1972

                So it’s been a while since last I posted.  I could blame work or sickness, but honestly I think it’s clear that this blog is more important than either my career or health.  Rather, it’s a function largely of how much I had to absorb in 1972.  It’s not so much the best year I’ve encountered (still ’68), but it’s got a lot of stuff going on , and a lot of stuff that seems to be operating in separate discrete worlds.  Even the previously unified world of R&B is starting to splinter now.  Earlier, artists like James Brown and Sly & The Family Stone comfortably straddled the worlds of soul and funk, but by now they’re starting to splinter into very different sounding camps.  I don’t want to overstate this divide, since they still owe a lot to each other, but Funkadelic sounds closer to Captain Beefheart in 1972 than to Isaac Hayes or Curtis Mayfield.  George Clinton and Beefheart share a similar off-kilter sensibility, at any rate.  In soul, on the other hand, I’ve talked about a “cinematic soul” sound as early as ’66, but I mean it a little more literally this time, as both Curtis Mayfield (Superfly) and Marvin Gaye (Trouble Man) try their hands at the blaxploitation soundtrack gig.  They sound very similar, actually, although I give the edge to Mayfield, since he wrote more actual songs, while Gaye tended more toward writing a score, with recurring motifs and chiefly instrumental songs.  Who they both sound the most indebted-to (as did Hayes last year) are the Temptations and their psychedelic-soul sound.  That sound, incidentally, probably peaks this year with “Papa Was A Rolling Stone.” 

                Elsewhere in soul, if Marvin sounds heavily influenced by Isaac Hayes and Curtis Mayfield, Stevie Wonder, esp. on his 1^st album of the year, sounds like someone who’s been listening to a lot of What’s Going On.  There’s more funk in Stevie’s sound, and his lyrical concerns are more focused on romantic love than the broader social concerns of Marvin, but especially on “Superwoman,” the song structure shows a clear debt.  Music Of My Mind gets tagged a lot as Wonder’s great leap forward, and I more-or-less buy it, but he really comes into his own on Talking Book, the first of three Stevie Wonder albums no serious music collection can be without.  Music had a synthesis of a lot of Wonder’s broader influences, but Talking Book brings it all together into  pop-song constructions worthy of the classic ‘60s Motown sides.  Also, I’m not sure, but I think Michael Jackson stole his little “hee-hoo!” exclamations from “Maybe Your Baby.”  Jackson, by the way, has a big hit this year with a love song to his pet rat. 

                My last note on soul concerns Al Green, who I grow to appreciate more and more as a natural continuation of that Stax sound into the ‘70s.  One of the fun elements of this project is learning where the influence runs differently than I thought it did.  Being careless with my chronology, I always assumed the horn line in “Love and Happiness” was indebted to Marley’s horn charts circa Exodus¸ but it now becomes clear that the influence probably went in the other direction.  Not a lot from Marley this year, although a couple of my favorite early-reggae gems are from ’72.  The Heptones’ Meet The Now Generation sounds a lot like the early Wailers, and is a minor gem, but ’72 is also the year of The Harder They Come, which probably just about anyone would agree is the one reggae album to own if you’re going to own one.  It’s also (I think) the album that first drew the attention of the broader world to the Jamaican scene in a big way, so I’ll be on the lookout for its influence in coming years…

                In rock, the biggest news is probably that this is the year glam breaks.  Obviously T. Rex had been working this sound for a few albums, but in ’72 we get not only more T. Rex, but also glam makeovers of David Bowie, Mott the Hoople, and Lou Reed, plus Roxy Music’s debut.  For that matter, Elton John rarely sounded glammier than on “Crocodile Rock.”  It’s easy to see why glam made such a splash when it did, since rock otherwise had been moving away from the 3-minute single in  a variety of prog, metal, roots, and soft-rock directions, and glam is very much a return to pop-rock, a la the pre-psychedelic ‘60s.  What’s interesting to me is how the artists under the glam label run the gamut from the Stones-with-glitter sound of Mott to the arty, synth-y Roxy Music, with the others falling somewhere in between.  Although Lou Reed probably deserves a special mention for how poorly he fits with the UK glam acts.  Obviously the presence of Bowie & Mark Ronson on Transformer means it has some common elements, but most of the best songs sound more like (or in some cases actually are) Velvet Underground outtakes, and a lot of the rest have a campier sound that the UK acts don’t really go for.  Also, I don’t think any of the UK glam artists had it in them to write a song like “Perfect Day,” at least not yet.

