BIG HITS (HIGH TIDE GREEN GRASS) THE ROLLING STONES @ 60

A great mess of growling guitars gets blasted by horns and the crazy wobbling disaster of Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing in the Shadow crashes to life. Buried vocals and frenetic pianos. Verses end in hazey harmonies. It's hard to know what's going on and things seem about to collapse at any second but it's just too much fun. Then you might be tempted by the middle eight to look at the words. A sudden calm, Jagger and acoustic guitar which intensifies as the band comes back in and the horn section rejoins:

Tell me a story about how you adore me. Live in the shadow. See through the shadow. Live through the shadow. Tear at the shadow. Hate in the shadow and love in your shadowy life.

Then it's back for another verse of cartoon madhouse before it finally collapses into more beautiful mess of electric guitar mire. Whatever this is about, it feels both mocking and dark. There is a video for this song made up of the band fleeing fans, getting noticed walking around the streets, and at their noted photoshot for the promo of this song in drag (supplemented by the same kind of images of them in their groovy normal gear lest anyone should get that wrong).

This song comes and goes in the Stones' catalogue. They got harder, more psychedelic, raunchier and darker but never before or since recklessly decedent. It could be the effects of a summer at the peaks of fame in Swinging London or the darker, more exhausting, trials of the road but what it does, pretty much for the first time is show a rock band glorying in the rock star lifestyle.

This opener is the first I'd heard of The Rolling Stones as a teenager beyond the hits and memories on the radio. My sister Anita bought this compilation for my birthday. She'd been there when I found the Yardbirds compilation the year before which put the hook in me about '60s music. When she saw me pick this she asked if I really wanted it. We were a Beatles household but something had happened one afternoon while napping to the radio after school. More on that later. But I had a yen for The Stones and it had to be satisfied. I insisted, put the record on and here it was, this giant schmozzle. At first, I took the brass as indicating the mooted Beatles ripoff strategy but this wasn't like anything the Fabs had done. It teetered and clanged and caterwauled. It's mess was its message.

Back in 1966, that was the point of front loading this best-of. Instead of a staid timeline approach, someone, probably manager Oldham, put the big, bad new ones on first. You could wait for the oldies at the end of the sides. Oldies, here, meant songs from the previous two years. Also, when The Beatles put out compilations at this time, they always started with Love Me Do. This one slaps the fan around a little, yelling, "hey, snap out of it, it's today!"

After this is Paint it Black (sorry, not putting the comma in) which blew my little mind apart with his Eastern Europe rhythm and further Eastern sitar. The song is about a profound grief that drags the narrator into a monochrome cosmos. The racing heartbeat of the bass and percussion, the traded licks of guitar and sitar with Jagger's alternating croon and scream force anyone who hears it to look into its heart and join the mourning. Proto Goth? Why not? It's all there: death, misery and despair. By the time the outro pits a hummed verse melody with Jagger's anguished cires for everything to be blackened, including the sun, there is nothing but darkness. I made cassettes of this record for a few school friends and they were all a little freaked by it. The song is still one from the band's catalogue that I will find and play for its own sake. 

Thunder! Twin guitars playing big chord riffs in unison, going through the same amp with a ton of reverb. As someone who's worked with limited tape space I know that the intro to It's All Over Now was done separately before the song began. there's some limited percusion and a lot of bass supporting the big rumbling guitars but it was done, like the intro to Shadows, to get your attention. After two run throughs we're neatly in the land of a Stones track in country mode with pecking rhythms and clucking solo and a mean voiced Jagger at the centre. Everything lifts for the hamonies of the chorus and it's bright as sunshine before falling back down. There's no more room for the intro guitars but there's an echo of them towards the last choruses when a big dark chord sounds at the start of each line and resolves into the chicken pickin' rhythm. A great recording of a sleek and cheeky song. The Stones' first UK number one.

The Last Time was the first time the band released a single with an iconic riff. Played high on the board, this nagging figure stands its ground until the chorus and then can't wait to get started just before that's over, crawling back in under the rug. Any guitarist who hears this for the first time can't wait unti it's finished to work it out. It's a lot less obvious that it appears. For good measure, Keith Richards' solo uses it as a starting point and provides his own responses. Jagger's vocal is on the bassier side which fits with the emotional gravity of the lyric (grave for the age group he and the fans were part of) about a doomed relationship. The chorus backing spares down for the crucial lines in the chorus when the words, "maybe the last time I don't know" have a moment before the riff twangs back and the band bash into life again. The outro is Jagger screaming what he's already said in frustration as the backing vocals almost mock his hesitation by repeating, "maybe the last time." This was the Stone's first originally written single, a number one hit. There is a similarity to note between the chorus and that of The Staple Singers' This May Be the Last Time but, really, it's only very superficially similar. Neither song detracts from the other.

Heart of Stone, another original, wasn't a single in the UK but could easily have been. It's a torchy blues rock ballad with lots of seventh chords falling on the dominant below that way fourths do in hymns. The progression and structure spice it up with some extended minor key passages, falsetto backings and a tidal chorus. A guitar figure below the swell, uses a wobbly amp tremolo to great effect which serves as a kind of truthtelling undercurrent to Jagger's swaggering claims of living like a lothario before the chorus has him protesting far too much before hanging himself on the title phrase in his baritone range before the next verse. Keith's fiery solo does the rest, a twanging blast to highlight the self admonition of the lyric.

