"All that is old and already formed can continue to live only if it allows within itself the conditions of a new beginning."
The list so far (albums 1 through 50).
CLICK HERE
101 Albums You
Must Hear ... Part 2Posted 5:46 p.m., April 18, 2006
|
The second of four parts.
I can hardly believe I got myself into this, but here's round two of the Top 101 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die.
Admittedly, this segment of the list wades pretty deeply into the classic rock pool. But hopefully you'll find some engaging surprises along the way.
So here we go again, the Kevblog's list of the world's greatest 101 albums, best first, as voted on and reviewed by the council of critics that live and work inside my head. These are numbers 25 through 50.
Here's a quick recap of the top 50 so far, or you can click here and read the earlier reviews (1 through 25).
26.) "Rust Never Sleeps," Neil Young (1979). Easily his most vividly imaginative collection, "Rust Never Sleeps" finds Young channeling the nascent hardcore punk-rock scene as he name-checks Johnny Rotten, Elvis Presley, Marlon Brando and Pocahontas. Probably not accidentally, Young's '70s farewell is programmed to mimic Dylan's "Bringing it All Back Home" (1965)--one side quiet (if hardly serene) acoustic folk, the other bruising rock, bookended by the twin manifestos "My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue)" and "Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black)." "Thrasher" is a veiled kiss-off to fellow travelers Crosby, Stills, Nash ("…they were just dead weight to me"); "Pocahontas" is as hallucinatory as it is melodic.
Amid the turbulence, Young delivers "Sail Away," one of his warmest acoustic ballads, with gorgeous backing vocals by Linda Rondstadt. The album's second side is the showstopper, however, comprising the most molten rock of Young's career. "Powderfinger" is his most fascinating composition, like a "Gunsmoke" episode from a parallel universe. A bold young man who tries to ward off the nuclear apocalypse with a single-shot rifle narrates the song; he pulls the trigger while watching the missile launch that will kill him. "I saw black / and my face splashed in the sky," Young sings, in the song's disturbing denouement. Side two then picks up velocity as it goes. Young indulges in a tasteless joke about the virtues of welfare mothers before heading off into another strange story song, "Sedan Delivery," the tale of a drug runner with a mad scientist friend ("No one knows the things that he knows," Young chants, as if Dennis Hopper's "Apocalypse Now" character has wrestled away the microphone). The closing track is the perfect exit; its threatening electric guitars sizzle like black lightning.
Bottom line, this is the most daring music ever attempted by a charter member of the Woodstock Nation, and it rescued Young from the dinosaur pit, while securing his place as "the godfather of grunge." Highlight: Electronic handclaps hilariously mimic the rhythm of a Laundromat washing machine in "Welfare Mothers."
27.) "Arthur, or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire," The Kinks (1969). It's not the first "rock opera" (that distinction belongs to the Pretty Things' brilliant 1967 album "S.F. Sorrow"). It has none of the flash or messianic overtones of the Who's far more successful "Tommy." Instead, what "Arthur" has going for it is the earthy humanity and sharp lyrical focus of songwriter Ray Davies. "Arthur" chronicles the life of Arthur Morgan, a retired British carpet layer--having spent much of his life on his knees--who now ekes out a suburban life in a house he dubs "Shangri-la." Life has been a struggle; Arthur lost a brother in World War I, lost a son in Korea and now is stricken by his difficult relationships with his surviving kids, one of whom wants to emigrate to Australia, the other of whom craves revolution, convinced that his old man has been brainwashed by England's stultifying class structure.
It's all as messy as real life on paper, but the narrative isn't really what carries "Arthur." It's the lucidity of Davies' everyday observations and the muscular music underneath. Little brother Dave's lead guitar, all but MIA on the previous year's "Village Green," is given room to range here. Dave's fretwork is particularly inventive on the extended instrumental coda of "Australia," and on the fabulous "Mr. Churchill Says," which morphs from a jaunty musical recitation of the prime minister's wartime demands into a high-speed minor-chord dirge, complete with air raid sirens. "Yes Sir, No Sir," sneeringly mocks military conformity, while "Some Mother's Son" ranks among the most uncompromising anti-war songs ever penned. And, of course, there is the wonderful leadoff track, "Victoria," Davies' infectious tribute to Great Britain's beloved queen. One of the last great '60s records. Highlights: The hilarious music hall parody, "She's Bought a Hat Like Princess Marina"; the Davies' Louvin Brothers-styled close vocal harmonies on the wistful "Young and Innocent Days."
28.) "John Wesley Harding," Bob Dylan (1967). American popular music's "Book of Revelations." Reemerging after a year-and-a-half hiatus imposed by his near-fatal 1966 motorcycle crash, this is a very different Dylan than the bruising rocker who blew away (and blew off) U.K. audiences during his notorious Hawks-backed summer '66 tour. Eschewing the blues-rock of "Highway 61 Revisited" and "Blonde on Blonde," this album finds Dylan stripping his sound down to its brittle, rustic essence, verging on, but not quite settling into country music (excepting only the closing yokel's rhapsody, "I'll Be Your Baby Tonight"). "Harding" finds Dylan at his most cryptic, casting himself as a kind of Delphic American seer in a batch of simple-sounding but multi-layered songs that are simply awash in rural American outlaw and religious mythology. No song is quite what it seems on first pass. The album includes "All Along the Watchtower," an apocalyptic tune made famous by Jimi Hendrix, and lesser-known but even more rewarding gems such as "I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine," "The Drifter's Escape" and "Dear Landlord"; several of the offerings here coming across like lost gospels.
Dylan has said he was attempting with this album to forge a sound similar to what Canadian folk musician Gordon Lightfoot was achieving around the same time. If so, he failed utterly. But that is no vice. Recording with seasoned Nashville sidemen Charlie McCoy, Pete Drake and Kenny Buttrey, "Harding" sports a weathered, monochromatic sound that vividly conjures the dusty ghosts of a vanished secret America.
