49. The Sonics - Here Are The Sonics (1965)

Tracks: Witch // Do You Love Me? // Roll Over Beethoven // Boss Hoss // Dirty Robber // Have Love, Will Travel // Psycho // Money // Walkin' The Dog // Night Time Is the Right Time // Strychnine // Good Golly, Miss Molly

Review:

Well this album is loud. I mean, really loud. Elephant stampedes, air raid sirens and atomic bombs are called to mind. Seriously, parts of this album would leave Guitar Wolf clutching their (his?) ears and moaning; I can only imagine the impact it made in Seattle in 1965. And of course I mean this all in the best possible way. The Sonics play 50s-style rock with a 1970s-style punk mindset, and the result is an album which is almost as hard, groovy and insane now as it must have been back in 1965. The singer can't sing, the band can't really play their instruments, and as a result everything the group has is thrown into a Neanderthal rhythm section and the ability to be as loud, dirty and wild as possible. And did I mention loud? These guys were really loud. L-O-U-D. Louuuuuuudddddddddddddddd

d.

The music itself is mostly just a mix of 1950s standards in the Chuck Berry/Little Richard mode, but it's all elevated to the next level by putting all the emphasis on groove. The version of "Do You Love Me" include here, for example, is the most infectiously propulsive thing on the list up to this point. I can't not dance to it. The version of "Money" is better than the Beatles', and the version of "Walking the Dog" leaves the Stones so far behind it's not even funny. And while the material is mostly shop-worn, the band throw-in a couple of original compositions which are easily the best things on the album. "The Witch" is a bizarre song about, well, a witch and the inadvisability of trying to make it with her, and it has this great stop-start rhythm that goes "BAM-BAM-BAM-BAM-BAM!

COZ SHE'S A WITCH!"

Seriously it's like Louis Prima meets the Stooges.

In addition to this you get "Strychnine", which is a weird and wild and feral song about getting your kicks by drinking strychnine, that doesn't quite sound exactly like anything else. Interesting lyrical conceits these guys have - an obvious influence, far down the line, on weirdo punk bands like the Misfits and the Cramps. A welcome addition to the musical lexicon! We'd live in a sadder world without kitschy horror-punk.

Given how cool these two songs are, it's a pity that the only real weak note on the album is an original composition. "Psycho", while not without its charms, is basically just a rewrite of "Do You Love Me" with none of the elements that made it work (although it does boast one really, really cool Can-style drum break). I don't mind it, but it's far below the level of the rest of the album, which is a real pity.

So, there you have it. This isn't great art. The Sonics are puerile, juvenile, atavistic and technically inept - and those are their good points! Seriously, as garage rock goes it'd be hard to better this. You've got the rockin'; you've got the groovin'; you've got the hedonistic abandon of youth... An all in an album that sounds like it was recorded through a cardboard box in a hurricane. Sure, it might get wearying after a while, but the whole album's only thirty-five minutes long! Talk about "purity of vision"! It's amazing what you can do with three chords, a few overloaded amps and a complete disregard for the integrity of your ear-drums.

9/10.

Download: The Sonics - The Witch MP3
Download: The Sonics - Strychnine MP3

Oh, and here's the Cramps doing a pretty good cover of Strychnine, too:

48. Jerry Lee Lewis - Live at the Star Club, Hamburg (1964)

Tracks: Mean Woman Blues // High School Confidential // Money // Matchbox // What'd I Say Part 1 // What'd I Say Part 2 // Great Balls of Fire // Good Golly Miss Molly // Lewis Boogie // Your Cheating Heart // Hound Dog // Long Tall Sally // Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On // Down the Line

Review:

My complaints about this album are basically the same as those I had about the Little Richard album a while back - yeah, it's fun and all in small doses, but Jesus Christ is this album a chore to sit through. Forty minutes that feels like four hours, in which Lewis slams (and I do mean slams, and with a frequent disregard for whether his backing band can keep with him) his way through a selection of originals and standards. The performance is great, I'll own - Lewis' lunatic speed-freak sexually deviant nature has been well-documented, and it's all on display on this record. This is probably the rawest and most sexual album we've had up to this point. Unfortunately, it's pretty hard to carry an album on rawness alone and, as much as I hate to sound like a whiny 1950s father figure, most of the songs just sort of sound the same - and not in a good, Bo Diddley sort of way. It's good, but I really have to be in the mood for it - and given that lately I've mostly been listening to ambient house and folk music, it's fair to say that I may not be at my most receptive just now.

So, for what it is it's pretty good. Lewis is wild and crazy, his song selection is good, and the Nashville Teens do a great job on the backing tracks. I think my main problem is that the guys seem to favour a "smash and howl" approach where I would generally be more in favour of a chugging groove. "What'd I Say" and "Money" both have neat rhythms, though, and really a lot of the songs have somethng to recommend thems. I tell you this, though - I'd better pick-up the pace, because I'm getting might impatient for the advent of funk music.

So what deep insight do I have to offer into this album? It's really good, but also really wearying. If I were a tipsy German dude sitting in the audience then I bet I would have had the time of my life. As it stands, though, I just.

Don't.

Care.

7/10.