Buddy Holly's Not Fade Away takes us further back in time to the early attempts at hitmaking. The Stones tear through it, pushing all the force out of their dual acoustic guitar attack, Jagger's screaming vocal and blues harp over a restless swell of percussion hammering the Bo Diddley pattern. When the electric guitar comes in for the solo it models itself on Hollys own chord crunching but at the punkier speedy pace of the version, like an amphetamined heart beat breaking the china. This is how you do a cover.

The time machine races all the way back two years for the first attempt at a single with Come On. See also Not Fade Away in that this is a gutiar forward speed up of the original. Chuck Berry's track is a mid paced rocker played and sung with a knowing smirk of a guy having a bad day ever since he broke up with his girl. The Stones put another chordy riff front and centre with hot clean guitars in unision and a big harmonica for accents. Jagger's vocal is a kind of lift from Berry's but like the rest of the souping up it's a young man's impatient response. There's a key change for the last verse which features a kind o fanfare from the harp that signs its death warrant as being anything but conventional showbiz (along with the key change itself). This reminds me of those very early publicity photos from the time manager Andrew Loog Oldham tried to get them decked out Beatle-style in matching suits. That lasted. This was probably added here at the end of side one where anyone listening might have found it a charming folly, but I also think their first number one was omitted so its Lennon MacCartney byline and royalties wouldn't be a problem. Then, when the contemporary listener got up and turned the side over, the advancement of a single year would become a giant thing.

Da Daa Da Da Daaaaaa. The fuzztone climb from a B on the A string to the D will live for evermore. Keith dreamed it and imagined a horn section playing it. Oldham claims to have suggested he try his new fuzz box but that sounds like a scene from a biopic. However it happened, after several uninspired takes the one with the fuzz box worked. And it sold all the fuzz boxes that Gibson had on sale and had bedroom guitarists overdriving their amps to get there, too. After this, the opening plea sings the title: "I can't get no satisfaction." Underneath that is a strong bassy dual guitar attack on a bedrock bass and a restless drum kit. Then the verses. Jagger is hitting out at everything, commercialism, useless information from the radio, contracts and showbiz ... biz, and even the good things like the fame and all the sex get tarnished by money and bad timing and he just can't get satisfied as the riff insists that all of this will just keep going on and on. The middle eight is big, heralded by a change in the drums and features a stadium sized chant, "Hey hey hey, that's what I say!" as that riff rolls on. And Jagger sounds like he's powerful enough to snap his fingers to stop it but it just is not going to happen. It's less about him than the fans, though, whose satisfaction in a briefly rising affluence clued them into wanting satisfaction in the first place, instead of accepting the kitchen sink lot of the generation gone. This is an anthem to the youth he was and sang to. Like The Who's My Generation, it never gets old.

Get Off Of My Cloud begins with a drum hook that keeps to a two barr pattern with the semiquaver ratatat at the end. When the guitars come in, playing big accents with the snare and then the same ratatat at the finish. The bass keeps a stubborn I IV V pattern and, if you listen, Brian Jones plays a connecting figure on an electric twelve string. Jagger's vocal is an extension of the call in Satisfaction, this time, telling the suited and uniformed world to keep out. While he didn't live on the ninety-ninth floor of a housing estate tower as he says, he could guess at the stress. Everyone's barging in complaining about the noise, offering a five pound prize for having the right detergent, and even when he goes for a drive and pulls over for a sleep, he gets so many parking tickets on his windscreen that they look like a flag. The vocal standard is lifted into the melody that Satisfaction dispensed with in favour of a rallying shout and is the better for it. When the call and response chorus that tells everyone else in the world to get lost, the monotone shout comes back and sounds right. This is how you follow up with something same but different.

Then we dip right down into introspection and acoustic and strings ballad territory. As Tears Go By was the first Jagger Richards song. It was never a UK single but was given to Marianne Faithful to take to the top of the charts swaddled in strings and Spector percussion. The Stones' own version has a gentle and lovely acoustic twelve string intro and backing before the strings enter to swallow everything but the vocal. Jagger sings it straight with genuine emotion as his twenty year old narrator looks ruefully at ten year olds playing the way he used to do. It's not made of much but it works every time. The biopic scene plays Oldham as instigator, locking Jagger and Richards in the kitchen until they came out with a hit. The still signature R&B band didn't think much of it (three of them aren't on it) and thought that putting it out would be like copying The Beatles (whose Yesterday had only just appeared. 

Then there's 19th Nervous Breakdown. A big bright chord figure keeps plinking out until a rising octave bounce crawls under it soggy with tremolo and growls until the whle band come it with a rollicking account of a society deb, old and jaded before her time who doesn't respond to anything the narrator tries to help her with. It's one of many songs Jagger wrote about what he found in the upper echelons of Swinging London. These observations pepper the Aftermath and Between the Buttons albums but this one really gets it right first time. The unstoppable force of the verses and the Chuck Berry style descending vocal melody do plenty but then there's the stop start chorus: "You better stop! ... Look around" (huge distorted guitar bend) and the rising Eastern floavoured chant of "Here it comes, here it comes here it comes. Here comes your nineteenth nervous breakdown." The middle eight interrupts the song but gains the ground back instantly with the harmonies and chugging guitars. On to the fade with Bill Wyman's dive bombing stutter on the bass. 

