1967

                First of all, 1967 seems to be the first year where the album, rather than the single, is the big-deal medium.  We’ve had albums, and even great albums, before this, but they never seemed quite as much a single statement  rather than a collection of songs.  Certainly Revolver was more a collection of songs, although Pet Sounds was more of a single piece (also maybe Bringing It All Back Home).  But it isn’t until 1967 that carving up different UK and US albums stops being common practice, so that means something, I think.  Not to be overstated, though.  If Sgt. Pepper counts as a concept album because its songs are centered around a common theme, then I give the nod for “first concept album” to Chubby Checker’s Your Twist Party, which seems to be a concept album about, well, doing the twist.  This is all well and good, except it makes my “listen to all the songs in a given year on shuffle” MO less effective.  So this may slow the project down some.  Life goes on.

                1967 is also the big year of psychedelia.  We saw some precursors last year (the Yardbirds, some of the Beatles’ stuff, etc.), but it’s all over this year.  And I struggled for awhile to find something to say about it.  I think ultimately it comes down to this: psychedelia is a genre (maybe the genre) where I find the most divergent swings between transcendently excellent and mind-numbingly bad.  Some genres for me rarely diverge from “ok”, and the bands tend to cluster around the mean (this is a big reason why I don’t love indie-rock in its 2010s incarnation: it’s all just so…pleasant but unremarkable; nice enough, but does anyone apart from their moms really get excited about bands like Wye Oak or Beach House or whoever?).  In some, its slanted heavily in one direction or the other (I think most techno/electronica/whatever is fairly bad, but the genre has some great examples).  But I almost never think that psych is “ok.”  Either it’s some of my favorite music of all time, or it’s so terrible I’m embarrassed to be listening to it.  Which, fine, is true of a lot of genres.  What frustrates me about psych is that I can’t seem to figure out what separates ‘good’ from ‘bad’ in my ears except to say “I like it” or “I don’t like it”.  By contrast, I can basically tell you what I think constitutes a country song I’ll like, for instance, and it leans heavily toward the ‘outlaw country’ of the 1970s.  There’ll be the occasional example that breaks those rules (either me liking something I didn’t expect, or not liking something I expected to).  I can’t find any real logic to why I do or don’t like a psych song.  It’s not whether it’s pop or what I think of as ‘deep’ psych.  Sometimes the pop stuff is glorious noise, other times it’s treacle.  Sometimes the deep stuff is magnificently outré, other times it’s a pretentious draggy mess.  It’s not whether it’s orchestrated or not, whether it’s jammy or not.  It’s not even whether or not I think the singer is a pretentious ass.  I think “Horse Latitudes” by the Doors is an example of everything wrong with circa 1967 psycheldelia, but I love me some 13^th Floor Elevators, and Roky Erickson is no more or less a pretentious pseudo-mystical ass than Jim Morrison.  But anyway, on to the details.

                I suppose a good place to start with psychedelia is with one of the few “classic” psych albums that I think lives up to its hype and more, Pink Floyd’s Piper At The Gates Of Dawn.  I’m enough of a fan of the later, prog Floyd to not be one of those people who say it’s the best, or even moreso the “only real” Floyd album, but it is the lone example of ‘psychedelic whimsy’ that comes off as genuinely unnerving & a little terrifying in an Alice-in-Wonderland kind of way, as opposed to just goofy and embarrassing.  It really doesn’t sound like much else in 1967, although it sounds like a lot of the ’67 bands tried to mimic it.  Too bad it’s a style that’s almost impossible to get right (certainly even the rest of Floyd couldn’t do it after they lost Syd).

                The two biggest bands in rock, the Beatles and the Stones, both released their psychedelic records this year, the very good but overrated Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and the underrated but fairly bad Their Satanic Majesties’ Request.  This probably requires a bit of explaining.  The Boomers, for whatever reason, have picked Pepper as the Beatles album, and I’m not really sure why.  It’s not their best (Revolver), it’s not their most ambitious (The White Album), it’s not their great leap forward (Rubber Soul), it’s not their biggest in terms of musical impact (Please Please Me, probably).  Really, it’s just a continuation & expansion of their Rubber Soul-Revolver sound.  I don’t want to slam it too hard, though; it’s a very good record, but it’s neither in contention to be my favorite Beatles record or my favorite record of 1967.  The Stones, on the other hand, may have gotten slammed for chasing trends, but Satanic Majesties  is a fantastically brave record, really.  Even acknowledging that the Stones were much more of a Beatlesesque pop band in 1965-67 than they’ll be remembered, this is a big dip into Pink Floyd-style deep psych, not the relatively conservative pop-psych of Pepper.  (and by Floyd-style, I’m talking Piper At The Gates Floyd, not Dark Side of the Moon).  So I give credit to them for being musically adventurous.  Unfortunately, the results are…uneven.  And pretty much all the worthwhile stuff was released as singles (In Another Land/The Lantern & She’s A Rainbow/2000 Light Years From Home).  “2000 Man” is good, and “The Citadel” isn’t terrible, but the rest is really, really bad.  On the other hand, “2000 Light Years From Home” is fantastic.  Also, their non-album 1967 single, “We Love You”/”Dandelion” is also tremendous.  “We Love You” is actually one of my favorite psych singles of all time, and definitely the most unjustly-forgotten Stones single. 

