17 September 2013 (Day 260) – What's The Best Album Ever? Not So Usual Suspects Part 1

I had time to play five contenders for the mantle of my favourite album today.  What binds together all of today’s albums is that these are albums by established acts that polls usually don’t feature very highly, mainly because the artists concerned have released at least one other album that capturing the attention of critics.  I started today with the lowest profile released by the original version of:

(# 599) The Velvet Underground – White Light/White Heat (1968)

In my opinion each of the first four Velvet Underground studio albums is eligible for consideration in my top 100.  Yet when these polls are put together it’s their debut album, The Velvet Underground And Nico that usually gets the nod.  I understand why this occurs given how Lou Reed’s and John Cale’s unorthodox lyrics paradoxically mesh with the fragile beauty of Nico’s voice.  With Nico (and Andy Warhol) now out of the picture a much truer version of the original line up of the band emerged on this album and the result is one of the most uncompromising albums ever released.  To me, this album is the sound of a savage decaying urban environment, sort of like a musical equivalent of the classic movie set in New York City, The French Connection.  The title track zooms part in a rush; the catchy I Heard Her Call my name is drench in feedback and the epic Sister Ray songs is the sound of the album getting lost in the city.  And yet there is still space to feature the breathless, almost poppy, Here She Comes Now and the bizarre spoken word jam The Gift.

(# 600) The Mothers Of Invention – Absolutely Free (1967)

I’ve always found it hard to justify my enthusiasm for Frank Zappa, especially given the puerile nature of some of his lyrics.   What’s beyond reproach, however, is his musicianship which at times is like listening to someone you know knows more about music than you.  That’s not to say he’s showing off, rather there’s so many influences going on throughout his works that you need to have an explanatory guide book to assist you.  No wonder The Simpsons Matt Goering is a fan and was a close friend on the man; a classic episode of The Simpsons similarly contains so many popular culture references that one cannot hope to understand them all, yet that doesn’t prevent its enjoyment.  As for the Mother’s albums; I’ve omitted We’re Only In It For The Money, because there are very few references in it that I do get and, in any case, it doesn’t have as natural a flow as either the debut album Freak Out! or Absolutely Free.  I tend towards the latter, due its presence of classic Zappa tunes including Plastic People, Call Any Vegetable and Brown Shoes Don’t Make It.  It also appears that future issues of this album, like my copy, contains the absolutely irresistible single Big Leg Emma and its magnificent B-side  Why Dontcha Do Me Right?  But realistically, I could have made as compelling a case for Freak Out!

(# 601) Public Enemy – Fear Of A Black Planet (1990)

I’ve never understood why this album gets so overlooked in favour of its predecessor, It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back.  Cresswell and Mathieson included Millions at number 10 in their recent top 100 book and this album invariably is the highest ranked rap album in such polls.  Whilst Millions is a great album, I think it pales against Fear Of A Black Planet.  In fact, I think almost every album ever released pales against it.  A certain member of my top ten, it is the both the finest rap album ever released as well as arguably the finest piece of black music put out since the Stevie Wonder masterworks of the early 1970s.  Yet while Wonder was able to produce albums with songs that eloquently argued the poor state of life for the urban Afro American in a way that still kept him in favour with middle America, PE simply didn’t stand for such niceties.  They simply told it as they saw it with a palpable rage and with an explosive production to match.  And listening to the album, the reason for the rage is thoroughly understandable.  911 Is A Joke bemoans slow response times for emergency teams in black areas, Burn Hollywood Burn about the stereotypical or non representation of blacks in movies and Hollywood’s expectation that movies need not be created for that audience, the hit single Fight The Power rejects notions that white people held up as heroes can’t be racist and the meaning of the title track doesn’t require explanation.   Revolutionary Situation even addresses the misogynist nature of hip hop culture.  Add in some awesome aural collages and brilliant sampling this is the rap album that should be played to any anti rapper who can’t see any merit in the genre.

(# 602) Pink Floyd – The Dark Side Of The Moon (1973)

Sometimes sales figures can be taken as a reliable measure of quality.  And when you have the equal second biggest album of all time (with AC/DC’s Back In Black) you’d think this album would actually rank higher in many best of polls that it does.  Yet frequently it gets trumped by other Floyd albums, notably The Wall and Wish You Were Here.  Why I’m not sure because the more I play this, the more I’m coming around to believing this is their masterpiece.  It is a brilliantly conceived suite of music that appears to be about the greatest fears that spin around inside the heads of humans.  The themes – time, greed, money, illness – are universal ones which are accompanied by magnificent performances.  No other album has as many individual highlights packed within it; the gradual fade in incorporating early sampling and the sound of jack hammers, the 2001 A Space Odyssey freak out that is On The Run,  the clocks heralding the start of Time, David Gilmour’s mighty solo in the same track, Doris Tory’s performance in The Great Gig In Sky, the use of cash registers to create a rhythm at the start of Money, the voices that appear during the instrumental sections Us And Them as well as the completely  unexpected sax solo, the lyrics in Brian Damage (“The lunatic is on the grass” and “I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon”) and the gradual fade out to the sound of heart beats at the end of Eclipse, ready to have you start the record all over again.

