1971@50: HUNKY DORY - DAVID BOWIE

If you were, and you should have been, a music fan taking an interest in this David Bowie bloke, you might have approached the coming of this new album thinking you were in for something certain. If the last one was a hint at anything this would have to sound like full on Sabbath.Then, when you got it and saw the glamour doll cover photo on the front and the washed out black and white one on the back withthe handwritten tracklist with cute little notes you might have wondered about that. And if you did, the answer was in the opening song.

Changes didn't start with a power chord from Hell but a jazzy piano chord. A few more and you could smell the cigar smoke and scotch of a jazzy bar somewhere in the midwest of the US. This suddenly jumps to rhythm like a little goblin and plays an old school rockriff but then goes south to an unrock out of key experience. Pause for a smokey vocal with more self reflection that would have been decent in a Sinatra piece before lunching to the stars with a bright stuttering chorus of overlapping melodies. "I know that time may change me but I can't trace time." He's doing what he says on the tin.

Oh, You Pretty Things follows immediately and almost sounds like an extension of the last song but it has its own ideas. The narrator is having a bad morning, seeing a crack in the sky and a hand reaching out for him. Looks like the nightmares are here to stay. A slighty more jaunty piano gives way to a languid ballad arrangement. It's starting to look like the end of the common human as the soaring chorus tells us against thumping piano. "Oh, you pretty things, don't you know you're driving your mamas and pappas insane. Let me make it plain. Gotta make way for the homo superior." Bowie was always a deep reader and Nietzsche left him as wasted as it did most who read it to the end. He knew that ol' Friedrich wasn't a Nazi and knew that his ideas took him into transcendence. So, on David's most poppy sound record since his Cockney Psychedelia one four years before, he wrote a song about that.

This blends seamlessly into Eight Line Poem, a series of images set to a kind of stretched toffee country ballad or distorted reflection of one. A room with the breeze blowing at the curtains, a kind of  prairie with the city in the distance. Mick Ronson's lap steel style playing on his Les Paul provides a rich descant to the gentle piano. An elusive image of the city's spirit being as fleeting as seeing the sun behind a tree branch. If there are more personal details to this one I know not nor care. It's a beautiful dozey mooded observation.

The next song, as good as its predecessors are, is the moment where the Bowie of all the years he's been Bowie separate from all the years he will be. There has been nothing like Life on Mars to this point and it is one of his eternal moments and one in his own career that he needed to beat to progress. He knew its importance. The verses describe a descent through F to C, dropping to E to D etc and would have worked easily on his old acoustic twelve string. But here is a case of getting what you pay for as he hired Rick Wakeman for the piano part. Wakeman young but already a lifelong musician was classically trained but an inventive improviser. Between the Strawbs and prog rock titans Yes, he was doing sessions. His fluid enlivening playing around the basic descent has led some listeners to hear chord progressions that aren't there. It is a cinematic performance. Bowie starts softly over it in one of his most subtly complex melodies with words about a debutante makes a scene in front of her parents and wanders listlessly into numbness as the bowed basses start sternly below. The chorus soars to an octave above the starting range as the strings bloom around it. Images of news shows, movies, tv, a world weighed down by its own media and false impressions. A clean high and brief guitar solo gives way to the next verse where Mickey Mouse has grown up a cow and on to more torutured and unstoppable disasters which might as well be fiction as fact. Another massive chorus and the penny drops as to the title line. It's not about humanity's next great adventure but a question: is that all we can do, now?

There is nowhere to put this song easily. It starts like a ballad but its lyric and arragement are so cinematic and fantastical. Despite the orchestral swells there is nothing of prog rock about it. While its brightness and falvoursome melodics and harmonic structure make it instantly appealing it failed several times as a pop single. It's just Life on Mars. (Trivia: the piano that Wakeman plays on this album is the same one Paul McCartney used on Hey Jude.)

A gentle strum with a light rollicking piano heralds Kooks (for small Z.) It's a comfy singalong to his son Zowie and imagines the three-strong family going about a loving and kooky life in a kind of cartoon world. He can go to school as much as he wants and then they can just throw the homework on the fire and go for a drive. He promises the boy belief and love and it's worth noting in this winsome piece that the child is being invited, not instructed, to join them. You might already know but I love the notion that Zowie grew up to be film director Duncan Jones. If you haven't seen Moon or Source Code you should. Guess he took them up.

If Life on Mars was soaring Quicksand is tidal. We are lifted to the crests of waves, float weightless at the crests, slide down and rise again. The heartfelt vocal sings a lyric of imagery of philisophy, faith and belief all of which add up to change. The chorus could be a stadium singalong but when I think of thousands intoning,"knowledge comes with death's release" I see a cult and need to open my eyes again. Bowie is saying goodbye to an attic full of old mind experiments and pathways (there's a word beginning with 's' that I refuse to use here). His mind is on the future and more of those changes from track one in mind. The bulk of the arrangement is layered acoustic guitars. Bowie long favoured acoustic 12 strings and there are a few on show but also moments where a gentle arpeggio on a 6 string tells the story. It's a marvel of balancing near identical voices. Bowie's vocal melody has the epic quality of some of the old stuff like Cygnet Commitee and he is generally left with the guitars to sing it in bittersweet voice. But then the same ranting bowed basses from Life on Mars come in and are joined by a lush full string section and Rick Wakeman's sublime piano improv. The chorus warning against belief hovers between inspiration and exhaustion and is a marvel of much from simple means. You might find yourself welling up with this one without ever knowing why but the sense of farewell to a former self could be as universal as going from adolesence to adulthood. The fade has more dazzling piano and strings as the tide takes the old self away.