                Also worth noting is that both the Stones and the Beatles released 2(!) albums in 1967.  A big contrast from the average every 2-3 year cycle nowadays.  Magical Mystery Tour is uneven, as befits its odds-&-sods nature; the EP/Side One part especially so.  Still, there are days I like it better than Pepper.  And Between The Buttons is, I think, the most underrated Stones album.  It’s basically their version of the Kinks’ contemporary sound, and there’s a bunch of great songs there.

                Speaking of the Kinks, they don’t sound as out-of-time as revisionist historians would have you believe.  They’re not getting into the fuzzy psych stuff, but the Beatles on Pepper sound closer to the Kinks on Something Else than they do to Jimi Hendrix or Pink Floyd.  At least in 1967, they don’t sound a lot different from their peers.  Also not sounding especially psychedelic, but putting out one of the best albums of their career is the Who, my prime example of how you’re now starting to get to albums that need to be treated as albums.  Apart from the fact that it’s got some of their best songs, I love that The Who Sell Out has a real sense of humor.  Even if Pete Townshend does turn an otherwise lovely song into a joke about deodorant (“Odorono”). 

                Also catching up on misc. British Invasion groups, Cream finally sound like they’ve caught up with the Beck-era Yardbirds.  Disraeli Gears sounds like Clapton doing his version of the Beck-birds sound.  Not that he’s mimicking, but more like it’s what they’d have sounded like if he’d stayed in the group and done his take on fuzz rock, right down to the weak singing and the album with an uneven fantastic/forgettable track listing.  I’m sure there are Cream die-hards out there, but for my money, if you pick up The Very Best of Cream, you’re not missing more than one or two essential songs off the albums.  Of course, I do have 3 of the 4 Cream albums, so who am I to talk?  The Yardbirds themselves, though, are running out of gas, unfortunately.  Jeff Beck is out and Jimmy Page is in, and while Page is a great guitarist, his album with them (their second, remarkably enough) is pretty uneven, moreso than Roger The Engineer.  Some of it’s great in its own right (esp. “Glimpses” – classic chant-y Yardbirds psych), some of it is interesting as presaging Led Zeppelin (esp. “White Summer” aka “Black Mountain Side” and (as a bonus track on my version) “Dazed And Confused”).  Also, one last Beck-Page Yardbirds song came out this year, a (really good) rewrite of “Train Kept A Rollin’”.  I’d have loved to have heard that lineup keep going a little longer.

                Leaving both Cream and the Yardbirds in the dust, though, is Jimi Hendrix.  You can trace precedents for a lot of what he did (the guitar sound from Jeff Beck, the stagecraft from Pete Townshend), but it’s all just giant step above.   Are You Experienced? is such a fantastic breakthrough of a record, with so much influence on everything that came after.  Not just psychedelia and metal, either.  Give a listen to songs like “Purple Haze” or “Are You Experienced?”, imagine them with a Mike Thorne or Martin Hannett production, and they’d sound like Wire.  I’m not saying that Jimi Hendrix was a proto-post-punk (or whatever elaborate construction), just that he was remarkable not just as a player, or because he added fuzz tone, but compositionally as well.  Here I come back to my theme that, in order to do deconstruction, you need to be able to do construction well first.  Hendrix spent years as a journeyman sideman for various artists, and it shows in how his songs aren’t just well-played, or entertainingly noisy, but really tight constructions.  Similarly (in this way if few others), what the Velvet Underground were doing on their debut really works both because of Lou Reed’s years in the pop-songwriting mill and because they put otherwise solid but not radical pop songs like “Sunday Morning” and “There She Goes Again” next to cacophonous songs like “Venus In Furs” and “The Black Angel’s Death Song.”  It really reminds you that they’re doing this on purpose, and not (Fugs-style) because they’re not good enough to do otherwise.