(# 603) David Bowie – Station To Station (1976)

I was never much of a Bowie fan during his early years.  However, a lot of people were which is why The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars usually gets a high ranking in many polls.  Hunky Dory too. But, for me, his career really took off with the wonderful albums he recorded with Brian Eno in Berlin and this is the best of them.  This album brilliant absorbs a lot of the experience Eno had gained from working with some of the key German experimental artists of the era (such as Cluster and Harmonia) and brilliantly reinterpreted it for English speaking audiences.  For many people, including myself, it was this album as well as Kraftwerk’s Autobahn that (eventually) opened my eyes to the scene and for that alone is reason to heap praise on this.  Not that it needs to as it stands on its own merits. The epic title track that opens proceedings introduced the world to Thin White Duke; Word On A Wing is one of his more convincing ballads; TVC15 is a cracking number and Stay is seriously funky (especially on live recordings from the era).  Golden Years provided the requisite hit single.   

16 September 2013 (Day 259) – What’s The Best Album Ever? Usual Suspects Part 3

Back at work after the weekend and my commitments limit the number of candidates for my title of the best album ever released to four albums that routinely get mentioned in other polls.

(# 595) The Beach Boys – Pet Sounds (1966)

About 15-20 years ago, one would have tempered the acclaim for this album with a statement along the lines that if best ever polls were limited only to albums released by American acts, this and some of the classic Dylan albums would slug it out for the honour of being number 1.   Today there is no further need to do so as Pet Sounds has increasingly captured the number one spot or just falls short.  A mere look at the Wikipedia entry for the album also reveals the extent to which this album is now regarded.  It’s all the more incredible for an album that was essentially a Brian Wilson solo album, played largely by session musicians and for which the efforts of the remaining Beach Boys was essentially limited to providing vocals and the album cover shoot.  Clearly influenced by The Beatles Revolver, this album is the home to some of the most enduring songs in the rock cannon – Wouldn’t It Be Nice, Sloop John B, God Only Knows, I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times and Caroline No. If one things hurts this album, it was Wilson’s inexplicable decision to keep Good Vibrations off the album; anyone, like me, that attended the shows where Wilson played this album in sequence, knows just how beautifully it topped off the whole thing.

(# 596) Miles Davis – Kind Of Blue (1959)

This album has received many accolades including that of the best selling album in the history of jazz.  Sales usually don’t factor into judgements as to the subjective merit of an album but it seems to be a factor in its inclusion.  (That is of course provided the compliers of the poll have not excluded it owing to it being a jazz album.)  For me, the album has been so overplayed, that it’s easy to take it for granted; I mean how many times have you been to a dinner party and your hosts have put this on as background music?  Opening cut Say What! – a brilliant piece of jazz and probably the genre’s most recognisable tune – has been flogged to death in movie scenes or commercials where something smooth of sophisticated is required. But it’s not the only triumph on the album; Blue In Green is a magnificently languid piece and All Blues harks back to some of the musical cues in Say What!  But, it falls a long way short of even qualifying as my favourite Miles Davis album, preferring his Quintet releases (especially Workin’) and his gritty electric works such as Bitches  Brew, A Tribute To Jack Johnson, On The Corner as well as the live albums from that era.

(# 597) Jimi Hendrix Experience – Are You Experienced (1967)

I remember once reading a review that concluded that the only thing missing from the album is the question mark on the title.  I beg to differ, as attested to the bonus tracks on my Experience Hendrix edition that reminds you that, although this was the debut album, singles and tracks as strong as Hey Joe, Stone Free, Purple Haze and The Wind Cries Mary were excluded.  Despite that, this is astonishing album that still contained some of the tracks that revolutionised the way the electric guitar was played, heard and perceived.  These include tacks such as Foxy Lady, Manic Depression, Fire and the evocative instrumental Third Stone From The Sun.  But topping off all of these is the title track, superb combination of hard rock, blues, psychedelica and Beatles influences.

