that finds the most success in the dark. Steps up to the chorus and then another solo plays us out. If the summer of love is being invoked here it is not the one felt in California. This is Belle Epoque not Bel Air. Less Leary than leery. Less Ashbury than Crowley. Good stock not Woodstock.

But there's the thing. As brilliant as this and all the other songs on this set are they do not add up to a cohesive whole. This album was recorded after the fabs had left the building with Sergeant Pepper in the vault. But where Pepper still feels like a concept album despite the concept being dropped early in the piece, Odessey and Oracle doesn't, despite a high cohesion in style between songs and a clear thematic vein running through most of the two sides. Why?

First, it was a year out of time. Recorded in 1967 (it really was recorded just after Sgt Pepper) but released in 1968, it's tack piano, harpsichords and novelty arrangements eclipsed the inventiveness of the songcraft by sounding like last year. The Fabs themselves would end the year with a double LP clad in an almost featureless white cover. Odessey's Carnaby St cutout and paisley artwork would have looked like an album with the word punk in the title in 1978. Listening now, none of this matters. The songs are good and set in deathless arrangements that neither embarrass with self-conscious psychedelic styling nor feel bloated by a lack of ideas. The album would not find its audience for decades. In the so retro it's new stakes, the mellotron strings and verby harmonies sound as now as Polyphonic Spree. There's no shame about an album being unloved in its own time. Odessey joins such wonders as The Pretty Things' SF Sorrow and Big Star's Sister Lovers, Nick Drake's Pink Moon on that shelf (among many others).

The album was also the soundtrack to the band's disintegration. The songwriters worked on new material (included on 2000s re-releases of Odessey) and were persuaded to contribute to a new LP under the Zombies name but it fell to earth. This is astounding when listening to the set with its riches and engaging themes and authentic golden age production and arrangements. But at least it is here and we can again let it fold around us with the strange warmth of its pessimism and the great flinty wonder of the most worldly choirboy who ever lived. If this has eluded you so far, choose it before something better known and judge them by it. Drink it in and enjoy the vengeance of it.

1968 at 50: WHITE LIGHT/WHITE HEAT - THE VELVET UNDERGOUND

This is the difficult second album but not in the usual sense. The Velvet Underground had no trouble extending the path of the first set, they just took another. It's difficult because it doesn't behave like the last one. Same voices, same playing and same kind of songs but all offered with such a confidence as to seem like a new band. It sounds like the band you suspect were there all along, just free of the oppressive inexperience that almost killed the first record. If the Velvet Underground and Nico was the album that bought by a hundred people who all started bands, White Light/White Heat is the one that reached across the decades and gave a new sound and attitude to the future. It's hard to love but impossible to forget.

The title track starts with everyone at once, a continued blast of four on the floor piano vamp with increasingly noisy rock instruments and a reversed call and response: White light - White light going and messing up my mind. If you played it with the same lineup as I Get Around you might let the attitude and subject matter slide. The two part harmonies are on pitch. The rhythm section is solid. Lou Reed sounds like he might as well be calling a dance from the early 60s with a name like The Spud or The Bangarang but he's talking about the chaos of mainlining speed and he takes us through the thrill of its threats with a constant sense of teetering. Around him, the backing vocals and band close in like the caving senses of the speed freak. Eventually Cale's bass barges into the centre of the mix and does a stuttering riff that has to keep finding its footing but keeps punching until everything quietly collapses. If My Generation was a sped up mod this is the next day in a diary entry of a whole life.

The first thing that you notice about The Gift, especially if you listen with headphones, is that the talking on one side and the music on the other. If you had any hope of the two channels merging into a warm natural stereo mix, forget it. Forget, also, any idea that Cale's solid Welsh coo is going to lift into melody. This means that if you aren't ready to commit to hearing John Cale read out a short story for a lengthy eight or so minutes you should probably skip this one. No, you shouldn't. Just as the headlight-eyed opening track was crucial to the force of this album so this defiantly wrong track is, too.