I woke from an afterschool nap one day to hear this plaiyng from halfway through on the radio. I didn't know it nor guessed at who it was. All the time, the messy perfection of it was sculpting a resolve in my brain: if I ever form a rock band they will sound like this. It was back announced and I needed my own copy. As for the band that sounded like 19th Nervous Breakdown. Ah, you can't lose 'em all.

Lady Jane follows with more about Swinging London, this time set in a kind of Elizabethan mating game. Gentle guitars and a ringing dulcimer provide the time machine as Jagger bids farewell to a number of ladies, announcing he's decided on Lady Jane. The name refers to female genitalia in the "scandalous" novel Lady Chatterly's Lover which would serve a sense of irony, given the delicacy of the music. True or not, the song only develops out from its beginnings when an expansive harpsichord part beds the instrumental section. I like the dark and light of it, the high and low, even without the gorgeous music. After Breakdown, it's a gently numbing rest.

Time is on My Side is a lazy and taunting blues ballad that starts (if you have the right version) with a lovely wailing guitar played high and leading into the chorus. This deep cut from the second album is modelled on Irma Thomas' original (i.e. original with a full vocal) but set within the band's context. The organ keeps things smooth as Jagger effectively jibes at his departed love (even going into a petulant spoken word section) and assuring her that she'll just keep running back to him. I've never loved this one but it's effective. Caution, some compilations put a version on with a dirge-like organ intro that will have you putting the jug on and coming back.

If you do come back you'll get a perfectly chosen closer, Little Red Rooster. Willie Dixon's sly blues taken up by Howlin' Wolf is a slow burn and intense workout of nuance and raw indolence. No surprises that The Stones would adopt it. They pare back on Wolf's passion and tension for a much cooler walk through with Brian providing illustrations on his slide guitar. There is a quiet threat in Jagger's reading. He's not trying to scare you the way Wolf does, but if you listen carefully, you should be scared. It's a late night with intoxicants take and a great way to end side two.

So, why have I done all this writing on a compilation album? Aren't they oversupplied with comps? A new one seems to surface every other year with the same songs on it. Sure but this one really is different. First, this was the first time most of these tracks had appeared on LP. At a time when albums were only just coming into view as cohesive statements, this provided one from singles and first explorations. It came out mid-'60s, at the start of an electrifying career and showed what they could do with fame and access to wider culture and the possibilities of songcraft and the studio. The journey from blues standards to proto-psychedelia alone is pretty extraordinary.

It's a good answer to anyone determined to push the old fiction that the band only aped The Beatles by front loading each side with tracks that only they could have taken to such extents. You want sitar like in Norwegian Wood? How about putting one in a dirge of grief that ends in a humming chorus and cries of despair? You want horns like Got To Get You Into My Life? Try them in the weird ramshackle Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby? The Fabs did lots of playing around with guitar arrangements but never to the extent of the real orchestration between Richards and Jones in most of their songs at this time. This album is a training manual for that. Would The Beatles have ever done anything like Satisfaction, Cloud or Breakdown? With that ferocity? No, they didn't need to as they were a different outfit and did things their own way. All the players in that rich period of pop music knew each other, dropped in on each others' sessions and drank at the same wells. This is a potent early testimony to that.

Also, it got me thinking about how you put rock songs together. The guitar orchestrations I talked about above were the starting point. If you play guitar, this feature of the early Stones will strike you straight away. So many of the tastemakers laud the advent of Brian replacement Mick Taylor for his fluid melodymaking as a lead player and they're right, but for me, The Stones were at their most arresting when it all sounded like a big soup which every last shake of spice could be clearly tasted. I defy every dual guitar rock line up to do this as well as this band at this time.

This record came out after their first fully band-composed LP Aftermath. I first heard it about ten years later. I can still hear Nita trying to turn me off the purchase and I can still feel the joy of going against that. From that birthday until I started buying the reissued early releases, this collection was always near the front of the stack.

Listening notes: as I long ago gave my copy of this to a friend and later the CD, I compiled it from the HD version of The Rolling Stones Singles: The London Years. This is a superb compilation that simply puts the A and B sides of all the UK singles until the Sticky Fingers era. As a CD it's three discs of mostly mono mixes (as they would have been on 45 discs). I cheated once and took the non-organ-intro Time is on My Side from another compilation as the guitar intro was the one on this article's compilation. The audio quality of this set as a hi-res package is stellar to the extent that it can be. It faithfully replicates the original mono masters which means it didn't get beefed up for the kids o' today. I put the songs in the order that they appeared in on the 1966 LP. So, it's not a pure experience but my point was that the sequence added up to greatness at a time when I couldn't have cared less as to the quality of audio reproduction or the sample rates. It's just a great set of songs. 

THE BEATLES' RUBBER SOUL @ 60

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

OUT OF OUR HEADS - THE ROLLING STONES @ 60

A slash of guitar opens fire with a sharply falling riff. As if it wasn't heard, it happens again. Jagger comes in with the rest of the band and they're off, swinging and loping around like a holy rolling preacher and his congregation except it's all about a girl and the pitch is already manic with the band rushing along with the shout of the vocal and the big thunderous guitar slowly guiding the whole show. When the backing vocals turn up they are somewhere between sweet doo wop and the snotty backing calls of The Yardbirds or The Who. If anything, this sounds like it comes from over ten years later, with the same amphetamine boost that drove The Dickies' crazy version of The Banana Splits. The original by Sonny Bono (yeah, that one) and Roddy Jackson was by Larry Williams who was one of the great early rock shouters and his take is a fine example of solid R&B. This time, instead of adapting a favourite, The Stones push it right out of its own envelope in a cover as tearing as the Fabs' version of Twist and Shout. If you didn't know This was The Rolling Stones, you'd think it was '70s punk. If they had done nothing else, they had learned how to start an album by getting everyone up to do the speed  and whisky frolic. All that in one and a half minutes!