The old side two begins with a cover that sounds like it comes from a musical. Fill Your Heart is so light and boppy and sugary that it sounds like a parody but that would be too much at odds with this record. Bowie's vocal ranges from the earnest to the impish as he tells us that being nice and gentle will clear you and make you free. While it sounds like a number written for one character to cheer another up, in context here it sounds like Bowie finding a similar promise to the one in Qucksand and changes about breaking away from burdensome normal life. Tight reed sections, springy piano and self harmonising give it the tang of a song made from sorbet. It ends, curiously on a saxophone squawk that falls into tape echo on to the opening of the next track.

Andy Warhol comes out from under the beaky echo with a sinister chromatic ringing melody and an engineer announcing the take, and title. Bowie speaks in a voice so affected you can feel the lights of the makeup mirror and the press of the greasepaint. A short back and forth about the pronunication of the name Warhol and you understand what's happening but if you didn't the take proper begins with peals of self-directed laughter. A forceful two guitar attack with Bowie on his 12 string and Mick Ronson on the 6 and taking the lead with a Flamenco-style minor run. Bowie throws out images of the artist who made his persona as much his art as the art itself, who pushes to the edge with semen fixes and imagines being a cinema where people could pay to look into his brain. Warhol himself was offended by the song, thinking it was a pisstake but Bowie was describing what he saw when he thought of the artist. Bowie never pulled the punch, not considering it to have been one and the pair did make up in the course of history. The Song ends on an exended acoustic thrash with Ronson chiuming harmonics overhead. Studio applause at the end. Worth noting here that the studio environment sounds and opening dialogue are not just a tribute to the glitz of the art life but also a nod to another of Bowie's inspirations Syd Barrett. The track If It's In You on The Madcap Laughs has a very similar false start where Syd flubs the opening twice and chats to his producer before his statement, "if we could cut," is cut and the song begins. I remember hearing the Barrett album long after being familiar with the Bowie one and the closeness of it popped right out. It's a clear and lovely tribute.

Song for Bob Dylan begins with acoustic strumming and a bendy electric intro. Bowie, stretching himself to invoke the Zimmerman and call him from his then current hiatus. Bowie wasn't alone in going to the extent of using an album track to say, come back and tell everyone what's what. Some folk think the painted lady of the chorus was the Factory's Edie Sedgwick but it really doesn't have to be. While the title does state the addressee this, like any song that uses an archetypal figure this one really speaks most through metaphor. Of course, Dylan fans tend to be fanatical enough to be that earnest (and Bowie might have been) so ...

Queen Bitch is a self avowed tribute to The Velvet Underground. An acoustic strum is taken up by a much ruder amp distorted electric guitar crunch with a strident 1-5-4-1 progression. This calms temporarily for Bowie's Lou Reed style spoken verses. The verses are all Reed and co. about the antics of a trans figure. An extended prechorus takes us into a joyous descriptions of frou frou in darkened rooms, tatts and bippity boppy hats. This song is nothing but utterly enjoyable and forms its own meta bridge between Bowie's admiration for the group and his production the following year of Lou Reed's masterpiece Transformer. The sound of this arrangement played by the band Bowie would take on tour and record with for the next two years and albums is the sound of those years and albums, a hard edged acoutic/electric stride.

A gentle strum opens The Bewlay Brothers. It's joined by a muted electric guiar using amp tremolo which echoes the vibraphone on the side one closer Qucksand. Bowie's voice come in dry with images of intrigue, campaigns and secrets. The chorus is a hard strum with some lyrical electric licks that might be either recorded backwards or just played and treated as though they are. The song follows the verse chorus pattern, returning to the quiet verses and building up for each chorus the same way. The exploits of the brothers of the title take on more cinematic bredth. And then, abruptly at the end of the final chorus the song is interrupted with a chorus of cockneys: Lay me place and bake me pie, I'm starvin' for me gravy. Leave my shoes and door unlocked, I might just slip away. It's gone from the Bewlay Brothers to the Kray twins. But really, it's Bowie himself and, more prominently, his half brother Terry whose schizophrenia was still galloping away from the mention on the previous album (All the Madman on Man Who Sold the World). Bowie would return to writing songs that stated his motion to understand his brother's condition. The two chord tension strumming into the fade of this song is accompanied by those cockney voices and is augmented by increasingly meanacing voices intoning variations of the words "come away". The sadness of the song is not just in the contrast it depicts between the brother's imagination and creativity and his inability to express it and Bowie's own swiftly developing capacity to do so. David cannot reverse Terry's troubles, he can only describe them.

This brings us to the end of David Bowie's most enduring statements, an undeclared concept album about change. After the earnest singer songwriter of Space Oddity (really, his second LP to be brought out eponymously, the first one presumably swept under) and after the metaloid sci-fi black-rocker he came to this point where he was shedding much of his training and the notion of being in training. Change begins at home and Bowie straight up learned piano to write most of these songs which is a major reason why they aren't structured in quite the same way as the previous albums' songs. There is a clear intention to forge the music through greater discipline with arrangements and performance (there are no extended guitar solos like on the previous outing and the epics are kept to a minimum and then with greatly trimmed running times). This is the record more than any of the others that finds the artist ready to put the hours in and work for his place and sweat for his stardom. It's a statement of change and it would not be the last. And that's kind of it. I mean, what could he have possibly done next?