It's Lou Reed's piece, the tale of a drab boy who is inspired to post himself to the woman he thinks is waiting for him states away. College is over for the year and she has gone back to Wisconsin. The thought of her giving in to any Neanderthal with a will is unbearable so he packs himself up with padding and provisions ("it'd be as good as going tourist") and off he goes. Meanwhile, over in Milwaukee, Marsha Bronson gets a visit from her friend Sheila and they talk idly about their sex lives. The package arrives and ... Seriously, if you've never heard this track I'm not going to spoil a horrifying and funny ending.

The music at first sound like any cruddy jam you've been in where no one wants to stand out and everyone metaphorically bows their heads and gazes at the carpet. But give it more of a listen and you'll hear it's far more concerted an effort. There's a dispassionate grind to it that lends a sort of contempt, a kind of icky confidence. The music's happy enough walking us through but when it's done it's done and you don't get conversation, ok?

This is supposedly Cale's first reading of the story and I've no reason to think otherwise. It is strange to hear such a sneering New Yorker tale intoned like Mr Davies from down the dell. But that's the point. This ain't Under Milk Wood. The alien accent reading out Waldo's nebbish thoughts seems ok but things get screwy as soon as the dialogue between the women starts. Not so, strange, I guess. Lou Reed was always a good writer, a sharp wit and a keen observer of the life around him and his way with speech patterns never abandoned him. It's so strong it reaches through Cale's thick Welsh cooing. The final deadly statement is met with the shrugging end of the music on the other side. The first time you hear this you swear it will be the last. But it won't be.

If The Gift was too much you might want to pretend the next track was being sung in Portuguese or Urdu. Lady Godiva's Operation begins with a gentle modal figure on a very slightly overdriven guitar. Cale again enters but singing this time. His voice is melodic but he sings each phrase as though describing something he's holding between thumb and forefinger but sounding world weary at the same time. In fact he kind of sounds like Nico. The gentle modal tune extends beyond where you would expect and gets no relief form a chorus. The more times you hear it the creepier it gets because you now know what's coming.

The first half of the lyric seems to describe a Lady Godiva as less the serious protester of the middle ages than a local temptress taunting the straight world with an effortless seductive power. The second part is the operation and seems to be a lobotomy which is by no means completely clear. There is a suggestion that the libido of the title character, with repeated listening less of the historical figure (but the confusion is intentional) than a contemporary seductive transsexual. The operation seems a botched lobotomy but it's not that simple either. Is the "great, great decision" the doctor makes one of where and what to cut? This is a song where reading lots of listeners' personal interpretations gets seriously spooky. My favourite is a ghastly one. Lady Godiva was considered a threat to the local boys. When she went in for her sex change the surgeon did as he was bribed and gave her a lobotomy instead. More simply, it might be a lobotomy from the off, her family responding to the era's somewhat medieval approach to sexual difference with draconian psychiatry and then surgery. There are some images of the shaved headed patient who "once was screaming". In the narration of the song the patient wakes on the operating table through sloppy anaethesis, interrupts the doctor who kills with his scalpel. From local radiant celebrity to tortured corpse. Lightless days.

The band plays gently but the guitars and Cale's downmixed viola are brightly distorted. There's an unnerving mix of sweetness and factory-like noise that holds together. As with The Gift, this is not a jam session. Same with the vocals. When the tone of the story changes from wistful admiration to the stark horror of the operating theatre Cale's cooing control is disrupted by Lou Reed's hard American accent speaking as much as singing, sometimes sounding like he's reading out a note to a listener in another room. And worse: towards the end, about the 4:40 mark while Cale is making the hissing sound like a respirator there is a whisper. It's almost completely buried but you can hear it in headphones: a voice, a few times, moves around the stereo image saying, "you're not a girl." This uncomfortable nightmare does not rest easy because its subject cannot.