Download: Jerry Lee Lewis - Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On MP3

47. Buck Owens and His Buckaroos - I've Got A Tiger By The Tail (1965)

Tracks: I've Got A Tiger By The Tail // Trouble and Me // Let the Sad Times Roll On // Wham Bam // If You Fall Out of Love With Me // Fallin' For You // We're Gonna Let the Good Times Roll // The Band Keeps Playin' On // Streets of Laredo // Cryin' Time // A Maiden's Prayer // Memphis

Review:

Buck Owens looks just like my brother! He really does! My brother is only thirteen, granted, but if 2020 rolls around and his portrait doesn't look just like the one above then I'll eat my genetically-modified space hat. It's really quite uncanny. Whether my brother will then go-on to host a successful revival of Hee-Haw is another matter entirely.

You know what else is weird? The music on this album. Well, maybe not, but I don't really know all that much about country music. I just know what I hate - and I don't hate this. It's a little bit rockabilly, but it's mostly just hard-edged, old-timey hillbilly music. Apparently this was the "Bakersfield Sound", which was a hard-edged reaction against the over-produced "Nashville Sound" that was doing quite well at the time? Apparently. What this all translates into is an album where all the music is quite stripped and raw, with a prominent back-beat and lots of twangy guitars and unadorned, yokel vocals yodelling about how a man's only true friend is his dog. Actually, the lyrics on this album are generally pretty good - nothing spectacular, mind, but they're often quite funny, although not always in a very PC way. For example, "Wham Bham" (and thank you mam), which is basically about exactly what you'd expect something with such a refrain to be about, and "We're Gonna Let The Good Times Roll", which is about a man's baby finally coming home to stay and includes lines about the pair locking themselves in the house and barring the windows and doors. Credit to Mr. Owens - it never quite crosses the line from ridiculous and funny to "weirdly threatening". On the other end of the spectrum, there are songs like "The Streets of Laredo", which is about sad, dead cowboys, and "If You Fall Out Of Love With Me", which comes right after "Wham Bam" and features antithetical lyrics requesting that, if a girl fall out of love with the man, she not let him know about it.

So all in all this is a pretty neat little album. There's a nice bit of stylistic variation between the raw and rockin' tracks and those that boast subtler, fiddle-and-slide arrangements, and Owens himself displays an impressive vocal range that covers everything from deep crooning to a high-pitched "Yeeha!" sort of spruking. I can't really see myself listening to it all the time, but I don't really listen to anything all the time - not even Kate Bush, and I love Kate Bush.

I'm not sure what to say about this. It's very good, but I don't really know enough about country music to offer an intelligent appraisal of it beyond saying "I really like "I've Got A Tiger By The Tail"". Incidentally, I really like "I've Got A Tiger By the Tail". It kind of reminds me of "Everybody's Somebody's Fool" by Connie Francis, although this time around the lyrics are about marrying a troublesome woman. Actually, that's one thing about this album that irks me somewhat - there's a sort of casual, low-key misogyny running through the proceedings, the kind that's never bad enough for it to ruin a friendship, but which is always enough for you to view the friend a little bit askew. Actually, even calling it misogyny might be a bit much. It only pops-up on a few tracks, always in a humorous context, and it's really just more of a bum attitude than anything, and meant in good fun. I don't want to give anyone the impression that this the country equivalent of an N.W.A. album. Although they were probably joking too... Anyway, if I want to avoid getting tangled-up in a web of semantics then perhaps I should just try and avoid saying anything at all. Ignore the last hundred odd words, if you will. This is what happens when you spend four years at university looking for patriarchal subtexts in everything.

Anyway! There you have it. Not a bad album. Apparently it's considered a genre classic, but I wouldn't know. All I know is that, from the small time I've spent with it, I really like it.

8/10

Look at this:



A bit ostentatious, honestly.

46. Dusty Springfield - A Girl Called Dusty (1964)

Tracks: Mamma Said // You Don’t Own Me // Do Re Mi // When the Lovelight Starts Shinging Through His Eyes // My Colouring Book // Mocking bird //Twenty-Four Hours From Tulsa // Nothing // Anyone Who Had A Heart // Twenty-Four Hours from Tulsa // Nothing // Anyone Who Had A Heart // Will You Love Me Tomorrow // Wishin’ and Hopin’ // Don’t You Know

Did you know that Dusty Springfield once punched-out Buddy Rich? Apparently they were on tour together, and he made a snide comment about her being a woman after she had the temerity to ask if she could use his band (which, incidentally, was booked as the shared band) to rehearse. A few hackles raised, a strong word said, and then BAM! That alone makes Dusty Springfield alright in my book.

Anyway, I spent this evening listening over A Girl Called Dusty, and had a very pleasant time with it too. That’s right, not only was Miss Springfield a talented pugilist, she was also one hell of a singer, and she put together a pretty cool album way back when. I think a lot of this has to do with the fact that she had a really good ear for the right material. With A Girl Called Dusty, we finally get a full-fledged, crazily-produced album in the Motown style, and there are quite a few times when the production gets a little off the wall. Thankfully, all the material (with the exception of “My Colouring Book”) is good, all of Dusty’s performances range from fair to excellent, and the insane Phil Spector-ish walls of choirs and drums and strings and horns are often actually a lot of fun, and in the end this is just a really cool soul album. It’s pretty darn good!

