1967 at 50: DAVID BOWIE

You love David Bowie, don't you? Of course, you do. Everyone does. But I'd bet out of all his albums in your collection you don't have this one. You might even look at the cover and then the track list and think it's a compilation of his early quirky songs. Read on.

It gets you from the off with a bright, folky oboe motif with handclaps. Bowie's natural London tones tell us the funny but sad tale of grown up child Uncle Arthur whose attempt to escape from his mother's dominance into happy wedlock is thwarted because his new bride isn't his mum. A British kitchen sink film in two minutes and seven seconds. Sell me a Coat is a kind Disneyfied Paint it Black with a gorgeous orchestral arrangement. Rubber Band is all Edwardian music hall about a romantic oneupmanship. You could easily transpose it to the Carnaby St world of rock stars in old military uniforms of the swinging London where Bowie lived and traded but I don't think we're even that deep here. Love You Till Tuesday is an impossibly cute note to a girl that she could have him all to herself for a limited time only if she played her cards right (he might even extend it to Wednesday). He's the Dandy of Ray Davies' song but doesn't need to be told he's alright.

These first four songs do what a pop album in 1967 was required to do, engage with stories and lure with a kind of musical open architecture whereby a harpsichord might sit in a mix beside a fuzzed up Stratocaster. The big invaders had reset the rules about albums in the previous years, Revolver, Aftermath, Face to Face, A Quick One and more; if you wanted to put a hit single in the first track and the rest of the two sides with a lot of Chuck Berry covers you were no longer going to be noticed. The password was sophistication. That's what you get here. Maybe too much.

There is a Happy Land is a dreamy evocation of the space created in childhood where the grownups may not go. We Are Hungry Men is a kind of Future Shock set to a rock backing with Bowie in a number of dramatic roles including news readers, German accented tyrants, a would-be messiah and his followers. It has moments of clear portent but not of the future of the West as much as Bowie's own, looking ahead to similar but better crafted pieces like Running Gun Blues or Saviour Machine (and then the personae of Ziggy or the Thin White Duke). It shoots itself in the foot with the campy voices and jokey thrust which are completely at odds with the more earnest passages. But it's interesting. When I Live My Dream closes the old side one with a ballad which is lovely but a little mothballed even for its time. What it does is extend Bowie's stylistic range into the grand sweep of future tracks like Sweet Thing or Wild is the Wind.

Little Bombadier opens with lush strings playing a waltz. The title character, traumatised by war retreats into childhood and plays with children as though he was another child, gets warned off by plainclothes cops and flees the scene. Bowie is more in stride with this one as his Weimar cabaret approach and straighter arrangement allow the song to grow into itself rather than sound like someone doing musical tricks. Silly Boy Blue's heralding trumpets tell of a novitiate Tibetan monk whose sense that he is the reincarnation of  a master gets him into constant trouble. Come and Buy Toys is a straight folk strum (with some very lovely acoustic finger style guitar playing) contrasting the abandon of childhood with the child's future working on the land. Although he never pursued the feel of it further than this the seriousness of the song and deceptive simplicity of the performance look ahead to the album he would better build upon in a few years' time.

Join the Gang is a regression to the winking social satire of the first side with a roll call of swinging Londoners. It's energetic and funny ... the first time. She's Got Medals is the kind of Cockney rocker the Small Faces made their own. Here, the story of a transsexual who goes to war is marred by a few too many cor blimey asides and knowing winks which is a great pity as the music is a brilliant moving rocker that could've gone somewhere. Maid of Bond Street offers the hollowness of fame wed with dissatisfaction in a Twiggy like model. It's a jazzy waltz with some fancy vocal hoofing but also some real pain. Please, Mr Grave Digger is sung without musical accompaniment but set deeply in a soundscape of wet weather and cracking twigs underfoot. A murderer returns to the grave of the child he molested and murdered. Confessing to the grave digger, he must then remove the new witness into a grave of his own. The fade has him mumbling to himself about the cold he's caught and various other fragments. And that's it, that's the way the album ends.

