1969 @ 50: THE VELVET UNDERGROUND

A band's second album is supposed to be the difficult one. But that's for bands who hit big with the debut. If only a few are listening they might well try to clone the first or try something new. The Velvet Underground did the latter, forging music that explored emotionally as well as sonically, pushing further into the shadows. This third entry is the anomaly. The amps are turned down and the guitars are clean and ringing. The vocals are up close and very personal. There is nothing like European Son or Sister Ray. Even the experimental outing takes a step back from that kind of daring. What happened?

Well, first, then there were three. The externally imposed Nico had exited after the first album. Her deep dark worldliness bloomed into stranger territory under her own name. And then Cale was ousted. What was left was Lou Reed's songs and a band ready to play them. Oh, and Doug Yule, a kind of neat casual Lou Reed on bass, keyboards and some vocals. It was a different band. Then again, it begins as though it is.

Candy Says, a shivery song about Candy Darling, a trans New Yorker who sings of hating her body and wondering what she'd see if she could look at herself from outside it. Doug Yule's fragile vocal sings with quiet pain over the kind of Latin chord figure on the guitar from the first album. The gentle fade out of shimmering doo doo wah vocals and major 7ths lulls into a dark silence.

What Goes On is a canter of clean electric guitars and a bright organ, harmonies and a playful-seeming lyric featuring the same kind of opposites as The Beatles' Hello Goodbye. Well, except for the steady downward movement of the tone of the words as they head toward being doomed and falling, despite the best efforts of the catchy chorus telling us it will be alright. Instead of that chorus at the end we get an extended instrumental outro of a verse and chorus with the organ's block chords standing in for vocals or perhaps grinding forward like the futility of life Reed's perky vocal suggests.

With Some Kinda Love we get to a point at which, now we know, Lou Reed the future solo act emerges. We've had characters in Reed's songs up to now but here they are given more dialogue and given life beyond the street life folklore of the first two albums. Margarita and Tom are talking about love and either waxing philosophical or getting pretentious but really, they're ... well what? Gearing up for sexual adventure or just getting deeper into the discussion. Is the kind of love that makes your eyes moist a reference to emotion or physical strain. It's hard to tell and Lou is having the last laugh. The entire song is two chords rolling on clean guitars and bass without drums as Reed more talks than sings his way through.

Take the same arrangement idea and slow it down with a sad sounding tambourine shaking distantly while the narrator more nakedly addresses the woman he's been seeing outside her marriage. It feel like it's ending, the passion dissipated, but his longing continues like the insistent gentle guitars flowing under him and he lingers on her pale blue eyes. This is the most pained, open and earnest account of his own feelings until the torments of Berlin, itself set in fiction but with a grindingly real result.

The next song must have puzzled its first listeners. A few lines of prayer repeated over a gently insistent guitar figure and featuring some effortless, bright vocal harmonies which will develop into something fuller and more glorious as the songs progress. So what does go on, here? There is no smirk in any of it. It sounds real. Was Reed converting from a Judaism he wasn't particularly committed to? Or was this the next step in a slowly developing concept song cycle about different aspects of love? It ends the old side one, leaving the listener possibly worrying what was to be found on the flip.

Side two opens with Beginning to See the Light, a phrase suggesting either dawning personal wisdom or religious inspiration. The full band backs Reed's vocal with clean but rich toned guitars and a bright shuffle. A preacher style yell for the verse but then choruses with changing lyrics about playing the fool and "here we go again" ending in a fade of fullthroated harmonies on the line "how does it feel to loved?" Through each verse a series of confessions or descriptions about what he does and what is expected of him moves to this last question which really is a query about how much light he's actually begun to see. Love is fun and beautiful ... but messy.

A drone of organ and the kind of guitar tone possibly not heard again until Cocteau Twins albums over a decade later. I'm Set Free. Reed again uses religious phraseology culminating the the chorus of the title with its much expanded vocal harmonies over a building band. It intermittently sounds like a gospel song but then he says he saw his head laughing and rolling around on the ground. This is either a very peculiar spiritual experience or just more unbound life given a godless church service. Again, there is no irony to this, no sneer of an adolescent infidel or smirk of a wiser worldly man, just someone who knows that joy has a price but the purchase feels so good.

