1963

1963

                The first time I have enough music to handle a year entirely by itself!  However, between two albums, a bunch of singles, and most of their BBC sessions, 40% of that music is by the Beatles.  I can’t really complain, though, since my big revelation from 1963 is that the early Beatles, which I’d always dismissed as lightweight fun, sound like punk rock after my 1950-62 listening (although Love Me Do did appear at the end of that period).  Following a relatively down period of 1960-62, here’s a band tapping into the same raw energy of the rockabilly cats, sounding much more vibrant than anything their contemporaries are doing.  They’re not perfect, but I begin to understand just why those early Beatles records made such an impact.  They were the Ramones of 1963.

                The Rolling Stones, who first appear in 1963, however, suffer from context.  The Beatles sound like they’re revitalizing rock & roll, bringing the energy of the mid-50s rockers back after a turn toward more sophisticated but less wild arrangements by the likes of Brian Wilson and Phil Spector.  The Stones, however, sound like a tamer version of the blues acts that are still tearing it up in the early 1960s.  “Stoned,” however, the druggy, mostly instrumental b-side to “I Wanna Be Your Man,” lives up to the Stones’ image in a way that the a-sides don’t.  It also sounds a lot like what’s happening at Stax, which is some of the exciting stuff happening in 1963.  Some of it still sounds throwback-y, but a lot of it is starting to get that classic Stax mix of tightness & grit.  Oddly, my Motown collection (Hitsville USA) has nothing from 1963 on it.

                Elsewhere, the Beach Boys and Dylan both are sounding more interesting.  The Beach Boys sound positively tame next to the Beatles, but still are a great pop band.  Dylan still sounds too bound by the dictates of NYC folk purism, but his originals are starting to move beyond just being clever to being classics (and here I’m talking much more about “Don’t Think Twice” and “Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall” than “Blowin’ in the Wind,” which shows its age quite a bit).  Phil Spector’s hitting his peak, though, and most of the best singles of 1963 are Spector productions. 

                Oh, and both the Skatalites and Toots & The Maytals have started putting stuff out.  Not much to say about them, as it’s just a couple of singles.  The Skatalites are still making jazz singles after American jazz had kind of forgotten about it, so that’s nice.  Toots & the Maytals sound more folky than they will going forward also.   It’ll be nice going forward to look at how Jamaican artists fit in with what’s happening elsewhere contemporaneously. 

Song of the Year: “And Then He Kissed Me”  Nobody does that big sound like Phil Spector, and this is one of his best.

Album of the Year:  The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.  And not just because I ripped off the cover for my wedding save-the-dates.  Not my favorite Dylan album, but the best of his early acoustic stuff, and its only real challenger for best album from the NYC folk scene was next year’s “Another Side of Bob Dylan,” so there’s that.

Artist Most Benefiting from Reevaluation:  The Beatles.  I knew they were good, but honestly mostly from their 1965-on stuff.  But that early stuff is, in its own way, more exciting than anything they did after, at least in context.  And learning things like that is, after all, kind of the point.

Artist Most Diminished in Reevaluation:  The Beach Boys, I think.  Stacked side-by-side against what the Beatles and the Stones were doing, they’re not as rocking, and stacked next to the Spector stuff, they’re not as sophisticated.  Later, they get better, obviously, and they’re still the best American pop band of the year, but circa 1963 Beach Boys sound than their peers in context.

1960-1962

1960-1962

                The first of our relatively fallow periods in the history of rock.  Rockabilly is mostly done, and our heroes of 50s rock are dead (Buddy Holly) or drifting out of the rawer sounds of the last decade.  Elvis is getting into his “I Can’t Help Falling In Love With You”/”Marie’s The Name” era, where the songs are good, and the performances are good, but they pale next to the music he made before the Army, in terms of energy or innovation.  In the 50s, he sounded fine next to Howlin’ Wolf and Elmore James; now he starts to sound more like a peer of Frank Sinatra.  Not bad, by any means, but not as interesting.  Chuck Berry, meanwhile, seems more interested in fitting in with the bluesmen.  Unfortunately, it’s not his strong suit.  He doesn’t have the voice for it, and his playing style is more well-suited to the up-tempo, jumpy rock & roll sound. 

                By no means is it all dire, though.  The Beach Boys are active now, and even at this early point, their harmonies are fantastic.  In a couple years, they’ll be hands-down the best harmony-singers in rock to the present day, but even on their debut the only group singers in the same league as them are the Phil Spector groups.  Still, pre-63 Beach Boys isn’t all that exciting.  The Spector stuff, though, is pretty excellent.  Obviously a much different (more produced/less raw) sound than the 50s stuff, but well worth getting to know.

