1967 at 50: THE VELVET UNDERGROUND & NICO

Bullshit is power. An idiot I once shared a house with was convinced that the word nice meant ugly but interesting. I was aware of the meme but he cited a dictionary as the source. He was the type of cardboard cutout stylist whose sense of reality is entirely dependent on a quilt of fragmented nonsense concocted by his peers. Someone high in the society of scale thought something up or just repeated it then it took its place beside gravity or Pythagoras' theorem as a piece of the knowable universe. Nice has never meant ugly but interesting outside a small group for a limited time period but my co-renter believed it was acceptable usage. He was in a quandary once after someone had described him as nice. He even devised a short anecdotal conversation helper around the incident, which ended with: "ugly but interesting. Hmm." I haven't seen him for about a decade and neither know nor care if he still thinks this but if he doesn't the turning point would have involved some humiliation from someone higher in his order. If he still has some sway it probably hasn't happened and he thinks "ugly but interesting" every time he hears the word nice and smiles enough for you to know it's to himself.

Brian Eno said, "The first Velvet Underground album only sold 10,000 copies, but everyone who bought it formed a band." He didn't mean it literally nor had to. The journalist he was speaking to and the readers of the published interview knew well enough that all he meant was that the record was influential. He was right and still is. The figure he quotes might well be accurate but the point is the impact, the resonance. The album has resurfaced many times over the decades as newer waves of musicians cite their influences. None of them need be lying but when the quote's echoes sound now it's more like: only two hundred people bought the LP but all of them formed bands. Only the very feeble will redistribute these tracks in the hope that their immediate social scaffolding will collapse into the shape of a rock band. But the sense of Eno's genuinely witty remark is easily forgotten when the surface of the soundbite gets such a gleam. Few outside of VU fans ever seem to mention the output that followed despite any riches it holds (which is a fair bit, by the way)

Why? Well, there is the music, which I'll get to, but there is also the deathless cache of avant gardism lead by the Andy Warhol brand and working all the way down to guttersnipes dying from heroin cut with bleach in dark alleys: it has edge. It is about people who had edge and it is by them, as well. For devil's advocacy I'll mention a recent putdown of the album that claimed that outside of a few tracks of inspired collaboration John Cale's contribution came across as indulgent noise and Lou Reed's as Brill Building hackery. So, edge or bratty fluke? More bullshit. Nevertheless, to dismiss the sub-cultural context of the Warhol environment and the enthusiasm of the young drivers of the band leaves the picture undeveloped. I think the set of songs stands by itself but when you do add the influences that made the whole package it deserves a decently yelled "wow!" But first the songs.

Sunday Morning would confuse any first-time listener who is listening to hear an avant-roque record. A celeste tinkles through the arpeggio of the progression while a picked bass dive bombs down to the tonic and the band and vocals enter with Lou Reed in wistful sweetness. Any charges of pop-to-order can be laid here as, by the sound alone, it could have been written for the Monkees or Petula Clark. An easy gliding rhythm with a cor anglais accentuating the fourth and na-na-na-na backing vocals that float on waves of reverb provide a pop ballad hobby kit. Drill down to the lyrics, though, and the picture changes. The narrator is pursued by his wasted years, phantoms created by self-consciousness or paranoia dog the footsteps and call from the crowds. Not even safe on a drowsy Sunday morning.

If you didn't think that was intentional just keep listening. Waiting For the Man plunges us straight into the thumping monotony of the title as the chords tonic to fourth repeat on the lower keys of a piano as guitars whine scratchily like mosquitoes to each side. Reed comes in with a very different vocal describing what, at least at the time, most of a life of chemical dependency consists of.  He fends off the aggression of the locals in the black neighbourhood who think he's cruising for sex and cringes as he waits because, as Reed well knew from reading Burroughs if not from his own experience (and Lou was an tertiary level reader), that you always have to wait. Finally, the dealer turns up, there's an excruciating walk to the apartment, a quick taste, the nexus and then the hasty exit. It will all happen tomorrow but that's not now. The cleverness of this song, the oppressive shiftless throbbing, the slight but annoying guitars and the tone of the narrator who professes coolness while feeling the hatred or burdensome indifference of everyone around him because if he doesn't feel that he's just another white-boy junkie who'll wake up one morning hairless and middle-aged and still craving or die near the garbage bins out the back, the cleverness is that we feel the warmth of the pose and understand the fear it masks. Reed the writer understood this, that it was so and that you would know, and knew that the lately cute rock medium was the perfect palate for it. Add the rest of the band as they were and you get this. Writing this just then has made me wonder if this album itself with its self-aware drama and characterisation isn't the first rock opera, however undeclared. I don't think that's an important thought (rock operas had influence but were doomed to give way to the eternally returning pop song package model albums that rise to counter every sustained attempt to lift rock music) but it's a diverting one.

Femme Fatale surfaces from the silence between tracks as a late night bossa nova with a pair of major 7th chords played on electric guitars. The treble is rolled off as though they are meant to sound like nylon string guitars but there is a quite clear admission that they are not. Nico's heavily accented droopy voice enters quietly before surprising with a strong voice for the second line, "she's going to break your heart in two," before falling back to the sexy whisper, "it's true". But the whisper isn't sexy, it's just where it would be sexy if Astrud Gilberto were singing it. From Nico it has the sound of a friend delivering hard truths to a broken-hearted other in a smoky three a.m. room. The song is all Lou Reed, a mix of charming melody and biting commentary: "You're written in her book? You're number thirty-seven take a look." And the chorus breaks out with a strong full voice from the lead and a response chorus that sounds like cartoon ravens in the next room. And here's something again. Is this mockery of pop harmonies accidental as it is in early Rolling Stones recordings or intentional. I ask as the lead out of the chorus is accompanied by guitars that are clearly out of tune even though they are being played on the same strings as the verse parts? The band resented the imposition of the model and hangaround by mentor Andy Warhol. Is this their protest? Is it a kind of comment on mainstream pop, adding dissonance to an otherwise sweetly tuneful song? Is it just poor quality control on the part of the band or their nominal but largely absent producer Andy Warhol? I'd veer toward the latter. Even so, none of that can spoil the gentle strength of the song.

The drone and grind of Venus in Furs rises like a theatre curtain and the stage is thick with red light. Even at low volume it sounds loud. The band, bass, drums and rattling guitar haul the riff up a hill before it rolls back down and they have to start again, all the while overseen by the sting of a droning viola. Reed enters without his street cred to describe the scenes from Sascher-Masoch (whose novel gives the song its title and characters) When he tells us in the middle eight that he is weary and could sleep four thousand years it sounds real. Otherwise, his higher register guides us through the scenes of domination, humiliation and pain as Severin takes his punishing pleasure. This is one of the tracks on the album to feature Reed's Ostrich guitar, an electric guitar whose strings are all tuned to a single note at whichever octave is closest to the standard tuning (the E's down a tone, for example, but the B up a minor third). The name is from Reed's Brill building days when he used a guitar with that tuning on a identikit dance song called The Ostrich. This can do a few things but here it emphasises the drone while allowing a multi-octave strumming of the riff as it rises and falls. It's aided and abetted by John Cale's viola part which drones but also puts in a rhythmic screech like it's giving orders. As well it might; the overall burdensome force has a nearly hypnotic power over the listener. This is broken by the two middle eights which surge into the relative major as Reed sings about his weariness and the viola plays long insistent fifths. And then, each time it falls back down the slope and had to be rolled back up. A reiteration of the opening verse closes the vocal - "strike, dear mistress, and cure his heart" - before the grind intensifies with the guitar playing and ugly but beautiful mandolin tremolo but down on the lower frets so that it starts sounding like a jackhammer. And Severin hits the floor and begs for more.

Many years ago I was sitting in what was then the Carlton Hotel's big high ceilinged bar (Queens Street in Brisbane) with another musician. There was table serivce and a guy playing pop standards on a jazz box.  He threw in something from The Beatles' Revolver album which I thought was strange and we got to talking about the music of that time and the Velvet Underground came up. I think that was because some of the songs like Femme Fatale had a jazzy guitar feel to them. In a lull he looked up from his drink and said, "isn't Venus in Furs a scary song?" I thought about it. I'd just come out of a couple of years guiding my band through various Eastern and Arabic modes. Drones in songs were something I was known for to a degree. So, when I heard the song mentioned that's what I thought of first but his quiet exclamation carried enough awe it compelled me to reassess. I recalled how Reed breaks his icy observational tone in one verse and sounds much more like an observer. "Taste the whip now bleeeeeeeeeed for me." He finishes the line with a giggle. He's in the audience, at one of the peep holes, his tongue out at the pain, the degradation, the welts and the blood. He's not just the power with the cat o' nine tails, he's the customer. Yes it is. It's a scary song.

Run Run Run hits the groove in a gallop. Apart from the switch to the fourth in the chorus it's all on the tonic. Chunga chunga chunga chunga. At first it's garagey but conventional enough. The verses are about kids getting kicks and then kicking the bucket. That's the life chosen then that's life. Live fast etc. The thing is there's no moral curation unless it's what at that time would have been unthinkable: advocacy. This is not a roll call of the wicked or even a service for the innocent unknowing youth, it's an honour roll. You gotta run run run run run take a drag or two. Run run run run run Gypsy Death and you. Trouble is with this the honour roll doesn't sound like Fanfare for the Common Man. No middle eights, no riffs, no Brill building chops. Just the gallop to the end with a lot of feedback and scratchy tremolo.

All Tomorrow's Parties begins before you realise it's started. A slow, solemn ascent through a major scale, what the basses would be doing in an orchestral version but pizzicato. And then it falls and as it lands back on D, Maureen Tucker's hammer hits the kettle drum (actually a normal kick with a lot of reverb), a quick breath out of time. On four comes the extraordinary piano part devised by Cale of hemisemidemiquavers for four hands playing through the changes. For a long time I thought this was a tape loop but the changes really do happen. That loop would have stretched a few Manhattan blocks. And then the voice.

If Nico sounded whispered and crooned through Femme Fatale she turns the fog horn of her lower range for zero visibility conditions and rolls out a vocal so grand and so cold that it almost obscures the beauty of Reed's melody. The song has a modal tonality, like something from the middle ages. You could imagine it sung by monks. Nico's hard note delivery (actually two deliveries but we'll get to that) forms a solid structure around which we gather and ogle. The monument strikes us with awe and fear as we see the contemporary Cinderella crouching in the shadows until she goes to the ball in scrounged and tattered finery. But the ball is not in fairyland but darkest Manhattan. Nothing to wear for the poor girl, Thursday's child and Sunday's clown who cries behind the door. There is a sneer in the words but Nico's performance presses it out of sight as, week after week, the girl in the song gets further away from the centre of the party but more dependent on it. The death march drum thunders on, the glittering rain of the prepared piano moves like a slow machine and the guitars (combined Ostrich clang and electric 12 string chime) provide the compromised grandeur. The procession continues without seamingly without cease. But stop it must and does, abruptly with a final brittle tremolo flourish. End.