(# 598) The Rolling Stones – Exile On Main Street (1972)

This album is very much like Pet Sounds in that its popularity and critical approval continues to improve so that today it seems unchallenged as the best album released by the Stone.  A sprawling double album of the type that I usually enjoy greatly, for many years the only thing that prevented my enjoyment of it was the horribly thin sound of the production.  (It’s also got Tumbling Dice on it which is by some margin the Stones mega hit I like least.) There was no doubt that the songs were there but whenever I listened to it I would always get frustrated how certain details got lost in the mix, especially the brass sections work on Rocks Off and Keith Richards best ever vocal track, Happy, when they really should have been front and centre.  Today was the very first time I allowed myself to listen to the 2010 remastered version and, to these ears, it’s one of the remastering jobs that’s made an appreciable improvement to the recording whilst keeping the elements of what made it great in the first place. Noticeably, the guitar lines of Keith and Mick Taylor can be untangled and there is now a warmth to the tracks that was definitely missing.  Rip This Joint and All Down The Line are now much more powerful more in keeping with their live sound from the era whilst more delicate fare such as Sweet Virginia, Shine A Light and Soul Survivor are now much more nuanced.  Perhaps the big three of Let It Bleed, Beggar’s Banquet and Sticky Fingers have a competitor.

14 & 15 September 2013 (Days 257 and 258) – The Miseducation Of otis.youth – Part 4

It was another busy weekend with not a lot of time for listening and so another dose of my music history is in order.

The Miseducation of otis.youth Part 4

By the time I graduated from University, I had accumulated a basic record collection including a handful of items on pre-recorded cassettes and an even smaller number that I’d taped myself. In a gap between finishing studies and commencing full time employment, I assembled my first catalogue which I still have today.  Originally, it was a single sheet of paper in which all 114 items in my collection were listed in alphabetical order by artist.  A gap at the bottom of the reverse side is headed “subsequent additions” and lists every item added to my collection since in the order in which I had obtained them.  I’m reasonably sure librarians and archivists describe this form of document as an “accession register” but to me, this has always been my “subsequent additions” list and I’ve maintained it, in an increasingly indecipherable handwritten scrawl, to the present day. 

Anyone reading this initial list today might form the view that my taste was fairly conservative compared to what I’d been hearing at University.  The first four Dire Straits albums are there, so are two albums by (grossly) underrated Atlanta Rhythm Section, three by each of the Eagles and Fleetwood Mac, two by The Little River Band, four by Pink Floyd, two by 10CC and even Toto’s self titled debut.  This reflects nothing more than my ability to find and purchase albums at a very cheap price or via tape trades.  I didn’t really know anyone who collected the material I loved hearing at University. The number of shops selling such music at the time was rather limited and the items were priced well outside my reach. 

This is also a fairly reliable indicator that I was still listening to a lot of music on the radio and watching it on TV at that time.  Television’s influence was to die once I started full time employment and I could obtain precisely what I wanted to hear.  Countdown became increasingly irrelevant, especially when it started using gimmicks to attach viewers such as dance contests, and Nightmoves eventually ceased production.  Radio, and in particular 3RRR, led my ears to strange new destinations.

Looking over my first record catalogue I can well remember the circumstances of some of the early purchases.  I obtained one of Atlanta Rhythm Section albums, the rather fine A Rock And Roll Alternative, on cassette from a Brashs sale one of my walks from Flinders Street Station to Uni.   My introduction to the recorded works of Randy Newman began when I bought a cassette copy of his Born Again album for 99 cents at a Coles Variety Store on a suburban Friday night shopping excursion.  My vinyl copy of Pablo Cruise’s Part Of The Game was purloined for about two dollars from a Coles store in the City, my having remembered a great review it had received in the paper a few months earlier.  Mulder taped my first Neil Young studio album, Hawks And Doves in return for my taping Live Rust for him.  That turned out to be a good deal as I had to rely on that tape whenever I wanted to listen to that album right up until Neil finally sanctioned its release on CD a few years ago.  

All of this was happening against the background of the very gradual introduction of the compact disc. I managed to resist this for an incredibly long time initially due to the need to save money to obtain a CD player and then the discs.  Later on, I was opposed to them for the very simple reason that I couldn’t understand what the fuss was about.  A friend of mine, who I shall call Andy, was an early and, for me, only convert to the cause.  He would play me CD versions of the early Dire Straits albums pointing out spots where there was a marked improvement in the sound quality.  I’d nod my head in approval, but in reality, I couldn’t hear a better sound.  I still don’t; if you haven’t played your vinyls for a number of years now trying doing do. You’ll find that the vinyl sound has a depth and warmth to it that’s not apparent in many CDs.  In any case, I couldn’t see the benefits of buying a CD player without having assembled a library of discs first.  Even then I didn’t start really gathering CD’s until the late 1980’s when it became apparent that vinyls were being phased out.