Still, it’s kind of a pity that the arrangements are so overboard at times. Even on Dusty in Memphis, which is often praised as the album where Springfield finally realised that she was a good enough singer that she didn’t need to bury herself under layers of arrangements (and which is the only other album of hers that I’ve heard - only $9.99 at JB-HiFi! What a steal! Oh, and I suppose a cassette of one of her disco albums too), there’s still far too many strings and backing vocalists. Can someone tell me if she ever cut and album that was just her and a little four-person blues combo or some such (aside, obviously, from “The Look of Love“)? It seems like it would be something worth hearing.

Which isn’t to say this isn’t worth hearing. “Twenty-Four Hours from Tulsa” is fantastic, what with the big groovy rhythm section and the chorus that just keeps getting bigger - I was OOOOOONLyyyyyy TWENty FOUR HOUrrrssssss froooMMMMM TULLLLSAAAAAAAA!!!! as it were. “You Don’t Own Me” not only has freaking amazing vocals but is just a freaking amazing song - scary, sexy, stern and empowering all at once (somehow). “When the Love Light Starts Shining Through His Eyes” swings so lovely, and the version of “Anyone Who Had A Heart” is all creepy and melodramatic and really good, even if not as good as the original. It sounds, I swear, like nothing so much as early-70s Bowie. “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow”, however, is one of those clear examples of producers mangling Dusty’s vocals. The backing track on the song is great, and sells the thing as a whole, but then you have Dusty’s vocals piped right into the middle awfully quite as though they’ were being played back via a P.A. system. Very odd. And unfortunate, since Dusty had such a wonderful and versatile voice. I mean, she does big balladeering, and then she turns out and closes the album with a rocking Ray Charles number complete with proto-rapping. The woman had talent! The woman knew how to make a knee turn to jelly. With hair like that, I suppose it would have helped o have been able to sing.

In the end, this is a nice, if not exactly earth-shattering, little album. It’s a very fine bit of African-American pop music being done by a bunch of pasty British people and that, after all, is what the 60s were really about. Yes, forget Kennedy and Vietnam and putting people on the Moon - the 1960s were about the growth in popularity of female British soul singers. I thought everyone knew that. After all, I think the fact that Dusty Springfield inspired Roisin Murphy’s Ruby Blue is at least as important a contribution to world culture as Robert Frost crapping on about his road trip at the Presidential inauguration. I may be wrong, but then I may also be half-asleep. I bet it’s both. I mean, if I can't even remember that the Rolling Stones were suppose to come after this then what hope have I for anything as complex as 20th Century History. Professor Prudence Flowers, your student has failed you.

So this is good. Quite good. The next one is better, though.

8/10

I’m not sure if I’m going to keep putting tracks up for download, since they went and deleted my Genius of Ray Charles entry just the other day on account of the MP3s I mean, I could repost it but I'm really lazy. Then again maybe I can work around it.

As a compensatory gesture, here she is singing a couple of her songs in German:

45. The Rolling Stones – The Rolling Stones ( 1964)

Tracks: Route 66 // I Just Want To Make Love To You // Honest I Do // Mona
(I Need You Baby) // Now I’ve Got A Witness (Like Uncle Phil And Uncle Gene) // Little By Little // I’m A King Bee // Carol // Tell Me (You're Coming Back) // Can I Get A Witness // You Can Make It If You Try // Walking the Dog

Woo! The Stones dude! Best band ever! Well, maybe not, but they sure were an important one. I guess one of their big contributions was helping rock to evolve as a form, while at the same time keeping it raw and vicious as possible? I guess that’s a good thing, since without them we’d never have had the Stooges or the Velvet Underground, and then where would we be? Well, I guess people who didn’t like glam or alt rock would be alright. Or Neu! and Can. Or, really, half the music on the world today... Personally I’m still hanging-out for the big skiffle revival – I know it’s waiting just round the corner. Any day now! By this point it should be clear that I know nothing at all about the Rolling Stones. Anyway.

I think my favourite moment on this album comes when Mick Jagger cries-out “Sting it, Ben!” on “I’m A King Bee”, only to have someone deliver a little guitar solo that sounds, somehow, exactly like the stinging of a bee. The rest of the song is kind of stupid, what with the goofy lyrics coupled with a complete lack of humour, but that one little part is pretty ace.

This is a pretty neat little album. No-one would ever mistake it for a masterpiece, but once I accepted that it was just an unassuming blues album, I found myself enjoying it quite a bit. It’s basically just an Anglicisation of the Chess Records sound, but there’s nothing wrong with that. The lyrics are generally dumb (in the case of “I’m A King Bee”, they are spectacularly dumb) and the production is really, really cheap, but sandwiched in between those two things are a few pretty neat songs. I’m particularly taken by “Mona (I Need You Baby)”, which is a gritty and groovy Bo Diddley cover with the best vocals on the album, “Can I Get A Witness”, which has a wonderful jumping boogie piano (and was apparently originally a hit for Marvin Gaye), and “Tell Me”, which was apparently one of the first song Jagger and Richards wrote together. Interestingly, in contrast to the rest of the album’s driving blues sound, the song is a quite nice doo-wop influenced number with multi-part harmonies and a jangling acoustic intro. The story goes that Keith and Mick were locked in the kitchen by their manager, and he refused to let them out until they’d written some original songs. I find it amusing that, under such circumstances, they’d churn out something so pretty. It sounds like the sort of thing you’d expect to find on the first Velvet Underground album. Maybe if they’d focused more on originals the whole record could have been this good. Although "Walking the Dog" is pretty cool too, I suppose.