The '80s CD release of the album featured a treat in the form of a mix of this song with a single vocal. Nico's voice on the initial (and almost every other) release is double tracked in the custom of the '60s. Producers would get vocalists to repeat a take as exactly as possible to add body to the sound. While this practice petered out with advances in recording technology by the mid '60s it was still used. The problem is that no to takes are ever going to match exactly. A syllable here or consonant there will always be out. Masters of the approach like the Beatles double tracked so closely that it sounds like expertly managed echo. Nico, never quite comfortable with her vocals until she shed the world's disdain and made strengths of her flaws (of all the ex VU crew her solo efforts are my favourite), was put through the double tracking mill for this song. The result is double the mournfulness and size. There are frequent mismatches but they only serve to indicate the size of the voice. That said, if you're interested, track down an early CD release or Youtube the single vocal version. It will immediately appeal for the sleeker line of the vocal. It isn't better, the original double tracked take still gives us more of what we need, but it is a relief.

The old side two provides no such relief. Heroin begins with a strummed single note (Ostrich guitar) and another clean (and normally tuned) one filling out the chords on the higher strings. This goes for ten listless bars before the rhythm takes form between the two and they diverge between playing a swirling arpeggio and the same grounded chords (C-F) and we notice John Cale's viola creeping in with a drone on C (infrequently thickened with a G). Lou Reed's vocal enters the scene before you notice. "I ....... don't know ...... just where I'm going .... "  A few bars later and "but I ...... gonna try for the kingdom if I can cause it makes me feel I'm a man when I put a spike into my vein ..." And everything under and around his drifitng voice begins to speed up. The voice takes energy from this and seems to rise into the light from the dark corner of the room where it began. He feels just like Jesus' son. But "I guess I just don't know. I guess that I just don't know." This is the pattern of the song for the next five minutes: the junkie rises slowly from his torpor through connection and euphoria and into the vision splendid before admitting he doesn't know, isn't sure, can't do anything. Far from repetitive, though, Heroin describes a slow pulsing arc in which the narrator climbs through great ecstasy, each time a little higher and, thanks to Reed's brilliance as a lyricist, believably into a kind of plateau of confidence bolstered by a band rising in increasingly powerful waves of energy and near edible noise that strains until you can't tell the difference between the pain of feedback or the sublime dissonance of the viola, just like the junkie in the middle. He doesn't know. He doesn't know, can't know, won't know, shan't know, beyond knowing as his screaming nervous system variously lifts and drops him. "And thank your god that I'm not aware. And thank god that I just don't care. And I guess I just don't know. And I guess I just don't know...." The bright drone of the viola and the chiming of the guitars slow to a stop, a tiny growl of a chord and it's over. It's where the narrator of Waiting for the Man went when he made his excuses and left and every day after that. By the end the drone could be that of a choir at his funeral.

A bright chord riff stops and starts before bashing into something between a country song and a beat band from the shady side of the street. It's the closest thing on the album to a conventional mid-sixties rock song. A call and response verse with Reed hitting a streetwise sneer and the band in falsetto behind him with a charming ramshackle chord solo some tight playing for once. At first it seems like a misogynist snarl but the "better hit her" line increasingly feels like a taunt to the kind of affected street-level machismo that has brought the woman in the song to this pass. She only falls for the worst ("not just any guy" has a severe ring here), suffers, gets up and falls again. As sordid and dejecting as it is this is a song about a survivor. She is not everywoman, just one and one that comes through, neither spitfire nor victim. I feel an odd kinship between this and Ray Davies' Dandy from the year before where the gadabout for all his shallowness and hedonism is alright in that 1960s hip way. Reed says it too in the fade. "Aw, she's alright."

I'll Be Your Mirror begins with sweet clean electric guitars and a brighter rhythm than Femme Fatale. Nico enters with her deep boom singing a melody that I could imagine Petula Clark or Lulu cooing. There's even a playfully lilting second section to the verses that strengthens the sugar. But this is a song about reassurance in the face of self despair. Is it some fragile Warholian model or just a teenager? It could be anyone but the thing that reaches out to me is that it sounds sincere. "Please put down your hands," she sings to someone who is not warding off a threat nor putting up their dooks but hiding their face. This goes sour at the end of the chirpy chorus when the palm-muted guitars come in with a sprightly rhythm, an audible microtone out of tune, so distinctly wrong that it could only have been intentional. Who knows? It grates. It grates every time I hear it but I know it's going to sound like that and I just let it happen. Intentional or not the dissonance adds to the darkness the guardian angel narrator seeks to clear and that works.

Black Angel's Death Song starts looming guitar under a squeaky viola pattern. Reed's Dyalnesque sneer tells of adventurous but dark choices in a nightmare landscape bloody with violence and gore. While there's a lot here from the literary memory of the English major there's also cinema but it isn't Panic in Needle Park is Bunuel and Bergman at their most fantastical and bleak. Apart from some loud hisses between verses the arrangement keeps to the guitar/viola duo for the entirety and peters out rather than fades or cleanly finishes. This has not been the junkie parade of Run Run Run, it's about the weight of life decisions and, dressed in the language of a ragged epic, bears witness rather than celebrates. It's the song of an angel, not a Gomorrahan.

European Son begins like any other of the rockier songs on the record but quickly spreads out into concrete noise and directionless noodling. Fans of the album often skip it or call it filler or indulgent but those charges only stick if it's offered as a track like the others. My feeling is that, while it might well have come from the kind of jam everyone gets into at the time but can't listen to afterwards thrown on as the last track, it's there as noise, it's meant to be annoying. Anyone who has listened to it in earnest hoping to glean the spirit of free rock a la Ornette Coleman are advised to fast forward to Reed's Metal Machine Music variously dismissed as garbage or defended as genius by Reed himself (it famously got under the skin of critic Lester Bangs who led a crusade against it) Me, it depends. I'll leave it on if it doesn't intrude on what I'm doing (it's the best sex music at twenty but the worst at forty but I was thinking more like washing dishes or the vacuuming) but there are examples in the temporal neighbourhood that outdo it for obnoxiousness like the Stooges' LA Blues or the decades-later hidden track of game noises on Beck's Odelay. Oddly, even though it stands outside of period the timid chaos of it puts it right back. Your choice.

Well, then, after the epics, the junk, the feedback and the cool, what does this album do outside of fulfilling its own cool? For starters it's cool was only very closely local. A handful of gigs outside of the Warhol wings and no radio play added up to no hits nor much attention. The attention came later, after the band had diluted its membership and then parted ways. Then, everyone had been there at the time and that's where the bullshit started. But bullshit is power and can sell itself on the whiff alone and does. The good news here is that this album rises above it. The sprawling mess of Latin beats, funeral drums, debased folk, drones and crafted noise is held together by songs strong enough to be recognisable covered in any genre (well, ok, maybe not European Son) because they are made of real stuff. You can leave the heroin chic, the avant-models, the strung-out cool and the affected sneers and you'll still have a good record. This is a good record despite the unintentionally poor production (accentuated by the moments of decent engineering that also happen) and not because of it. It's a marvel of band-inspiring craft and earsplitting clashes. It's Stockhausen meets the Everly Brothers. There is nothing like it that spans with such ease Revolver-era Beatles and Throbbing Gristle. All of the above but it's still just good.


Listening Notes: Exclusively, as a reference for this article, I used the hi-res master of the 45th anniversary release, bought as a download online. You could scratch around for a original Verve vinyl copy but if you wanted to hear what it sounded like as a mastered sequence the 24 bit 96 kHz is the one to choose. On the other hand this album will never be improved by higher audio presentation as the original production is mired in a series of bad engineering decisions from the time of its production. It will either sound like the Velvets with extra noise (authographic!) or pristine but poorly produced. Up to you.

1967 at 50: YOUNGER THAN YESTERDAY - THE BYRDS

For a fourth album this sounds a lot like a difficult second. In a sense it is, though. It is their second after the departure of previous chief originals writer Gene Clarke and his voice. It's a second album also in the sense that it differs far more from its immediate precursor (5D Fifth Dimension) than the first two did. It's a set that features both the familiar and the experimental, enriching some of the best ideas of the previous albums and catering to the formula for the fans. From the crazy Crosby cauldron of Mind Gardens to the as old as yesterday Dylan cover with a rich 12 string intro, this disc sounds like musicians who want to go ahead but eat the mass appeal, too.

So, start with a track that mixes cynicism with idealism like So You Want to be a Rock and Roll Star.
An arpeggiated two chord figure on the 12 string let's you know who this is. Add some amp breakup (so console clipping) to that instrument of purity and you get the old band with a new attitude. When the harmonies come in (no lead vocals with this one) they are more distant than we're used to, thin and compressed they sit in a pocket of the mix rather than ride on its surface like they did in Turn Turn Turn. This is a song about the same kind of self awareness that made those things an issue to fans and the rock press alike. The title is taken from the kind of do it yourself manual that middle America was buying to help build its garden sheds or improve its job prospects.  "So you want to be a rock and roll star .. Just get an electric guitar and learn how to play..." But the joke of it sours quickly with, "sell your soul to the company who are waiting there to sell plastic ware." Bypass the passion for music and go straight to the fame, the sex and the money. This is from a band who had raked in more than their share of all of that and then witnessed what a fickle public could do, especially when guided by a still very conservative media. The song is rough and as processed as smooth peanut butter but they want you to know that they are on top of this and put in some delicious Latin lead playing on the Rickenbacker and an livelier trumpet (Hugh Masekela!) to sharpen things up. The real sound of a stadium of girls screaming stands in for half a verse and if you have the 5D album in mind it might remind you of the song about the Lear jet it ended on. A tiny epic of attitude and incorrigible musicality from players who know you understand. That's a good start.

So why wind things back by three or so years to the next one? Chris Hillman's Have You Seen Her Face with its big opening riff (not on a 12 string, admittedly) and Merseybeat tune and Tambourine Man harmonies is the kind of California cool song about a girl that the last album pretty much erased. Yet here it is. The band rocks with some fine mid-60s grit in the guitar tone to contrast the Gregorian harmonies and it passes by very pleasantly.

CTA 102 was a radio source from a quasar that engendered speculation that it might be evidence of alien civilisations in deep space. Written by McGuinn and Troubadour regular, roadie and guru of the weird and the wonderful Bob Hippard. Together the pair latched on to the notion that their song might reach the citizens of CTA 102, setting it in a radio-friendly Byrds harmony jangle that might be launched via Earth waves to the great Cosmos. A clear next step from 5D's Mr Spaceman the song takes a turn for the strange when the instrumental section is wifully ditressed to sound like a distant radio signal over which we hear some strange sped up vocals which could be backwards (they aren't, it's McGuinn and Crosby speaking gibberish) to invoke the aliens commenting on the Byrds song. The blend of slight major key pop with a big scary idea gets beyond the cuteness of the presentation but only just. Still, it's a step ahead.