Finally, I got a full time job and with it the need to get a car.  Fortunately a sibling was upgrading and so I obtained her, already used car.  The combination of steady job (plus income) and car had a major effect on my habits.  Almost immediately, I started to buy the items I wanted for the collection.  My first real target were the albums released by the members of the so called US West Coast Paisley Underground – acts such as The Dream Syndicate, The Long Ryders, Rain Parade, etc and other acts loosely attached to the scene such as Jason And The Scorchers.  A strange act from Athens Georgia called R.E.M. also caught my attention and I started to add albums from Blues giants including Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon, Howlin’ Wolf, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Bo Diddley, young guns Robert Cray and Stevie Ray Vaughn and many others.  In fact it was an awesome Stevie Ray performance I saw in Melbourne on 26 October 1984 on his first Australian tour that set off this bout of blues exploration.

The car gave me the freedom to do a lot of things.  For starters it meant that I could go to great many my shops in sourcing additions to the Collection.  This was a godsend.  In my student and unemployed era, I was a slave to public transport and I was able to devise these mental maps where I could criss cross my part of Melbourne’s suburbs to visit the stores I knew would hold cheap product for purchase. It also enabled me to visit BJ who lived on the other side of the Melbourne metropolitan area and he introduced me to the places in his area where he obtained his music and it put me within reach of this new yellow shop in East Keilor which sold albums incredibly cheaply. 

Finally, a car and a wage meant I could start gigging on a regular basis.  By the end of 1986 my gig rate had started to accelerate that I started to compile a list of all the gigs I’ve attended.  In that year alone, I saw the same number of gigs as I had over the previous three.  Fortunately, I had retained the ticket stubs from these gigs and so my gig list starts with a Festival Hall gin on 19 March 1983 by Dire Straits.  The support act that night was The Church and it was that performance that made me a fan of theirs.

And so with money, mobility and no long term marriage prospects, the gates to Nirvana had been opened and I was ready to participate in an orgy of consumerism.  The next 10-15 years were effectively to see me married to my passion.

3 September 2013 (Day 256) – What’s The Best Album Ever? Usual Suspects Pt. 2

It’s half way through the day when I realise today is Friday the 13^th.  Not that it matters as I’m not very superstitious and, in any case, far too busy with work commitments.  As it is, I could only play through three albums that routinely feature in the top 10 whenever polls of the best album ever released are published.

I started my day with a classic double album:

(# 592) The Clash – London Calling (1979)

Bookended by two mighty singles, the title track and unlisted Train In Vain, this is generally regarded as the best punk album ever released.  Now don’t get me wrong, this is a superb album, but it’s Sandinista! I keep playing in preference.  I figure it this way; The Clash were an English band that generally saw the world through English eyes.   Lyrically speaking that’s largely the case here too but, in some cases, this gets lost in arrangements that sound like the band has back tracked on its instincts in favour of seducing the United States by producing the great sprawling American rock album.  Examples: Brand New Cadillac and its rockabilly fervour; The Right Profile with its hard rock attack and references to Montgomery Cliff; Koka Kola; even London Calling with lyrics that appear to be referencing Three Mile Island -  when these moments come they jar and makes me wonder whether the band actually believed in their sloganeering.  It’s a minor point, to be sure, but enough to sway me in favour of its underrated successor.    Still it’s a brilliant listen, Hateful, Clampdown, The Guns Of Brixton, The Card Cheat, I’m Not Down and Revolution Rock providing the back bone of what could have been the best British album ever released.

(# 593) Nirvana – Nevermind (1991)

It’s the album that certainly help save rock in the early 1990s by encouraging a generation of fans, men and women, to pick up guitars.  It also help the underground to become the mainstream albeit for a little while by opening the eyes of the musical establishment to the wealth of talent that existed in unlikely locations, if they were prepared to look.   But these are statements about its significance and, truth be told, it is almost the perfect album.  A couple of factors hurt it just a little in my eyes.  First, is the clean, pristine, state of the art production which, although it works beautifully on the sublime Come As You Are, Polly or Something In The Way, is simply too much for tracks of such brutal power as Smells Like Teen Spirit, Breed, Territorial and Stay Away.  These are tracks that seriously require some “dirtying up” along the lines of what was achieved on In Utero, an album I distinctly prefer.  Whenever I hear that terrifyingly roar that accompanies the opening of that album’s Scentless Apprentice, I think back to some of the tracks on Nevermind and wonder what could have been.  Also, when you have an album that ends on as magnificent a note as Something In The Way, there is absolutely no excuse for the hidden Endless Nameless that follows.  Only The Beatles’ placement of Her Majesty at the end of Abbey Road is a greater crime.