So. In the end I like this. Most of the songs are nothing to write home about, but it’s at least pleasant to listen to (unlike the early efforts of another prominent British blues-rock band of the early 1960s). It’s an interesting little signpost on the road to modern rock music, and it’s enjoyable enough if you have a fondness for such things. I think it’s telling that the best songs here have a big emphasis on the groove. “Tell Me”, “Mona”, “Can I Get A Witness” – all big grooves, you know. Personally, I can’t wait till we finally get around to “Sympathy for the Devil”.

Download: The Rolling Stones - Tell Me MP3
Download: The Rolling Stones - Mona (I Need You Baby) MP3

Fun Facts: “Walking the Dog” was the first Stones song to make it to number one on the Australian charts! And here it is, being performed somewhere other than Australia:

44. Solomon Burke – Rock ‘n’ Soul (1964)

Tracks: Goodbye Baby (Baby Goodbye) // Cry to Me // Won’t You Give Him (One More Chance) // If You Need Me // Hard, It Ain’t Hard // Can’t Nobody Love You // Just Out of Reach // You’re Good for Me // You Can’t Love ‘Em All // Someone to Love Me // Beautiful Brown Eyes // He’ll Have to Go

Well this is a nifty album. An album that grows on you. Not only is Solomon Burke a great singer, a former undertaker and a Monarch of the Realm, but he’s in possession of that chief virtue of any singer/songwriter – a healthy disrespect for genre conventions. It’s in the title, really – he brings the rock, he brings the soul, and on several tracks he brings a strange, vaguely Cuban hybridisation of the two. You have to love an album that invites direct comparison to Ben E. King, Burt Bacharach and Marty Robbins. Yes, there’s country here too! “Just Out of Reach” is an honest to goodness country ballad. And he covers a Woody Guthrie song! How wonderful is that?

And not only are all these songs really well-performed, but the arrangements are great. The basic core of the group is Solomon, bass, drums, and guitar. The drums are spare but lovely, and you get some neat semi-Latin rhythms on “You Can’t Love ‘Em All”. The bass is... serviceable. It serves the songs great, but it’s never flashy. The guitar, however, is absolutely amazing. You get spiralling, picked rhythms on most of the tracks, all a little bit country, and then you get some ace bluesy noodling on the slow gospel “Someone to Love Me” (which sounds kind of like Otis Redding). This track also features a truly wonderful backing chorus, which is something that pops-up through a lot of the album. Additional elements, such as piano, choir, and the odd bit of brass (and even a woodwind, at one point) are sprinkled liberally through the record, but rather than saturating the songs, they’re used intelligently to augment the recordings. The result is an album which is really very, very well produced. Once again, the most obvious comparison would be Otis Redding, whose Otis Blue, with its stripped-down production, seems to have taken a few pointers from the Solomon Sound. In any case, I really like “Someone to Love Me”. If I have learnt one thing from doing this it is that I have all the time in the world for slow-burn gospel.

So on top of this we have Solomon Burke’s singing, which is pretty great. The guy was apparently a preacher before he became a singer, and the gospel influence is pretty prominent throughout this album. Thankfully unlike Otis Redding (who I will continue to compare him with) Burke doesn’t feel the need to ramble about over his songs with a complete disregard for the rhythm of his backing track. His voice fits with the album perfectly, in that it’s very good while at the same time never flashy for flashiness’ sake.

Unfortunately, there is a downside to all of this. While the album is immaculately put-together, it also suffers from being kind of lacklustre at times in terms of song choices, and in a few instances the tracks are getting by more on the strength of Burke as a performer than of the songs themselves. Still, this actually contributes to the charm of the album – it’s a good, old-fashioned pop album, with no real low-points and the one genuine high in “Cry to Me”. “Cry to Me” was used in Dirty Dancing, didn’t you know? One thing I never understood about the Dirty Dancing soundtrack (and believe me, I am intimately familiar with the Dirty Dancing soundtrack – ah, to be young in the early 90s and have an older sister) is that they used all those old songs to evoke a period feel, and then they dumped-in stuff like “Hungry Eyes”, “The Time of My Life” and Patrick Swayze classic “She’s Like the Wind” (someone was hoping for a chance to audition for the Scorpions). I mean, I like all three of those songs (shut up) but I always thought it a little jarring. Maybe it was meant to evoke the timelessness of the story? In any case, the use of “The Time of My Life” in the climactic dance-party sequence does make thematic sense as a way of pointing towards the exciting new world of the future, without actually having to pay the rights to use a Beatles song. Still...

In any case, this is a pretty neat little album. “Cry to Me” is amazing, “You Can’t Love ‘Em All” has some exceptionally goofy lyrics but sounds wonderful, “Someone To Love Me” is gorgeous and “Just Out of Reach” is a lovely country ballad. I’m also kind of fond of “He’ll Have to Go”, but that has more to do with my Dad have a tendency to burst into loungey renditions of it at inappropriate moments (another favourites of his happens to be “Evergreen” by Barbara Streisand). I wouldn’t call this a masterpiece, but it’s a damned nice listen.