In case, after the Gift and Lady Godiva's operation, you were ready to lift the needle and quietly replace the disc in its inner sleeve, nevermore to remove it, side one ends with a gentle Latin figure on a clean electric guitar that sounds for all the world like it had been lying around from the first album (though it's a little stiffer, nyuck nyuck). Here She Comes Now retains this gentle gleam as Reed half whispers variations on "if she ever comes now" over the constant floating bossa nova.It could be a sedated resetting of waiting for the man or even the effect of waiting for the rush but it works at its most obvious level as a song about working someone gradually toward orgasm. The giver's own impatience mounts but that's all part of it. The woman seems unresponsive, made out of wood, but he keeps going. But this is not a Doors song and we don't get the money chords. The lulling ebb and flow of the setup just continues to the fade with Reed stuttering the lines in frustration.

Side two blasts straight into I Heard Her Call My Name. The opening is chaotic with Reed's amp on 11 and the tortured signal screaming with too much pain to steady itself. Other instruments are clattering or roaring without any real coherence. Reed repeats the main line from the previous number but chucks in a few troublesome phrases like "gone gone gone". He's ready. His eyes are wide open. It is both literally and figuratively the flipside of Here She Comes Now. The girl plummets into uncontrollable orgasm.

But then it settles into a rough but structured rock song with a call and response like the title track and things get odd. By what he's saying it sounds like he's hearing her call his name not in sexual ecstasy but from beyond the grave or, just maybe, from beyond the point of death but still on the bed. Finally he tells us that his mind split open. More uncontrolled guitar screaming in the breaks and a repeat of the only conventional verse with the garage band style backing vocals singing the title phrase. Is it a memory, a directly recalled moment of orgasm, or maybe just a moment of genuine sudden grief that feels as strong as this without stopping to pick up any softening nostalgia.

Reed's wild playing could sound to today's listener like a mid-life crisis guy in the guitar shop trying to do Hendrix or someone who didn't have a clue but there's a lot more going on here. The unmeasured opening chaos lets us know that the more ordered verse is only part of this track's expression and serves as a couple of visits to dry land while the screaming miasma of the rest of the universe blows around it like a cyclone. Reed isn't trying to mock or emulate the emerging guitar heroes of the day like Hendrix or Clapton, he's found an approach to guitar playing that meets his notions as a composer and arranger. This isn't the more studious opposition of a Frank Zappa where (to my ears, anyway) the subversion has class clown scrawled all over it (early Mothers, at least) it has a far more situationist feel to it and is yet another cue for future generations. Listen to any Sonic Youth from the '80s and feel the familiarity.

Sister Ray is too often given a dismissive wave of a hand, usually to do with its length. At seventeen minutes it's the only other track on side two. Again, the grinding backing (two chords and two chords only) is not a jam in any sense, though its members are free to come in and noise off however they might. As with most of this album's songs this one is about the account, the story Lou Reed tells and directs with mise en scene of raucous but steady garage grind. Though it can feel like it with Cale's left hand parts on the organ or the chugging low string barre chords, there is no bass guitar on this track; the session is a one off, the way jazz was done (until Miles made Silent Way but that's another story). But this ain't jazz.

Reed tells the story of an aborted orgy with local characters, drag queens and sailors. It's told from a few viewpoints like a Rashamon imagined by Hubert Selby. A central event of a drugfucked partier taking out a gun and shooting one of the sailors comes circling back around as does a variation on the response which is not horror but might be shock as someone always says to the shooter that they shouldn't do that as it stains the carpet. Unlike Operation where a pair of voices were used to disrupt a single narration, Sister Ray keeps it all with Reed as he plays several characters per verse (see what I did there?) without annoucement. Refrains help like the one about him trying to fit up some heroin but failing to get his vein while getting a blow job. But he couldn't hit it sideways just like Sister Ray said. It's funny, queasy, sleazy and horrifying by turns and sometimes all at once. It's earnest and it's funny as the sordid tale loops around the way it would in memory while the growl, crashing and grinding goes on like the traffic out the window.