And then you get Mercy Mercy and Hitchhike which is how they used to do covers. They're both fine, and if you're inclined toward the sound, you'll leave them playing. There's the big boom guitar that they'd been perfecting the big dual guitar arrangement started with the likes of It's All Over Now.

That's How Strong My Love Is is a cover of Otis Redding's torchy soul ballad, done with those big guitars and a forward momentum and a heartfelt Jagger vocal.Things mellow down for Sam Cooke's Good Times which the band delivers with a smooth sheen held up by strong bass and band-wide vocals. The arrangement puts rock instruments in where Cooke's original is more orchestral and creamy. It's more a tribute than the reinvention that the opening track.

The side ends with one of the few originals, Gotta Get Away. Bright guitars and a lower fuzzed out one sounding like a brass section and the band getting laid back, Jagger comes in with a plaintive and melodic tune about a breakup that really does sound like the last time.

Side two opens with Chuck Berry's Talkin' About You. The Stones ditch the frantic Berry pacing, opening with a precursor to the big Keith chord riff and getting on down the road with sleaze and intent. This is a band that doesn't suspect it's going to sound like a bigger and meaner version of this in about three years.

Cry to Me is not given with Solomon Burke's gymnastic vocals but something more reserved. It's a strong take with high emotion and good use of the twin guitars and backing vocals but, at best, it's a fine attempt at adding the swinging London cool to the storm of the original. It's the Stones pleasing a crowd. See also the net track We Got a Good Thing Goin'. It's there to let everyone know how the band could keep a venue warm.

Heart of Stone is next and completely outclasses most of the covers on this LP by showing how to learn lessons and still sound like yourself. A tight 6/8 lament with a snarl, this one uses the sinuous guitars of The Last Time and the baritone arpeggios of It's All Over Now, Jagger's increased emotional and vocal range, finally convincing falsettos in the backing and a stirring climb to the chorus that just makes you want more. One of the best early originals. 

The Under Assistant West Coast Promotion Man is attributed to Naker Phelge, the whole-band credit given to joke numbers like We Want the Stones on the "live" album. That sells it short, though, as it's a fine and funny mockery of the hangers-on of the Amercian style of the burgeoning rock music industry like this one with his toupee and seeya sucker suit whose too cheap to save a dime for the bus but full of his own merit and essence.

I'm Free builds on a fluid bed of tremolo guitars and a vocal approach that nods through an original to the glories they's just been playing to soul and R&B on this record. It's a worthy original but it's overshadowed. 

This is the band that had already released The Last Time and (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction, pillars of riff rock that shake the walls of guitar shops to this day. A quick look (don't even listen) at any compilation of early Stones material and you'll understand that the prominence given to singles left their early albums emaciated. The Beatles third album was all Lennon-MacCartney originals and screamed global success. Out of our Heads feels pedestrian by comparison. Two years of US tours, mayhem and rampaging success and the result is so resolutely OK?

WIth their chief rivals on a roll that would go many years and through so many creative ceilings, no one could pretend that albums were the stocking fillers of the rock world. While the band's singles would continue to rip holes in the sky, it would be nearly half a year of waiting until their own first home grown killer LP. It's almost as though they were watching the clock with this. It's all prefectly stated and includes some inspired moments but against their rivals in chief and up and comers like The Kinks and The Who ripping ahead with their own recordings it feels like treading water.

Then again, this also is probably due to static management as much as it is to low creativity. Wunderkind Andrew Loog Oldham wasn't the only manager of the band. There was a lot of old showbiz stasis happening to all the music making in the U.K. industry. Oldham's flair with the directions of the singles and his slavish devotion to Spectorism certainly pushed the stunning list of bangers the band released on 45rpm and, himself, probably considered the LP a second thought. Rubber Soul and Pet Sounds were on the horizon to change everyone's mind on that idea. Meanwhile, there were these kinds of albums that reminded fans of the clubs and pubs and promised hints of the new and, as long as they looked as good on the sleeves, provided some cool decor to the batch pad of swinging London. 

THE BYRDS' TURN TURN TURN @ 60

If you tell someone that a band made the same album a few times in a row you will risk turning them off before you get any further. Well, I'll risk it this way: The Byrds made the same album five times, they just it better each time. While sounding unmistakably like themselves, especially when trying to sound like others, the songcraft and musicianship were constantly enriched. They are one of the signatures of '60s rock to the extent that the insertion of anything from their first five albums into a movie soundtrack will do more for the setting than millions of dollars worth of art direction. They were also one of those bands that only seemed to be on compilation albums for a long stretch. They seemed to have survived entirely on Dylan covers before fading into hits 'n' memories radio. That's what I thought until I heard this, their second, album.

To be a recording artist up to the early '60s meant you got art directed, hair and clothes, and told to sing this musical gimmick that some old man had written. When the nova event happened with The Beatles hitting the U.S. (i.e. the galactic) market, everyone wanted their music made by the people who wrote it. Add the instant cool of a young Bob Dylan and you could throw out all that lovey dove malarky and get some real statements out in the open. That's all fine if you were Dylan or The Beatles but most aspiring chart toppers weren't. 