(# 594) Radiohead – OK Computer (1997)

These days this is the album that is most likely to top a best ever poll voted for by Brits.  Once again it’s a damn fine album but I distinctively prefer the albums either side of it – the straight ahead indie rock on The Bends and the absolutely fearless, expectation defying Kid A.  It is filled with highlights such as the monumental, Pink Floydish Paronoid Android, the delicate Lucky and the glorious The Tourist.  (Listen to the last 60 seconds or so of the latter and you can hear the first stirrings of the sound MUSE were going to master.) But I suspect the band were already looking far ahead; the album highlight for me is the grandiose No Surprises, the ironically titled track that foreshadows the direction they were to move into.  Put another way, what I saying is that ever since Kid A came out and in view of the albums that have followed that album, OK Computer is clearly the band’s transitional album in which they take their first, albeit confident, steps to their brave new world.  How such an album can be regarded as one of the best ever, when it doesn’t even have that function in the band’s own catalogue, is beyond me.

12 September 2013 (Day 255) – What’s The Best Album Ever? Usual Suspects Pt. 1

A few weeks ago a couple of Australian journalists Toby Creswell and Craig Mathieson published a book titled The Best 100 Albums of All Time.  It’s been out for a few weeks now but only now do I think I’m ready to start addressing the general topic.  I’m not going to attempt to put a top 100 together, or even a top 10, but over the course of the next week or so, I’ll play and then give some idea of what I think about the usual suspects that clutter the upper end of such lists, give an indication of some of the albums I think are worthy of a high placing but which are frequently overlooked, suggest some live albums, some Australian albums and finally reveal my number 1.

As is the norm for such exercises, I should indicate my reservations about this as an exercise and then give my idea of my criteria for inclusion.  Given that I’ve decided to embark on this exercise by the publication of the Creswell/Mathieson book, here is the top 10 that they’ve come up with:

1.       Bob Dylan - Highway 61 Revisited
2.       The Beatles - Revolver
3.       The Clash - London Calling
4.       Nirvana - Nevermind
5.       Van Morrison - Astral Weeks
6.       Joni Mitchell - Blue
7.       The Rolling Stones - Sticky Fingers
8.       Fleetwood Mac - Rumours
9.       The Velvet Underground & Nico - The Velvet Underground & Nico
10.   Public Enemy - It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back.

From what I understand the duo did this by deliberately limiting the number of Beatles, Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan albums for inclusion.  They also did not solicit anyone else’s opinion by conducting a poll of experts, however randomly or carefully constructed, favouring an analysis of the polls that have been undertaken in the past.

Fair enough.  After all, many types of biases can come into such polls as analysed depending upon who you talk, the most obvious being a preference for Amercian vs British acts (and vs Australian acts if one was conducted in this country), more recent vs older releases and the inevitable marginalisation of genres such as dance music, blues, jazz, hard rock/metal, alternative, electronica, reggae, etc by inviting one of two genre experts to flavour the overall result.

And then there’s the concerns I have about the construction of such lists.  Not only are many genres sufficiently underrepresented by such polls, I would also suggest the concept of focusing on albums effectively reduces the number of candidates down to a time frame that would start in the mid 1960s when artists began to conceive of albums as artistic statements.  Thus, many albums from rock’s pioneers, especially from the 1950’s, when albums were basically one of two hit singles with a lot of filler attached, are never considered. 

But I would also argue that the same applies to albums from around, say 1990 when the CD became the dominant format for releasing albums.  The extra running times have caused many acts to release albums with extravagant running times which ensured that a typical CD could hold about the same quantity as two vinyl albums.  Add, record company practices of releasing new albums by artists every second or third year, you essentially had acts releasing the same amount of new material in the same time frame but with varying numbers of individual releases.  And we’re really yet to see what impact the all digital era is going to have on the concept of the album.  With many acts gaining control of their release schedules and choosing to release albums via their own websites, the tendency – led by Radiohead – has been for such acts to return to vinyl length running times.    

Ultimately notions of what constitutes “the best” is an extremely subjective matter and the odds of any two people on the planet delivering the same 100 tracks would have to be extraordinary.  My own notions are no different.  For the purposes of this exercise, my criteria is to arrive at the album that gives me the greatest pleasure and has been able to consistently do so over a long period of time.  My selections will:

- include only officially released albums conceived by the actual artist; single artist or multi artist compilations (which are not standard across the world in any case) are excluded as are box sets and CD + DVD packages.

- consider only the original version of the album; extended versions, collector’s, legacy or special anniversary editions are largely excluded but albums re issued with additional tracks with the intention of that becoming the standard version are included, and

- to allow live albums, excluding those which are complications, box sets, special editions, etc.   Bootlegs are excluded.