His erstwhile manager, Ken Pitt, was keen to develop Bowie away from his earlier mod R&B attempts on the charts and fame and steer him into a more generalist entertainer like Anthony Newley. That is what's behind the massive swings in style and tone that tear this album from its potential shelf mates like A Quick One or Face to Face. While Ray Davies might go from ragging the Carnabitian army with a rollicking mockery to the poignancy of Waterloo Sunset, or the Who from Boris the Spider to So Sad About Us, Bowie here, in debuting the new name in his first long player, feels like he's trying to cover every possibility as a master of whichever style he comes across. At its best the results point us to his future career as a songwriter of high power but at its worst he hides his light under bushels of Christmas novelty song mediocrity.

Is that harsh? No, it's disappointed. Bowie's strengths are clear from track to track but his eager youth and managerial myopia made this album sound like an over keen audition tape for an Anthony Newley warm up act. It's harder to take this set when you recognise its clear signs of things to come. When he emerged two years later with an album also eponymously titled (as though attempting to obscure the first) but better known as Space Oddity it was as a much more confident artist whose London accent sounded natural rather than self-protective and whose songs found more solid setting for their range of mood and imagination. If the darkness of We Are Hungry Men was smothered in wincing cuteness it was to find release in the eerie epic Cygnet Commitee or the horror in space of Space Oddity both of which function as songs first and then as plots.

But, let's be fair. There are songs on the debut that stand now, as much as anything from the late '60s. Bowie collaborated on the arrangements of this first set of wholly original material. That's like the way he taught himself piano to write the songs on Hunky Dory. Bowie's first full decade of success, ending in 1980, is witness to the power of career concentration and the willingness to explore and learn whatever was needed for the next one so that each of them emerged both signature and distinct from the previous one. In this album he changed his name by borrowing from an adventurer who had given his name to a knife and told the world he was ready. Yes, it's hampered by aesthetic guesses which can be so off that they embarrass but it's also in line with its times (perhaps too much: it's birth as a retail item was troubled by the coincidental release of Sergeant Pepper).

Put it this way, you know those people who affect flamboyance in their dress and manner but turn out to be flatly conventional in their opinions? Well, this album is the opposite of that. The goofy showbiz and pearly king swagger conceal stories with depth about stress, crime, reincarnation, death, superficiality and the dark side of fame. This is from a twenty year old who had come to understand that his attempts to be a Jagger-like figure were doomed as long as there was a real Jagger, who saw a song in every news report or morning walk and carved them finished out of sheer imagination. And he did it outside of the mainstream in that he did it alone. What we should be hearing among the Cockney and the goofy sound effects is the emergence of an artist and a star. It flopped. He didn't. Ten years later he captivated the world with a story about a couple kissing at the Berlin Wall. And he ended his days with farewells that crossed dimensions and entered massive landscapes. This box of novelties and winks wasn't the first time he was driven by imagination but it was the first time he could show us how it worked. So, if you come across it, let it play and see that at work.

1977 at 40: Metamorphosis

"Does anyone remember laughter?"

At the beginning of 1977 I was hanging out to see The Song Remains the Same at the cinema and waiting for the new Queen album but there was another thread winding its way from the twine: I'd seen the Weekend Magazine story on punk in London and the bits of the Anarchy in the UK video haunted me. 1976 ended with a marathon two hour Countdown that went through the year's hits. It was low on the chart but the clip was played in full. John Paul Young quipped to Molly that the singer had a future playing the Hunchback of Notre Dame.

That separated me from John Paul Young's tribe of oldies forever. He had just looked popstar age before that but at that moment he might as well have been forty-eight. Gone. But there was no way I could get to hear the Sex Pistols as the single had already been deleted (I had expected it to be in the 45s bin at Palings and could take my time about getting a copy). There were no follow ups and might not be. There had just been that moment, as far as I could tell. I was haunted. Meantime there was everything else.

By the end of the year a few albums (mentioned below) caught my senses and then, finally, on the day of the election that sank the cause of progressive politics in Australia until the following decade, there was the beautifully ugly cover of Never Mind the Bollocks Here's the Sex Pistols in the normal LP shelves. No brown paper bag, just there like Boston or Bad Company, another record. She didn't know it but my grandmother (who had sent me to town to buy my own Christmas present - I was fifteen and that's the way it worked) was about to pay for the record that changed me. That was the summer. I went in as an adolescent grub and emerged as a greater spotted moth.

"Noooooooooo future! Noooooooooo future! Noooooooooo future for you!"