7.5

Download: Solomon Burke - Cry to Me MP3

Download: Solomon Burke - Someone to Love Me MP3

I wish I could dance.

43. Jacques Brel - Olympia 64 (1964)

Tracks: Amsterdam // Les Timides // Le Dernier Repas //Les Jardins du Casino //Les Vieux //Les Toros //Le Tango Funebre// Le Plat Pays // Les Bonbons //Mathilde //Les Bigotes // Les Bourgeois // Jef // Au Suivant // Madeleine

Morbid, sarcastic socio-political show tunes from Belgium, you say? And with theramins? Sign me up! Who knew Lee Marvin was such a talent?

I’d previously only been familiar with Brel’s work in translation, but thankfully this list has forced me to finally face-up to my ignorance and give the original versions a chance. Unfortunately, this resulted in my being a stubborn idiot and deciding that, yes, I know enough French to understand the philosophical paronomasia of an acerbic Belgian. Well, in actual fact I only know enough French to understand one word in five when sung, which resulted in my following along to each song with the lyric sheet in front of me since for some reason my written French is much better than my spoken. And yes, I know that, having gone to all the trouble of looking-up the lyrics in French, I could have just looked-up the English translations, but damn it man it’s the principle of the thing! And if that means that I’m only vaguely aware of what most of “Les Timides” was actually about, then so be it!

(Actually, I did look-up a fair few of the translations, but that’s neither here nor there. I'm actually rather bitter about my bad French - I mean, we had a bunch of Parisian students visit once when I was in year 11, and they all spoke near-perfect English. Most of the people in my French class could barely make it through the play we had to write about trying to order lunch. Although there were those two guys who staged a dazzling rap battle about trying to find a bus station).

So. Jacques Brel. I used to be of the opinion that I vastly preferred covers of the man’s work to the originals, but after seeing Brel give these tunes the live treatment I’ve changed my mind. You see, the emphasis with these songs is quite heavily on the lyrics, and the lyrical trend is for each song to launch the kernel of an idea in the first stanza and then, through each succeeding stanza, work the notion up in greater detail until the whole things reaches a big climax – or anti-climax, depending on the song. So in effect Brel has written a bunch of show-tunes, and he acts them out as you’d expect any cabaret star to do. He works himself into a fervour over the whoring, fatalistic sailors in “Amsterdam”, and he hams it up gloriously as the cretinous suitor in the exquisitely creepy “Les Bonbons”. Then you can almost hear him crying as he sings of “Les Plats Pays” – which is an absolutely astonishing portrait of his home country – and then he minces like a twit in the role of one of “Les Timides”. It’s all brilliantly done, and gave me the sensation of an original cast recording that was far more successful than any such thing could be, given that I wasn’t missing-out (I assume) on the various silly dances.

In any case, my point is that the lyrics on this album are great. “Amsterdam” is a wonderful glimpse into this sort of hellish, beautiful vision of life amongst the mariners, while “Les Toros” is a great song about bullfighting in which the toreadors dream that they’re Garcia Lorca, while the bulls “dream of a hell where deceased men and toreadors will burn”. Anyway it sounds better in French. Then you have not one, but two! ruminations on death in “Le Dernier Repas” and “Le Tango Funebre”, and “Au Suivant”, which is a damned disturbing song about losing ones virginity in the assembly-line of a military bordello (it is a metaphor). Oh, and “Les Vieux”, which is a very sad song about getting old, and “Les Bigotes”, in which the conservatives get their reward “dans le ciel qui n’existe pas”, and then, well, really the whole album is a winner.. The only songs I don’t really like are “Les Jardins du Casino” and “Les Bourgeois”, but then that’s just me. And really it has more to do with their merely being quite good songs on an album jammed full of masterpieces. Allez au diable, vous maudits jardins! Baisez mon ane, vous bourgeois!

Really, this is just a great album. Jacques Brel is often held-up as a pinnacle of Francophone song-writing, and I can certainly see why. You have a man writing truly beautiful poetry, setting it to a great tune, and then performing it all with a vigour and gusto to set your head turning. It’s really excellent. It may be a cliche, but French when used properly is a truly wonderful language, and it’s things like this that make me wish I spoke it better. Well, this and Stephane Mallarme, but I suspect I wouldn’t understand him very well in any case.

Aargh this review is shit but the music is wonderful.Except - Who the hell is Frida the Blonde?

9/10

Look at him go!



He just can't stop!

Tracks: Hard Day’s Night // I Should Have Known Better // If I Fell // I’m Happy Just to Dance With You // And I Love Her // Tell Me Why // Can’t Buy Me Love // Any Time At All // I’ll Cry Instead // Things We Said Today // You Can’t Do That // I’ll Be Back

Review:

Another year, another Beatles album. This one was the soundtrack to a hit movie! Isn’t that exciting? It isn’t that exciting? Well, I bet that in 1963 the whole thing was pretty damned exciting. In any case I'm going through a "rock" phase at the moment, so if I was ever going to generous to early Beatles then now is the time.

The Beatles have advanced a lot since the last album, even if only in terms of song-writing focus. Meet the Beatles was a bad-to-mediocre affair with a couple of stand-outs. A Hard Day’s Night is a mediocre-to-good album with a few let-downs. It’s all a trade-off, really. The songs are still basic early 60s pop-rock, but that’s not such a bad thing given that the Beatles helped to define the style of the times. And of course the two big singles, the skiffly “Can’t Buy Me Love” and lust-draped title track, are both glorious and show an obvious sort of progression. But then you have the other tracks.