Renaissance Fair begins with a lovely gleaming arpeggio on the Rickenbacker which forms the ground for a slightly overdriven chord figure. Translucent harmonies sing of olde worlde costumes and market stalls at one of the Renaissance revival events that became regular events with the hippies and the folkies. The singers think they are in a dream of the days o' old and, to be fair, a Renaissance fair in the '60s prior to the inevitable commercialisation might well have looked, felt and smelled as though everyone was partying like it was 1467. Sonorous word pictures of the stalls and the vibe are told in a deft Crosbian blend of medieval and jazz intervals and some lovely melisma on the vowels. If it was another band from the time I'd be in a swoon. Here, it glides by lightly and goes, pointing to Crosby's near future in CSNY which is to say beyond my interest.

Chris Hillman's next number Time Between plunges into contemporary Nashville with a leaf or two from new folk rock outside of the Byrds' own brand of it. Hillman's is creditable, given that he's not trying to trowel it on as a country number. The real revelation here is his fluid Telecaster playing which twangs and bends with the best of them. A pleasant song about a long distance relationship.

Pleasant is the word for most of the album so far and it's a let down after the opening broadsides of the first two sets and the bold self effacing experimentation of the previous one. Which is why we have to wait almost a whole side to get to the second great song of this LP. David Crosby's Everybody's Been Burned begins with a spooky 12 string arpeggio travelling through chords complicated by 9ths and fourths as it climbs and gently falls through a minor key. It could be the theme song of a mystery and indeed seems to find an intrigue of its own. The title and first line promise a song sung in sympathy to someone damaged from a relationship but it just doesn't go there. Crosby's pure tenor takes us through some cold observations about the futility of loving and even just trying to love. "I know that door that shuts just before you get to the dream..." This eerie line gives way to a gentle 12 string solo that begins lyrical but seems to get stuck halfway as though its stuttered staccato phrase cannot or should not be finished. The second and final verse sings about the impossibility of seeking love by turning, running or hiding and then, quite chillingly ends with: "So I guess instead I'll love you." The rolling 6th and 9th chords press on into the fade. It's like a first draft of Love the One You're With as imagined by Charles Manson.

The old side two begins with a strong rock song, Hillman's first really good one on the album, Thoughts and Words. An urgent descent through the minor  on the 12 string and a six finishes with an aching drawn-out grind on the E sus 4. Hillman enters with a mournful tone, descending with the chords, and lyrics about his love for a woman taking him over before the tight high harmony of the chorus and  its surprise: "I thought I was on top of it all!" The second verse gives way to a swirl of two backwards acoustic guitars that add a weirdness to the situation. A final verse staves of repetition by including Crosby's descant response to Hillman's lines into the final chorus and closing vortex of backwards playing to the final chord. While the chorus seems a tad worn compared to the rest of the song it does fit and shows us that Hillman could be more than the providore of album filler.

When I first heard Mind Gardens I made a conscious decision to soldier through it so that I would never have to hear it again. So, formless, pointless and hippy the song and its creator, David Crosby seem to vanish into the void of their own arseholes. Lots of backwards guitars and meaningless musings in a meandering mess of a melody. Listening to it for this post had me kicking down each pillar of that dismissal. First, it does have form. Crosby's wandering improvisations on the tune can distract from that but they too carry beauty (particularly the line "but when the sun came" with its beautiful Indian melisma on the last word) and adorn the central modal tune that climbs out of the dark rich Celtic musical soil where Crosby found it. His strong tenor tells a tale of overprotection before wisdom arrives with a lesson about trust from nature. It's a fable and doesn't need assignment to a more mundane story (it could apply to romantic love, parenthood, or even, gosh-darn, gardening). It has become my favourite track on the album.

My Back Pages starts with a compromise, a chord progression repeats without being moulded into a bright 12 string riff or having the song just start. When I first heard the album and knew its place in the sequence I winced a little and wondered why the band went backwards this way. It's an even tamer Dylan cover than any they had already done and, with its rousing chorus and McGuinn's Dylanesque lead vocal and then big, ringy Rickenbacker solo, it has the feel of a management call or even the band themselves voting for a single for the old fans. The experience of the Dylan-free but controversy-plagued 5D and the banning of the masterpiece single Eight Miles High, the Byrds could be forgiven for bashing out a bit of the old tried and true. Coming after the most startlingly original song they'd ever done and dumping the listener into cliche drive feels like surrender to the very forces they castigate in the bold opening track.

Chris Hillman was to expand his songwriting abilities considerably from the next album on but on this breakout set where he provides four new originals to an albums sequence and adds another lead vocal to the range he has only really been able to distinguish himself with one. Thoughts and Words is more in line with where the band were moving but still retained some marks of earlier periods of pop music. The Girl With No Name is a song I confuse in memory with Time Between and Have You Seen Her Face. They are all country flavoured songs constructed according to prescription and played sung with a checklist precision that says to me: well all the notes are right, what more do you want? Plenty, actually but that can wait until Notorious Byrd Brothers.

Strident slightly-overdriven guitars bash out the opening chords of Heatwave until you realise that it's a new recording of the song Why from the previous year. This was apparently included at David Crosby's insistence. I'll echo the title here. The band already had a good swag of new material on hand, some of it more impressive than this but they chose to end their entry in the most game-changing year of the decade with the b-side of an old single that flopped. And then the new version strips the previous outing by removing most of the distinctive bending 12 string soloing that engendered the term raga rock to apply to at least two years of progressive rock music. It's still a decent Byrds song but now it sounds like the begrudging compliance with a tantrum.

You might have guessed that this is not my favourite Byrds album. I won't offer any what-ifs to suggest how it might have been improved. Chris Hillman's songs irritate me but if you don't have those you might not have a host of splendid ones in the years to come. It was good to be pleasantly surprised by Mind Gardens which I'd written off as hippy timewasting. But more than Fifth Dimension's production being plagued by the loss of a major contributor Younger Than Yesterday's  set reveals the effects of that gap and they are not good. If I were old enough to have bought this album on first release I would have played it once all the way through and then only returned to it for individual tracks. Even now, walking around and listening determinedly to the whole sequence, often daily, my impression is of some real tries at finding the new with the old strengths and falling back to routine as though exhausted. Perhaps it would take David Crosby becoming so unbearable that freedom from him became the spur. Whatever it was, the band, already limping, would yet find some greatness as they continued to develop and progress even to the point of sound unrecognisably different from the Byrds of the first album but in a way that disturbs rather than inspires.

1967 at 50: JEFFERSON AIRPLANE - SURREALISTIC PILLOW

Like a lot of '60s classics I knew of White Rabbit long before I heard it. I finally heard it in a movie and then years after on a beaten up LP left among a pile of others in the first house I lived in after leaving home. A little later I heard Somebody to Love and was wowed by that, as well. With little information to hand I was left believing that Jefferson Airplane was Grace Slick's backing band. The album those songs appeared on had not been reissued. I left it at that.

Then with the rise of interest in the then less known bands of the later '60s that fed a lot of bands in the early '80s the story was fleshed out a little more and the reissue of Surrealistic Pillow appeared in the shops. I got mine some time in 1984 as part of my fortnightly trip to the Record Market on Queen Street, Brisbane. I studied the sleeve on the bus home. Pink-tinted black and white band shot on the cover with the title in the old-is-new art nouveau font telling everyone they're from late '60s San Francisco. Interview on the back where Grace Slick described her voice as "loud, unmistakably loud." Yeah, that'll do.

I put it on while I made the coffee and started the dishes in the kitchen. Apart from the big hits I heard a kind of meandering sloppy rock band alternating with endless acoustic numbers. After that I played it for the hits and was careful to have that stylus lifted before so much as a bar of the embarrassing Plastic Fantastic Lover could sound. That was me and the Airplane. Until now, when I came to list albums to write up about 1967 turning 50. So I read up a little and found a high res copy which had both stereo and mono mixes.

This post will mainly draw from the mono mix as it presents a punchier play and leaves most of the reverb at the door. The stereo mix suffers from the '60s phenomenon of producers believing they had to pan everything to either channel (George Martin was among them, so not even the Fabs escaped this). This sounded artificial and so masses of reverb was troweled on to cover for the resulting dryness. There is an archaeological interest in pursuing this but if you ever get into '60s rock music you should take advantage of the recent phenomenon of mono reissues as you will be hearing what the fans heard first time around. You'll hear of what the music meant.

So, side one, track one, She Has Funny Cars tells you everything you need to know about the rest of the album and if you are a careful listener you'll get it and relax into a fine late '60s experience. It's loose but not sloppy, rocking but relaxed, if someone's got something to sing they take the mic or get near it and add. Dig? It's like friends playing music together. This song has been long worked out at gigs and the in-our-nature groove of it is studied and perfected by the time it hits the console. Heard about the Frisco band sound in documentaries? This is it: high skill hippies strutti' the stage.

A couple of bars of tom toms bashing almost all the life out of a rumba beat before the bass and guitars come in with a descending run in the same rhythm. Easy to forget that the American bands of the later '60s brought something to the table that their British usurpers never thought of: jazz. It lapped from beneath the groove in the Byrd's most recent album and the just-released fellow Californians The Doors let it loose through their dark woods. I don't mean fusion or anything that just lay down and slumped like the rest of the adult orientation of the decade to come; this is still a rock band playing and they're slamming the syncopation rather than trying to impress with it.

Marty Balin at the mic also follows the rhythm, hitting every other tom beat in a lyric that talks of disorientation. This breaks for a jazzy guitar work out in the minor as the vocal reverses the confusion and sings about personal freedom. And then a cool female vocal pours through in counterpoint like a glass of sunlight. And then BAM both yell about the power of the individual mind. That's the structure, loose but sure. Things seem crazy but take a breath and look around. You're in control. I wonder how often those sentiments were heard on the corner of Haight and Ashbury at the time. Here, they sound sincere, not from the church of Tim Leary but from someone who stood outside and got what they needed from the sermon and the singing.

If you looked at the cover and wondered if the beautiful raven haired woman in the photo did besides some hippy interjections the wait is up. Grace Slick brought two songs to the band from her first one, The Great Society. They both proved mega hits and characterise the band to this day. She starts before the rest of the band: When the truth is heard to be lies! The band thunders behind her as she admonishes the social casualty for shrivelling into loneliness in the free love crowd. Slick's note-perfect bellow berates and prescribes. Stop whingeing and get amongst it. The chorus tightens the order into compulsion and there can be no resistance: Don't you want somebody to love? Don't you NEED somebody to love? Wouldn't you love somebody to lo-o-ove? You better find somebody to love. This tempestuous piece manages to both embody hippiedom's doctrine of love and scream its perceived relaxation into torn shame. Against the tide of decades it still stands and wins.

And then they go and spoil it all by saying something stupid like you're My Best Friend. After the cool and bold aesthetic manifesto of the opener and the banshee call of the follow up we get the Ringo song. I've seen commentaries that suggest that this one is a barely covert gay song but, really, if it is or isn't, it's a piece about intimacy. Drummer Skip Spence who left in a drug abuse cloud (admittedly to pretty big things) left this big hippy Hallmark card here. I hear the opening count-in an pretty much listen for the pleasant texture and the slightly elevated by Slick's beautiful response lines and descant harmonies.