29.) "The Band," The Band (1969). Having already waxed rock's most stunning debut album (1968's "Music from Big Pink"), Robbie Robertson and company make their play for immortality with the eponymous follow-up. Having passed through a decade's-long apprenticeship backing rockabilly wild man Ronnie Hawkins, and later Bob Dylan, the Band by 1969 had gelled into a well-oiled machine, and "The Band" is their essential document. Robertson has taken over songwriting duties, and has matured into a worthy challenger to his old bandleader, Dylan. Though raised on a Canadian Indian reservation, Robertson seems to have absorbed every nuance of rural white America, giving stunningly sympathetic voice to the Confederate south on "The Night they Drove Old Dixie Down," and "Rocking Chair": and in Arkansas-born drummer, mandolinist and singer Levon Helm he has a singular voice to write such songs for.
But "The Band" is by no means a mere history lesson. The rollicking "Up on Cripple Creek" is one of rock's cheeriest descriptions of the run-up to adultery, while "Lookout Cleveland" is one of the rare "we-salute-you-concertgoers" tunes that actually works well. All that aside, the heart of this masterful album is the Steinbeckian closer, "King Harvest (Will Surely Come)," a knowing depiction of a Depression-era farm-belt labor conflict. Upon finishing the song--incongruously recorded in a makeshift studio in the Hollywood boathouse belonging to Sammy Davis, Jr.--Helm was heard to remark, "There, that's the Band." He was so right. Highlights: Richard Manuel's tear-jerking vocal performance on the delicate "Whispering Pines"; Rick Danko's Bill Monroe-channeling vocal intro to "Unfaithful Servant."
30.) "All Things Must Pass," George Harrison (1970). No wonder George wanted out of the Beatles. The first member to threaten to break up the band (after the group's final concert performance at Candlestick Park in August 1966), George Harrison apparently had more to gain than anyone by seeing his famous band dissolve. Or at least that is what is suggested by this prolific three-LP blast of pent-up creativity from the Quiet Beatle.
Several of these songs, including the epochal "Isn't it a Pity," had been studio-tested by the Beatles, but each was rejected in favor of yet more offerings from the ever-fertile Lennon-McCartney axis. Harrison obviously had a huge back catalogue to draw from when it came time to team up with producer Phil Spector and lay down these multi-faceted tracks in mid-1970. "All Things Must Pass" proves the fitting revenge for all that neglect, emerging as possibly the finest of all the solo Beatles' records--the main challenge posed by Lennon's jangle-nerved "Plastic Ono Band." Had George only dumped those pointless all-star jams that muck up the final disc and turned this into a focused two-disc LP, there wouldn't be any question whose album was best. There is no doubt that this is easily Harrison's best solo record--surpassing most of his Beatles slices as well. Includes the charting singles "What is Life," and "My Sweet Lord." Highlights: The vastly underrated "Beware of Darkness," which mixes Harrison's patented preachiness with a sly, Monty Python-esque humor; and "Apple Scruffs," a loving, skiffle-flavored tribute to the groupies who spent days on end camped outside the Abbey Road studios guarding over the final Beatles in their final years.
31.) "Barabajagal," Donovan (1969). Really, this should have been embarrassing. Donovan Leitch had spent the latter half of the '60s cranking out a series of hip but generally lightweight--if also immensely entertaining--folk-rock records. (There was a welcome hint of rock heaviness in his evocative '66 album track, "Season of the Witch," an eventual FM rock staple). Once he had graduated from his initial Dylan phase, Donovan found his musical sweet spot in a sonic crease somewhere between the Beatles and the Lovin' Spoonful. But by '69, the old flower-power formulas would no longer fly. Cream had come and gone, and Led Zeppelin--whose members, tellingly, had provided key support to his previous hit single "Hurdy Gurdy Man"--were just cranking up. Producer Mickie Most demanded that Donovan push his music into this "heavy" direction, and amazingly, the Scotsman was up to the task. Not that Donovan totally dumps his folkie persona. Even on the densest tracks here (the lurching title track and Terry Reid's "Superlungs, My Supergirl"), he still sounds like a closet troubadour. But the added firepower, provided by members of the Jeff Beck Group and Led Zeppelin, actually becomes the delicate Donovan. Wisely, he doesn't try to sustain the big noise throughout the album, choosing to check in with some of his friendliest folk songs ("Happiness Runs," "I Love My Shirt"), as well as some of his lustiest. The main course is "Atlantis," Donovan's extended-coda answer to the previous year's monster hit "Hey Jude," and his most successful attempt at writing a new pop mythology. Thoroughly entertaining. Highlight: The utterly charming--this is not a typo--anti-war song, "To Susan on the West Coast Waiting.")
32.) "Tonight's the Night," Neil Young (1975). Possibly the bleakest rock album ever recorded--we'll give it the edge over Lou Reed's similarly heroin-themed "Berlin")--this record was just a little too much for Warner-Reprise, which for two years resisted its release. Thus, while recorded first, the album wound up as the follow-up to Young's nearly-as-stark "On the Beach," making this rock's biggest one-two bum-out punch. Where "Tonight's the Night" gets its power is anyone's guess. Young is clearly a mess, he can barely sing and on several songs lurching tempo shifts lead to blatant mistakes by the musicians--including Young, guitar whiz Nils Lofgren and several surviving members of Crazy Horse. But it works all right. In fact, it makes for one of rock's most compelling burnout statements. (Young has called it his "most liquid"--read: alcohol-fueled--record.)
Its origins lay in the recent deaths of two Young cronies--roadie Bruce Berry, and troubled Crazy Horse lead singer Danny Whitten, both killed by heroin overdoses. A secondary, related theme is Young's desire to shrug off the rock-royalty status he had achieved with CSN&Y, and through his solo blockbuster "Harvest." ("I'm a million miles away / from that helicopter day," he rasps, effectively exiling himself from the Woodstock Nation with a single remark.) On "Borrowed Tune," he plagiarizes the Rolling Stones' "Lady Jane" melody, apologizing because he is "too wasted to write my own." Most harrowing of all is "Tired Eyes," a trashed-out chronicle of a drug deal gone bad, resulting in the murder of a friend who "tried to do his best, but he could not." ("What do you mean, he had bullet holes in his mirror?" Young sings, his voice a dissolute whine.) Sung through frayed vocal cords that sound like they'd recently done business with a cheese grater, the lyric to "Tired Eyes" has all the nightmarish impact of a Raymond Carver short story.