When I first heard this song in the '70s it was out of context, on a compilation that mixed and matched the first three albums. Because of this it just came on out of nowhere and in them auld vinyl days it meant that I'd really want to hear the other song on that side (it was a double LP) to put it on. So I didn't. Much later with the 45th Anniversary hi-res download I was able to hear the whole sequence of the album in one go. I dreaded doing this as my memories of its notorious tracks haunted me but I started doing what I do for all these blogposts: I put it on my phone, went out for an hour long walk and let it come to me.

This always freshens well worn music and debugs less familiar tracts. It took about three of those walks but it got there and I got it. Sister Ray finally sounded like it was at home and the album finally sounded like the big dark obelisk of sound and blackened cinema that it is. And this time I heard, through appreciating the integration of the ideas, a band at its serious best, exploratory and unforgiving. I will always love the first album with its trophy hall of dirges, sweet and sour takeaways, grimness and cheek but White Light/White Heat works better, more like a song cycle than a bunch of songs. It's better produced, more deliberately arranged, more solid in the playing and tougher in the writing. There is no cute sixties-ness about it and it doesn't sound like the metal that grew out of blues at the end of its year. Even the cover was out of time. It was Andy again but instead of a big colourful wink it was a subdued image, hard to see in the shadows (but always seen once seen), black on black, a skull on an arm in a field of black. Hindsight might suggest to you the artwork of Peter Saville at that later Factory and the art he put on the arresting covers of Joy Division or Durutti Column around a decade later. Here in 1969 it might have felt like a postal delivery from the future.

The Velvet Underground released five albums in their initial series of incarnations and they were distinguished from each other by their similarities (even the last one which is really a misnamed solo album by a non-original member). Their differences draw them into a block that testifies to internal strife (a similar "then there were three" sequence that the Byrds were going through) but for me White Light is the only one that feels like a band is making it and at a time that compounded late nights with too much talk and drugs and lunches where all the nightmares and whimsy became articulate and performable. Maybe that's why it's ghosts haunt the future in the grooves of Jonathon Richman, Kevin Shields, Lee Rinaldo and too many more. I've chosen individuals rather than band names there, not because I think those bands were only those people but to give a name to each to renew the perception, to get us arguing again, to get us listening to this kind of record again, to get us grumpy and creative. We owe and the fun is in the paying.

1968 at 50: THE BYRDS - THE NOTORIOUS BYRD BROTHERS

Towards the end of 1967 The Byrds were a different band from the one that recorded the final original line up album 5D. And different again from the one that had recorded the more consistent Younger Than Yesterday. By the end of recording this one the quartet would be a duo looking at a very uncertain future. Gene Clark was long gone but David Crosby was getting restless and unpredictable. Clark was briefly asked back but left soon after. Crosby was fired, never to return outside of much later revivals. The drummer Mike Clarke was sacked, asked back and sacked again. A bonus track on the 1997 remaster CD bears witness to the cranky state that band had got to as Mike Clark runs the gauntlet of McGuinn, Crosby and Hillman and their tripartite wit as he consistently fails to please. All that, more, and the band still managed to created their slickest and most convincing development yet. I prefer the early ones, however flawed and bitsy, but I can't go past Brothers for the pleasurable wholeness and sheer joy it offers.

Artificial Energy starts with a stutter on the snare and a full brass section before the band comes in with guitars and vocal harmonies. But something's wrong. The brass is clear as a bell but sounds like it's playing down the street, not a part of the whole arrangement even though it's constant force is keeping an otherwise fairly standard rock tune bouyant. The song is about being so sped up on amphetamines that you only find out you've committed murder during your come down. Bum. Mer.
The story takes us from the elation of the come on to the worst of the plunge down. So, what at first might seem a bizarre mixing decision gains some weight as a canny trope to suggest the out of body fog that a big speedy time can give. The end features the kind of druggy frown of a bad time with a little feedback that seems to drag itself under a rock.