I’ve also got some ideas to deal with the issue of not clogging issues through having to decide between albums by certain acts, but I'll justify these when we'll get to them.  

And so, I started this process today by listening to some of the records in my collection – the usual suspects, as it were – that tend to routinely appear in these top tens:

(# 588) The Beatles – Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967)

Apparently Creswell and Mathieson have not included this album – a frequent winner of such polls – in their top 100.  I’m not sure what their reasoning is but I would not include this in my top 100 either.   In fact, I’d doubt it would get in my top 200.  Whilst I have no doubt whatsoever, that this is probably the single most significant album ever released – after all it pioneered conceptualised album cover art, is a form of early rock opera (though not sustained), was one of the first to publish lyrics on the sleeve – it doesn’t come close to even being my favourite Beatles album.  Either of Revolver, Abbey Road, the White Album and probably Rubber Soul has it covered.  Although the Sgt. Pepper/With A Little Help From My Friends opening is almost the strongest to any Beatles album, and the epic A Day In The Life is the best closure to any album in history, it’s the tracks in between that let the side down.  Being For The Benefit Of Mr Kite sounds fairly dated now, Harrison’s Within You Without You is too long to justify its inclusion and When I’m Sixty Four and Lovely Rita are trite.    She’s Leaving Home, whilst an effective track, sounds out of place within the largely joyful tenor of the rest of the album.  And the failure to include Strawberry Fields Forever and Penny Lane is just plain unforgiveable.   Put another way, being the most significant album of all time doesn’t necessarily result in the best album of all time.

(# 589) Van Morrison – Astral Weeks (1968)

I love Van Morrison and I think this is a great album which brilliant combines soul, folk, blues and jazz influences.  Sweet Thing, Cypress Avenue and Madame George are awesome and The Way Young Lovers Do employs some interesting Spanish influences.  And yet, no matter how many times I’ve played this, it only holds my interest for as long as it lasts.  Even today, after owning this for about 30 years I did not have the ability to recreate the melodies in my mind.  If the album isn’t on, I simply can’t do it.  Even today I’m not sure what to make of this; is it proof of the musical complexity and hence genius of the music or has the penny simply not yet dropped?  I simply don’t know.  With such a fundamental dilemma, I can’t place this anywhere near my top 50.

(#590) Bob Dylan – Subterranean Homesick Blues (aka Bringing Them All Back Home) (1965)

(#591) Bob Dylan – Highway 61 Revisited (1965)

Two albums, combined length 99 minutes (only 25% longer than the longest CD) and, more importantly, released a mere 5 months apart, it is almost impossible to overstate the significance of these two albums on modern music as we know it today.  These were the albums, or should I say the music, that changed rock from silly love songs with even sillier lyrics. Both albums, with their mixture of acoustic and electric music, employed some of the most abstract lyrics ever committed to vinyl and completely demolished all notions about popular song lengths.  In other words, Dylan succeeded almost by himself in setting up rock music as an art form like other forms of “serious” music.  Consider some of the tracks on these albums; She Belongs To Me, Maggie’s Farm, Mr Tambourine Man, It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding), It’s All Over Now Baby Blue, Like A Rolling Stone, Ballad Of A Thin Man, Highway 61 Revisited, Desolation Row– these are some of the most admired, and in some cases, covered songs in the history of recorded music and have inspired countless acts over the years.  Their influence over The Beatles, for example, probably cannot be calculated.

Over the years, I’ve steadfastly refused to separate between these two albums.  Given the combined running time which could make for a reasonably priced double CD and that the music was recorded and released over a timespan in which some of today’s mega acts would struggle to record an EP, I do not have the slightest hesitation in grouping these two albums as a single entity which occupies the no. 2 position on my list.

I’ll go through some more usual suspects tomorrow.

11 September 2013 (Day 254) – In Memoriam

I didn’t need to look for inspiration for today’s listening.  As soon I opened up my musical journal and read the date I knew what today’s theme would take.

I remember the events of 11 September 2001 very clearly because music played a major role in my witnessing the awful events which took place that day in New York City.   I was lying in bed at the end of an extremely busy day at work waiting for the documentary When We Were Kings to be played on the ABC.  All I wanted to do was hit the record button of my VCR with the intention of going through it at my leisure later on to enjoy the awesome musical footage of James Brown, B.B.King and others who had gone to Zaire to accompany the Muhummad Ali v George Foreman Rumble In The Jungle.  I dozed off for a few minutes as the preceding program was coming to end; by the time I woke up the documentary had begun and, rather than hit record or turn it off, started to watch, only to doze off again.