Fair warning: You should not play this record after 2 a.m., or while coming down from a weeks-long, whiskey-soaked bender. Highlight: Even assuming you've given up the weed, the country-fried "Roll Another Number (For the Road)" retains its winning stoner charm.
33.) "Oddesey and Oracle," The Zombies (1968). Maybe it's off base to feel sorry for a band that charted three of the '60s best British Invasion singles ("She's Not There," "Tell Her No," and this record's immortal "Time of the Season"). But the reality is that, despite boatloads of songwriting and performing talent, the Zombies in the end just couldn't catch a break. While clearly among the most inventive of British pop acts, after their opening salvo of hits, the public unaccountably lost interest. Thus, except for a forgotten soundtrack album and an LP hastily assembled to capitalize on the success of "She's Not There," the band didn't get to record proper LPs. By the summer of 1967, Rod Argent, Colin Blumstone and the gang decided to call it quits--but to go out with a bang. That was "Oddessey and Oracle," one of the quintessential British rock albums.
In one sense, it's an alternative "Sgt. Pepper" as recorded by a band with superior musical chops. Virtually every cut is a classic. The opener, "Care of Cell 44," turns a country-music cliché on its head by addressing a woman awaiting her release from prison; it rides in on a primly proper Rod Argent piano melody. The beautiful "A Rose For Emily" is an "Eleanor Rigby"-styled lament for the wasted life of a lonely old woman. "Maybe After He's Gone," is built upon Chris White's minor-key classical-guitar figure, but quickly expands into a glorious major-chord vocal chorale. And so on. Ironically, the album tanked both in Britain and the United States until Al Kooper--then a Columbia Records producer--convinced the company to re-release "Time of the Season" as a single in 1969, where it zipped up to the top of the charts. By then, however, the Zombies were finished. Cut for cut, this was a worthy challenger to the "art-rock" crown forged by the Pepper-era Beatles. Highlights: Though insistently drug-free, the Zombies produced one of the late '60s trippiest tracks with "Hung Up on a Dream"; "Beechwood Park," with its lazy-organ fugue motif, plays like the rejected theme to a Julie Christie flick.
34.) "Revolver," The Beatles (1966). Most lists place this record anywhere between No. 1 and No. 3 among the all-time greatest albums. And, if this list had caught me in another mood, I might have acquiesced. It's just that it hasn't been on my disc-changer lately. That's no knock on "Revolver," which in many ways survives as the most contemporary of Beatles' recordings--weighted down neither with the flower power niceties of "Sgt. Pepper," nor with the blues-rock excesses that popped up on White Album and "Abbey Road." Like the Beach Boys' "Today!", "Revolver" is the product of liberation from the grind of concert tours--the Beatles recorded it knowing they would bear no responsibility for trying to duplicate its sounds onstage--their last tour was scheduled to end in late August 1966, only weeks after this record hit the racks. Thus freed, the lads frankly went nuts, using the studio as an instrument in and of itself. Anyone who doesn't have the track listing already memorized probably doesn't like the Beatles, anyway, so we won't bother running down the tracks. Suffice it to say that no band ever sounded so cool and cocksure while also being so wildly experimental as the "Revolver"-era Beatles. Likewise, none of the Beatles' contemporaries would tackle, let alone successfully execute such a broad array of musical styles--from the formal English chamber pop of "For No One," to the druggy mod-guitar workout of "Dr. Robert" and the inflammable Southern soul of "Got to Get You Into My Life." Actually, talk to me next week, and I might be ready to change its ranking to No. 1. Highlight: Those strange seagull sounds fading in and out of the Timothy Leary-inspired "Tomorrow Never Knows" come from a manipulated tape-loop recording of a laughing Paul McCartney.
35.) "Bluesbreakers with Eric Clapton," John Mayall's Bluesbreakers (1966). Wherein Clapton is promoted to God--by a swarm of Swinging London graffiti artists. After a stormy apprenticeship with the pop-leaning British blues combo The Yardbirds, Clapton opted out to pursue a more purist course. He found John Mayall, a worldly man already approaching his mid-30s (Mayall, in fact, had fought with the British Army for three years in Korea). It was a match as perfect as it was short-lived. With Clapton in tow, Mayall's Bluesbreakers would record just this one album, a classic of white British blues. The leadoff track, Otis Rush's "All Your Love," sets the stage with Clapton's strutting, fractured lead guitar line dominating. Mayall's greasy electric organ shares the spotlight with Clapton's hopscotch guitar on the next track, Freddie King's "Hideaway," which leads into the scorching Mayall original "Little Girl," featuring one of the most unsullied blues riffs of Clapton's career. Mayall's vocals are mostly just serviceable, actually a bit thin throughout, but the rhythm section of John McVie (later of Fleetwood Mac) and Hughie Flint (later of McGuiness Flint) is solid and robust.
The truth, obviously, is that this is Clapton's show, and it marks the real beginning of the guitar-hero era. Clapton would leave the band soon hereafter to form Cream, and while he would play a great deal of exciting and enduring music in the future, he would never quite approach the blues purity of his work with the Bluesbreakers. Highlights: Surprise! These have nothing to do with Clapton. Mayall does Sonny Boy Williamson proud with his self-penned harmonica excursion, "Another Man," while the swinging Ray Charles-styled horn charts adds some high octane to another nice original, "Key to Love."