Goin' Back is The Byrds we knew were still in there under the crazy trumpets and words of the opener. But again it's a strangely muted version. The vocals are low in the mix, however full bodied and like on the previous two albums there is no big pop riff on the Rickenbacker to announce it. It's a cool and laid back ode to returning to the energy of childhood imagination by the great Carole King and Gerry Goffin and the Byrds glide through it as though in pennance for the decadence of Artificial Energy. A first listen might have it sounding bland and over light, a regression even (Crosby thought it was) but, really, it's pitched at a perfect level and it's mix of characteristic 12 string chime, block harmonies and Brian Wilson like glockenspiel lead us warmly into the rest of the album. Whether you think it's really going back or a gentle way forward no Byrds fan can keep the door shut as the final gorgeous three part la-la-la chorus glitters into the light.

A gentle ground of clean chiming guitars, low bass note and insistent high hat begins Natural Harmony and for a moment you relax into the thought of a gentle hippy ballad. Indeed the first droning vocal lines "falling through, me and you" seem to support that. Suddenly the voices take flight and there's something wrong. The voices sound a little phased, a kind of underwater distortion. The next iteration reveals a distant whining under the vocals and then when the next section starts with a droning tambura under the voices you stop and realise that it's actually a very early synthesiser. Multi-tracked as all synths in 1968 were monophonic, the effect is intended, overflowing, treacly yet firm and Eastern. Listening now, you might be forgiven a shrug but this is among the first uses of synthesis on a rock record. As such we are hearing a prototype of electronic arrangement and must listen closer. The song is a hippy ballad but instead of the backwards guitars or tapeloops, the wahwah pedals or fuzzboxes of other bands (or even this one in earlier incarnations) the miracle machine of Bob Moog has entered the studio to stay. The usage adds colour and texture but no gimmick. The following decade would render this cliche but here it is innovation and present in our ears at a lot of time and effort. An early Moog filled a room and took an expert to get any sound out of it. Listen to the track. It sounds effortless and natural. Hillman's songwriting has also come many leaps from the bland country rock of his samey numbers on Younger Than Yesterday. And yet this collective forward lurch is kept tightly packed in a song that really only feels (on first hearing) like a conduit between those that sandwich it. Further listens reveal riches.

A segue with a strident ride cymbal flows into Draft Morning. One of David Crosby's long melodic phrase songs without choruses, the voices come in over a gentle rolling guitar /bass figure, only slightly above the backing. Smooth lines and creamy harmonies belie the grievous lyric about being called up for service in the heavily unpopular Vietnam War. The break in the middle is not a solo but an emulated battle with the horn section from the opening track playing military stabs, explosions and gunfire. This fades as the rolling figure returns and the final verse ends in a question which suggests the narrator's resistance. The fade is led by the 12 string playing bugle arpeggios and a gentle la la harmony given the same kind of phasing treatment as the previous song. The lyric really only runs to three sentences yet the song feels full. McGuinn and Hillman worked on this number after Crosby's departure, giving themselves co-writing credits and further alienating them from the already distant Crosby. For all that the song flows easily from those before it and adds a dignified solemnity to the sequence.

Wasn't Born to Follow sounds like it could have come from any of the first three albums with its cantering pace, chiming Rickenbacker and unison vocals. But again something seems a little strange. There is a very slow phase cycle affecting the bass and guitars (a lap steel and a Telecaster join in). The solo section plunges into heavy phasing with a squealing series of 12 string bends and the band sounding like they are playing through a jet engine. A smooth transition takes us up out of this for the final verse which sounds like the old Byrds again but then the playout is distinctly country with a twangy Telecaster kicking up the chord progression (is it James Burton? he's one of the session men listed) before it all ends with the clump of a snare drum. This is the second Goffin/King track on the album and the fact that it sounds like one of the band's originals from an early album testifies to what they always brought to their cover versions. This is so appealing it always feels a verse too short. It feels perfect placed in the soundtrack of Easy Rider with its forward motion and easy vocals.