Albums:

Low - David Bowie

I was confused by Sound and Vision and was ready to write Bowie off as lost to disco (because of Young Americans and some tracks on Station to Station). I had a friend tape this rather than buy it myself. The first side seemed like a lot of chimey nothing but the first half of the second side sounded like the best and darkest sci-fi movie ever (and then there was Star Wars at the end of the year which might have had a chance if it weren't for everything else I encountered in the ten months leading up to it). I made a tape of the tape which reversed the sides (it was on a C90) and listened that way.






The Clash

I bought this at the Big W down the road. Mine (long gone) had a black and white only cover and later ones had the ripped margins in olive green (a bit like the colour-reversed Never Mind the Bollocks art). There's a lot to fire up a teenager here but it sounded so thin and localised that I had to imagine my empathy. The start of a seldom interrupted indifference I felt for the band. I appreciated the sentiment and a handful of songs to come. For a while it was the only LP I had that sounded like what I took for punk.






Damned Damned Damned

Had a cassette but got tired of it. I don't know why but it felt like a good start that the band didn't know how to maintain. I could leave it on but didn't care if I left the room while it was going.











TransEurope Express - Kraftwerk

I did like the sci-fi sound of this, a mix of cold German precision and spooky atmospheres and large lovely electronic landscapes. Had it on cassette.











Peter Gabriel

The first of what would be four self-titled albums from the ex-Genesis tonsils intrigued me as the reviewers seemed to be spooked by it. I hadn't consciously heard a bar of Genesis at that stage and nudged them into the shelf already stuffed with the likes of Jethro Tull, Yes and ELP and the like. The spook was that it sounded like a rebirth with none of the great technoflash (a RAM magazine coinage created in absence of the prevalent term Prog which came later). I was hooked enough from the video to the second single Modern Love in which he thrashed about in a Rollerball uniform on a shopping mall escalator, removing his mask only to sing the middle eight with his face in shadow where it wasn't obscured by hair. The song itself I still like. It's a big barre chord rock song with a great vocal that rests somewhere between a metal scream and a Greg Lake posh tenor. Nothing on the rest of the album lived up to it but moments like Moribund the Burgermeister or Humdrum gave enough for me to buy the next one without hearing it first. Also, it led me to investigate Genesis but I didn't pursue it after a few real tries.


The Idiot - Iggy Pop

Heard this more at the Uni parties my older siblings would take me to in the following year but I knew about it before then as it was always brought up in connection with Bowie's album Low.












Beatles at the Hollywood Bowl/Star Club

Any new Beatles was manna for the second generation fan. Of the two live Beatles albums released in 1977 this was the best sounding but least interesting. The Star Club album was the reverse of that. The cover art had magnified black on white type which made it look like a bootleg and photos of the punters that felt authentic (the screaming girls in the art of the Bowl album looked very '70s) and for the first play it sounded hard and punchy. But then if I tried to play it again I could only do it for isolated tracks. I friend of mine had a few boots of bands like Led Zeppelin and gave me tapes which is why I never bothered with them.





Deceptive Bends - 10CC

I'd been a fan of this band's cleverness and talents with catchy pop with subversive lyrics, a kind of Romper Room Frank Zappa (whom I reviled). This was the first album after the darker minded pair, Lol Creme and Kevin Godley, exited for more interesting territory. The wit is still there and the epic Feel the Benefit continues to have some power but I can't now easily say why I listened to this so much in this year. Wouldn't now.







News of the World - Queen

Almost the redemption of Day at the Races and its patchy form filling, News of the World brought us the football anthem We Are The Champions with its "nah nah nanah naaah" chorus but also the funny response to punk Sheer Heart Attack and the stompin' We Will Rock You. But by the end of 1977 it seemed like a missed boat. I bought a friend's copy at a discount and played it a little but it just couldn't compete with the rude noise I had aligned with in the meantime. Oh, and this was the one on which they stopped boasting how they didn't use synthesisers and those were in pretty full force through a lot of it. Good a point as any to give up on a band you once liked.


Rattus Norvegicus - The Stranglers

I hated what I took to be a group of middle-aged prog rockers with shorter haircuts and slightly shorter keyboard solos passing themselves off as punk because they wrote songs about rude things. I guiltily loved some of the arrangements but in my defence it's because the better of them (Get a Grip on Yourself) sounded like a distillate of '60s psychedelia. Also, they were one of those bands whose fans matched them for baseless obnoxiousness: a Stranglers fan was almost invariably a massive fuckwit (and almost always older).