36.) "Jerusalem," Steve Earle (2002). Virtually alone among his contemporary songwriters, San Antonio-reared roots rocker Steve Earle tackled the dark undercurrents of post-9/11 America. Four years on, with presidential approval ratings hovering at between 36 and 38 percent, "Jerusalem" might sound like a less than radical outing. But it got Earle's name bounced around plenty in the right-wing echo chamber at a time when every Chevy Tahoe in the United States still had an oversize American flag sticker plastered to its rear window. Most of the conservatives' anger was directed at "John Walker's Blues," a song that uses a fictitious first-person narrative to explain the development of a white California teen, John Walker Lindh, into "the American Taliban." The song never endorses Lindh's viewpoint, a point his critics ignored, but it does make the salient point that some of same forces that created the 9/11 terrorists also exist in our midst and must be addressed.
What makes "Jerusalem" a great album, however, is Earle's willingness to look beyond the events of 9/11 to a larger examination of the space that America finds itself occupying as the forces of darkness settle in on the new millennium. "Amerika V. 6.0 (The Best We Can Do)" is a searing diatribe against the growing gap between rich and poor, depicting at one point a conversation between fat cats who plot to build a wall around their country club "to keep the riffraff out until the slump is through." Sighs Earle's antagonist, "Yeah, I realize it ain't exactly democratic / but it's either them or us / and it's the best that we can do." Clearly, Earle doubts that, and the album finds its soul in its uplifting title track, a kind of southern-fried update of Lennon's "Imagine." "I believe there will come a day / when the lion and the lamb / will lie down in peace together / in Jerusalem," he dreams aloud. Encased in some of the most muscular, modern and guitar-heavy music in his canon, "Jerusalem" cements Steve Earle's status as the next-generation Phil Ochs. Highlights: Earle's bayou banjo workout, "The Truth," and the non-political Sir Douglas Quintet pastiche, "What's a Simple Man to Do?"
37.) "Brilliant Corners," Thelonius Monk (1956). How do you teach human beings to play music like this? Monk's huge fingers hammer out piano chord progressions that distill some arcane interplanetary polymath, while conducting varispeed arrangements apparently inspired by sun-warped Count Basie records. And yet here are Sonny Rollins (tenor sax), Ernie Henry alto sax), Clark Terry (trumpet), Oscar Pettiford (bass), Paul Chambers (bass) and Max Roach (drums) working hard to make sense of it all. And astonishingly, they do. It's not quite right to say that, in the hands of these experts, Monk's music makes "sense," but they certainly help make it eminently listenable, and endless fascinating. The introverted, faltering piano-student intro to the title composition is the kind of eccentricity that got Monk branded a self-conscious oddball. But that's taking the fun out of his weirdly inventive music. Time signatures? You win a kewpie doll if you can predict even once when and to where they will shift. But this music isn't just weird for the sake of being weird. No, "Brilliant Corners" swings, particularly on the Sonny Rollins showcase, "Ba-Lue Bolivar Ba-Lues-Are" and "Bemsha Swing." Eccentric? Yes, quite. Challenging? Sure. Catchy? Ever so much. This is the strangest music you will ever find yourself absently whistling while working out in the garage. Highlight: The celeste that punctuates Monk's crab-like but somehow stately ballad, "Pannonica" (a standard that was introduced on this album) lends it a childlike charm; Monk's vaguely Ellingtonian rendering of "I Surrender, Dear," the album's only solo piano performance, might just be definitive version of this old chestnut.
38.) "From Elvis in Memphis," Elvis Presley (1969). This Memphis recording is possibly the finest ever blue-eyed soul album, and is certainly one of two (possibly three) candidates for Presley's career pinnacle. After nearly a decade slogging through crappy movies with wimpy soundtracks, Presley had fallen off the pop-idol radar in the age of the Beatles. Those movies generally paid off at the box office, however, so Presley was able to ignore the slide. But time was catching up with the Pelvis, who was now 33 years old. By '68, even the movies were starting to tank. But his fortunes reversed dramatically with a soul-stirring Christmas '68 NBC-TV special. This recording date with producer Chips Moman was the King's bid to extend the winning streak.
Possibly because, for once in his career, Presley kept his minder, Col. Tom Parker, at arm's length during this effort and recorded only songs he personally liked, the project succeeded beyond anyone's expectations. Wisely, Presley acted as if psychedelia had never happened, gravitating to contemporary late '60s Stax soul sounds, which proved a perfect match for his own style. This is country soul as great as Otis Redding's best. A number one single, Mac Davis' socially observant "In the Ghetto," was the most bankable result, but the most musically satisfying numbers here ("Wearin' that Loved On Look," "Long Black Limousine," "Power of My Love") are among the King's finest.
He doesn't abandon the country music he always loved ("Any Day Now" and "It Keeps Right on a-Hurtin'" work fine), nor is he above trying to exploit someone else's recent success (he covers Glen Campbell's "Gentle on My Mind"). Whatever he tries, it all works, resulting in some of his most moving, heartfelt performances. It wouldn't be long before he would swap out his newfound hipness for karate kicks and white jump suits, but for a brief period in 1969, the King was back. For a minute there, even the Beatles must have had something to worry about. Highlight: Your neck hairs will rise in salute to Presley's howling preamble to the opening track. ("Well, I just left town for a little while…."); the reassuring "True Love Travels on a Gravel Road" is Presley at his most sincere.
39.) "Beggar's Banquet," The Rolling Stones (1968). Never has a compromised artistic arc resulted in a record so spectacular. The Stones' "comeback" album followed on the heels of "Their Satanic Majesties Request," a fitfully brilliant 1967 excursion into brooding psychedelic excess that left critics and fans alike mostly cold. In effect, the Stones' formula--listen to the latest Beatles' album, repeat the formula with an added touch of malevolence, wait three months, release new Stones album--finally caught up with them. "Majesties" sold briskly at first, then faded as fans decided it was a thin attempt to best "Sgt. Pepper." (In retrospect, "Majesties" deserved better, actually. But we'll get to that...)