                Also, both Motown & Stax are active by now.  Motown is fantastic right out of the gate, although like Spector a more polished sound than the rawer sounds of the 1950s.  Stax is more hit-and-miss.  Otis Redding’s debut single (These Arms of Mine) is in 1962, and he emerged more-or-less already fully-formed.  Other Stax stuff from this era sounds a lot more old-fashioned to modern ears.

                Bob Dylan’s debut also is 1962 (plus I’ve got a lot of Bootleg Series stuff from 1961-62.  Early Bob isn’t all that exciting, though.  He’s a clever lyricist, and he can play and write in the folk vein fine, but like Pete Seeger in the 50s, sounds a little too constrained by the formalism of playing “folk” as understood by New York City intellectuals.  Still, it sounds like he’s trying to tap into something deeper than the pop stuff of the time, so I get why he (and the NYC folk scene generally) appealed to people.

                My only other note on this is realizing how much more active in the 1960s the Chess artists were than I thought.  I knew that both Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters made atrocious psychedelic albums in the late 60s, but in my mind, songs like “Ain’t Superstitious”  and “Little Red Rooster” were older than the early 1960s.  Makes me rethink the mid-60s British blues-rockers as less like crate-diggers and more as covering their contemporaries. 

                Oh, and we get our first 3 versions of “Apache” in this period.  Bert Weedon and the Shadows, both from 1960, and Jordan Ingmann from1961. 

Song of the “Year”:  “Money (That’s What I Want)”, probably.  Something by either Motown or Spector, for sure, as those were the two most reliable sources of singles in this period, and “Money” has such a great propulsive energy.  Plus not even the Beatles could outdo the Barrett Strong original.

Album of the “Year”:  The Louvin Brothers Satan Is Real.  Like 1950-1955, a lot of the great stuff was still singles-based outside of jazz.  And I’m less enamored of early 60s jazz than what came before or what was right around the corner.  So I’ll throw the title to one of the rare fully-formed country albums of the period.

Artist Most Benefiting from Reevaluation:  The Mar-Keys.  I’d always unfairly considered them a “little brother” band to the MGs, but their instrumentals were some of the best stuff coming out of Stax in the first few years.

Artist Most Diminished in Reevaluation: None, really.  This is a period of music I’d basically just ignored before now.

1956-1959

1956-1959

                There’s really good stuff in here.  As a jazz fan, I knew that already.  As a rock & roll fan, I think I always underestimated the 50s stuff as historically important and interesting to hear revived later on, but that’s hardly fair.  This early stuff is at least as good as a lot of what came after.  Getting used to the thin clean production takes some getting used to.  Also, it’s still very close to what’s going on in country & blues at this point.  My Sun Records comp, for instance, has one disc of “country” and one disc of “rock & roll,” but the line is pretty arbitrary.  Johnny Cash, for instance, goes on the country disc, but that’s probably only because of what he did after.  Otherwise he sounds at least as rock & roll as anything Elvis was doing at the same time, at least on things like “I Walk the Line” and “Folsom Prison Blues.” 

                My ‘real’ country diminishes substantially in this period, which is of course more to do with my collection than what was really going on then.  I missed all the Hank Williams from the early 1950s, though.  The blues stuff keeps being very good, and fits well alongside the rockabilly.  Chuck Berry, though, much better at playing rock & roll than the blues.

                Overall, a period with a very clear pop/jazz – blues/rock & roll split.  Good stuff on both sides, but it doesn’t sound right all mixed together.  Still, I expected the late 1950s to be of more academic interest, and less fun in its own right.  So that was pretty exciting.

Song of the “Year”:  Dave Brubeck – “Take Five”  One of my favorite songs for years and years, and one of the best examples of how to fuse progressive intelligent composition into a catchy pop song.

Album of the Year: Thelonious Monk – Brilliant Corners.  When I explain to people why I hate the Animal Collective, this is my go-to example.  You need to master the rules before you can deconstruct them.  If you do, you get masterpieces like this (or, more modernly, things like Kid A).  If you don’t, it just sounds like you’re using intellectualization as a fig leaf to cover your incompetence.

Artist Most Benefiting from Reevaluation:  Hard to say.  Really a genre as a whole.  That early rockabilly is pretty amazing.