Well, if nothing else they do show variety. You have “I’m Happy Just to Dance With You” and “I’ll Be Back”, two little Shadows-styled numbers the former of which is vastly more enjoyable than the latter, and “Any Time At All”, which is also reminiscent of the Shadows but which somehow manages to both rock hard and conjure visions of Petula Clark. You have “Tell Me Why”, a deliberately goofy Everly Brothers knock-off by way of a game show theme, complete with backing vocals by the rest of the Beatles pretending to be ladies. “If I Fell” is a tepid ballad that sounds like Prudence & Patience cast-off, but much more successful is “And I Love Her” – which has stupid lyrics, but is otherwise a very finely done sort of Country & Western ballad married to a bongo-styled beat and some very nice minor riffs on the chorus. And it’s quite sweet, which is always nice. It reminds me of the ballads of early Zeppelin. And it had woodblocks, of all things! Another neat song is “I Should Have Known Better”, which sounds quite Motown, but which boasts a prominent bluesy harmonica and a decidedly “rock” chorus. And I’ll Cry Instead” is ok too, if only because I have a soft spot for skiffle. Decidedly not OK is “You Can’t Do That”, which boasts an interesting backing track but is let down by utterly abysmal vocals by John Lennon. And I mean truly, unbearably awful. I wonder why they even put this on the album – I mean, there were already 11 songs! Did they really need another one?

It’s this sort of “throw everything at a wall and see what sticks” attitude that seems to be undoing the Beatles at this stage. If this album had ended with “Can’t Buy Me Love” then it’d be a very strong, interesting set of songs. Heck, if the track order had been rearranged a bit so that it didn’t trail of so suddenly, that might have helped too. I suppose this is what happens when you record a side’s worth of A material that made the film, and then decide to pad side 2 with all the songs that weren’t good enough to be in the movie. It’s especially problematic given that the first, good, half is not especially brilliant to begin with. Then again, this can be countered by the fact that, for the first time, the album features only songs written by Lennon and McCartney. The singer-songwriter era is really kicking into gear now, which is a pretty exciting development for all concerned.

So, in the end an important artistic and commercial development on the part of the Beatles, and a pleasant listen for anyone with a fondness for early 60s pop-rock. But that's about it.

7/10

Download: The Beatles - And I Love Her MP3

41. Stan Getz & Joao Gilberto – Getz/Gilberto (1963)

Tracks: The Girl from Ipanema // Doralice // Para Muchuchar Meu Coracoa // Desafinado (Off Key) // Corcovado (Quiet Night of Quiet Stars) // So Danco Samba // O Grande Amore // Vivo Sonhando (Dreamer)

Well this is a lovely little album. A poorly-packaged album, perhaps, what with the tendency for the little information booklet to fall out of its little cardboard flap every time I pick it up (curse you Verve Masterworks!), but the music itself is quite lovely. The two songs that most people probably know from this album are “Corcovado” and “The Girl from Ipanema”, the one a lounge standard and the other a lounge standard that went to number 5 on the Billboard pop charts, but thankfully the rest of the album is pretty good too. This isn’t really surprising, since this album is generally held up as an artistic high-water mark not only of bossa nova, but of jazz in general. That it was also a massive commercial success is just icing on the cake.

So what is the deal behind this album, you ask? Do you really care? Is anyone even reading this? According to my web logs most of my traffic comes from people Googling the album cover of Birth of the Cool. On that note, I’ve earned the right to be glib. Basically, the deal with this album is that Stan Getz, having been bitten by the bossa nova bug back at Jazz Samba, eventually decided to do the next logical thing and collaborate with the inventors of the genre. So we have Antonio Carlos Jobim, both a nifty pianist and the most prominent songwriter in the genre*, and we have Joao Gilberto, the innovative guitarist and singer who hatched the bossa nova rhythm by locking himself in a room for six months and fiddling with his guitar, and they play a clutch of their songs while Getz takes some very lovely solos alongside them. Joining the trio we have Tommy Williams on bass, the awesomely named Milton Banana on drums, and, for two tracks, Joao’s non-professional wife Astrud singing very flatly prettily in English on the two big singles. And there you have it.

The results are of course quite charming. Everyone knows “The Girl from Ipanema”, with it’s little “bim-bom-bim” intro and indelible melody line, but it’s just the highpoint on a uniformly excellent album. (What’s that? You don’t like “The Girl from Ipanema”? Go to hell). The two tracks with Astrud are the stand-outs, but one gets the sense that this was just Stan Getz displaying business savvy in insisting on having a pretty girl sing in English on the two strongest songs. None of the other songs really jump out and slap you in the face with their brilliance, but then that isn’t that kind of album. The melodies are sinuous and subtle, working their way under your skin, and the rhythms just sort of bobble along in this happy little way. Each song starts with a little vocal section, and then you have the solo, and then maybe you have another little vocal packed away in there somewhere. All very nice. As a result, the tracks sort of blend into one another, but if you play any one of these songs by itself its individual genius soon becomes apparent. “Desafinado” is of course marvellous, “So Danco Samba” is just such silly fun, and Stan Getz delivers truly wonderful solos on both this and “O Grande Amor”. In fact, Stan Getz really shines through most of this album – he was already the best thing about Jazz Samba, and he’s obviously just gotten better with time – although if Getz/Gilberto belongs to anyone then it’s definitely Gilberto, who really is a beautiful (albeit very stoned-sounding) singer. Although having said this, Gilberto is all over “Doralice”, and that’s the one song on the album I’ve really not got much time for. O accursed “Doralice” :( Then again, it does stop the album from getting monotonous – if nothing else, Getz/Gilberto is a very well-paced album.