That's the Story of My Life bounces along like a cartoon theme from the fifties as Reed sings this over and again: "That's the story of my life, the difference between wrong and right. But Billy said both those words are dead. That's the story of my life." It sounds like it reads, a diary entry set to music but repeated as though the thought will never go away. Wrong and right are dead words. Reed's voice is affected, stung. And the boppy jaunt of happy faces gambols around his shaking head as he stares into the footpath as he walks.

The Murder Mystery is the closest thing on this album to the kind of experimentation the band would do in earlier lineups. A rapid ascending riff, a languid organ meander and then all four members of the band recite text at once in a cacophony that only very incidentally comprehensible but isn't meant to be followed: the tumble of the voices speaking suggests a strange alienated mood. This is broken up by a pair of voices (notably Maureen Tucker) singing disjointed phrases in a minor key phrasing: (please raise the flag rosy red carpet envy ...) before plunging back into the babel of voices. Is it a chaos of individual stories? Some of the passages are chants of words drawn out by the syllable. Are they the scattered thoughts of a murderer following the act? All and more beyond. This, to my ear is an exercise in suggestion created by the tension between a soundscape and an evocative title. Strangely, such a challenging and complicated piece is never irritating and you can try and isolate one of the voices to follow (it's very difficult) or just let it flow. There is a lot of discipline in the making of this piece and it ends up being a kind of aural sculpture rather than a song, fashioned and deliberate. It's both an awkward standalone on an album of openness and melody and a strangely engaging culmination of the complexity of the life the other songs describe.

We finish as we began with Reed giving to another band member. I can hear Reed singing this but Maureen Tucker's artless rendition is an apt message of farewell. After Hours is a mix of Goodnight Irene and Show Me the Way to Go Home as solo pieces traipsing through imagery both whimsical and dark set to the kind of  melody that wouldn't be out of place in a Disney film. But it's about some very final thinking. "Say hello to never."

Reed didn't know it yet but he was already writing outside of a band. The band is clearly audible here and playing well in a kind of studied simplicity. Even more than its successor (the band's last with Reed) this set feels more at home beside Transformer or Berlin than the first two records. This is not to devalue the contributions of the others but in a record as dominated by its songwriter (even when he isn't singing his own lyrics) the Velvet Underground as a feeling as well as a band has left. Then again, if you don't know any of that, you could just put this on and relax into its Sunday afternoon of easy moods supporting troubling thoughts like a warm dose of something opioid. Go on, tell 'em Lou sent ya.

1969@50: LED ZEPPELIN

GAH GAH ... GAH GAH!

Massive powerchords tell us someone is knocking. The drums begin, hesitant and stuttering but take strength form the guitar. The bass joins with the first full riff but by that time the mighty call of the vocals, a barely controlled scream brings everyone in to centre stage. Led Zeppelin have arrived.

"In the days of my youth I was told what it means to be a man....."

This is album is waterlogged by controversy over the attribution of the songs. The controversy is not a storm in a teacup and has a complicated history. There is no consideration of this album in 2019 without being aware of it. It's fun. It's great storming joyous fun as the most articulate monster group to be given the label heavy metal take their place and hold it tight. But there's controversy.

(Note: I've already reviewed this one here. This is about other issues related to the record.)

Quickly: Babe, I'm Gonna Leave You is a song by Anne Bredon, Willie Dixon has two numbers You Shook Me and I Can't Quit You, Baby, Dazed and Confused was originally by Jake Holmes and titled I'm Confused, How Many More Times takes a number of Howlin' Wolf lines an riffs. Unlike the more recently tested case of Stairway to Heaven (which is a bullshit case) these ones were not seriously contested by the band and settlements were made and attribution on the cover art altered. My copy of the album, reissued in the late '70s clearly stated Dixon's and Bredon's tracks but not Bert Jansch's arrangement (note, not composition) of Black Mountain Side. The epic side closers Dazed and Confused and How Many More Times were not attributed to people outside the band membership. The former had done service in Jimmy Page's former band The Yardbirds. Is that bad? You betcha!