                Also probably worth noting is the glam-prog of the Electric Light Orchestra.  Obviously Bowie and Roxy Music have art-rock/prog inclinations, but ELO’s take is somewhat different, goofier, and trashier, but still sounds not unlike the string sections T. Rex are experimenting with on songs like “Children of the Revolution.”  Prog itself might hit its peak in ’72, with phenomenal records from both Tull and Yes, both of whom would slip into self-parody next year, as well as the debut of Neu.  Neu!, like all of their albums, is far from perfect, as few of their downtempo experiments work, but full credit for developing a sound that’s strikingly, well, new.  There are elements of bands like the Thirteenth Floor Elevators, and of course the more ragged Can/Amon Düül krautrock, but this is, I think, the birthplace of the motorik sound, the clean, mechanical pulse that both Neu and Kraftwerk (who were all the same band until they splintered in ’71) would work with, and become a key influence on a lot of the new wave, post-punk, and techno to follow.  More conventionally, Thick As A Brick, Close To The Edge, and parts of Fragile though, are about as good as prog gets, although Tull & Yes don’t have much in common sonically with each other apart from a fondness for complex song construction.  Tull continues to develop its idiosyncratic hard-folk approach, while Yes (like Zeppelin last year) is drawing from a wide range of contemporary influences.  Their core sound continues to sound closest to Deep Purple, of any contemporaries, but there are hints of Zeppelin, folk guitar, maybe a touch of funk, and some decidedly CSNY-esque harmonies by Jon Anderson harmonizing with himself. 

                Deep Purple, however, have basically abandoned whatever prog elements lingered on In Rock, in favor of a sound that sounds more like a harder version of Mountain than just about anything else going on.  It seems kind of odd to group them together with Sabbath as metal, since the two sound pretty much nothing alike, and I’m thinking that it’s only later, when bands start appearing influenced by both of them, that they get retroactively grouped together.  If anything, Mott the Hoople sound more like Purple than Sabbath, at least on songs like the future Bad Company hit “Ready for Love.”

                If Mott the Hoople and ZIggy Stardust-era Bowie’s basic sound is ’65-66 Stones with a glam sheen on top, it’s interesting that the Stones themselves don’t sound glammy at all.  If anything, they’ve never sounded as grungy and blues-country-soul-roots focused than they do on Exile On Main St.  There are some similarities with the Kinks on Everybody’s In Show-Biz, insofar as both are bands adding a horn section and looking towards an older American sound, consequently sounding out of place among UK rock acts.  The Kinks, however, are looking much further back, to Dixieland/music hall jazz, and also are deeply uneven in their attempt (their first weak record since their first 3, sadly).  The Stones, meanwhile, put out possibly (probably) the best album of their career, and make a more lived-in version of their Beggars’ Banquet.  Honestly, the band the Stones most sound like in 1972 are the Grateful Dead, an association I never noticed before now, and which may explain why the ’72 is my favorite live Dead year.  (if I were to reduce my live Dead collection to a single album, it would undoubtedly be either Europe ’72 or Hundred Year Hall, both from the same tour).  The Stones are of course harder and tighter (what with the horns and all), while the Dead are mellower and jammier, but compared to the extremes of, say, Deep Purple and Crosby & Nash, they sound very close together.  Compare, say “Big Railroad Blues” to “Casino Boogie,” and tell me you couldn’t hear either band playing the other’s song.  The comparison holds up even more when you compare to other groups mining similar territory.  The Flying Burrito Brothers, for instance, end their career with a post-Gram Parson live album (no, I don’t acknowledge the existence of the post-Parsons and Hillman faux-Burritos which I think still exist).  But the live Burritos, while competent executors of a country-rock sound, don’t have the mélange of rock/soul/country/folk influences that the Dead & Stones do.  Creedence, I suppose, also work a similar terrain, but honestly just sound very bad on their breakup album this year.  It’s not a problem of band democracy, since among the worst songs are some of Fogerty’s compositions.  Rather, their formula is just sounding tired, I think, and increasing the country influence doesn’t help…