Then we get a pair of songs to take us to the run out groove of the old LP side one. Today and Coming Back to Me form a kind of mini song cycle about love. But this is not the love that cures the miserable of the second track or even the goofy ya-big-lug friendship of My Best Friend. This is a understanding of love that is so intense and worshipful that it enters the realm of the nightmare. This is not the love song of Stephen Foster and his folky warmth, nor the worldly shrugging perversion of a Serge Gainsbourgh, this is a love song as lived and imagined many times by Edgar Allen Poe.

Today begins with a gentle acoustic guitar arpeggio played on the lower strings in a minor key. It's quiet but it's serious. It's joined by a soft and figure on an electric, plucked high on the E string, descending and curling modally (by an unaccredited Jerry Garcia). It's like a moment from a late '60s Miles Davis records but bottled and rotated as a loose riff. Distant and reverbant from the amp it adds a strange sheen to the chords, a kind of melting clock tick. Balin's plaintive tenor comes in: Today, I feel like pleasing you more than before. Ok, an odd if pleasant sentiment but then: Today, I know what I want to do but don't know what for. After this the normal love song hyperbole about living for someone else takes on something that is a little unsettling. He ends the verse with a line about his dreams coming true. The monologue continues, building, piece by piece, the narrator's adoration with the suggestion that he has yet to speak any of this to the person in question or, more terrifyingly, he serves them all the time in such a thrall that the only thing left of him is his love. If that love is the sole thing he can now register, as the one thing keeping him from self annihilation, keeping the life supply constant, it is the kind of love song one might sing to a parasite. She (I'm going to economise on pronouns here and go with a heterosexual relationship as it is the most likely one meant by the song's author) somehow compels him to say that he has changed. He counters (his own claim) by avowing that he cannot be anymore than all he already is. By this time Balin's disturbed prayer is joined by Grace Slick's descant harmony but it is distant in the reverb, not in the same room. A kick and snare drum also start, delivering a slow and steady one-two crash, like Grace it's from a distance and heavily reverb-ed. Another verse of increasing desperation gives way to a crying despair: Please! Please! It's taken so long to come true. It's all for you. All for you. The song gently quietly lowers its head in a soft guitar lick that reaches to the major third but this slight smile of a note won't be heard by the narrator whose eyes are closed but whether it is a dream of a sleep of exhaustion or a vision of delusion will not be clear.

This lyric could be from a '90s band, couched in stalker references and rawly painful. I don't know if Balin is writing from his own experience or imagining himself inside this torment but his understanding of the kind of obsessed mind that, even directing this kind of concentrate anger at another cannot yet bring himself to recognise her faults (accepting any of the lines as compliments would be a major one). This is a genderless piece in that either male or female voice could sing it but I cannot imagine the mighty Grace giving this anything but rage. She might, on the other hand, play the song's object with daunting power. If you have ever fallen into a relationship like this (as I did more than once in my teens and twenties though cannot anymore) you will recognise its agony and probably find it hard to listen to.

Coming Back to Me begins with the kind of arpeggiated acoustic guitar chord that you'd hear under the credits of a movie from the time about a love affair scoured by mental illness or addiction (The Sterile Cuckoo, That Cold Day in the Park, or Believe in Me), a minor chord with a ninth thrown in which normalises into the fifth of the dominant. Then there's a slow smile of the relative major for a few bars before the repeat. The third time is joined by a dismal figure played low on  a recorder which brings the troubled movie mood back into focus. Balin comes in with some pretty well wrought images about summer holding its breath and winter looking the same as it always does and then, for the major key lift: "... and through an open window where no curtain hung..." and back to the minor key "... I saw you coming back to me ..." the last word on the major in the first verse suggests a relief to the tension we get in the first few lines. But really we are just in for more tension. He describes more melancholy scenes from his loneliness before seeing her coming back through the rain in the trees or the mist at the hills by the sea and finally wonders if she or his infatuation was just something he made up for fun.

But fun is not what we get in the music or the delivery. This spooky girl who can turn up in the reflection in a teacup or a sudden glance never approaches nor speaks nor reveals any real sign of animation seems increasingly like a phantasm or, finally in admission, just another wish. This is the crushed figure from Today after his stay in care. Still on his prescription, clean shaven and with a more socially acceptable dress code and haircut, he is still visited by the spectre of the dominator or even just a girl he saw once (like Dante his Beatrice) whose apparition never left him. Never left? It's worse than that: she keeps returning to him like a prodigal lover. The acoustic guitar arpeggios are reinforced by a second player and the curlew-ish recorder slinks through the scale, avoiding all the defining thirds and tonics in clear suggestion of the ghostly figure at the edge of the singer's vision. The slow fadeout tells us this will never finish.

The thought occurred at one point while listening to this song that this might be the statement of Today's dominator getting sentimental about the last victim. Think of that when you listen with the lyrics close by and you will have nightmares. That said, the lyric, whose poetics float somewhere between Paul Simon's cute melancholy and Leonard Cohen's wry horror, really doesn't court the ambiguity that would allow this vision. Still ...

The old side two begins with a bang as bright crunching barre chords bang out a syncopated figure bonded by some deft lead noodling. We're back in Frisco rock world. Marty and Grace in harmony and pained expression declare that they need to do away with bad people, people who waste others' time or ridicule the hippy guys' long hair before, puzzlingly coming in with a wailing chorus of "you know I love you, baby, yes I do" which sounds like the opposite of those words. The last verse is a mash of the fallen times of gleaming consumer goods and school kids selling drugs on the street for exorbitant rates. "... know I love you, baby, yes I do!" If that declaration is at the centre of the social torment around them it offers little comfort. The title 3/5s of a Mile in Ten Seconds is screamed over the fade as the guitars wail high up on the fretboard. I always assumed that this was the speed of something every day like a sneeze or an "amazing fact" stumbled upon in a text book like the swiftness of human ejaculation (look up the meanings of the band names 10cc and Steely Dan for some later zeitgeisting adventures) but no one seems to know beyond the notion that Balin just saw the fraction and the word mile together and thought: "title". Well, what does She Has Funny Cars mean?

D.C.B.A. 25 begins with a beautiful '60s picked bass sound, descending through the notes in the title. Marty sings about breaking up and wandering about free and then Grace joins him in bright harmony over a rich bed of clean booming electrics. Going through crystal chandeliers and fields of purple pleasure to a state of great peace and understanding, the vibe is all flower power and acid (25 was the version of LSD current at that time) which could turn a boy and girl breaking up into a yellow bus trip to Ixtlan. The best lines include: "too many days I've left unstoned" and "I can but dance behind your smile." Slick provides a more inventive and melodic descant to snake around the second half of the verses, using variations of Balin's lines. If the band had thought they were just getting a big voice and a couple of sure-fire hit songs with Grace Slick the real story was that her native musicality lifted them from San Fransico hippies into well deserved global attention. Moments like these are evidence.

How Do You Feel is a big acoustic singalong that contains some studious making making. The words are about how happy a beautiful girl makes Marty Balin feel. While the initial recorder coo that introduces the song seems to promise a Hollywood hippy theme song the rest take it into a pleasantly loose pop song. The folky massed acoustic guitar and Mamas and Papas boy/girl harmonies and mid '60s tuneage float by under a cloud of reverb and everybody's happy. But what we're heading towards is, while not a radical twist, a different musical place as Balin supplies more of the same kind of lines about the girl Grace and he or one of the others answer with a stubborn "how do you feel?" It is the same every time, a gleaming fifth that does not waver so much as a microtone. It could be an organ chord. It isn't, though, it's how this band harmonises when it tries the block vocals of fellow West-siders like the Mamas and Papas, Beach Boys or the Byrds. The harmony shines through the reverb and glistening acoustics like an epiphany. Finally, there is a waver but it's intentional and just provides more perfectly pitched vocal sunshine. That's how I feel.

Embryonic Journey was an acoustic guitar instrumental piece that the effortlessly skilled Jorma Kaukonen. Kaukonen recorded it for the album at Balin's insistence. He had been shy of putting something as different on the album. Balin was right. The piece fits well with its bright strident chords and finger style noodles as it wanders into gentle contemplation and back to shining boldness. It's less than two minutes but, unlike most solo acoustic guitar, is not a bar too long.

Then there's White Rabbit. Never before or since has two and a half minutes of rock music sounded so epic. But there's a problem. Standing in as the go-to song for film scene that concerns unreality or psychedelic drugs, it now sounds to a world jaded of the connection. By the time Atom Egoyan used it in Where the Truth Lies where a girl dressed as Alice sings it during a drug delirium scene I was wincing. In this it joined the first half minute of Bach's Tocatta and Fugue in D minor as a kind of vaccination music whereby the now inert signifier of an emotion is inserted for your cultural antibodies to deal with. Fine, Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds or Interstellar Overdrive would be too expensive to use but why oh why always that one? Well, there was a beginning and it isn't in the song's acid rock origin directly.

In the '70s you weren't a teenager whose conversation was complete if you hadn't read the paperback confession Go Ask Alice. This thin borrowable found its way into every school port whose owner you could name and could stand. The byline was anonymous or Anonymous and it was a diary by a teenaged girl who falls into an ocean o' drugs, surfacing now and then before sinking into dark perdition. It was, I'll own, rivetting but it was rivetting in the same way that Reader's Digest short stories about alcoholism, heroin, lives of crime (and whatnot other bad stuff) in that it got to the nasty bits quickly and almost kept you up until the redemption or the grim life lesson. I used to think of the thick floppy mags that turned up regularly in our postbox as holiday or cyclone reading. That's when you opened them and it's when you closed them. Anyway, Alice was like that so when the movie came on tv everyone had to watch. It was ok as they go, the anti-drug sermonising which had seemed invisible in the book was writ large on the tv screen but it was set in the '60s, which I was rapidly preferring to the '70s  I was stranded in, and featured some great songs. The best of which was the one that gave the story its title: White Rabbit. It plays over the opening credits and I couldn't believe anything as wild and powerful as that could have come from ten years before. The woman's voice at the centre of it was so commanding and the melody so curling and then steel hard. "Go ask Aliiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiice!"

I had to have the song. It wasn't in the shops. There were no home vcrs to record it with when it was on. I never heard it on the radio. By accident I found it on a strange LP crumbling in a corner of the Auchenflower house. The record was music that inspired Stardust (the David Essex vehicle). There were other great unsungs on the track list but my eye went straight to White Rabbit. An ex flatmate still had his old 3-in-one (i.e. turntable, cassette deck and radio) there so I made a tape of all the salvageable songs and made off to my room and heard the thing as though for the first time.

Bass and snare drums start rolling the rhythm from Ravel's Bolero (which isn't a bolero but more of a march). A clean but hot electric guitar snakes its way around an insistent semitone shift (F# to G) fluid and gentle at first but tightening. Then Grace Slick enters on the mic, her voice pure and cooling: "One pill makes you larger and one pill makes you small. And the ones that mother gives you don't do anything at all... Go ask Alice when she's ten feet tall." The melody moves with the semitones on the backing with quick melismatic triplets that could be either Spanish or Arabic. The next verse is the same melodically but already is heating up. "Go ask Alice when she was just small."