It would take no critical reappraisal at a later date to measure the virtues of "Beggar's Banquet," an album that sees the Stones steering away from the pop-centric patterns of contemporaries like the Kinks and Beatles, and back to pure, loathsome, raunchy rhythm & blues. In May of '68, they fired a warning shot in the form of their greatest single, "Jumping Jack Flash" (No. 3 on the U.S. pop charts). When "Beggar's Banquet" emerged in December, it would have taken initial listeners less than three seconds to recognize it signaled the arrival of a revamped, blacker-hearted Stones. "Sympathy for the Devil," the most politically radical of Stones songs, positively quivers from its assortment of voodoo rhythms, topped off by a Mick Jagger vocal that is only too convincing in its first-person Satanic conceits. From there, the mood shifts abruptly with the dour "No Expectation," featuring the last great instrumental performance from the band's soon-to-be exiled (and soon to expire) founder, Brian Jones, whose weeping bottleneck guitar lifts the tune well beyond a standard-issue country blues.
Obviously reinvigorated by the familiar blues setting, "Beggar's Banquet" captures the Stones firing on all cylinders with their most authoritative R&B since their debut. It is also the Stones' angriest record, capturing the unsettling ambience of 1968 better than any other musical document, and cut the template for the remainder of the band's career. Highlights: Jones' ominous tambura on the anarchist's theme, "Street Fighting Man," adds menace to what might otherwise have sounded like a cheap high-school fight song; Keith Richards gives his first lead vocal performance on the stirring "Salt of the Earth."
40.) "Rehearsals for Retirement," Phil Ochs (1969). Protest singer Ochs had played perennial second fiddle to Bob Dylan throughout his recording career. In fact, Ochs once was dismissed by Dylan for being merely "a journalist"--virtually the ultimate putdown for a proud anti-establishmentarian folkie. But there was something to the charge. Ochs, whose topical songwriting skills really were second only to Dylan's, had painstakingly chronicled the turbulence of his times with hard-headed tunes like "Here's to the State of Mississippi," and "I Ain't Marching Anymore." However, in 1969 things changed; it was the year after the riot-scarred Chicago Democratic National Convention (violence Ochs witnessed firsthand). It was another year of war escalation in Vietnam, and it was a time bereft of inspired leaders--the Kennedys, Malcolm X, MLK, all murdered. "Rehearsals for Retirement" finds Ochs giving up journalism to recast himself as a new-age Cassandra, forecasting the nation's collapse.
"Rehearsals" is a bitter, savagely satirical album. With the Buddy Holly-flavored "Pretty Smart on My Part," a multi-character sketch of an America swimming in paranoia, Ochs attracted the unfriendly attentions of FBI chieftain J. Edgar Hoover. (A line in the song unwisely had a protagonist singing, "We'll assassinate the president / and take over the government." Hoover apparently didn't appreciate the irony.) "I Kill, Therefore I Am" goes even further, this time with a biting depiction of a violence-addicted white cop. Meanwhile, in the despairing "My Life," Ochs begs authorities to "take your tap from my phone / and leave my life alone." The album's centerpiece, "The Scorpion Departs but Never Returns," makes a deadly nuclear submarine accident a metaphor of the sinking ship of the American state. As Lincoln Mayorga plays his graceful piano behind him, Ochs comes unhinged: "I'm not sinking / No, I'm not sinking / tell me I'm not sinking...."
Intriguingly, the music of this LP does not reflect Ochs' gloom. Instead, by nearly eliminating the overindulgent orchestrations of 1967's "Pleasures of the Harbor," Ochs and his acoustic guitar front a stripped down rock ensemble, whose empathetic sidemen seem intent on carrying the full weight of whatever lingering hopes Ochs carries for his beloved America. "The World Began in Eden and Ended in Los Angeles" even features a sunny horn section like those employed to such towering effect on Love's "Forever Changes." A fascinating, harrowing document of the agonizing close of the '60s decade.
Highlights: Ochs' songwriting was never more dispassionately artful than on his oblique chronicle of the '68 Chicago riots, "William Butler Yeats Visits Lincoln Park and Escapes Unscathed."
41.) "Parklife," Blur (1994). Blur had been hanging around half a decade aping British neo-psychs The Stone Roses, when--at the point of bankruptcy--the group underwent an overhaul, reshaping itself as logical heir to a U.K. guitar-pop lineage that included the Kinks, the Small Faces, the Jam and Madness. The previous year's "Modern Life is Rubbish" impressed the critics, but almost no one else. But Blur pulled it all together on this release, which represents the full flowering of the new Britpop movement. Inventive and exciting from front to back, it is a veritable cornucopia of musical styles, ranging from the Euro-disco parody "Boys and Girls" to the dazzling Walker Brothers tribute "To the End" and the thrashing "Bank Holiday"--a song even the most hardened of oi-boys could pogo to. It might have been an eclectic mess in another group's hands, but lead singer and lyricist Damon Albarn holds things together with his cold wit and ear-catching "Mockney" accent. The obvious antecedent is the Kinks' great 1967 "Face to Face," which also held a magnifying glass to the mundanity of every day British life, finding cause for both joy and cynicism. Blur holds a wide lead over their forebears, however, when it comes to performance. Led by the muscular guitar riffing of Graham Coxon and a well-oiled rhythm section, the Blur of "Parklife" is a terrific sounding band, not merely a terrifically clever one. One of the great albums of the 1990s, "Parklife" also contains some of the most uncharacteristically compassionate songs that front man Albarn would ever be associated with. Highlights: You can't beat the galloping title track, with Cockney narration provided by an inspired Phil Daniels, star of the '70s cult film "Quadrophenia"; the swirling "This is a Low" delivers an emotional gut punch, placing it at the very front ranks of '90s song craft.