                Otherwise in the US, it’s interesting to me how much West Coast psychedelia really sounds much more heavily-indebted to folk-rock than its UK counterpart.  At this point , the best of the San Fran bands is Moby Grape, a band otherwise forgotten by history, but apparently once hyped to be the ‘next big thing.’  They weren’t, but their first album is some very good folk-rock with a light touch of psychedelia.  And the songs and playing are both better than, for instance, the Jefferson Airplane or the pretty-amateurish Country Joe & the Fish or early Janis Joplin.  Still, the most exciting thing out of San Fran in 1967 was Sly & The Family Stone (more below).  Doing far better in 1967 is LA.  On the deep-psych end are two Doors albums.  I kinda feel about the Doors like I do about Nine Inch Nails (oddly enough).  Both are bands I loved in high school, but both are also bands I respect now without ever really wanting to listen to.  The Doors to me were always better thought of as an organ-driven rock band with a singer with a great voice; Morrison’s lyrics were to be tolerated because the sound was so great, not celebrated as poetry.  So, in terms of Doors epics from 1967, “The End” < “When The Music’s Over”, but “When The Music’s Over” << “Soul Kitchen”, the former just a rewrite of the later with more pretentious lyrics.  Also (leaving LA), the best extended poetry/jam by a Morrison was Van’s “TB Sheets,” which fuses the rocking energy of Them with the more abstract poetry of solo Van.  Also an absolutely stunning harmonica sound.

                The best album out of LA in 1967, though, was hands-down Love’s Forever Changes.  I don’t understand how this one was slept on.  It’s not hard-rocking in the mode of my other ’67 favorites, but it’s just about perfect.  And I don’t even know how to categorize it.  At times I hear elements of the Byrds (who Love sounded a lot like on their debut last year), Motown, and psych.  What I don’t hear a lot of is the much rougher psych-rock sound of their first 1967 lp (Da Capo).  More than anything, though, I think it sounds like a truer follow-up to Pet Sounds than anything the Beach Boys actually released.  Much weaker harmonies (of course), but following on that meticulous orchestral arrangement.  That makes it sound too derivative, though.  Just listen to it if you haven’t.  One of the best parts about the 1967 listening was reminding myself just how much I love this album, and realizing how unique it sounded, while also sounding very much of its time.  Da Capo is great too, for what it’s worth, or rather the first half is (in a more rocking sound than Forever Changes).  The second half is the first example of a highly-regrettable fad in late-60s records: the wanky side-long psychedelic jam (read: filler).  So I think of Da Capo as a great EP.

                The Beach Boys themselves tried (and failed) to put out SMiLE, which got a release in 2011 approximating what it would have sounded like.  It’s good, but I suspect the actual version would have been trimmed somewhat (the released version being twice as long as any other Beach Boys album to date).   Still, you can hear the original ambition: to do an album of songs as intricate & complex as “Good Vibrations.”  If they had pulled it off, it would have been an easy contender for best album of the year, and I would have loved to have heard what a fully-functional Beach Boys would go on to do.  They’re still good, but the actually-released Beach Boys stuff from here on out makes them sound more followers than leaders (until they get really bad in the 70s).  What I don’t think SMiLE would have been, though, is tremendously influential.  Love managed an approximation of the Pet Sounds sound, and others would later too, but the SMiLE multi-part pop-prog style is just too complex, and I doubt many could pull it off, or even attempt it credibly.

                Someone who does attempt it credibly, though, is surprisingly enough Neil Young.  I’d generally thought of Buffalo Springfield as fitting into the Byrds country/folk-rock continuum, but that’s really based on what their members would go on to do.  The Springfield themselves, though, were a fantastically diverse pop band, with, yes, some early country-rock leanings, but also a healthy dose of c. 1967 cutting edge pop music in the British Invasion style, Stones-style ragers, and most surprisingly enough, Neil Young’ s attempts to pull off a “Good Vibrations” or (more clearly) a “Heroes & Villains.”  Obviously not a straight copying of the sound, but songs like “Expecting to Fly” and (especially) “Broken Arrow” are definitely Neil’s attempts at that sound.  Obviously the members of Buffalo Springfield went on to long & interesting careers, but for the first time I find myself thinking of the band not just as a point of origin but a missed opportunity that I would have loved to have seen keep going beyond just one more contractual-obligation record the next year.