The build beneath the voice, now stronger with piano chords and a tighter snare beat lurches into the middle section. Grace's voice is bigger and harder in the whirlwind: "When men on the chessboard get up and tell you where to go-o and you've just had some kind of mushroom and you're mind is moving slow. Go ask Aliiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiice ..." It snaps from the E major back to the strident F# for the final section, the rhythm intense: "When the logic and proportion have fallen sloppy dead...." And then everyone in the world is playing behind her, as she bellows in the purest pitched bellow knowable to humanity, the surprise return of the A-C-D grind: "Re-he-memberrrrrrrrrr what the dormouse saiiiiiiiiid." Bash bash bash bash. "Feed your heeeeeeeead! Feed your heeeeeeead. Feed your heeeeeeeee-eh-eh-eheh-eh-ead!" The voice exhausted falling a little over the fade of the crash cymbal.

Hearing a great song for the first time is like a first kiss. Each new time is like the first and surprises with its softness and its power and, however short it is it lingers in the recollection as a whole night's sensation. So immersed are we in that moment that the nerves that give us the real world are pulled into that castle keep of sound with its dungeons and wings and ceremonial rooms, its nooks of function and shrines of trophy, each verse a new chamber of strength and the central hall of the chorus where everyone is always welcome and to which everyone returns. And then you do it again because, at least for that first time, one is ever enough.

Grace Slick brought this song from her old band The Great Society. They recorded it (and Somebody to Love) and it's worth the Youtube-ing. A long instrumental introduction of electric 12 string and a sax riffing around an eastern flavoured scale for about four minutes before a fairly mannered performance from Grace ends things. As Jerry Garcia was revealed to be more than the spiritual mentor that the album cover had him (some significant guitar parts were his and the arrangement of Somebody to Love was him recognising the power inside the pretty original) maybe it was he who drove home Slick's notion of using the Bolero rhythm and the notion of one single crescendo instead of the jammed piece that it had originally been. Some people remember the song as getting faster but it doesn't break a sweat as far as tempo goes, steady all the way. It does, however, get intense, more and more and more intense with a swell and drive that everybody who has ever experienced any kind of sexual pleasure is familiar with? Why is that important in a song based on Alice in Wonderland? Because it's about teenagers finding things out for themselves. Sex, yes, but everything else, too. And so they did, for themselves but if they heard this song it would have felt right as they went to the protests and happenings, the inner urban collectives and now-legendary rock concerts, feeding their heads.

At a second shy of two and a half minutes, that's a lot of doing.

And then they have to go and spoil it all ....

Plastic Fantastic Lover starts with an acoustic guitar vamp that tells you straight away that you're about to hear a Dylan-a-be. A big bass doop thunks in a few bars. Then Marty comes in with a Bob-like monotone snarl about an artificial woman who is so lifelike that no one suspects, possibly because they are too busy admiring her surface. He shows her off and enjoys his love life with her but she falls apart like any consumable and he has to go and spend more money. It's science's fault! Technology has made us need things we didn't know existed. Et cetera. Tongue in cheek of course but that's the problem. This was 1967 and the song from the year before so its hippy anti-establishment strut would have appealed with name checks of I.B.M. and collisions of real and mechanical rape. There's a little more to it but I never found out for years after owning the album as its smugness put it in the unintentional embarrassment file. It was hindered by the sound effects of a whirring electric motor (a mix master? a vibrator?). Yes, it need not be about a sex toy and the depth might come from the confusion of that with other consumables like stereos or tvs. But the righteous hippy being satirical cut the exact wrong way back in 1984 when I first heard it and there was a groove scratched to hell on that vinyl from me being as swiftly casual as I could as I sped to lift the stylus and pretend that White Rabbit was the crowning finale of the album. Now when I stroll long enough I still wince a little at the guitar opening but let it run. It's hardly noticeable after White Rabbit anyway.

1967 at 50: THE DOORS

The Clown Princes of Flower Power share a joke.

The creepiest scene in the movie Shivers is when the female lead in a moment of crisis is telling a dream she had. Her voice is measured as she recounts meeting an repulsive old man who seduces her by assuring her that everything anyone ever does is sexual:

"..That even dying is an act of eroticism. That talking is sexual. That breathing is sexual. That even to physically exist is sexual. And I believe him, and we make love beautifully."

When we see it for the first time we understand that it is the parasite in her system speaking through her going through its laboratory-designed mechanism of seduction. We've seen the parasite raw. It resembles both a liver fluke and a turd and is transferred orally. But what we see is the face of a beautiful young woman and hear her cooing voice curling around the next victim like a swirl of cigarette smoke. We feel the danger ... and ache to be part of it.

The Doors had had a few years experience honing their stagecraft in the venues of Los Angeles by the time they got into a studio to record their first album. They had found how best to contain some numbers until they could fit anywhere and they had expanded some tiny romantic ballads into epics that could inspire, terrify or both. All that was needed was to get it down on tape. Oh, and the same stuff that would make that Cronenberg movie scene so eerie and alluring eight years later: performance, pure performance from internal forces that could make the infected rage after being delivered with a kiss.

I had picked up a retail cassette copy of Morrison Hotel in an op shop. It was just the tape, no case or inlay. I bothered as I had read two longish pieces about the legend of Jim Morrison in some of the music mags I read. This was late '70s so, with the deconstructive assault of punk all but tattooed on my arm, I found the admiration from writers who might have been as old as the unimaginable twenty-five suspect; they were praising him like a pagan demigod without conveying what it was that bade them so. Why? Well, the music was hard to get to. You could dig around the op shops, ask around in case your school friends had them in the older siblings' collections, or you could sit in front of 4TO on a Sunday morning when they were in golden oldies mode and wait. And then you'd just hear Light My Fire.

Ok, I'd heard Light My Fire and liked it but the whole funeral pyre schtick seemed as contrived as a theatre restaurant vampire. I'd read the lyric to The End in Endless Circle, a creative writing textbook from early high school. The lines didn't seem to relate to each other, had few rhymes and splodged into babble. Then when I put Morrison Hotel on and the initial ran na nan na nan na nannerly riff started up I almost turned it off and tossed it in the bin. I had spent hours, perhaps days, in the meagre fields of '60s pop music archeology in the mid '70s, esacaping the oaf rock of Hush and Rose Tattoo only to find this yobbo party from back in the era of gold and adventure. I let it run and smirked at the line about the future being uncertain and the end being always near, a token bit of Rimbaud (a name I knew from those articles about Morrison) and lived through the fade of blues rock cliche.

There are stellar moments on Morrison Hotel but it's so patchy that getting to them on a cassette was too much like hard labour. The tape got shelved. End of story. Light My Fire was a good song. Enough.

Cut to 1980. Having missed the start at the cinema I got home to Townsville for the Christmas holidays and persuaded Dad to see Apocalypse Now at the drive-in. The setting is important. It was North Queensland in December, hot and humid. Throughout the screening a gentle drizzle drummed on the car roof, military helicopters throbbed overhead, visible as black shadows against the purple overcast. The movie begins without credits. Where they would have been is a visual overture. A tropical beach hemmed by a thick dark green forest. The intense glare seems to phase in and out of focus just as it does to look on a Townsville beach. Choppers in slow motion cross the screen like circling predators. And swelling through this familiar visual atmosphere, tinkling at first and then swirling and snaking along a clean Gibson SG's fretboard, the drums and a keyboard base adding cicadas and throbbing temples to the mix, it comes. The choppers file past again, close to the forest and as the vocals start - This is the end, beautiful friend - a huge sash of napalm flashes and spreads along the foliage making the heat hellish and pressing the breath from every nearby lung. And, yes, these were the words that looked so amateurish and try-hard on the page. Now, here, they sounded like the Grim Reaper channeling Sinatra. I have never known a better matched of movie scene to sourced music. That's still the gold standard.

Ok, so now I needed to hear The Doors.

If the star had got a bit of retouching in the '70s by the early '80s it was unignorable. Getting to Uni with my Brisbane op shop radar honed and hearing the albums and the post-midnight drones about the greatness of the Doors my information calorie count went on assault. Then there were the rereleases and it all came home. First of the rank was the debut, the one with that song on it.

I took my reissue copy home the next Christmas holidays where it played beneath the screams from the pool outside the rumpus room or, more gently, crooned through moonlight with friends and liquor after hours as we chatted, wading or hanging from the edge rather than splashing. If you put it on after Joy Division (I only had the second album at that stage) you noted the connection and if you put it on after the B52s you cooled down into it and, given the circumstance or luck, seduced. Blues shouting, chanting rock choruses, smooth trip-outs, Brecht-Weill cabaret numbers and that big gluey epic capping it off. It was 1981. The Russians were blowing up Afghanistan, the Americans were getting antsy and the creepy phrase Cold War Two blared its way into news commentary. A war mongering B-movie star who would describe the USSR as the Evil Empire was in the White House and his best mate, Maggie Thatcher was pressing the UK into the dirt of the gutter. The wrong fingers were too close to the big buttons. The Doors, played fourteen years after first release, just felt like home.

But is it any good?

The cover was a warning. The name of the band was the album and the soon to be iconic art nouveau font loom large but larger still is the great big face of Jim Morrison, beautiful and frowning like a young Lord Byron takes up a full half of the cover. The half of his face is in shadow and that's where you'll find a group portrait of the other three, the people who made the most sound on the record, posed like a group from a framing shop sample photo. The back cover is more egalitarian but that's the back. Was that a compromise (like the censored lyrics) by a band eager to get their first album out? What little I knew of the band and their personalities (though I could guess at Morrison's) seemed at odds. A band that insisted all original songs be accredited to the whole band let's this EDDIE and the Cruisers look be the one? That would never happen now without annotated self-aware irony. But, no, whether they liked it or not, the great stick-it-to-the-man Doors let the record company do the talking on that one (they'd have a chance to reverse that image on Ed Sullivan soon after).

Anyway, so I dropped the needle in the groove. And ...

Side 1 begins with a Latin sizzle on the ride cymbal and what sounds like a Fender bass pretending to be a tuba but is really a Rhodes piano bass. Hang on, need some explanation, here.

I'm basing this article on my listening of the original mix as heard on an '80s reissue. This means that I'll be thinking of that mix and edit rather than the magnificent hi-res digital one released in 2007 by Rhino. Normally, I wouldn't go into it too much but there are real differences here. First, the recent releases of the back catalogue are full remixes and edits from the ground up (where possible) and presented as the kind of remasters that would be done on a contemporary album with the capabilities of digital audio and modern sound systems. This means (IMHO) that they not only sound better than when they were on vinyl but you get to hear what the editing job on the original didn't deliver (missing lyrics, for example) and something more like the band would have released if allowed. I'll be referring to the differences where significant but for the most part my guide will be the 1967 presentation.