42.) "The Soul of a Man: Al Kooper Live," Al Kooper (1995). A long-awaited career overview. Al Kooper was rock's Zelig--a seasoned New York musician who somehow found himself present for virtually every important historical moment associated with American rock music in the 1960s and early '70s. Launching his career as a 14-year-old guitarist in the Royal Teens, Kooper saw his first success with the novelty hit "Short Shorts." As a songwriter, he had provided Gary Lewis "This Diamond Ring," a monster mid-60s hit single. And of course he was present in the studio when Bob Dylan was tinkering around with the arrangement of "Like a Rolling Stone"--Kooper's Hammond organ accompaniment laid the foundation for the quintessential Dylan sound of the mid-60s. From there it was onto the Blues Project, founding--and getting fired by--Blood, Sweat and Tears, teaming with Mike Bloomfield and Steve Stills on the fabled "Super Sessions," and, sometime later, wandering into a tavern and noticing a southern-fried bar band that he thought was good enough to make a record. Their name: Lynyrd Skynyrd. (And we've already talked about his place in the Zombies' saga.)
But all that is just part of the Kooper story. The rest can be found here, on this wonderful double-disc live recording made during a trio of 1994 career-retrospective concerts at New York's Bottom Line club. Far from diluting the power of his original recordings, the performances on this album in almost every case benefit from improved technology, and so are superior to the originals. This is especially true for the BS&T classics associated with Kooper ("Somethin' Going On," "I Can't Quit Her," and "I Love You More Than You'll Ever Know.") Every facet of the man's career is covered, with sharp reprisals of standards from the reformed Blues Project ("Flute Thing," "Two Trains Running"). Guitarist Jimmy Vivino, meanwhile, does sterling work sitting in for the late Bloomfield on "Super Sessions" classics "Albert's Shuffle" and "Seasons of the Witch."
A fine recording that finds Kooper, despite the weathering decades, in his finest voice. Highlight: There are liberal sprinklings of between-song chatter that allow Kooper to put these great songs into context. It wouldn't be the same record without them. Pure manna from heaven from one of the least acknowledged of classic rock's primary architects.
43.) "Electric Ladyland," The Jimi Hendrix Experience (1968). Granting an exception for Noel Redding's "Little Miss Strange," which feels like it was excised from a Kaleidoscope album, this double album is the quintessential Hendrix. A psycho-soul buffet that bridges a wide variety of styles, from swirling chamber pop to proto-funk--about the only two things most of these songs have in common is Hendrix's unique soulfulness as a guitarist and singer, and the two ounces or so of pot the musicians each consumed per session. (Conversely, however, a few musical themes do find their way into more than one piece, and "Voodoo Chile" appears twice, in wildly different arrangements.)
"Electric Ladyland" was Hendrix's first U.S. No. 1 album, but it had a difficult entomology. Hendrix's bandmates were beginning to rebel, and Chas Chandler, formerly the Animals' bassist and Hendrix's most important early champion, had grown fed up with the guitarist's perfectionist side--always insecure, Hendrix would habitually record and re-record parts ad nauseum. Chandler quit his job as producer during these sessions, and while the loss of his disciplining influence would result in a slightly less focused record than the previous two, Hendrix reveled in his newfound freedom, recording at leisure as his own producer, and bringing in a host of guest musicians, including Dave Mason, Jack Casady, Stevie Winwood and Al Kooper (here he is again!). It worked like a magic trick on "Electric Ladyland," though it's notable that Hendrix would never see another studio album released during the remainder of his life.
Occasionally excessive but always fascinating, "Electric Ladyland" is a fitting document by which to remember this immortal guitar hero. Contains the definitive treatment of Dylan's apocalyptic "All Along the Watchtower." Highlights: Moody, surf-inflected guitars permeate "Moon, Turn the Tides (Gently, Gently Away)"; Detroit's riots are tapped as inspiration for "House Burning Down," the most directly political song Hendrix would tackle before 1970's live "Machine Gun."
44.) "Blood on the Tracks," Bob Dylan (1975). Just as had been true for Sinatra before him, it was the loss of a woman's love that inspired what many argue was Bob Dylan's career apotheosis. There is no denying the power of "Blood on the Tracks." The title is a sharp double-entendre--an allusion to the violent Old West imagery that permeates the record, and an acknowledgement that these are some of the most painfully bitter of Dylan's creations. These are also some of Dylan's most vividly poetic and expertly performed songs, particularly on the tracks recorded in the Twin Cities with a Minneapolis pick-up band after a stalled series of New York sessions. In it, Dylan walks the listener through the various stages of grief as he deals with his marriage's break-up, from anger and revulsion to regret and brief periods of peacefulness. "Tangled Up in Blue," sets the stage--Dylan, who had always shrouded his past, here takes the listener on a guided tour through it.
The centerpiece is the album's most biting song, "Idiot Wind," which begins as a Wild West melodrama but abruptly drops that pretense, veering into a bilious harangue against Dylan's wife. "One day you’ll be in the ditch," he spits, in what could be a threat, with "flies buzzin’ around your eyes / blood on your saddle." Before he is done, however, he turns his rage against himself, as well: "We are idiots, babe / it's a wonder we can even feed ourselves." "You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go," the following cut, is "Idiot Wind's" spiritual flipside. Draped in sadness, the guitar figure is incongruously sunny, its poingant lyric expresses a resigned acceptance and gratitude for the time he shared with his departed lover.
The whole album is a emotional rollercoaster, though nothing here is more touching than the masterful "Shelter From the Storm," a deceptively simple song that uses images of a suffering Christ, of a solder wallowing in mud, to express the comfort love brought him--before he lost it. Here Dylan seems to take the blame for this failure, but here, too, at last he lifts his face to catch a glimpse of hope: "Beauty walks the razor's edge," he sings. "Someday I'll make it mine."
In effect, by harnessing his immense poetic talents to probe his own failed relationship, Dylan hands us all a template for sorting through similarly troubled times when we, too, are so afflicted. A tremendous gift. Highlight: As if Dylan's seared soul needed a cheerful diversion, there arrives one of Dylan's most amazing songs, the buoyant, rousing Wild West fantasy "Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts."
45.) "John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band," John Lennon (1970). When comparisons are made between John Lennon and Nirvana's Kurt Cobain, people aren't thinking of Lennon's generally optimistic Beatles work, nor his more accessible "Imagine." They're thinking of this record, the most uncompromisingly confessional singer-songwriter disc ever waxed by a major recording star. This is the sound of a man at war in his own mind, wiring the conflict for sound. Recorded several months after the Beatles' breakup, "Plastic Ono Band" was inspired by the primal scream therapy Lennon was engaging in under Arthur Janov, treatment that involved directly confronting the traumas of childhood. More than once here, Lennon rips loose with throat-shredding howls. It's unsettling to say the least. But also totally compelling in this context.