We'll take that up next year. On that, as I've found over the past two years of examining 50 year old albums the era has diminished in importance while some artists have risen to the top of my attention. So, instead of Year@50 it will be Ablum by Artist@50. If you've been reading so far, thank you, and let's take it higher and further. Happy NY.

1971@50 : STICKY FINGERS - THE ROLLING STONES

Fresh from both the downer of the Allen Klein takeover and the triumphs of touring on a scale they'd never quite done in the '60s, The Rolling Stones continued to refine the attack and image of the previous two studio discs but also to declare themselves reborn, free of bad guys in suits and the unit-producing assembly line they wanted of their acts. Klein still owned everything from before this and proved ineluctable. So, the band repackaged themselves as the biggest indy act in the world, struck their own record label and began again. This is that band's first statement.

The hammer on anvil punch of the opening chords of Brown Sugar say this clearly. It's the kind of grinding groove that they'd been building since 19th Nervous Breakdown and Jumping Jack Flash but here it's meaner, a fat punch that crawls on strong legs to a dark grind with a tale intended to offend. Images of slavery, abuse and assault in almost every line. That much is not ambiguous. On the other hand, Jagger at his best is an arch lyricist and here at the dawn of the jet set incarnation of the group would have delighted in mixing up the imagery. But was it such a coup to get into the top 40 with a song so risque? If you take it as an extension of the sexual licence worn at the time to signify cultural enlightenment then, sure, stick it to the wowsers. But slavery. I am under no impression that Jagger advocated the violence depicted in the words but that he chose to use the imagery. Set any of that in the Belgian Congo and watch that wry grin go the way of the Dodo. Is it more like the movies Drum or Mandingo, then? No, because, as much as they pandered to that icky eagerness in their audiences both films were careful to clarify the distance between their purposes and those of their characters. But I don't think Jagger is trying to play both sides as much as play a character. He's no more a slaver here than he was Satan in Sympathy for the Devil. It feels far more like the same provocation as in Midnight Rambler which went as far as quoting Albert de Salvo's confession. Brown Sugar veers more towards the schoolboy snigger, though. So, does a verse that's more about his own sexual adventures cleanse it all? Not if the rest of it stops you listening. Maybe it's one of those songs that you can pretend is being sung in another language. That is a mighty Keith-led rock groove, after all. Up to you.

Sway begins with the rock band equivalent of a boulder falling from an outcrop. A big guitar bash on a blues scale before settling into a rolling guitar progression and Jagger's vocal entering soon after. A compelling lament for the narrator's life bound to his pleasures and those of departed friends. That old demon life has got him in its sway. The immediate contrast between the nudging wink of Brown Sugar and this compounds Sway's sincerity. To cap that Mick Taylor delivers a soaring solo of a kind that had never been part of a Stones song it plays into the fade as the memories of assignations and addictions swell in the distance. If you'd just heard Brown Sugar you might shrug at the attempt at bad boy posturing but if you listen long enough to hear this it will be like standing back from the frame to see the picture as it really is.

I said cap in that last paragraph. Well, I shouldn't have. It diminishes the power of Wild Horses with its impossibly gentle strum and the sound of Jagger's five hundred year old voice. He loves her though she puts him through hell and this he comes to understand is from her own suffering. The guitar interplay, two acoustics (one with Nashville tuning which sounds like a 12 string ... but isn't) waft like breezes as Jagger's heartfelt singing rises between them. Mick Taylor's electric playing is a lot gentler than in Sway but no less poignant for that. By the time the whole band has joined it feels like an intensification rather than simply added instruments. One of the Stones' most moving pieces.

Two laments in a row so it's time for something rockier. A dual guitar attack of crunchy riff on one side and a more fluid electric clean on the other. Boy lusts after girl and is trying to get into her house. No, not more assault, this one feels more a give and take consensuality with real wry humour from Jagger. The final harmony chorus is proof that this band did do a lot of that whicdh gets overshadowed by the cock rock bravado but here it's clear and shiny and powerful. The groove develops into a loose jam with softly jangling guitars and Bobby Keys's asphalt heatwave sax taken over by Taylor's slinky Les Paul playing. If anything gthey did in their first decade approached straight up jazz it's this song's coda. Actually, there's more than a nod to Miles's In a Slient Way.

You Got to Move is all sliding dobro and and humid delta afternoons. Jagger isn't quite singing in blackface here (the way he sang early country outings all houn' dawg) and rather than plain appropriation sounds more celebratory. It closes side one and encouraged anyone listening to go and find out more about this blues thang (even if almost all of them just got up to turn it over).

Side two opens with more provocation. Bitch begins as a full band riff and a growling vocal. The narrator is drunk, hungry and restless and that's about it except the joke of it is not that the woman he's singing to is a bitch, it's love itself that torments and drags him in. A full horns and brass onslaught of the riff is impressive and then the dual guitar workout that it becomes the extended fade of shouts, blasts and grinding chords. Not subtle nor was meant to be.