Why put that there instead of at the end in a Listening Notes section? Well, the bass riff on the Rhodes bass piano is important. The sound isn't like a bass guitar, it's like something else entirely. Keyboardist Ray Manzarek, a whizz on the ivories and a solid thinker on tone, made up for the bass player that the band chose to do without by playing one of these (here's a demo) adding a unique sound on the bottom end but also doing so with a classically-trained verve (if you think classical players don't have verve you need to listen to more classical music): his bass playing is great. However, if you compare the original mix with the more recent revisit you will hear great big Fender basses in some of the songs in the latter that the earlier mix buried (possibly to blur the difference with the keyboard bass). The piano bass was the sound of the live lower end of this band and as a hyped up and polished version of the live show on this album, that's important to know. Anyway ...

Ray plays a jazzy arpeggio on the piano bass and introduces us to the fuzzy but boomy sound of the live band's nether lands. All through the album it rises beneath the crisp top and dominates, giving the listener a ride on the back of a seamonster at midnight: smooth but murky and dangerous. First big lesson from the first few bars of the first album: it's not all Jim. So ...

Latin sizzle and big boom bass. Robbie Kreiger comes in on his Gibson SG, lightly distorted it is almost indistinguishable from the bass but playing a counter figure, note against note. Then the voice, urgent high but muscular: The day destroys the night, the night divides the day. Try to run try to hide. And then, screamed: Break on through to the other side, break on through to the other side, yeah! The low rumble, the expansive sizzle on the percussion (John Densmore is listed on the album credits as percussionist, not drummer), the zapping guitar and the bellowing voice put me into a landscape of hills shaken by a storm. I was already associating the band with cinema from Apocalypse Now but this made a movie of its own. The tortured hills had no gothic heroine nor anything supernatural but they were spooky. Separated from this only by an imagined glass door, I slid it to one side and entered the storm. Jim's recalling nights of pushing the boundaries with his companion (could be drugs, could be bigger, could be drugs and something bigger) when the acid was legal and the dark of L.A. summer nights endless. The original mix truncated a repeated cry of "she get high!" to "she get -" which, not knowing otherwise, sounded like he was pushed to the brink of his description by the power of the memory and couldn't finish the picture. The freed "she get high" is almost a disappointment to hear in the new mix but that's what he sang to the mic in the Studio and to the other girls with islands in their arms and countries in their eyes at the Whisky and the Kaleidoscope.

Soul Kitchen begins with a more pedestrian figure on the organ, staccato chords, sharp and white. the piano bass comes walking in underneath. The snare kicks the drums in and Robbie's Gibson, more vigorous up the fret board, bends through a tight funk lick. Then Morrison: Well, the clock says it's time to go now ... the cars crawl past all stuffed with eyes, streetlamps share their hollow glow ... still one place to go ... This is the same couple from the song before but after a few too many nights on the other side, lying exhausted, waking up for sex and top-ups, sharing cigarettes by the infernal red light of a sign through the window. The sensual weariness gives way to a screaming chorus that settles (and this is where the first bass guitar is smuggled in) A spirited solo by Krieger sounds as tired in this setting.

I never lived like that. There were episodes here and there, some stretched into weeks or months but never a life. No one lives like it, they just remember it that way. But when you're fifteen, hormonally insane, and can't tell the difference between your orgasms and the ones you hear on records, you think you're going to live like this, tangled in the sheets with an other whose fingers talk in secret alphabets in places where it's always closing time. The song ends without a reprise of the chorus which lets you know it's not just another pop song but suggests with the "all night, all night ..." groan that, exhausting as it gets, there's more. One final bellowed repeat and the song ends, looking out on the dark between the tracks.

Then we get something like the other side. Morrison starts with a rising figure, crooned: Before you slip into unconsciousness I'd like to have another kiss, another flashing taste of bliss, another kiss ..."
The melody steps down as it reaches up and a gentle keyboard and guitar ebb and flow swells around. What starts as a lullaby becomes a series of shared memories, continuing desires and, after a gorgeous piano solo, a shouting vision of the ship of the title, filled with a thousand girls and a thousand thrills and so a million ways to spend your time, a boy's own spectre of masturbatory abandon. But, then, "when we get back I'll drop a line." He'll write a letter? He'll dose himself with a mass of LSD? It's gone from romantic to self-pleasing to fleeing the scene. For years I thought the last line was "jump the line" meaning, to me, absconding, having taken his fill. Dunno, but this first indication that the band is much more than a set of three-chord blues shouts raises the stakes well above the already impressive introduction. The tone is hedonistic but the mood is dreamy and veers to the melancholic. Ships dock, perhaps delight, but always move on. Or they sink. I know better but I would love to think that this was the Doors' answer to the Seekers' Morningtown Ride.

Twentieth Century Fox is one I still think of as filler but it's short and welcome in the sequence. I'd never pick it out to listen by itself. It starts with a guitar lick that sounds cliched now but probably signalled hard rock then, curly and bluesy. Jim variously admires and dismisses a local godess of the scene. But is she? She's got the world locked up inside a plastic box. Her moniker might mean that she's a corporate identity, a big poster image with all enticing synthetic genitalia. Maybe that's just a tv set or the notion of the mass media (as it was termed then) and its home in the band's native L.A. Up to you. Either way, it's pretty clever. The original mix of this is chunky with edges softened by the suppressed highs that plague this record but the 2007 remix pushes a giant picked Fender bass centre stage and makes it a monster rocker. When it comes up I'll wait for that bass to come in. Not the original sound but yummy.

Alabama Song is a Brecht/Weill standard that starts with Ray Manzarek combining Piano Bass with the Vox organ in a clipped un-rock 2/4 beat (oom-pah oom-pah oom-pah). "Show me the way to the next whisky bar, oh don't ask why ..." The change of mood and pace is abrupt and dramatic. The band fall into the Teutonic Wemar thump under words of desperation and depravity with a similarly abrupt change to 4/4  for the chorus which swings whimsically by contrast. And in comes the Marxophone sounding like a big clanging street piano. Because this is done with such intentional coldness it clears the table of the campiness that contemporary rockers added to pastiches of the jazz age (e.g. Little Miss Queen of Darkness by the Kinks or the soon-to-come When I'm 64 by the Beatles). It feels more like the band reaching back and finding something akin to their present.

A sharp snare hit launches Light My Fire and Manzarek plunges into his Bach-like intro, sounding both old world and innovative at once. The arrangement spaces out underneath the vocals in a kind of big spooky jazz vamp. This one is almost too familiar to talk about. It's the song that many people use as a Doors signifier. Well, it's all there: the bright garage organ, a mix of jazz and psychedelia without ever blanding into fusion, a love song that mixes imagery of groovy romance with funeral pyres, a great Morrison vocal that goes from a Sinatra croon to a violent scream. All I'll say here is that the sheer sexiness of the groove in the verses with the band in fine slinky form (Robbie Krieger's finger-style chording on the clean SG working perfectly with Densmore's restless shuffling) allow what might have been a slightly shadowy bubblegum song into an epic. Apart from Mazarek's plodding and overlong keyboard outing which never quite feels like a solo the flow of the track reaches a strong median between live abandon and studio crafting. Krieger's fluid and beautiful soo enters the lull after Manzarek's excursion and feels like a new act in the story rather than a token guitar solo. Stately and grand at first, it eventually joins the mob on the street and yanks some time-challenging stutters out which are taken up by the band to a conclusion that needs to end in the Bach riff and the big screamed repeat of the second verse and the refulgent final chorus where the sky itself is burning. One last baroque riff and exeunt omnes. End of Side One.

Side Two opens with the most serious attempt at a straight electric blues number. It's a cover of a Willie Dixon's Back Door Man and is magnificent, enough to compel this blues infidel to listen eagerly every time. A thudding bass on the A, shrill organ riff, cold but driven, and Jim yelping like a dog. "Ahm a BACK - DOOR - MAY-EN!" It's a growling threat on the make through the streets, predatory but pointedly consensual. This hunter doesn't hit, he seduces. His biggest boast outside of his rampant virility is the creation of cuckolds. The title might suggest a preference for anal but should be taken more literally. He steals into other men's houses and takes what they assume the marriage vows have secured them. Whether Morrison identifies or aspires is difficult to tell what he does is play a role. While there were white blues bands aplenty at the time and cabaret acts like Classics IV whose publicity shots had the singer in a werewolf mask, The Doors approached their blues performances as character pieces. Not character pieces like a VCA grad auditioning for neighbours but a Brando in full immersion. Right up to Crawling King Snake, Jim sounds like he's testifying rather than evoking. And the band is playing without the academic reverence which turned me off white blues to begin with but something more like the lunging emotion that emerged and set after nights of band/audience give and take. Of note, again, is Krieger's guitar playing, stabs, bends and muted rhythm. If his solo is a touch more ordinary than on other songs in the list his rhythm playing makes up.

I Looked at You is a basic proposition. We spy each other, mutually attract and it's on. No turning back. That's the gist of the lyric. The music goes from a brisk trot to a storming chorus. If it weren't for the force that renders the plainness of the lyric into a real urgency this one might sit beside Twentieth Century Fox as a filler but, starting from silence and jetting to the final orgasmic yeahs, it fills the formula of a generic rock song well but takes it further by removing the valentine card images.

A falling sigh on the slide guitar opens The End of the Night. After a tiny pause the organ meets the fall with a rising figure. The two fuse in a single phrase rising and falling like water. "Take the highway to the end of the night .... take a journey to the bright midnight." Slow and eerie, this is the albums most cinematic song. Drawing from Blake and Celine as well as his own stock of boundary-pushing alienation, Morrison tells us what it's like to be on the outer edge irrevocably and by choice. The slow arrangement ebbs and flows around his vocal as a whimpering slide solo emerges from the gloom which ends in an ominous snare roll before Morrison re-enters screaming the lines again. Some are born to bliss and some are born to the end of the night. The language is a lot plainer than in other Morrison lyrics and the statement feels genuine as a result. The croon followed by the shout is already typical at this stage in the album but in this number there's a conviction to it that doesn't feel like acting (which, of course, might mean that it's the only real acted one).

Take it as it Comes starts with everyone in a brisk gallop. "Time to live, time to lie ..." At first it's like an answer to the Byrds' cover of Turn Turn Turn but Ecclesiastes is not on the menu here. The smooth energetic rocker with a fast but highly colourful keyboard solo from Ray variously croons and shouts about the good stuff you can see if you slow down. It's not everything in its season but, hold back and take everything you can. I often confuse this with I Looked at You but this is a much fuller piece and includes a lovely stripped back final verse where an arpeggio on the bass dominates under the vocal before the final chorus storms back in. As this is an album fresh from live performances this song like all of them ends cleanly rather than in a fade which is more typical of the era. The elongated final line "move - ing ... way ... too ... faaaaast!" screams home and everything ends with the dying of a crash cymbal.

Which brings us back to do. The downward glissando on the guitar and the whispering cymbals. The haze of organ and Jim comes in: This is the end, beautiful friend.