                The Dead, incidentally, sound better live this year than the Allmans, fill about half of their Eat A Peach album with tracks from the same show as last year’s Live At The Fillmore.  It’s a fitting tribute for the deceased Duane Allman, except that it’s clear why this stuff was held back from that album.  On the other hand, the first of the post-Duane tracks show great promise for the Allmans going forward.

Another artist attempting to mine a similar sound is Stephen Stills, on his Manassas album (which, for what it’s worth, borrows the Stones’ bassist).  It’s my favorite Stills album, and an interesting concept, with a side each of rock, country, folk, and rock & roll, but 1) it’s more interesting to hear these sounds mashed together into something new and 2) the songs just aren’t really that memorable.  An album I enjoy listening to, and respect in its ambitions, but can’t really say I remember much in way of melodies off of.  So it loses the best-CSNY-album-of-the-year title to Harvest, Neil Young’s oft-maligned mega-hit.  Admittedly, the strings are a little goofy, but listening through this time, I hear them as a last gasp of the orchestral sound Young played with in the Buffalo Springfield and on his solo debut.  As for the remainder of CSNY, Crosby & Nash have joined together for the first of a series of duo records.  It’s…ok, I guess.  The Nash songs sound like Nash country-pop songs and the Crosby songs are in a mellow “Guinevere”/”Déjà Vu” vein, not the rockier side he’s flashed from time to time.  The bigger problem isn’t the unadventurous nature of the sound, though; it’s that none of these songs, except maybe “Southbound Train” would have had any chance of making it onto either Crosby, Stills, and Nash or Déjà Vu.  Although perhaps I should, as I’ve thought of doing for the Beatles in their early solo careers, attempt to construct what a 3^rd CSNY album would sound like if assembled out of their ’72 albums.  For what it’s worth, I think Stills would be the hardest-rocking one…

                Elsewhere on the softer side of things, we get the debut and breakout records of a pair of acts that can probably be grouped together for their common approach of mixing mellow sounds with deeply cynical, deceptively mean lyrics.  Not that there’s a great deal otherwise in common between the jazz-pop approach of Steely Dan and the more conventional folk-rock sound of Randy Newman.  Steely Dan are the more interesting sonically, although they sound more conventional here than they will on their later records, while Newman sounds like a missing link between New Morning-era Dylan and the sound of comeback Dylan in a couple of years (musically, not so much lyrically).  Dylan himself, by the way, releases no new music in a calendar year for the first time since his debut single way back in ’62.  Combined with the release last year of his Greatest Hits, Vol. II, you’d be excused for thinking that Dylan was done as a recording artist.

                A couple of notes on artists held up by later generations of alt-rockers as forerunners outside of their time, who both offer a non-glam form of pop-rock.  That tag doesn’t fit Big Star at all, who sound 100% natural sandwiched between Zeppelin and CSNY, and whose sound basically sounds like a mix of Zeppelin-esque rock and the folk-pop of the Byrds and Buffalo Springfield.  So good, but hardly unconventional, except when measured against their Stax labelmantes.  The Modern Lovers, on the other hand, do sound strikingly out of place, mixing a sound that’s somewhere between the Velvets circa Loaded and garage rock with a lyrical sentiment that would have sounded cornball in the heyday of early ‘60s pop.  Sonically not tremendously innovative or anything, although I’m a sucker for organ-driven rock.  Maybe that’s why I love Jonathan Richman’s confessionals, but get bored quick at brokenhearted young people playing guitars with holes in them.  Also, I’ll give credit to Richman for being as much a lyrical original in his own way as Dylan or Reed, even if his rock & roll naïf act would degenerate into shtick in his solo career.