Page knew his blues from his elbow and knew the sources of his inspiration. The management might have done the misdeed but really, the band allowed the world to think that these were their songs. Subsequent releases have featured corrections to all of these. My current copies of all the most recent Led Zep albums were downloads without more than the front covers without a syllable of attribution. Now, for anyone only just getting into the band by this method, all songs might as well be by them.

What does that mean for the music? Nothing. The music soars and grind and growls and slinks through the lightless depths of carnality the way it always did. The marriage of Robert Plant's gigantic vocals with acoustic guitars still astonishes today. The singer, guitarist duel at the end of You Shook Me still stuns. Dazed and Confused still knocks you over rudely and sexily. All of that remains and much of it is the point of what Led Zeppelin did with the songs that it variously wrote or appropriated: it altered them forever. Jake Holmes's I'm Confused sounds like a plaintive hippy with poor grammar (I'm being choosed?) but Zep's take is a massive storm of creepy and horrifying landscapes and anger. The Bredon song was done more in the style of someone else who covered it (Joan Baez) and so was already removed. How Many More Times was a demonstration of how far the band could digress from their riff based beginnings and still come back, stronger if torn and scarred. The point of the first Led Zeppelin album was transformation. The band changed the songs it wrote (there are genuinely original songs on the album, by the way, like the opening of each side) beyond their origins and took their audiences with them.

If you want an indication of this I refer you to the Albert Hall footage in the Led Zeppelin DVD. It is extraordinary what a quartet of great players can do.

What does that mean to the question of attribution? Nothing. The songs are still their author's songs and not Led Zeppelin's. When most of the album was initially issued with this false attribution it does indeed make a difference. Time, lawsuits and settlements have set the record straight (so to speak) but the fact that the deed was done will (and should) hang over this and at least the next album. The pity of this is that this set of songs that was the result of rushing into the studio before the band could settle into songwriting was almost all lifted from other sources and then misattributed.

What I like is that the opening song, that introduction to the world of that force is an original. Anyone else hear Keith Relf singing Good Times Bad Times? Change the range from Valhallan to normal human and you're there. The album is as powerful as ever. The filter of hearing it through some bad practice must be on the listener. That is unfair. Early Rolling Stones albums (almost entirely composed of covers) put the right names beside the songs why couldn't this lot? They should have. My advice is to know this when you listen and, if you pursue the band to their later development and flourishing, get ready to glory in some of the most forceful and eloquent music of its era. Recall the taint but enjoy the getting of wisdom. Then go back and hear this and hear how wondrous and thunderous they were.

Ok, this is a PS. I was out walking through a particularly lovely midsummer evening, thinking about what I'd written here and wondering if I'd been even handed and I realised I'd left something important out. It has to do with the decades since the '60s, the more recent ones in which I've witnessed rock music, the music that used to be innovative simply by trying something unexpected and going with it, ceased to be innovative and began to plunder earlier decades for its style and too often lift whole songs without attribution. The taint on Led Zeppelin for doing this remains and can conceivably be invoked by people who celebrate plagiarists of newer vintage. Who's wrong? Everyone. So, here's something to do.

Let's pretend that Led Zeppelin's debut album was released with all the songs' bylines correct. There'd still be a few originals but most of the album would be considered covers from the get go. Imagine that. A band whose live shows (in which who wrote what took an easy second place to performance) made them the world's biggest drawcard in rock outside of the Rolling Stones in the first months of their existence has released this great record of old blues tunes that will blow you head off. Willie Dixon's You Shook Me sounds like a great black condor soaring under storm clouds. And do you remember that whiny little song I'm Confused by Jake Holmes, that guy who claimed to be straight and a hippy? It now sounds like nothing on earth before it, going from a doom-laden bass riff to godlike scream then down into weird valleys of lightless horror before coming back for a second attack.

You see what I mean? The album wouldn't be "it's good but they got a away with robbery" it would be "wow, and look where they went after that!" And that, finally, would be right.

But we are, of course, just pretending.