This meant that those charts were stuffed with cover versions. Even the Fabs put covers on  their first albums to fill them out. So, when young folkie session man Jim McGuinn and friends went and saw A Hard Day's Night, everything fell into place. Some of that art direction and rock instrumentation later and his band made of friends and people who looked good in a bouffant started churning out the kind of cover versions that no one else was doing. Dylan's Mr Tambourine Man went from his quietly stabbing acoustic number to The Byrds' glorious cathedral of chime and choir. In 1965 that was like doing a metal take on Elliot Smith now. Like seeing any trope's origins, it seemed cliched until you knew.

So when the band went front and centre with their take on Pete Seeger's setting of lines from Ecclesiastes it mattered. I welcome you to YouTube versions by Pete Seeger and Judy Collins where you'll hear beautiful and elegant renditions of this perfectly constructed song. When you then hear the first track on this album with its impossibly thick and clean electric 12 string fanfare and solemn but shining vocal harmonies you will know the transportation of it. This is not a crass rock 'n' roll joke on the oldies, it's a strident celebration in a rock setting. Turn Turn Turn opens the window with a deal more force than anything on their impressive first LP through both the band's pluck in trying it on and the sheer perfection they achieve. If Judy Collins' melting solo rendition sobered you up, this new take could be the mental metronome to Vietnam War protests. Along with moments like The Beatles doing Twist and Shout or The Stones' Little Red Rooster, The Byrds Turn Turn Turn improved on and consolidated what they'd proved was their eternal contribution from the previous outing. 

Two important techniques are at work, here.  The first is the upped ante of putting dual 12 string parts in the arrangement. If the instrument's qualities made a difference in the first album, two at once broadened and reinforced huge swell of it. During the solo where McGuinn is playing a rapid claw hammer arpeggio of the changes against the melody ringing out in front the music is elevating. The other is that they got better at their own harmony scheme. This is simpler than you'd think. Two vocalists sang in precise unision, taking the song's melody. David Crosby added a descant, often improvised which lent a kind of organ chord effect to the vocals. While this approach can stifle creativity on the fly by being too regular, here it sounds spontaneous and free. This is one of the great cover versions. A lot of people think it's an original from the confidence and execution. It almost is. 

After this a bright bluesy riff  propels the whole band into a brief open string drone before the vocals come in, urgent and cool. It Won't Be Wrong is a throwback to early McGuinn songwriting but it fits in this treatment that establishes the uniformity of the music overall as busy, bright and, whether fast or slow, solid and centred. This one is all early Beatles with harmonies clearly schooled in the John low and Paul high approach. The return to the base key after choruses and bridge is a precursor of the same technique they'd use later in Eight Miles High, a gripping establishment of mode.

Set You Free This Time surprises with its mature sounding vocal and country inflections. It's one of the moments like Here Without You on the debut, that shows how confident a songwriter Gene Clark was. He takes the vocal, introducing a clearly distinct voice after the opening two choral performances. It's a more grown up look at a relationship song, as well, with the narrator recalling the early signs of trouble in the solo sections and the other's regret and pleas in the harmony second part of the verses which end with the title. The sense of heartbreak is palable and feels as strange in this album as the lead-heavy I Come and Stand at Every Door does in the following set.Because of that, I used to skip this one (as a teen listener) until experiences like it happened to me. Now, I find it beautifully sober.

Lay Down Your Weary Tune opens with the band in full voice and instrumentation for the large scaled chorus. This is broken by McGuinn's solo vocals for the verses. Like Mr Tambourine Man, the band is expanding a Dylan original to cinematic breadth with the unvarying melody pressing on like a march across an epic landscape. I will never tire of hearing this song.

And again a big sound is followed by an intimate one. He Was a Friend of Mine is led by McGuinn's acoustic arpeggios with the same clawhammer picking he used on the solo section of Turn Turn Turn. Like the title track, this is an adaptation of an existing tune, a folk song in mourning for a fallen comrade. McGuinn overlayed the sentiment with a statement of grief after the Kennedy Assassination. The shiummering harmonies' solemnity are timeless.

Side two begins with The World Turns All Around Her and it springs up with the trademark 12 string riff (the intro adds a little grinning swagger) and bright harmonies. It moves at a clip but the Clark original is about a boy pondering his mistakes in his broken relationship and pleas the new boyfriend be more devoted than he was. The middle eight which tells of his understanding of what he effectively threw away is a mster stroke of songwriting, allowing a pause and shift in feel and key before the final verse springs back into the compromised elation of the music. I will choose this as a single selection quite habitually.

Anyone who made anything of the shift to country rock years after this couldn't have heard this record with side one's country ballad and the hymn-like homily of Satisfied Mind. The solemn unision singing breaks out for the chorus when Crosby's descant soars high overhead. A joy.

If You're Gone is another Clark original and the lead is taken by him. The lyric is a series of propositions beginning with the word 'if". After a series of these conditional statements about the effect of the other he is singing to, the final two lines spook me out:  'If I love you I might never know your name. If you're gone then there is nothing that remains." Instrumentation is sparse but that is to aid the placing of the extraordinary backing vocals which are wordless hums forming organ-like chords. It's as strange as hearing a Yardbirds compilation album where Hang On Sloopy gives way to the Gregorian Still I'm Sad. It's quiet but heartfelt and unforgettable.