I Got the Blues opens in big Memphis style with a huge double guitar arpeggio with rising brass as Jagger gives a big performance at the mic. This is the closest the band get to anything of their early albums but this outing is bigger and richer and more sophisticated, almost as though this is what they heard in their heads as the well-meaning Andrew Oldham puzzled over how to get the sound bigger. Here, the magnitude comes from the space between the guitar band, the sad brass chorus and Billy Preston's effortlessly soulful keyboards.

Sister Morphine is as creepy as the title sounds. The narrator whine's about his strung out pain from his hospital bed. The opiating nurse never comes around enough, ever. The doctor has no face but doesn't need one. This song is all disorder. After all the big production of the rest of the album  this song starts so quietly it sounds like studio chatter. Slide guitars are as much effects as instruments. The reverb comes and goes as the pain builds or subsides and the mix is kept tantalisingly uneven; all the bits you want loud are buried and the constant pleading of the junkie is forever. The workout to fade is with a snidely insistent slide (courtesy of Ry Cooder) and a tinny piano rattles with a tight , disorientating echo to the fade. In addition to the usual Jagger/Richards credit we see the extra name and life experience of Marianne Faithful whose life was not the happiest at the time of writing (which was during the previous album but works here).

Dead Flowers begins with the same arch country sound that songs like Country Honk or Factory Girl but, while the humour is still there it's far more attuned to the kind of traditions it evokes. The girl thinks she's too good for him, keeping him pining while she slums it among the actvists and bohemians. It's ok for her to keep sending him the dead flowers. He won't forget to put roses on her grave. For the first time the Nashville feel is approached without self-consciousness (although the references to smack instead of Bud do add a little of that). Fun.

The thing to know about Moonlight Mile if you're unfamiliar with this record is that (like Sawy) this is a guitar led song that was done without Keith. Keith was not fit for duty for those (though he did sing backing on Sway) so Mick Taylor stepped in with this shimmery wonder with its pentatonic melodies, easy acousting strum and whimsical lyrics of travel under open skies. This was a jam at the end of weeks of Jagger noodling the Eastern toned figure on an acoustic guitar. The album's only string section enters without sounding inappropriate for a moment and manages to be both lush and restrained. More of an atmosphere than a song but a lovely breezy way to close.

With the two ground breakers Beggar's Banquet and Let it Bleed behind them, a refreshed career in front of crowds massively bigger than anything in their initial touring years and a reputation for being naughty tramps in lurex The Rolling Stones came to this thrid chapter in the big four albums that came to define them despite the decade they'd already fashioned. After this, every one of their albums would follow the pattern with varying degrees of conviction and this is the moment that seems to have felt exactly right.

While Banquet and Bleed both feature more adventurous approaches there is an overall arc discernable when listening to these records in chronological order. By the time Sticky Fingers comes along the production is of the strength that added to the standard of all high profile act's releases at this time and is still considered standard. And this is what is really meant when people who revere these records mean when they describe them as timeless: they aren't out of time as much as occurant at the time when this presentation was consolidated. This is the thing that gets to me when I think of listening to this record and it's the one that will bid me scroll to something else. The slickness of sound that stretched over the decades (do not kid yourself that the nineties added anything more than better electronics) is here in these grooves and there to stay. It's also in The Eagles, the couples version of Fleetwood Mac, The Doobie Brothers, Meatloaf and anyone else whose records sounded perfect before they sounded compelling. I'm not blaming the Stones or this record, just saying, this is when they, too, bought in. You can stretch that easily to the Andy Warhol cover that made the title so champagne risque.

But after all that goes through my mind, if I go ahead and choose it, I listen to the end, from the atrocity of Brown Sugar to the painkilling float of the last song's fade. It works. It waits there, whether or not you pick it, and will pour into your ears and reward you the same as the first time. 

1971@50: WHO'S NEXT - THE WHO

I've covered this here. The series it was part of was Unheard Classics, records in the margins of what I got into while forming my tastes. While I knew and loved the Who that I heard on Meaty Beaty Big and Bouncy and a little later on A Quick One and Sell Out I didn't give much credence to the '70s Who. I can recall hearing Slip Kid from By Numbers and Who Are You on the radio when they were fresh. I heard bits of this in the '80s when someone had left a cassette of it at my place in Brisbane but it wasn't until the '00s that I bought a copy of the re-release with bonus tracks. So, I knew three songs: Baba O'Reilly, Behind Blue Eyes and Won't Get Fooled Again. I thought they were great but still prefered Boris the Spider.

Getting the full album and, with its liner notes, an understanding of its origins added meaning to the songs I heard, though I found no easy link betwen the Lifehouse story and Bargain or My Wife. I found most of the tracks more than listenable with the standouts remaining the ones I already knew. Then in 2015, planning the blog article, I walked around on my urban hikes taking it in and letting the whole sequence form and the album appeared. I always stopped after Fooled as I wanted to hear the original as released. 

So, while this might well contain a lot of the stadium rock cliches that were only newly minted back in 1971 and my still vigorous punk sensibilities fomr my own youth resisting them, I grew to admire this set. It makes a strange follow-up to Tommy which exists at a point between the psychedelia of Sell Out and the '70s rock of Who's Next. Most of Tommy is acoustic, at least the memory of it is and most of this seems arranged so Pete Townshend can leap and windmill his way around a massive stage. Getting past that, which is the real life lesson here, and simply listening to the passion of a band who were breaking through to their next phase as arena gods and still managing to sound honest and modest is humbling. Sometimes getting over a barrier is worth it if only to see how slight it was to begin with.