Listening notes: I've heard my brother's original pressing and my first copy was a late '70s rerelease but as soon as I bought a CD player in the '90s I started restocking old favourites including this one and got the superb (if loudness war influenced) contemporary remaster and finally I have the deluxe high resolution download from an online retailer. My verdict is for the latter, the biggest and clearest representation with a good dynamic range. I've bored too many people on how little I care for vinyl but these really do smash the rest. Anyway...

1968 at 50: THE WHITE ALBUM REDUX

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And a Happy New Year to ye!

1968 at 50: What I Didn't Get To (and Some that Didn't Get to Me)

If you see a title here of an album you love I recommend you skip this post. It will read like an adolescent scratching away at sacred cows in the hope of causing offence. It's not that. I wanted to open my ears and heart to what was shaping up to be an exciting mix of revisits and first listens. When I mention something here it's not necessarily because I think it's bad music but most typically, albums that begged more time than I had to appreciate them.

Hurdy Gurdy Man - Donovan
Some great songs here including the eerie title track and one of my gateway drugs to pop music from classical as a twelve year old, Hi It's Been a Long Time. The problem with this as I listened to it on long walks to let it settle into memory and engender thoughts was that for every great track there's one that doesn't create an impression. For every Peregrine there's a Teas. Eventually, I didn't have enough to form an opinion on. I'd be writing about my favourites and it would look like skipping.

Elecrtic Ladyland - Jimi Hendrix
I used to love this album but didn't hear it until the mid-2000s and kept listening a I was surprised that Hendrix proved to be a decent songwriter, not just a virtuoso guitarist. 1983, Midnight Lamp and Watchtower are masterworks that show real vision a far as lifting the showman into all round greatness. Except there's so much showmanship still there, so much is guitar pyrotechnics that it's hard for someone who finds that musically indigestible to write about with any understanding. Maybe it's just too big for me.

Wheels of Fire - Cream
From one of the greatest moments in the extended psychedelic era, The White Room, things descend to a mud of white boy blues that, while I like it better now than when I first heard the album as a teenager, does not have the inventive energy and melodic strength of its predecessor Disraeli Gears. There is a lengthy live component which is more what the band were about but it's largely lost on me. It would be an article whingeing about how the album wasn't as good as the first track.

Bookends - Simon and Garfunkel
There's a lot to like on this album like the psychedelic effects of the opening track, Garfunkel's field recordings of people at a rest home and some genuinely beautiful moments but I have a dog in this fight. My year 12 English teacher was a big fan and the way he introduced the idea of pop song lyrics as poetry was with this album. He taught it eloquently and inspiringly. But my most played record at the time was Never Mind the Bollocks which was slowly being usurped by This Year's Model and Armed Forces. I found more in those lyrics and I don't listen to lyrics. By the time Mr Cook sat us down to listen to the oppressively fragile Old Friends I looked up from closing my eyes and trying to connect and saw him softly mouth the words. I could not give this one a fair trial.

The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter - The Incredible String Band
My sister tried to interest me in these folk in that summer o' 74/75 when I realised I had to pay more attention to rock music if I was going to survive high school. She didn't have this album but I did like one or two tracks from the one she did have. Thinking I'd been neglectful I visited this for the first time this year and couldn't listen to the end. It sounded like everything that repelled me about the psyche folk scene of the late '60s. Sorry, just beyond me.

Shades of Deep Purple - Deep Purple
Sorry, Deep Purple were one of those hand-me-down bands form the previous generation that kids at school would be devoted to. Mine was Led Zeppelin. Perhaps it was just a choice of which one you got to first or was recommended best (those siblings who promoted Led Zep also pushed Sabbath who I never took to). Not the band's fault, of course, but still, something I couldn't approach.

In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida - Iron Butterfly
Legendary drum solo that went for most of an LP side. I used to skip Moby Dick which was a lot shorter. I heard the real people part of the song at different points but couldn't bring myself to go there again.

In Search of the Lost Chord - The Moody Blues
My sister had this one, too, and I liked all of them but at last listen earlier in the year it doesn't reach across. Don't quite know why. I like the datedness of Piper at the Gates of Dawn and such. Not this, though.