                And while I may have not 4 sentences ago denigrated sensitive young people accompanied by guitars with holes in them, that critique will not extend so far as Nick Drake’s Pink Moon.  Partly that’s because it’s more folk-based (and actually folk-based, not just acoustic-guitar-based), and partly (mostly) it’s because his lyrics and song construction reach a level of abstraction that makes his closest peer sound probably like Van Morrison on Astral Weeks.  Morrison, incidentally, put out yet another record hewing to the Moondance  template.  It’s a good sound, and it suits him, even if I miss Them, but it’s hard to say much about an artist that keeps working such a narrow sonic template year after year. 

                Oh, and I did promise to talk about Elvis this year, since this is the last year I have (most of) an Elvis album.  Elvis Now!  is pretty good in a country-pop sound, lyrically-absentminded cover of “Hey Jude” notwithstanding, but I don’t really have a lot to say about it.  Except that I do kinda love the Band-sounding gospel of “Put Your Hand In The Hand” and the shuffling “I Was Born About Ten Thousand Years Ago,” the song appearing as chopped up interludes on Elvis Country.  Also, non-album single “Burning Love,” while derivative of Elvis’s young-man sound, is probably his last great single.  Finally, speaking of artists moving past their prime, the Beach Boys put out the odd-in-its-conventionality Carl And The Passions – ‘So Tough’.”  If Surf’s Up was probably the most distinctively Beach Boys-sounding record they’d made since ’67, they’ve never sounded less like themselves than on this one, where they decide to sound like an entirely conventional 2^nd string roots-rock band.  It’s not bad, but it’s not what you listen to the Beach Boys for, and it’s not a style that plays to their strength.  Plus, they’ve drafted a pair of new members, who contribute a couple of songs of their own that sound so little like the Beach Boys (not even any Wilsons singing!) that it sounds like they were added to the album by mistake…

Song of the Year:  “Roundabout” – Yes.  Fragile isn’t Yes’s best album (that’s Close to the Edge or The Yes Album), but just about everything that made Yes one of my favorite bands is here: the seemless shifting between moods, the nonsensically abstract lyrics, the virtuoso performances in service of the song rather than showboating, the joyous energy.  Not only my favorite Yessong, but I think my favorite prog-rock song, skimping neither on the “prog” nor the “rock.” 

Album of the Year:  Exile on Main St. – The Rolling Stones.  Maybe not the greatest rock album of all time, but the greatest rock & roll album of all time, and without a question in my mind the Stones’ peak.  Also one of a bare handful of albums I refuse to go more than a day or two without having on hand.

Artist Most Benefiting from Reevaluation:  Randy Newman.  I had a vague sense that he was a worthy singer-songwriter, but in his focus on external concerns rather than self-expression and his cynical sense of humor, Newman is more Dylan-like than any of the other “new Dylans” that were hyped around this time.  I think I need more of his albums…

Artist Most Diminished in Reevaluation:  Marvin Gaye.  Just one album after his artistic breakthrough, Marvin’s in follower mode here.  Trouble Man is pretty good, but it’s nothing that Isaac Hayes or Curtis Mayfield didn’t do better on their soundtracks, and it’s kind of a punt after the innovative and experimental What’s Going On?