1971@40: LED ZEPPELIN/IV/FOURTH ALBUM/FOUR SYMBOLS/ZOSO/WHATEVER

I've already covered this one in my series on this band's records. That article is here. In that I go over how I came to hear the record and what it means to me personally. Also, I address the bullshit plagiarism courtcase over the guitar figure at the start of Stairway to Heaven. So, I won't be saying anything about them here beyond noting (as I couldn't at the time) that the case and later appeal were found in favour of Led Zeppelin and not the plaintiff (who was not the author of the piece in contention, anyway). So why Am I doing more than linking? Well, it goes somewhere towards completing the picture on the blog and as I noodle here there might be more to say.

I talk in the other article about how I came to discover Stairway to Heaven at my sister's prodding. The song that really hooked me, though, was the last one in the list. Track  4, side 2: When the Levee Breaks. From the apocalyptic drum opening to the final snarl of the electric 12 string this song still carries me along atop its thick and heavy current. Someone on a newsgroup a long time back said that whenever they heard this track they wanted to become this music. I know what that feels like. There is a new arrangement idea with every verse, a middle eight that arrives after a cinematic powerdown that then crashes into screaming life again with an impossibly high and powerful Robert plant vocal. Things panned left are then panned right. That Fender XII never sounds remotely like a '60s folk rock jangle, it's a mighty cloudbursting force. Slide that sounds both assured and diseased and the same goes for the harmonica playing. There is a full verse played before a note of it is sung and not a second of it feels too long. I was already aware of it but one night when my brother Stephen had the radio on in his room it came on and I heard it afresh and marvelled all over again.

This is the album that you can have and safely claim you know something of Led Zeppelin. Barnstorming rock, mystical ballads, poppy side steps, gentle acoustic numbers, eastern influenced riffs, the lot. It's also the one with a profile high enough even these decades after its fact that allows attacks from all sides by people who latch on to a popularly known artifact so they can appear wise about it. See also, Sergeant Pepper, Exile on Main Street, Dummy or Nevermind. That cultural placing alone can be offputting but then you really can just press play and smile as the warm up notes cluck to life just before Black Dog tears your ears off. This is joy.

1971@50: IMAGINE - JOHN LENNON

Ok, so you're first album of conventional songs has you screaming your lungs out about the pain of your life, fame and the world in general. Where do you go after that? A quiet fishing village on the Irish coast to settle with the love of your life and a ukulele? Sounds nice but you know what's nicer? Forming a set of songs at leisure to show you can still do everything the kids loved you for and move on as well. Imagine is that record and it goes from a gentle, heartfelt and godless prayer that would go on to achieve anthem status to a heartburn blues, a character assassination, a rant that is a much better rock song than it deserves to be, a big swamp of an anti war workout and more. Imagine is a carefully controlled variety show that sets its statements in radio friendly bites and throws a few bones to the album-centric serious rock market. At no time, even though some of the songs are from the era, does it sound like The Beatles. 

The title track of this album has acquired a sanctity that few songs achieve. Over a thickly echoing piano, broken chords and a small ascending link to complete the cycle, Lennon's voice, distant in its own cloud of echo, asks us to imagine life without the small earthbound concerns of nationalism, greed as well others brought down form their lofty places like religion and heaven. He knows he's being a dreamer but if everyone could share the dream the world could be one and free of its old binds. You can't fault the sentiment but until you can separate the song from the singer there's a credibility slide at the top of which is a rich and adored man being whistful.

If, however, you really can tear one from the other, the song's beauty lies in the plain naivete of its presentation. Really, just listen and imagine. The piano and voice are central but there's a very plain bass, sparse drums and strings doing little more than what a basic organ track might have done. It's the low artistry that offers welcome to any who will listen. If you are inclined to attack this aspect of it then you are attacking the message itself as it is inseparable from its packing, author aside. A simple dream for a tired and complex world. It still works.

Crippled Inside might sound like a parodic country song but for all the accented cliches in the arrangement it comes across as sincere. Do what you like to dress up your pain and frustration and pretend you love this masked life but you're still broken within. I find the honky tonk piano annoying in this one. It's one of the most authentic aspects and perhaps that's why: it shows up everyone else. You can wear a stetson and some boots but one thing you can't hide is your sneer when you're snide.

Jealous Guy enters on an icefloe of tinkling piano and thick strings. The vocal mleody has a kind of eastern finish to each line as it sinks into the arrangement. The narrator of the song is apologising to a lover he has hurt. He explains that he couldn't help himself, admits he's weak against his own anger and that he's just a jealous guy. Elvis Costello, in a memorable interview I read in the late '70s, explained that for all the song's tender feel it is being told from a position of power. Cant help it, I'm just jealous. Lennon originally wrote this as a kind of spiritual travelogue in the Beatles' retreat in India. Perhaps the sentiment in Child of Nature (as it was originally known) didn't convince him after the explosive end of that episode and he shelved it until he could find a more fitting use. The melody is quite yearning and aching which is emphasised by the verse that he whistles. There is point at which stark honesty might well be confused by listener for an unapologetic taunt of a victim. Could the sense that an abusive partner is trying to smooth things over so they'll be better from then on, just like all the other times be actually triggering? I don't know. It makes the bland string arragement of this track sinister, to me, a kind of vulnerability icing. I can zone out and receive the song's beauty but that's how I have to do it.