In the end, there isn’t much I can say about this album. The best word to describe it is probably “Charming”. It has such an unassuming quality to it, as though the whole thing were being tossed-off in an afternoon with no thought given to the possibility that it might become a success. “Casual genius”, you might call it – which is probably the defining trait of the genre. The result is an album that sounds like three AM in a swanky nightclub when everyone has left except for you, the band, and the girl that you’re dancing with.

I'm kind of mad that I was wrong about "Agua de Beber" being on this one, though. I love that song.

9.5/10

Download: Stan Getz & Joao Gilberto - O Grande Amor MP3

*incidentally, in the interim between reviewing Jazz Samba and getting around to this, I checked-out a couple of other bossa nova projects. Jobim's album with Elis Regina, Elis & Tom, is really good and definitely recommended. The same goes for Regina's Aquarela de Brasil from 1969, and for Elizete Cardoso's Cancao do Amor Demais from 1958. I also recall Jobim's The Composer of Desafinado, Plays being decent, too, with instrumental versions that are really heavy on the lush strings. I have now exhausted my knowledge of bossa nova completely.

40. James Brown – Live at the Apollo (1962)

Tracks: Introduction to James Brown//I'll Go Crazy//Try Me//Think//I Don't Mind//Lost Someone//Medley: Please, Please, Please, etc. //Night Train

So now ladies and gentlemen it is Star Time. Are you ready for Star Time? Thank you and thank you very kindly. It is indeed a great pleasure to present to you at this particular time national and international know as the hardest working man in show business...

A little soul, a little jazz, and now we are back round again to soul. Today we are getting down like James Brown. Or with James Brown. James Brown is the man making the music, and we are getting down alongside him in his particular manner. A manner which apparently involves lots of young women shrieking and making lewd, if the audience reaction captured on this recording is anything to go by (and we can only hope). Well can I believe it, too, as this may be the sexiest album ever recorded. And to think that the whole thing almost never came to be! Even though, at the time, everyone knew Brown’s real strength lay in his live act, the man himself was the only guy who thought it might be a good idea to actually record it. In the end, he told his label boss “To hell with you, Syd Nathan; I shall do it myself” and then he went off and recorded the album at his own expense, across three nights at the Apollo Theatre in New York. From that day forth, all sets on amateur night would be limited to no longer than ten minutes each.

Which is to say that this is a pretty great album. A lot of people argue (and their opinions are of course quite valid, though in fact they may be wrong) that this is the very best live album ever put to tape. I don’t know if that’s true, but then again it’s probably irrelevant anyway. If we compare with Sam Cooke (most obvious point of comparison) then we have a less ferocious, and considerably less raw, album here. However, James Brown’s album is by far the better recorded, and this is an important (and good thing) for one very big reason. In a word, James Brown’s band is tight. “Tight” tight. Imagine the tightest band you’ve ever heard, and then imagine it tighter. Do this even if you have heard James Brown’s backing band. His band is actually tighter than his own band. I don’t know how he managed it, but there you are. Possibly he had a gun under his cape. Then again, it’s more probably got something to do all the practice from his insane touring schedule, and the fact that Brown used to fine his musicians fifty dollars for every note they missed. I wonder what effect this approach would have had on a band like say... the Raincoats, perhaps?

The neat thing about the tightness of Brown is that it’s integral to his music. His twelve-piece band is very rhythmic in focus, and every single instrument is coming in right on time, playing a neat little phrase or soloing along perfectly against the beat. At this point James Brown was still the Godfather of Soul, not yet having been appointed Minister of The New New Super Heavy Funk (I believe George Clinton was prime-minister of that particular Parliament); as a consequence, the beats are more of the soul stomp or boogie-woogie variety, and we get a lot more throat-tearing ballads and plaintive crooning than one might expect from the singer of “Hot Pants”. Still, everything is just so damned well-executed. Things start-out slow, with a few nice ballads, then build-up to the insane jazzy groove of “Think” – which is one hell of a song, and makes me think I should be in a car chase in The Blues Brothers. The real strength of Brown as a singer was of course in his sense of rhythm, and he chants and claps hands like a loon across all two minutes of the song. Then we lull again, and the songs start stretching out, and we get a suit of beautiful ballads, the best of which is a full ten minutes long. “Lost Someone” is one of those wonderful songs that is filled with a massive amount of momentum, but which never actually goes anywhere. This may actually be my favourite sort of song, I should note – and in any case, it’s an obvious antecedent to Brown’s later, full-fledged funk (I also suspect Isaac Hayes may have taken a few pointers from this song). The band starts by running through the song as it was released as a single – a beautiful bit of gospel – and then extends the closing refrain seemingly indefinitely, riding on nothing but two gorgeous horn riffs and a six-note bass riff. And then Brown brings the audience in, basically making love to them through his song, asking them to cry “Yeah!” and having the hordes of young girls in attendance scream “YEAH!!!!” back, and every time right on the beat. And even if you are the straightest of men, you will cry "OWE!" and swoon for him when he calls for you to say "Owe". And you will envy the girls he starts singing to specifically. The way these guys – Cooke and Brown – bring the audience in as another instrument is just marvellous. I’ve never heard the studio version of the song but I can’t imagine it coming within a thousand miles of this. Brown almost breaking down into tears, croaking-out his pleas of “I’ll love you tomorrow!” Grunts and screams and the whole thing recycling itself over and again... It’s just such a wonderful song. I could listen to it all day. And then it ends, and out of nowhere it launches into the "Please, Please, Please" medley, a thunderstorm of hot and sweaty R&B. A+, James Brown and the Famous Flames. A+ indeed.