Get to You begins with a lap steel pouring cream over a 5/4 rhythm. The string section takes on a drunken loping quality. The vocals are one to one harmony and the lyric tells the story of a flight to London to get to the you of the title. The chorus of "that's a little better" squeezes the vocals into the distance and filters them through a phaser as the percussion intensifies. In the third verse the narrator reveals that it's taken twenty years to get there which throws in a little intrigue. Is it sci fi or a projection into the future? One of the briefly returning Gene Clark contributions with McGuinn though the original credit went to Chris Hillman and McGuinn.

Change is Now begins with a bass droning under a bright guitar arpeggio. The hushed harmonies  come in with a cathedral like solemnity before a brief country chorus and an electronic solo section which sounds like a heavily treated 12 string and a backwards one over the same drone. The chant like verse returns and lifts to the same Nashville chorus with brighter vocals and a tweedling lap steel. We end with the hushed chant telling us that the fear is gone. A deceptively plain message of peace.

Old John Robertson starts with a bugle arpeggio on the 12 string but then blasts off into a brisk two beat country. Old style Byrds harmonies  but with a constant chiming steel. When the title character's wife dies there is a sudden incursion by a string section with a beautiful brisk but still sorrowful figure. Back into the song the phasing is back and stays as the song tells the tale of how this now lonely man was ridiculed without anyone asking for the truth of his life as fear kept them out. A kind of Simon and Garfunkel pathos number but with a cowboy band on acid. All this under two minutes.

Tribal Gathering settles into another 5/4 jazz groove. A busy vocal melody delivers images of angels and butterflies and crowds of happy people. Instrumental breaks scream with electronics and drones. Another verse and another psychedelic break. End. This is what happens when a young David Crosby and a young Chris Hillman write a song together. It's just over two minutes and it's gone from gentle jazz to freakout twice.

Weird synthesised warbling gives way to a gentle harmony vocal about the carefree life under the ocean wave in Dolphin Smile. Another wailing droning break with a thudding funereal drum. Another gorgeous verse and it fades into tinkling and glistening.

Full Sci Fi synthesis for the backing of Space Odyssey. A loping waltz time with sea shanty style melody in the vocals and a solemn fuzz guitar. The seagoing balladry is in fact about space voyages and takes more than a leaf out of Arthur C. Clarke's story The Sentinel. Stanley Kubrick would release his epic 2001: A Space Odyssey later the same year. McGuinn would continue to approach science fiction for his inspiration but this sombre piece about a mysterious pyramid on the moon and it appearing to have waited for an evolved species to find it probably finds its highest expression, there at the apex of the strange object in the song. With a pace and gravity that recalls the dark plea of 5D's I Come and Stand at Every Door we can hear how seriously he took the notions he sang of.

While it can often feel so light that it passed by without leaving a trace Notorious Byrd Borthers yet makes a strong and cohesive statement of its times, of the fear of war and the rewards of peace and hope, always hope. But while those sentiments might remind us of the scriptural references of the earlier Turn Turn Turn the theme here is progression. Twin forces of traditional country voices and the electronica that was turning the most basic of songs into wailing otherworldly things weave together to give us an album both recognisable as The Byrds and suggestive of a very different group. Even the sameness of the instrumental breaks with their drones, feedback and wailing set in gentle vocal harmonies and the rolling chimes of the electric 12 string, and the often unbroken sequencing  suggest that the instrumentals are windows on to a swiftly passing landscape of uncharted worlds.

And then there were two. Soon enough there would be only one but McGuinn soldiered on, taking the name into country, hard rock, gospel and finally a kind of grinding early seventies rock that felt like the ship had run aground. Until then there was this lift from the blandness of the previous set that showed how very much could be done when the lineup grew chaotic and tempestuous. It sounds like an album, not a fight.