The second Dylan cover is The Times They are a Changin' and it gets the by now standard Burds treatment, making Dylan's voice in the darkness version danceable and radio friendly. McGuinn again lends his Dylan party impression to the solo lines before the other two vocalists chime in with harmonies. Not remarkable but not a skip either.

Wait and See is a McGuinn/Crosby collaboration and is superior filler with a lyric about seeing a hot girl. It's couched in brilliant harmonies and rich Rickebacker chimes and is over before it's begun.

So far, this sophomore effort comprises a consolidation of the great start of Mr Tambourine Man, expanding the band's musicianship (particularly the vocal arrangements) and songwriting powers in a carefully helmed quality management by the producer Terry Melcher. This sounds even more like the product of a tightly co-ordinated band that sound distinctive and pleasurable whether expressing sadness or sprightly energy. Then theres the last track.

Ending the last album with a kind of tongue in cheek version of a wartime oldie verged on embarrassing but was saved by an earnest approach that made it work. They try to do that again with Oh Susannah. The Stephen Foster classic from the previous century was known to anyone who'd had to sing it in music class in the American education system. It was a pretty good fit for the band that was clearly happy to embrace genuine folk tunes and filter them through harmony-laden rock. So, why oh why did they decide to do this one as a joke? We get the whole verse and chorus melody played out on the 12 string with cute little tinkles and bumps from Mike Clarke on the drums and then gthe band comes in for a romping vocal version. Repeat twice, including the excruciating 12 string melody. It's the sound of a band at rehearsal thinking they're being funny by doing an inappropriate version of an oldie or a softy (like a black metal cover of a Carpenters song). This kind of shit is only ever funny at the time and should never be recorded and heard again. If We'll Meet Again worked despite the humour and kept short of cringe, Oh Susannah on Turn Turn Turn bolts right into the centre of a grimacing faux pas. It means that the celebrations end with the plastered uncle who thinks his strangled rendition of My Way is a scream while the catering staff quietly clean up the tables with their eyes lowered.

The refreshed CD release of this from the mid-'90s features a number of extra tracks, including a decent cover of It's All Over Now, Baby Blue and a banging original The Day Walk (Never Before), both of which would closed the record in strength. Even the unfinished instrumental Stranger in a Strange Land would have done that. But no, this self-concious joke that is longer than everything else on the album apart from the title track, destroys this otherwise strong offering's chances of being thought of as a perfect advance from the debut.

I first heard this album when I was fifteen. A school friend had it at home as part of his elder siblings' collection and he taped it for me. It played me through that middle year period very easily, the heights of its invention, ringing electric guitar (which I didn't know was a 12 string, and angelic voices merged perfectly with the chirps of the cicadas out in the yard under the sun. The Byrds were one of the select bands I pursued when the great reissue revival of the early '80s brought us rereleases of The Kinks, The Who, The Doors and so on on new vinyl so we didn't have to rely on finding good copies at op shops. The 1996 CD was pure pleasure (apart from that one dud) and I fell into the joys of the album all over again with stunning presence and detail. 

Turn Turn Turn was a band tightening up everything that had worked for them on their debut release and presenting the thing they didn't have for that, experience. The sound is decisive and the songs, old or new, are strong. They might have kept that up for the rest of the decade without adverse criticism. What would happen, though, was further exploration. Call it acid, if you like, but add a lesson-learning disastrous tour of the UK and the restlessness of any young group of artists who need to find new paths. Not everyone did that as fast as The Beatles but this transitional effort opened the door on to years' more progression done with style and, curiously enough, honour.

Listening notes: I chose the1996 rerelease for this blog as its clarity, depth and presence exceed the vinyl rerelease of the '80s which I also had. As far as I know, this is still available. Before I forget, I should mention that this will be my final Byrds anniversary article as I've already done the remaining titles to the end of the '60s by them, having started in 2016 with the one on Fifth Dimension.

THE KINK KONTROVERSY @ 60

Strutting guitar riff and lead interplay honk out a blues workout as Dave Davies takes the lead vocal on Milk Cow Blues. It's a version of a standard so removed of most the versions the band would have heard that it qualifies as a rewrite. It's more of a record starter than an outright song and it's there at the front telling everyone at the party that The Kinks have come to play.

Ring the Bells tugs everything down with its acoustic guitar and laid back Ray vocal. It's a quiet celebration of being in love. Ray makes it sound like he woke up at half past three in the morning to reassure himself. The melancholy audible through the sentiment and the arrangement has already appeared on other Kinks records and it's gleaming the surface here.

Gotta Get the First Plane Home introduces a kind of playing Dave Davies would keep using throughout the '60s. It's a clunking staccato, just below amp breakup and palm muted, every note knocks at the next one. It's so good he starts the next song the same way, using the same beginning note. The song is a routine, gettin' back to my baby lyric and fills the time. Same goes for the next one When I See that Girl of Mine except that lines after the initial couplet of the verses stray from the R&B formula into the kind of extension Ray Davies would keep using ("I don't care if it rains or shines") whereby the melodic material reaches out beyond expectations and delivers more tension for the upcoming chorus.

I Am Free is a 6/8 rock waltz of the kind that The Stones were already mastering. Even the guitar interplay is Stonesy with strumming here and biting stabs there. Dave takes another lead. It's pleasant enough and the change in time signature is welcome.