ABBA the Album

I had long abandoned ABBA (most of my acquaintance cast themselves adrift after Fernando was poured into the drinking water and we all got sick) but this album did contain I'm a Marionette which remains pleasantly unnerving (in the best way, I'm not being sarcastic). Otherwise by this stage it sounded a little too homogenised for this punter. Also, this was tied in to the movie which seemed too cute and teeny even if I had any interest left.









Talking Heads '77

I only heard Psycho Killer from this set until the following year and only very recently owned the album. I like it now but can't say if I would have then.












My Aim is True - Elvis Costello

A lot of folk cite this as one of the great debut albums but I only bought it after the third one and then from completeness. I liked less than half (I know, missing a joke there but I'm serious) of the tracks and found the Californian soft rock approach irritating (well, the band did go on to back Huey Lewis!) I'll admit that the songwriting didn't change that much between albums as much as the arrangements, the great Attractions washed the songs clean of the plodding Americana with beautiful garagey power, sounding far more like my late '70s. That said, I can listen to Alison and Watching the Detectives (on the Australian release) any day of the week.


Rumours - Fleetwood Mac

My pre-punk hatred for this and the other main Nicks/Buckingham Fleetwood Mac albums stems from my brother playing his cassette of them ceaselessly for weeks. My Queenslander house featured walls that stopped short of the ceiling (to promote airflow) so I didn't miss a beat. There's merit in the writing, production and singing here but there's about the same amount in anything by the Doobie Brothers, Steely Dan or the Eagles and I was already finding those acts excessive and aurally indigestible. This album was to rise in the estimation of twenty-somethings decades later but so did anything by ELO. That didn't make me want to reassess but I heard it again many times and still found it horrible.

Heroes - David Bowie

If I could only like half of Low I'll have to admit I didn't like this beyond the big title song until the year after when it started feeling like it fit. Spiky arrangements, screaming choruses that seemed to go nowhere for a long time, instrumentals that felt more like film music. I now like about half of it but do and did dig Bowie's outsider/insider look on the cover.







Never Mind the Bollocks Here's the Sex Pistols

From the moment I saw them on Weekend Magazine before the seven o'clock news one Sunday I was waiting for this album. This anticipation (almost a year in construction) was not just met but rewarded with excess. A life changer to which I've already devoted three long posts. My most-played record for the remainder of the decade.

The only other album I can think of that had anything like the same impact on the way I listened to music and how alligned I felt to it was Portishead's Dummy almost twenty years later. But Bollocks was the deadly frisbee and the shield against which I felt strong as well as apart. That felt very, very good.


Singles:

Baracuda - Heart: A galloping assault with a soaring vocal about .... an attack? Kind of sounded like a sex song but could have been about someone very nasty. The chugalug was lifted from Led Zeppelin's Achilles' Last Stand from the previous year's Presence album but served very well at the centre of a short form single. Kudos for making a clean guitar tone sound like metal and for the abrupt ending.

I Feel Love - Donna Summer: One of the greatest pop singles ever. Essayed elsewhere on this blog. Couldn't make this list without it.

The Way That You Do It - Pussyfoot: A time-travelling Spice Girl rolled this one out in a clip I can't remember as it was replaced by the lame "live" one at the Countdown Studios the night she hosted. Ooh na na hia ooh na na hia hia indeed. This was too easy to hate but too persistent to ignore. Pop music was the rug under the feet of this novelty dirge and it was about to get pulled. Then about five years later it was back under big hair and synthesisers with squelching presets.

Don't Cry for Me Argentina - Julie Covington: Sung by the tough girl from the Rock Follies the hit from Evita made a persistent appearance in the Countdown top ten. The video was shown only once. It was a series of stills of Covington in a long and shear white dress in a white room standing or sitting on the floor, looking serious. I liked the Latin sound of the melody and the halting opera of it but didn't get a copy. I think I liked the idea that something so slow and un-rock could be filling the singles bins at Palings.

Rockaria - ELO: At first I thought this was funny, like everyone else but it really wore out its welcome quickly and when the kids who always caught up last caught up with this you had to get tortured all over again when they told you how clever it was. It was a rock song with a soprano in the breaks.

Jet Airliner - Steve Miller Band: Even back then I knew this was a kind of by-the-numbers soft rock but I loved the clean rhythm guitar tone and singer-songwriter vocal. Kraft processed cheddar and tasted just as satisfying to the undeveloped pallet.