                In the world of soul, I have a lot less to say.  Not really a lot of change at either Stax or Motown.  Motown’s formula is starting to show a little bit.  I’d not noticed before this project, because in a vacuum the songs are all still excellent, but Motown’s been mining the same sound for most of the decade now, and while there have been a few tweaks here and there, it’s not nearly so fresh, esp. when on the rock side of things, it’s hard to believe it’s only been 5 years since the post-rockabilly doldrums.  Stax is a little more changeable, but not a lot of difference from 1966.  The most forward-sounding thing I heard in the world of soul/R&B came from Sly & the Family Stone.  Just a pair of singles released, but so remarkably ahead-of-their- time that I double-checked the dating.  They sound so much like the hard funk of the 1970s.  I didn’t realize how far ahead of the curve Sly & The Family Stone were.  I don’t know that they’d necessarily have been even classified as soul/R&B and not rock in 1967, but their influence is definitey felt more on the funk/R&B side of things, since rock (sadly) stops being dance music right about now.

                My last note on soul is that this is the year the Charmels released “As Long As I’ve Got You.”  You may not think you know it, but if you were listening to hip-hop in the 90s, you’ll recognize it immediately.  Cash rules everything around me.

Song of the Year:  “Purple Haze” – The Jimi Hendrix Experience, really without any close challengers.  A song that I still remember how it blew me away when I first heard it

Album of the Year:  Are You Experienced? – The Jimi Hendrix Experience.  It’s a year with some very good albums, but this one towers above all of them.  By no means perfect (“Third Stone From The Sun” is a waste of tape), but it practically divides rock into pre-Hendrix and post-Hendrix eras.  My runners-up are Buffalo Springfield Again, Love’s Forever Changes, and Pink Floyd’s Piper At The Gates of Dawn. 

Artist Most Benefiting from Reevaluation:  Sly & The Family Stone.  I hadn’t realized how far ahead of the curve, and how influential, they really were.

Artist Most Diminished in Reevaluation:  The Rolling Stones.  I’d bought into the revisionist hype that Satanic Majesties was a lost masterpiece, but it’s not.  The Stones made good psychedelic singles, but couldn’t cut it in album form

Albums Listened To:

13th Floor Elevators - Easter Everywhere

B.B. King - B.B. King

Bob Dylan - The Basement Tapes

Bob Dylan - The Bootleg Series Vol. 2 : Rare And Unreleased, 1963-1974

Buffalo Springfield – Again

Buffalo Springfield - Retrospective - The Best of Buffalo Springfield

Country Joe & the Fish - Electric Music for the Mind and Body

Country Joe & the Fish - I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die (mono)

Country Joe & the Fish - The Collected Country Joe & the Fish

Cream – Disraeli Gears

Cream - The Very Best Of Cream

David Bowie – Starting Point

Frank Zappa - Absolutely Free

Herman's Hermits - Their Greatest Hits

James Brown - 20 All Time Greatest Hits!

Jefferson Airplane - Surrealistic Pillow

John Lee Hooker - The Ultimate Collection 1948-1990

Love – Da Capo

Love - Forever Changes

Merle Haggard - HAG: The Best Of Merle Haggard

Miles Davis Quintet - Miles Smiles

Mitch Ryder & The Detroit Wheels – Sock It To Me!

Moby Grape – Moby Grape

Neil Young - Decade

Otis Redding - Remember Me

Otis Redding/Jimi Hendrix - Historic Performances Recorded at the Monterey International Pop Festival

Pink Floyd - The Pink Floyd Early Singles

Sly & The Family Stone - The Essential Sly & The Family Stone [Disc 1]

Stevie Wonder - At The Close Of A Century

The Beach Boys - Good Vibrations: Thirty Years Of The Beach Boys

The Beach Boys - The Smile Sessions

The Beatles - 1967-1970

The Beatles - Magical Mystery Tour

The Beatles - Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band

The Byrds - II: Cruising Altitude

The Doors - The Doors

The Ethiopians - Everything Crash: The Best of The Ethiopians

The Jimi Hendrix Experience - Are You Experienced?

The Jimi Hendrix Experience - Axis: Bold As Love

The Jimi Hendrix Experience - BBC Sessions

The Kinks - Something Else By The Kinks

The Kinks - The Kink Kronikles

The Rolling Stones - Between The Buttons

The Rolling Stones - Singles Collection: The London Years

The Rolling Stones – Their Satanic Majesties’ Request

The Turtles - Happy Together

The Velvet Underground - The Velvet Underground & Nico

The Who - The Ultimate Collection

The Who - The Who Sell Out

The Yardbirds - Having A Rave-Up

The Yardbirds - Little Games

Them - The Story Of Them

Traffic - Mr. Fantasy

V/A - Hitsville U.S.A.

V/A - Nuggets: Original Artyfacts From The First Psychedelic Era

V/A - Psychedelic Pop

V/A - Rushmore

V/A - Samba Soul 70!

V/A - Stax/Volt Singles 1959-1968

V/A - The Stax/Volt Revue: Live In London, Vol. 1

Van Morrison - Bang Masters

William Shatner - The Transformed Man