Music from Big Pink - The Band
Not for me. Have tried and failed too many times to get into them at others' recommendations to no avail.

Ogden's Nut Gone Flake - The Small Faces
Some great songs but I cannot get past the diddlyoddlypodogooboo language of the narrator. This from an admirer of James Joyce. Go figure. The thing is I'd have to put that into context and try to be understanding but it would drag me down.

I also really tried to like Otis Reddings' Dock of the Bay album past the title track, Jefferson Airplane's Crown of Creation, anything by the Grateful Dead, Van Morrison's Astral Weeks, and a fair few others which just didn't make an impression. I have to state here, as well, that time was a big factor. Whether I knew an album or not I would listen to the entire thing every time I went for an extended stroll (which would be long enough to take in a whole 45-ish minute record. I tried with some things but where they repeatedly failed to strike or I lost patience with them and listened to something else or just whatever the sounds around me were I couldn't write about them. Understand that the era was not mine and I had trouble imagining the excitement that met these records when they were fresh. In all examples of what I did write about I discovered in formative teen years when they were older than my time's top 40 but were better. If it's any comfort that does mean that I have very few durable favourites from the mid '70s as they were eclipsed completely by my expeditions to the mid to late '60s. So, no hard feelings, it's just time.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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





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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1978 at 40

1978 and I went to my last softdrinks only school party ever and would soon add university parties to the social calendar where the music was better and the general scene a major lift. The few of us who fell into the thrall of the new music coming out of the UK and starting in our own land were about to get a feast of what we liked about the year before. The Sex Pistols disintegrated after a disastrous tour of America. By the end of the year Johnny was in PiL and all was forgiven. I cut my hair shorter every other month. My brother Greg joked that it was growing back into my skull. I was so punk I got Mum to buy me a leather jacket for my birthday. It was a Brando style, double breasted and I could wear it for about two hours per year in Townsville. The NME had more to say about the music I wanted to learn about and, late as it always was there, I bought each one for the next few years. Of course the charts were still dominated by streamlined baby-boomer rock and novelty songs but there was an undercurrent that a very few of us could hear beneath the blah. Things just seemed to change shape every few months. I went to Brisbane for the August holidays and wanted to stay there. By the Christmas holidays I lived in an extra corridor of the perceivable world where it was always a kind of hybrid of London and Transylvania, played a Maton Flamingo as raucously as I good through an old transistor amp and a Companion fuzz box and started writing my own songs.

THIS YEAR'S MODEL - ELVIS COSTELLO AND THE ATTRACTIONS

A revelation! I've never reconciled with My Aim is True. Apart from a few standouts I find its plinky plonky West Coast proto yacht rock indigestible. Yet, when I listen to its successor which I consider magnificent, I have to concede that if The Shamrocks (who became Huey Lewis' News) of the first album played on it it might have sounded indistinguishable from the first. Then again, if he'd had The Attractions on the first one it might have been as good as this. As it is I still think of This Year's Model as EC's debut album and My Aim is True as a kind of demo disc. Anyway ...

The Australian release on Radar included Watching the Detectives which hadn't appeared on any LP in the UK. I was glad of it as I remember thinking that if the rest of My Aim is True had resembled it I  would have liked it better. A spidery reggae with a spine tingling organ drilling through it as a lungless vocal mixed images about a girl more interested in the movie on tv than mucking around and the kidnapping case on the screen. 

But that was at the end of side one. The whole record starts with EC spitting out the first line before the rest of the band comes in. No Action, This Year's Girl, The Beat, Pump it Up, the songs sped past with constantly nasty observations about fashion victims and alpha males. A reader's letter to RAM once listed every statement on the album that began "I don't want..." It was massive. The record started with the phrase. There was even a whole song with that in the title. 