In 1970, Lennon was still at the top of his game. He concsiously chose to make the "Plastic Ono Band" arrangements starkly minimalistic, often no more than one acoustic or electric guitar or a piano, accompanied by Klaus Voorman's bass and Ringo Starr's drums. That's a bit of a shock considering that Wall of Sound wizard Phil Spector was twiddling the producer's knobs during these sessions. The lack of layered instrumentation puts the focus squarely on the raw emotions. "Mother" addresses Lennon's abandonment by both parents. In "Working Class Hero," he directs his invective at his audience: "You're still fucking peasants, as far as I can see," he hisses. Though not directly political, in the piano-driven "Remember," Lennon abruptly closes out with the cry, "Remember: the 5th of November!"--an allusion to Guy Fawke's 1605 plot to explode the British Houses of Parliament. "Isolation," shines a light on the Lennon household, relating the insularity imposed on John and Yoko by a gossiping press, investigating authorities, expectant fans, and the growing demands of the radical chic--whose siren call Lennon would soon be unable to resist.
But not all is sulfurous on "Plastic Ono Band." "Love" is Lennon's sweetest lullaby. Though it reads like empty sloganeering on paper, the feeling he conveys with his graceful piano figure and vulnerable vocal makes it the most direct expression of tenderness Lennon would ever again allow himself.
Lennon predicted this album--a relative commercial failure by Beatles' standards (No. 6 in the American charts)--would ultimately outlive the rest of his body of work. He may yet prove correct. Highlight: That funereal church bell that opens the record actually is the tape-recorded sound of a hand-held playground bell slowed to about one-quarter its original speed.
46.) "Frank Sinatra Sings for Only the Lonely," Frank Sinatra (1959). Legend has it that his former wife Ava Gardner once commanded Frank Sinatra to shut up, using one of the great soured-romance zingers: "Why don't you just sing--you tell the truth when you sing." Truth was, Sinatra must have been pretty bummed out when he made this record, his second Capitol Records outing with arranger Nelson Riddle. This is "Wee, Small Hours," Book II, wherein our forlorn narrator, still hung up on an unrequited love, has long since passed from stunned sadness to dangerous dissolution. While not quite a challenger to "Tonight's the Night" for "downer recording of all time" status, this certainly is the bleakest album of Sinatra's career. That said, it also is possibly his most powerfully evocative.
Written especially for Sinatra, Sammy Kahn and Jimmy Van Heusen's "Only the Lonely," is a fine scene-setter, with such desolate lines as "each place I go / only the lonely go … the songs I know / only the lonely know." Delivered in an unusually vulnerable voice by Sinatra, its impact is doubled by our familiarity with the untouchable Rat Pack persona Sinatra so carefully cultivated--giving this track, and the others that follow, a kind of headline quality: the Chairman has not just been brought down by a mere mortal female, she has laid him low. Sinatra never sounded more desperate, but he was never better. That is, unless you count the following track, the Earl Brent/Matt Dennis composition "Angel Eyes," a candidate for pop music's greatest torch ballad. Though wallowing in self-pity, the sincerity of Sinatra's vocal, and the grace of Riddle's understated orchestration, eases out the song's inherent drama. Also containing such sad-eyed Sinatra favorites as "What's New," "Willow Weep for Me," and "Guess I'll Hang My Tears Out to Dry," "Only the Lonely" vies with "Wee, Small Hours" for title to Sinatra's finest hour. Highlight: Amazing in every detail, Sinatra's wonderful reading of Johnny Mercer's "One for My Baby"--a tune given added grace and strength through Bill Miller's distant nightclub piano--makes this the greatest of all barroom ballads.
47.) "Innervisions," Stevie Wonder (1973). A landmark achievement in American soul music. It's nowhere near as bludgeoning a protest statement as some of Phil Ochs' albums, but with this record, there is no doubt that Wonder is taking on Richard Nixon's America.
He does it obliquely, meandering in with the minor-key jazz labyrinth, "Too High." This is not a celebration of the wonders of drugs, but the opposite, with Wonder countering the burbling bass with a fractured, anxious lyric: "I'm too high, I'm so high, I feel like I'm about to die." Recovery comes with "Visions," which features a calm and contemplative, even romantic melody. But the song does not deal with romance, but Utopian America, as it registers Wonder's fear that his nation is drifting ever farther from its ideals of justice and equality. Immediately after that, it's back to hard reality, with "Living for the City," one of the most bad-ass funk tunes Wonder ever recorded (stopping just short of the all-out assault of the previous year's "Superstition"). This may be Stevie Wonder's shining moment, unsparingly tracing the path of a naive young black youth from the sticks heading to New York, only to get immediately--and unintentionally--embroiled in a failed drug deal that lands him in prison for a decade. Wonder's vocal change, from smooth soul to gritty rasp says everything that needs to be said about the changes wrought on the young man inside the big house. He comes out expecting nothing more than to go on "livin' just enough for the city."
As great as that song is, Wonder comes within an ace of topping it on this record with what may be his meanest groove ever, "Higher Ground," a song so funky that funk-punks the Red Hot Chili Peppers would cover it more than a decade later, and fall well short of besting the original. But "Higher Ground" isn't a comment on the political or social landscape, it's a spiritual and intellectual call to arms, Stevie playing the preacher as he exhorts "teachers to keep on teaching" and "believers to keep on believing" until we reach the higher ground. But even after that song rolls away, Wonder's stun gun still has some juice in it. "All is Fair in Love" drifts in as one of his most poignant love ballads, nestled into a gorgeous arrangment built around descending major/minor piano chord inversions. Amazing stuff.