And then the album wakes up. Till the End of the Day blasts to life as a trio of full barre chords crashes down to the open E. "Baby, I feel good, from the moment I rise..." It's a kind of reworking of the early days' chord riffs with new DNA injected. Everything is bright and speedy. The rock band is surrounded by a swarm of extra percussion and it gallops with the energy of the best weekend. Of their surrounding singles and most of this album, this is the song that kids would be getting their threads right for parties, dates, clubs and the whole world of the hungry night. Solid walls of shining harmonies, guitar punches and the pure momentum keep this one hurtling right up to the final four chord crash at the end as the tension between major and minor resolves into a slowly oscillating minor chord. And then you want to hear it again.

Side two. The World Keeps Going Round kicks into life as a kind of Spector wall of sound number if it had been recorded in a garage. Big distorted piano, drums and bass. If there's an electric guitar in there, it's so closely mixed with the piano that it's indistinguishable. Ray comes in with balancing lines: "You worry 'bout the rain. The rain keeps falling just the same." Then the obligatory romance line about breakup before the title line in the chorus resets the knowable cosmos. And then you get this: "What's the use of worrying cause you'll die alone?" Pure Ray Davies bleakness in a song that lopes and crashes like a drunk getting in before dawn. It might sound like bus stop philosophy like "plenty of fish in the sea" but there's a frown to the chorus that prevents any platitudinal warmth from spoiling it. This is the Kinks of See My Friends, their single from the middle of the year, a constant memento mori among the colours of Carnaby Street.

I'm On an Island starts with a strident acoustic chord progression and Davies in as close to the strange calypso accent he would persist with fo rthe next two decades on assorted titles. He's on an island but can't escape. His girl left him and he has nowhere to run. He's the only one on the island. He wouldn't be anywhere else if only she was there with him. This island is much more like the one in John Donne's poem. The approach is comical but it's the same message as See My Friends: being alone and young and abandoned is bleak. There's a perfomative quirk that might have come from playing it live or even just in front of the mic when they recorded it. After the refrain which ends on a held high note he starts the next verse as though out of breath and it sounds like he has been repeating the phrase to himself and anyone who'd hear incessantly: "I'm - on - an - islan'." It's not the first joke song The Kinks did (and certainly wouldn't be the last) but it's the most neatly presented one. A few months afterwards we'd get Dedicated Follower of Fashion and a sub tradtition in the band would be forever with them.

Then you get the anthem so much on the other side of Till the End of the Day that it was its B-side. Where Have all the Good Times Gone? opens with a sledgehammer version of the same chord progression as Till. Instead of the amphetamine rush of that song it's a crashing comedown as Ray whines over a steady rock grind that things are on the downswing. As the song progresses, it's clear how clever this lyric is by unfurling the guilt the previous generation want the new one to feel for taking all their new toys for granted, the delicious freedoms of the night clubs and the culture they were making, and then giving it fifty lashes of sarcasm. The good times haven't gone anywhere, they're here, now and swinging like the rest of London. The pummelling rock of the song feels like a bummer but the clear message is about kicking the downs and jumping into it. It doesn't rush to life like Till the End of the Day but the chorus with its low whinge bvy Ray and high, exuberant descant by Dave let any who will get the joke.

And then you get three songs, just when you thought the record had made its last statement. It's Too Late cunningly mixes a rock progression on acoustic instead of electric with a country melody. Girl regrets her breakup but he's no longer in the mood. What's in store for me matches a stinging 2/4 beat with a boy girl romance plea from Dave. You Can't Win is Ray in snarling mode pretty much just restating the title in different ways.

I've lumped all those together because, as listenable as they are, they cannot match the power of Good Times with its giant scale and strange exubrance. That was the song that should have closed the album, making a perfect compliment to Till the End of the Day on side one. After the big final chord of Good Times it feels like waiting for the post credit sequence in a 2020s film that never comes.

The package was a good one, however. The cover art showed a white background with four unconventional band member shots tha gave way to a large picture of Dave Davies caught with motion blur banging out a power chord on his hollowbody Guild. While the album suffers from the sense of being recorded before its original songs were fully baked, the standouts form peaks and tell listeners of the time that there was more to come. 

Listening notes: I strolled around or sat and listened to this as a high resolution download I'd bought from an online shop. It's in mono, not compressed and all of the wincing Shel Talmy production decisions jab at the ear but it is the cleanest version of what appeared on vinyl at the time that you can get. 

KINDA KINKS @ 60

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rolling Stones No. 2 @ 60

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE WHO'S MY GENERATION @ 60

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

"Out in the street!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

KINKS @ 60

A brief tuggle of guitars and drums and the band bashes into Beautiful Delilah. The guitars are hot but clean. It's the vocal that sounds overloaded, a constant rasping growl that could be a young buck's inner monologue or that of some aging lech looking where he shouldn't. This unmelodic assault stretches time for its mere two minutes and wraps around your ears like fine grain sandpaper. That's what most of this album is going to be. It is the sound of a sustained wince.

Not only does this band that has originals on offer, start with a cover of a Chuck Berry song but it's not even frontman Ray Davies singing but his brother Dave. You can tell when, for all his torn tonsil rawness, his "r" that sounds like a "w" plonks him right back down to London and not Tennessee. It really screams ersatz. When the originals turn up, they are just like that with the name Davies on the by line. It sounds like the grubbing square-spectacled record execs of the U.K. scooped up anyone under twenty-five who looked good in a suit and could at least hold an electric guitar, kicked them into a studio and gave them an hour to make a record. 