It's So Hard is a kind of constipated blues. Life's hard and then you die by your own hand or the world's. A big bursting sax from maestro King Curtis lifts things a little but, ironically, this is less convincing than the last time he tried a blues, in his cushioned palace of Beatledom, Yer Blues, which was a piss take, anyway. 

I Don't Wanna be a Soldier Mama starts with a beautifully distorted bend on the guitar before splashing into a vat of reverb with the rest of the band as John tells us of all the bad things he doesn't want to be like a soldier or a lawyer or a rich man or a poor man or a sailor or .... The crashing echo and metallic sound of the vocal give this one a kind of mystique but it's so repetitive (by intention) that you really have to just lie back in it and float.

Gimme Some Truth starts like a punch, straight in to the driving band, slide guitar, bass, rhythm electric along with Lennon's clear and alsmot reverb-free vocal which bites hard at "tight-lipped narrow minded mama's little chauvanists" among other deliciously invective word salad. The middle eight intensifies this by bashing into the fourth above as Lennon rasps his Eddie Cochrane voice: "No short haired yellow-bellied son of Tricky Dicky's gonna Mother Hubbard soft soap me". Bugger the lot of this lysing and spinning, just give him some truth. George Harrison takes a sweet but sharp slide solo which leads back into the middle eight. The grind and the power just make you want to listen to this all afternoon; it feels like every frustration you've ever had all at once is getting beaten up by the good older guy at school. This was originally a Beatles song. I only found that out in the last few years. There's a recording of the band going through the middle eight with Paul helping enthusiastically. It made more sense to be thinking it was one of the fresher tracks as it really packs more of a wallop than anything else on the record. Still, the realisation here, an old progression dragged out of an old songbook and it gets to sound this good. Possibly my favourite solo Lennon song.

With great judgement Oh My Love's almost spooky gentleness follows this onslaught. It's a needed drop in violence but a continuation of intensity. In terms that sound very much like Yoko's poetry, John feels the wind and sees the sky and for the first time his mind is wide open. Lennon's double tracked vocal is perfectly controlled and moves through the pentatonic melody in a glide. A dreamlike but tightly packed love song of nothing but sincerity. Piano, guitar (George is playing his Les Paul clean and its thick ringing adds a swooning eeriness), bass and voice. No Woolworths strings required nor any given. This is a tiny masterpiece with a gigantic statement.

I knew enough about the Beatles' story to understand on first listen that How Do You Sleep? is a savage character assasinaiton of his old partner in tunes Paul McCartney. References to Sgt Pepper, the Paul is Dead hoax, a lot of Paul song titles from then and the time, accusations of writing muzak and so on. The song with its unvarying structure of self call and response, charge after charge without right of reply plays like those revenge fantasies you might recall form childhood where you stand up and get 'em good and they just stand there and take it. The music is a growling bluesrock, mean as mustard and relentless. This is the one track where the strings work as you don't expect them against the hard guitar rock but their sinewy lines, (for once not just playing chords) add a cinematic weight to the harrangue. But, in the end, harrangue is what it is. Lennon later attempted to ameliorate it by saying that he was just using his anger to construct a song. Really? Songs don't just appear and live in this environment, they get arranged, and recorded with many takes, mixed and pressed on to records and packed into artwork for the world at large. If you put out a record on a whim and forget about it what does that say about your integrity as an artist? He sang it and he meant it. The story went that he heard Paul's song Too Many People and took it personally (and bloody how!). When McCartney responded, if he did, it was with Let Me Roll It. That sounds like no one but John (even down to the hard driven riff and the primal scream in the fade) but it's just a love song. This meant more to me as a teenager when I thought along those lines, vengeance for a trifle, but now I just try to enjoy the music of it.

How begins with a descending melody in the vocal followed by a pair of emphatic chords on the strings and reminds me of nothing more than what the same producer did to the song Long and Winding Road which was so damned by its writer. It doesn't sound like a subtle dig though (not after the last track). John wonders how he can go on when he feels so uncertain and disorientated. It's perfectly adequate and feels bigger than it should but has a consolidating middle eight and does its job. Lennon's vocal lifts the song above this lukewarm reception of mine as, again, he sounds completely sincere.

Oh Yoko might have been almost designed to rankle anti Yoko folk (who existed in their millions) as a ditty about the best revenge being living well. But again, it just sounds sincere as John's pleasant and happy voice rides above a kind of Dylanesque country shuffle. A blend of Onoesque imagery and Lennonesque word play and a junty good natured rhythm that rise to a joyful chorus that should sound embarrassing but never does. It's just so good natured that you might forget that the last time he closed an album off it was with the listless and exhausted My Mummy's Dead. The jaunty jalopy of Oh Yoko jingles all the way to the fade and we're all happy. 

Lennon was famously fickle about his own work, damning it one day and casting thunderbolts of self-praise the next. Some of the better known quotes from him about Imagine were complaints that he allowed to be too sugar coated. The worst of the string arrangements do carry it closer to supermarket muzak than they should; there is no irony to them when they flab out the sound in songs like Jealous Guy and Imagine itself. Not just George Martin but anyone who took the job of preparing string accompaniment to these tunes who wasn't already just doing what he was told would have produced something less anodyne. Compare the masterful, living strings on Nick Drake's Five Leaves Left to the muzak of the orchestrations on Bryter Later. It wasn't just John Lennon who suffered but my feeling is that he was complicit, perhaps insisting on the approach being simple and simple equalling honest. I don't know that much but I always note them and have to pretend they're keyboards which is how they seem to be written.