Highlights: Stevie clearly hasn't lost his sense of humor, as the blast of girlfriend-impressing Spanish at the start of the Latin-tinged "Don't Your Worry 'Bout a Thing" illustrates.
48.) "Morrison Hotel," The Doors (1970). After their seminal 1967 debut and its solid follow-up, Jim Morrison and the boys went on something of a gradual downhill slide. The individual hits kept coming, but their albums increasingly lost focus, despite strong moments on each. They reached their critical nadir on the over-produced if somewhat undervalued "The Soft Parade" of 1969, a moment further marred by strife within the band and legal problems outside of it. "Morrison Hotel" is the Doors' "Let It Be," a hard-rocking, back-to-basics affair recorded during a lull between court dates over Morrison's alleged acts of perversion on a Florida concert stage.
The record gets out of the gates quickly with the loping "Roadhouse Blues," in which Morrison aims to confront the apocalypse, beer bottle in hand. Driven by the twin attack of Robbie Krieger's barking guitar and John Sebastian's Howlin' Wolf-styled guest turn on harmonica, it is one of the Door's tightest, bluesiest performances. Several other blues-rock workouts also feature prominently, including the rapid-fire "You Make Me Real," and "Maggie M'Gill." "Waiting for the Sun" and "The Spy" are sharp updates of their late '60s acid-rock sound, while the mystical and meditative "Blue Sunday" may be the loveliest thing Morrison ever wrote. Best of all is Morrison's paranoid state of the union address, "Peace Frog."It starts as a kind of rapid-fire sermon about all the places where one might find "blood on the streets" (Venice, L.A., Chicago, New Haven), then it shifts gears. Morrison suddenly slips into a mystic trance, and begins mumbling about "Indians scattered on dawn's highway bleeding / ghosts crowd the young child's fragile eggshell mind." It's an allusion to a catastrophic car wreck Morrison supposedly witnessed as a child, and it's as stunning a moment as this band ever captured on record. Song for song the strongest offering in the Doors' canon.
Highlight: Robbie Krieger's jazzy, insistently trippy guitar phrase that repeats throughout "The Spy" is one of the decade's most memorable riffs; "Queen of the Highway," though shrouded in its exact meaning, might be Morrison's most autobiographical song.
49.) "10,000 Years," The Honeydogs (2003). The latest in a long lineage of great Twin Cities rock bands (viva the Litter!), Minneapolis' Honeydogs have been putting out exemplary albums for 11 years. Along the way, they've undergone an interesting evolution, starting out on the periphery of the alt.country set, gradually absorbing influences and adding instrumentation until, by 2000's "Here's Luck," Adam Levy and his 'Dogs had grown up into a full-fledged classicist rock act worthy of comparison to Zombies' best work. With 2003's "10,000 Years," the Honeydogs reached their zenith. This cinematic concept album makes the Who’s "Tommy" look like a Katzenjammer Kids cartoon--though there is some similarity in both albums' emphasis on redemption. But "10,000 Years" is far grittier, unspooling as an obscure narrative about a test tube baby squaring off against a dystopian future, and dealing with such hard issues as inner-city crime, drug addiction, war and genocide along the way.
Still, like the Kinks' "Arthur," the story works best as a framework around which to fashion a set of excellent songs. Levy has grown up into a kind of Brian Jones for the 21st century, expertly weaving an array of exotic instrumentation and world-beat signatures around strong, compelling pop melodies. For this record, the band unloads its entire, encyclopedic pop arsenal, incorporating Bavarian beer hall melodies, Cuban rhythms, bossa nova, Indian raga, and more, all without forsaking their usual addictive melodic hooks. "Dead Stars" starts off the set with a monochromatic piano figure that sounds like it might have been lifted from the soundtrack of one of Buster Keaton's more poignant movie moments, but then it drifts into a grand Randy Newman-styled ballad. "Poor Little Sugar," a hard-eyed tune about a child lost in the wilds of the drug-infested streets, rolls languidly along on a funky Curtis Mayfield groove.
But the album's keystone is its surging title track, a jaundiced vision of a world turned upside down by murderous terrorists, wrapped in one of the most ear-catching high-energy rock arrangements in the Honeydogs' history. (It's worth noting that this scarifying little song was completed prior to 9/11.) Highlight: Good news! (Via the album's closing track.) "They've found evil's home … 23rd chromosome." Most helpful.
50.) "Super Hits," Marvin Gaye (1970). Placing this greatest hits package instead of the more acclaimed "What's Going On" on a best-album list like this one is like wearing a Ronald Reagan pin to a Grassroots Party convention. It's really not supposed to be here. And true enough, no one can deny the beauty and power of Gaye's 1971 gospel protest. But these ears have a greater affinity for Gaye's earlier work with Motown. Formulaic as it may be, as commandeering as the Berry Gordy regime might have been toward its roster of artists, these are still the most rousing and attractive performances of Gaye's stellar career.
"I Heard it Through the Grapevine" retains its sultry allure after all these decades, and still has the power of its clear vision of a man in turmoil. "Pride and Joy," one of a handful of tracks on the record that Gaye pitched in to help write, was Gaye's second charting single, and with its finger-snapping, jazzy verses and rousing gospel-tinged call-and-response choruses, there are few more ebullient or joyful songs to be found anywhere. Likewise for the timeless "Ain't that Peculiar," one of classic Motown's flat-out moments of greatness. "Chained," while still securely fitting in the Motown formula, hints at something new; it is a hard-driving, brassy soul workout, approaching some of the harder-edge psychedelic funk that the Temptations would release in the late '60s. And Gaye's powerful "Baby Don't You Do It" would provide fodder for The Band, who transformed into one of their live showstoppers.
Tune for tune, just at the level of sheer exhilaration, "Super Hits" deserves a place on the shelf of anyone who enjoys the classy, high-energy, soul-stirring Motown sound. Sadly, this one too seems to have gone out of print. Try eBay. Highlight: "Hitch Hike," one of Gaye's grittiest vocal performances, was picked up by the Rolling Stones for one of their early records.
To be continued ...
-- Kevin Featherly