That, I emphasise, is how it sounds. Stand back, make sure you're not hungover (as this music will punish you in that state), think a little more historically, and you might well hear something you didn't at first, the beginnings of greatness, looking here more like a larval stage of a buzzing insect than a rock band but forming, all the same, right in front of you.

Yes, most of these two sides are rusty, clanking covers and soundalikes. Yes, Shel Talmy had a lot to learn about record production. Yes, this is not a patch on what was to come. No, this was not the last anyone would hear of The Kinks and for good reasons.

I'm going to be selective about the tracks I'll describe on this one as most of them are made of the same adjectives and I don't want to put either of us through that. However, I'd like you to consider what people who bought long playing records back in the '60s expected of them and how they made their way into daily lives.

The music discs that mattered the most in the early '60s were singles, seven inch vinyl platters with one song per side that got played on the radio. These were where bands put anything they called art, the big statements that failed or succeeded which meant the band did either. The Kinks had already flopped with a (with hindsight) horrible version of Long Tall Sally and an under appreciated original called You Still Want Me. The reason this album was made on the Pye label's shilling was the breakthrough of the third single, which we'll get to.

What that meant was that if the singles proved the band to be viable in the market, they go to do an album. What most of them did was a version of their live set. And that is where you get to why this record is so rasping and ugly: this is what The Kinks sounded like live. If you bought it, you bought it for a sound that could get a party dancing to the slamming beats and cut-through vocals of R&B standards. If the originals didn't stop anyone dancing, that was more of a proof of concept than anything. Repeat.

Follow the various threads through to 1965 to find out how albums became something more than this by the mid '60s and you'll see how the LP became an attempted art form. Before then, it was a long ad for live shows or live shows you were too young for.

Also, none of these emulations are slavish recreations of originals. The later '60s were plagued with blues purists whose museumish covers attempted authenticity only to sound more irritatingly British. In the early '60s these bands found their own feet by doing the songs the way they worked at the pubs. 

Then you get to the end of side one and the single that made the difference. If Long tall Sally was weirdly reserved (compare it to the Beatles' screamfest) and You Still Want Me second rate Beatles, You Really Got Me was an explosion.

It starts with a snarling two chord riff, mean as mustard and unstoppable. The emphasis changes as soon as the band kicks in but it's still going. Ray's vocal comes in slyly but changes into earnest with the first rising chord change. A chorus of humming voices starts up and the momentum gathers, hitting the ceiling repeatedly when it leaps up a fourth for the chorus, a raucous shouting of the title three pounding times before a brief relief with a chord one tone down before everything starts again. The next time that happens Dave Davies' solo scratches its way in, scurrying around the room and hissing dissonantly. Back for the verse with a distant piano and the chorus finished with four bamming barre chords. End of side one.

Amp distortion had only ever been accidental on British recordings until that moment when Dave put a little amp through a bigger amp so the stressed output valves of the first one blare out to the mics in front of the second. That's a fuzz pedal by longer means. You can find overdrive on blues records and select  rockabilly sides but even The Beatles only seemed to get to its outer edge (listen to Misery on Please Please Me), remaining hot clean rather than blasting. Dave Davies gets it monstrous, making it huge when matched by the bass. Even now, after decades of evermore refined guitar overdrive, this scratchy early step still thrills. When I went to see Ray Davies and band (not The Kinks) play the Palais down here in Melbourne there were very young ushers dancing to this in the aisles, getting up and into the song's celebration of everything good about being young and ready.

More of the covers and clones populate the second side so the party can just keep going. That is until the penultimate track comes up and we can with hindsight, understand one of Ray Davies' strains as a songsmith at its beginning. Stop Your Sobbing. Ray starts before the band. "it is time for you to stop all of your sobbing". When they come in on the word sobbing it becomes a kind of beatgroup ballad led by Ray's melancholy plea. A second part of the verse calls the others in before Ray repeats the title with a non verbal extension on the last syllable. It feels like whatever began with You Really Got Me has ended crushingly and his narrator is fronting up with a kind of tough aloofness but knows it's a see through mask. The change for the middle eight with its admission that he really wants to hold her and conquer her sadness and would if it weren't too late. The music of this section is, however small its scale, momentus, showing what drama can come from a slight rhythm change and plainer chords. So it's on to the fade and the next one who really gets him. Repeat. The sense of this inevitability is the other side of swinging London, the one that happens in all those kitchen sink epics of the East End and Ray knows it.

From this song came the serious pausing for thought audible in See My Friends, Waterloo Sunset, Days, Shangri-La and so many many more. The page representing The Kinks in the Nik Cohn and Guy Peellaert picture book Rock Dreams, after the louche fantasies of The Beatles, Elvis and the Stones, is a back street of London at night. Ray stands beside a woman with a pram, they are both looking at the viewer. Stop your sobbing, there's more.

The album plays out with what was the last song favourite of every R&B combo in the greater city of London. Got Love if You Want it was the cue for a rave up jam and experiments with dynamics. That's what happens here. What's up next? Oh, there's this new one from The Yardbirds!

Think of these two pinnacles on this LP. Let them stay visible over the duty-bound live set chestnuts that make the mood, remember that, equipment limitations aside (Abbey Road this wasn't) these two sides of songs were pretty much exactly what The Kinks wanted out of their first LP, something you could dance to and keep dancing to. Most bands, if they got as far as this, put it out, split up and lived on memories. If you revisit this you will start noticing the vocal arrangements, use of piano, growing awareness of why songs work, and get a sense that Ray Davies knew the music his friends could make and took it there.