When I awoke again, I was jolted awake by the image on my screen.  There were no images of Ali, Foreman, Brown or B.B; instead there was footage of the World Trade Centre with what appeared to be a smoking hole in one of the towers.  No sooner had this registered, I saw a plane emerge from the left hand side of my screen and crash into the other tower.  Whoever was speaking at the time clearly wasn’t watching their monitor and I screamed at my TV set in a futile attempt to get that person to acknowledge what had just happened.  To this day I don’t know whether I saw that particular crash live.  But I stayed up until well into 12 September as the news from the Pentagon and Pennsylvania came through; it was only after the second tower collapsed that I tried to force myself to sleep.  I didn’t succeed all that well and then kept the television on for the entire night.  I wasn’t the only person who did this that night and the following morning was one of those weird days when everyone who witnessed the events had a compulsive need to speak to each other, almost as a form of therapy or consolation.  That afternoon I accompanied my then Manager to a meeting on the 12th storey of a building on the outer fringe of Melbourne’s Central Business District network of skyscapers.  To this day, it remains the only meeting I’ve ever attended that everyone involved was sitting on the one side of a table facing the windows.

Since then, September 11 is marked by various events to commemorate the innocent victims and the heroic rescue workers who lost their lives.  Some musicians were moved to record music about the day; Neil Young wrote Let’s Roll, Bruce Springsteen was inspired to record The Rising and a variety of musicians (including Young and Springsteen) performed largely inspired versions of well known songs in a live television fund raiser called America: A Tribute To Heroes.   Additionally, just about every biography or autobiography written about an American musician talks about their response to the day.  For example, Pat Benatar in her autobiography wrote of dilemma about whether to perform her show that night.  She decided to go ahead, figuring anyone that would come probably wanted to find some form of solace in music.  As a result, she gave an acoustic performance to a full house and found some of her songs, especially the opener that night We Belong, invested with a new meaning.

The dilemma faced by Benatar has been shared by many acts or record companies when they are forced to address the loss of loved ones or comrades in music.  Today’s playlist contains some examples of the different ways they’ve gone about it:

(# 584) Lou Reed And John Cale -  Songs For Drella (1990)

The two original front men for the legendary Velvet Underground put aside their differences to record this tribute to that band’s patron, Andy Warhol.  (Drella was his nickname.) It is a dignified, moving and reasonably straightforward rendering of his life in music.  Smalltown is a great character setting opening; Style It Takes memorably namechecks the VU and tracks like Trouble With Classicists, Faces And Names, Slip Away (A Warning) and Nobody But You brilliantly carry the story along.  But it is the closer Hello It’s Me that raises lumps in throats as they address his death and convey the wish that they hoped he enjoyed the show before a final goodbye.

(# 585) AC/DC – Back In Black (1980)

Just about everything associated with this album is the band’s tribute to fallen lead singer Bon Scott.  There’s the title, the all black cover, the church bells ringing in the start of opening track Hells Bells, but for the most part, the greatest tribute was that the band kept going, following exactly the trail Bon probably would have done.  Some of the tracks were started by Scott but were finished by the Young brothers and his replacement Brian Johnson; certainly it’s hard to conceive of tracks like Have A Drink On Me or Let Me Put My Love Into You coming from anyone other than Scott.  But none of this will explain why this is now, with Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side Of The Moon, the second biggest selling album of all time as well as the biggest selling heavy metal/hard rock album and the biggest by an Australian act.  Rather this is because this album is the home to Hells Bells, Shoot To Thrill, the title track and the memorable hit single You Shook Me All Night Long all classics of the genre and the culmination of everything Scott and his comrades had sought to achieve.

(# 586) Stevie Ray Vaughan And Double Trouble – The Sky Is Crying (1991)

Record companies usually don’t do acts who died at the height of their powers any favours when it comes to posthumous releases of previously unreleased studio material.   Usually the main problem is in finding someone sufficiently well versed to distinguish the good from bad.  This is not one of those cases.  Released a year after Stevie Ray’s tragic death in 1990, his label brought in his brother, Jimmie Vaughan, to select the tracks for this album.  And Jimmie chose extremely well showing off all aspects of Stevie’s work.  The title track is a an explosive slow blues (even if too obvious a title for the album), Chitlin Con Carne is a jazzy instrumental similar to some tracks on his last studio album and which may have indicated a direction he was to go and Jimi Hendrix gets another nod through a cover of Little Wing.  But the killer tracks is, again, the final track.  Life By The Drop is the sole acoustic number in the SRV catalogue and it is absolutely brilliant with lyrics that could easily be misinterpreted as a career overview. There is no other track that could have conceivably been used to end the album.