I'm back in the car with Dad as the drizzle on the roof thickens the tropical air and the opening of Apocalypse Now fades in on the drive-in screen, real choppers throbbing overhead. I'm listening to it for the first time as an album track a year later, again in Townsville, an afternoon scotch and dry in one hand, its ice cubes liquefying rapidly. The shrieks of children from the pool are muted by the splash of dive bombing other kids. I'm at any number of University parties in cooler Brisbane where this song always ends up on the turntable among the Birthday Party, Banshees, Bauhaus and anything else. I'm somewhere with a guitar noodling around the D chord, gently hammering on the D from the C#, trying to work out how Krieger had done it, not suspecting he played all of the Doors guitar parts without a pick, a Flamenco player's fingertips guessing at sitar style without quite making it from chords to raga. Later, Melbourne, another summer night. Rain. All of that, every time.

The interplay of the instrumentalists carried cleanly from the stage show. The song had started as two verses of melancholia, boy bids farewell to girl. After year of playing that the middle grows so big it's almost the whole set, a spooky epic of Oedipal murder and transformation. The guitar coils and uncoils, slithering here and rising to a scream there with Krieger's perfect control of his amp's breaking point. Densmore avoiding the snare, preferring the hiss of cymbals and thunder of the tom toms. Manzarek grounding on the Piano Bass, avoiding the third so Robbie could change from major to minor at will. The organ variously fluid, shimmering like heatwaves or freezing into block chords. And there was Jim, sometimes centre stage sometimes darting around it, finding the shadows and the spotlight, peering through the cracks in the walls at the killer who woke before dawn. I know, I'm getting carried away but I just put it on for reference and had to stop typing just to listen again with my eyes closed. This is one the great moments of my listening life, as arresting as my first hearing of Mozart's 40th symphony and its terrifying counterpoint (my first fandom was for classical). And while the band went on to do it longer, better, funnier or scarier live I had no idea of that. All I knew was that it happened like this in the recording studio once. I also had an inkling that it had got that way by being played to ragged perfection in dark and sweaty clubs which brings us back to do, again.

This is a live album the way that Please Please Me was: it came from the clubs. While the Beatles debut is as clean as you'd expect, the rumble and danger is under the surface, only perceptible in the promise. The Doors is a record from the other end of the same decade when more was allowed, from a Los Angeles that housed all the dangers of Hamburg and many nightmares beyond it.

So, yeah, it's good.

The overriding sense from my first hearing of the album (well, every one up until 2007) was a kind of cowl of cloud smothering the high end. The bass is everpresent but it's the lower mids that dominate from the guitar to the vocals. Only John Densmore's snare and cymbals cut through and then not always. The strange thing is that it feels intentional, as though cutting the treble that would make it pop out on contemporary radio and record players would draw the fans in to turn it up, dim the lights and listen harder. On the systems I first used to hear it in the 80s the lack of brightness was a frustration. There was nothing to bring the sound into the younger ear without cost. You can't remove reverb once it's there and you can't add treble once it's gone. I wondered if the distant storm of the sound was meant for the relaxed and intoxicated. The CD release didn't improve things as it only presented a cleaner version of the mud. I bought the box set Perception eagerly in the late '00s as I read it was a remix from the ground up. Also, I was and remain a sucker for rejigging the '60s to surround sound. The box contained both DVD-Audio and CDs. I still have it and still trot it out. Really, you won't hear a spookier rendering of The End or Riders On the Storm outside of it.

The newer mixes, overseen by original engineer Bruce Botnick, were a promise delivered. All the extra bits censored ("She get -" was back to "She get HIGH!" and all the naughty words and orgasmic breathing and grunting were back in The End). And EVERYTHING sounded more defined. All the bits deemed naughty were restored. She got HIIIIGH! and the Oedipal consummation over the freakout in The End was back in (as it had been when used in Apocalypse Now, mind you). Mostly, for me, though, the Fender bass has been moved up. It's presence in Twentieth Century Fox takes that clever filler and makes it welcome in the sequence. The cool arpeggiated chunky line in Take it As it Comes drives like a mofo and the contemporary ear is delighted to hear the range from this rich low end to some crisp highs. It's not the original mix (which also had some draggy pitch problems) but listen to the thudding, bass enhanced opening to Back Door Man and dare to disagree.

The Doors established themselves in the venues of a Los Angeles of tough rooms and nascent hippydom that accepted anything alternative to a tired mainstream culture. Like the best courtships, the band offered its audience something that felt friendly and too hot to hold at the same time. The mix was some stunning musicianship that was saved from flavourless perfection by the gleeful taunting chaos of a frontman who knew his Baudelaire from his Bo Diddley* and just how much sex his every blink communicated. If you're put off by that thought and consider a glancing acquaintance with Jim Morrison tells you all you need to know about the band, give this one some air. It really does make sense when you hear it.



* This joke borrowed from monologue Scanlon by Barry Oakley which, I saw around the same time I first heard this album, at La Boite Theatre down the road from where I lived.

1966 turns 50: Revolver, The Beatles

Over some coughs and rustling a mutter counts to four and then two. After the 80s remasters you can hear the "or" just before the music starts as "four". It sounds like three in the morning. The studio air is thick with cigarette smoke. The lights are low but their hue is greasy and worn, not romantic. Then Taxman slaps to life with a complex rhythm made of a tight bond between bass and drums and a slicing Gibson SG slashing out the chord figure. It's taken decades and the suggestion of a Beatle expert on a podcast to make me realise that this beginning is an upgrade on how The Beatles started their first album only three years before. One, two, three, four and bam! This is Revolver and there's always something new.

Paul's count-in on the first album was all lust pop, the four a scream of ignition for the clanging guitar engine that burst to life. George's close-mic mutter has a sinister feel to it and isn't the real count in anyway. It's 1966, three years of Beatlemania have pushed these twenty somethings into a very strange adulthood and now the Quiet One sounds like he's discretely spruiking a burlesque plus show. That gives way to a hard rock song about tax.

Some context is called for here. I didn't hear this album in 1966 but the late 70s. There was a tide of Beatles reissues in the mid 70s which made it as a trickle to Townsville in 76. Revolver wasn't among them. I knew it was an album that had appeared before Sgt Pepper (which had never gone out of print) but like Rubber Soul it was impossible to find. This made it mysterious and to my BBC thriller mind this made it irresistable. What was on it?  Sight of a mail order record club ad in an old copy of Playboy or Esquire listed Eleanor Rigby and Yellow Submarine. That, I knew had been a single and concluded that it would also have Paperback Writer and Rain, too. This was shaping up. The magazine thumbnail of the cover featured a negative image of what I would later learn was the cover. This meant that the faces of the Beatles looked like something from a sci-fi movie. Wow, more to this than teases the eye, I thought. Soon, it was the great forgotten masterpiece of dark energy that the colour and commerciality of Pepper had conveniently eclipsed. I took my favourite bands very seriously as a 13 year old.

While I did get a copy in 1977 as part of the 70s reissues the first time I heard the whole thing was when my sister borrowed a copy from one of her friends. It was an original pressing. It was mono. This almost put me off as all I knew of stereo or mono was that mono was old. Beggars and choosers. I ran down to the rumpus room, picked out a radio cassette of hits and future memories, set up the dub and let it happen.

As Taxman slashed to life I explored the cover. Four heads rendered in pen and ink, crammed together, looking in different directions. The eyes weren't drawn but cut and pasted from photographs. This gave off a strange air as though they'd let a fan design the cover. The same sister who accessed the record for me (thanks to Penny Johnson, btw) used to lead us in collage sessions with Clag, scissors and Mum's old She magazines. Under her guidance a kind of contained psychosis took form as we mixed 'n' matched anything we could cut neatly, and filled pages of scrapbooks with monsters made of lobsters and Prince Charles, pinstriped bankers and microwave meals etc.

This record cover was like that only more controlled the real eyes looking out of the pen and ink heads bore an odd hostility which I felt but couldn't name. Smaller photo Beatles were pasted around the heads, popping out of spaghettish hair or spewing out of the ink lines in lumpy photographic boluses. In the centre of all four heads small drawn figures of the four seemed to be walking through this strange scene looking variously lost, arch, aloof or ... well George's eyes were blacked out. While most of the 12 X 12 square was filled with this un-flower-powered black and white confrontation the left side between the heads of Paul and Ringo was almost entirely white. Had it not been finished? I would come to know the value of negative space in art but when I saw it there it looked like it was meant to puzzle or disturb. I returned to it repeatedly as the album played.

The Taxman backing vocals started sounding like the same 7th chord as in the Batman theme song and then the weird guitar solo snaked out of the speakers, sharp and wriggling and almost over before it began before the chorus came back in with bright harmonies sung through a frown. Paul's tight bass riff funked in exact step with the drumming and was joined an octave above by that Gibson playing the same figure. "And my advice for those who die. Declare the pennies on your eyes." "I'm the taxman and you're working for no one but me." What? Bloody hell.

I didn't hear the Beatles albums in sequence but a decade after their release in something like reverse order. We had a copy of Abbey Road in the record stack and I'd bought my own Pepper and Magical Mystery Tour and then the White Album. The same sister's boyfriend later that year would lend me his original copy of Rubber Soul. So, the notion of the Beatles singing about dark or nasty things wasn't new to me but, working out the timeline, what was new was how early it had started. I'd never owned the popular Red and Green compilations but I did have a couple of 60s era ones with the singles from 62 to 65. Taken as a whole, you could trace the development in those from Love me Do to Day Tripper but this stuff coming out of the stereo was almost absurdly advanced.

After Taxman slithered into its fade out with another guitar solo (later learned it was the same one just collaged on to the end, and that it was Paul not George who played it) the light rain sound of the groove between songs gave way to harsh staccato strings and urgent harmonies. "Aaaaaah look at all the lonely people!" Eleanor Rigby sounds like endlessly rainy streets and cold winter afternoons as the highly compact tales of loneliness are  sung in a tone of a court reporter, unaffected, matter of fact. That's not often pointed out when this song comes up. Normally, there is mention of the strident Bernard Hermann string arrangement, no rock instruments and the theme of the song but no one ever seems to talk about how coldly McCartney sings the verses. Like the anti-vibrato stance he took with the strings in yesterday he strips the emotion out of this song and cools it down to a kind of horror tale. As a kid, only very barely aware of all the lyrics I was disturbed that Eleanor wore a face that she kept in a jar by the door. I also got one sequence wrong and mixed up the wedding with the phrase "no one was saved". That froze me if I thought about the song. This is before you get to the Psycho-soundtrack string section and the strident pace of a song that might easily have been a sentimental ballad. Hearing it afresh in 1977 felt like finding the grail on an archeological dig. I didn't wonder how the first listeners heard this back in '66 I was hearing it like that now.

I'm Only Sleeping begins with a six string strum and Lennon digs in with a monotone over changing chords played on slow acoustics. It's not a double bass but sounds like it. Then snaking through the ooh-ooh-ooh backing harmonies and John's softened snarl come coils of backwards guitar sounding eastern but also like nothing else. There's even a backwards solo that suggests the sensory warping of the dream state. The narrator of the song just wants to stay in bed and walk through the great open cosmos he finds behind his eyes. The song ends with a whole snake pit of slithering backwards guitar lines.