Through all this there was a lot of great playing. If this was punk (it was being called New Wave as a pointless distinction) it wasn't Never Mind the Bollocks with its ten tonne guitar band onslaught. This was furious with different textures, screaming organ chords, skeletal guitar lines, a very serious rhythm section with a master bass player who could play tunes like McCartney but thud and stone out like Aston Barrett. It was part film noir and part bubblegum and the refusal to resolve the two created a constant tension which might have been unbearable if it weren't for the fact that you could sing along loudly to every chorus. If the Pistols gave me strength to be myself this record dressed that up and sharp. If I think of 1978 I think of this record.

THE KICK INSIDE - KATE BUSH

Once the hormonal storm subsided at sight of the videos for Wuthering Heights on Countdown I bought the single and then the album. In the midst of punk this only claimed to be songs. Neither overcomplex and hippy like Joni Mitchell nor too gentle and accessible like Al Stewart, The Kick Inside went to strange dreamscapes and cinematic realms while somehow staying firmly on the grass of the green and pleasant land. The musicianship was exemplary and the arrangements intriguing. Wuthering Heights had her sounding like a ghost that thought it was still alive but Man With the Child in his eyes was delivered well beyond her tender age. If anything, she reminded me of the Bowie of Aladdin Sane or Diamond Dogs. In the end she was herself which is why she was also impossible to ignore. 

PUBLIC IMAGE 1ST EDITION

I was so excited at hearing the single Public Image, how it leaped beyond the Sex Pistols sound and how that band was only represented that year by the album of demos, practices and novelty tracks and couldn't compete. Swindle only really made sense as a movie soundtrack. It was fun but wore off. PiL's debut, however was the opposite. Public Image was pure magnificence, a soaring modal guitar figure and Johnny singing his  heart out, sounding ever more determined and real. The rest of the album was a chore until you learned to leave it on and let it get to you. Aside from the single every track seemed designed to irritate in some way. Eventually, all the fun I found in Swindle was eclipsed by this set. The best was to come. I ordered a copy through the local import shop. It was on clear green tinted vinyl and the plastic film finish on the cover art was blistered in a weird way, looking like rivulets running down the front. The woman at the shop tried to flatten them with a coin but that was futile so I got a dollar off the price.

ARE WE NOT MEN? - DEVO

Better loved by the people at the Uni parties I went to than by me this nevertheless grew on me. I think I was bothered by how conventional it sounded once you took the image away. But even I could not resist the speed up of Gut Feeling or the Great call and response of Uncontrollable Urge.

WHO ARE YOU? - THE WHO

This is where I parted company with the band. I quite like the title track which was a single and had a clip that was played on Countdown but hearing the rest of it was a constant deflation. I had spoiled myself with a compilation of their early singles and a cassette of Sell Out and nothing here stood up to those.

GERM FREE ADOLESCENTS - X RAY SPEX

Oddly this was given a track by track playthrough and discussion on local commercial station 4TO and it frustrated me that I could never find a copy locally. I got one in Brisbane much later in the year. Still listen to this one.

MAN MACHINE - KRAFTWERK

Another favourite of the local alt.unistudent. If I appreciated Krafwerk it was through the explanations of someone a crucial five years older than me. Love it now, though.

GIVE 'EM ENOUGH ROPE - THE CLASH

As soon as Never Mind the Bollocks came out I stopped listening to The Clash's debut album. I heard this one at parties and never bothered to get a copy.

THE MODERN DANCE - PERE UBU


A Uni Party disc. Another one that crawled back in the years after. Haven't heard it for yonks but it's welcome when I do.

OUTLANDOS D'AMOR - THE POLICE
The video for Roxanne came out of nowhere on Countdown one Sunday. I didn't quite get what they were doing with the reggae which seemed a lot starker than the fuller sound I was familiar with. I loved the harmonies in the chorus, though. Never had the album but thought I'd give it a mention.

AMBIENT 1 MUSIC FOR AIRPORTS - BRIAN ENO

Another one for the uni crowd but not a party album. It took me two decades to give this a proper spin. I would use it as intro music before my film nights as its beautiful cathedral ambience set a relaxed mood.

ANOTHER MUSIC IN A DIFFERENT KITCHEN - THE BUZZOCKS

I heard this more at uni than at the time but loved the punk aggression blended with high melodism and distinctive vocals. And in the north Queensland of the late '70s hearing "I hate fast cars" was a glass of cool cordial.