(# 587) Pink Floyd – Wish You Were Here (1975)

What’s this doing here you wonder?  Many people's choice for the mantle of the finest Floyd album, this was never conceived as a memorial album but is rapidly becoming one.  As all Floydheads know, the bookends of this album, Shine On You Crazy Diamond is about former member Syd Barrett with at least two other tracks, Welcome To The Machine and Have A Cigar relating to the music business and the way in which it gradually unhinged him.  Now that Syd is gone, these tracks take on a much greater relevance.  It has also been magnified by the death of Richard Wright whose keyboard work on Shine On is now viewed as a fitting epitaph.  Then there is the remaining track, Wish You Were Here, a track that Floyd Fans now apply in their minds to Barrett and Wright and presumably the remaining members when their time comes…..

….which brings me back to 9/11.  One of the musical highlights from the America: A Tribute To Heroes broadcast came from the unexpected combination of Limp Bizkit and John Rzeznik of The Goo Goo Dolls.  Their number was a solo acoustic cover of Wish You Were Here.

10 September 2013 (Day 253) – Post Election Blues

One of the hardest things I’ve had to do for this blog is to think of a title for each posting.  Most of the time I try to link it to something that’s happened during the day or, more frequently and obviously, something that links my listening for the day. 

But today is different because there is a certain ambiguity in today’s title that I feel needs explaining.  So let me make things perfectly clear.  “Post Election Blues” does not mean that I’m lamenting the end of this particular electoral campaign.  Who would?  Some might say we were in a campaign since January when the then Prime Minister set a date of 14 September. A number of “political journalists” (an oxymoron if ever there was one) thought so, conveniently ignoring the fact that half of the States and Territories now have fixed election dates.  And no, this isn’t a comment that this particular campaign has ended.  This was just about the tamest election I could ever remember and one  in which anything of note appeared to occur in the first couple of days and then fizzled out as our conservative politicians  tightened up their discipline and learned to hide their weakest campaign assets which included their leader.  After all, nothing disciplines ego driven, self centred Australian conservative politicians into putting aside their natural impulse towards seeking ways to drive marketplace competitors to economic ruin more than an imminent election victory aimed at obtaining the power to reapply that natural impulse upon the same population that elected them in good faith to run an economy and provide them with the social services they need. 

No, this title is just an expression of my frustration at the result which, due to the egos of just a couple of individuals and their supporters over the past 6 years, has opened the door to an opposition that is clearly not going to govern in the interests of a greater public good.  I used to be puzzled about how any conservative political parties anywhere in the world have managed to get elected any time in history, however, this is one occasion where I’ve understood why this has happened.  Perhaps I could adopt the stance of the great and immortal Kent Brockman, “I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, Democracy simply doesn’t work”, but the people have spoken and their wishes must be respected.  

Anyway this was my thinking as I returned to work and I took with me an album that I think was made in a similar mindset:

(# 581) Ry Cooder – Election Special (2012)

Written and recorded in the lead up to last year’s US Presidential election when the election of a Republican candidate was more than a distinct possibility, Cooder ruminated on the possible consequences.  Remove one or two tracks and delete references to Guantanamo Bay and Jim Crow and he could very well be singing about Australia as of last Saturday night.  And you don’t need me to tell you that, as a Ry Cooder album, all the playing and production is top notch.  It’s not in the upper echelon of the Cooder catalogue but it would worth a spin once every three years here (and four years in the States).

(# 582) Vieux Farka Toure – Self Titled (2007)

Vieux Farka Toure is the son of Ali Farka Toure, a singer and guitarist from Mali who was largely  brought to public attention when Ry Cooder collaborated with on the rather wonderful Meeting Across The River.  This is Vieux’s debut album and on it you can hear how is paying respect to his father who died close to its release but not before hearing a rough mix.   As such it is an album dominated by the Malian version of the blues as mastered by his father (subsequent releases have seen him move away from this template ) and it comes as absolute no surprise that the highlight of the album are the two duets with Ali, Tabara and Diallo.

(#583) Beirut – The Flying Club Cup (2007)

Sometimes the packaging of an album just about describes the music within it.  Take the album title and apply it to a front cover showing and English/French type seaside scene from the 1920s or 1930s and a back photo image of what appears to be two girls from the same era and you’ve already got the setting to an Agatha Christie Hercule Poirot mystery. Thus it comes as no surprise to find stately music with period era French (or should that be Belgian?) musical influences complete with the melancholy vocals of Zach Condon.   But what comes as a total surprise is the realisation this is an American band.  I’m not sure this particular album is my cup o’tea but I suspect other albums – which utilise other musical influences – should be worth exploring.