Outside of arrangements a major affliction in this record is the energy-draining reverb that some tracks are subjected to. I am not of the anti-reverb synod and have no respect for it or any blinkered thinking about music production but Soldier and Imagine, among others, are hampered by it. The title track about the possibility of world peace andits singer sounds small and distant. The snarling attack on accepting a place in the rat race, Soldier, sounds like a jam in the next room.

Imagine is the album Lennon presented after his personal demons were dealt with in the previous one. Here he resumed his place in the world and sang to it of peace, regrets for cruelty, rejection of its social demands and finally love and it works as two sides of music as well as a suite of songs. Less compact than the previous one but more outreaching for all that. Of the two it's the one I'm more likely to listen to.

This article was informed by my own experiences with the LP as I owned it in the late '70s as well as the recent Complete Collection box set. The LP was bought at Ken Herford's import shop around the corner from my place and was a US pressing with quadraphonic capability. The stereo system my father built for the main entertainment room had four large speakers but they presented the same stereo image back and front as a kind of basic surround sound. Quadraphonic playing required special equipment which I nor anyone I ever knew had. that said the sound of this deep dish vinyl filled the room with warmth and sparkle. The blu-ray disc that comes with the box set blows that completely out of the water with an intimate immersion that makes you feel like you are lying on the floor as the music is being recorded.

I didn't wholly like the album as a mid teen. I liked the melodic numbers, found Soldier an impenetrable mess and thought It's So Hard sounded like a pisstake and How sounded like muzak. While I skipped tracks on every album I had these were songs I never bothered with more than once. The most played pair of songs were Gimme Some Truth and Oh My Love which I delight in to this day. The LP came with an outsize poster of Lennon at a white piano. It went on the wall of my room. When I moved from Townsville for good and distributed a lot of my '70s albums to people who might wanted them more than I ever would again, I kept Imagine. When the Complete Collection appeared I hesitated and decided against buying it but then saw it at a massive dicount and figured I'd get it for the blu-ray alone. 

The blu-ray features a warm, immersive surround mix of the album, keeping parts of the arragements in place within the  expanded field. There are no gimmick moments of saxes flying around the room or vocals taking turns in different speakers. This adds to the sense of moment and presence and the audio qulaity is never less than warm and pleasing. I was curious to try the offered quadrasonic (used to be called quadraphonic) mix that I was never able to hear the first time and can report that it's almost as involving as the 5.1. If anything it's noticeably more trebley, lacking roundness in the bass and the punchier parts of the drum kit but it is taken from the master prepared for vinyl so it wouldn't have the bass capability of hi res digital to begin with.

As to the content beyond the album itself there is a great mass of it: raw studio mixes, elements mixes which highlight different aspects of the tracks like the strings, out-takes, soundscapes that combine contemporary interviews with working versions of the songs as well as representations of the various stages of the singles from the time like Happy Xmas (War is Over). I would recommend against trying to swallow everything on offer here all at once; the repetition factor alone will exhaust you. I'd recommend for picking out sequences as the trackorder of the album is kept to whatever state the songs are in. If I have a favourite moment of the extra material it is the double tracked vocal of Oh My Love. For some reason Lennon and/or Spector chose against the exact doubling developed at Abbey Road for Beatles recordings and tried it the old way. Lennon's pitch is flawless and his nuance so closely matched it's breathtaking yet no one could do this exactly and the surrounding instruments mask much of it; hearing both in isolation, the eastern flavoured melody sung with such a studied care sends shivers up the spine.  

This box set is a wonder. You pretty much get the deepest dive any member of the general voting public is ever going to get into the origins, gestation and fruition of this record. And that's before you get to the heavy bound book. Want to know about Imagine and also the processes the ex-Beatle was going through to make this statement shell out for this box. It looks beautiful and sounds like a dream.

1971@50: PAUL AND LINDA MCCARTNEY - RAM

About a year after releasing the most surprisingly bitsy ex-Beatle album Paul McCartney brought this more studio slick effort to the public, roping Linda in for the byline. Where McCartney had him in the garden shed, pasting musical  polaroids in with glimpses of grandeur, Ram lines everything up like a real record as if to say it was him behind the woolly beard, after all. 

I didn't own a copy of this record in the '70s. In fact my solo Beatle collection was pretty slight. It wasn't hard to find a copy I just had a wincing response to seeing it that mentally sounded like Nah! See also, Red Rose Speedway and Wings Wildlife. The only ones I had of Paul's were Band on the Run and Venus and Mars. Some great tracks in there but ... My first copy was a hi-res download from an online retailer. I'd walk around with it in my ears and see if I liked it.

Too Many People: By which Paul remembers the value of starting strong. Acoustic guitars and both clean and dirty electrics, rangy vocal with cool water harmonies and falsetto lines and melody as appealing as a perfect lamington with a cup of perfect tea. This is the Paul of Abbey Road rather than the hermit of Kreen Akrore. There's even a note of protest in the words (which would be taken by his old co-writer somewhat personally but that's for when I get to Imagine) which adds a little heft but, really, the message here is that he is back and ready to roll. And roll he does. 