THE SCREAM - SIOUXSIE AND THE BANSHEES

One of the great debuts and albums of any kind from the rock era. Late night sounds and muffled offscreen drama surrounding thundering drums and slashing guitar all beneath the ghostly wail of one the most expressive and signature vocalists of this year and the next decade. One of those records you think you've heard too often until you put it on again and you listen to the end. 

PARALLEL LINES - BLONDIE

The third disc from the New York sass-squashers began with a run of great power pop but after that it was a sheer drop into filler and the album version of Heart of Glass which went for a whole afternoon (I'd never quite loved it in the first place). The previous set, Plastic Letters, still gets my vote as their best but the one after this was a lot less dependent on a hit single for its identity. The follow up had much better songs and a higher substance to filler ratio but the end started here. They knew they were a pop band and it injured them.

MORE SONGS ABOUT BUILDINGS AND FOOD

Heard tracks here and there and probably the whole album at Uni parties. It just made an impression. I liked rather than loved them and but for the next two albums (including the epoch-making Remain in Light) might have only just remembered them.









BAT OUT OF HELL - MEATLOAF
I liked the big voice but the whole rock and teen mythology felt older than Grease. The normal kids at school loved this one. I had to tape it (and the entire soundtrack album for Saturday Night Fever) for a friend (didn't bother with my own copy) and he went away with a tape of The Kick Inside. Lose-Win.

SOME GIRLS -THE ROLLING STONES

I had the year before bought the album Goats Head Soup which I still like and the year before that I got a '60s compilation which started a lifelong fandom of the British Invasion era of the singles band. This one was from the heart of their initial stadium band era and I could take or leave it. Miss You was fun and I had a friend who loved the whole platter but all I could think about was that I could have bought a copy from the local K-Mart which had the original cover art with the movie stars on it (replaced after a lawsuit by pictures of the band).




SINGLES!

Hit Me With Your Rhythm stick made a performing monkey out of me as I'd do the vocal before Biology class over a period of months. Pump it Up cured the golden oldie laid back bore of the first album and made the '60s sound like the future. The clip with the geeky one doing the stagger walk in a suit stolen from a scarecrow sold me on so much. No One is Innocent had me on the fallen angel Johnny's side so I thought the first spin was fun before being too good for it. The flip, Sid's My Way was more my stuff. Forever Autumn sounded enough like the Moody Blues to be enjoyable but it was from a concept album so embarrassing it was played to us in the English class as art. Warm Ride was an old sounding song with a great dynamic vocal. Dreadlock Holiday was a fine soundtrack song for a funny clip. Rasputin was so goofy that it never failed to stir a young drunk to the dance floor under the house to try the Russian kick dance and land on his bum bruise to be. Khe San worked as a modern day bush ballad but was also the first sign that Cold Chisel were nothing like the rip snorter that journalists who had seen them live had promised. It sounded like new country. It was fine and probably deserved to be bogan anthem #1. Sultans of Swing sounded like JJ Cale with Segovia on a Strat. Full boomer groove but I loved it. I Can't Stand the Rain popped, clicked and raged behind a barnstorming vocal and an arrangement that changed under every verse: beautiful. Werewolves of London: performing monkey time for me again. Best Friend's Girl sounded like everything on the crumbling Super Hits LPs in the rumpus room which was fine with me. Because the Night began and ended my fandom of Patti Smith. Take a Long Line had an old jug band cut their hair and dress punque. Cheesy n eeesy but it worked better than when the Stranglers did the same thing. Miss You was the Stones doing disco and we all knew the spoken bit before Economics. Baker St still thrills with a quiet slice of life and a murdering sax hook. Ca Plane Pour Moi was and is laughable bullshit but catchy enough to transcend the language barrier. Turn the Beat Around sounded like a kind of Masonic chant for performance at Studio 54, dancey and creepy all at once. Every 1's a Winner won and again proved that as punk as anyone got, Hot Chocolate could still make it through.

Here's the thing about these two photos of me: the one at the top was taken by someone else 

and the one at the bottom was taken by me. Which one am I smiling in?