Album List

Al Green - The Absolute Best

Big Star - #1 Record

Black Sabbath - Vol. 4

Bob Marley & The Wailers - Soul Rebels [Bonus Track Edition]

Bob Marley & The Wailers - Trenchtown Rock: The Anthology 1969-78

Bruce Springsteen - 18 Tracks

Can - Ege Bamyasi

Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band - Clear Spot

Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band - The Spotlight Kid

Charles Wright & The Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band - Express Yourself: The Best Of Charles Wright

Chuck Brown - The Best Of Chuck Brown

Creedence Clearwater Revival - Chronicle, Vol. 1

Creedence Clearwater Revival – Mardi Gras

Crosby & Nash – Crosby & Nash

Crosby, Stills & Nash (& Young) - Carry On

Curtis Mayfield - Superfly

David Bowie - Changesbowie

David Bowie – The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars

David Bowie - Ziggy Stardust - Live - Santa Monica 20th Oct. 1972

Deep Purple - The Very Best Of Deep Purple

Dennis Alcapone - Guns Don't Argue

Electric Light Orchestra - Strange Magic: The Best Of Electric Light Orchestra

Elton John - Greatest Hits 1970-2002

Elton John - Wedding Songs

Elvis Presley - Elvis 30 #1 Hits

Elvis Presley - Elvis Now

Fela Kuti - The Best Best Of Fela Kuti

Funkadelic - America Eats Its Young

Isaac Hayes - Greatest Hits Singles

J.J. Cale – Naturally…

J.J. Cale - Very Best Of

James Brown - 20 All Time Greatest Hits!

James Brown - Make It Funky: 1971-75

Jethro Tull – Living In The Past

Jethro Tull - Original Masters

Jethro Tull – Thick As A Brick

John Lennon - Imagine Soundtrack

Joni Mitchell - Hits

Led Zeppelin - How The West Was Won

Lou Reed - Collections

Lou Reed – Transformer

Marvin Gaye – Trouble Man

Michael Jackson - The Essential Michael Jackson Disc 1

Miles Davis - Get Up With It

Miles Davis - Miles Davis In Concert: Live At Philharmonic Hall

Miles Davis - On the Corner

Mott The Hoople – All The Young Dudes

Mott The Hoople - An Introduction To Mott The Hoople

Mott The Hoople - Greatest Hits

Neil Young - Decade

Neil Young – Harvest

Neil Young – Journey Through The Past

NEU! - NEU!

Nick Drake - Pink Moon

Nick Drake - Way To Blue (An Introduction To Nick Drake)

Os Mutantes - Everything Is Possible!: The Best Of Os Mutantes

Paul McCartney - Wingspan: Hits

Pink Floyd - Obscured by Clouds

Randy Newman – Sail Away

Richard Thompson - Henry The Human Fly

Ringo Starr - Photograph: The Very Best Of Ringo Starr

Rod Stewart & The Faces - Gold

Roxy Music - The Best Of Roxy Music

Steeleye Span – Below The Salt

Steely Dan - A Decade of Steely Dan

Steely Dan – Can’t Buy A Thrill

Stephen Stills – Manassas

Stevie Wonder - At The Close Of A Century

Stevie Wonder – Music of My Mind

Stevie Wonder – Talking Book

T. Rex - 20th Century Boy: The Ultimate Collection

The Allman Brothers Band – Eat A Peach

The Beach Boys - Carl And The Passions - So Tough

The Ethiopians - Everything Crash: The Best of The Ethiopians

The Flying Burrito Bros. – Last of the Red Hot Burritos

The Grateful Dead – Europe ‘72

The Grateful Dead - Hundred Year Hall

The Heptones - Meet The Now Generation

The Kinks - Celluloid Heroes

The Kinks - Everybody's In Showbiz

The Kinks - The Kink Kronikles

The Modern Lovers - The Modern Lovers

The Rolling Stones - Exile On Main Street

The Rolling Stones - Forty Licks Disc 2

The Staple Singers - Be altitude,respect yourself

The Staple Singers - The Very Best Of The Staple Singers

The Temptations - Psychedelic Soul

The Who - The Ultimate Collection

Toots & The Maytals - Misc.

Toots & The Maytals - Time Tough - The Anthology

V/A - Beleza Tropical: Brazil Classics 1

V/A - Mp3

V/A - Pure Funk

V/A - Reservoir Dogs

V/A - Samba Soul 70!

V/A - Trainspotting

V/A - Trojan Dub Massive Chapter I

Van Morrison – St. Dominic’s Preview

Yes - Close To The Edge

Yes - Fragile