3 Legs: Except he shouldn't do it this way. McCartney blues is not what I want to hear, especially when the pointless lyrics don't earn the musical hue. A call and response acoustic stomp that at best I can tolerate in passing. This is the first sign that he's getting indulged rather than encouraged.

Ram On: Noodley piano, some studio patter and a ukulele comes in with a real vocal in a minor key. This builds to a gentle band arrangement. Goes nowhere but is very easy on the ears.

Dear Boy: If the previous track had a nod or two to late '60s Beach Boys this is an outright wink to the kind of texture and rhythmic play of a Surf's Up or Heroes and Villains. A strident Rhodes vamp and a busy melody soon joined by a choir of beautifully arranged harmonies. Aimed at Linda's first husband rather than Lennon, this one, too, was taken personally by the latter. The frenetic pace and purpose of the song is breaks for breath as a rattling lead guitar solo sounds before a rich choral fade. Utterly marvellous.

Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey: This is as Beatlesque as the album gets with recollections of the Abbey Road medley. A plaintive vocal starts with the rest of the band. We're so sorry, Uncle Albert. For what? Well, this is Paul putting the words on last so you're going to have to stop caring. A phone voice verse in a posh accent still makes me smile: "we're so sorry, Uncle Albert, but we haven't done a bloody thing all day...." The melancholy turns jaunty without a real break. A silly flugel horn tune is overtaken by a screaming chorus and early Fabs style clean guitar progression. A nonsense verse about Admiral Halsey, a falsetto something then back to the flugel horn, the big chorus before a coda and fade. It's hard to call this track a masterpiece despite the obvious love of craft and rich melodic content and mood mapping but the words are meaningless rather than slight and, though this doesn't really get in the way, seem to undercut the music. Oh, did I say fade? I meant crossfade as a few ugly guitar squawks lead us to ...

Smile Away: If blues isn't Paul's thing he's out to hammer that home with a big clumsy balls out rocker which brings back the Beach Boys salute with Bula BVs and what sounds like lyrics made up during a jam version that through insistence (or lack of resistance) made it on the album. Could be worse is the best I'm giving it. But, honestly, considering the scale of Uncle Albert which should have put it at the end of the old side one, why put this on the end?

Heart of the Country: A good strong acoustic strut where the jazz influences fit well. This makes me wonder if he adapted the White Album sliver Can You Take Me Back was nagging as this melodically and rhythmically. Lovely.

Monkberry Moon Delight: And then there's this. A strong strident minor key thumper with stupid words and a vocal pushed into what sounds like self parody. Those two elements ruin this number. Listen to this and the later 1985 when he got the combination right and compare. I have to pretend it's a guest vocalist. I think he's trying for a kind of Cab Calloway in the voice. It's completely at odds with the smoother BVs. Goes on.

Eat at Home: A domestic life plea which might also be a thinly veiled sexual invitation is set in a pleasant soft rock pool. The Buddy Holly style symmetrical melody is delivered in a pleasing mid range vocal. While not ground breaking, it's a smiler.

Long Haired Lady: In which Linda gets a few solo lines demanding relationship commitment. The scale starts big here with a massed acoustic guitars and brass arrangement adding breadth. What sounds initially like a plea for respect in a relationship soon turns into a quirky but sincere sounding love song that stretches into a Hey Jude coda with fanfare trumpets, a stronger restatement of the Linda lines before a final verse and then more Hey Jude fade. Easy listening but intentionally so.

Ram On: A messy but fun reprise of the side one fun mess.

Back Seat of My Car: Broody guitars support Paul's melancholy vocal about a plan of personal freedom with his love. This is a clear invocation of what he loved about the Beach Boys at their most polished. Brian Wilson's rapid changes, chanting BVs, silky lead vocals lead up to a far more McCartney-style minor key chorus of "we believe that we can't be wrong". A sudden jaunty break smooths out again and leads back to the chorus and a big finish. This is the most like the decade to come (not just for McCartney) that the album reaches and it is appropriately at the end of the sequence as though gazing out over the waves or into the sky towards whatever the new times hold.

This record feels like McCartney really did get out of bed and concentrate on getting a record done. He and Linda even went to America to do it and due to that and a number of other value changes and shifts produced a record that didn't sound like a broken rock star in a shed but a composer's expression. While I can never love some of these tracks the whole thing makes sense and carries the feel of music made for a public. 

Personally, I think that if I had bought a copy of this as a teenager I would have listened to all of it once before skipping on every further outing (which I did, admittedly, on most albums at the time) but the relief of having a record that sounded like it cared what I thought of it would have remained. I would graduate to preferring records made without that care but it was warmth that would have taken me then.

There's a vague meme some folk are circulating that this is the prototype indie pop album and it needs to stop. That only goes in one direction and one only. If someone comes up with a means to fashion the exact textures of an old thing nowadays they are copying the past and only copying the past. Paul was not telling the future. Any attempt by people who don't understand or care about the difference between influence and mechanical reproduction is doomed to exposure or, worse, snivelling sychophancy. So, if you are in your twenties or maybe late teens and you come across a listen to Ram, you are hearing the past, whatever you think of it. Instead, consider how that past has been plundered by people who got there a little ahead of you and made records that sounded like they were done in 1971 and are treated as reverently as if they'd come from then. Consider indulging that rather than exalting it. Thank you, thank you, ladies and gentlemen.