The sense of springing forward while standing still that I mentioned earlier is actually a part of what makes this album so great. Knowing what we know about Brown, the expectation is that things will get funky at some time or another. And, in fact, the whole rhythmic foundation of the band sounds like it’s on the verge of making the jump into on-the-one and break beats. But it never comes. And by the end of the album, which is only thirty-five minutes long, you’re left dazzled and energised with nowhere to go but back into the album again.

This is a truly wonderful record. In fact, I might even say that it’s better than Sam Cooke’s. I didn’t think that at first – in fact, on the first listen I considered it kind of so-so. Now, however, I’d regard it as a masterpiece of passionate concision. James Brown was a master showman, and this album is a collection of perfect songs, performed faultlessly and in exactly the right sequence. This isn’t a showy album – it doesn’t slap you in the face with its brilliance. It just quietly sidles in behind you when you’re not looking and then proceeds to kick your arse.

If you are reading this and you haven't heard this album, then drop what you are doing and acquire it at once.

9.5/10.

Download: James Brown - Lost Someone (Live at the Apollo) mp3

39. Charles Mingus - The Black Saint and The Sinner Man (1963)

Tracklist: Solo Dancer // Duet Solo Dancers // Group Dancers // Trio and Group Dancers

Review:

Ladies and gentlemen, this is just damned imposing. See also: impressive, impassion, and impossible. It's not an album, it's a monument. That this whole thing was actually composed – that somewhere, out there, there are charts for this thing – is simply baffling beyond believe; much easier to believe that it poured-out of some chink in the fabric of reality. In fact, I bet this is what Cthulhu listens to when he’s relaxing at home. But of course, it was written down, and arranged, and rehearsed, and yes it was even played – by Charles Mingus, no less, supergreat jazz-dude and the man I’d most like to buy a drink for (if I had a time machine).

The Clown was the first jazz album I ever heard. I downloaded it along with John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, after someone starting asking people to choose between the two albums in a thread about “Haitian Fight Song”. Well, I sided with The Clown, and since then I’ve never looked back. Something about Mingus’ music just sort of clicked with me – like Jaki Liebezeit’s drumming, the Fiery Furnaces’ ADD-fuelled story-telling collages, or VU-inspired lunatic guitar-terrorism, it just seems like the perfect soundtrack to the human mind. This seems appropriate, given the album’s origins. Charles Mingus was a famously unstable man, and he not only spent time in a New York mental hospital prior to writing this album, but had his psychiatrist contribute to the liner notes. The album itself is actually a ballet, written as a sort of insight into the nature of Mingus’ manic-depressive mind. The result is a schizophrenic tempest of Latin guitars, swing-rhythms, careening trumpets, lyrical piano passages, pummelling drums, pulsing bass, and turn-on-a-dime tonal shifts; an album that’s simply awe-inspiring in its complexity, emotional effectiveness and raw, unhinged beauty.

The most impressive thing about this album is probably that it isn’t actually an album, in the traditional sense. Rather than being a collection of songs, “The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady” is actually a single coherent composition, complete with recurring phrases and a sort-of narrative build. At the same time, Mingus seems to have conceived of the thing as a recording project, and unlike most jazz albums of the time The Black Saint... actually makes extensive use of sophisticated studio techniques such as overdubbing, editing, and the mixing-in of new elements. Mingus was one of the finest writers to ever work in jazz, and the combination of his prodigious compositional ability, the virtuosity of the assembled players (who were given freedom to refine their parts even further in rehearsals), and the meticulous approach afforded by the recording studio all combine to produce what is simultaneously one of the most elaborate and the tightest albums ever produced. Hell, forget albums – I’d go so far as to argue that this is one of the finest things anyone ever composed, period. Which is appropriate given that Mingus (who was not always the humblest of men) self-consciously constructed the thing as his defining masterwork. How often does that actually succeed? Not nearly often enough.

It’s a masterpiece, really. It sways from beauty, to terror, and round about along every possible feeling in between. Put it loud on a stereo, lie down to listen, and I bet you won’t move for the next three quarters of an hour. Mingus knew how to apply good writing to the evocation of a mood, and in this album he conjured-up every mood you’d ever care to feel, and he guides you through them like Virgil through Hades to the glorious madness of the conclusion. This is what the world would sound like if you captured it in a bottle, with all the hope and horror that such entails. Perfect.

A+

Download: Charles Mingus - Trio Dancers mp3

(although really you should listen to this in its entirety.