Artist Most Diminished in Reevaluation:  Buddy Holly, surprisingly enough.  He’s still very very good, but sounds a lot tamer than many of his contemporaries.  Also, his later, more orchestrated stuff points toward the safer, mellower stuff of the next couple of years.

1950-1955

   1950-1955 

            Unsurprisingly, Édith Piaf sounds entirely appropriate next to Frank Sinatra.  Somewhat more surprisingly, Miles Davis sounds really good mixed in with the both of them.  I tend to think of Davis in terms of his big album-sized statement albums (Kind of Blue, In A Silent Way, Bitches Brew), and forget that jazz used to be a singles medium, and Davis got his start doing that.  And even the longer stuff still sounds mighty right next to the vocal jazz of the period.  Not that it should be surprising, but I just separate these things in my mind.

                Also, whether it’s the music as a whole or just a reflection of my collection, my early 50s stuff splits pretty clearly between jazz/pop on one side and country/blues on the other.  Whatever happened since then, it’s fun to remember that, this early in their evolution, the biggest difference between country and blues was who played the music, and nothing all that great in the music itself.  And, of course, by the mid-50s, we start to get our first proper rock n’ roll, which at this point fits really well alongside the blues and country.  None of this is particularly new or insightful, I guess, but go listen to Elvis’s Sun Sessions.  1) already Elvis was kicking tremendous amounts of ass.  2) the difference between Elvis and, say, Hank Williams on one side or John Lee Hooker on the other is that Elvis was more grungy than the former and more frenetic than the latter.  Also definitely worth noting that in this period we get Chuck Berry, our other great early rock ‘n roller, the one who could play an instrument and write songs.  Still, in 1955, Elvis feels more important, if just because he less clearly can be pushed in with either blues or country.  Also, he’s a far better singer than any of the other early rock & rollers, apart from maybe Gene Vincent.

Song of the “Year”: Elvis Presley – “That’s All Right”.  I think “Rocket 88” has a stronger case for the first rock & roll song, but “That’s All Right” is the debut of a massively important artist, and still tears today. 

Album of the Year: Probably Miles Davis’s “Bag’s Groove.”  But largely because this is still a singles-dominated era.  Still, a good one.  If it wasn’t an after-the-fact comp, Elvis’s Sun Sessions would be a contender.  That’s just good stuff. 

Artist Most Benefiting from Reevaluation:  Édith Piaf.  I picked up some Édith Piaf mostly because Liz likes her so much.  But it turns out there’s a reason for that. 

Artist Most Diminished in Reevaluation:  Pete Seeger.  Already by the 1950s, folk starts to sound formulaic and imitative, concerned with sounding “correct” than evolving as a living genre.  Still, that’s probably harsher than I mean.  The songs & performances are all very good, and there’s a reason they’ve been summer camp sing-a-long classics.  But it pales next to artists like Leadbelly & Woody Guthrie in the 40s and earlier.

Introduction

Introduction

                So 2011 was a really terrible year for music.  I don’t know if it’s because I’m a bitter old man now, or just the luck of the release schedule, but apart from the new Black Keys, the SMiLE ‘reissue’, and maybe the new Fucked Up, I don’t think I heard anything I’m likely to be listening to a year from now.  So that, combined with my getting the Beatles mono boxed set for my birthday (thanks, Andrew!), has got me looking backward.  At which point I noticed that iTunes has already noted the year in which things were released.  Hence this project.  I’ve decided to listen through my music collection year-by-year, spending no less than one day (and possibly more if a year is either really good or I have a lot of music from that year) listening more-or-less exclusively to music from that year.  Because my collection is spotty before 1963, I’ll handle those periods in bigger-than-a-year chunks.  I have nothing interesting to say about the 1920s-40s, as those periods are so dominated by a few virtually random collections, so I’d basically just be talking about how I feel about Jimmy Rogers or Robert Johnson or Duke Ellington, rather than their context.  Because I find this fascinating, but I don’t know who else will, I’ve decided to make it a blog that you can conveniently ignore rather than gassing on about it to whomever may be around me. 

Rules, everybody loves rules!

1)      I go by earliest release.  Singles that later appear on albums in later years get listened to the earlier year. 

2)      Live albums released while the band is an active concern get listened to year of release.  Archival live albums get listened to year of recording.  In Led Zeppelin terms, “The Song Remains The Same” gets listened to in 1976, but “How The West Was Won” gets listened to in 1972, not 2003.  Odds & sods comps get listened to year of recording, if possible.

3)      I’m not double-checking itunes’ work.  I’m crazy, but not that crazy.