So, that's a sharp edged rock song about tax, a baroque severity about loneliness and a trippy song about dreaming. Not a She Loves You in earshot. This was already happening in previous albums but not to the same commitment as here. These are the opening tracks meant to grab the screaming hordes. They do grab but there's something eerie about each one. This does sit well enough in its times with things like The Kinks' Dead End Street, The Who's Substitute, The Stones' Paint it Black or 19th Nervous Breakdown all hits. But these were the Fabs, the moptops, the teenybopper's delight and here they were opening an album with subject matter that looked the other way as though trying to ignore the human jet engine behind them. Dylan reportedly looked up after hearing it and said: I get it, they don't want to be cute anymore. It was the music, as well. None of this sounded even like the steps forward on the previous album, it sounded like exploration. There was more.

Love You To begins with sitar glissandi far more authentic than the twanged echo of the vocal melody in Norwegian Wood. The rag is played through, the percussion (including tablas) roars into gear with a mix of tambura and distorted electric barre chords and a volume pedal. George's song is a series of couplets that don't always seem to belong. Sometimes it's about love and lust when you want it with whomever is nearby and sometimes it's about false hearted people. Whether it was George just throwing lines together or building up a picture I always hear this as a sinister memory. Maybe it's the force of the backing against his laconic vocal.

Five songs in and we finally get a love song. Paul's Here, There and Everywhere is a gorgeous jazz chord progression on shining electric guitars. Paul's vocal is the opposite of Eleanor Rigby, delicate and emotive, sung on the bridge between head voice and falsetto. Lush harmonies form a bed on the floor as sunlight floods in through the skylight. And then in the middle eight there's a strange chromatic figure Harrison plays on the electric. It fits but it's also quite sharp like a surf rock or spy movie riff. When it passes we return to that sunlit floor and finally to a circular repeat of the title and a couple of rich gleaming chords from the jazz ballad encyclopedia.

Yes, now it's Yellow Submarine with Ringo singing what became a kids' party song with more than a few flat notes with only a strummed acoustic to act as a safety net. It's naff and feels too long. But then I'll still take it over the kind of rock classique covers they were still playing live. And, really, there's a lot of fun happening in the studio that makes it through the speakers. This first hearing of it in context with all the heavier songs around it lent it a kind of in joke darkness. I don't hear that anymore but it was good to imagine at the time.

She Said She Said slides to life with a pair of electrics just at amp breakup for that extra jangle and sustain. A cool Lennon vocal relates a weird conversation the kind of which he would have had in the predawn world of swinging London club land. It was, in fact, derived from a conversation he's had with Peter Fonda about the latter's childhood near death experience. Lennon adapted it with a Lewis Carroll whimsy. The harmonies soar, a tiny organ note pierces the mix like tinnitus and the bass booms ahead (Harrison playing after McCartney had stormed out of the session) all of it twists together into colour and texture. It sounded like a perfect '60s rock song which is to say it sounded better than anything I was hearing on the radio at the time. I still love this song and will happily play it as the only track from the album.

Side 2 starts with a chunky piano plodding along like a cartoon bear. A snare roll and the bright harmonies of Good Day Sunshine burst in. Paul sings an easy mooded number of being in love on a sunny day with the heat of the road burning his feet while he and his girl head for the shade of the park. Little to see here but it's so nice and, like everything else so far, sounds like nothing they had done before.

And Your Bird Can Sing matches a complex guitar duet with dynamic harmonies on the lush side of Beach Boy and a song about being there for someone who's still in thrall to her riches and privileges.

For No One is McCartney again extending the kind of narrative song he was revelling in at the time (the single around the album but not on it was his Paperback Writer). In this case he sings about a couple whose relationship has dissolved, they are adrift, go about their routines, empty of all thought beyond a series of self delusions about the other, crying tears for no one. The instrumental descent is played on a clavichord. Slight electric bass and drumming and some chordal extensions on a piano fill this out but everything is kept minimal. And then one verse is only half as long as the others and into the space comes a figure on the French horn that is both light and because of that quite grave giving the whole song the feel of a film score. All in two minutes and two seconds!

Dr Robert starts with George's SG at amp breakup playing a sharp syncopated two chord rhythm. Lennon comes in low with the opening lines about ringing his friend. The harmonies come in after that and the song mixes imagery of public health and very private and privileged health as the Doctor of the title will pick up you if you're feeling down before a blissed-out middle eight where the guitars ring like bells over a shimmering organ chord and heavenly harmonies: Well, well, well, you're feeling fine. Well, well, well he'll make you..." The main song bashes in again and then another medicated section before the shuffle to the end. The song fades but you can hear the full end without listening too hard. Many fans of the band and this album dismiss this one as filler but I like the way it bridges the beat band sound that made them famous and the coming expansion of the sound and the exploration that was already taking place on the same album. It's two and a quarter minutes long, leave it on.

George's unprecedented third song, I Want to Tell You, begins with a fade in of an arpeggio chord on the Stratocaster he got during Rubber Soul. The timing of the riff is strange and only kind of fits the snare beat tha comes in under it. Once the band kicks in with a four on the floor shuffle centred around Paul on an out of tune piano we only hear it at the end of the chorus. George sings about the difficulties of communication in a state of confusion. Could be lysergic but just as easily could be social as the daily life of the swinging Londoners around them was getting tougher to unpack. A jolly rhythm belies this but the close harmonies accentuate it, finding their apex in the line at the end of the chorus: I've got time. At the end of the song the phrase is repeated until it unravels into the three vocalists trying out some Indian style scales as the strange arpeggio from the intro plays below it to the fade.

Got to Get You Into My Life blasts to life with a brass section straight out of the soul train, supplied by touring mates Sounds Incorporated. McCartney's tune climbs by thirds until the last words of the verse lines which go a full octave over that as the bass thumps on the ONE, a G which he keeps even though the brass ends on an F. The chorus waits until the end of the second verse and is entirely composed of the title phrase. Then it's back into it. but it's not just a three verse two veg. After the chorus there's a single chord break when the guitars finally appear. Instead of them reclaiming it as a standard rock song they are there to add texture and jangle on the lower strings, almost droning like a tambura. The last verse is all shouted in the upper octave as the brass section follows in the same range. Everything lifts as Paul screams some ad libs and the brass screams along with him to the fade. The band had long been associated with black artists from the US but if they covered them there was always a shortfall. Here they used the influence, the thing that got them about the soul records in the first place, and followed that. Is it echt funk? Doesn't need to be, it's the Fabs finding a new road and that's always good. McCartney, decades after he might have, confessed that it was not a song to a girl but to the cannabis that he'd come to use as others used wine, every single day of his life.

And then after that there is the track that everyone points to for being the raddest. They have just heard a whole album of innovative rock music from a band who didn't have to do anything more complicated than repeat their last successes until the well dried up. Nevertheless, Tomorrow Never Knows took pride of place as the closing track, forcing attention away from the rest. When I played the mono vinyl on that morning in early '77 this was the one that put every other backward tape or sitar or music concrete suggested in the rest of the album into context. They all seemed to head to this one.

The snarling drone of a tambura if lifted by Ringo's strange back to front rhythm and Paul's bass insisting on a C high on the fretboard. Then something like seagulls rise in the mix and then John comes in with the opener. If taxmen and lonely people seemed strange subjects for the world's greatest boy band then try this: "Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream. It is not dying. It is not dying." The tune plays the notes of a major chord like a bugle call, adding to the confusion. It doesn't sound remotely as Indian as the drone at the start. Then there's a break as something which still sounds unearthly happens. A kind of folk dance made out of scraps of orchestral music, woodwinds and brass uncoiling from under some almost screaming chords. It fits but it sticks out. But it fits. When John comes back in his voice is squeezed by a Leslie speaker and sounds like he's at the end of a long tunnel with more of the same in the lyrics. "Ignorance and hate may mourn the dead." And the seagulls screech overhead, again and again. A loud backwards guitar solo. More seagulls. "So play the game existence to the end of the beginning, of the beginning, of the beginning..." sings John at the other end of the void, fading into the chaos of sound, the orchestral stabs playing like fills. At the very end of the fade, ever more weirdly, a bar room piano plays some honky tonk chords into the silence at the end of the groove.

If there had been anything as boldly unapologetic yet also still recognisable and enjoyable pop music from the distance I first heard this I didn't know of it. Punk was already breaking through but this almost forgotten album by the biggest band in history was telling me that I shouldn't just be chasing the three chord distortion and slogan choruses from the desolate London of 1977. That felt the best but what if there could be more exploration after the reset finished? This was the record that told not only me that it was possible but necessary. It didn't mean that post punk bands needed to sound like the Beatles from a decade before but that they should race past the new standard before it blanded into a genre like any other (which it did and quickly).

Listening notes: This is mostly based on my first full hearing of the album as an original 1966 vinyl LP. That's a memory. The more immediate source was the 2009 remastered mono box set copy on cd in accordance with the original's mono mix. This, the closest you'll get to hearing what the band wanted has a lot of detail left off the stereo mix (which was considered a kind of luxury item as far as their fanbase went).

This was the album made as the band were acting on their instincts to stop touring and start exploring. That's important as, more than anything else until Let it Be it was a full band recording, the treasure at the end of months of intense idea sharing and playing. After it there were albums with more sophisticated arrangements and daring moves but they were also the work of a band that was less a creative unit than a series of recombined backings for individual members. Revolver is what a creative and collaborative peak sounds like. The single before it was Paperback Writer/Rain a powerful paring of daring with plain rock songs given unprecedented treatment (extra bass on one and backwards recording on the other) and the one after was Penny Lane/Strawberry Fields Forever, the sound of a new era.

The album was eclipsed by its successor, Sgt. Pepper for decades and while that basked in the light until mention of it became a cliche it wasn't until the US market got the '80s CD release with the original track list intact (it had originally been released there minus some key tracks) that the relation of the two albums was reversed and Revolver began to top the lists. This is good and bad.

It's good because it means that the album takes it's well earned place at the top (at least of thinking about the Beatles) but it's bad because this makes it a target of every contrarian bore who thinks it signals the need to champion Please Please Me or Freddie and the Dreamers. For my part I heard something made in 1966 which made me go looking around for anything else I could find from the year. What I learned was that Revolver hadn't been made in a vacuum of unguided genius but was very much a part of the scene it seemed to lead. There was so much I found from the mid '60s that inspired with its daring and style and so much I longed for a smidgen of that to appear in my own time. If it didn't happen it would be up to me or anyone else who wanted their lives enhanced by culture as rich.

That week of holiday wasn't just that album. I was also going through the Queen back catalogue. One morning I was blissing out to Sheer Heart Attack, second last track, side two, She Makes Me with its giant drums and acoustic chords and celestial harmonies. My sister who had organised the loan of Revolver from her friend heard it and called down from the kitchen that the Beatles album had to go back to Penny soon. She'd mistaken Queen for the Fabs.

So, there it is, a pop music monolith like the one in Space Odyssey, come down among mortals to lead them to the next development. Well, it did a lot of inspiring and well beyond its time but, take that on board or not, care about it or not, it's still a good record, not just an important one, an engaging one, an intensely musical one, a fun one.