I Go to Rio - Peter Allen: The grinning Broadway cabaret monster whose video was one of the most embarrassing things on television that year had a mega hit with this chirpy clunking slice of Hell from our parents' area of responsibility. He banged at a white piano and stripped down to the singlet. If you're thinking proto-G.G.Allin stop it now.

God Save the Queen - The Sex Pistols: I kept missing this. It was never on Countdown but it was on Sounds but Sounds was a lot of interviews with cabaret has beens and I often skipped it. Every time I did, though, they played something good. I didn't see the clip until I saw it in context in the Great Rock n Roll Swindle years later. This also meant I didn't hear it until I bought the album at the end of the year. We ogled the photo of the A&M signing outside Buckingham Palace reprinted in RAM magazine. That would have to do.

Lucille - Kenny Rogers: "You picked a fine time to leave me, Lucille. With four hundred children and a cop in the field." Indeed she had. Kenny Rogers would have a string of nu-country hits in the years to come. At least one of which was made into a tv movie (Coward of the County) after the hits dried up. He makes this list because I heard that Mr Rouse had been walking across the quad at school once when one of his Woolworths shoes disintegrated. He had (on good authority) said: "you picked a fine time to leave me, loose heel."

Don't Stop - Fleetwood Mac: Crap then and crap now.

Don't Give Up on Us - David Soul: Hutch crooned his way through a ballad that sounded like it came from four years before. There was another one called Silver Lady later which had him do a bullseye Bryan Ferry. There was no jealousy response single from Starsky.

Nothing Stays the Same Forever - Hush: The out of time glam band went from boorish football choruses to this quite interesting atmospheric number. For a band with no ideas beyond pub rock they really got something here. Never did again, though.

Don't Fall in Love - The Ferrets: This just appeared paranormally one Sunday evening on Countdown. We didn't know where it was from or who they were but it was really, really good. Some of the cheek of the mid '70s pubrock made good but also a quirky leanness and nerve enough for us to declare it new wave (a protean term then which, before it came to be spoken with an obligatory sneer, could sound quite thoughtful and discerning). A genuine classic of the era.

Living Next Door to Alice - Smokie: Another band like Racey who seemed to emerge from the clubs of Northern England to present the world with a series of A&R prescribed songs that became hits until they stopped a few years later. The singer had a croaky voice  and a sort of grown out Rod Stewart perm. He still had both by 1980 when he had his last wheeze in a duet with Suzie Quatro. Everyone finds each other.

Blue Jeans  - Skyhooks: The great sharpened satirists of Horror Movie and Ego is Not a Dirty Word sang a little country song about fashion or denim or something but I'd stopped listening to them by then.

In the Flesh - Blondie: Released the year after its host album, the A and B sides were flipped when Countdown played the B side and it blazed the local ears. There was a '50s feel to it but the lyrics were grown-up and Debbie Harry's delivery and appearance in the clip wiped every other note played on the show that evening. Everyone was talking about it at school the next day. The band was aligned to punk even though they came across more as '60s revivalists at the time but it was still thrilling to have something from the margins in the charts. They toured and their career (however brief) ascended.

Mull of Kintyre - Wings: Pleasant enough folk waltz but I bought it for the White Album style b-side Girls School which still rocks fine!

Pretty Vacant - The Sex Pistols: This one was played on Countdown as they couldn't ignore them at that stage. The video was as cold as a London December and as exciting as hell. It was hard and shouty and perfect. A year of pop music dissolved under its force.

And there it was, what the previous year had joined no band put asunder. I started the Christmas holidays in 1977 getting slowly tired of Queen's News of the World and ached for the Sex Pistols album. When that was in my hands the world changed. Everything I'd taken with thanks from older siblings fell away like old skin. The freedom of it made me listen more closely to those things I kept (selected Beatles, Stones, Who, Yardbirds) and meet the new, violent attack of punk as it hit. Everything was re-evaluated, everything was open to thought if not deed and the world of the straights with their Saturday Night Fever mainstream installment plans softened into the blur of the background. I'd long given up on trying to fit in with them but now knew that I didn't want their protected lack of imagination, their common as muck sense nor cared about their shallow judgement. I didn't have the safety pins in my nostrils nor the glue in my hair and I never uttered the words at the time (because it was the kind of crap that grownups said) but I was a punk.

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.